Raph Koster has a pointer to a rant on Gamasutra about how World of Warcraft sucks.
Nothing new there… (checks watch) Yep, it’s been a little over a year, time for the backlash to hit the mainstream. Still, this article is pretty interesting, especially from the point of view of its author. He happens to be a competitive Street Fighter player, so you can probably guess where he comes down on the player skill vs time investment discussion. And again:
…playing a fair game is what it’s all about. It would never occur to us to play a game where one player gets to do 50% more damage because he has a level 60 Chun Li.
The problem, of course, is that not everyone is going to be a wizard at playing Chun Li. The barrier of entry to knowing exactly how to blow away people with arcane 8-step combo moves is far higher than a “level 60 Chun Li”… and learning how to do them – how to be a competitive, truly skilled player, I would argue, would take more time than grinding your Chun Li to 60. It would feel fairer to some to be able to leverage their hand-eye coordination or whatever to “pwn” people more effectively – but would people resent being “pwned” any less because someone was able to game the system instead of grinding out levels? This is, of course, an old discussion, and Raph’s hit on it more than once.
There’s some other surprising takes in the article as well, that challenge a bit our preconcieved notions of “WoW as the casual MMO”. To wit:
Group > Solo. You can forget self-reliance, because you won’t get far in World of Warcraft without a big guild. By design, playing alone (even if you are the best player in the world) will get you worse loot than if you always play in 5-man dungeons. If you always play in 5-man dungeons, you’ll always get worse loot than if you play in 40-man raids. The player base has been hit over the head for so long with this notion of 40-man raids, that players are taking that as given. I see so many people who have been fooled into thinking this is justified, that it actually scares me. They think that you shouldn’t be allowed to get good loot unless you do something with 39 other people, because that’s harder. Coordinating 40 people is hard, but so is winning a Street Fighte tournament, which you have to do by yourself.
This is interesting to me on a couple of different levels.
World of Warcraft actually discourages grouping, at least during the 1-60 character building stage, for the majority of gameplay. To be precise, the experience doled out in groups makes for a far less efficient character growth rate than if the players were solving quests solo. Not only that, with the exception of elite quests and instances, the entire game can actually be played solo; in that it’s one of the most forgiving MMOs in that regard.
That this player took away “World of Warcraft enforces grouping” from this tells me that the groups he felt he had to be in were SO jarring, and SO resented, that they shaded the rest of the experience. (The references to “40 man groups”, which only occur in the vastly different post-60 elder game, tend to bear this out.) To quote again:
Unfortunately, the game offers no difficult solo content leading to good loot. (Note to picky readers: there is some, but it’s soooo far out of whack with raid rewards that we can safely ignore it, the same way Blizzard does.) The designers must be so extraverted, that they can’t fathom the introvert point of view.
Again, within the same paragraph: “There’s no content for my playstyle. Well, there is, but the other stuff is better. You know it, I know it, Blizzard knows it, so it just doesn’t exist for me.” This is a far more important lesson to learn than what he is actually saying. As long as there is content percieved as “better”, players won’t settle for what they can easily achieve through their own devices. They will resent not being able to get The Best.
And again:
Warcraft\’e2\’80\rdblquote maybe accidentally\’e2\’80\rdblquote hit upon this concept, and now seems spit on it and all those who appreciate it. If a Blizzard developer read this, his PR department would say they are not spitting on this play-style, but unfortunately the game design speaks louder than words. “Spit on” is exactly how I feel. But far worse is the idea that millions of children are learning that doing things on your own is bad. Albert Einstein accomplished far more in the field of physics by himself during off-time as a patent clerk than a 40-man raid of so-so physicists ever would. I want little Johnny in Idaho to learn that lesson, but he sure won’t find it in World of Warcraft. 40 mundane people with a lot of time would put Albert Einstein to shame any day of the week in this game.
Little Johnny in Idaho may be learning bad lessons, but the lesson Little Scott in Virginia is learning is that as long as 40 man raids exist, there will be people who wish they didn’t have to do them – but still want the rewards that were crafted to reward the combined efforts of 40 people. This is important: rewards for the effort of 1 person isn’t good enough. As long as better exists, that will be the baseline. “Why can’t I get the same stuff as the 40 people working together. I’m smart! I should be able to get the same stuff! Or stuff just as good. It had better be just as good, too, or else it may as well not exist.”
The author also dislikes one of the primary pillars of community in an MMO:
You’re either with a guild, or you’re nobody to them. I can’t imagine being in only one IRC (chat) channel at a time, or choosing only one gaming community, yet I can only join one guild at a time. It’s a very weird social environment with the same dangers as nationalism and flag-waving.
I wonder if the author has settled on one family yet.
Seriously, this part kind of strikes at the core of community building. Like attracts like. We join guilds that have people that we get along with. If we don’t, we don’t last particularly long. If we do, we form bonds of friendship that persist beyond the game itself. This is a pretty key part of what makes the community behind MMOs tick, and the author’s rejection of these out of hand makes me wonder what sort of enforced guild grouping he felt he had to endure to get Those Shiny Things Only 40 Man Raids Give You. If you’re detecting a theme, congratulations!
