Forgotten Corners of World of Warcraft
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
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 King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.
Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth.
WoW's world > Guild Wars' world. In terms of gameplay, I definitely prefer GW. In terms of story, world, characters, Wow blows it out of the water. I just struggle to care about anything that's going on in Tyria
Guild Wars 2 has public world events, where large numbers of players (50+) team up against a boss or a mob of enemies. Almost all bosses are HP sponges, so it gets repetitive very very easily. (ArenaNet attempted to make more complex areas, which mostly just added grind.)
In terms of world exploration, Guild Wars 2 has a few unique ideas there with Vistas (get to a certain point of the map and get a nice view) or Jumping Puzzles (platforming challenges), the latter of which I am not a fan due to the wonky controls.
The core issue why I don't play GW2 anymore is that it gets pretty samey. They did add episodic content for free which is pretty nice, except the plot was completely incomprehensible.
This in effect turn every fight into a fight between mob health pool and how many active defenses you brought along.
On top of that, anyone can "heal" someone that has gotten defeated and so bring them back into the fight.
I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.)
¹ http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments
² https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-serv...
Interesting. What do they use instead?
Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).
This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
You collect a bunch of cards (skills) and then build a deck (skill bar) from that.
The next expansions however speeded up the leveling process. You start level 1, do some story mission that kickstart your adventurer into the real world and you are level 20 by the time you finish the prolog (i.e. you start on an island, and by the time you get to the main continent you are max level).
Then, you can play where you want, with who you want. Only your gear and your skills matter.
GW1 was an amazing game. As much as I like GW2, I wish they had kept more gameplay mechanics from the previous game.
This was my biggest surprise with GW2. All the videos leading up to its release had me really excited. The combat looked so much more engaging and interactive. In the end, I found myself preferring GW1. But to be fair, it may just be age. I find it harder to play games for extended periods of time than it was back when I was in high school.
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".
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.
WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. 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, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.
The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.
That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
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
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 activities for the sake of progress.
And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.
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 same coin. A game like Wow (which I found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent) is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to win.
Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.
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.
Ah, the early days of EQ, when I couldn't figure out how people would drag their corpse to safety.
I helped a fellow player build an iron farm when he didn't know how.
Helped another player try to debug his auto-brewer setup.
Built a vending machine so new players can get cheap food. Got a full set of diamond armor as payment one time.
Exchanged Christmas gifts.
Helped a new player find a place to live. Upon arrival, we stood at the top of a cliff and admired the view. Then, he noticed a lone chicken and immediately named him "Colin". When the night came the chicken got out, and we both went leaping down the mountain after him. We lost half of our gear, but Colin was safe and sound in the end.
Had a pool party. A player was living in the extreme hills biome. Upon visiting him, I remarked that it'd be fun to jump off the cliff and try to make it into a tiny pool of water. So that's exactly what we did. Invited other people, and spent about two hours climbing up the mountain, then jumping off.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like this all the time, but if you find a good server with good players, it can be a really fun experience.
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.
An experience like that is one you can't script and it is richer as a result.
It's funny. I played a korean grinding MMO which was heavily based around this. But it was also fairly buggy and some of its mechanics poorly designed. The most fun we had was whenever new content was introduced. Figuring out how things worked and then abusing it.
Once you were near the soft cap - there was no practical exp limit, level requirements just started to increase super-exponentially at some point - you just looked for other things to do. Trying to take on bosses that were considered too hard by coordinating more players than intended by the game system or abusing their AI, using the near-invulnerability one had in lower-level dungeons to lure hundreds of monsters around you, find breaks in the invisible walls to leave the map etc.
I think the sandbox aspects of even the least sandbox-y MMOs make the most fun. Non-intervention by the devs (either by policy or by inability) also helps to provide some feeling of freedom, you just do whatever you want instead of being railroaded into some sort of "intended playstyle".
