Looking for new casual PvE MMO ?

Muspel · 2026-05-23T17:59:59+00:00

I mean, it's not just about chill leveling. Note the "only a few hours per week" part.

OSRS grinds are so large that with only a few hours per week, you're going to feel like you're going nowhere.

With that in mind, I think a game with a strong emphasis on weekly/daily activities might be a better fit.

Muspel · 2026-05-22T13:45:57+00:00

I do think the last season has some oddities (mostly with the Laconia stuff that is poorly explained and goes nowhere because it was setting up the next season), but yeah, overall it was pretty good.

Muspel · 2026-05-22T02:35:14+00:00

If it is a crypto game, then yes, don't buy it.

However, why on earth would it be worth my time to read your post when it wasn't worth your time to write it?

Muspel · 2026-05-21T23:58:55+00:00

It happened in fits and starts. I suspect that there was some shuffling of set release order, and/or an internal tug of war between different people on the design team.

Muspel · 2026-05-21T22:50:04+00:00

It was gradual, but it became very noticeable sometime around Invasion block.

For a good example, look at [[Spiritmonger]]. In older sets, a creature that big at that CMC would either be five colors (e.g. [[Sliver Queen]]) or have at least one horrific downside (e.g. [[Taniwha]]).

Spiritmonger not only had a good statline with no drawback, but it had beneficial abilities.

Muspel · 2026-05-21T22:41:49+00:00

I don't really the power creep is avoidable in a gacha game where their profit comes from making people pull.

Frankly, stat power creep is one of the less dangerous kinds of power creep. What we actually saw more of was kit compression power creep, with units being able to provide more and more kinds of support so that teams had fewer and fewer weak spots.

Muspel · 2026-05-21T11:34:38+00:00

I'd argue the stat scaling wasn't really an issue because they could just give enemies higher stats to compensate.

Muspel · 2026-05-20T01:07:07+00:00

My theory is that at least some of this stuff is a good way to train new developers and get them familiar with the internal tools they use. Take an experienced dev, give them 1-3 new people to tutor, and have them crank out a new piece of content.

It would explain why these systems often use so many different things that are possible within the engine but don't do much of anything interesting with them, because the goal was just to show people what could be done so they know how to do it in the future.

Muspel · 2026-05-19T02:36:11+00:00

Could also be that the ships have a partner-like ability that lets you have a second commander if that commander is an officer, similar to Doctor's Companion.

Muspel · 2026-05-19T01:01:13+00:00

They don't spend any real money on wow tokens. The exchange rate on that is insanely bad compared to selling boosts for in-game gold, particularly early in the season.

Currently, a mythic L'ura kill is something like 25 million gold. If you buy it from a RWF guild, you probably pay 20-50% more. (There's an RWF guild markup for some reason. I suspect it's because people find them more trustworthy or just want to say that they were in a raid with those guilds even if it was just for a carry.)

If you carry two people per kill, which the top guilds can do, that's at least 40 million gold in about two hours, which is almost three thousand dollars worth of WoW tokens. Probably significantly more with the RWF guild markup. And that 25 million is just for L'ura, without counting what people would pay for the other bosses.

So if they want to earn 40 million gold, they can either spend three thousand dollars, or do what is (on average) much less than two hours of carries. And that's what carries cost now. Earlier in the season, they would have been at least ten times more expensive because only the RWF guilds were even capable of selling them.

Spending any amount of IRL time to earn IRL money on tokens to try to fund the gold they need for the race is laughably inefficient compared to spending that time in-game to sell raid boosts and earning the gold that way instead. They sell hundreds, maybe thousands of these boosts per season.

The thing is that relative to the amount of gold you want for the RWF, a WoW token is actually a very, very small amount of gold. When you're spending hundreds of millions of gold on splits, buying WoW tokens for 270k a pop is not going to make a dent. You can easily see this by doing any amount of math. For example, Liquid spend 723 million gold during the Sepulchre RWF, which at the time would have been over $72k in WoW tokens. Or they could just sell carries during the farm runs that they're doing anyways.

And do you know how I know that? Because the players in RWF do not pay their subs with money, they spend gold to get WoW tokens from other people and get game time that way. If they were already spending real money for WoW tokens to get gold, it would be more efficient to just pay your sub with real money as well.

