SW:TOR, GW2, WoW:Cataclysm

Eisberg

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Those 3 will probably be released in the same year. I could see all 3 of them being the top MMOs and have some really tight competition. For me though, I'll probably play both SW:TOR and GW2, since there will only be a monthly fee for one of them. I might play WoW:Cat for a little bit just to see the new changes to Azeroth.
 
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I think Star Trek Online will be released next year too
 
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Well, being an active WoW raider, I have to try Cataclysm (after doing Crusade -> Icecrown Citadel), but I honestly hope SW: Tor is successful and can become my new game. I was hoping the same for Age of Conan, but that didn't work out at all.

Generally, I'd love a change of scenery, and a game set in the Star Wars universe would suit me perfectly, but in most MMOs the list of lacking features is so long it's hard to prefer it over WoW.

WoW itself was far from perfect upon release. In fact, it was quite a rubbish game back then - didn't even have a PvP system. However, most MMOs that are released today have to fight against a game that has had several years of development time, and people simply won't accept a title as flawed as WoW once was. They expect a game that'll beat WoW in its current form right from the start.

Unfortunately, I am one of those people. I can accept a few flaws here and there, but entire sections missing will simply reduce the enjoyment below what I'd experience in WoW. I'm just not *that* desperate for change, despite having played WoW since the original beta.
 
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WoW itself was far from perfect upon release. In fact, it was quite a rubbish game back then

WoW may have had flaws upon release, but please.

It's dead to me now, but calling it "quite rubbish" is pretty extreme.

Games aren't just competing against 5 years of evolution, they're competing against an EXTREMELY competent core design, art direction, and engine.

One of the best games ever made, and I say this as someone who'd rather vomit than play it again.
 
Well, release an MMO today without the following, and it would get slaughtered by critics:
- No PvP system at all
- Hardly any high end content (MC and Onyxia were the only places worth mentioning for a very long time)
- Huge gaps in the levelling where you had to grind/do loads of instances
- Bugged talents
- Horrible itemization
- Loads of places where your character would get stuck or fall through the world
- Etc. Generally loads of technical issues/bugs.

Basically, it was no better off than games like Age of Conan, WAR or any other half decent MMO. However, it was the first somewhat casual MMO (its predecessors EQ, UO, SW:G etc were all fairly hardcore), so it got a huge player base, and in time they fixed most of the issues and created the most complete MMO we've seen so far.

I've played since the original betas (still play it), and I remember exactly how empty the game was back then. People tend to get all nostalgic and remember "the epic battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill". What people don't remember, however, is that such battles were pointless, because there was no PvP system in place.

I admit that I have grown used to playing a game that "has it all", and there's no way I would even consider a game today that was released as empty as WoW was back then. I'd grow bored after two weeks, in the same way I got bored of AoC/LotRO after two weeks, despite all the potential.

I agree that the engine, art direction and overall potential was indeed present back then as well. That's my point - LotRO, AoC and WAR all have similar foundations, yet they stand no chance against the mammoth, simply because they are competing against a game that has evolved so much since its initial release. They'd easily be a serious contender for WoW in its original state, but they are seriously lacking compared to WoW today.

Maybe rubbish was a strong word. I don't consider any MMOs I've mentioned "rubbish". However, my point still stands - many MMOs show a lot of promise, but having potential is no longer enough, as they have to compete against such a complete product. People expect new MMOs to be able to surpass WoW already on the release day, which is very unrealistic, considering just how far WoW has come the last five years.
 
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I played it from the beginning as well, as did many critics and players proclaiming it a masterpiece.

I remember EXACTLY what was in it and what wasn't - and yet I think it was absolutely incredible in terms of the things I mentioned.

You don't seem to remember quite so clearly because:

There WAS a PvP system - there just wasn't any honor system. People were having great fun doing lots of PvP - and there are even players today who claim they'd rather have it back as it was before honor was introduced. It's true that you can argue it was meaningless - but if people had fun, it doesn't make much sense. I actually despise their current PvP implementation and find it the single greatest disappointment with WoW. But the PvP system and combat is brilliant and remains the tightest and most entertaining system in MMO existence.

There were no gaps in content with a lot of grinding, because you could quest more or less all the way to 60. If you call quests grinding, then that's your business but it's not the norm.

Horrible itemization is so subjective I don't even want to get into that, but I certainly don't agree that it was a big issue and it's something all MMOs suffer from in one way or the other.

The limited high end content, I'll grant you - but that was par for the course, even an improvement compared to other MMO launches.

Technical issues? Again, nothing compared to the vast majority of launches at the time of release. They had big issues due to unforeseen popularity, but the client itself was pretty damn solid and considering the revolution in terms of fluid animation and combat - that's an amazing feat.

There's no way anyone could reasonably compare WoW upon release with AoC upon release, but whatever floats your boat.

Again, I think it's a popular but failed notion that the reason so many MMOs have a problem competing with WoW is because of the evolution it has gone through. I think people are actually forgetting just how good the game is at the core - and saying differently is jumping on the bandwagon without actually thinking things through.

I agree that the engine, art direction and overall potential was indeed present back then as well. That's my point - LotRO, AoC and WAR all have similar foundations, yet they stand no chance against the mammoth, simply because they are competing against a game that has evolved so much since its initial release. They'd easily be a serious contender for WoW in its original state, but they are seriously lacking compared to WoW today.

I don't agree at all, as those games have very specific reasons for not being able to compete.

AoC - beyond having an atrocious launch, effectively removes itself from serious competitive space by being set in a very "mature" universe with much higher system requirements.

LOTRO - Sluggish dull combat, no potential for PvP, mostly high-brow content that don't appeal to children and the casual audience as much as pop-culture WoW. Also, it's loaded with extreme and unnecessary travel times.

WAR - Well, beyond having a boring clunky combat system, it's specifically about PvP and not PvE. That, again, appeals to a very limited segment compared to please-them-all WoW. It's simply not very good when it comes to non-PvP aspects and the PvP is almost impossible to do without a group.

So no, it's not just WoW and its evolution. All three games have serious issues that prevent them from being as great a success as WoW.
 
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You MMORPG players are a strange bunch......

The thing is that MMOs are very close to what I like about cRPGs, the advancement and gaining new spells/abilities, I don't care much about 'story' really (with my really bad memory, more often than not I forget the story in most cRPGs anyway and just follow the quest list). For example, I finished Oblivion twice, and all I remember is that there were some gates I had to close. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2? don't remember the story at all, just that there was a bad guy at the end. Same with pretty much any game. To me it's all about character(s) development really. That's not to say that I want cRPGs to be all about combat. Character development can and it's better if it includes other aspects, like crafting, trading, etc.
That's why I enjoy MMOs, creating a level 1 char and salivating about the spells/powers down the road. I loved City of Heroes since this was elevated to the max with all the potential archetype/primary/secondary powersets and how to slot each power. I loved SWG because of its crafting system and the whole vendor thing.
 
