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Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

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Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#171

Post by mahouse »

zanny wrote: post #147
ChuckMcM wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you script the raids (or do you?) When I last looked at private servers all of the scripting for the boss mobs was unavailable so you basically had every boss be a simple spank and kill fight.

NPC actions (actions in general besides movement, particular to WoW) are server-side. Most WoW private server cores come able to handle player interactions and the "default" mob pathing / behavior AI, but it is generic to every version of the game. The server maintainer than overrides the default behaviors for every NPC they or object they want to script. IE, cast X spell, or use Y item. There are servers for every v…

Most of those rely on lots of features of the client. Such as environment destruction.

I also play on Molten, and they are pretty selfish. It's a cash cow.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#172

Post by danneu »

toxican wrote: post #162
danneu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other people have no reason to group with you though. Everyone is perfectly content doing their own thing and will often outright decline party invites. The only place this was ever not the case was on Mist's daily island. 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 year…

They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin looting for non-quest drops, etc.

Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`.

What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions from players including the decision to party with someone or not.

But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel. I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from different places.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#173

Post by digi_owl »

girvo wrote: post #145
digi_owl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is in essence that GW2 has become overly streamlined for sake of PVP. It is a curse i see with all MMORPGs that provide some kind of "competitive" PVP. Sooner or later the PVE side suffers because of some "exploit" or "OP" combo that makes PVPers cry foul.

I agree. One of the things I love about PvE is the ability to feel powerful, properly powerful. Unfortunately, that can be at odds with competitive PvE, so it's unsurprising that the two goals can affect one another.

Indeed. A classic example is the concept of control. Back in the PVE only days, control was indispensable. Every time you aggroed a mob, other mobs nearby would also tag along. So controllers stepped in to subdue them while the DPS and tanks went to work on the main target.

But while it is fun to keep a mob helpless for minutes in PVE, being at the receiving end of it in PVP is no fun at all. So these days control has pretty much gone byebye, or is heavily curtailed when applied to characters rather than mobs.

Another thing is that in recent years games has gotten more "furious". Back in the day a fight good fight could drag on for minutes, with each side trading blows and coming up with strategies and counter strategies as the fight ebbed and flowed. This put brains ahead of player brawns or reflexes.

But now it is all interrupts and twitch. Dodge this, block that, constantly moving out of fields and looking for "tells".

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#174

Post by tedks »

FlannelPancake wrote: post #149
tedks wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to note that while MMO's don't explicitly incentivize exploration, some of the memories my friends most enjoyed in WoW were glitching underneath Stormwind, into unimplemented areas in raids, all over the place. MMO's are social games, and even if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false. I mean really, why do you thi…

> saying that they "don't encourage fun" You missed the second part of that clause, which is pretty critical context. > So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc PvP most certainly falls under that umbrella in italics. Getting to grand marshal back in the day involved sinking copious amounts of time into battlegrounds i…

You don't need to be grand marshall to play PvP. When I played WoW you could just hang out at level 19 and keep playing early-level PvP as long as you wanted to. And the simple challenge that PvP is is always fun. Gear is one part of pvp, but it's fundamentally about beating the other player.

I think you have a very cynical view of video games, and a very simplistic view of human psychology. The mere existence of a reward to do something doesn't make someone want to do anything else anything less -- it just might make someone want to do that thing more.

I think the real problem comes from players, like you, who are literally unable to break the skinner box and are slavishly dedicated to extracting rewards from the system, using only the components of the system. Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you, because everything is reduced to work, the mechanical gaining of utility from authority figures. I blame overprotective parents and overscheduled youth and hope you one day feel better and can explore in MMOs without feeling discouraged.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#175

Post by wellboy »

To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type".

A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#176

Post by radikalus »

Reading this brought back a LOT of great memories.

I remember exactly how I fell in LOVE with WoW. It was f&f, and all it involved was walking from Stormwind down through Westfall to STV. And, then, opening the map and realizing "Shit, this was less than 1% of this world."

