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Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

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Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#41

Post by abakker »

FlannelPancake wrote: post #35
minimaxir wrote: post #3

I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned. As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich Ki…

I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that). WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage explorat…

Good point - Silithus ALWAYS had a low population, because it sucked to get to, and sucked even more to level there. The quests are almost all formulaic, (kill 10 ant monsters, etc.) and there are few plots in any of the quests. Once you hit 60 in the original game, there was plenty to do in _any_ other area that made it worth leaving and never coming back. I did some leveling in all the areas that were available at the time because I liked exploring, but the quests there actively discouraged moving very far from the base, as most of the quests could be completed close by.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#42

Post by ecdavis »

I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time. Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration when it comes to MMOs.

When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#43

Post by drewbug »

patio11 wrote: post #40

Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp leve…

Are they really that expensive to develop?

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#44

Post by jhwhite »

So much nostalgia reading that article. Sometimes I miss playing, but I've moved on with my life. I'm now in shape (I became very overweight during my WoW days), my career is moving better, and I've started a family. But sometimes I wish I could play and talk with the people in my old guild.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#45

Post by MikeTV »

Skilleen wrote: post #28

I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with permanent stat boosts. I remember our guil…

LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this. The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#46

Post by squeaky-clean »

Blackthorn wrote: post #16
minimaxir wrote: post #3

I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned. As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich Ki…

Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.

I didn't like how GW1 did this at all. As they added expansions and more content, the game's population appeared to grow thinner and thinner, because the same number of players were spread out over more areas of the game. I really hope they avoid this with the new expansion for GW2 somehow. The "megaserver" system they use will probably help quite a bit.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#47

Post by dbg31415 »

This is nothing new. Even back in the day, the only people playing in certain old zones were people leveling... the goal of the game (for anyone other than the insane loremasters) is to get to max level as quickly as possible so you can raid and PVP.

Blizzard is taking steps to allow people to see old dungeons, but they have not yet created incentives to keep people exploring old content. Arguably, it's not a great idea to spread people out... as the game population dwindles it's better to keep the players in the same zones so they feel like they are in a populated world and not a single-player game.

Anyway agree there are some really cool parts of the game that ANYONE could see... but they get abandoned. I care more about old dungeons and old raids, but really they've done a good job of allowing players to see that content and farm it for transmog gear and nostalgia.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#48

Post by ropman76 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #26

God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to…

Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#49

Post by RexM »

leemac wrote: post #9

My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence. Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have…

There are private servers that try to be as close to Vanilla as possible, however that does mean that you have to put in the hours to get to level 60. Valkyrie is fairly populated. https://valkyrie-wow.org/

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#50

Post by patio11 »

drewbug wrote: post #43
patio11 wrote: post #40

Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.) It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp leve…

Are they really that expensive to develop?

A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
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