EQ Never
- Thread starter Convo
- Start date
Gaige
Legal Ephebophile
- 1,912
- 116
Should pay more attention I guess as Smedley himself said EQN was coming to PS3 and is multi-platform.
Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 8,761
- 613
i don't resent blizzard's success but to defend them from a gamer's perspective is absolutely fucking absurd.
Laura
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 582
- 109
He's a tool fanboy who is incapable of acknowledging what is obvious, considering the consistent quality Blizzard had in the past and the hellbent focus ActivisionBlizzard has on maximizing profit margins in the present. It's fucking nauseating.
wow isn't a well-rounded mmo unless you think mundane quests in cartoon land are cool
Wasit a good game? Sure, absolutely; one of the three best MMO's of all time, even by my estimation.
Is it a good gamenow? No, it's fucking shit. Welfare epics and guided hand-holding have no place in a real MMO. Even Blizzard initially avoided the concept of 'let's give EVERYONE WHATEVER THEY WANT IMMEDIATELY', because it's fucking terrible game design, and Blizzard was once actually good at game design.
And, for the record, EQ is pretty much shit now too. I'm an equal opportunity hater because the games that are out now just aren't good from a 'hey look I actually accomplished something' point of view.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 7,927
- 9,578
It's just that it hasn't changed much in over 4 years. That is enough to make me bored and unsubscribed, and unlikely to resubscribe until at least the next expansion (I don't see any real reason to check all the content patches).
If I had never ever played WoW in 7 years, it would probably be the greatest game at the moment. But for anybody else?
Agraza
Registered Hutt
- 6,890
- 521
Every game has a limited amount of novel experiences to offer. MMOs are somehow expected to remain fresh forever. For a very limited few people they are, but generally they exist on huge turnover rates of people that barely experience a quarter of the content. And that's pretty universal to the medium. I'm not playing it right now either. I recently went back to EQ when it went F2P, started paying, raided, saw a lot of new stuff, etc. Eventually it caught up to me, or I caught up to it, and I had enough of EQ. It's decent, but it's not as good as WoW. It's way better than it used to be.
EQ is a better game now than it probably ever was before. And not necessarily because of the WoW-ification. Recently they've decided to make new expansions very hardcore gear resets, and I disagree with that. WoW has done gear resets way too aggressively, one in each content patch, and I've complained about that since it began in LK. They're starting to back off how fervently they do it, and should trend in that direction further imo. Unfortunately EQ has been going the other way very fast lately. They need to slow the fuck down and find the middle-ground.
I'm talking nuts and bolts here. Transparency of mechanics, ease of interacting with other players, time investment vs. character progression, barriers to entry of content, complexity of content, learning curve of difficulty, etc. I tend to side with WoW over EQ on all of the above and more. WoW is both easier and harder than EQ. EQ has one depth of content, the deep end. WoW has the kiddie pool, the deep end, and everything in-between. Just because the experience is no longer novel doesn't make it poorly designed.
Generally every game compares poorly against it, and you can FEEL the inferiority complex the players of every other game has because what do they all have in common in public chat? They talk about WoW, and how their game is better, and why can't all the sheeple see that? It's like fucking hipsters online. WoW is popular, so it isn't cool like whatever shitstain they log into every night. I've played a lot of games, and I try to find their merits. I'm still sore Tabula Rasa crashed and burned and essentially none of the things it did right have become widespread. But to find those merits I have to turn off general chat (if I can) because all anyone talks about is WoW...and Obama.
EQ is a better game now than it probably ever was before. And not necessarily because of the WoW-ification. Recently they've decided to make new expansions very hardcore gear resets, and I disagree with that. WoW has done gear resets way too aggressively, one in each content patch, and I've complained about that since it began in LK. They're starting to back off how fervently they do it, and should trend in that direction further imo. Unfortunately EQ has been going the other way very fast lately. They need to slow the fuck down and find the middle-ground.
