Pros and cons to playing wow

[Lyion]

It's too easy. There's no sense of accomplishment in WoW imo. There was plenty in EQ1.

I think I'm sucking in my communication skills. My responses were based on this quote, and in Harrison saying games to him aren't enjoyable unless they have a 'Wow, I did it' factor.

I like games being fun and challenging, but not ridiculous. I've cleared almost all the content in WOTLK. I do agree there isn't the level of accomplishment in WOW, but I think that's due to better design.

I have a job that requires a lot of brainpower, doing database design for real application clusters and large data warehouses. Off hours I like to relax and game in a fun manner, just like I like to shoot hoops or play a few holes. That doesn't mean I don't want to excel, but I don't want to work on claiming the X-Prize or running Iron Man competitions, or do another first Trak kill without the batphone or anything likewise to me that would really indicate a 'Wow I did it' moment. That's just me.

[Tikker]

Player ingenuity used to be a key factor in the game, now it's who can interpret the strat best.

I don't think so, really

it's just now that everyone has a decade+ of knowing how to play the game

everything was relatively new to most folks back in the EQ era. looking back, there really wasn't a whole lot of stuff that required crazy outside the box thinking in order to beat the encounter.

[vonkaar]

Skill has pretty much flown out the window. In all the time I spent in WoW, I never felt like I saw truly 'skilled' players (outside of PVP). Knowledgeable, sure. There were plenty of people who 'knew' a lot of shit about the game... but, I'm talking like... badass enchanters (Saldor is the only name I remember) keeping half of old-sebilis mezzed and never dropping below half-mana. Bards kiting entire zones-worth of mobs, slowly picking them off. GREAT monk pulls/splits. Loads of examples out there for EQ 'skill' (Manalope, Sinnah or Drolkrad owning anyone in PVP while wearing newb gear) but I can't think of any in WoW. The 'best' players typically had the best gear and/or mods. The impressive bits are mostly "people doing their jobs."

Bad players - all the time. Blacklist em and never group again. But GREAT players? Never met any. It was just a game of who knows their shit, and who should stick with Diablo.

[Jay]

Yeah Arlos, hard modes. There was not one that stayed alive if we dedicated the weeks worth of raiding to it. I'll admit Thorim was broken when we beat him (ground lighting did 0 damage) but it became a 1 night ordeal once it was fixed. I think firefighter took us 2 weeks, but still, that's not hard compared to EQ's heavy hitters.

[Arlos]

I dunno, I can't think of much at all that we took that long to kill in EQ, really, at least stuff that wasn't completely broken, like the original version of Rathe Council. Original Trakanon maybe, but that was in large part because the server had hardware issues, and would crash every time we did the fight. AOW, certainly, but I already mentioned him. None of the VP dragons on their own took us more than a couple weeks, not even Phara Dar. Vyemm was the hardest thing in NTOV, and he didn't slow us down that much. Hm, maybe Rallos Zek took us that long, but as I recall, that was less due to the encounter difficulty than packs of people acting like retards.

A couple things to keep in mind too, when you make those assessments. One is as Tikker said, we're all FAR more experienced in MMOs now than we were then. We know a lot more about how boss encounters work, how to coordinate 25+ people at once, etc. Also, strats are vastly more open now. Back then, you didn't have people saying ANYTHING about strats, much less posting how-to's to youtube. I guarantee you if there was as much strat reveal then as there is now, you would have a very different memory about beating some encounters and your accomplishment thereby.

Lastly, coding has gotten far better now, and the games are much less exploitable. No modern MMO is going to let you completely break intended encounter design by doing things like we did, with pulling mini-Aten through the ceiling downstairs into the 1st floor Goo room. Nor will they let you get a world first ventani kill by levitating over lava and hiding under a bridge, like Conquest did.

