The Sad, sad, state of MMORPG in this brave new era...

Chris said:

Vanilla WoW was amazing with how open it was, even the bits that sucked like running out of quests and grinding in Ferelas or Silithus sounds like an adventure now compared to the rails it has now.

I think Burning Crusade was the sweet spot between the open exploration of Vanilla and the good raids with some polish/rails of Wrath.

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I think people that don't play are out of their minds.

Wow has the absolute best MMO experience possible right now. Did they simplify it? Yes .do they piss us off? Yes. However, in general the gameplay has never been better .

And let's not even talk about the raids

response to Control -

Eh, you know 2-10k people who would pay for that experience. Those people are also incredibly more likely to congregate together, and share similar ideas when they do. So they aren't reaching out to others and making a good case for their game-play style preference; they are making the case to other people of their preferred game-play style.

Vanilla EQ was trash compared to modern games. It was good when there was literally no real competition, but it isn't nearly as awesome today. Cue being the grognards who quad/oct-box shit in the progression servers because it is a very small subset of players who think that is better than modern games. Not like 100k vs. 10m.... it is much closer to 10k vs. 10m. Major difference in opinion.

I would not play a game on par with Vanilla EQ -today.- And I think that is going to be a massively common sentiment. If you take away cell phones, the internet, and all the shit that basically made EQ from 1999-2003 great (all the non-EQ specific environment and technology related aspects) you would actually have less than you have now, which is all the hardcore EQers oct-boxing the progression servers because science/technology have progressed to the point where that is easily possible.

The "idea" of Vanilla EQ is a myth; it can't exist because the only people who want it to already play on prog/emu servers. Nobody else gives a shit.

Ukerric said:

That would be TL;DW you mean

At the end, they're talking about AAA rumors: CCP is supposedly making a new MMO (hopefully better than Dust), there's the mystery MMO from Amazon & Smed, and the elephant in the china room: Magic The Gathering MMORPG...

But those aren't for 3+ years, probably.

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Don't count on CCP to bring anything to the table. Their CEO is Brad levels of self absorbed. When I visit the EQLive forums I get a kick out of the "you're killing EQ" posts that occasionally show up...poor summer children have no idea what a terrible CEO and dev team can do to a game.

Noodleface said:

I think people that don't play are out of their minds.

Wow has the absolute best MMO experience possible right now. Did they simplify it? Yes .do they piss us off? Yes. However, in general the gameplay has never been better .

And let's not even talk about the raids

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That's not saying a lot. Most of the current MMO's are worthless. WoW is a lot of fun but there can certainly be some things that could be better as well.

Fyff said:

That's not saying a lot. Most of the current MMO's are worthless. WoW is a lot of fun but there can certainly be some things that could be better as well.

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Of course, wow isn't perfect. They've made dumbass changes,.especially in legion. I do get salty when people put on the 'vanilla was better' hats. It really wasn't. The game has never been in better shape

WoW Classic will come out and people will go ' wow this sucks' and go back to BfA

Noodleface said:

Of course, wow isn't perfect. They've made dumbass changes,.especially in legion. I do get salty when people put on the 'vanilla was better' hats. It really wasn't. The game has never been in better shape

WoW Classic will come out and people will go ' wow this sucks' and go back to BfA

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I think you're obfuscating your opinion with objective truth. Classic will be a massive hit just like EQ progression servers are. Nostalgia is a motherfucker

Imo scale has a lot to do with why I don't like wow...

This big bad ass god like dude that is neigh infinitely powerful... eh 5 dudes our of Westwood took him out.

Atleast in EQ it was 70-100 people that have been hardened through grueling leveling process all working together.

Classic wow atleast 40 was still - big..-ish

Now it's 5...eh 10.. People playing color match Simon says with fire rings and other variants while jumping around mashing number keys.

Xadion said:

Imo scale has a lot to do with why I don't like wow...

This big bad ass god like dude that is neigh infinitely powerful... eh 5 dudes our of Westwood took him out.