And finally, the author decides that rules are bad.
The very idea of using the terms of service as the de facto way to enforce a certain player-behavior goes against everything I’ve learned. A game should be a system of rules that allow the player to explore. If the player finds loopholes, then the game developer should fix them. It’s never, ever the player’s fault: it’s the game developer’s fault. People who currently make deals with enemy faction (Horde or Alliance ) to trade wins in battleground games are not really at fault. They are playing in a system that forces anyone who wants to be rank 14 to do exactly that. A line in the Terms of Service saying that you shouldn’t behave this way changes nothing, and teaches nothing.
Cheating is fine, because the players learned how to cheat. The game developers should wave a magic wand and fix it! Failing that, they should just let players evolve new forms of gameplay. I believe the terminology used for this in Ultima Online was “creative uses of magic”. Needless to say, most people that found this term used during an interaction with customer service found it an insulting, patronizing copout.
Players expect an even field of play. Developers absolutely have to fix bugs as they are discovered, but that does not give players carte blanche to discover and exploit interesting ways to break the game. The author seems to resent the fact that terms of service exist, but I suspect if he played a game where they were honored only in the breach his opinion would change dramatically.
These examples go on and on, but the basic idea here is that Blizzard treats the players like little children who need a babysitter. There are mountains of rules in the terms of service that tell you that you shouldn’t do things that you totally can do in the game if you want. Why they don’t just alter their design and code so you can’t do these things is beyond me. But this mentality is drilled into the players to the point that they start believing that it’s ok. They start believing that it’s not ok to experiment, to try out anything the game allows in a non-threatening environment. Well\’e2\’80\rdblquote that’s a dangerous thing. That’s the point at which the game stops being “fun” by Raph Koster’s definition, and it’s also the point at which the game can no longer teach. The power of games is that they empower a player to try all the possibilities that he can think of that the game rules allow, not that they have pages of “rules of conduct” that prevent you from creative thinking.
Which is all well and good. I want to explore new frontiers in cyberspace and new ways that men pretend to be women to get other men to give them shinies too. But in most worlds, including the one we happen to live in, running afoul of the community standards (our world calls them “laws”) isn’t excused by the complaint that the offender was “exploring the boundaries of society”. Amazingly, there are folks who aren’t joyous explorers of the human psyche, but just want to be irritating weasels. Thus why rules exist. Thus why “babysitters” exist (in our world, we call them police officers). I totally can rob money from stores and punch random passers by in the face. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do this? Those damn terms of service, getting in the way of my fun!
Back to seriousland, what this tells me is that there isn’t enough education about why rules enforcement exist. Grizzled veterans of gameplay ‘experiences’ past know that people online are, nine times out of ten, raving assholes. I’ll grant the author a blissful ignorance on this one, and give Blizzard bonus points for making a world with such a well-enforced rule set that the author can’t understand why it exists in the first place.
Sometimes, you learn things you didn’t expect in places that didn’t expect you to learn them.
#1 by Damien Neil on February 23rd, 2006
> I wonder if the author has settled on one family yet.
This strikes to the heart of why he’s right on this one point at least, and all the major MMOs are wrong.
I haven’t settled on one family, and I’ll bet you haven’t either. I’ve got the family I was born into, the friends I made in my backwoods Connecticut hometown as a child, the friends I made in college, the friends I made in college, the friends I made in my new home in Silicon Valley, the people I work with, and numerous other “families”. These groups overlap. I spend more time hanging out with my coworkers and SV friends than I do with my birth family…and yet, I go home to be with that family most every Christmas. I feel no less close to them despite that fact.
The standard MMO guild structure is utterly antithetical to way people associate in life. It encourages–and sometimes forces–people to pick one association and stick to it in preference to all others.
If real life worked the way MMO guilds do, I’d have been forced to give up my family when I went off to college–and again, when I got a job. Sorry kid, isn’t uber enough to raid SysProg…come on, it’s only got a dozen members and half of them haven’t even hit level 17 and gotten their mounts yet. Time for you to drop that tag and join .
I started playing WoW with various real life friends. We founded a guild so we could hang out and chat together. Over time, however, half of those people have left the guild for others. Some wanted to raid, some wanted more roleplaying, and so on. It wasn’t that they wanted to stop associating with the rest of us–just that the game mechanics forced them to make a choice.
I’ve played one game that didn’t limit guild membership: A Tale in the Desert. The average player in that game belongs to a dozen guilds or more. There are the family guilds, which keep friends close to each other. There are the corporations, where people coordinate large group activities. There are the regional guilds, where all the inhabitants of a given region gather to chat. There are the affinity guilds, collecting people who share a common interest. THIS is how people form associations in real life: Not artificially bound to a single circle of people, but caught up in a gloriously complex web of relationships.
#2 by Dunadurium on February 23rd, 2006
lol, I just read that right before i checked your site and was thinking some of the exact same things. What a noob.
I hate how there are so many articles popping up written by these WOW newbs. At least let someone who knows what they are talking about write their articles (I have come to expect more from gamasutra anyways). Then the flood of new players coming to the genre sees these things and takes them as biblical scripture.