For me the only exception was Un'Goro Crater. That was by far the most fun I had in the game apart from PvP arenas. Dinosaurs, cool quests inspired by 70s TV shows I watched as a kid, and just the fact that it was such a beautiful rendering of the real Ngorongoro Crater.
Of course I stopped playing in 2007, so I'm sure there's tons I've missed out on since. But I really enjoyed the early quests and their unique stories, even the hammy stuff like the Edwin VanCleef/Deadmines quests. Given the level cap is at 100 now, I don't see why Blizzard doesn't open up the game as free-to-play for the first 60 levels (the original game before any expansions) instead of just 20, and you pay to play beyond that. I would definitely pick it back up if they did that.
I mean really, why do you think people get gear? It's so they can play more parts of the game and have more fun.
Personally, I can't really defend dungeon running that much because I always liked PvP more -- having human opponents to fight was always more fun for me, and the game certainly encouraged that. Some of my friends will still talk about how they were the top of their server or server group, and have folders of screenshots of them beating other prominent PvPers.
I never got very into WoW because by the time it got popular with my friend group in earnest I had switched to Linux and wine only ran WoW at about 20fps. But I had plenty of fun playing it and I barely got into it at all. Saying that the game doesn't encourage it is total bullshit. Finding night elf in Warsong, chasing them down, and watching their health drain from my warlock's curses was some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. And I got a shiny token for that, too, so there.
Basically GW2 is a game that respects your time - waypoint teleports instead of flight paths, no corpse runs, no tagging mobs, per-character (or maybe player?) resource nodes, world events you can just jump into and everyone receives credit based on participation, area quests you don't have to pick up to start getting participation, and a lot you can do at the level cap that's not grinding gear - in fact the best is almost all crafted. I think this has to come down to the game being an initial purchase plus very carefully designed micropayment options instead of a subscription model. The micropayments are pretty much all vanity stuff or conveniences like extra bank slots, there's no gear and the only content options are Living Story episodes you weren't around for. Gold is easy to acquire & swap for the currency.
I think Blizzard tried to introduce some of this stuff in Mists of Pandaria, but there's just too big a gap for them to bridge now. Guild Wars 2 is missing world PvP, but has huge World-versus-World three way maps and team-based PvP. I miss Southshore mass insanity as much as anyone, but WvW is better.
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 in order to get a special title and some special gear. There was/is most definitely a carrot on a stick for PvP as well.
In contrast, players have never been incentivized to explore much. Maybe you get a title nowadays, but it's not going to be anything cool like 'Dreadful Gladiator'. There's no special sword for exploring every sector of Azeroth.
EDIT: Further thoughts
> 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.
Why do you think it's false? It's implicit discouragement. In the thinly-veiled skinner box that is WoW, gear and tokens and titles are positive reinforcement.
It's not a huge leap of logic to say that positive reinforcement tends to discourage behavior that doesn't lead to the reward.
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.
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.
So there are a couple levels for exploration: if you don't want to do it, then hurrying through the quest chain gives you lots of XP and you can move on. If you're mildly curious, you can go collect the stuff that interests you, without any real damper on your experience if you decline. If you're gung-ho about exploration for its own sake, there are also plenty of hidden bits and pieces everywhere that aren't necessarily collectibles.
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.
If I'm level 100, I should be able to go into a level 5 area and kill everything with one hit, but I wouldn't get any XP because it wasn't challenging.
However, if my low level friend is playing and they want a buddy to help them with low level content, it would be nice to have the option of scaling my character down to my friend's level where I would be challenged by level 5 content alongside them (and even gain some degree of proportional XP or maybe scaled loot from it)
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 easy.
2) Rarely ever play the game because a) the group wants to avoid 1) and b) it's hard to get five friends spread across four timezones together on the regular.
3) Play the game as often as we want, as we each have "regular" solo characters, and "play-with-the-friend-group" characters, but get far less than the regulation amount of fun out of the group games, as all-too-often there's only like one set of low-level story content, so playing with the group causes to to re-run stuff for like the billionth time anyway.
