Decline DiD WoW ruined MMOS?

[rusty_shackleford]

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

BRD wasn't a 5-man dungeon until 1.10, and wasn't designed as one.

 

[anvi]

I disagree with most of that Porky. Firstly I don't think "a lot easier and more solo oriented" was a good thing. Besides the fact that it doesn't make much sense to have a massively multiplayer game that is solo oriented, I think it also bred less social players. I grouped with people in WoW that run around together and didn't say a single word and then just leave the group, rudely, after their quest is done. I think how people behave on the internet in general went down the shitter so that is partly to blame for it, but still, in EQ people always said hi to everyone when they joined a group, and they would talk a bit about where they are heading and how to handle certain things. And then they would at the least say goodbye at the end of it. I think the game pushing people together from level 1, had an impact on the players and made them more social in general. And it makes for a more interesting gameplay too, because group gameplay is generally a lot deeper and more interesting than soloing.

Also I disagree they found the right balance of difficulty. EQ seems far too difficult on paper, but when you play it for a while, you quickly overcome most of the tough aspects. And that is a huge part of the fun, getting beat up early, makes succeeding later feel like a much bigger accomplishment. WoW went for instant gratification and it wasn't as good. When you can beat low level enemies by nothing more than a single right click and then go afk, that leaves you with nothing to overcome. Nothing to struggle against. Everything is handed to you far too easily, and it makes it extremely bland to most people who played EQ. I admit a lot of the stuff someone would read about EQ doesn't sound fun, but you have to actually experience it to appreciate what it did to you and to other players. It did so many things that you just can't explain in a FAQ or feature list or something. For example being generally tougher, really brought people together. Even if you spent a lot of the time soloing, you would still help out people who you came across in the world and talk to them, and vice versa. People would share buffs and information with a passerby because the game being tough created a spirit of "us vs them", us being the players, and them being the mobs that regularly slaughtered the players. So if you are running along a coastline miles from anywhere, and you spot another player coming the other direction, you likely run to meet each other to see what's happening. He might say, "Be careful if you keep going, there is a bandit on the rampage back there." Or he might be a class that has a movement speed spell that will really help you on your journey, and you might have something to help him too. And it isn't just a better 'spirit' amongst the players, it created gameplay too. Often you would bump into someone in a chance encounter like that, and you ask what they are doing, and they are on a quest that they are struggling with, so you team up to help him and you get something amazing from it too that you didn't even know about.

Also I disagree anything in EQ was 'retarded'. Some of it was too brutal (dying and the exp curve), some balance issues (some classes couldn't solo), often too obtuse (there were no tooltips so you had to test out new spells to see what they do). But none of it was stupid, it was mostly because they believed in the game feeling almost like a survival game, being designed to bring people together and not be hand holdy and soloable, and also because it was old. As much as I love EQ, I would have tweaked about 90% of the game if I could have. But tweaking is all it really needed, and like I said, WoW completely threw out the baby with the bathwater. Some things were an improvement, but far more of it was worse, even in classic WoW. Also the best dungeons I've seen in any game, by a huge margin, were in EQ. I could link maps but most of them can't even be mapped properly because they have upper and low levels, so it would really need to be in 3d to even see where everything is. They were truly huge, and had complex layouts designed to confuse people. People would get lost in dungeons and need to get help from other people to come and help them get out.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I heard the complaint recently about people being almost totally silent when running with a group then when they get what they want they just disappear, no thanks, no goodbye, no nuttin'. I used to play on NWN persistent worlds and everyone was totally friendly, social and chatty and they became your friend. Some of them were perhaps too friendly. I remember one guy who had to watch his newborn one night when his wife was out while we adventured online. Out of the blue, he wanted me to be his cyber butt-buddy. I said, "Dude, WTF? I ain't no cock-puffin' ass-farmer! Get away from me! And you wit a newborn and a wife!" But, hey, I told you they could be social. I'm afraid to think what happens on those highly populated porny, furry-esque loverslab types of NWN PWs.

 

[Taxnomore]

I think it's safe to say that I have never played a good MMO. The original UO might have been different but it was a different crowd then, and the Ultima community and high school version of me was pretty compatible with LARPING.

I've played UO. I've played WoW. I've played FF14. I've played fucking FO76 and others. And even on the bits that are done right in those games (yes, FO76 does _some_ things right, they are) , there is nothing satisfying. They managed to feel like time wasters. There is always grinding involved. When there is not, the "it's like a single player game" bits make you wonder why you are not playing a single player game, since the games also feature the drawbacks, of, you know, being online. Which means not only requiring an internet connection but also being awkwardly in a LESS dynamic game world because you can't let players fuck with everything on the server.
The character development is most often made so that you can't really fuck up your character, so there is no much strategy involved EXCEPT if you... yes... are into the multiplayer side of it.