I'm talking nuts and bolts here. Transparency of mechanics, ease of interacting with other players, time investment vs. character progression, barriers to entry of content, complexity of content, learning curve of difficulty, etc. I tend to side with WoW over EQ on all of the above and more. WoW is both easier and harder than EQ. EQ has one depth of content, the deep end. WoW has the kiddie pool, the deep end, and everything in-between. Just because the experience is no longer novel doesn't make it poorly designed.
Generally every game compares poorly against it, and you can FEEL the inferiority complex the players of every other game has because what do they all have in common in public chat? They talk about WoW, and how their game is better, and why can't all the sheeple see that? It's like fucking hipsters online. WoW is popular, so it isn't cool like whatever shitstain they log into every night. I've played a lot of games, and I try to find their merits. I'm still sore Tabula Rasa crashed and burned and essentially none of the things it did right have become widespread. But to find those merits I have to turn off general chat (if I can) because all anyone talks about is WoW...and Obama.
Dr Neir
Trakanon Raider
- 832
- 1,505
Gah, not another console port. Sigh, not a fan of the crappy camera, sluggish movement and sloppy UI.
The funny part is, if Itzena hadn't brought his tool fanboy approach into the thread, we wouldn't even be talking about WoW right now; it would have been dropped after Dumar's point (which was totally accurate), and we'd have moved on. WoW is the benchmark for financial success, certainly - to an absurd degree - and that success is something of which other companies would love to have even a small piece, but in order for that to be done, there needs to be some reinventing of the wheel. WoW is old, it's tired, and it's stale - it's been the same thing for years and years on end - and someone who doesn't even entertain the idea that people don't want another carbon copy of WoW (despite mounds and mounds of evidence to support that the formula simply doesn't work in any other game because the players aren't established in them) is either intentionally trolling or a fucking moron.
Agraza
Registered Hutt
- 6,890
- 521
I agree that the copycats should end. I thought ToR was actually a decent attempt at stepping away from WoW, but many saw it as a WoW in space. I want more games along the lines of MineCraft and EVE. I like building things, and I'd like to do it in a persistent multi-player environment. Thus my interest in the likely unimpressive SimCity game about to release. But EVE and MineCraft have not been financial colossi, and so I don't expect the investors of the world to rush to back them. That's why I'm all for evolutionary design. Find something that works, and fix the problems it has while adding experimental qualities. Unfortunately many of the WoW clones skip the step of "fix the problems it has". They go right on to adding experiments. So they're doubly flawed games, both by their heritage and novelties. You can get money telling people you can make WoW better. People with money probably know what WoW is. This willingness to invest in failure is apparent. So use that willingness, but actually make it happen. You won't make it better by just tacking shit onto WoW like Eeyore's tail.
EQ has a solid basis, but since it's WoW's daddy, it would probably benefit the most and suffer the least from embracing its similarities to WoW. Unfortunately many proponents of an EQ3 incorrectly perceive EQ's liabilities as its assets. It is nowhere near the market success it once was, and its developers (EQ and EQ2) tend to share the opinion of the playerbase that it should strengthen its faults at the expense of embracing newer designs. My biggest issue is transparency of mechanics. EQ and EQ2 are fucking opaque as all shit. Most of the players, many even at the high end, are complately unaware of how to play their class. Developers consistently expose alarming ignorance of basic game mechanics as well. I assume the fault in this lies in both incompetency and resulting turnover of the developers themselves. I cannot appreciate not exposing how shit works to preserve some ill-conceived notion of mystery, especially when the developers are then found to be the ones in the wrong after the few bright players backwards engineer how shit truly works.
It's not like the EQ developers (or players) are unique in their ineptitude concerning class mechanics. WoW's devs (and players) are notoriously bad players. They cannot correctly balance difficulties because their internal team cannot come close to the best player guilds, despite having the game's blueprint laying about them. They balanced the first raiding hard modes with the idea that we would beat them after later content was released. They were beat within a week of their own debut. They then kneejerked in the other direction and balanced the next big bad so he was mathematically impossible, and didn't concur with the player's argument that it was such at first. Internally they weren't able to beat either one, so how could they easily tell? EQ's devs take it a step further though, by obscuring game mechanics to give themselves breathing room to balance shit terribly.
