111–120 of 183 posts
I bet Second Life is even worse for this, and with even more creepy locales (how many virtual furry-fetish dance clubs have been left abandoned?)
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues. Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense. One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just s…
It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that WoW is vastly more popular than UO ever was -- UO peaked around 250k subscribers, WoW peaked around 12 million (~48 times the population). This presumably indicates that far more people found it "fun". This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it... Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describin…
Enjoy the fun while it lasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey. Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression. I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it wa…
Where did you get this cost estimate? Does that include expansion packs and patches?
It seems pretty cheap - Blizzard spent less time and money for the initial development than any of its subsequent and unsuccessful major competitors.
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it... Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describin…
Blizzard has a long history of lawsuits to prevent such a thing, starting with bnetd in the 2002. Scapegaming was the target of the first WoW-related lawsuit in 2010 for running their own server, but certainly not the last. Enjoy the fun while it lasts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment#World_of...
Nostalrius being based in France, and running zero Blizzard code on their servers, may give them some protection (IANAL).
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…
Interesting, people thought the same thing about EQ expansions. I've heard many people say they wish they could play a server with pre-Luclin
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…
I once went as far south as I could, I was determined to find something new. There were mountains, so I spent hours trying to climb them, using a combination of jumping and my horse I did eventually get to the top!! It was all WEIRD and FLAT!! The textures were stretched really really long, you could see the pixels. And the textures seemed random, from different realms and stuff. There were deep valleys in places, bu…
Ah, here it is. The internet documents everything. http://wow.gamepedia.com/Newman's_Landing?cookieSetup=true
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way. Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, an…
Last time I played, Eve had levels. If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts. Worst part is there's no way to speed it up.
There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money.
So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted.
The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS.
I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.
I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours. I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.
I'm not much of an emotional guy, but looking at those screenshots from way back when I was 15, about 9 years ago now, hits me 10x harder than your typical tear-jerker movie/book. It's definitely a shame that never comes back beyond the few screenshots.