Is old school completely dead?
~Dunadurium
#3 by Apache on February 23rd, 2006
pot
kettle
black
that is all
#4 by Hank on February 23rd, 2006
I actually read that whole article! While waiting in a WoW BG queue.
That guy is a jerk. WoW is one of the most solo friendlt games out there. I am solo (or duo with my wife) most of the time while leveling to 60. Even after 60 I’m solo or duo EXCEPT for BGs or high level dungeon raids.
And about the rules, there are lots of things that the game designers COULD prohibit, like killing Civilians for example, but dont prohibit. They impose penelties but allow it. There are lots of other things that the game designers cant or wont code in but are still against the rules and it seems perfectly sensible to have some written “Thou shall NOTs”.
After all, God (our designer) COULD have designed us to not kill our fellow man, but instead She gave us freedom of choice between right and wrong AND 10 written rules.
#5 by Dunadurium on February 23rd, 2006
Damien, I agree with you to an extent and i think this is especially if not exclusively a wow/”casual game” thing.
I mean the first time I tried WoW i flew to lev 10-15 with no need of any player interaction at all. The first time i grouped for a quest, we went through and did good 2-hour series of quests, the whole time this pally spoke to me maybe 5 sentences. When we were done he thanked me for grp and was off. It was almost like a mutually beneficial deal that went down. Both parties benefiting at the moment but neither needing to keep in touch. This went on through the levels. There were relatively few people that actually would sit and talk in the minimal downtime. The fact being that the game absolutely does encourage solo play. Grouping is just a means to get things done as apposed to a community building fundamental element. Grouping in WOW almost seems like your just being used. After you disband and wander off never to meet each other again, it feels like the community aspect of WOW is non-existent. So yeah, when you get in a guild in this game it feels like you are cut off from every other group of people.
What ever happened to having a friends list? When I quit I had maybe 15 people on my list, of those maybe 5 I ever saw on a half regular basis.
In EQ when I quit I had countless numbers of names (going back a few years of course) but of those I had different groups of good friends. Like the guys I grouped with a year ago that maybe don\’e2\’80\’99t play as much any more, or some people from my early noobish guild, as well as a few of the friends from when I was a noob that went different ways or joined a different group.
What I\’e2\’80\’99m saying is that an MMO community can be EXACTLY like what you describe, and in fact that\’e2\’80\’99s what makes it interesting. In WOW this is not that case and the game is actually almost the opposite-where community means nothing more than a way to advance your own personal game, instead of being part of something larger. This may also stem from the relatively fast progression rate in that a player may max a character in a month or two and move on to another, never to touch his first one(or just rarely log it on).
Overall my personal thinking is that a \’e2\’80\’9ccasual game\’e2\’80\’9d of the WOW fashion cannot truly foster meaningful communities of the style that a more \’e2\’80\’9chardcore\’e2\’80\’9d or long-term game can.
Just my two copper of course so feel free to expand on it,
~Dunadurium
#6 by Factory on February 23rd, 2006
Hmm this article prolly is more interesting for the way the mentality that he describes in http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPart1.htm , reacts to a game like WoW.
I agree with him that rules should be fixed though, relying on a human arbiter will produce arbitary results, hard and fast rules will avoid this problem.
#7 by Damien Neil on February 23rd, 2006
Dunadurium, I think you’re missing my point and replacing it with another.
Calling WoW a “casual game” is pointless. Yes, it has a faster level grind to $MAXLEVEL than some of the competition, and it’s generally easier to level without grouping. It also has just as many catasses as any other game out there. There are the people who grind honor points for twelve hours a day, every day, in order to max out their PvP rank. There are the people who spend 4-5 hours a day in raids, and just as much grinding faction or the like.
WoW supports much the same communities as other games of its ilk. Yes, the lack of downtime and increased soloability means that the social structure while leveling is different from the old EQ. I very much doubt, however, that the nature of a family, RP, or raid guild is substantially different between WoW and EQ–and what differences exist will be largely a matter of how much history the games have accumulated.
No, the problem is that EQ and all of its heirs that I am familiar with discourage membership in multiple communities. Being a member of a family guild, an RP guild, and a raid guild is generally mutually exclusive. The attitude that people must “settle on one family” is utterly absurd, and corrosive to the social fabric of the game.
#8 by Bigwig on February 23rd, 2006
the part where he compared wow players to eistein made me laugh.
to console myself over the rest of the article i simply replaced phrases like “terms of service” with “no rules” and phrases like “self reliance” with “co-operation”
#9 by Cael on February 23rd, 2006
Shouldn’t that be %MAXLEVEL?
I agree on the Time > Skill point, personally.
MMOs reward the stupid and the obsessed. There must be a better way, unless every development studio believes that “stupid and obsessed” is an ideal market.
I suppose that for a long-lasting subscription, it is.
#10 by Dunadurium on February 23rd, 2006
Damien I agree with you on this, i did actually jump the gun and just skim over your post.