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I often wish an crafting system would be implemented in offline-RPGs as well.
 
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I'm really eager to try out SW:TOR just for the story elements. If they manage to copy whats great about dungeons and bossfights from WoW it'll be a nice bonus. Luckily my wow-addiction is long gone so there will be no expansion pack on me.
 
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Many jRPGs have solid crafting systems, I'm playing one right now. But western games are too focused on combat sadly.

I don't know what exactly you people mean by "crafting". But if you mean something like crafting of weapons, items, potions and so on: We had it in Witcher, Drakensang, NWN 2, Divinity 2, Two Worlds, Gothic 3... or am I missing something?
 
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There WAS a PvP system - there just wasn't any honor system. People were having great fun doing lots of PvP - and there are even players today who claim they'd rather have it back as it was before honor was introduced. It's true that you can argue it was meaningless - but if people had fun, it doesn't make much sense. I actually despise their current PvP implementation and find it the single greatest disappointment with WoW. But the PvP system and combat is brilliant and remains the tightest and most entertaining system in MMO existence.

There were no Battlegrounds, no rewards, a long ressurrection timer once you had been killed a few times. Tell me, what's great about having to wait 5 minutes before you can ressurrect if your enemy has killed you a few times? Sitting in ghost form is exciting? Or maybe you only had PvP sessions that lasted a few minutes, so you never got the ressurrection timer? Any PvP session lasting longer than a few minutes in WoW vanilla would leave everyone with massive timers.

There were no gaps in content with a lot of grinding, because you could quest more or less all the way to 60. If you call quests grinding, then that's your business but it's not the norm.

On the contrary, there were massive gaps in quests, as zones like Hinterlands, Searing Gorge, Silithus and so on were more or less empty at the time. They added a lot of quest hubs later on to make it smoother, but from the start you either needed to level almost exclusively with rested XP or in instances, or you'd experience a gap of 5+ levels in the 40-55 range where you had to grind mobs with no quests to do.

Horrible itemization is so subjective I don't even want to get into that, but I certainly don't agree that it was a big issue and it's something all MMOs suffer from in one way or the other.

Look at this set, Lightforge for Paladins:
http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=188

What is this supposed to do? Spirit, Strength and Intellect on the same set? Paladins have never used Spirit for anything, Healadins can't use Strength, and DPS Paladins can't use Int. It was aweful. Paladins, at the time, had to either stick with Valor (a set intended for Warriors), or a set intended for cloth wearing spellcasters. Both cases would lead to an uproar when the Paladin wanted loot, as they "had Lightforge". Shamans were in the same boat, as were Druids (most Druids used Rogue items at the time).

If you released a loot system that bad today, people simply would not accept it. They want optimized items with a clear function, that boosts you in the right way according to your class/spec.

The limited high end content, I'll grant you - but that was par for the course, even an improvement compared to other MMO launches.

On par with MMOs launched back in the days, certainly, but again - it's not something people would accept today. They'd want significantly more.

Technical issues? Again, nothing compared to the vast majority of launches at the time of release. They had big issues due to unforeseen popularity, but the client itself was pretty damn solid and considering the revolution in terms of fluid animation and combat - that's an amazing feat.

This is my whole point. At the time, WoWs launch was fairly smooth. However, if WoW was released today in the same state it was back then, it would not have been considered smooth. The launch of AoC, LotRO and WAR were all significantly smoother, with less downtime and less technical issues. I remember the first week of WoW, where everyone had a latency of 10.000 ms, and the servers were more down than up. Would that be accepted today? No, not a chance.

AoC - beyond having an atrocious launch, effectively removes itself from serious competitive space by being set in a very "mature" universe with much higher system requirements.

Right, but even the players that did have strong computers and liked the mature world, ended up quitting. Why? Lack of end content, despite the game having more end content than WoW did in its original form.

LOTRO - Sluggish dull combat, no potential for PvP, mostly high-brow content that don't appeal to children and the casual audience as much as pop-culture WoW. Also, it's loaded with extreme and unnecessary travel times.

Originally, WoW had very few flightpaths. More were added later on. Most places could only be reached by (very slow) mounts, and noone had access to the fast mounts untill later on (900 gold at the time was a fortune that was practically unobtainable, as quests did not reward gold). It was not unusual to spend a good 20 minutes going from point A to point B in WoW, for example when going to an instance. Oh, and there were no summoning stones back then, so you had to wait for everyone to arrive.

WAR - Well, beyond having a boring clunky combat system, it's specifically about PvP and not PvE. That, again, appeals to a very limited segment compared to please-them-all WoW. It's simply not very good when it comes to non-PvP aspects and the PvP is almost impossible to do without a group.

Both LotRO and WAR have combat systems almost identical to WoW. I can't see how you can consider WoWs system so much better. Maybe you remember vanilla as if it was TBC? Back in vanilla, most classes had very few "strikes" or "abilities". Most talents were just passive abilities. For example, the Paladin class only had autoattack and judgements to deal damage, and had to simply wait around while attacking stuff. That goes for Shamans as well (no Stormstrike etc). Rogues and Warriors were somewhat decent, but most classes had very long cooldowns and very few abilities to actually use. It was far from the action packed system it is today, where everyone has an ability to smash almost at every global cooldown.

So no, it's not just WoW and its evolution. All three games have serious issues that prevent them from being as great a success as WoW.

I still think nostalgia is making people remember it as if it was somehow close to what it is today (or even better). The truth is far from it. It was very slow paced with long cooldowns, few abilities, long travel times, redicilously long ressurrection times and very few ways of doing anything without waiting for hours - even getting a raid going for Stratholme or similar could take half a day, because people kept going "I'm not joining if there's another Rogue in!", as they didn't want to share loot.
 
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There were no Battlegrounds, no rewards, a long ressurrection timer once you had been killed a few times. Tell me, what's great about having to wait 5 minutes before you can ressurrect if your enemy has killed you a few times? Sitting in ghost form is exciting? Or maybe you only had PvP sessions that lasted a few minutes, so you never got the ressurrection timer? Any PvP session lasting longer than a few minutes in WoW vanilla would leave everyone with massive timers.

Who said everything about it was perfect?

I was on a PvP server, and I think you're blowing the issues way out of proportion. I generally didn't play massive PvP - but I stuck with small scale PvP, and in that way resurrection timers were a non-issue. The massive PvP was meaningless, so in that way I agree - and yet people had tons of fun with it.

