161–170 of 183 posts
I had a plenty of exciting real life experiences after I quit WoW back in 2010, but somehow I still look back at my in-game experience with an incredible warm and fuzzy feeling somewhere inside of me.
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WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times…
> And because of all that, there's just zero incentive > to quest in WoW with other people. The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game. Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.
I would hardly call auto-grouping dumbing down. It's a passive thing that helps put the "Massive Multiplayer" back in MMO, which is something WoW has been lacking outside of capital cities for years now.
Oh, nostalgia is hitting me hard :D
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The scaling zones of GW2 were not very popular for those of us that played in the beginning. Traditional MMOs allow your character to gain power. The power gain of your character is a large reason for many of the game systems to exist. To develop a system that takes away all this character power that you've gained felt boarderline 'slap in the face' like. Stripping character power is never a proper solution for an MM…
GW2's scaling zones were exactly what got my friend group playing the game, and kept them playing. With every other MMORPG we'd played up to that point -and every one of the very few we've played since GW2-, our group would inevitably do one of three things: 1) Never start playing together, as the level gap between the newbies and the more veteran players meant that challenges were either impossible, or impossibly ea…
However I'd like to add that the scale-down isn't at all that dramatic! I can kill a Moa or a bandit in Queensdale with 2-3 hits on my level 80 Mesmer (and he is a condition-based build), while it takes much more effort as a level 3 Thief.
Also the traits, and gear stats remain, to an extent; they are maybe scaled down but they are still present.
Furthermore, it also depends on the class you're playing. If you're a heavy-armour character with attack-centric stats you'll easily 1-hit anything, but if you're a healer engineer, you'll need to invest more effort.
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…
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Are they really that expensive to develop?
WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things. The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a l…
So if they needed boss fights, a team might produce 150 pseudo-unique boss fights that are 90% complete. Then when they actually need 2 or 3 for a new dungeon they just grab them, finish them up quickly, and incorporate them into the game?
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…
The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players.
The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear.
() Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.
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Where did you get this cost estimate? Does that include expansion packs and patches?
Google around, it's something apparently Vivendi released, early during vanilla - it's for the first 4.5 years of development before release. It seems pretty cheap - Blizzard spent less time and money for the initial development than any of its subsequent and unsuccessful major competitors.
Wish MMO developers would take a page out of Blizzard's book instead of trying some crazy arm's race of graphics/voice-over/what-not. There's definitely space for novelty, but in gameplay rather than gimmicks.
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Perhaps you only visited after the gate was opened? This zone was very busy on PvP servers, because of the horde v alliance competition to open the gate to AQ first. I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
Pre-AQ, he's absolutely right that the place was a dead zone and no 60 would bother spending any time there. Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.
By the way, it can still be accessed, since it looks like for WoTLK they just copypasted the map around: https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V
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Slight correction: the dungeon finder isn't a new thing, it was added in Wrath, though later than the heirlooms.
That's correct. Although looking into it more, it appears the revamps of the old world dungeons which made them much easier and less time consuming didn't happen until later expansions. (E.g Scarlet Monastery and Blackfatom Deeps two expansions later.)
But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.