Jeru
Novice
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- Jun 25, 2019
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It was already done many times in many MMORPGs.. Early game version servers that either stayed at certain expansion or progressed all the way to modern versions. This is nothing new.
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Decline DiD WoW ruined MMOS?
- Thread starter Cryomancer
- Start date
laclongquan
Arcane
What does this "new" has to do with anything? The answers they want are for these questions:
Does it still get played at reasonable number?
Does the revenue pay for overhead cost?
Does it still get played at reasonable number?
Does the revenue pay for overhead cost?
I also hate how people are obsessed with the best of everything. There was a point, around 2008 or something, when all I used to see in regional chat in MMOs was, "Hay guyz im new, wot is da best dps/tank/healer?" And I used to see the same person, once he had harassed everyone into giving him a satisfactory answer to the best class, would then ask, "Wot is teh best weapon for a rouge?" Of course the same prick would also ask everything else too, "how do i opem my inventory?", "where is teh blasmith in dis town?", "i haz quest to kil 10 lizads, were r teh lizads?"
In the good ole days people picked a class they liked the idea of, and went with it. It might not be the best but usually a class that wasn't the best at something, made up for it in other ways. You would then go exploring and adventuring, and you would find a weapon. It wasn't the best weapon in the game, but you were happy to have something better than the rusty stick you started with. People would figure things out themselves, it was part of the adventure. And you would set off somewhere and get sidetracked by something, end up in a completely different place. That was again, part of the adventure, and the whole point of having an open world is so that players can end up going in any direction. There is no point having any of that if people only want to follow a guide, best class ---> wot is da best newbie hunting area ---> best area at level 10 ---> best weapon ---> best raid guild ---> time to move on to the next game.
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Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Yeah, yeah, but how does ESO fit into the grand scheme of things MMO? Because that's what I've been eyeing, as soon as I can get the whole kit on sale - DLCs + expansions - for the price of 3 six-packs + change.
It is pretty terrible if you want anything like EQ. It is just like every modern MMO, you play as a superhero, you press a few buttons, enemies explode before they land a hit on you, a month later you are max level and you do a Dance-Dance-Revolution raid where nobody says a word and nobody has to think. And then you are done and looking for another game. PVP is a bit above average though, and the group McDungeons are tuned to require decent players who have googled the strategy before joining the group.
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Cryomancer
Arcane
Yep, but TF2 din't archived the same level of success of OW...
Deal an massive damage on other genres, but you can find good SP offline RPG's.
Norfleet
Moderator
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- 12,250
In other words, they made a permanently life-defining choice at the very beginning of the game without possessing any of the information required to make an informed decision about it. That remains my least-favorite design paradigm in these games, really. This design paradigm is like asking a child to decide what they want to be when they grow up and then forcing them to stick with it for the rest of their lives.
There was information about the classes, and you could talk to people for suggestions if you really wanted. Also if you don't like it you can just make another class. Most people made other classes to see them. I switched classes after the first year and the new character leveled up quickly because I knew the game and could give him some uber gear.
Cryomancer
Arcane
I played a little classic wow(not from bliz) last year. At beginning was amazing, but when i was around lv 50, i become extremely demotivated. The fact that every other warlock of the same level was an clone of me without gear with few minor tweeks in a tree that can easily be changed made me have zero attachment to my character. The fact that every fight was spam tha same rotation made me fell like i was in a very repetitive job, not in a game... Uninstall the game.
The high levels is when I started to dislike it too. Leveling wasn't too bad. The thing that I hated the most is that there was zero randomness to the dungeons, or anything really. It was very linear. Nothing is more boring than just going from balanced encounter to balanced encounter, pressing 1234 and on to the next. EQ wasn't like that at all, and enemies were put together in huge groups that were impossible for any group, so you had to split them up which was risky business. There was also a respawn time that made resource management really important. You had to rest after every fight or you were too weak to continue, and if you were inefficient players and needed too long to rest, you would start a new battle and then get attacked by the previous enemies too and that could be big trouble. The groups of mobs were generally close together too which helped make this possible, so if you have a huge battle and then need to rest, your next battle up ahead is not very far from the previous battle, so you can easily end up engaging them and then getting attacked in the back by the respawns of the previous fight.