Overall what I was getting at is that MMOGs provide an environment where it is very possible to form these different groups and circles within a game community, and while a game may provide limited infrastructure to accommodate these things naturally happening (guilds, families, fellowships etc), you need not solely rely on them as there is the freedom to achieve them in alternate ways. The thing that does hamper though is if the game is already designed to fail in the social aspect, which is why I cited WOW.
So I fully agree that a virtual world supporting more or alternate social structures, especially in a game that is designed for community, is a great idea and definitely something that games in the future can take to another level.
~Dunadurium
#11 by Kemor on February 23rd, 2006
That article starts up interesting but in the second part, you just feel that the guy is simply ranting, trying to use his “what do they teach” argument to back him up.
UO still remains the only true MMORPG to date I think. The whole character development concept and the freedom you had in the game are things I really miss. Hopefully, some day, some game company will come back to simple things, where items don’t really matter, where you don’t have bunch of levels just to keep you busy, where you can focus on the character itself and have it simply living in a world…
#12 by R on February 23rd, 2006
>As long as there is content percieved as \’e2\’80\’9cbetter\’e2\’80\’9d, players won\’e2\’80\’99t settle for what they can easily achieve through their own devices. They will resent not being able to get The Best.
#13 by R on February 23rd, 2006
Nice of it to eat the rest of my post.
#14 by Donal Mor on February 23rd, 2006
The author of the article overlooked another big flaw in WoW and video games in general, the lesson that ‘cheating is ok’. It seems cheating in many forms is rampant in all video games, from cheat guides, cheat codes, eBayed resources, game ‘add-ons’, to blatant hacks. What is startling is the growing acceptance of this as being normal and ‘ok’.
#15 by Andrew Crystall on February 23rd, 2006
The complaint about “one family” is prefectly valid in the vast majority of MMO’s, where the text system is highly restrictive. Eve, with the ability to have user-created chat channels, multiple chat windows open, resizeable, and tabs which flash when people speak should be the VERY minimum.
And in Eve Online you CAN stab a passerby in the face, or loot your corp’s bank and run away with it.
#16 by Guildrum on February 23rd, 2006
Allow players to cheat the system? Toss out the ToS? Oh God… I feel an Ultima Online rollback flashback coming on!
#17 by D-0ne on February 23rd, 2006
I see the problem as a lack of PvP focus on the world as a whole.
Forty man raids are fine. The problem with the design of every MMORPG’s 40 man raids is the lack of actual political design of reward and punishment in the game’s PvP. Your enemies should be able to hurt you in more ways that just standing over you and chanting “azzrape”. How about a system of get enough black marks and you *can’t* do the 40 person raids because too many members of the community think you’re a jerk? Complicated? Not really. Unfair? Not really. I can’t think of a single time in the last 15 years in any online game where 5 let alone 10 people would have marked my avatar as a jerk in game.
I don’t have the time for a multipage discussion on this, I honestly wish I did have the time. The problem is not one of rewards but of punishment.
The problem is that a jerk can gain more, more quickly (just by being available for action) in all of these games than an honestly nice person (who isn’t available 24/7). The community has no way to punish, penalize or drive out anyone.
The problem isn’t mechanically how rewards are being distributed but to whom they are distributed. Just my nut job opinion.
#18 by xaldin on February 23rd, 2006
“We join guilds that have people that we get along with. If we don\’e2\’80\’99t, we don\’e2\’80\’99t last particularly long. “
You’re using the royal ‘we’ here. No “WE” (I) do not join a guild for those reasons. I join a guild that antagonizes me the least while providing me a means to an ends. People suck. I don’t group with them, guild with them or otherwise interact with them willingly. I do so only as much as I need to working towards a given set of goals.
In DAOC it was to RvR so I had to join a guild that ran a near perfect 8 man group or it didn’t even go into the frontier (I sidestepped guilding there and stayed with my one man guild name thankfully so I least didn’t have to interact with them outside of combat).
In WoW it’d be a raiding force who can farm or near farm BWL. They get a healer that is out for perfection within his class, I get my gear. Everyone gets something. I don’t have to like them, I just have to do my job and do it well enough that nobody really cares if I laugh at their jokes.
Depending on how you define ‘long’ you could argue that since I don’t stay with the same group every single MMO I’m meeting your criteria of not ‘lasting long’ but within the confines of a single game I tend to last for some time.
“If we do, we form bonds of friendship that persist beyond the game itself.”
I don’t want those bonds. I want a god damned game that I can pick up and put down when I have time. When I want to form ‘bonds of friendship’ I’ll take up golf with the admirals.
“Grizzled veterans of gameplay \’e2\’80\’98experiences\’e2\’80\’99 past know that people online are, nine times out of ten, raving assholes”
And you want me to be friends with them or not progress. Yeah great idea there.
#19 by Heartless_ on February 23rd, 2006
Two ways to combat the “stupid and obsessed”…
1. Make them pay for the content they consume. For a WoW example… make a player pay a micro-transaction to enter Molten Core. So if the catass consumes faster they pay more. It makes sense because they ARE using the games resources MORE. Casual gamers pay less.
The problem will still exist in this model and more likely it would create a seperate debate about who has more money. However, the people paying for more content have every right to defend that they are paying for it and that if someone not paying for more content can just quit.
