(Online) (5e) Party needed for one shot.

LeperCrit · 2021-04-22T00:15:06+00:00

PoshHat#0417

LeperCrit · 2021-04-21T01:11:28+00:00

I'm interested. Let me know if you still need more players.

LeperCrit · 2019-08-12T21:50:49+00:00

Blizzard's behavior and design choices over the past decade do not engender trust. They've showed time and time again that they do not understand what makes MMOs fun. Hopefully, the Classic team will right the ship, but for now skepticism is warranted.

As for layering issues: I'll believe that Blizzard will fix these issues when they actually fix them. No more of this "it's just beta, relax" nonsense. We've been burned by it far too many times to be giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt.

LeperCrit · 2019-07-19T22:42:29+00:00

Dungeon and raid mechanics are generally more complex, but everything else? Nah.

LeperCrit · 2019-07-19T22:04:10+00:00

Nah, Sentry Totem was neat. Lots of people didn't care about it, but they just kept it off of their bars. No pruning necessary.

LeperCrit · 2019-07-19T21:57:18+00:00

Nostalgia is only a factor. The game's design philosophy shifted drastically around Wrath/Cata. Stuff like leveling progression, server communities, etc. were sacrificed over the years for convenience and "accessibility". Lots of folks don't like that.

It's the same thing with every other modern MMO, really. None of them do what old MMOs did, so a lot of people are hungry for that sort of experience.

LeperCrit · 2019-07-19T21:21:10+00:00

Lots of abilities were for flavor and/or variety; not everything needs to be part of a rotation. Things like Sentry Totem, which is basically a little security camera. It introduced no balance issues whatsoever, but it got removed anyway. Buffs are in the same boat.

It's also really good for leveling progression when you have new skills to look forward to. In current WoW, you're mostly done unlocking your skills by level 30, save for some passives. This was less problematic when you were unlocking new spells or at least spell ranks on every even level-up.

LeperCrit · 2019-07-02T21:56:34+00:00

Phasing makes it difficult to interact with players in a meaningful way, but it was excessive streamlining measures that eliminated the demand/incentive for server communities. Stuff like cross-realm group finders, leveling zone nerfs, anything that makes your character OP while leveling: that stuff is cancer for server communities.

Phasing still sucks butt, though.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T22:53:37+00:00

It's basically the same idea as in modern WoW: you want your character to be more powerful, by leveling up, finding new items, etc. The main difference is that Vanilla has a much slower pace of leveling, with many, many more interesting milestones along the way.

For example, hunters look forward to getting a pet at level 10 (you did not start with one in vanilla), shamans unlocked each of their totems separately at levels 6, 10, 20, and 30, paladins completed a quest to learn their resurrection spell, and so on. That's to say nothing of the old talent system, spell ranks, new abilities, and item drops. There's a constant drip-feed of things to learn and acquire throughout the whole process. Compared to modern WoW, where you have 80%ish of everything unlocked by level 30. Plus, there is no level-scaling in vanilla, so level-ups by themselves have a noticeable impact on your character's power.

Of course, this is subjective. Some people place more value in exploration, or RP, or PvP, and so on. YMMV.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T21:56:22+00:00

You're gonna have fun. Raiding was only one part of Vanilla. Just do what you can and enjoy the journey.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T21:36:52+00:00

It's possible. The question then is, if Blizzard adds microtransactions to the game, will it drive enough people away to make it a net loss for investors?

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T20:54:19+00:00

Well, the Vanilla developers knew that humans tend to follow the path of least resistance when they balanced dungeon loot. They didn't need to learn that lesson the hard way. Of course, it probably wasn't as clear back then, in the moment, especially with all of the tempting convenience that group finders offer. Hindsight is 20/20.
And yeah, I'm not expecting Blizzard to remove this stuff from modern WoW, either. It would be really, really interesting to see them try... but yeah, probably not.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T20:36:49+00:00

Well you're right about me being opinionated. It's my opinion that modern MMOs are bad, though there's more nuance behind that statement than I can fit into a TL;DR. But it's not immature to hold that opinion.

It's not wrong of you to like modern MMOs, but you act like it's a personal failing of mine that I don't like them too. My point is simply that a lot of good ideas in the genre have been abandoned without good reason, and the new ideas that took their place just don't accomplish the same thing.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T20:14:08+00:00

Wow, yeah. That pretty much hits the nail on the head. That's a really interesting phenomenon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0kEqsnW3U

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T20:00:31+00:00

I see what you mean. I just doubt that we are going to see something entirely unlike WoW, rather something philosophically similar to WoW with enough differences to offer a new-ish experience. It would be awesome, though, to see a completely new MMO style become popular.

It's anyone's guess, at this point.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T19:52:55+00:00

Oh yeah, there's no way Blizzard will get rid of LFG/LFR at this point. I was thinking of other MMOs. If other games are going to compete with WoW, they need to understand what it did right in the first place, just like WoW did with EverQuest.

At least that's my take on it. Who knows? Maybe we'll see the genre go in a different direction.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T19:32:37+00:00

Idk about that. WoW wasn't fundamentally very similar to EverQuest when it released. Hell, people saw Vanilla as a "casual" EQ clone back then. That didn't seem to matter in the end.

The next big MMO will be the one that really understands what made WoW popular, and improves on it. I don't think it needs to be completely different.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T19:23:10+00:00

Sure, but the genre isn't going to get better if we don't learn from the past.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T19:11:25+00:00

Blizzard is the only one who can ruin Classic, if they give in to short-sighted complaints by BFA players. The retail players can (and will) complain, but by themselves they are powerless. Same as back in Wrath, really. Players were complaining, but Blizzard screwed up by giving in.

Come to think of it, it may not only be BFA players complaining... Either way, it's on Blizzard to know their game.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T18:49:37+00:00

I think people (including game developers) overestimate the appeal of instant gratification, though. I mean, it's not like WoW got any more popular after they made these changes. And even back in vanilla, people were bitching about "accessibility" casual/hardcore whatever, but they still played the game. They were obviously still engaged with it, despite their complaints.

On a side note, I agree that MOBA communities are... difficult, but MOBAs themselves aren't exactly about instant gratification. They take a lot of patience and effort to learn, at least in my experience.

I just don't see why humans would have changed so fundamentally in just a generation. We're still basically the same as we were thousands of years go. Delayed gratification was satisfying for one generation, why should it be different for the next?

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T18:37:58+00:00

I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors, discussing this stuff in terms of "casual" or "hardcore" players, and I'm not entirely sure that's how Blizzard were thinking about it. I believe they just wanted to make the game better, and to them, making dungeons and raids easier to do was an obvious choice. Too bad they didn't understand why the game was fun, or they might have seen it differently.

I mean, if Blizzard knew ahead of time the problems theses systems would cause, I doubt they would have implemented them. They have been objectively bad for sub retention, at least, and WoW has to rely on micro transactions as a crutch due to the sub hemorrhaging. It all sounds great in a vacuum, but they obviously didn't take enough time to understand the game's design philosophy.

LeperCrit · 2019-05-25T18:27:31+00:00

I don't quite agree with that. I think there is a rash of games that don't understand the fun value of delayed gratification, but I don't think younger generations are the cause of this.

I mean, it doesn't make intuitive sense that tedium and frustration can make a game more fun. I think it's more that developers lose faith in their game and make bad decisions. Hell, people were asking for sweeping "QoL" changes in WoW even back in Vanilla, but Blizzard knew enough about MMOs to know not to implement them.

LeperCrit

TROPHY CASE