World of Warcraft: Current Year
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Wired Interview with Ion Hazzikostas - How WoW Has Evolved with the Internet
Wired recently interviewed Ion Hazzikostas on the evolution of World of Warcraft with the internet over the years. Here are some highlights. Click the banner below to read the whole article.
Wired recently interviewed Ion Hazzikostas on the evolution of World of Warcraft with the internet over the years. Here are some highlights. Click the banner below to read the whole article.
- In the early days of WoW, opacity was a double-edged sword. Strategies and class hierarchies were mostly dependent on fragmented information that didn't work for everyone.
- The reality is that back in the day almost everybody was playing the game wrong.
- These days, the internet as a whole has refined the process of accelerating and socializing information.
- Because of this, stretching and sustaining an increasingly elusive sense of awe in the game has many more challenges.
- In the early days, WoW's magic came from a sense of mystery due to the vastness of its world and the long, rocky path to top level.
- This feeling of being teleported into an antagonistic, unknowable world forced players to use each other as buoys.
- You were much more tolerant of each other's mistakes and faults because of the effort needed to create a group.
- Finding good players usually ended in friending each other for faster leveling next time.
- There's an inverse relationship between friction and the strength of bonds that are formed as a result of that friction or to overcome that friction.
- Over time both Blizzard and the players began to streamline ease of access with quality-of-life changes and information sources such as wikis and guides.
- Today players are almost trained to min-max their characters. The community pushes people in this direction.
- Although there have been things added to the game to make finding a party easier, things like group finder and server hoping has also made online strangers plugged into a party disposable.
- WoW Classic isn't made to be blasted through at top speed, and as a result questing feels less like a means to an end than an end in itself.
- Back in the day, much of the novelty of the game was the ability to talk to strangers online. Today, almost every multiplayer game has voice chat and social networking systems.
- Although there isn't the same desperation to connect, the core of WoW still holds up. It is still a place where people gather, a fantasy-washed social media network.
- Ion mentions having a co-worker who was one of the original developers on WoW, whose guild in WoW classic split up over loot drama. Some of the old tropes never go away.
- Ion says that they have an incredibly passionate community that they couldn't be more grateful for, but they are still always chasing that mystery, the fantasy of the unexplored and undiscovered.
- The reality is that back in the day almost everybody was playing the game wrong.
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Falstaff
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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So I had a DH that was level 112 just accumulating rest exp for the past 6 weeks. Got him to 120 today in about 4 hours. Is there any quality of life stuff I should do immediately upon getting 120? Last time I played this was just after Warfronts came out, or whatever the Arathi Highlands thing was called...
xzi
Mouthbreather
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Absolutely correct interpetation of exactly what I said.
Ignore the fact that I didn't know there was a bear form quest until I was in UBRS
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Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Flying, and Cloak quest. One is a quality of life option, the other is simply being able to do anything you want to do, old or new.
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Basically for the most efficient(but completely out of order story wise), you want to get friendly with your 3 BFA factions to get Uniting Zandalar/Uniting Kul Tiras if you haven't done it while leveling, which unlocks Warchief/King Order quests to go to Nazjatar. You follow that questline until you get the teleporter back and have to do the Magni questline and do that to upgrade your neck to lvl 50 instantly and unlock essences. Upon doing that, you'll get the Nzoth questline Return of the Black Prince/An Unwelcome advisor, and you go through that to unlock visions and your cloak. Also gives some decent gear upgrades on the way.
Then you can do whatever to gear up the rest but that's the priority since it's the biggest upgrades and unlocks the current endgame content(nzoth raid, visions and nzoth assaults).
Then you can do whatever to gear up the rest but that's the priority since it's the biggest upgrades and unlocks the current endgame content(nzoth raid, visions and nzoth assaults).
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xzi
Mouthbreather
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I taught a bunch of LFR players how to do Drest'agath and Il'gynoth a few nights ago and honestly the most rewarding thing I've done in a while. They were so stoked. But it was such a giant waste of time lmfao. Getting people to just.. stop dpsing and drawing huge fuck off blobs on the ground with the laser was like herding school children onto a bus.
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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That site is actually really fucking sick as a way to search the auction house outside the game.
WoWPay2Win
Tired of being bad in World of Warcraft? Just swipe your credit card and buy your BiS gear off the auction house!
www.wowpay2win.com
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You know, when Ion said in that Wired interview that everyone used to play the game wrong, I thought to myself: I think Ion just surrounded himself with people that are likeminded, goal-oriented and driven, and will methodically research and optimize to reach that goal.
On the other hand there is a whole lot of people who (in Ion's view) still play that game wrong, and you can't even bring them to look at the ingame journal where all abilities of the bosses are listed and it tells you what to do in your role.
Big question is: Can you really tell people they are playing the game wrong, when playing itself is done for pleasure and recreation? If they are having fun: are you really going to tell them they have fun the wrong way?
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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"Stop Having Fun" Guys - TV Tropes
The gamer equivalent of the Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy. He's a Hard Core gamer, plays in all tournaments, and knows everything about how to play. He knows all the secret moves (even the glitches), the most effective strategies, and the quickest ways to …
tvtropes.org
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xzi
Mouthbreather
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I think it depends on what the goal is. If it's a bunch of people that want to kill a raid boss and have a goal of killing said raid boss but they just refuse to learn something simple like move right instead of left when it's called on voice chat, I'd argue they're playing completely wrong. Which isn't a weird strawman, it's something that literally happened in FOH multiple times in multiple tiers from multiple different people.
But I don't really care if someone out in the world is pvping by only pressing crusader strike, godspeed to them. I have way more fun playing off-meta shit than I do "playing correctly"
But I don't really care if someone out in the world is pvping by only pressing crusader strike, godspeed to them. I have way more fun playing off-meta shit than I do "playing correctly"
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Stacking up +movespeed gear to clear old irrelevant content.
Ion: Lol stop playing the game wrong fags. I know I'll nerf things until the play the game how I want them too.
Make sure you faggots do you wizard chores and unlock flying just to end up quiting because you realize you were doing shit you hate just to play the game.
There are thousands of these kind of examples but please hand wave it all away.
Ion: Lol stop playing the game wrong fags. I know I'll nerf things until the play the game how I want them too.
Make sure you faggots do you wizard chores and unlock flying just to end up quiting because you realize you were doing shit you hate just to play the game.
There are thousands of these kind of examples but please hand wave it all away.
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kaid
Blackwing Lair Raider
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When there was so little information out and DPS meters/sims were still a long way off it was really hard to really know how to play your character "correctly". I know when I first got recount and saw my dps I pretty quickly saw stuff I was not doing very well and with an actual DPS meter I pretty quickly about doubled how much damage I was doing. Also learning to keybind stuff so you don't have to click anything important. This is a lot of reason people are blowing through stuff on the classic server players are just a lot better at the game than they used to be and the knowledge and information about everything is way more robust than back in the day.
Leadsalad
Cis-XYite-Nationalist
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Eh, the 1.12 talents and the revamped itemization (+hit and +spell damage on dungeon gear) are the biggest things that have impacted Classic clear times.
We had threat meters and dps meters in MC/Ony after a month or so.