World of Warcraft: Current Year

Mist

Mist

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The base engine of WoW is not very good. It's better than that shit Gamebryo engine that other games were using around the time WoW came along, but it's still not fantastic and hasn't aged particularly well.

The Overwatch engine is considerably more impressive. I wonder what it's true capabilities are, since it was originally built for an MMO-like game.
 
Cybsled

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mkopec said:
The best thing they could do for modern wow is to retire it. Start fresh with vanilla that they have, and add new shit from there keeping in the spirit of the vanilla experience. They could call it WOW alternate universe or some shit.
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Vanilla WoW was just EQ1 2.0 - Vanilla WoW, while popular, was always going to be a time limited thing. Nostalgia wears off really fast.

I doubt they will do WoW: An Azeroth Reborn either. Their engine, while old, isn't the main issue. It's the design elements as of late using that engine.

Although a new engine would be nice, considering the game will be 20 years old pretty soon
 
Caeden

Caeden

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Bubbles said:
in this situation they can't do shit. Any attempt to restrict their employees would have "but muh free speech" written all over it.
Blizzard just fucked fuck at the start when they were signing contracts. They should have made sure middle management just can't go off one social media. In this day and age you can't have your employees put that vague disclaimer which says something like "opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer" and think people would actually differentiate between personal and corporate. Any blizz employee making any tweet is seen as company line
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I guess. Nobody seems to have a problem dropping the “free speech, not consequence free speech” bullshit when it’s opinions that are unpopular with a particular set of commie fucktards…I mean consumers. Really, Blizzard is making a choice to let mob mentality win. If they shut even one of those dumbasses up with a “customers are always right”-esque internal discussion, that person would virtue signal the fuck out of it and be handed a new job at whatever doomed venture his or her “right-think” comrades are in now.
 
xmod2

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Chris said:
Gear drops from boss or bought with badges as a guard against bad luck.
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You know shit is dire when people think badges are still a good solution. FF14 already has that shit and you can go play the single player MMO if you want most of what you are talking about. There is a reason we called them welfare epics.

WoW and most mmos suck because they neglected what was unique about them, the online persistent world and community. Modern MMOs have lost the thread and are just shitty single player games with onerous grinding thrown on top of it. If WoW was a standalone offline game, nobody would play it, and, guess what, it basically is. FF14 even let's you run the story dungeons with NPCs so you don't have to interact with other people. It's not as bad in FF14 ultimately because it's basically a single player FF game with some multiplayer lobby / prestige stuff thrown in on top of it. Diablo 3 and PoE are mmos by modern standards.

The "MMO" part of the genre has been diluted for a few reasons. For one, it's not novel for a game to be 'always online' and multiplayer. Second, WoW and EQ were both before the advent of pervasive social media. Now we have Twitch, Discord, etc, so there is no need to be 'in game' to hang out with your friends. These were just crutches, but the games didn't find a way to harness the 'mmo' part as those times changed around them.
 
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Cybsled

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You’re conflating progression/loot acquisition with mmo community, though. That is the fatal error WoW made: the EQ1 mindset of “raid or get phat loot = only thing to do”. FF14 actually does a much better job of offering alternatives.
 
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xmod2

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They are conflated in an mmo. The best gear should required you to interact with the community.

Most of the problems Blizzard tries to solve with the game/policy are 'community' problems that should be handled by guilds / the community.
 
Cybsled

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Sure, you need to interact to get best gear. That isn’t being argued.

But the sole focus being +gooderer items isn’t what gets you a good community in a game, because other people are a means to an end in that situation
 
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Neranja

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xmod2 said:
These were just crutches, but the games didn't find a way to harness the 'mmo' part as those times changed around them.
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Look around you: No one has the time to poopsock 12+ hours a day in an MMO anymore. The old players now have this thing called "life", and classic MMO design was based around Diku-style time investment instead of skill: the character has the skill, not the player.

New kids don't have the patience and attention span for MMOs anymore, so you have to change the design to cater more to the average player for a wider target audience. Hence WoW has moved to faster combat and player skill instead of character skill. This is probably also the reason why they have basically cut the leveling time 1-50 in Shadowlands.

Also, I don't get this "welfare epic" bitching. The casuals are the majority for the game, or probably "were". I think most of them quit.

My guess is that less than 20% of the players even raided Molten Core in the original WoW. Sure the hardest difficulty content should get the best rewards, but at the same time you have to give the players a progression path. And sadly, WoW only has gear as a progression path at max level.
 
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Neranja

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1628527245113.png


illneverleave.jpg
 
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xmod2

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Neranja said:
Also, I don't get this "welfare epic" bitching. The casuals are the majority for the game, or probably "were". I think most of them quit.
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The casuals quit when gear access is as easy as it's ever been, but thrived when they were basically denied access to the gear. This is exactly the point.

When there is content unavailable to you, the horizons of the game world seem to stretch out forever. You "could" progress, but that would involve joining a guild, etc. Your character is never finished. As soon as you get a bunch of purples in ever slot from LFR/badge bullshit, your character is 'done' and you beat the game. No content is restricted from you so you realize the game is actually shallow as fuck. Casuals have good memories of hanging out in Orgrimmar and seeing the 20% of MC raiders with all their goofy looking gear and thinking "wow". No casual has any good memories from modern mmos.