I think the core combat system - with brilliant class/talent/skill design and super fluid responsiveness is absolutely incredible. The classes and the brilliance of their abilities and the talent tree is 100% unsurpassed still. Blizzard are masters of this, and nothing comes close.

Yes, I'm talking about on-release. I know there were unfinished/broken talents - but you really didn't notice it until much later in the game, and the CORE design and idea is what made it SO DAMN GOOD.

That's the core I'm talking about, and I remember having tons of fun - even with server crashes or lag based on having hundreds of people in the same place.

I also endorse penalties for dying, but WoW is too casual for my tastes anyway.

On the contrary, there were massive gaps in quests, as zones like Hinterlands, Searing Gorge, Silithus and so on were more or less empty at the time. They added a lot of quest hubs later on to make it smoother, but from the start you either needed to level almost exclusively with rested XP or in instances, or you'd experience a gap of 5+ levels in the 40-55 range where you had to grind mobs with no quests to do.

I played the european release - and I levelled from 1-60 without ever feeling it was a grind. I quested for the most part, and then I went to instances with friends. Sometimes I grinded mobs- but that was for my own pleasure because it was much faster than questing and I liked my rogue.

Look at this set, Lightforge for Paladins:
http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=188

What is this supposed to do? Spirit, Strength and Intellect on the same set? Paladins have never used Spirit for anything, Healadins can't use Strength, and DPS Paladins can't use Int. It was aweful. Paladins, at the time, had to either stick with Valor (a set intended for Warriors), or a set intended for cloth wearing spellcasters. Both cases would lead to an uproar when the Paladin wanted loot, as they "had Lightforge". Shamans were in the same boat, as were Druids (most Druids used Rogue items at the time).

If you released a loot system that bad today, people simply would not accept it. They want optimized items with a clear function, that boosts you in the right way according to your class/spec.

As I said, this is a balance issue that every MMO suffers from. It's pointless to point it out as specifically bad. People would not accept it? That's your subjective opinion.

I don't believe for a SECOND that people would stop playing WoW if itemization was like it was upon release.

On par with MMOs launched back in the days, certainly, but again - it's not something people would accept today. They'd want significantly more.

People always want more. I'm talking about the core design and execution of WoW upon release, and I'm talking about it as the primary reason people don't go to other places. It's excellent and unsurpassed in many important ways.

This is my whole point. At the time, WoWs launch was fairly smooth. However, if WoW was released today in the same state it was back then, it would not have been considered smooth. The launch of AoC, LotRO and WAR were all significantly smoother, with less downtime and less technical issues. I remember the first week of WoW, where everyone had a latency of 10.000 ms, and the servers were more down than up. Would that be accepted today? No, not a chance.

The reason WoW suffered, again, was primarily due to extreme popularity.

So your point is silly. If it wasn't as popular, it wouldn't suffer those problems.

Launch issues are a separate issue that you can't compare directly with modern day standards. It has little or nothing to do with the game design itself - but more the market and audience.

If WoW launched today, as it was in terms of design and features, Bliz would be fully aware of the modern day standard in terms of launches and would have adapted. It would STILL suffer from server crashes and what not, because they STILL wouldn't know just how popular their game would be. Also, computers are more powerful today, and as such the graphics would naturally have improved.

You just can't compare such things directly.

Right, but even the players that did have strong computers and liked the mature world, ended up quitting. Why? Lack of end content, despite the game having more end content than WoW did in its original form.

Why people quit? I was among them.

Funcom told endless lies and the game was in a horrible and hollow state. It didn't have any of the really cool features promised at launch. The siege system was non-functional for months, there was no PvP system (as promised), the game had gargantuan technical issues. DX10 wasn't implemented UNTIL A YEAR LATER - despite being listed as a feature on the box.

More content? Are you kidding?

WoW was at least three times as big, with a LOT more content. Yeah, AoC had endgame raids and a small handful of instances - but the game was so poorly balanced you could PuG through all content without even trying.

WoW's crafting was infinitely more intricate and fulfilling ON LAUNCH than the travesty that is AoC crafting.

It's absolutely incomparable in terms of content. You're thinking in rigid terms as in end-game content and not actual content of that content.

Originally, WoW had very few flightpaths. More were added later on. Most places could only be reached by (very slow) mounts, and noone had access to the fast mounts untill later on (900 gold at the time was a fortune that was practically unobtainable, as quests did not reward gold). It was not unusual to spend a good 20 minutes going from point A to point B in WoW, for example when going to an instance. Oh, and there were no summoning stones back then, so you had to wait for everyone to arrive.

Why do you insist on talking as if I didn't remember how the game was? I played it from beta, after all.

Yes, there were long travelling times in WoW - but I consider LOTRO considerably worse. I've played nearly every MMO in existence, and I think of LOTRO as probably the worst in terms of boring travelling quests - because they're the norm not the exception. LOTRO is a modern-day theme-park MMO, so there's really no excuse for forcing you to run around relatively samey HUGE areas doing basically nothing but errands. You could argue it's fitting with Tolkien lore - but to most people it's dreary as hell.

But I will concede that WoW was not particularly good in this way, and areas like Stranglethorn were quite painful. That said, at least areas were extremely varied and though flight paths were more scarce - at least they were cheap and easily affordable, unlike many in LOTRO where you don't ride because you don't want to pay the ridiculous prices.

Both LotRO and WAR have combat systems almost identical to WoW. I can't see how you can consider WoWs system so much better. Maybe you remember vanilla as if it was TBC? Back in vanilla, most classes had very few "strikes" or "abilities". Most talents were just passive abilities. For example, the Paladin class only had autoattack and judgements to deal damage, and had to simply wait around while attacking stuff. That goes for Shamans as well (no Stormstrike etc). Rogues and Warriors were somewhat decent, but most classes had very long cooldowns and very few abilities to actually use. It was far from the action packed system it is today, where everyone has an ability to smash almost at every global cooldown.

Obviously you have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the response time from pressing a key and your character reacting on screen and the "feel" of combat. I promise you I'm not alone in this, and WoW is generally considered to have the most fluid and entertaining combat system of all MMOs - with the possible exception of AoC. AoC has a great system as well, but unfortunately the game was plagued in the extreme and suffers from a VERY poor reputation now.

LOTRO and WAR use traditional press-and-wait combat systems, and the timing and animations are very poor in comparison. It's not something you necessarily notice if you don't enjoy fluid combat or maybe you just don't think about it. Some players care deeply about combat and how responsive it is, and I am one of those players.

I still think nostalgia is making people remember it as if it was somehow close to what it is today (or even better). The truth is far from it. It was very slow paced with long cooldowns, few abilities, long travel times, redicilously long ressurrection times and very few ways of doing anything without waiting for hours - even getting a raid going for Stratholme or similar could take half a day, because people kept going "I'm not joining if there's another Rogue in!", as they didn't want to share loot.