The problem with WoW and monthly sub MMORPGs is that they create a falsehood of “everyone is created equal” because they are all paying the same. I pay $15 and deserve the same as the catass paying $15 a month.
But like I stated changing the business model doesn’t get rid of the problem, but it does make it easier to defend. The people paying more support the game more and therefore deserve more than those unwilling to pay less or unskilled enough to progress far enough to purchase more content.
NOTE: I don’t really support this model, but I understand it’s appeal. My hunch is SOE has a game featuring this business model hidden away.
2. Fast progression with player created content as the end game focus. This is a much more appealing solution to the problem. Think Ultima Online and the skill system. The general “skilling up” was a short period. The acquisition of “uber loot” was null and void because you really spent most of your time in the regular crafted gear.
Magical items were used, but really didn’t turn your character into a super power house ala WoW or EQ “uber loots”. Yes the items were more powerful, but with the high turnover of weapons and item decay they were in and out of the system (aside from the Blessed weapons).
With UO’s fast progression everyone was soon on the same playing field. Most content at this point was player driven (talking pre-Trammel days). The catass may be online for 12 hours and own a castle, but there was probably a guild of casuals a click away that had already built an entire town.
Then there was the PvP aspect which had a somewhat “player skill” driven concept. Better PvPers would kill lesser PvPers. Player Killers (PKs) ran rampant and soon there was Anti-PK springing up all over.
Player drive content combats catass because the majority of gamers are not cat asses.
#20 by Tony H. on February 23rd, 2006
Raph Koster is a nutcase. Plain and simple. I’ve had this viewpoint for years now. He’s never seem completely ‘right’ to me, no matter how many times I’ve read his work, hear his talks or meet him in person. He’s always seem a little off kilter. But back to the topic at hand.
Raph has a few points, I think. Although he then streaches them far beyond reasonable. For one thing, if you focus his discussion on end game content, which most people feel is the real meat of a game, then his points make sence. Building up to end game, typicaly is seen as just a hurdle that needs to be passed and serves no purpose other then to delay people from the end game.
That being the case, while many do enjoy the large population of many MMOG’s. The difficulty they have tends to be an issue of time and patience. Many, with limited time, or limited patience, tend not to do well in raid based settings. This is because, Raids are slow, long, but I argue, typicaly unchallenging. Why unchallenging? Because you as the player typicaly are an insignificant aspect of the whole situation. You’re just one of fourty. a small fry that, while part of the whole becomes a strong force, you’re not really all that spectacular in what you do individually. It doesn’t seem challenging, and typicaly you’re just repeating the same function your class was primarly designed to do. Heal, swing a sword, or cast a spell. Their is no creativity in Raiding. Their can’t be because trying to orchestrate 40 people to do anything complexe usually is a Herculean trial of frustration and futility.
That being said, Smaller raids, with just as good rewards but increased difficulty, can offer players more personal stories, more telling adventures and more interesting content to explore then yet another tale of defeating Ugh`sloghoth the Sloth Giant Lord for the 50th time to get the Ring of Slothyness but then, you lost the roll so you’ll need to go on another 50 raids and hope it pops again.
THAT sounds like fun?
#21 by Nyght on February 23rd, 2006
PvP game fan discovers WoW was not designed for his playstyle. News at 11:00!
I hope that designers are now passed the point where they think they can hit all or even most playstyles in a single world and do a decent job for any of them. Unless of coarse you have mulitples of WoW’s budget.
The guild issues have some broader appeals. I think it should be remembered that real communities are largely meta-game. In game systems should take that into account and enable that instead of working against it.
#22 by Brask Mumei on February 23rd, 2006
The exclusivuty of guilds has many problems. It also prevents the creation of narrow groups – say, a group of clerics that want to talk about cleric stuff – because said group is combat ineffective.
Guild like tools must exist for forming “weak” groups of like minded players. You are right I want to hang out with like minded people, the trouble is I have a bunch of different like minded people and “like minded” isn’t transitive so we can’t put them in one giant uber guild.
#23 by Freakazoid on February 23rd, 2006
Neglecting one play style for another works both ways. If solo items are just as good as group items, there won’t be any reason to do a group activity except for the hell of it (or more like the “fun” of it, which as we know, isn’t really fun).
In that sense, I think Guild Wars got it right. The second best equipment is easy to get with minimal grinding. The best equipment is only slightly better, but requires tons of grinding. It isn’t considered efficient and the edge it gives is not noticable, but they do look much better than the second best. It gives catasses a sense of accomplishment, but it doesn’t really help them better to overcome someone in second-best gear who is much more skilled in pvp.
I figure as long as pvp remains mostly inaffected by item benefits, people can settle for at least second or even third best, because skill differences will actually show.
The point about communities, I think you hit it right on the money as usual. I dislike most people, and the people I happen to like aren’t on my server or I have to level up to 60 again to play with them on their server (or vice versa) and also have to deal with their 18 friends who I don’t like. In order to get to them, we need to both sacrifice something huge to our gaming experience for a while. The only way around it would be as if we bought the game brand new and we leveled together, and that’s not really possible for most people who already have a 60 grinding the dungeons.