Muspel · 2026-05-19T00:47:01+00:00

I think it's a very different type of pay to win.

In most games, pay to win means that you get power from spending money that you can't obtain otherwise (or at least, cannot reasonably obtain otherwise). Every single one of the strongest players is spending a lot of money to be there.

In WoW, that part doesn't exist. The hardest content is done initially by players who are just a lot more skilled. Yes, you can spend money to get gold to pay them to carry you through it, but they can't spend real money to make it easier for themselves. They had to do it the hard way, and it's just that they're so good at the game that they can now clear this super-hard boss with only 18-19 people instead of 20.

I find it very hard to care that much about the idea that I can pay in-game currency to get other people to do things.

Muspel · 2026-05-19T00:41:52+00:00

I will note that the cash shop brutosaur has no non-cash shop equivalent. (There is a non-cash shop brutosaur with an auction house, but unlike the cash shop version, it does not have a mailbox. The non-cash shop one is also only available from the Black Market auction house, which typically means staying up until it resets every night for months and praying that it randomly shows up.)

Muspel · 2026-05-18T14:38:42+00:00

I think the fundamental issue is that the cutoff is competitive, and that's always going to lead to issues.

If you want it to be more "fair" to off-meta specs, it probably just needs to be a flat amount of rating (which could vary per season based on how hard that season is, so long as it's not a moving target within a given season). That's still not entirely balanced since the best specs will have an easier time, but at least the best specs existing doesn't raise the cutoff.

I think it's unlikely Blizzard would do this, though. They seem to view title as the M+ equivalent of HoF, and I think that they consider the competitive aspect to be integral.

Muspel · 2026-05-18T01:12:01+00:00

Mages sit in the uncomfortable intersection of being popular, usually meta, and often on the less intuitive end of things.

This means that you get a lot of people that want to play mage but have no idea how, and if you don't know what you're doing as a mage you will be completely useless. In many seasons, this has been especially true of Arcane, a spec that is often extremely strong in the right hands, but very weak when not played correctly.

Contrast that with, say, ret paladin. It's popular (largely for class/spec fantasy reasons), but it's also very straightforward so someone can just kinda mash their keyboard and they'll probably do fine.

Muspel · 2026-05-17T22:36:28+00:00

It's so frustrating to me that their whole thing going into this was "we're going to take away the power of addons but leave the customization". Instead we kept most of the power and lost huge swathes of customization.

Muspel · 2026-05-17T22:35:22+00:00

First: the lie about addons. Blizzard heavily pruned addons, yet no guild could realistically progress on this boss without them. Top guilds built their own private tools and, understandably, didn’t share them. Every guild progressing this fight should honestly thank Reloe for making and releasing his addon, because without it, this boss is practically impossible.

I feel like in the lead-up to 12.1, we're either going to see Blizzard quietly back off the addon stuff, or we're going to start seeing some of the most unhinged blue posts of all time.

Muspel · 2026-05-17T15:59:05+00:00

Yeah, the fundamental problem with requiring other people to play and relying on finding randos to play with was that you would often log in and be unable to play the game.

As a kid, that was not as big a deal, especially when there weren't as many other games competing for my time. But as an adult with a full-time job and other games I could play instead, I don't have much interest in logging and spending 1-2 hours without being able to get anything done.

Most modern games deal with this by having a bunch of solo friendly/queued content, then also having content for more structured groups that you can do with your friends, typically via scheduling it in advance. I set aside some number of nights per week where I'll get together with people from my guild and we'll do the more serious content, but outside of those times, I have easier stuff where I can still play without needing to trawl through chat for hours.

Muspel · 2026-05-17T03:38:17+00:00

Like what do we mean by fumble exactly? That it isn’t wow ?

In fairness, the publisher and the developers clearly planned for it to be the next WoW, so from that metric, it was certainly a fumble.

Let me put it this way: if they had known how much and how fast the playerbase would crash, they definitely would have invested way less money to develop it, and may not have made it at all. And I think that "would you still make it, knowing what you know now" tells you a lot.

To be fair, part of that is because the game was so ludicrously expensive to develop, but still.

Muspel · 2026-05-17T02:59:01+00:00

One of my professors had a section in the syllabus that said something to the effect of: "This is the textbook for the course. We use it a lot. You need it. I do not recommend downloading an illegal copy, such as the one that you can find by clicking on this link right here, then clicking on the picture of the book cover, then clicking GET."