You can, of course, think what you will.

But I have a pretty solid memory of how the game was, and I mean it when I say I remember exactly what features were in place upon release and what features came later.

You should note that I'm not saying the evolution is irrelevant to other MMOs not standing a chance, but that I consider the primary reason to be the core features I orignally mentioned.

WoW, upon release, was not only exceptionally well crafted - it also understood how to appeal to the masses in a way that no other game has accomplished. It had an art direction that only the most dedicated "hardcore" players could have a problem with, and one that appeals to nearly everyone.

It had, and still has, the single most fluid and responsive combat system and engine in general - and it wasn't instanced except for, well.. instances.

No open world game since then has as fluid and responsive an engine, and that's another reason people don't migrate to other places.

It had an INCREDIBLE amount of variety in terms of area design and feel. Basically, every single area in WoW was like a world upon itself. I clearly remember being so impressed with this aspect, and it was like entering a movie set for each area. No other MMO comes close to this variety.

Oh, and let's not forget an absolutely amazing sound design. You can easily identify what is happening simply by sound alone. This is another area Blizzard understands, that WAR/LOTRO have no clue about. Every sound in those other games sound like anonymous "clinky/clanky" things and you generally don't notice you've been trapped/stunned/feared until it's too late. Even worse, many effects don't seem to have any distinct sound effect at all.

Just think of the stealth sound in WoW and what it does to the non-stealther hearing it. That's the power of excellent sound design.

It had the kind of pop-culture approach to light humor and dark settings that simultaneously draw people in and don't push anyone away. You can play it with family and friends and everyone can have a good time without being disgusted, offended, or scared. It's not something I personally enjoy, but I recognise the amazing drawing power of their approach.

It had a fantastic balance between challenge and fun. Nothing worthwhile was so easy as to be a push-over, and the game evolved without you really noticing it. Most other games are either way too easy, or simply too hard.

In WAR - PvE feels like a drone activity and you tend to know the outcome before you even start - because it's balanced like that.

Blizzard understands, and understood, how to introduce concepts without overwhelming people at the same time.

By calling it "quite rubbish" upon release, YOU are the one seriously mistaken - and even if everything is subjective, you can go look at the general reception based on both professional critics and normal players.

It was and remains a masterpiece.

Instead of insisting on this bandwagon opinion about WoW, try thinking about it for a second.

Why is Everquest 2 a failure in comparison? It targets the same kind of audience and it has just as long a development schedule as WoW has. It has followed much the same evolution?

Why is so totally and fully inferior in the minds of SO MANY people?

Do you really think it's by accident? Don't you think it has to do with how polished and well executed it was?

Aren't you completely underestimating how much content the game had at launch?

In fact, I'd argue that WoW had MORE content at launch than EVERY SINGLE MMO released since then has had upon launch.

You're simply being unfair, in my opinion.
 
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I was on a PvP server, and I think you're blowing the issues way out of proportion. I generally didn't play massive PvP - but I stuck with small scale PvP, and in that way resurrection timers were a non-issue. The massive PvP was meaningless, so in that way I agree - and yet people had tons of fun with it.

Ganking is not proper PvP. A real PvP system must be organized, so it's possible to fight on an even level and challenge one another over time (i.e StarCraft, WarCraft 3, CS: Source, etc). I know that quite a few people enjoyed ganking near BRD/UBRS, but that doesn't make it a good PvP system, and certainly no better than the rubbish system LotRO had at launch.

I think the core combat system - with brilliant class/talent/skill design and super fluid responsiveness is absolutely incredible. The classes and the brilliance of their abilities and the talent tree is 100% unsurpassed still. Blizzard are masters of this, and nothing comes close.

http://wowvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Talents.View.Beta&category_select_id=12

This is an oldschool talent calculator. Tell me, what is the brilliant part here? Most talents are boring, passive or makes no sense (Strength bonus in the Holy tree?). I see nothing here that you wouldn't expect in any MMO. Todays talent trees are very solid, but back then? Not at all.

That's the core I'm talking about, and I remember having tons of fun - even with server crashes or lag based on having hundreds of people in the same place.

I had loads of fun too, I still do, or I would've stopped playing at some point. However, if someone had forced me to go from the current version of WoW, to the original version, I'd stop instantly. My expectations are just that much higher now.

I played the european release - and I levelled from 1-60 without ever feeling it was a grind. I quested for the most part, and then I went to instances with friends. Sometimes I grinded mobs- but that was for my own pleasure because it was much faster than questing and I liked my rogue.

Then you either:
- Played a lot in instances.
- Played a lot with rested XP.
- Never tried to level an alt really fast.

The gaps were there, as surely as they were there in AoC. The gap was mainly a 5 or so level gap in the level 40-55 range, but this was later fixed by Blizzard by adding quest hubs in Hinterlands, Searing Gorge and Silithus, as well as adding a few quests here and there.

As I said, this is a balance issue that every MMO suffers from. It's pointless to point it out as specifically bad. People would not accept it? That's your subjective opinion.

There's a difference between balancing issues and items that are so poorly itemized noone knows why they even exist, or what they were intended to do.

The reason WoW suffered, again, was primarily due to extreme popularity.

So your point is silly. If it wasn't as popular, it wouldn't suffer those problems.

Not at all. Age of Conan had a bigger boom at launch than WoW, yet they managed perfectly fine. The truth of the matter is - in Europe, a lot of the server clusters were located in various parts of Eastern Europe, with fairly rubbish network. These servers were so unstable it was laughable (I recall Shadow Moon, renamed Shadowmoon in TBC, and Earthern Ring being among them). I still have no idea why they were even located there in the first place, though it was probably to save some money. I do know that it had nothing to do with localization, as there is no such thing as localized recommendations in WoW (you never get adviced to move to a certain server because it happens to be closer to where you live).

The servers in France and Germany were usually fairly solid.

If WoW launched today, as it was in terms of design and features, Bliz would be fully aware of the modern day standard in terms of launches and would have adapted. It would STILL suffer from server crashes and what not, because they STILL wouldn't know just how popular their game would be. Also, computers are more powerful today, and as such the graphics would naturally have improved.

Again, AoC managed this perfectly fine. Also, Blizzard didn't know how many copies they sold? Of course they knew. Besides, you can expand server clusters without breaking a sweat - buy a few new servers, hook them up, done deal. Lack of network bandwith? Buy some more.

Such hardware issues are not at all a problem. The problem was bad testing, a failure by Blizzard - they never truly tested whether all their clusters/networks could truly handle the load, so they started off with a completely unacceptable load per server. In time, they had to reduce this load to make the servers more stable (lower the cap on how many players could play on each server).