Oh, and Vonk, I must disagree with you, at least a bit. Yes, gear is a vital factor, but I have seen well geared tanks who can't hold aggro near as well as someone with vastly inferior gear, and I have known healers I would trust to keep me alive were they in nothing but greens over others I know in all raid epics. There is still room for skill, if there's not quite as dramatic ways to show it as there used to be. And yes, believe me, I truly miss doing insane pulls and splits as a monk. You have no idea how many hours I spent in places like the revamped Paw, learning how to feign split things. I wouldn't claim to be the best raid puller who was in LOS, I can think of at least a few who were as good or better, but I never met anyone who could feign split as well. Unfortunately, that was sometimes a downside for raids, as it would take too long, and piss the enchanters off. heh. So, yes, you do have something of a point, but I think you're overlooking some things too.

-Arlos

[Naethyn]

I think South Park hit it right on the head with the guitar hero episode. It was probably unintentional but Heroin Hero represented exactly what Wow is - Constant injections of satisfaction chasing a dragon you'll never ever catch.

Unfortunately just like any drug it takes more and more to get that feeling again to the point of it never/rarely coming back.

Wow is setup to make people succeed. EQ is setup to make people fail. Any bit of success you may have earned in EQ is that much sweeter because of it's design.

[brinstar]

levitating over lava and hiding under a bridge, like Conquest did.

ha i remember that, what a fiasco

Oh, and Vonk, I must disagree with you, at least a bit. Yes, gear is a vital factor, but I have seen well geared tanks who can't hold aggro near as well as someone with vastly inferior gear, and I have known healers I would trust to keep me alive were they in nothing but greens over others I know in all raid epics. There is still room for skill, if there's not quite as dramatic ways to show it as there used to be. And yes, believe me, I truly miss doing insane pulls and splits as a monk. You have no idea how many hours I spent in places like the revamped Paw, learning how to feign split things. I wouldn't claim to be the best raid puller who was in LOS, I can think of at least a few who were as good or better, but I never met anyone who could feign split as well. Unfortunately, that was sometimes a downside for raids, as it would take too long, and piss the enchanters off. heh. So, yes, you do have something of a point, but I think you're overlooking some things too.

-Arlos

it's true. i started WoW with a crew of three other RL bros and we went all the way to 60 in dungeons-- just us four and one random PUG guy. we knew WTF we were doing. the priest never let anyone die, the hunter and rogue always knew how close they were to swiping agro from me (this was back before those ghey-ass agro meters), and i almost never pulled more than i intended to pull. when we got to be 50+ we joined a guild and were fuckin' amazed at how stupid the average player was. rogues would routinely get stomped, pullers would bone easy pulls, bear dr00ds would swipe the sapped mob-- and perhaps the most heinous phenomenon of any game ever, the fucking hunters would pull agro and then wait until the huge boss reached them to FD. unfortunately we did not have the time/motivation to jump up to better guilds. yeah, our guild was outfitted almost entirely in purples, but as a wiser man than m'self once said: you can't polish a turd. i'd take our crew in blues/greens over theirs in purples any day of the week.

EQ was the same way, skill > gear. back in the day i was not the best SK on the block, and my buddy stev (the rogue in the previous paragraph) was not the best enchanter, but to this day i am still proud that the two of us, with our relatively shite gear, used to go duo in chardok and HS. we crawled almost all the way through HS (drusella still owned us no matter what lol), and held the CD slave pits for hours. i would imagine those places to be quite trivial by now, but back then and with our stuff it was not something your average retards could pull off.

[Jay]

I dunno, I can't think of much at all that we took that long to kill in EQ, really, at least stuff that wasn't completely broken, like the original version of Rathe Council. Original Trakanon maybe, but that was in large part because the server had hardware issues, and would crash every time we did the fight. AOW, certainly, but I already mentioned him. None of the VP dragons on their own took us more than a couple weeks, not even Phara Dar. Vyemm was the hardest thing in NTOV, and he didn't slow us down that much. Hm, maybe Rallos Zek took us that long, but as I recall, that was less due to the encounter difficulty than packs of people acting like retards.

A couple things to keep in mind too, when you make those assessments. One is as Tikker said, we're all FAR more experienced in MMOs now than we were then. We know a lot more about how boss encounters work, how to coordinate 25+ people at once, etc. Also, strats are vastly more open now. Back then, you didn't have people saying ANYTHING about strats, much less posting how-to's to youtube. I guarantee you if there was as much strat reveal then as there is now, you would have a very different memory about beating some encounters and your accomplishment thereby.