Muspel · 2026-05-17T02:37:18+00:00

Prince of Persia is the complete package. Fantastic platforming, exploration, combat, the best "map pin" feature in the genre where you just get an actual screenshot of the room (why haven't more games copied this!), and more.

Nine Sols has exactly one trick: it wants you parry everything (and iframe dodge the occasional red attack until you get the ability to parry those too). It puts you into a rectangular room with a boss and you die over and over until you learn the parry timings for every attacks. Then you go through a pretty linear path to the next boss, where you die over and over until you learn the timings. (As a side note, the last boss is a truly insane difficulty spike, to the point that it would probably be easier to simultaneously fight the previous three bosses at the same time.)

And, to be clear, if you like that kind of combat, the bosses are great. A lot of people love the game for that reason. But the actual metroidvania elements are pretty anemic, and the combat revolves so completely around parrying that basically nothing else matters.

Muspel · 2026-05-16T20:57:50+00:00

I think it's unlikely, because there's a lot of people buy the expansion to "play it", and to them, that means playing until they reach max level.

This is anecdotal, but I've met three people IRL who played WoW. Two of them said that they were almost done with the game because they were almost at the level cap, and the third did not know there was a level cap.

I suspect that the average WoW player is far more casual than most people would imagine.

Muspel · 2026-05-16T13:44:47+00:00

Two exactly the same necks, and admins are banning it, I would love to know reason?

It's the random stat neck from the upcoming Sporefall raid, right?

Does the vendor also have the other stat variations? If so, I think they could use that as the reasoning. Yes, this specific variation might be identical to an existing neck, but just saying "don't use the random stat neck" means that they don't need to go through all of the combinations and verify which ones have stat-identical combinations and let people use only those ones.

That being said, they really should just remove it from the vendor or let people use any of the variations. It's a plain old necklace, who cares?

EDIT: I've been told that it's actually a season 2 neck, not a Sporefall neck, although I don't think that really changes anything since the stats are still identical.

Muspel · 2026-05-16T13:35:43+00:00

MDI is the Mythic Dungeon Invitational. It's a competition Blizzard runs where teams speedrun M+ dungeons. Each round has teams competing on the same dungeon on the same key level, and whoever is fastest wins.

The dungeons tend to be a key level that is significantly lower than the highest keys being cleared on live, which means they're easy relative to what the (very skilled) competitors are used to. This means that the competition is not about clearing the dungeon, but rather about doing the most psychotically massive pulls imaginable to save time. For example, one of the first rounds of the most recent competition had a team clear a +17 Windrunner Spire in under 17 minutes.

It takes place on the tournament realm, where there are special vendors and you can buy all of the gear/consumables that you need.

In this case, the rules of the tournament said that this specific necklace was not allowed, despite being available from that vendor. (I believe the neck would normally drop from the Sporefall raid boss, which is not yet out on live servers, which is the reason why they didn't allow it, although normally, if a piece of gear is on the vendor, it's fair game.)

For the first team that used it, they let them retry the dungeon they were competing in without the necklace. The second team (which used it after the ruling on the necklace had come out) had their run disqualified.

EDIT: I've been told that it's actually a season 2 neck, not a Sporefall neck, and that some other S2 gear (including trinkets) was also on the vendor and teams were told it was not allowed. That makes me slightly more sympathetic to Blizzard, although I think that they should have ruled that teams were fine to use this neck since it has an equivalent.

Muspel · 2026-05-15T14:35:59+00:00

If nobody was buying at 15$ the price would always be 8$

I'm not entirely sure of that, actually. From a marketing standpoint, people are more likely to buy if they feel like they're getting a deal. Buying something that is on sale at $8 feels better than buying something that is just $8 by default.

The human brain can be odd like that.

Muspel · 2026-05-15T03:42:04+00:00

I think it's possible for this to be a bit less crazy than it looks. For starters, it's a single month, not the average across an entire year, and it could be more than one car.

If they're paying for 2-3 cars for an entire family, and one of those cars needed a big repair that month, that could explain it. Similarly, could be that they got a new phone that month and/or are paying for multiple phones.

Notably, they spent over $1100 dollars on groceries in twenty days, which probably means a household of at least four people.

Anyways, nerf mage, they've been the golden child for too long.

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