Well, now what?

Rod-138_sl said:

So the NFL used to be way more awesome to watch (70s 80s) , because it was brutal,niche, unbalanced, and full of legends, but now it's been streamlined into an entertainment business and its kinda meh.

I remember FoH on Veeshan acting all emo when we begged them to help get our corpses out of fear (unnatural selection, legends in our own mind). They were such dicks, saying things like they were only able to get half of the corpses to make our little hopeful hearts drop, but they got all of them, bless their greasy souls.

Those were brutal days of the 80s 49rs playing the 80s Saints, but those were awesome days. Everyone wanted to look cool and take down Gods, but we didn't know wtf it took to get there, to be a winning franchise, but we wanted it, even though those guys were dicks.

I want that disparity, where even if 2 great players with equal time play, one may be great at one thing and terrible at another. Where the server has a handful of dudes that are just stellar at their job. I wasn't one of those players, but it gave me motivation to try, I miss that

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How incredibly wrong you are about the NFL then and now perfectly sums up the nostalgia people wrap themselves up in mmo's.

i don't know. i played EQ for 5 years (from release till just after OOW) and i played WoW right up until TBC was released. i found nothing difficult about warcraft whatsoever. leveling was easy, instanced dungeons were easy (and fucking boring), raiding was slightly more difficult, but still found it much easier than most of the raids i did in EQ (perhaps they got more difficult after TBC, i don't know). there was absolutely no death penalty whatsoever in WoW, which took any sense of danger completely out of the game. in EQ, death was something you wanted to avoid at all costs, while leveling, exploring, dungeon crawling or raiding. dying sucked. without any fear of dying, i don't see how the hell anyone could say that WoW was somehow more difficult than EQ. for me, it's all about risk vs. reward. the risks in EQ were great, which made the rewards all the more memorable. i found none of the rewards in WoW to be very memorable at all because there was hardly any risk in order to attain them.

Best bet for The Return of The Vision would be in a indie game. If I were a publisher, I wouldn't drop 100 mill trying to make EQ Next.

Raids weren't hard in EQ; any raid that was often times "hard" was more an issue of how many fucking clerics or enchanters you had, or how long you could outlast shit. Things in say, GOD were a bit different, because they started introducing things that required something more than just CH chains (They required spiritual light chains too, lol) or required you pay a bit of attention in some respect, other wise one person could, and did wipe a raid. I remember one of the raids in Tacvi being some snake bitch where her adds had no hps, and did no damage. Downside was that they would literally one shot themselves on ANY damage shield you had, and exploded, killing the other adds which created some kind of chain effect and would wipe the raid. Which was easy to remedy, but there were always tons of people who forgot which abilities had DS shields "baked" into it as an extra ability. Druid self buffs, some clickable effects, etc.

And then, let's not forget that all of THAT stuff was done with the idea your raid group would be ten levels higher than you actually were. How fun it was to be banging our heads on tunat for ages and going nowhere and then hear them admit that.

In WoW they started making most everyone responsible not only for their life, but often when you were progressing, enough people die and that's your raid.

However, you do have a point about the death penalty issue, but I don't really think I'd ever want to go back to that era. I remember how often during progression you'd have to gain a bit of extra exp as a buffer so you didn't delevel. God, that was fucking stupid.

My boyfriend and I just had a long conversation about EQ vs WoW vs new MMOs, and what it came down to was that EQ/old WoW probably meant more to us because it was a community. You knew people, raided with them. You spent long amounts of time making groups, so once they were together, once you carved out an area, or got to the dungeon, there was time to meet and talk to people.

That doesn't really happen these days. The rest of it however, the things that you love, and remember adding good elements to your game, were in large part nostalgia, and also that it was one of the only games out at that time, and certainly the only amazing game.

There are things I remember fondly about EQ because it served as my first "real" foray into MMOs (though I played UO, EQ was by far way more interesting to me) but there are many things I don't want to see come back.

etchazz_sl said:

i don't know. i played EQ for 5 years (from release till just after OOW) and i played WoW right up until TBC was released. i found nothing difficult about warcraft whatsoever. leveling was easy, instanced dungeons were easy (and fucking boring), raiding was slightly more difficult, but still found it much easier than most of the raids i did in EQ (perhaps they got more difficult after TBC, i don't know). there was absolutely no death penalty whatsoever in WoW, which took any sense of danger completely out of the game. in EQ, death was something you wanted to avoid at all costs, while leveling, exploring, dungeon crawling or raiding. dying sucked. without any fear of dying, i don't see how the hell anyone could say that WoW was somehow more difficult than EQ. for me, it's all about risk vs. reward. the risks in EQ were great, which made the rewards all the more memorable. i found none of the rewards in WoW to be very memorable at all because there was hardly any risk in order to attain them.