Lastly, coding has gotten far better now, and the games are much less exploitable. No modern MMO is going to let you completely break intended encounter design by doing things like we did, with pulling mini-Aten through the ceiling downstairs into the 1st floor Goo room. Nor will they let you get a world first ventani kill by levitating over lava and hiding under a bridge, like Conquest did.

Oh, and Vonk, I must disagree with you, at least a bit. Yes, gear is a vital factor, but I have seen well geared tanks who can't hold aggro near as well as someone with vastly inferior gear, and I have known healers I would trust to keep me alive were they in nothing but greens over others I know in all raid epics. There is still room for skill, if there's not quite as dramatic ways to show it as there used to be. And yes, believe me, I truly miss doing insane pulls and splits as a monk. You have no idea how many hours I spent in places like the revamped Paw, learning how to feign split things. I wouldn't claim to be the best raid puller who was in LOS, I can think of at least a few who were as good or better, but I never met anyone who could feign split as well. Unfortunately, that was sometimes a downside for raids, as it would take too long, and piss the enchanters off. heh. So, yes, you do have something of a point, but I think you're overlooking some things too.

-Arlos

That's part of it too Arlos. I HATE how readily available strats are and I hate how there are barely any guilds in WoW that try to walk in blindly and figure it out on their own.

[Arlos]

Oh, no doubt on that. And yes, you can lay that largely at the feet of instancing removing the exclusivity competition factor out of it that EQ had. Of course, bosses being exclusive was the cause of more problems, headaches, drama, and no doubt massive CS issues and lost customers that it doesn't surprise me that recent games have universally gone away from that model.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

EQ was the same way, skill > gear. back in the day i was not the best SK on the block, and my buddy stev (the rogue in the previous paragraph) was not the best enchanter, but to this day i am still proud that the two of us, with our relatively shite gear, used to go duo in chardok and HS. we crawled almost all the way through HS (drusella still owned us no matter what lol), and held the CD slave pits for hours. i would imagine those places to be quite trivial by now, but back then and with our stuff it was not something your average retards could pull off.

Four big points here:

First, EQ didn't have the addons that really make WOW fluid and easy for the casual and less skilled masses to play. This and the many additions WOW itself has done have made the game easy and caters to the masses of casuals. This is smart from a business standpoint. Also information was extremely difficult to get, unless you were in a guild that knew Brad or had him on speed dial.

Second there is no risk associated with any content ingame. Death is trivial. When we took a single group into Fear and cleared it we did so with the danger of losing our corpses. This also promoted much more community and guild interaction. The Scions raid in Fear is a great example of this. Likewise, the Dragon Zerg guilds also interacted with us often for help.

Third, EQ was more of a mystery and less of a numbers game than WOW. The amount of theorycrafting going into PVP and PVE is staggering. I guarantee you Drolkrad and Manalope never spent 5 minutes theorycrafting, and apples to apples in PVP they'd kick the shit out of any of the current 'hard core' Arena teams.

Fourth, there is no reputation in WOW. Server transfers, name changes, race changes, cross server PUGs, etc eliminate this. One can raid all the content being the suckiest gamer in the world. I suppose this is by design as everyones 15/mo looks the same to Blizzard. On Nameless, I knew exactly what I was getting in that pickup group based on the Shaman, Enchanter, and cleric that I had. Granted, I did almost all my grouping with the same dozen people, but when we needed another there generally was a good understanding of how good or bad the person we were getting was.

I enjoy WOW, but it's a mainstream game made for the Scions of Veeshan and Dragon Zerglings of the world, in my opinion.

[vonkaar]

I wonder if Tigole or Ariel ever read around here anymore. Would love to peek inside their minds.

[Arlos]

That I don't know. I do know, though, that Tigole is no longer working on WOW. He got assigned to their new un-announced MMO project. (I mean, the project is known to exist, you can go to their employment page and they have jobs open that are specifically for "non-announced next-gen MMO", but so far there hasn't even been an informed whisper in the media as to what that MMO might BE. The only information was released by Blizzard themselves, that it's an entirely new IP, and isn't related to Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, etc.)