But who is, really ? I don't get the appeal. If you play with a group of friends, you HAVE to have the same rhythm of gameplaying otherwise your party will get imbalanced : you won't be able to follow in tough areas, they will be bored in low level ideas. What the hell ?

TL;DR : MMOs are a flawed concept. They are inferior to their SP counterpart and add extra struggles to concept that were refined offline ; the multiplayer part require you to be REALLY into it to be fun, and most sane people aren't.

I guess a good MMO is pretty much like UO : no set direction assigned, no "main quest", and freedom. But in this day and age, if you're not the Hero, people won't bother.

 

[Beastro]

WoW looked at what other MMO did and improved on it, they didnt "ruined MMOs" because they mostly did logical progression of existing systems ... WoW was evolutionary and not revolutionary.

This.

EQ was struggling to find its form originally, but it eventually did by the second expansion and began to solidify the "content" obsession MMOs have.

EQ had a very rough idea of things like an end game and raiding originally and the result was a compromise rather than what the devs originally intended.

An example of that are using Monks and SKs to pull and split mobs through the use of Feign Death, something they devs didn't foresee and at first fought until they realized it had its place and gave those classes a vital role without them adding more (Monks we originally just a DPS class, after that they become one of the key raid classes that made raiding near impossible to do without).

Another is the use of the Cleric Complete Heal spell which was intended to be an downtime heal to top people off between fights that became the primary heal spell for raiding as Clerics developed chain rotations to make sure their heals landed in between the 10 second cast time. Again, completely unexpected and fought at first until the devs realized their original intention to fighting raid mobs, effectively heals just spamming whatever little heals they could, was not enough to keep tanks alive fighting the raid mobs they'd created. Without CH those targets could have been done, but they'd have required completely different raid compositions that would have actually made raiding barely functional and shit to go through.

 

[Beastro]

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.

Not originally, you were expected to deal with all of them at once and have the CC around to face them.

The thing with FD completely undermined their encounter design, but they went with it. Compare that to Blizz which forced mobs to be chained together, so even if you could split a group the rest would come with the one you got no matter what.

That's the Blizz way to fixing problems. Cross faction chat produces too many CC complaints? Remove it. Taking out Windriders and Guards to overrun a town too troublesome, make them OP and insta spawn to drive players to stop attacking towns.

some balance issues (some classes couldn't solo)

That was part of the charm and the trade off you made with picking a class.

Druids rocked solo, but were terrible in groups and raids, Necros less so but their dots weren't as good in groups and their unique abilities to contribute were kinda unexpected in ways (like the mana feeding spell line).

Compare that to Warriors, Clerics and Chanters who struggled to solo (outside of chanter charm that was high risk) but were guaranteed group and raid positions.

 

[luj1]

With all this in mind, do any of you expect Pantheon will turn out any good?

 

[Cryomancer]

I guess a good MMO is pretty much like UO : no set direction assigned, no "main quest", and freedom. But in this day and age, if you're not the Hero, people won't bother.

This is one of the reasons that most survival games like Ark, Conan Exiles, etc has far more RPG elements than mmos. I an not saying that they are RPG's, but at least characters are not clones with different clothing and the combat is not pressing tab and trowing the same rotation, the combat is much more interesting, looting, defending, raiding, etc too. I don't need to say that on this survival games, you don't have legions and legions of "Molag Bal slayers" as you have on ESO.

Kotor 1/Kotor 2 are amazing games. Swtor is boring as hell. NWN1/NWN2 too(mainly with mods), neverwinter online is so awful that i could't play for long time. Seriously. I have almost 500 hours of NWN on STEAM(EE) + GOG(original), 120 hours of NWN2 but could't play neverwinter online for more than a day. Look to an Dracolich fight on the mmo vs on the sp experience

on mmo

on sp game

IS that hard to do make MMO where????

• Attributes are attributes, measuring what your char can and cannot do. Not every warlock at lv 70 being an clone?
• Armor works like armor aka offers protection and few types of enchanted armor offering MINOR bonuses
• No cooldowns, come with spell slots like most D&D based games or Dark Souls, long casting times and expensive special arrows on Dragon's Dogma
• The game doesn't start at lv cap and the level measures your character progression where few people are near lv cap and there are no artificial limitation. Eg, on Dark Souls, with 45 INT and logan catalyst, an soul spear deals taX" damage. Doesn't matter if you are lv 70 or 500. Leveling serve as progression but there aren't any artificially caps to force you to grind on area A, then grind on area B, then C<...>
• No ridiculous limitations like necromancers with only one summon, arrows who disappear after few meters, etc
• Consequences for taking some decisions. Compare vampirism on ESO with vampirism on Morrowind or Daggerfall. Become an vampire should make you far stronger in some situations(night time) but far weaker to fire, taking sun damage, etc.
• No numbers more inflated than Zimbabwe currency. An mob with 500 hp, 50 AC and 37 SR with +30/+23/+26 saves on NWN1 is extremely tough. No numers above 3 digits that means nothing from regular foes. Unless you are fighting an deity at epic level, no mob should have more than 3 digit hp.
• The same char freedom of an SP game

I an not asking too much. There are TONS and TONS of SP games who fulfill most of this requirements.