Why people quit? I was among them.

Funcom told endless lies and the game was in a horrible and hollow state. It didn't have any of the really cool features promised at launch. The siege system was non-functional for months, there was no PvP system (as promised), the game had gargantuan technical issues. DX10 wasn't implemented UNTIL A YEAR LATER - despite being listed as a feature on the box.

Me and my friends were also among them. We quit due to lack of content. No more, no less.

WoW's crafting was infinitely more intricate and fulfilling ON LAUNCH than the travesty that is AoC crafting.

WoW has always had a decent crafting system, no doubt about it. I never actually cared about crafting, but I certainly see that it's above par.

Yes, there were long travelling times in WoW - but I consider LOTRO considerably worse. I've played nearly every MMO in existence, and I think of LOTRO as probably the worst in terms of boring travelling quests - because they're the norm not the exception. LOTRO is a modern-day theme-park MMO, so there's really no excuse for forcing you to run around relatively samey HUGE areas doing basically nothing but errands. You could argue it's fitting with Tolkien lore - but to most people it's dreary as hell.

I seem to recall almost every town and city having a horse and wagon that would instantly teleport you to other towns/cities. Sure, travelling around in each zone takes time, but no more time than it does in WoW. Running at a low speed is running at a low speed, after all, and LotRO doesn't feature a bigger game world than WoW.

I'm talking about the response time from pressing a key and your character reacting on screen and the "feel" of combat. I promise you I'm not alone in this, and WoW is generally considered to have the most fluid and entertaining combat system of all MMOs - with the possible exception of AoC. AoC has a great system as well, but unfortunately the game was plagued in the extreme and suffers from a VERY poor reputation now.

You would have a point if you were talking about non-vanilla WoW. However, your point is moot regarding vanilla WoW, since most classes hardly had abilities to use at all, and those abilities often came with very long cooldowns. Rogues and Warriors were exceptionally reactive at the time, but most others had autoattack and very little else. Just look at the talent calculator I linked. Most classes only had one active skill per talent tree, in addition to a few skills gained while levelling.

It had, and still has, the single most fluid and responsive combat system and engine in general - and it wasn't instanced except for, well.. instances.

I agree with this. I like how the world is divided/instanced (most of it is open, but dungeons are instanced). AoC has a horrible system, one that just doesn't work, despite whatever performance gain you get from it.

It had an INCREDIBLE amount of variety in terms of area design and feel. Basically, every single area in WoW was like a world upon itself. I clearly remember being so impressed with this aspect, and it was like entering a movie set for each area. No other MMO comes close to this variety.

How much time is honestly spent exploring zones though? Why is so much effort even being put into such things? It is something I will never understand, as the levelling process in most games insignificant compared to the time spent at max level. Most players spend their time sitting in Ironforge/Orgrimmar/Shattrath/Dalaran or doing instances/PvP. I know of noone that spent a lot of time lumbering through the world on their 60% mount looking at the scenery - people got enough of that when trying to get from point A to point B because they had to do an instance.

Oh, and let's not forget an absolutely amazing sound design. You can easily identify what is happening simply by sound alone. This is another area Blizzard understands, that WAR/LOTRO have no clue about. Every sound in those other games sound like anonymous "clinky/clanky" things and you generally don't notice you've been trapped/stunned/feared until it's too late. Even worse, many effects don't seem to have any distinct sound effect at all.

Basically, I always turn off music/sound in MMOs after a while, because I get tired of hearing the same things over and over. WoW is no exception. I do turn on the sound at every new expansion just to hear what the new soundtrack is like, but then I turn it off again after a while.

It had a fantastic balance between challenge and fun. Nothing worthwhile was so easy as to be a push-over, and the game evolved without you really noticing it. Most other games are either way too easy, or simply too hard.

Strongly disagree with this. It was laughable. 20 serious raiders could carry 20 morons through MC without breaking a sweat. Onyxia and Ragnaros were both decent, but that's about it.

Also, fun? In the good ol' days, Paladins only had 5 minute Blessings, so in front every stinking trash pack in Molten Bore, the Paladins had to rebuff 40 people. The global cooldown in WoW between each cast is 1,5 seconds, so that's a minimum of 60 seconds of buffing per trash pack. Of course, one of the Paladins were always AFK, so when he got back, the buffs were off, and everyone had to rebuff yet again. Raiding was such a drag in those days compared to any modern raids.

It did improve in BWL though.

By calling it "quite rubbish" upon release, YOU are the one seriously mistaken - and even if everything is subjective, you can go look at the general reception based on both professional critics and normal players.

That's the whole point. If vanilla WoW - the same WoW that got stunning reviews back then - was released today, it would be compared to the current version of WoW, and get slaughtered. Unlike most genres, especially RPGs, MMOs have evolved a lot in the last few years, and most peoples expectations are through the roof - they're just unrealistic. They actually expect new MMOs to somehow compete with a beast that has been in development for 10 years, with billions of dollars invested.

Why is Everquest 2 a failure in comparison? It targets the same kind of audience and it has just as long a development schedule as WoW has. It has followed much the same evolution?

Because your assumption of the target audience is wrong. EQ2 was released not long before WoW, but unlike WoW it was following in the footsteps of the original EQ. The target audience was the hardcore market, and it was fairly successful in that market.

However, it requires so much more time to get anywhere than WoW, it was obviously never going to be a hit among casuals. Just maxing out your character in EQ2 takes ages - in WoW you can level up a new character from 1 to 60 (later on 70/80) and obtain decent gear in about a month. It won't be the best gear available a month after you started levelling, but close enough to compete for that gear.

In fact, I'd argue that WoW had MORE content at launch than EVERY SINGLE MMO released since then has had upon launch.

Weeks of levelling != years of playing at max level. It is what happens at max level that truly matters if you want people to keep paying in the long run. Like I said, this does not include riding around on a 60% mount to enjoy the scenery - I have never heard of anyone doing that a lot at level 60. Most people I knew back then were idling in Ironforge/Orgrimmar while chatting with friends, or trying to look for PuGs to go Scholo/Strat/UBRS/LBRS. Those instances would be laughable today, on par with the crap released in AoC, and certainly not worthy of being called "good content". At least, no more than the rubbish in AoC.

MC was present, but again, hardly worth mentioning. Possibly the most boring instance ever created, mostly due to foolish mechanics like short duration buffs that were needed everywhere.
 
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Ganking is not proper PvP. A real PvP system must be organized, so it's possible to fight on an even level and challenge one another over time (i.e StarCraft, WarCraft 3, CS: Source, etc). I know that quite a few people enjoyed ganking near BRD/UBRS, but that doesn't make it a good PvP system, and certainly no better than the rubbish system LotRO had at launch.