Unfortunately, due to issues I am not even going to begin to go into here, the aggregate ex-LOS community as a whole aren't in contact much with the blizzard folks any more. On an individual basis, though, some certainly are. I email Tig once in a blue moon, but that's about it, as I don't want to pester him or be seen as attempting to ring up the batphone. I tried to meet up with the guys at the '08 Blizzcon, but there was just too many people there to be able to find them randomly, which I didn't anticipate beforehand, so I hadn't bothered to contact them well in advance to set something up. Was going to this year, but couldn't afford to make the trip.

Anyway, (back on topic), one thing you must give their raid encounter design team credit for is that the boss fights are generally well done, fairly unique, and with frequently really interesting mechanics involved. There really are almost no basic tank & spank fights out there, and what few there are exist generally as DPS checks, and do always involve SOME other mechanic. (like Patchwerk's hateful strike, etc.) My memory of many dragon fights in EQ was that for a lot of them, DPS classes could be replaced by one of those bobbing head birds, as you never needed to move, or do anything but stand there and click your special attack button periodically. (or your nuke button if you were a caster) Compare that to, say, the Yogg fight, even with 4 keepers, or the mimiron fight, especially hardmode.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

Anyway, (back on topic), one thing you must give their raid encounter design team credit for is that the boss fights are generally well done, fairly unique, and with frequently really interesting mechanics involved.

they're interesting the first time

once you've nailed the script you could bot it np.

I've tried a dozen times, but I just can't 100% nail down what made EQ so great

yes community, but it's more than that

there was just something about the mechanic of the game, the forced grouping, and sharing of dungeons that made it fun

[brinstar]

maybe you just hit it on the head tik

the glory days of EQ happened before instance technology came along, so the spawn competitions and steamrolls and cutthroat leapfrogging was a disguised form of PVP

[Arlos]

Honestly, I think some people are glossing over the negatives of EQ in their memories at this point. I NEVER found it that great as a GAME. It really was just a DikuMUD with a 3D graphics engine. Given that I'd been playing Dikus for years before EQ, I didn't find it especially novel from a game design perspective.

Remember all the things we used to hate? Having to stare at a book while medding, endless bitching about "The Vision", so many classes having no use at one point, being gods at another, then back to uselessness again? How about sitting in the same tiny room for 8 hours hoping against hope some rare mob would spawn, if you could even get into the camp, and then having to hope the item actually drops, and you win the roll, assuming someone doesn't ninja it? How about sitting at one patch of hillside for 18+ hours waiting for a quest mob to spawn, only to have him not show? How was that "fun"? Hell, mindlessly farming the same 3-4 rooms to grind AAs, so you felt like a rat on an infinite treadmill. Was that "fun"? For me at least, those things were so mind-numbing and frustrating, I literally gave up all questing that was more involved than "take this boss drop to mob X and get reward" that wasn't absolutely necessary for raid access, I spent the absolute bare minimum time possible to get the absolutely essential AAs, and I never did tradeskills unless THEY were actively needed for raids. Once those things were accomplished, I would actively not play except for raids. Because it just wasn't fun.

For me, it was LOS that kept me in the game, really. Without raiding, and even without raiding at the top end of the game, I wouldn't have played EQ for anywhere near as long as I did. Yes, LOS contained raving packs of assholes, and I didn't like some of them, and many of them didn't like me, and it frequently frustrated me how we'd treat other people, but it gave me the one thing in the game that kept me playing: the crack of being able to go places no one else could go, kill things no one else could kill, do things no one else could do, and experience parts of the game that no one else would get to experience, not for months and months anyway. THAT motivated me. THAT made me show up every night and play until 2 or 3 in the morning. Helping the guild accomplish its goals, and by doing so accomplishing my own. The rest of the game? Dog vomit.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

maybe you just hit it on the head tik

the glory days of EQ happened before instance technology came along, so the spawn competitions and steamrolls and cutthroat leapfrogging was a disguised form of PVP

I don't even think it was that.

