World of Warcraft: Current Year

Fingz_sl said:

I'll bite your troll.

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Absolutely, too bad they abandoned good game design for the McDungeon value menu and never made another BRD.

Fuck it. I actually only do the multiplayer aspects of WoW if I can. I deplore dailies and really only did certain reps that showed the stories like the 5.1 reps and so on. I raid with my guild when I can, which is probably 4-5 times a month due to work but I like the hotbar action, classes, etc. that only an MMO can give. LFR lets me see the story and I'd be fine with no loot dropping in it but I understand why Blizz put loot in.

This is a dumb argument. WoW is not to blame for anything in this industry. They designed the game they though their customers wanted. NONE of those guys made Bioware make SWTOR, Trion make RIFT, SOE make EQ2 as it is, or any other current themepark as it is. That's on the other companies' lack of creativity. Now I would also argue that WoW isn't worth 15/mo anymore and is probably more worth box price plus $15-20/patch as DLC, but overall I get my Semi-MMO fix out of this on my casual time. Harder games exist...why don't you guys go play that? My god, EVE, Darkfall, etc all exist. Go play. Not my fault those engineers suck or the settings don't fit.

Dumar has a LTTP gif in his sig, that game was NEVER hard but was awesome. I remember doing the whole "beat it with out dying" thing to get the Link with the triple zeros or maybe it was 001 after the end on my save. For the entire existence of games there have been hard and easier games in a genre. WoW is the latter of MMOs. What is wrong with that? I mean the top level is still hard as fuck but they let casual players "beat it." Games have been doing this for years. You could tear up some SNES or other games on easy and see the exact same content and nobody said shit.

Dumar_sl said:

Absolutely, too bad they abandoned good game design for the McDungeon value menu and never made another BRD.

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Players didn't like BRD because it took too long. Scarlet Monastery, on the other hand, was popular, each of it's 3 instances could be ran in an hour or so.

Blizz just gave the players what they wanted.

Maraudon in Desolace was another huge instance. It was hard to get groups for BRD or Maraudon.

WoW had a lot of similarities with EQ in the beginning and moved away from that design style over time.

Went over to look at the WoW forum and saw this post abouthow difficult things were in the beginning of the game. Some WoW players agree with Dumar while others say it's just nostalgia. Sound familiar?

Fingz_sl said:

Players didn't like BRD because it took too long. Scarlet Monastery, on the other hand, was popular, each of it's 3 instances could be ran in an hour or so.

Blizz just gave the players what they wanted.

Maraudon in Desolace was another huge instance. It was hard to get groups for BRD or Maraudon.

WoW had a lot of similarities with EQ in the beginning and moved away from that design style over time.

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Like I said, this argument is over and the "Waah, mye-peen" crowd lost.
They just need to

Quaid_sl said:

Well, he's wrong if the goal is a more populated game. He's absolutely right if the goal is a better game.

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Itzena_sl said:

Better inyouropinion which, as can be seen quite clearly, is irrelevant to Blizzard.

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Betteris irrelevant to Blizzard, so the whole argument is pointless. Market share and profit are the decision makers for a publicly traded company.

"Better" is also subjective in this case. "Better" forwhom?

The reason why it was harder to get groups for BRD in the beginning was the shit-poor itemization for 80% of the bosses. Risk(time spent) vs. reward.

Tantrik_sl said:

The reason why it was harder to get groups for BRD in the beginning was the shit-poor itemization for 80% of the bosses. Risk(time spent) vs. reward.

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I'm sure that contributed a bit, but the main problem was that it took too long time to be practical for most people. It wasn't like you could find a group and do BRD if you had a couple of hours after work to play.

Mauradon and Blackrock Depths suffered because they had shit lv40 and lv50 loot and it was difficult to skip parts of the instance you didn't want to do, not because they were non linear.
Blackrock Spire and Stratholme were very popular and also big non linear dungeons but had clear ways to skip the half you didn't want and were both run by players as two dungeons, though the one super dungeon option was there and was used.