Atleast in EQ it was 70-100 people that have been hardened through grueling leveling process all working together.

Classic wow atleast 40 was still - big..-ish

Now it's 5...eh 10.. People playing color match Simon says with fire rings and other variants while jumping around mashing number keys.

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During PoP we used to one group half the raids. Turns out Enchanters with AA's were amazing.

Noodleface said:

Bro I've been playing the game since the day it released

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Then there is no way you believe what you just said. You want to argue that the game play is better for you now than ever, I am glad you find it to your liking, but for me it isn't. To say it plays or feels the same as Vanilla is garbage though. In legion I round up every mob in tether range, dozens and dozens on my PRIEST and just solo them all down in seconds.. on my tank it is even more ridiculous, the game plays more like Diablo now than Wow vanilla. Dungeons aside from bosses are just a pull then aoe shit fest.. not at the end of the expansions when everyone is over geared, but literally day one of them opening.

Again, if you like that style of play, great, but I prefer a slower paced methodical approach to combat with cc and strategic pulling and that does not exist in modern wow or really any other MMO out there currently.

Rezz said:

Eh, you know 2-10k people who would pay for that experience. ..

The "idea" of Vanilla EQ is a myth; it can't exist because the only people who want it to already play on prog/emu servers. Nobody else gives a shit.

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I agree with most of that, especially if we're talking about vanilla EQ's specific featureset. I guess I was thinking more in terms of its production values though. Compared to AAA production values, features are pretty cheap. A few thousand paying players could keep a tiny team chugging along if the players didn't really care what the game looked like.

Aaron said:

The problem is, is that both the world and we have changed. I think most on this forum are in their 30s and 40s, have jobs, kids, responsibilities and shit. These modern MMOs are designed for people in their late teens/twenties who have much more spare time and don't know any better.

The glory days of EQ and early WoW are gone and they ain't coming back. An MMO that did try to replicate it would almost certainly fail I think, or at least would have to be a relatively low budget MMO catering to a niche market.

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Exactly, and that's really the gist of the whole thread. The new games are made for people that aren't us. What would a game made for us look like instead? (assuming that it has to be made by a super-small team with basically no budget, which is pretty much the only way that any highly-non-conventional game is getting made)

I mean, it took a bunch of tweaks to get the usability and pain points of EQ smoothed over, but I'd rather sit down and play my EQemu than any of the current gen mmo's. I also know I'm weird, but so are a lot of us

I didn't know I was arguing with pussies not enjoying mythic content (both raids and dugeons). Carry on with your crying.

Aaron said:

Depends on how classic Wow Classic will be. They'd be dumb to make an almost complete Vanilla experience, thereby neglecting a decade of progress. For example, if they make switching specs as expensive and difficult as it once was then it's just going to hurt them.

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This is where ideology some will disagree. The advantage of a fairly high money and time sink into changing trees imo is a good thing - Bill IS a X warrior, Fred IS a Y warrior - we take them both because we need both their skills and they are the best X and Y warriors we have! lets rock.

Or, fuck it lets take johhny doeverythinglikeshit it will get us through... just touch a button and poof! you are an entirely new character! tada! no investment, no commitment.

The way the cost and time penalty scaled up allowed for experiments while you leveled and learned to then grow into a solid archetype and whatnot.

I was on Thunderlord as a destruction warlock - I leveled, raided and PVPed up to Knight Lt. as that spec - I HAD to know my shit because destruction in the early days was a odd row to hoe in pvp proper- I was actually Destruction / Demon for the sub/mix of trees.

Mythic content? I liked dark age of camelot

WoW actually evolves. And although this means they make plenty of new mistakes, for every one of those they'e fixed five or ten others.

One of the worst things this does to the MMO landscape is you constantly run into annoying stupid shit that WoW fixed six years ago and you aren't willing to put up with now just for whatever niche gimmick the poorly developed indie game hinges on.

Remember that game where your ability bar was a rotating wheel for some reason?