#24 by Glazius on February 23rd, 2006
“I can\’e2\’80\’99t think of a single time in the last 15 years in any online game where 5 let alone 10 people would have marked my avatar as a jerk in game.”
That’s because marking you as a jerk wouldn’t tick you off.
There are going to be 5, let alone 10, people who under any black-mark system will be sitting on a ledge in the city and spamming /target-next-player /blackmark-target.
–GF
#25 by Gwaendar on February 23rd, 2006
>>Damien Neil says on February 23rd, 2006 at 2:27 am:
>> I wonder if the author has settled on one family yet.
> This strikes to the heart of why he\’e2\’80\’99s right on this one point at least, and all the major MMOs are wrong.
> I haven\’e2\’80\’99t settled on one family, and I\’e2\’80\’99ll bet you haven\’e2\’80\’99t either.
He’s married. Chances are high that he meant the family you might found some day instead of the one you’re born into. And yes, that’s actually, at least to me, more tight-knit than my much wider circle of friends.
> # Andrew Crystall says on February 23rd, 2006 at 7:46 am:
> Eve, with the ability to have user-created chat channels, multiple chat windows open, resizeable, and tabs which flash when people speak should be the VERY minimum.
You know you can do that in WoW too, right?
#26 by Hellfire on February 23rd, 2006
Thank jebus Scott saw this whackadoo for what it is – I read the article before I read his commentary and was starting to fear the worst…
The argument that someone should be able to “solo for epics” is nothing more than e-peen envy. I’d be willing to bet that half (or more) of those people wouldn’t say a word if the colors weren’t universally known to be the “tiers” of loot valuation. How long before they’re bitching about not having solo-friendly Legendaries? Wit the new ultra-ultra-uber zone hitting in the next-ish patch I’m sure there will be a new half-dozen of them entering the loot tables for also-rans to be pissed about. I say that in a rather derogatory way, but my point is simply this – harder content == better rewards. While some look at that and say “it just requires time” or “lols grinding” – that shit ain’t easy. Access to those ultimo items is my reward for conquering difficult content.
Within the paradigm of WoW’s “normal” gameplay there is simply no reasonable way to make something as challenging as Hakkar (or Ragnaros, Magmadar, Nefarion, Azuregos, et al) that would then be worth an equivalent loot table. With 20 and 40-player groups you can craft scenarios that require 3 different kinds of crowd-control, 3 off-tanks and 5 pooled healers or any of a hojillion other “strategies”. You can’t do that when your 5-player encounter, by definition, excludes 3 classes from attending.
#27 by Hellfire on February 23rd, 2006
Note: I have a great guild and a great group of friends that allowed me to catass 1..60 very, very quickly. After that I have raided at what could only be described as a languid pace. I raid 1-2 end-game zones a week at most and enjoy the lovely hues of my various accoutrements.
I have cake. I eat cake, too. It’s not impossible.
#28 by Hank on February 23rd, 2006
You do deserve just as much reward for playing solo as for playing in a 40 man group. You confirm the guys theory “people who group are more important than people who don’t”, but then say he’s wrong because 40 people should get better loot? How does that make any sense?
40 people should get 40 times the loot, not better loot. If you want the best gear, you must group with a huge group. That is stupid. You should be able to get the best loot solo, or as a group. Most people don’t want to be in huge groups, they just have to because its the only way to get the best gear.
#29 by Andrew Crystall on February 23rd, 2006
Hank, then there’s no point grouping, since organising those 40 people is a challenge in itself. If grouping is pointless..why is it a MMO?
Gwaendar, WoW is by FAR the best MMO on the market for UI. It is perhaps the one thing from WoW which I hope other MMO makers will learn. (Did I mention I know Lua?
)
I mentioned Eve becase I really do thing it does the reasonable minimum. But other MMO’s in the pipeline like DDO and Auto Assualt…do not :/
As for rolling for loot…I like DDO’s system. Everyone can pull something out the chest. If it’s not what they want…they can trade.
#30 by Andrew Crystall on February 23rd, 2006
Oh, and Hellfire?
Thanks for illustrating the weakness of a class-based MMO
#31 by Raph on February 23rd, 2006
Raph Koster is a nutcase. Plain and simple. I\’e2\’80\’99ve had this viewpoint for years now. He\’e2\’80\’99s never seem completely \’e2\’80\’98right\’e2\’80\’99 to me, no matter how many times I\’e2\’80\’99ve read his work, hear his talks or meet him in person. He\’e2\’80\’99s always seem a little off kilter. But back to the topic at hand.
I’m stalking you, too.
But FWIW, I didn’t write the article.
#32 by =j on February 23rd, 2006
Sirlin’s entire argument is based off a flawed assumption. He believes that the only way for a MMORPG to be “fun” is to “win” and that “winning” requires the “phatest leewt”. The best loot is (currently) in high level PvP and 40-man raids. Everything else is time-investment grinding.
I saw a lot of similar sentiments in DAoC. RvR was all. Leveling to 50 (or whichever battleground was popular) was the dues you had to pay to play the “real” game.