Scarlet Monastery was a McDungeon but I think it was popular because it had some specific very good lv40 drops which looked fantastic, with easy horde travel.
Dire Maul was also a McDungeon and hardly anyone ran it because everyone wanted the looks of Tier Sets eventhough Dire Maul loot may have been slightly mathematically better.

So I'm not seeing a clear "nonlinear wasn't popular, McDungeon was popular" message there, someone at Blizzard just fucked up.

Itzena_sl said:

"Better" is also subjective in this case. "Better" forwhom?

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If you phrase it like that, the only "better" that matters from the company point of view is Blizzard managing their product in a way that leads to better results for their shareholders/bottom line/revenue.

Raiding sure wasn't better. Staring at a wall spamming decursive for 20 minutes during Chromaggus was not fun. Hidng in some weird LoS during the drakes wasnt fun. Keeping people out of the fight to out of combat rez in Molten Core wasn't fun. Oh your hunters with Tranq shot dont log in, fuck you sorry. can't do Princess Huhuron this week. Lol release C'Thun. Hey I hear you like brining 8 warrior's to a raid, have fun with 4 horseman. Oh you enjoy 4 hours of farming herbs in SM Graveyard yard right? No? Good Luck with Lotheb. Don't even get my started with Sapphirion

Yea I have some fond memories of raiding in vanilla but they are most definatly nostalgia. The shit people can put up with is crazy, and raiding is vastly better now.

Dire Maul was also a McDungeon and hardly anyone ran it because everyone wanted the looks of Tier Sets eventhough Dire Maul loot may have been slightly mathematically better.

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Diremaul was actually fully connected. In theory, you could run every wing without rezoning. It was chunked off into subsections, though, so players could run specific wings if they wanted to. If you did the bonus loot Ogre run, there were some nice (at the time) items, but that took planning and you needed certain classes/items.

Part of the failing of BRD and Mauradon is there was too wide a gap between the high end and the lower end. In that sense, they were kinda like LGuk in EQ1: You had worthless shit up front and all the good stuff was in the hard area. Dorf Emperor at the time had that nice melee item, but it was a huge level difference from the normal levels you started to run BRD and it was a big time investment. At least in Lguk, the place was fucking perma camped so you could easily walk from zone to the undead king and then you just camped there for hours clearing the stagger spawns. In BRD, you had to clear your way to emperor (which was very hard at the time and took a long time) every single time you wanted to make an attempt for loot. And even then, you still weren't guaranteed the drop you wanted.

Asherah_sl said:

I'm sure that contributed a bit, but the main problem was that it took too long time to be practical for most people. It wasn't like you could find a group and do BRD if you had a couple of hours after work to play.

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Sure you could. The dungeon was rather intuitively separated into distinct areas aimed at a certain level range...didn't need to split it into 4 instances to figure that out. Also, by the time you were in a level range to kill emperor, you didn't need any drops pre inner-city.

Tantrik_sl said:

Sure you could. The dungeon was rather intuitively separated into distinct areas aimed at a certain level range...didn't need to split it into 4 instances to figure that out. Also, by the time you were in a level range to kill emperor, you didn't need any drops pre inner-city.

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Sure, but most people did not know BRD well enough to do this early on. Which is one of the reasons that BRD didn't became so popular with PuGs. I mean, with some creative lava swimming you can skip past everything up to the Lyceum, but attempting this in a PuG would probably leave half of the group dead in the lava.

Back in our day we had to form up a group in town and then run all the way to the dungeon to do it. Most mouse clickers and keyboard turners didn't even know where Maraudon or Dire Maul were. The rest didn't know BRD's layout.

Malakriss_sl said:

Back in our day we had to form up a group in town and then run all the way to the dungeon to do it. Most mouse clickers and keyboard turners didn't even know where Maraudon or Dire Maul were. The rest didn't know BRD's layout.

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...thus as a warlock, I would get spammed with requests for summons all the damned time ;/

I dunno... I have a very different memory of Vanilla WoW...

Most of my BRD groups lasted for hours... I'd say a good 75% were successful in the Lyceum... People knew their way to Blackrock Mountain, Dire Maul and Mauradon just fine. People were pretty good. I mean, you'd get retards breaking sheep and such, but most did just fine. I never had trouble getting a pug group for any of those places.