I'm not talking about ganking.

You can have an opinion of how a real PvP system should be, but I don't agree with it. That said, WoW doesn't appeal to me in terms of PvP - precisely because it has become all too organised.

http://wowvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Talents.View.Beta&category_select_id=12

This is an oldschool talent calculator. Tell me, what is the brilliant part here? Most talents are boring, passive or makes no sense (Strength bonus in the Holy tree?). I see nothing here that you wouldn't expect in any MMO. Todays talent trees are very solid, but back then? Not at all.

It's pointless to have this debate if we're going into this subjective territory. We could spend years going back and forth about what we like and what we don't.

I'm talking about the talent tree concept, and how it allows you to diversify within a class. I think there were several fantastic talents upon launch, but naturally there were questionable decisions as well.

The point of having strength bonus in the Holy tree, for instance, was likely to allow Holy paladins to retain a measure of melee prowess. I'm sure some players felt they succeeded or at least gave them that feeling.

I had loads of fun too, I still do, or I would've stopped playing at some point. However, if someone had forced me to go from the current version of WoW, to the original version, I'd stop instantly. My expectations are just that much higher now.

I doubt that, but whatever you say.

Then you either:
- Played a lot in instances.
- Played a lot with rested XP.
- Never tried to level an alt really fast.

No, I didn't. No I didn't. No I didn't.

The gaps were there, as surely as they were there in AoC. The gap was mainly a 5 or so level gap in the level 40-55 range, but this was later fixed by Blizzard by adding quest hubs in Hinterlands, Searing Gorge and Silithus, as well as adding a few quests here and there.

I didn't experience any gap, but I did in AoC.

There's a difference between balancing issues and items that are so poorly itemized noone knows why they even exist, or what they were intended to do.

I could point out severe balance issues in every single MMO I've ever played extensively. It's a trivial thing to argue, and I don't have time to into specifics or we'll never reach any understanding about this.

Not at all. Age of Conan had a bigger boom at launch than WoW, yet they managed perfectly fine. The truth of the matter is - in Europe, a lot of the server clusters were located in various parts of Eastern Europe, with fairly rubbish network. These servers were so unstable it was laughable (I recall Shadow Moon, renamed Shadowmoon in TBC, and Earthern Ring being among them). I still have no idea why they were even located there in the first place, though it was probably to save some money. I do know that it had nothing to do with localization, as there is no such thing as localized recommendations in WoW (you never get adviced to move to a certain server because it happens to be closer to where you live).

You don't seem to be aware of how rocky a start AoC really had. Do you even realise how they solved the issues during very late beta? They effectively removed adjacent players and NPCs from your view because they couldn't make it work. That's why, for months, players kept disappearing right in front of you - and they still do to an extent.

You must understand that their heavy instance design is what allows so many players to exist on a server without issue.

If you read up on what Blizzard did before launch, you'd realise that they looked at the most succesful launch until that point - and prepared for DOUBLE that amount, and created a server infrastructure in an effort to prepare.

You have no understanding of how these things work if you think sales alone gives you time to prepare. It's not a trivial thing establishing the kind of infrastructure that can support millions of players in a short time. They did everything they could to prepare given the state of the market at the time.

Again, AoC managed this perfectly fine. Also, Blizzard didn't know how many copies they sold? Of course they knew. Besides, you can expand server clusters without breaking a sweat - buy a few new servers, hook them up, done deal. Lack of network bandwith? Buy some more.

Please give me a break. You have no idea how complicated and expensive it is to "expand server clusters". It takes a lot of people and a lot of resources and you don't just do it on a day-to-day basis. You have to plan for it, and for that you have to guage how many you'll need.

Such hardware issues are not at all a problem. The problem was bad testing, a failure by Blizzard - they never truly tested whether all their clusters/networks could truly handle the load, so they started off with a completely unacceptable load per server. In time, they had to reduce this load to make the servers more stable (lower the cap on how many players could play on each server).

This is so factually wrong I can't even put it into words.

Do you really think Blizzard, one of the most competent developers in the industry - if not THE most competent developer - don't know how to handle server load?

Again, it's REALLY simple, they weren't prepared AT ALL for the level of success we experienced.

In fact, the entire industry was in shock about how successful the game was. Totally unprecedented and no one could have guessed that.

Me and my friends were also among them. We quit due to lack of content. No more, no less.

That would seem to be a problem, now wouldn't it.

WoW has always had a decent crafting system, no doubt about it. I never actually cared about crafting, but I certainly see that it's above par.

Well, that's something I guess.

I seem to recall almost every town and city having a horse and wagon that would instantly teleport you to other towns/cities. Sure, travelling around in each zone takes time, but no more time than it does in WoW. Running at a low speed is running at a low speed, after all, and LotRO doesn't feature a bigger game world than WoW.

The problem is that the costs are prohibitive in LOTRO. New players can't afford it unless it's the select few routes that don't have the high costs.

Again, the problem is there in both games - I just think LOTRO is significantly worse.

But I don't think it's fruitful to go back and forth on this without something more concrete, and I can't be bothered to go in-game and time it.

You would have a point if you were talking about non-vanilla WoW. However, your point is moot regarding vanilla WoW, since most classes hardly had abilities to use at all, and those abilities often came with very long cooldowns. Rogues and Warriors were exceptionally reactive at the time, but most others had autoattack and very little else. Just look at the talent calculator I linked. Most classes only had one active skill per talent tree, in addition to a few skills gained while levelling.

What?

Are you serious?

Talent trees generally don't provide characters with abilities. Character classes get abilities around every 2 levels.

Every single class had "reactive" abilties as you call it. Paladin judgments were instant, for example.

The expansions have added only very few extra abilties, so most of what you see is the vanilla abilities - except for the few cases of completely redesigned classes, like the Paladin.

How much time is honestly spent exploring zones though? Why is so much effort even being put into such things? It is something I will never understand, as the levelling process in most games insignificant compared to the time spent at max level. Most players spend their time sitting in Ironforge/Orgrimmar/Shattrath/Dalaran or doing instances/PvP. I know of noone that spent a lot of time lumbering through the world on their 60% mount looking at the scenery - people got enough of that when trying to get from point A to point B because they had to do an instance.

To me, exploration is the number one thing I go after. Right before combat and depth of class/combat mechanics.

WoW is and remains utterly exceptional.

You're talking about max level characters that have already gone through the exploration phase of the game.

You must be one strange player if you didn't go through a ton of areas during your first months of playing

Basically, I always turn off music/sound in MMOs after a while, because I get tired of hearing the same things over and over. WoW is no exception. I do turn on the sound at every new expansion just to hear what the new soundtrack is like, but then I turn it off again after a while.