Frankly, I have never seen the appeal of high level content. For me, the “fun” is the leveling. The developement of the character. I have never in my 8+ years of MMORPG playing ever maxed out a character. Not even in UO (where in the stack-of-pennies-macro days was laughably easy). When the character starts to stagnate, I loose interest and move on to something else.
The run-all-over-creation missions in AO killed the game for me. Skill grinding in SW:G killed the game for me (I am most bitter about this one. LUM FIX PLZ K THX). The lack of noticeable improvement lvl45+ killed DAoC for me.
#33 by Hellfire on February 23rd, 2006
(awwww, Raph has a best buddy!)
“weakness of a class…” – Out of context quoting, but I play a paladin so I have to capture funny where I can.
In all seriousness: Everything I was talking about is withing the existing WoW paradigm. If you look at Eve or DDO or make fundamental changes to the “normal” way WoW works? Totally different ballgame.
WoW follows in the EQ mold of “randomizing” loot tables based on the mobs you’re killing. It doesn’t bother me per se, but I’d love to see more attention paid to the people who participate vs the RNG. Baby steps, I guess. I’m just glad shaman BP’s no longer drop during Alliance raids.
ZG/AQ do solve *some* of that within the existing game mechanics. The quests are the quests, the components/faction to fulfill them are your rewards. You know exactly what you’re getting and approximately how much effort it will take from day-1. This is then supplimented by the “standard” loot drops that MMO players expect from whacking a giant foozle.
#34 by Grinless on February 23rd, 2006
I will say it once more: “How many wildly succesful MMORPGs will it takes before developper consider soloing a valid playstyle ?”. The solo-friendliness is no stranger to it’s mass appeal success.
Grouping is not the end-all be-all of player retention and there is many soloer playing your games for YEARS that it’s not even funny.
You Scott; you Raph; may keep playing games because of the social ties made within it; but me, and scores of others, end our subscription the day a guild or a large group is required to play…
#35 by Heartless_ on February 23rd, 2006
Hellfire you’re as bad as the original author. Catass finds out he doesn’t like casual gamers at 12!!!!?!?!?!?!?!111one!!#@$
#36 by D-0ne on February 23rd, 2006
The general idea that other people suck and we all have to live with that is a major, major flaw in MMORPGs today.
Politics and chaos and PvP effecting the world are ignored in todays MMORPGs and that’s a bad thing. These things would solve a lot of the “issues” currently under debate.
Heros in Fantasy never had the best gear. They had the best souls.
#37 by Kalain on February 23rd, 2006
I agree with some points in the article (namely that raids shouldn’t give the absolute best gear, but that’s mostly because I think from a pvp standpoint such a huge gear discrepancy screws everything up), but mostly reading this last night annoyed me to no end.
Yeah, I think raph’s a loon. A smart, well spoken loon. Basically my idea of fun and his don’t jive, so I’ll just disagree a lot. But this whole article wasn’t really raph’s thing.
The one point that stuck me was “If you invest more time than someone else, you “deserve” rewards. People who invest less time “do not deserve” rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien.”
That is obviously written by someone who has never beaten their heads against the brick wall of a College Degree. Simply getting to the point of an interview in most jobs (at least on the east coast) is a quick pass over with “time in college” being more important than finding out if the person is skilled. Once you get past that, you can try and prove you’re good, but there are plenty of things in the world that assume time spent doing something (even say, 7 years of experience sucking at something versus a genious with 1 year of experience writing ground breaking code) is more important than actually evaluating skill. Or for something very basic, no matter how good a cook you are, if someone else starts to simmer for 30 minutes before you do, you’re not going to finish the 30 minutes of simmering before them.
Anyways, the whole thing pretty much comes down to gear, and WoW’s suprising lack of stat caps (for the pvp game at least). Without stat caps, gear gets more and more out of hand, and leaves the non raiders more and more outclassed even if they decide to simply play the pvp game. I raided, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t very fair when my character was placed in direct competition with someone who didn’t, no matter how well they played their character.
But I like my guilds, be they small or large. I don’t feel that I have to only be friends with my guild, either. I guild with people I like who have similar goals. I chatgroup with people I like but don’t see as often (be they more casual or more hardcore than I am).
#38 by Hank on February 23rd, 2006
Andrew:
“Hank, then there\’e2\’80\’99s no point grouping, since organising those 40 people is a challenge in itself. If grouping is pointless..why is it a MMO?”
Its not a MMO. Its a MMOG. Speak the words, stop using a retarded partial acronym.
Second, its a MMOG because there’s lots of people. Why do you think that its only a MMOG if people are forced into large unweildy groups? If people want to play that way, they can. If people don’t, they shouldn’t have to. If doing hard single player quest X gave me the same loot as doing hard 40 player quest X, only it gives it to all 40 people in the 40 player one, then everyone could play how they want, all be rewarded equally, and life would be good.
But no, instead people have to insist that there is some inherent value in forcing people into large groups. And thus developers make the best loot only available to such groups, to reward them for putting up with being forced into a huge group in the first place. Its retarded.