 

[anvi]

With all this in mind, do any of you expect Pantheon will turn out any good?

I suspect it will be good but not great. But maybe they can prove me wrong. I suspect it will be too easy and too simple. For example in Vanguard they added a bunch of taunt abilities to tank classes that were 100%. So every fight was tank holding the enemies, healers spamming their 1234 which kept tank alive, and nukers spamming their 1234. It was so routine and boring. The fun of EQ was that so much could go wrong, and usually it did. Most of it wasn't even as they designed, it was because pathing was terrible, or because people couldn't be bothered to keep a stopwatch on respawn time which meant someone going to pull 2 mobs and coming back with 4 just as your room respawns. Or because your tank sets off to pull an enemy and some nearby group has just died with 10 mobs on them, and your tank runs into it all. Also the exp was so slow, people generally wanted to fight in places that were a bit above them. So a group of level 30s could fight level 27 mobs all day and never get in trouble. But you could progress a LOT faster if the group of level 30s are fighting mobs that are generally level 31, some maybe 34.

Some or all of this could be in Pantheon but I suspect they will make it more accommodating for players which for me at least, will mostly fuck it up. In Vanguard the only time I found it exciting was doing dungeons with 3 people instead of 6. Especially if I am playing all 3 myself. If Pantheon is like that too, I think it will die on its ass in a month. But hopefully they can surprise me.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Yeah it is not WoW's fault all the other mmo's copied it.

This. Can't blame WoW for being successful since it was an appealing product after all, but you can blame the retards who tried to copy WoW without even a fraction of the money or dev talent that Blizz had, at the time. No one with a modicum of intelligence would've thought that the best way to compete with WoW was to make an inferior copy of it. They should've tried to make something different. WAR kind of tried that, however WAR was just DAoC but inferior in every way so it flopped as fans of DAoC like me saw no reason to play it.

 

[Mark Richard]

No, he's completely right. Early Everquest had far, far more player interaction than the games that came afterward. You used to ask people in game for advice or help, even directions. "I have a quest to slay the goblin king, where is he?" Now it's on your quest compass, and even if it weren't, you knew where it was going to be 10 levels ago when you read about the optimal quest route on a guide written by people who were in the beta. All without ever speaking to another person. And every aspect of MMOs is like this now, right down to how you even fight, what you wear and what you craft.

I have fond memories of just trying to travel, asking people for help and directions along the way, worrying I might get in over my head and squished by something well beyond my means. Not having a map of the area you're in made a huge difference, but nobody would put up with that these days and areas aren't dangerous areas to be explored, but linearly scaling grind zones to progress through.

Exactly. A group with all the modern amenities are not going to interact like a group who're dependent on each other for survival. If we can solo most of the content with a GPS, map, and guide, then what incentive is there to communicate? By the time I get to the endgame content, I don't have the contacts which I should've been collecting organically throughout the entire game and need to build an entire network up from scratch.

 

[Cryomancer]

This. Can't blame WoW for being successful since it was an appealing product after all, but you can blame the retards who tried to copy WoW without even a fraction of the money or dev talent that Blizz had, at the time. No one with a modicum of intelligence would've thought that the best way to compete with WoW was to make an inferior copy of it. They should've tried to make something different. WAR kind of tried that, however WAR was just DAoC but inferior in every way so it flopped as fans of DAoC like me saw no reason to play it.

Not only that. Imagine that somehow(maybe with alien technology) you managed to deliver more than wow delivers on quality and quantity, anyone who is playing with friends and guild mates on wow will NOT leave wow for an game "a little better". in order to take from wow crowd, you need to be much better Hell,Children's Online Daycare and FIFA who are both extremely weaker in teh social aspect sell the same game every year due brand recognition and consumer habit. What game devs should do IMO is to satisfy an demand who nobody is satisfying in mmo genre. An RPG without this BS mechanics...

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Exactly. A group with all the modern amenities are not going to interact like a group who're dependent on each other for survival. If we can solo most of the content with a GPS, map, and guide, then what incentive is there to communicate? By the time I get to the endgame content, I don't have the contacts which I should've been collecting organically throughout the entire game and need to build an entire network up from scratch.

I think the best approach would be to balance in the middle between those 2 extremes. A game where all the content requires a group is going to turn a lot of people away (like myself), because I don't always want to deal with other people, sometimes I just want to be by myself (and yes, in the same game). But if all content and/or achievements are doable solo, then of course that ruins the whole purpose of an MMO.