And, really, even with the level scaling, your skills don't go away. Having a character in the party that's five or ten+ levels higher than the zone content makes it substantially easier than a character that's at-zone-level or just a few levels higher. (It remains quite satisfying to drop an offensive golem on some level one goblin and splat it in two hits.)
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.
But you've got to admit that the scale-down is substantially more dramatic than in pretty much every other MMORPG, no? I mean, if you've forgotten, like spend a week or so with Firefall, then come back to the starting area. :P
Moreover, a scaled-down level 80 will get level 80 gear when killing creatures. For folks who are invested in gear collection, but have low-level friends, this makes them far more likely to play together. (Wish I'd mentioned this in my original post. :P )
The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.
This gutted the economy (especially on small-medium servers) and led to me quitting.
Raiding was fun, PvP was alright, but when the economy was mustered into farmville-time gating...I gave my favorite MMO up.
wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests.
This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
- For the longest time in FFXI equipment was golden; not in WoW and not in FFXIV
- "Gear Score" / "Average Item Level"
- Instanced-only endgame content
- Instant travel to every zone for all players who've been there before
- All content is beaten before the end of a content cycle
- No very high-end content which goes months or !years! without being taken down (Vrtra:~2yrs, AV:~4yrs, PW:~3yrs, etc.)
- General fight mechanics and style (don't stand in the poo, tankbusters, buff-type mechanics); not really many new ideas at all
- Flying mounts added in first expansion; unavailable in first-version areas, only in expansion areas
- Character jumping in a FF-series game! Heresy!
Regarding FFXIV relics and revisiting zones; relic quests will be nerfed into oblivion with the expansion, just like all previous relic chains were when subsequent content was released. WoW used to make you run around areas and talk to people for legendary weapons too[1], even some of the areas mentioned in this article like Silithus. Then the level cap went up and people had little use for those items anymore.
This all boils down to MMOs lowering the entry bar by allowing new players to catch up with the most experienced players at a casual pace. You're never very far behind the bleeding edge, could be caught up in a month or two. Whether or not that's a good thing is opinion and perspective; FFXI required a very substantial commitment to compete in endgame and it definitely bordered on unhealthy obsession for many max-level players. That said, it'd be great to see some seriously difficult/"unbeatable" (preferably open-world) content, even if they use the old zones to make it happen world-boss-style.
[1] http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-...
Compare and contrast Super Metroid, as discussed recently, which sends you back to areas you've already visited once you have the equipment to experience them differently:
But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me.
In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people.
In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes).
I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much.
I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.
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, but you could run around them given enough time. I took a bunch of screen shots, eventually I fell off the back of them and had to swim four hours to get back to land. WoW is a crazy game.
Ah, here it is. The internet documents everything. http://wow.gamepedia.com/Newman's_Landing?cookieSetup=true
I later became a Game Master and had the ability to fly invisibly through the terrain on live servers and occasionally would make a point to travel to random nooks, either not normally accessible or else very hard and time consuming to reach by legal means, and that was fun too. This was before flying mounts: characters would appear to swim through the air and could be made to travel very fast indeed.
The best hidden secrets in the game were things like The Chair, at the base of The Room, an underground dungeon that could only be reached by flying through the terrain of a castle that stood on Game Master Island, which itself could only be accessed using Game Master powers. Rumors were that early rule breakers in the game, perhaps in beta, were transported into The Room where all they could do is sit in The Chair or not. I don't know if that's true.
Probably people discovered all this on private servers as well, but there was definitely something magical about doing it on live realms - at least for me.
I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too much sense not to. I know I'd have to problem running the old 40 and 20 man raids with pugs (because the way the game mechanics have changed, those raids are now trivial with even half the number of people it took in 2006) for fun. That actually sounds like fun. The current game sounds like the most auspicious waste of time sink, which is why I got off that merry-go-round in Wrath of the Lich King around the time where they stopped doing tiered progression at all and made every patch effectively a game reset.