Also the bad pathing, frustrating as it was, could make it far more interesting. You can handle a group of 3, so the warrior shoots his bow at a group of 3 mobs. But the bad pathing makes them run through a wall and attract 5 more enemies, and now you are fighting 8 mobs. Exciting, nailbiting really because dying was such a torture. But also a talented group could survive that, but most groups would die or need to teleport. WoW has nothing like this at all. No randomness or unexpected excitement, and also no way for a good player to shine and a bad player to think, "damn I want to get good at this!"
I can't type too much or people hate it but, there are a thousand other things that made WoW dumbed down compared to EQ and they all really add up to a much blander game. The way crowd control worked was a big one of those things. WoW totally ruined it.
Also the bad pathing, frustrating as it was, could make it far more interesting. You can handle a group of 3, so the warrior shoots his bow at a group of 3 mobs. But the bad pathing makes them run through a wall and attract 5 more enemies, and now you are fighting 8 mobs. Exciting, nailbiting really because dying was such a torture. But also a talented group could survive that, but most groups would die or need to teleport. WoW has nothing like this at all. No randomness or unexpected excitement, and also no way for a good player to shine and a bad player to think, "damn I want to get good at this!"
I can't type too much or people hate it but, there are a thousand other things that made WoW dumbed down compared to EQ and they all really add up to a much blander game. The way crowd control worked was a big one of those things. WoW totally ruined it.
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I think it's like this:-
One way of fostering community in MMOs is by making the game just hard enough and opaque enough so that things go more smoothly if you team up with other players Teaming up with difficult stuff leads to buddy relationships forming, buddy relationships lead to regular teaming, regular teaming leads to guilds and such forming organically, and because of their organic origin they remain pretty solid throughout. Longevity of community is (IIRC from discussions on this) one of the main factors leading to longevity of MMO. I say "opaque enough" because originally with MMOS, part of the thing was also for the "Explorer" type (using the Bartle taxonomy) to learn the game's nooks and crannies, and then for them to be a source of information for other players - again, communication, interaction between players, being the key.
The thing about WoW was that it made the content easier to do solo. (It's funny saying this now, because out of the box WoW was still harder than any MMO since - it just wasn't as hard to get into as the previous generations.)
So the twofold problem has been that 1) the WoW-ification of MMOs has made content easier to solo, and 2) at the same time the internet has obviated the need for people to communicate in-game about the lore (in terms of what's what, where, how things are done, etc.). (I say "the internet" - ofc the internet was around in the days of early MMOs, but it wasn't as easy to find information as it is today, in those days even the internet had its own "opacity" to some extent, which has now almost totally disappeared.)
(The only MMO that ever got around the difficulty-is-good problem was City of Heroes, which had its own unique way of getting people teaming up and communicating with each other: the rewards for the instanced content were more lucrative when teamed than solo, and any quests you had auto-completed along with the team leader's, so people tended to team up, and community was fostered in that way. And again, City of Heroes had one of the best communities of any MMO. Also, instance difficulty was easily tunable on the fly by the team leader for their team, and there were a few other neat little synergies that fostered community. It's a shame no other development teams iterated on these ideas, although some of them did filter through to other MMOs, like sidekicking/mentoring, but probably too little too late.)
Going back to the Bartle taxonomy of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Player Killers - a taxonomy that had been developed in the iteration of massively multiplayer online gaming in the form of text-based MUDs and MOOs, that came before graphics-based MMORPGs as we know them:- there's no reason for Explorers to hang around in MMOs beyond just playing through everything once. There's no reason for Achievers to communicate with other players to get to know where the best stuff is, and what the best things to do are (they can get that info on the internet). There's no reason for Player Killers to hang around in MMOs that strictly divide their servers, and it's no fun for them if there's nobody to prey on - while at the same time, an MMO without any risk for PvE players at all, beyond what's provided by the devs gets boring in the end. And because little community forms, there's no need for Socializers to stick around either.