The 'skill' in an mmo is not twitch, and it shouldn't be time investment. It should be the challenge of putting together large groups of people with disparate goals in order to conquer middlingly challenging content that is impossible alone. EQ and early WoW raids had room to bring social invites / the tanks wife / your scrub friend and give them access to gear and content they wouldn't normally have access to. This built social cohesion, guild loyalty, etc. Gear catch up was the guild running older content to funnel gear, which also built a sense of obligation / appreciation for the social group. The unique thing about an MMO is the persistent, online world, where you are just a peon living in it. Big and great things should be accomplished by people who can master THAT aspect of the game. Not via dps rotations, speed running dungeons, or dancing around giant telegraphed boss attacks.

The core of an mmo is "I am just an adventurer in this big world. There is a dragon over there I can't kill alone, so I'm going to go to town and grab some other people to go kill it."
 
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mkopec

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Cybsled said:
You’re conflating progression/loot acquisition with mmo community, though. That is the fatal error WoW made: the EQ1 mindset of “raid or get phat loot = only thing to do”. FF14 actually does a much better job of offering alternatives.
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LOL except EQ at its core was a single group game. And for the majority of people that played it it was just a single group game. There were raids, sure, and became more of a focus later, but make no mistake most people spent 90% of their time in a group setting farming some shit.
 
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Neranja

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xmod2 said:
Casuals have good memories of hanging out in Orgrimmar and seeing the 20% of MC raiders with all their goofy looking gear and thinking "wow". No casual has any good memories from modern mmos.
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Casuals also had access to T0.5 gear in Classic, which was also purple. That's the thing: you need a character progression system in parallel to the raid gear grind.

It's not like there isn't a secondary and third gear progression in the game already with M+ and PvP. What does it matter that the casual can progress his character and maybe jump into the deep end of the pool, if he finds himself with more time? These interesting times we live in (mostly indoors, or with masks) would have been an excellent point for that.

xmod2 said:
It should be the challenge of putting together large groups of people with disparate goals in order to conquer middlingly challenging content that is impossible alone.
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But that is not the way WoW went. And to be fair: People raved about the action combat in Tera and BDO. So of course Blizzard took notes and tried to move their combat in that direction. Fan forums also have a lot of stupid "I couldn't play a Tab-targeting MMO anymore" shitposting.

The whole thing could be boiled down to: The WoW developers didn't stick to their tried and true formula, and tried to introduce "New WoW", and just like Classic Coke you now also have "Classic WoW". What a coincidence!

xmod2 said:
The core of an mmo is "I am just an adventurer in this big world. There is a dragon over there I can't kill alone, so I'm going to go to town and grab some other people to go kill it."
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This ... I have a problem with. Not because you are wrong, but because the answer is right ... for you and like minded people. And you should totally play like you want with like minded people, that's the whole point of an MMORPG. But not everyone is like you, and may have other interests. Remember the Bartle taxonomy?

Anyways, here's an excerpt from the WoW diaries:

excerpt.jpg


Where's Eric Dodds when you need him?
 
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Mist

Mist

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Badges for raid gear was stupid.

But reroll coins were brilliant.
 
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Chris

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xmod2 said:
You know shit is dire when people think badges are still a good solution. FF14 already has that shit and you can go play the single player MMO if you want most of what you are talking about. There is a reason we called them welfare epics.

WoW and most mmos suck because they neglected what was unique about them, the online persistent world and community. Modern MMOs have lost the thread and are just shitty single player games with onerous grinding thrown on top of it. If WoW was a standalone offline game, nobody would play it, and, guess what, it basically is. FF14 even let's you run the story dungeons with NPCs so you don't have to interact with other people. It's not as bad in FF14 ultimately because it's basically a single player FF game with some multiplayer lobby / prestige stuff thrown in on top of it. Diablo 3 and PoE are mmos by modern standards.

The "MMO" part of the genre has been diluted for a few reasons. For one, it's not novel for a game to be 'always online' and multiplayer. Second, WoW and EQ were both before the advent of pervasive social media. Now we have Twitch, Discord, etc, so there is no need to be 'in game' to hang out with your friends. These were just crutches, but the games didn't find a way to harness the 'mmo' part as those times changed around them.
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Bad luck protection and raids/guilds required for best loot are not mutually exclusive.

There is no reason why my BWL clearing Druid had to wear a blue dungeon chest piece because the purples never dropped.

I don't mean the Burning Crusade system of clearing heroic dungeons for badges which were equal to raid loot.

Just have it so if Stormrage Chespeice never drops, I can use my BWL badges to buy "Blackwing Chest of Healing" which has worse stats, no set bonus, and worse looks, but can only be obtained by doing BWL and makes my stats not be shit for no reason.

Random drops from bosses isn't actually that good, there are better ways to do it without handing stuff out for free to casuals.
 
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Fucker

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mkopec said:
LOL except EQ at its core was a single group game. And for the majority of people that played it it was just a single group game. There were raids, sure, and became more of a focus later, but make no mistake most people spent 90% of their time in a group setting farming some shit.
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And the other 10% of the time waiting for the boat.
 
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Folanlron

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xmod2 said:
FF14 even let's you run the story dungeons with NPCs so you don't have to interact with other people.
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A note that the trust NPCs only work in Shadowbringer dungeons, these are not the same as the GC trust system cause they are designed too avoid a lot of mechanics in fights... while the GC trusts are well.. really dumb.. rofl
 
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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People spent time in groups in EQ1 because it was insanely hard to solo and even leveling was a slow process. Then because combat was boring and brain dead, people chatted to stop going insane.

Wanting people to fill in the blanks to shore up shit game design isn’t good game design
 
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