There are servers for every version of the game that I know of that at least strive to be "blizzlike" with mob and world behavior. It can get pretty complicated, for example the Icecrown Citadel Lich King fight, which I know works pretty well on Molten but I have never tried it elsewhere. It has environment destruction, player teleportation, mob spawning, player movement via mob interaction, and multiple NPC interactions. That would be a bitch to reimplement, I imagine.
I also play on Molten, and they are pretty selfish. It's a cash cow.
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 level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.
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 lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places.
They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models.
Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.
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 was also thinking about how... if you've ever been invited to a rich-person's event, like a glitzy fashion show or something (I got a media invite for one once), there's all sorts of free drinks and food and chocolate and what-have-you.
But all that expense is justified because if they win you over and have you buying whatever they're selling, they recoup all their losses.
I suppose it's the sheer scale that's staggering. Some people are playing at much higher stakes, and it hard to really grasp how things are.
And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off.
But here are the sums.
They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000.
That is a NPV of 3.
Can i haz MBA?
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 was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.
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.
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 other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore.
I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.
Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players.
I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be...
What does the WoW protocol look like?
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).
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.
You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.
I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
I think if something has at least a minimum amount of popularity, and a portion of the software (the client in this case) is still available, then enough people will find a way to keep it alive even when it's been abandoned by its creator.
A decade from now there will still be WoW private servers, and there will still be the opencore-esque projects providing the server infrastructure to run private instances of it. Albeit I wish the private server community shared source more, but I'm not really involved in it so more power to them for putting in the scripting effort to make all the mobs work again.
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.
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 skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
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, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
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 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
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. :)
Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO.
I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.
There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.
I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).
It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.
Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.
One of my favorite "wow, that's random" discoveries in WoW is the Plants vs Zombies minigame by the Dalaran crater in the Eastern Kingdoms.
So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.
It felt a little like going back to college a couple of years after graduating, where a layer of nostalgia wasn't enough to disguise how much I, and the place itself, had changed. (Because college, like WoW, is a lot more about the people for me than the physical buildings.)
I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL.
The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented.
A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo
The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.
Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.
After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.
I used to love wandering around the world, finding hidden spots, and exploring the different pieces of Azeroth.
Now I'm older and feel way too guilty devoting that amount of time to a game.
Incidentally, one of the main pleasures of Minecraft (for me) was the same exploration.
I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:
http://cowlark.com/2009-03-31-south-kalimdor-farm/index.html
(Man, WoW looked awful back then. Six years ago!)
It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there.
I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together.
Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS).
It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS.
Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning.
Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.
Mr Smite - Deadmines
It added a whole level of meta-gaming and risk. It also made me ungodly rich in gold.
Then I hit the level cap and stopped playing. Oh well.
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.
There's also some great articles about unfinished content in WoW, like this one about a half-implemented zone with lots of lore around it, giving it a particular mystique: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/05/wow-archivist-the-karazha...
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.
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.
Blizzard can solve the problem, they have the brains and the cash. I wish they'd make a new MMO with all their learnings! They could deprecate WoW and start all again. Every expansion you kind of do that anyway.
The thing about all the forgotten content is that at some point in time during some xpac, it was very pertinent and relevant. But now it's still there many xpacs later.
His videos are both tranquil and surreal.
It sounds strange but some of my dearest friends and fondest memories of being a teenager was via World of Warcraft.
If you want to play on those zones, you can resort to a private server with a old expansion. There are very good ones on vanilla where those zones are alive. :-)
That list of locations falls very short, too.
When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.
And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all.
That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.
> And because of all that, there's just zero incentive
> to quest in WoW with other people.
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.
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.
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 part is my repair costs are zero gold.
Skywall\Fistsofdeath
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.
Oh, nostalgia is hitting me hard :D
Unfortunately no real documentation of things like realm population (or comparisons across multiple realms), changes over time (day of week / weekend, holidays, etc.).
Yes, "the game designers declined to comment" but I was hoping for something with a little more detail. However, that doesn't appear to be in line with the rest of the content on the site.