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You are right about the death penalty. However, raids in WoW got a lot harder for individuals in TBC. I would imagine most guilds were the same as mine: we had to disallow certain members from raiding once we got into TBC, as players who were fine in naxxramas just wiped the raid repeatedly on the early 25 man tbc content. The first 25 man boss was easy, the next 3 had mechanics where a single player could easily wipe the raid just by standing in the wrong place at the wrong time (before the encounters were nerfed).

After that it changed a bit, some content got easier and then some harder content was released etc. But it was almost always harder than the original level 60 content.

There should be a rule about length of post in this thread.

I think a few people fail to realize that devs want their content to actually be played by more than 5% of the population.

Flunklesnarkin_sl said:

Are you suggesting that more content exploration / adventuring / hidden quests is a bad design concept?

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Not at all. I was simply pointing out that memorizing fight mechanics is much much easier than the logistics of organizing large groups of people and getting them to the fight, especially if there is no clear path set before them.

So Lithose's claim that shifting more complexity to the social and discovery aspects of raiding and less on the mechanical aspect of raiding would make things easier, is wrong in my opinion.

As for what is a good design and what isn't... I wasn't really commenting. I was just relating where the primary difficulty, to large group content, lies for the average casual player.

Lithose_sl said:

And yet this was the system that saw the highest number of WoW players, and strongest growth. ...
... Like I said, subtle--and there is a balance. We don't need massive social networks. But we do need to put more difficulty on that end of the spectrum and take some off the other end (And not simply make a "mouth breathing raid mode"--which makes the world feel very, very sterile and the "ritual" feel like a pointless exercise meant to deliver our daily carrot.)

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Ok, but you were talking in terms of difficulty before, now you are talking in terms of good or bad design. Those are two different animals.

qwerty_sl said:

Choices are bad because people don't know what to choose.

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Idk, choosing can be ok in some situations, but in others it's probably not a good idea. It can be so hard to decide >_>

You retards, you want to know what's wrong with video games and MMO's? Everyone's trying to make the next WoW that will get 12 million subscribers so they're doing shit they think the community wants, instead of doing shit THEY want. The only people that support the games are the companies that want the money money money and when it doesn't come support is dropped and people are layed off. That's mmo the genre's dead. Fucking deal with it and come out your parents basements, faggots.

Sutekh_sl said:

You retards, you want to know what's wrong with video games and MMO's? Everyone's trying to make the next WoW that will get 12 million subscribers so they're doing shit they think the community wants, instead of doing shit THEY want. The only people that support the games are the companies that want the money money money and when it doesn't come support is dropped and people are layed off. That's mmo the genre's dead. Fucking deal with it and come out your parents basements, faggots.

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Leave my parents basement, one sec. I need to roll my magic dice.




Guess I have to go outside now.

Pancreas_sl said:

Not at all. I was simply pointing out that memorizing fight mechanics is much much easier than the logistics of organizing large groups of people and getting them to the fight, especially if there is no clear path set before them.

So Lithose's claim that shifting more complexity to the social and discovery aspects of raiding and less on the mechanical aspect of raiding would make things easier, is wrong in my opinion.

As for what is a good design and what isn't... I wasn't really commenting. I was just relating where the primary difficulty, to large group content, lies for the average casual player.

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My post was ambiguous but I clarified it later. I did not, however, claim that WoW was more difficulty overall--my post was pretty specific in terms of where the difficulty was higher. What I actually said was this.

Wow is more difficult from anindividual player perspectivethan anything in MMO's before it. (In terms of end game)

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Now, the thing is, you can't boil difficulty down to +/- statements. The above is a very specific perspective--only from a single end game player. From an outside observer, someone taking in theentiregame, I wouldn't say there is a large shift in difficulty at all, if anything, EQ might be seen as more difficult. But from the observation of a single raiding player, attempting to memorize the reactions to 50+ mechanics (His class mixing with the fight), WoW is absolutely, hands down, more difficult. Nothing in EQ, all the way up to Rathe council, came even close in terms of position/APM/awareness requirements. HOWEVER, EQ was not an easier game overall. Social difficulty is...well, it isvery difficult.Thedifferenceis that such difficulty is controllable by the community. Where as pure memorization/reaction, is not socially controllable at all--unless you count designing mods to counter some complexities.

For example, organizing a 25 man raid with a trash clear that requires discipline and team work, but has more simplistic boss mechanics, is every bit as difficult as a 25 man raid that is essentially an arena style fight with much more complex bosses. But there is a big difference between the two. In the above scenario, the raid more emphasized on social organization/management, the brunt of the difficulty can be handled by your best players and they can organize, direct and carry your weakest. In the highly complex, reaction based fights--your best players can do very little to carry the weaker ones--they simply have to take the time to memorize the fights. This becomes *especially* true in post pre-nerf TBC WoW and then mid-LK wow, where tons of fights have random raid ending mechanics that targets can not be chosen by the raid leader (So you literally end up in situations where you will win or wipe depending on whether your stronger or weaker players get picked.)

