121–130 of 183 posts
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…
I'm back playing again. I have a few lvl 100's, but I decided to start a new character -- this one would have no weapons and no armor -- just a tabard. I wanted to see how far I could get with just my fists. I'm up to 21 so far. I can take out regular mobs that are 3-4 levels below me with few problems. But I do die -- about as often as I did in BC, so about 3 times as often as everyone else does these days. The best…
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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...
Two questions: Where were those servers located, and were they reverse engineered or using leaked server binaries? Nostalrius being based in France, and running zero Blizzard code on their servers, may give them some protection (IANAL).
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. :)
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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.
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> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activiti…
Totally different genre, but this is one of the things that's great in CS:GO - you level up, but it's not from improving your avatar, it's from improving your own skill level - learning tactics, improving aim etc. Much more engaging than games that reward you for how many hours you sink in. (They do have elements of that in CS but they are entirely cosmetic).
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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.
Which really isn't too different from not having good enough gear in WoW and so on, the only difference is that in EVE you level up even when you're offline. And you don't have to fly anything, you do whatever you want to. Brave Newbies is probably the most famous for flying what ever the hell they could.
I personally loved flying support, and knowing that not many people wanted to (or could!) gave me a valuable niche that not only made me feel important, but made me valuable in the eyes of my fleet mates as well. Hearing the FC call out "Hey guys, we actually have a logi in our BS fleet tonight, so be sure to call for reps" was great.
Those "newb" roles often have their own perks. You'll hear many a veteran speak of how a new player gets to enjoy certain things a veteran can't. We quite enjoyed bringing a new player on and explaining to them that these first days were their best, for now that they were in a corp, their costs were taken care of. Loss in EVE is the biggest, most stressful thing to manage, and it's fantastic telling a new guy "Look, you're inexpensive, so just tackle anything you can, we'll pay for your clones, buy you a stack of frigates. Enjoy these days you're expendable, and have fun while you're waiting for your skills to train up."
Those guys come in at a couple of months and tackle some Vindicator, and get on a 3bil ISK killmail. Show me a WoW level 10 that does that.
Great times. =D
I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detra…
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> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activiti…
This is the opposite of my experience playing multiplayer Minecraft. There are no goals here, other than ones you set yourself. You simply log in, hang out with people, and mess around. Here are some things I've done that were the highlights of my time on this one particular server (semi-vanilla PvE): I helped a fellow player build an iron farm when he didn't know how. Helped another player try to debug his auto-brew…
Reminds me of a blog post/article I read long ago about how a group of players sorta discoverd rocket jumping in quake and decided to try and use it to get up this massive unaccessible ledge just for the fun of it. Spontaneous unexpected events like this are turkey something special in gaming, I suppose exactly because they're not designed for. I'd agree that mindcraft is fairly good for these type of unplanned happenings. I suppose you could consider it a culture thing.
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> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activiti…
This exact reason is why EverQuest grabbed me so much harder than any other MMO since. Another huge reason is the danger factor. In WoW, there is effectively no punishment at all if you die, so there's no fear of exploring new places. In EQ, there are (or at least were) steep penalties if you die in the wrong place. Ignoring the fact that you lose XP that could amount to hours of lost progress, you may compound your…