Also, there's the problem that one's first MMO is a stunning, never to be repeated, cherry-popping experience. And once everyone's played one MMO, then we've all had that experience, and there's no other MMO we can get it from.
One way of fostering community in MMOs is by making the game just hard enough and opaque enough so that things go more smoothly if you team up with other players Teaming up with difficult stuff leads to buddy relationships forming, buddy relationships lead to regular teaming, regular teaming leads to guilds and such forming organically, and because of their organic origin they remain pretty solid throughout. Longevity of community is (IIRC from discussions on this) one of the main factors leading to longevity of MMO. I say "opaque enough" because originally with MMOS, part of the thing was also for the "Explorer" type (using the Bartle taxonomy) to learn the game's nooks and crannies, and then for them to be a source of information for other players - again, communication, interaction between players, being the key.
The thing about WoW was that it made the content easier to do solo. (It's funny saying this now, because out of the box WoW was still harder than any MMO since - it just wasn't as hard to get into as the previous generations.)
So the twofold problem has been that 1) the WoW-ification of MMOs has made content easier to solo, and 2) at the same time the internet has obviated the need for people to communicate in-game about the lore (in terms of what's what, where, how things are done, etc.). (I say "the internet" - ofc the internet was around in the days of early MMOs, but it wasn't as easy to find information as it is today, in those days even the internet had its own "opacity" to some extent, which has now almost totally disappeared.)
(The only MMO that ever got around the difficulty-is-good problem was City of Heroes, which had its own unique way of getting people teaming up and communicating with each other: the rewards for the instanced content were more lucrative when teamed than solo, and any quests you had auto-completed along with the team leader's, so people tended to team up, and community was fostered in that way. And again, City of Heroes had one of the best communities of any MMO. Also, instance difficulty was easily tunable on the fly by the team leader for their team, and there were a few other neat little synergies that fostered community. It's a shame no other development teams iterated on these ideas, although some of them did filter through to other MMOs, like sidekicking/mentoring, but probably too little too late.)
Going back to the Bartle taxonomy of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Player Killers - a taxonomy that had been developed in the iteration of massively multiplayer online gaming in the form of text-based MUDs and MOOs, that came before graphics-based MMORPGs as we know them:- there's no reason for Explorers to hang around in MMOs beyond just playing through everything once. There's no reason for Achievers to communicate with other players to get to know where the best stuff is, and what the best things to do are (they can get that info on the internet). There's no reason for Player Killers to hang around in MMOs that strictly divide their servers, and it's no fun for them if there's nobody to prey on - while at the same time, an MMO without any risk for PvE players at all, beyond what's provided by the devs gets boring in the end. And because little community forms, there's no need for Socializers to stick around either.
Also, there's the problem that one's first MMO is a stunning, never to be repeated, cherry-popping experience. And once everyone's played one MMO, then we've all had that experience, and there's no other MMO we can get it from.
I agree with all of that. Although the cherry popping thing, I have had a second virginity cherry pop that happened one time. Vanguard which was basically a cross between WoW and EQ. It had a bunch of things that really annoyed me and many problems, yet there were some amazing things that blew my mind. I loved it almost as much as my first love. In fact I would much rather play it now, if I could. I will always love EQ but I have played it to death for 20 years.
Also do you guys know about Pantheon? That is a "group focused" MMO by one of the makers of EQ. It is attempting to bring back almost forced grouping, tough gameplay that needs a team, pulling and crowd control is a skill, tactics need talking about before a fight and there is some downtime so people will get a chance to talk to each other for a change. Whether it turns out to be a good game remains to be seen though, but I'm hopeful.