Well, you don't explore and you don't play with sound. Would you say that's a common approach? I don't think so.

Strongly disagree with this. It was laughable. 20 serious raiders could carry 20 morons through MC without breaking a sweat. Onyxia and Ragnaros were both decent, but that's about it.

Eh?

You have ABSOLUTELY no idea what you're talking about. Molten Core was an extremely challenging raid and it took players months to learn it.

Just coordinating 40 people to meet was a challenge, but several encounters were incredibly hard. I think we wiped an entire month on the 2nd boss.

You're very obviously completely ignorant of what it took to learn these places from the ground up.

This has been the most revealing of your statements, and now I'm going to have to doubt you've ever raided during pre-BC. I don't think you have - or someone else carried you through.

Also, fun? In the good ol' days, Paladins only had 5 minute Blessings, so in front every stinking trash pack in Molten Bore, the Paladins had to rebuff 40 people. The global cooldown in WoW between each cast is 1,5 seconds, so that's a minimum of 60 seconds of buffing per trash pack. Of course, one of the Paladins were always AFK, so when he got back, the buffs were off, and everyone had to rebuff yet again. Raiding was such a drag in those days compared to any modern raids.

Yeah, 5 minute blessings sucked. I agree.

That's the whole point. If vanilla WoW - the same WoW that got stunning reviews back then - was released today, it would be compared to the current version of WoW, and get slaughtered. Unlike most genres, especially RPGs, MMOs have evolved a lot in the last few years, and most peoples expectations are through the roof - they're just unrealistic. They actually expect new MMOs to somehow compete with a beast that has been in development for 10 years, with billions of dollars invested.

If WoW was released today, it wouldn't compete against what we have today. WoW almost singlehandedly created the current climate.

You can't compare things directly, because you have to take into account how the market has changed, and how the technology has changed.

The only thing you can compare directly are those not directly related to such things, like art direction, game design, and basic engine.

Because your assumption of the target audience is wrong. EQ2 was released not long before WoW, but unlike WoW it was following in the footsteps of the original EQ. The target audience was the hardcore market, and it was fairly successful in that market.

It was a light-weight EQ and very quickly started emulating WoW, and yet it failed utterly.

Technically, it was a failure as well - which WoW wasn't.

However, it requires so much more time to get anywhere than WoW, it was obviously never going to be a hit among casuals. Just maxing out your character in EQ2 takes ages - in WoW you can level up a new character from 1 to 60 (later on 70/80) and obtain decent gear in about a month. It won't be the best gear available a month after you started levelling, but close enough to compete for that gear.

Yeah, and that's appealing to the casual market.

You're arguing my case.

Weeks of levelling != years of playing at max level. It is what happens at max level that truly matters if you want people to keep paying in the long run. Like I said, this does not include riding around on a 60% mount to enjoy the scenery - I have never heard of anyone doing that a lot at level 60. Most people I knew back then were idling in Ironforge/Orgrimmar while chatting with friends, or trying to look for PuGs to go Scholo/Strat/UBRS/LBRS. Those instances would be laughable today, on par with the crap released in AoC, and certainly not worthy of being called "good content". At least, no more than the rubbish in AoC.

Every single MMO runs out of content at one point or another, that's just how it works. WoW had a lot of both races and classes that people enjoyed levelling up whilst waiting for new content.

That's another strength of WoW against AoC and LOTRO - the 6 starting areas to give a fresh experience for alts.

MC was present, but again, hardly worth mentioning. Possibly the most boring instance ever created, mostly due to foolish mechanics like short duration buffs that were needed everywhere.

I played MC for months before we mastered it. I loved every single minute of mastering it, because it was extremely challenging to learn.

The year I spent trying to get Thunderfury was less interesting.

Every raid becomes easy once you learn how it works, but MC took a lot of people A LOT of time.
 
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You have no understanding of how these things work if you think sales alone gives you time to prepare. It's not a trivial thing establishing the kind of infrastructure that can support millions of players in a short time. They did everything they could to prepare given the state of the market at the time.

Please give me a break. You have no idea how complicated and expensive it is to "expand server clusters". It takes a lot of people and a lot of resources and you don't just do it on a day-to-day basis. You have to plan for it, and for that you have to guage how many you'll need.

Ahem. I work as a developer at a company that dwarves Blizzard when it comes to delivering such architectures. I am part of such a delivery team every single day of the year. Do not try to tell me how to do my job, I know my job very well, and this was not a "being flooded" issue. This was an issue of servers not being properly tested, so the amount they allowed *per server* was too high. They didn't lack the number of servers. They had plenty. They simply allowed too many to play at them at once. That was their mistake, no more, no less.

I can't recall the numbers they started with, but I seem to recall it being lowered to around 10.000 players per server, to stabilize them. It worked, but it should've been prevented from the start.

Do you really think Blizzard, one of the most competent developers in the industry - if not THE most competent developer - don't know how to handle server load?

Again, it's REALLY simple, they weren't prepared AT ALL for the level of success we experienced.

Far from the truth I'm afraid. Blizzard, at the time, was completely ignorant to what it takes to run anything with that kind of server load. Most competent developers in the industry? Are you crazy? You'll never find those in the gaming industry - the most competent developers in the industry are working for major banks, public and private scientific departments, Accenture/IBM and other giant delivery comapnies, etc.

You have ABSOLUTELY no idea what you're talking about. Molten Core was an extremely challenging raid and it took players months to learn it.

Just coordinating 40 people to meet was a challenge, but several encounters were incredibly hard. I think we wiped an entire month on the 2nd boss.

You're very obviously completely ignorant of what it took to learn these places from the ground up.

This has been the most revealing of your statements, and now I'm going to have to doubt you've ever raided during pre-BC. I don't think you have - or someone else carried you through.

Actually, I've been a hardcore raider for as long as I can remember. I've cleared every scrap of content WoW has to offer (currently working on the Hard Mode version of Trial of the Grand Crusade), and achieved more or less everything it's possible to achieve in PvP (though I only reached rank 12 in the old PvP system, since 13 and 14 would've required too much time off from work).

The only reason - and I mean the *only* reason - MC was ever challenging, was due to the fact that most guilds (except the top guild on each server) were forced to bring far too many mediocre or poor players to their raids. Players that wouldn't read tactics or even try to get a general understanding of how the fights worked - they'd show up with far from maximized gear, with a subpar spec and "keyboard-turner" playstyle.

This is why top guilds were often many months ahead of everyone else (even guilds that were somewhat hardcore). They recruited players who actually bothered to put that extra effort into maximizing their character, their playstyle, and their particular role on the various bosses.

MC almost killed my motivation for PvE, but from BWL and up it started to improve. By AQ40, the game had some serious guild breaking encounters. The fights were so much more varied, and so much more challenging.