This is why I liked early WoW, because I feel like it struck a good balance between the two. Regular quests and PvP were doable solo, so you could adventure around to your heart's content, but then more advanced content, like dungeons, raiding, some elite quests, and so on were only doable by groups.

 

[Jasede]

WoW was definitely a milestone, and very casual compared to things like EQ1 or UO. That said, it was dumbed down much more over the years so that now, WoW Classic is considered 'hardcore' (lol.)
That said, I do think WoW (Classic) are pretty fun, but so are EQ1 and UO. Those games are all fun.

Like someone said earlier, it's not really WoW's fault that everyone copied it. But I must say, it makes trying newer MMORPGs a waste of time. FF14, EQ2, WoW, it's all the same cooldown+buttons system. I guess you could go for a turn-based one like Dofus Wakfu...

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

WoW Classic isn't a good game, but it's a guilty pleasure game.

 

[ADL]

Vanilla World of Warcraft didn't ruin MMOs, the response to it did. Imagine how different this genre would've been if 95% of all the resources ever put into it weren't attempted WoW killers.

 

[ADL]

MMOs were ruined by things like:

• Free online strategy guides (wowhead etc..)
• Data mining
• Infusion of overwhelming competitive mindsets via things like twitch, youtube, tournaments, etc..
• Addons that allow for 'autopilot' play
• Beta testing
• 3rd party auto-calculation softwares
• Ultra polish and banning/removal of overlooked mechanics etc..

These things basically solve and explore the game before it's even released and combined with overwhelming competitive mindsets among the playerbases remove a huge chunk of what made old school mmos so much fun (discovery/exploration/creativity).

What's annoying is that most of these problems are unavoidable and the game developers have very little control over these. So they can't really design games anymore that have these great elements built in because, before the game even releases, the secrets have been unveiled and spoiled, everyone knows how to play optimally, and guess what: if you don't play optimally you don't get invited to teams.

This is why Project Gorgon is so great. The developer has basically begged the playerbase not to create a wiki and the small but dedicated community playing it has respected that wish so it has a genuine sense of exploration and discovery still.

 

[Cryomancer]

This is why Project Gorgon is so great. The developer has basically begged the playerbase not to create a wiki and the small but dedicated community playing it has respected that wish so it has a genuine sense of exploration and discovery still.

There are mmoish mechanics like CDs, stats linked towards gear, etc on Project Gorgon?

 

[Kane]

WoW and X-Box completely ruined gaming. Since then it's ok for developers to be stupid whores and deliver Everquest/Halo N+1 ad infinitum.

It's beyond me why people still hand them their money for the lazy trash they pump out. We need a good fucking recession where all these losers are decimated back onto the job market with a no-return ticket. The whole industry is rotten to the core.

 

[hoothoot]

Consumers ruined gaming just like they ruin everything, including world.
Vanilla wow was some gud shit.

 

[laclongquan]

• No ridiculous limitations like necromancers with only one summon, arrows who disappear after few meters, etc

It's not ridiculous. Necromancers with sea of summons (like skeletons) is a basic popular conception. if you dont set down limitation on that gamers would drive the servers to the ground with oceans of summons.
Same idea with any summoner type, really. It's basic thinking~

 

[Ranselknulf]

The short answer is no, WoW didn't ruin mmo's.

The entire market was changing even when WoW wasn't the undisputed mmo king.

WoW is what happens when one company gains a commanding share of a market, like Google or Facebook.

They start buying up all the best code and ideas to implement in their game before a new "company" can emerge.

I've never played WoW, but I wouldn't mind trying the vanilla servers one day.

 

[Cryomancer]

It's not ridiculous. Necromancers with sea of summons (like skeletons) is a basic popular conception. if you dont set down limitation on that gamers would drive the servers to the ground with oceans of summons.
Same idea with any summoner type, really. It's basic thinking~

There are a big gap between unlimited summoning and only one summon...

 

[laclongquan]

One summoner = one summon, the server is fine.

One summoner = 2 summon, that is twice the load. Maybe fine in normal time, but definitely crowded as all hell in high traffic time.

One summoner = 3 summons, the server is possibly stressed all the time.

 

[Cryomancer]

One summoner = one summon, the server is fine.

One summoner = 2 summon, that is twice the load. Maybe fine in normal time, but definitely crowded as all hell in high traffic time.

One summoner = 3 summons, the server is possibly stressed all the time.

Not true. NWN1 had an mod(PRC) who makes summoning like PnP and it din't crashed the game. If i remember correctly Age of Coann allowed multiple summon, up to 11 for necromancers.

How many "mobs" there are in a mmo? In an single dungeon you can have tons of mobs. Three of four of then will not be a problem. And you can apply something similar to "swarm" rules if you wanna summons with complex IA and pathfinding.