EQ was new and hotness. WOW is improved EQ, but it's just not new. It's better in almost every way, but at the end of the day it still just is upgraded Everquest. It's magical to those who didn't UO or EQ, but for those who've done it it's just another MMO.

From an analogy I used before:

My first car was magic. My current car owns it in every way possible... but it's still just a car, and not nearly the deal #1 was.

[vonkaar]

Arlos, I completely agree with everything you just wrote... and that's hardly the first time I've said that after 10 years of NT .

And ditto to you, Lyion.

It wasn't a great game - it was just the first for me. I loved the MUD experience (still have my 1995 'secrets of the MUD wizards' Syms manual) and EQ completely surpassed those early 'games'. My first EQ experience was watching over the shoulder of the owner of my comic store playing his druid. Funny how the comic-store owner / EQ dork stereotype started for me at day1. Anyway... he was kiting some glowing blobs in wolf form. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, so I went out and bought it that day. I played a druid on the same server (TN) and wanted to be JUST LIKE HIM. Of course, I passed him at lvl 22(ish) and he quit playing shortly after... but that magic was 'real' for me. I ranted and hated on the game just as much as the next guy (besides Tork and Tigole, I suppose) but it remains the benchmark for me.

I certainly had fun playing WoW. I had a group of coworkers at FUNimation that I grouped with on a semi-regular basis. We never had the best group makeup, but it was a blast. As soon as that fell apart, the game was pointless. Guilds don't stick together like they did in EQ... loyalty is a joke and 'friends' is just another term for, "some dude I can group with to help me finish a 4man quest or get revenge on that asshole rogue."



I think that Lyion hits it right on the head. The newer games will likely be superior and offer greater immersion, but EQ will always have that special place in my heart - flaws and all.

[Tikker]

i know what you're saying arlos, but i disagree

the wildest banter and bullshit would come out of the long boring camps. that's where the community overcame the design flaws (i actually think they weren't so much design flaws as much as people just didn't play the game right )


i never hated EQ, just some of the fuckers that played it

but I definitely wouldn't have stayed playing as long as I did without LoS

it wasn't just the raids and stuff, altho that was awesome, but it was having the phat lewts that let me do a ton of shit by myself that would have been impossible without those lewts that really kept me entertained

2boxing my way thru VP before the revamp was an absolute blast

or just being able to invite any other 4 folks along to do almost anything was a fantastic bonus

[10sun]

the wildest banter and bullshit would come out of the long boring camps. that's where the community overcame the design flaws (i actually think they weren't so much design flaws as much as people just didn't play the game right )

2boxing my way thru VP before the revamp was an absolute blast

or just being able to invite any other 4 folks along to do almost anything was a fantastic bonus

I agree with the trimmed down statement above.

I was still playing EQ up until a few months ago when my core group lost yet another and we decided to pack it up and stop paying for a box army.

It got to the point where we'd challenge one another to random boss encounters seeing who could solo what while the other sat there, watched, and pitched in if things started getting hairy.

I'll probably reactivate for fableds this coming year, simply because it really is fun to go back against the old bosses beefed up.

Gotta jet for an art show prep ><

-Adam

[Harrison]

When I got fitted out in full VT gear, and started to go back and rape Kunark solo as a cleric...I was having fun.

To me, it's the feeling of a community that is completely lost in most new games. No one knows who each respective "elite" player of their class is, or any of that shit. People jump ship from guild to guild, etc.

Reputation means nothing.

Such is why I use the same name, for over a decade, in every game. I have more fun playing private servers for Ragnarok Online than I did most any new game since EQ1.

WoW was fun for a few months here and there when a group of RL friends would plow through it. Then we'd all get bored at the extreme repetition of doing the same fucking shit over and over again.