EQ has a solid basis, but since it's WoW's daddy, it would probably benefit the most and suffer the least from embracing its similarities to WoW. Unfortunately many proponents of an EQ3 incorrectly perceive EQ's liabilities as its assets. It is nowhere near the market success it once was, and its developers (EQ and EQ2) tend to share the opinion of the playerbase that it should strengthen its faults at the expense of embracing newer designs. My biggest issue is transparency of mechanics. EQ and EQ2 are fucking opaque as all shit. Most of the players, many even at the high end, are complately unaware of how to play their class. Developers consistently expose alarming ignorance of basic game mechanics as well. I assume the fault in this lies in both incompetency and resulting turnover of the developers themselves. I cannot appreciate not exposing how shit works to preserve some ill-conceived notion of mystery, especially when the developers are then found to be the ones in the wrong after the few bright players backwards engineer how shit truly works.
It's not like the EQ developers (or players) are unique in their ineptitude concerning class mechanics. WoW's devs (and players) are notoriously bad players. They cannot correctly balance difficulties because their internal team cannot come close to the best player guilds, despite having the game's blueprint laying about them. They balanced the first raiding hard modes with the idea that we would beat them after later content was released. They were beat within a week of their own debut. They then kneejerked in the other direction and balanced the next big bad so he was mathematically impossible, and didn't concur with the player's argument that it was such at first. Internally they weren't able to beat either one, so how could they easily tell? EQ's devs take it a step further though, by obscuring game mechanics to give themselves breathing room to balance shit terribly.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 7,927
- 9,578
Minecraft has sold 20+ million copies. Granted, the price is a lot less than a MMO (notably the pocket edition), but the earnings are "kind of nice".
Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 4,864
- 6,821
Obviously, the devs involved would have restrictions in the tools that prevented that. EQN isn't the minecraft mmo, Smed only uses that as an example because there isn't anything else to reference at this point. EQN will have some sort of world building tools apparently, but they will be very limited.
Agraza
Registered Hutt
- 6,890
- 521
Well it would be like a dye or appearance slot system. I don't want neon pink ogres (EQ), but I do want the ability to customize what I have to some degree. I want it to be within certain parameters. Like we can develop some land into a castle, a crafting hamlet, a trade port, a cathedral, etc. On a macro scale our efforts of laying out our kingdom takes shape. And I'd like it to be granular, allowing people to interact with it on several levels. So it's not just a couple guys at the top playing RTS with the territory you fight to control, but I get to live in a house in that hamlet, or barracks in that castle. I contribute crafters to the construction or soldiers to the defense, etc. etc. Not quite as granular as MineCraft, to avoid the penis buildings.
EVE lacks in some regards a lot of that pick up the game and play with a few friends against NPCs element that fantasy MMOs tend to make a big deal of. MineCraft lacks for group/guild structures and a universally accessible persistent world, among a lot of other things. I'd like to see them meet somewhere in the middle with a fantasy setting. There are a lot of question marks in such a concept though, and I don't have the answers, but I'm eagerly following games that are making inroads. EVE could rapidly expand in this direction, but they don't embrace empire building the way I'd like them to. Shadowbane had a few elements that EVE could use.
EVE lacks in some regards a lot of that pick up the game and play with a few friends against NPCs element that fantasy MMOs tend to make a big deal of. MineCraft lacks for group/guild structures and a universally accessible persistent world, among a lot of other things. I'd like to see them meet somewhere in the middle with a fantasy setting. There are a lot of question marks in such a concept though, and I don't have the answers, but I'm eagerly following games that are making inroads. EVE could rapidly expand in this direction, but they don't embrace empire building the way I'd like them to. Shadowbane had a few elements that EVE could use.