That wonder at HOW big and rich a world had been crafted lasted for years. In the first year of release, /played was > 160 days, despite being a leader in a world-first-oriented top PvE guild, 90% of it was world pvp and exploring.

And yet it wasn't actually the environment that shaped the experience, but that we all lived in it.

In vanilla, the world MATTERED. And in a way that wasn't always 'fun' for everyone. (Red is dead bro)

We competed to claim world spawns. We griefed, camped, exploited strange environment mechanics, raided opposing cities and killed world leaders or didn't, set up roaming 5v5s, lagged out in Southshore in 200v200 struggles, denied guilds access to instance zone-ins, cursed when we sometimes got our come-uppance (and we sometimes famously did), and we had meaningful rivalries and camaraderie with other players on our server.

We all had stories about nearly every player you'd meet. Actions of single players had potentially huge social impact.

That disappeared when we all retreated to instances. (Flying mounts were a similar scale catastrophe in world engagement) We no longer really had communal experiences.

I functionally quit WoW at the end of BC. I still played a bit in later seasons and expansions, but just arena selling glad titles primarily, as the magic was gone for me, and not for lack of trying -- I had every possible opportunity and advantage to love the game in the later expansions but never really could.

This sounds more negative than I'd like, because I have really no strong bitterness towards WoW. It was a shaping experience for me. I formed great friendships and memories, learned a lot about myself, and a game like WoW has to grow and evolve and a necessity of that is that some won't enjoy the changes.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#177

Post by radikalus »

throwaway_gm wrote: post #139
waterlesscloud wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can swim around very outside edge of the continents, even where all the mountains were. Somewhere miles away on the backside of nowhere there was a little dilapidated house. Ah, here it is. The internet documents everything. http://wow.gamepedia.com/Newman's_Landing?cookieSetup=true

In vanilla, I spent one full night just swimming around the Eastern Kingdoms on my druid. I'd recently heard rumors about the Ashbringer possibly existing in the game, just waiting for some wandering soul to come across its incredibly well hidden home, possibly requiring high level fishing skill to attain. Despite the fact that the scenery was mostly repetitive and to most anyone else should have been incredibly bori…

GMs used to teleport people to GM island on my original server for fixing various things WAY back in the day. There were a few exploit mechanics that enabled regular players getting there. (Briefly via teleport hack but I think there were 'legit' methods for a window of time with spirit regen + low level rogue maybe?)

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#178

Post by radikalus »

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…

Silithus had highly active PvP during those patches leading up to AQ though. Before the pages farm, yeah, nobody ever went there.

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#179

Post by swombat »

mikerichards wrote: post #138
swombat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the final element missing to instil real fear? True PvP, where anyone might decide to betray you and kill you while you're resting to recover hitpoints or manna or whatever. It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success. Each of those are opposite sides of the…

The only PvPing I did was on the RvR server over near Freeport, either as a human or dark elf. That was a blast, since there was no instanced battlefields. Maybe one day a MMO will bring back that magic. Alas, nostalgia wasn't enough to overcome the shortcomings of original EQ with Project99 in 2015.

Well, as I mentioned, from what I hear, Eve has that. It may not have orcs and elves. On the other hand it has big fracking spaceships with huge lasers...

Re: Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft

#180

Post by FlannelPancake »

tedks wrote: post #174
FlannelPancake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saying that they "don't encourage fun" You missed the second part of that clause, which is pretty critical context. > So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc PvP most certainly falls under that umbrella in italics. Getting to grand marshal back in the day involved sinking copious amounts of time into battlegrounds i…

You don't need to be grand marshall to play PvP. When I played WoW you could just hang out at level 19 and keep playing early-level PvP as long as you wanted to. And the simple challenge that PvP is is always fun. Gear is one part of pvp, but it's fundamentally about beating the other player. I think you have a very cynical view of video games, and a very simplistic view of human psychology. The mere existence of a r…

Lol, you're projecting something fierce here.

Like:

> Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you

Really? That's the only explanation here? Not that I might be right about Wow?

You're clearly upset about something else. Let me know when you're ready to have a real conversation.

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