[Tikker]

for me, WoW lost it's luster when your core group got seperated on quests

when you ended up redoing the same shit 4-5 times you realized how shitty it was


but when everyone is on the same page, it was fantastic

[Drem]

Remember all the things we used to hate? Having to stare at a book while medding, endless bitching about "The Vision", so many classes having no use at one point, being gods at another, then back to uselessness again? How about sitting in the same tiny room for 8 hours hoping against hope some rare mob would spawn, if you could even get into the camp, and then having to hope the item actually drops, and you win the roll, assuming someone doesn't ninja it? How about sitting at one patch of hillside for 18+ hours waiting for a quest mob to spawn, only to have him not show? How was that "fun"? Hell, mindlessly farming the same 3-4 rooms to grind AAs, so you felt like a rat on an infinite treadmill. Was that "fun"? For me at least, those things were so mind-numbing and frustrating, I literally gave up all questing that was more involved than "take this boss drop to mob X and get reward" that wasn't absolutely necessary for raid access, I spent the absolute bare minimum time possible to get the absolutely essential AAs, and I never did tradeskills unless THEY were actively needed for raids.

that's weird. those are all of the reasons i enjoyed EQ. "take boss mob drop to mob X" are the type of quests i hate because they're so quick and easy. it's more annoying than anything else. i hate quick and easy anything tho. i hate fast travel in fallout 3 and oblivion. /shrug

it's like kraft insta-mac vs. making real macaroni and cheese. or buying frozen meatballs instead of making them. i'm not a fan of the easy way out. and EQ has definitely become a really easy game

and also, i don't like it when people compare the raid difficulty of velious or PoP to some new WOW raid. new EQ raids are just as scripted and interesting, i guarantee. why? because they're basically the same game nowadays

[Jay]

Remember all the things we used to hate? Having to stare at a book while medding, endless bitching about "The Vision", so many classes having no use at one point, being gods at another, then back to uselessness again? How about sitting in the same tiny room for 8 hours hoping against hope some rare mob would spawn, if you could even get into the camp, and then having to hope the item actually drops, and you win the roll, assuming someone doesn't ninja it? How about sitting at one patch of hillside for 18+ hours waiting for a quest mob to spawn, only to have him not show? How was that "fun"? Hell, mindlessly farming the same 3-4 rooms to grind AAs, so you felt like a rat on an infinite treadmill. Was that "fun"? For me at least, those things were so mind-numbing and frustrating, I literally gave up all questing that was more involved than "take this boss drop to mob X and get reward" that wasn't absolutely necessary for raid access, I spent the absolute bare minimum time possible to get the absolutely essential AAs, and I never did tradeskills unless THEY were actively needed for raids.

that's weird. those are all of the reasons i enjoyed EQ. "take boss mob drop to mob X" are the type of quests i hate because they're so quick and easy. it's more annoying than anything else. i hate quick and easy anything tho. i hate fast travel in fallout 3 and oblivion. /shrug

it's like kraft insta-mac vs. making real macaroni and cheese. or buying frozen meatballs instead of making them. i'm not a fan of the easy way out. and EQ has definitely become a really easy game

and also, i don't like it when people compare the raid difficulty of velious or PoP to some new WOW raid. new EQ raids are just as scripted and interesting, i guarantee. why? because they're basically the same game nowadays

Interesting... I totally agree with Drem.

[Harrison]

Yeah, fuck easymode run back and forth bullshit.

[Arlos]

And sitting there waiting for Stormfeather for 20 hours only to have him not show was an ecstatically fun experience? Spending 10 hours at a stretch in Guk waiting for the Monk epic quest guy to spawn, again, only to have him never show was "fun"? I think not.

Note that I didn't say that the simple boss drop turn-in quests were fun, just that those were the only quests that I became willing to do, other than those quests that were required in order to get access to raid areas.

As for WOW, if your guilds never stuck together or did anything, you were in the wrong guilds. On my server in WOW, there's easily 15+ guilds that raid 25-man content, of which probably 5 are at least working on the hardmodes. There's 2 of us that have finished them. All of those things you complain about: nothing to do, people being at disparate quest stages, etc. all go away when you're all max level, in the same guild, and raiding every night. If you haven't done that, and were a heavy raider in EQ, I don't know how you can say that WOW sucks compared to EQ when you haven't tried the same playstyle in both. How do you know if you won't get as caught up in serious WOW raiding as you did in serious EQ raiding, if you're not in a guild as good as you were in when you were in EQ, and doing the same sort of things as you did back then? You're comparing apples to oranges.

-Arlos