But, to put it more simply, let me say it like this---Boss fights, for the vast majority of PEOPLE are absolutely more difficult in WoW. Boss fights themselves are not more difficult overall.Do you see how both of those statements can exist simultaneously without being contradictory?

That's why simply making it "easier" doesn't work--because it actually feels easier. Adding more social difficulty, while taking away some reaction/APM difficulty, keeps the overall difficulty the same, while allowing the players to disperse it better in order to compensate for their own strengths and weaknesses.

Pancreas_sl said:

Ok, but you were talking in terms of difficulty before, now you are talking in terms of good or bad design. Those are two different animals.

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Difficulty does not need to be binary. Difficulty is just an aspect of design, when I'm talking difficulty I should justnaturallybe talking about design, when you divorce the elements of design and difficulty, you end up with...well, you end up with WoW, where everything that's harder is only harder because it has +more mechanics/stats. Thingscanbe more difficult in one sense, and less difficult in another and still retain the same "overall" difficulty. Yes, I know that sounds overly subtle, maybe even pedantic *but* I think a huge problem of the current MMO generation is designers who like to think game design is a separate beast from difficulty--the worst offender of this is the wow "derp mode" switch. (It's like the culmination of this thought process that difficulty should be seperate from world/game design--like a tacked on, alien thing.)

But to be more specific, lets say it like this...If most uber guilds playing WoW tried to be successful in EQ,most would fail--which to a casual observer might denote EQ fights are farmoredifficult. However, if most uber WoW guilds were fighting the actual bosses in EQ, most of them would probably find them a joke in comparison to many of the bosses in WoW. To a binary observer, those two statements can't be made to mesh. And yet they can be made to mesh when you account for the fact that difficulty in games comes from avarietyof sources and should be something organic to the world.

In the end, if you attempt to distill difficulty down to just player reaction to observable mechanics, you end up creating a type of difficulty that alienates MOST, if not all, non-gamers who simply do not have the reaction speed/ability to memorize and adapt in the same manner that say, someone whose been raiding for years can. But humans *are* reasonably good as social interactions (usually). So pushing some difficulty to that end of the spectrum wouldn't make your game easier overall, but it would make it more accessible to players who like to game, but might not be strong gamers.

This, I really believe, was a key to vanilla's wow success that was lost along the way in the hopes to make the game more accessible. Because a lot of design input seems to come from people who lead OR were part of the "core" group of their guilds--and I think a lot of those people, when asked how to make the game easier, had a bias view of where the difficulty in the game came from. Their answers would have, probably, been things like management, attendance and organization. It's really not surprising that when difficulty was being lowered, those were the areas that were first pruned away. And then when the game became "too easy (Start of LK)", the areas that were beefed up were the non-social, "reaction based" areas. This lead to the imbalanced WoW we have today, where everything is tied to a psychopathic game of brinkmanship with Simon Says from hell, and you end up cutting friends who can't pull 100% of their weight in every fight.

Flank_sl said:

You are right about the death penalty. However, raids in WoW got a lot harder for individuals in TBC. I would imagine most guilds were the same as mine: we had to disallow certain members from raiding once we got into TBC, as players who were fine in naxxramas just wiped the raid repeatedly on the early 25 man tbc content. The first 25 man boss was easy, the next 3 had mechanics where a single player could easily wipe the raid just by standing in the wrong place at the wrong time (before the encounters were nerfed).

After that it changed a bit, some content got easier and then some harder content was released etc. But it was almost always harder than the original level 60 content.

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yeah, there is some weird stuff going on here.
etchazz. "wow is easy, because you die alot. EQ is hard because you don't want to die" Really think about what you are saying there. Death penalties don't make the game harder, they just make you a coward.
I fail to see how that is fun at all. I would rather a player want to try something stupid and crazy, "that just might work", and fail horribly.
Wow, is "easy" because you can go, try something, and die. over and over till you learn the mechanics. Hey, I just described every NES game ever. Battletoads, Ghosts and goblins, etc. are they easy? how about the GW2 jumping puzzles? did you do the halloween one? was that hard or easy? the death penalty is not what makes it hard. If the GW2 halloween JP, had a death penalty of lose an item, or level every death. No one would have even tried the damn thing.
That doesn't make it harder, that simply shifts the risk vs reward.

Which then goes into, tuning content, as you say Flank. Naxx/black temple bosses that wipe the raid if 1 person is a moron. FUCK THAT SHIT. that and bosses with hp so fine tuned, that you HAVE to have 40 people in the raid with the correct gear and spec to beat the boss. Again that is shitty shitty design. Wipe and start over, because 1 tool died, and you no longer have the dps to be a hard enrage timer is one of the dumbest mechanics/design elements ever added to gaming. It needs to be the opposite. If 5 players know what they are doing, they should be able to kill that boss with the other 35 dead, even if it takes 2 hours. recovering from a near wipe is a million times more entertaining then having that "harder" boss, that means wipe if 1 guy dies.