Also I think the MMO genre is really weird because I can imagine lots of huge possibilities that currently no game has even come close to. I can imagine stuff for single player games too, but not even close the extent of MMOs. What we have of MMOs so far is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of what we could have. EVE Online has already done a lot of what excites me, but it does it in a spreadsheety sci fi way. I want to see similar things happen in other MMOs, players running companies within a game world, say you play as an actual trader, you go to a desert region and buy some camels and then travel for a real life week to another part of the game world, and then you can sell the camels that nobody has ever seen before for a huge price. Then you use that money to setup some semi automated trade routes, hire some players or NPCs to help protect the trade routes from bandits. Soon you become rich, grow into a corporation, fund construction of a village near a lucrative dungeon. The village grows as players and NPCs come to do trade. Village becomes town, town becomes city. But a competing corporation wants to take you down by any means. Maybe a big war with catapults and fireballs, but maybe all that needs to happen is for the leader to be assassinated and disruption to some of the key businesses, and suddenly the whole empire crumbles. I'd like to see legendary weapons too, like they had in MUDs. A sword that only exists once in the entire world, and whoever has it is super powerful. Everyone knows his name, and there are bounties on his head because everyone wants that sword. His allies will protect him, his enemies will constantly try to assassinate him. Maybe an ally betrays him and kills him. Takes the sword for his own. That player is now infamous, everyone will know his treacherous name. There are a million cool things you could do with an MMO, but none of it is getting done because everyone is stuck in the WoW mindset.
As soon as people think about a legendary sword now, the first thing people think is, "Dat sounds too OP bro, it would make killing dragons to ez". I like balance in a game, but I like fun even more, and sometimes it is better to have extreme things in a game. Also anything can be balanced in a smart way with a good enough dev. There is something else I really want to see in an MMO but it is a technical issue apparently. But basically I can imagine some incredible games, but the entire genre has completely stagnated, so I think there will first need to be a game that revolutionizes the genre. And only if that succeeds, will more money get spent on more far-out ideas. And maybe in the distant future the genre can get back on track to thinking big again. Just in time for my funeral :p
Also do you guys know about Pantheon? That is a "group focused" MMO by one of the makers of EQ. It is attempting to bring back almost forced grouping, tough gameplay that needs a team, pulling and crowd control is a skill, tactics need talking about before a fight and there is some downtime so people will get a chance to talk to each other for a change. Whether it turns out to be a good game remains to be seen though, but I'm hopeful.
Also I think the MMO genre is really weird because I can imagine lots of huge possibilities that currently no game has even come close to. I can imagine stuff for single player games too, but not even close the extent of MMOs. What we have of MMOs so far is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of what we could have. EVE Online has already done a lot of what excites me, but it does it in a spreadsheety sci fi way. I want to see similar things happen in other MMOs, players running companies within a game world, say you play as an actual trader, you go to a desert region and buy some camels and then travel for a real life week to another part of the game world, and then you can sell the camels that nobody has ever seen before for a huge price. Then you use that money to setup some semi automated trade routes, hire some players or NPCs to help protect the trade routes from bandits. Soon you become rich, grow into a corporation, fund construction of a village near a lucrative dungeon. The village grows as players and NPCs come to do trade. Village becomes town, town becomes city. But a competing corporation wants to take you down by any means. Maybe a big war with catapults and fireballs, but maybe all that needs to happen is for the leader to be assassinated and disruption to some of the key businesses, and suddenly the whole empire crumbles. I'd like to see legendary weapons too, like they had in MUDs. A sword that only exists once in the entire world, and whoever has it is super powerful. Everyone knows his name, and there are bounties on his head because everyone wants that sword. His allies will protect him, his enemies will constantly try to assassinate him. Maybe an ally betrays him and kills him. Takes the sword for his own. That player is now infamous, everyone will know his treacherous name. There are a million cool things you could do with an MMO, but none of it is getting done because everyone is stuck in the WoW mindset.
As soon as people think about a legendary sword now, the first thing people think is, "Dat sounds too OP bro, it would make killing dragons to ez". I like balance in a game, but I like fun even more, and sometimes it is better to have extreme things in a game. Also anything can be balanced in a smart way with a good enough dev. There is something else I really want to see in an MMO but it is a technical issue apparently. But basically I can imagine some incredible games, but the entire genre has completely stagnated, so I think there will first need to be a game that revolutionizes the genre. And only if that succeeds, will more money get spent on more far-out ideas. And maybe in the distant future the genre can get back on track to thinking big again. Just in time for my funeral :p
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Cryomancer
Arcane
Other thing that i din't like about mmos is that they often confuse difficulty with time consumption. On Dark Souls, took almost two hours for me to beat Artorias. Not because i need to spam tha same 1,2,3,4 rotation over and over again for long battles, but because he has movesets hard to predict/evade, drain a lot of stamina if blocks, is fast and etc.