Regarding the sound/exploration:
Sure, I spent a month or so simply soaking in the game world. It was a good month too, but then I spent years not caring one bit for the zones, as I was idling in Ironforge whenever I wasn't doing instances. After reaching level 60 with both my Shaman and Paladin, and doing the most interesting quests (quests didn't reward gold back then, so there was little reason to do quests beyond the interesting ones), I never really saw the point in travelling through zones I had already quested in on my way to 60.

I still do what I always have, and most people in my guild do that as well - we move to place A when we have to move to place A because something specific is happening there. Other than that, we idle while chatting in the guild.

Same goes for sound - it's enjoyable for a while, but then I turn it off. How many times is it possible to hear the same soundtrack and the same sound effects without going mad? I do know people that still play with in-game music, but that'd drive me nuts, so I put on some Iron Maiden or similar instead.
 
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Ahem. I work as a developer at a company that dwarves Blizzard when it comes to delivering such architectures. I am part of such a delivery team every single day of the year. Do not try to tell me how to do my job, I know my job very well, and this was not a "being flooded" issue. This was an issue of servers not being properly tested, so the amount they allowed *per server* was too high. They didn't lack the number of servers. They had plenty. They simply allowed too many to play at them at once. That was their mistake, no more, no less.

Spare me, please. It does nothing for me that you claim to dwarf Blizzard in terms of how to establish a server infrastructure. Your comments about Blizzard being stupid simply tells me you haven't got the slightest clue how hard it must be to establish a working infrastructure for a totally unprecedented amount of players.

You're making yourself look like a fool.

I'm not telling you how to do your job, I'm telling you that you have no idea what it takes to build an MMO server infrastructure based on severely limited information regarding playerbase.

You're also completely wrong. They didn't significantly reduce amount of players pr. server until years later. They got server problems under control within a couple of months.

I think it was 1-1.5 years ago they reduced the amount of players from ~15-18K to 10-12K.

They did this because there WERE a number of servers with relatively severe problems, and they had basically infinite funds to add servers to compensate.

It has nothing to do with lack of insight.

I can't recall the numbers they started with, but I seem to recall it being lowered to around 10.000 players per server, to stabilize them. It worked, but it should've been prevented from the start.

Yeah, and you know how to run a WoW server and you would have known exactly what number should have been in place based on your job?

Give me a break, please. You haven't got the slightest idea.

The amount of players pr. server is but a single factor in a sea of factors. Adding servers to a cluster or reducing maximum players doesn't do away with the core challenges of getting the netcode to handle player PROXIMITY. That's the real challenge, especially because of how fluidly WoW handles combat. The problem was how to handle hundreds of players in near vicinity, because that's when traffic escalates to the extreme. Reducing total amount of players pr. server wouldn't prevent hundreds of players meeting up at any one place.

That has to do with net code as well as simply server capacity, which I guess you also know everything about - and I guess you know how to do net code for large scale MMOs as well? Right - of course you do. Blizzard totally revolutionized MMO combat and fluidity - but your company would have handled it better because you know about server infrastructure? Mmm....

Blizzard simply wasn't prepared for how many people would connect and login at the same time, and they needed to establish much larger capacity data centers than they expected. Beyond that, they needed to adjust their netcode to handle player proximity at multiple places because too many players wanted to join in the fun. You can limit maximum amount of players - but that's not really the key to reducing player proximity - because you can't predict player behaviour.

So many non-hardware related factors are part of the challenge - and you can be assured that Blizzard who pioneered with Battle.net had a ton of experience with this sort of thing. They simply didn't expect what they got.

Far from the truth I'm afraid. Blizzard, at the time, was completely ignorant to what it takes to run anything with that kind of server load. Most competent developers in the industry? Are you crazy? You'll never find those in the gaming industry - the most competent developers in the industry are working for major banks, public and private scientific departments, Accenture/IBM and other giant delivery comapnies, etc.

You won't find the most competent game developers in the gaming industry?

I think you're wrong.

The only reason - and I mean the *only* reason - MC was ever challenging, was due to the fact that most guilds (except the top guild on each server) were forced to bring far too many mediocre or poor players to their raids. Players that wouldn't read tactics or even try to get a general understanding of how the fights worked - they'd show up with far from maximized gear, with a subpar spec and "keyboard-turner" playstyle.

That's the only challenging thing about any raid. Once you learn the simplistic puzzles, it's really all about group coordination.

It's the way raids work - and little has changed apart from the amount of people participating and the amount of hoops Blizzard want people to jump through in their approach to boss encounters.

This is why top guilds were often many months ahead of everyone else (even guilds that were somewhat hardcore). They recruited players who actually bothered to put that extra effort into maximizing their character, their playstyle, and their particular role on the various bosses.

What you're saying is irrelevant.

The challenge was there regardless - and your claim that 20 top raiders could carry 20 crap players is completely wrong. A couple of morons, and the entire raid would wipe again and again - and I know, because we had our share.

MC was very challenging, precisely because you had to coordinate 40 people.

Was it a nice challenge? No, but I don't think of any raid encounter as a nice challenge.

I look to PvP for a challenge, and WoW doesn't provide my kind of PvP - really.

It was a challenge to maintain top DPS position, and that's basically what carried me through the raids.

MC almost killed my motivation for PvE, but from BWL and up it started to improve. By AQ40, the game had some serious guild breaking encounters. The fights were so much more varied, and so much more challenging.

That's your perception.

I stopped raiding around end-game BC, pre-Black Temple.

In my mind, every single raid encounter is a total joke in terms of challenge - EXCEPT for coordinating a large team and getting them to actually do what they're supposed to do.

I was, AFAIK, no. 1 DPS horde side on Shadowsong EU - I learned the encounters based on 1-2 wipes, and the rest of the time was spent waiting for others to "get it".

I despise the concept of how they make raids challenging, no matter how many ridiculous things they wanted people to learn - like jumping in and out of water or CC'ing with perfect timing etc.

It was STILL just a pattern you had to memorize and I never really felt like I had to perform my job well, especially as the game "evolved". It was rarely about DPS people doing top DPS - it was about DPS people doing above average DPS, and that was the challenge - because people were too often crap at what they were doing.

Except for a tiny subset of encounters, that was really the key. Getting all 40 or 25 people to do an average to an above average job. It didn't matter in the slightest that you had god-like players on your team, as long as everyone did a decent job.

This is more true today with WoW than it was in the old days, because it's now more casual than ever.

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In any case, this is a pointless pissing contest by now.

You've said too many things to indicate you don't have a single clear memory of how WoW was, and your ridiculous claims about server infrastructure is just not something I can take seriously.

This ends here.
 
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