Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

View on HN

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 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.

Good point - Silithus ALWAYS had a low population, because it sucked to get to, and sucked even more to level there. The quests are almost all formulaic, (kill 10 ant monsters, etc.) and there are few plots in any of the quests. Once you hit 60 in the original game, there was plenty to do in _any_ other area that made it worth leaving and never coming back. I did some leveling in all the areas that were available at the time because I liked exploring, but the quests there actively discouraged moving very far from the base, as most of the quests could be completed close by.

I remember playing it over and over. There were a few characters trying to max out their lvl 60 toons. There was some strange quest line that got added before they bumped the max lvl up to 70 (I seem to remember) so some people wanted the quest items while still at 60.

I recently did silithus again....it reminded me why I hated it so much in Vanilla. Especially because you had to go there to get your cooking to 300

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.

Why do you consider the original Naxx to be a shitshow?

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

> 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 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.

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 woes with continued deaths trying to get the loot that remained with your corpse. The fear-factor had me addicted, and made accomplishments that much more rewarding.

What you said and real nighttime in EQ. I remember being alone, a low level, lost in Karana as night was approaching. I knew if I died that I might not know where my corpse was for the corpse run, so I had real fear, and was real cautious.

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 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.

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...

PvP makes things interesting, for sure. I suck a PvP, but I'd never play on a non-PvP server because it adds that spice of the unexpected. If you want to farm mobs, you have to stay viable in PvP, just in case.

If you want a truly punishing experience that gives a game exceptional gravity, try MUME[0]. Best PvP experience I've ever had.

[0] http://www.mume.org

steep penalties if you die in the wrong place.

Ah, the early days of EQ, when I couldn't figure out how people would drag their corpse to safety.

Ah, the thrill of sneaking into Lower Guk as a Lvl 19 Bard, only armed with a flute, hoping that a group would camp the Froglok Assassin and they would allow you to loot a Mask of Deception drop.

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-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.

Love your stories.

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.

Reminds me of my experiences playing Ace of Spades before it got bought out. One time we just randomly had a ceasefire on the server. An embassy was built half green and half blue, halfway between the two sides. We built a night club and bar in the basement and everything was strangely peaceful. Unbeknown to us, one rogue player dug all around the embassy until there was just one block holding it all up at which point he collapsed the whole thing leaving a gaping hole. Within moments the fighting started up again and that strange magical moment was gone.

An experience like that is one you can't script and it is richer as a result.

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).

In the end this is why I decided to quit WoW (~2007). I realised that I was not actually gaining anything from it, since the game requires such little skill to play (even in PvP and end game instances). Not to mention the massive time sink. With CS:GO you can play matches which are both smaller time commitments and more challenging.

> and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress.

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".

Which single player games do you recommend? Those that emphasise exploration sound really interesting

Miasmata is a great example.

> not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place

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.

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 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.

Having played WoW for years and gotten into just about every corner of the maps, almost all the undeveloped regions, and every Easter Egg area I heard about in Vanilla I have to say it was one of my favorite activities in the game and completely unrewarded. Guild Wars 2 rewards just about everything with XP (crafting, gathering, some achievements), but exploration & map completion also come with tangible rewards and enough XP to level a ton just running around. It's a really nice feeling to track down that last hidden point of interest or vista and have the big announcement pop up. There's a big reward for 100% completion of all maps, but not many people make it 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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch for GW2, but GW2 pretty explicitly rewards you for exploration. Following the quest chain through an area (to the extent that there is one; the chain is slightly orthogonal) only reveals an incomplete picture of the zone. The zone itself explicitly informs you that there are a number of Things Left To Do Here. Collecting all of those is a necessary component to crafting legendary weapons.

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.

I disagree somewhat. At the very beginning of the game (before any expansions came out), leveling was very slow. It might have been an order of magnitude slower ().
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.

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

Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.

> They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.

Interesting. What do they use instead?

Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).

Guild Wars focused on your synergy with your party. The content got harder but your character stats didn't improve. You got a few new skills at your disposal (and eventually 1 elite skill) but mostly it was about understanding the game mechanics and how to work as a team better.

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).

They use skins.

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.

Progression through Guild Wars rewards you with access to new skills. At any given time you can only bring 8 of those skills (and only 1 of them can be elite) with you at any given time. In addition, your character is limited to using skills from 2 classes. Many of the skills have specific interactions or triggers. Some skill specifically counter, defend against, or take advantage of other skills. Mobs have a set of skills (including some mob-only skills). The result is a logic puzzle that may have many solutions, left for the player to figure out.

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.

I have taken to liken GW1 to a trading card game.

You collect a bunch of cards (skills) and then build a deck (skill bar) from that.

GW1 was amazing for that. Vanilla had you spend some time to level up to 20 (max), and you felt like an adventurer by the time you maxed out.

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.

> 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.

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".

I didn't like how GW1 did this at all. As they added expansions and more content, the game's population appeared to grow thinner and thinner, because the same number of players were spread out over more areas of the game. I really hope they avoid this with the new expansion for GW2 somehow. The "megaserver" system they use will probably help quite a bit.

I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities (to level up the ultimate weapons, basically). It also has far less areas (although I think bigger zones), and almost each zone has content for a wide swath of levels. There's also quests (again for the ultimate weapons, mostly) that make max level people redo the older dungeons, and they're often quite helpful for the newer people doing them for the first time - without those players being too powerful (level sync mechanics).

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.

Except FFXIV hasn't seen nearly the massive expansion that WoW has. Heavensward will give some indications of things to come but I see them following WoW extremely closely, almost methodically. Some examples:

  - 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!

FFXIV is a WoW clone in just about every regard, it's just young. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's quite hard to say there's much of anything being done differently.

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-...

> I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438811

the issue with a guild wars 2 model is that you can never really feel like the hero as no matter how low of zone you go to you are not more powerful. There is something visceral about mowing down opponents who only mere levels ago would strike you down if you were not careful.

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

Both styles have their merits, as evidence by WoW beginning to implement a 'timewalker' feature where players will be able to run old content dungeons with properly scaled stats (it will offer rewards useful for max level characters). There's just so much content in the game now, glad to see them making the most of it in a relevant way.

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.)

Most of the revamps were done for Cataclysm.

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.

  Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth.

What does that mean?

That WoW > Guild Wars

More like

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

Names of settings, GW and Warcraft respectively.

There's a side effect to the downscaling of all content in that all content feels the same.

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.

Their problem is that so much of the defensive options in game are active ones that avoid or nullify all incoming damage. Mobs don't do that, so instead they are given a massive health pool.

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.

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 MMO.

The trick is to make the level scaling optional.

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)

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 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.)

I agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I enjoyed Guild Wars 2.

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 agree that one's scaled-down is a fair bit more powerful than the effective character level would lead one to believe. Indeed, that was the point that I was trying to get across. :)

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 )

Apparently there is a class-specific (monk) 50% EXP boost¹ too. Also you can pay $60 for a character boost² to lvl 90.

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...

Of note with the 90 level boost, you get one for free when you purchase the expansion, which makes it easy for returning players to skip the content! (I ended up taking my 80 Death Knight through to 90 the hard way so I could see Cata/MoP content)

>> have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game

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.

Not just that you downscale, but that certain parts of the game, like dailies, actively encourage you to go to low level zones to do stuff.

The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.

It's sad that a company introduces mechanics to skip over vast swaths of content because people don't find them fun to play.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com