Anyway, in therms of being an MMORPG, survival games such as Conan Exiles have much more RPG elements and interesting things than all mmos that i have tested.
See this massive castle build by players being defended against players on Conan Exiles. Much tactic on building and defending the fortress, much interesting decisions, interesting combat where skill matters, is not tab and press max dps rotation buttons, enemies creating backholes to enter, thralls defending the walls, explosives, distractions... Conan Exiles has some problems, not allow players to use arcane magic(but clerics can summon an avatar of an deity) and the high amount of hit points making some fights very tedious, not mentioning the "overswinging" sword/axe moves but is much more rpg than most mmos.
Anyway, in therms of being an MMORPG, survival games such as Conan Exiles have much more RPG elements and interesting things than all mmos that i have tested.
See this massive castle build by players being defended against players on Conan Exiles. Much tactic on building and defending the fortress, much interesting decisions, interesting combat where skill matters, is not tab and press max dps rotation buttons, enemies creating backholes to enter, thralls defending the walls, explosives, distractions... Conan Exiles has some problems, not allow players to use arcane magic(but clerics can summon an avatar of an deity) and the high amount of hit points making some fights very tedious, not mentioning the "overswinging" sword/axe moves but is much more rpg than most mmos.
It succeeded financially, but it wasn't an improvement in terms of gameplay. It is the McDonalds of MMOs. Huge success, but it is not the best burger.
Not true, WoW improved a lot of things, but it also made far more things much worse.
laclongquan
Arcane
A boatload of players endorsed those improvement of Blizzard's by paying money to them. That certainly say otherwise to your statement.
You would be more correct and objective by saying those improvements are not to your liking.
Norfleet
Moderator
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2005
- Messages
- 12,250
Heh, I remember this taxonomy. I was the Killer-Explorer. Whereas killers are clubs and explorers are shovels, I'm an entrenching tool, I dig holes and can also bust a man's skull. I dig for hidden knowledge, and then I weaponize it for murder. Good times. People like us, well, we were not liked, and we still aren't.
Improvement is physically impossible. Entropy must always increase. Decline is inevitable and inexorable. Everything is shit.
No there are lot of people who back me up if you look in the right places. Do you think McDonalds make the best food on the planet? Because that's what your logic is saying. Also most of the people who played WoW never even heard of Everquest or UO, let alone played them. So they can't say if something is better or not, because they have no reference.
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Sad. I think that is only true of mainstream games though, they are in a race to the bottom. The flashier and dumber they can be, the more they sell, and the more it proves to the retarded industry (and laclongquan) that they did the right thing. But there is still room for innovation outside of the mainstream. A one man dev could make something amazing and innovative today, even a new MUD. The problem is getting enough people to play it so that it can grow in the future. But that is getting better all the time as gaming grows in popularity.
Even if only 1% of gamers actually care about gameplay more than graphics and popularity, it is still a lot of people.
Norfleet
Moderator
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2005
- Messages
- 12,250
That's possible. The rule technically only applies to closed systems. An open system isn't subject to this as long as it can sink entropy elsewhere.
More importantly, it's probably an untapped market, whereas chasing the "majority" market puts you into direct conflict with the existing players...and obviously, nobody's really looking to leave their existing game, unless you develop a strategy to specifically induce conversion. I have a few ideas for how such a thing could be done, but I'd have to ask a lawyer if such a tactic would be legal. And it'd almost certainly be overhead-intensive.
thesecret1
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2019
- Messages
- 6,701
Runescape before 2007 was pretty great, probably because it was nothing like WoW. It's sad that nobody tried to copy that.
Vanguard had a hell of a lot of potential, and I loved it too. Unfortunately, my rig couldn't handle it when it came out, so I only played it when it was already pretty dead (although I did get a few months' solid MMO-ing out of it, good times!).
I heard that the mess was caused by a confluence of several problems, including some messing around from Sony, but particularly some inept management from a coke-fueled creative director.
But had Vanguard come out optimized, reasonably polished with all zones finished, etc., etc., I have no doubt it could easily have been a close second to WoW, because it was much more like an updated Everquest than either EQII or WoW.
I think it's pretty obvious from the longevity of EVE Online that there is an untapped market out there. Also, I'd instance the "realism" mods for Bethesda games. I think there's definitely room for one or two MMOs that are more steeped in fairly detailed simulation and gameplay than any of the extant ones. I think there's a decent-sized audience out there (mainly professional people, in fact) that would be willing to pay through the nose for it. A steep monthly fee would both pay for the game and keep out the riff-raff.
I think the thing with EVE is that they lucked out in terms of their theme needing much, much less in the way of graphics and art design (actual creation of assets) than your standard MMO (and also, with them being amenable to regular updating of visuals). I'd rank MMOs in the level of investment as superheroes->fantasy->space games. So I'm SOL because I'd love to "live" 24/7 in a superhero MMO again, but it's probably never going to happen.
(The problem with superhero games of course being that the mandatory travel powers shrink the psychological size of the game world, so the developers would need to make maybe four times the assets just to compete with a fantasy game. I remember once someone complaining that the size of the central city zone in Champions Online felt small and cramped, then someone demonstrated that it takes about the same time to walk across as it takes to walk across one of the WoW continents
)
PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,392
In its early days WoW was pretty damn good, for a themepark MMO. It was a lot easier and more solo oriented than EQ and most previous MMOs, but that was generally a good thing, as some of the stuff in EQ was retarded. But overall, it hit just the right balance between difficulty and ease of use. Leveling took a long time, dungeons were huge, non-linear in many cases, and hard, mobs were relatively hard, you had to use actual tactics in combat, there was a lot of social interaction, as you had to get to know people on the server, traveling around the huge world was fun (especially getting to dungeons in enemy territory), and there were cool quests and class quirks.
It was later on that the retardation gradually seeped in. Multiple talent trees, switchable on demand, cross-server dungeons and pvp queues, instantaneous world travel, flying mounts, phasing, small linear linear dungeons, and all the other crap. Anybody with half a brain could see how bad these features were a mile away, but of course Blizzard didn't care, because all that matters is increasing profit.
The difference between early WoW and later WoW is best seen by comparing Blackrock Depths and Hellfire Ramparts (first dungeon in Burning Crusade).
VS
It was later on that the retardation gradually seeped in. Multiple talent trees, switchable on demand, cross-server dungeons and pvp queues, instantaneous world travel, flying mounts, phasing, small linear linear dungeons, and all the other crap. Anybody with half a brain could see how bad these features were a mile away, but of course Blizzard didn't care, because all that matters is increasing profit.
The difference between early WoW and later WoW is best seen by comparing Blackrock Depths and Hellfire Ramparts (first dungeon in Burning Crusade).
VS
Cryomancer
Arcane
Now look to SP dungeons. As you can see, dungeons on SP games are far more detailed and complex than mmo "raids"
Hall of the Fire lord on M&M VI
http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/New.World.Computing/might..magic.6.1/mm6.html#md_cd
Floor 3 of ToEE
source http://www.gamebanshee.com/templeofelementalevil/locations/dungeonlevel3.php
Dragon Eye 4 - IWD
http://www.gamebanshee.com/icewinddale/walkthrough/dragonseye4.php
Hall of the Fire lord on M&M VI
http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/New.World.Computing/might..magic.6.1/mm6.html#md_cd
Floor 3 of ToEE
source http://www.gamebanshee.com/templeofelementalevil/locations/dungeonlevel3.php
Dragon Eye 4 - IWD
http://www.gamebanshee.com/icewinddale/walkthrough/dragonseye4.php
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