#39 by Kalain on February 23rd, 2006
Ideally, an MMO would provide something for everyone to do that would eventually wind up with an equivalent reward for each path. Sadly, nobody does that because it’s Hard.
The thing is, WoW’s raid pve is iffy in it’s difficulty. While BWL is worthy of good lewts, MC really isn’t. They’re bad epics, but still massively better than most blues.
That said, large group coordination is only difficult if the reason they’re all together is phat lewt. If they enjoy being together, keeping a raid moving and being effective is a breeze. The key failures people make trying to form a leet raid guild is picking up people with conflicting personalities, and downtime between kills (boredom breeds lazy and pissy players, feed them mobs and they’ll stay busy).
I’d like to see a game do a decent overall plotline/automated kingdom thing where you could join a “raid” simply by zoning into a battlefield, or go into one that was capped at fewer players, or do small solo stealthy missions.. but until that time comes, I figure solo play should be acceptable, but at the minimum a group isn’t asking all that much. 40 people is asking a lot, but I wouldn’t mind it if the loot wasn’t all that much better, it was simply there for people who wanted to raid for the sake of raiding, not winding up with gear that’s 20-30% more effective than anything else you can get.
#40 by Hellfire on February 23rd, 2006
I play less than 10 hours a week. Usually what amounts to 2 or 3 raids worth or a night of questing, depending on where I can find a spot. I guess that doesn’t fit into the whole persecution complex “the casuals” try and build up when people who play for the same length time are able to do all the things they scream about NOT being able to do. I get to play whatever content I have a hankering for and collect my share of the phat lewts all without devoting 6 hours a night 5 nights a week to a game.
Participating in 20 or 40-person content has no correlation to being a casual or hardc0re player. Some of the people in my guild have been playing since launch and have just started doing ZG runs as newly minted 60’s. They’re lucky to be able to play for more than an hour or two at a stretch. The guild makes the difference for that type of player. They are accepted in our guild and we welcome the limited time they have to adventure with us. Raids of any importance are posted and if they can make it they sign up.
I enjoy the ability to solo while “grinding” out the early game. It’s nice to be able to jump into the game, achieve something meaningful and then jump right back out again. Spending more than 10 minutes LFG is NOT fun – I’m just as likely to log off and go play TrackMania or something else than I am to continue waiting. We’re also talking about MMO’s here, not Knights of the Old Republic. I don’t get why people are surprised or angered that a game with the words “massively multiplayer” in the description is unwilling/unable to provide a better single-player experience than Planescape.
lern2casual, nub?
#41 by Hellfire on February 23rd, 2006
Also… Even if you exclude the managerial issues from wrangling 40 people onto a raid target the fact still remains that no solo (or even 5-man) content can scale in difficulty enough to justify equivalent itemization. I already said as much earlier on – the depth of an expected raid force frees the encounter designers to put in very challenging stuff that they can then reward the player for appropriately. For what it’s worth there are a few hundred epic world-drops that anyone just out killing random_mob_001 can take solo or grouped. It’s just the luck of the draw.
A solo player running a 20-step quest for 6 hours but never killing a mob higher than 56 isn’t deserving of a brand new Sulfuras. Furthermore wouldn’t that be the very epitome of a catass?
WoW isn’t DDO. In the context of what WoW actually is there is simply nothing a single player can do that has an equivalent “difficulty” to what is required to kill Nefarian or Hakkar or Ragnaros or any of the big game. Could WoW be made to use more puzzle/crafty/thinky stuff to reward the solo player? Absolutely – and that would actually BE epic.
#42 by =j on February 23rd, 2006
from D-0ne:
Politics and chaos and PvP effecting the world are ignored in todays MMORPGs and that\’e2\’80\’99s a bad thing. These things would solve a lot of the \’e2\’80\’9cissues\’e2\’80\’9d currently under debate.
They are ignored for a reason. I will never again play a game where I can be randomly killed, corpse-raped, and have all my personal effects (house included) stolen. I am not alone. Sheep is not a viable class. It never will be.
The [good|bad] old days of UO are gone. Get over it.
#43 by Joe on February 23rd, 2006
Harder content should NOT necessarily equal better rewards. This whole “raids should give better rewards because they’re hard” argument is silly and bogus.
It’s predicated around the idea that the Game Devs should be some arbiters of fairness, dispensing content and loot as they see fit.
To have a decent game, the Devs have to (As AC1 devs wisely did with Darktide) put themselves more into the *background* of determining winners and losers. Player-created forms of content, such as PvP or social structures, should be the fluid systems through which outcomes such as “better” and “worse” come.
A great chat system, like EVE’s, is essential for this. So, too, is worldwide unrestricted PvP.
From there, you give players *tools*, not restrictions, and let them work their magic.
In games like AC1, your sword was a tool – your selected means by which you whacked whomever or whatever you chose to whack. Everybody’s sword was about as good as everybody else’s, and people coalesced into a relatively small number of player templates such that there wasn’t any big issue of “OMG he has that item/skill and I don’t” during the game’s golden era.
In WoW, your sword is not a tool – it’s a restriction. One sword can be a hell of a lot better than the next, such that your gear is a ‘gatekeeper’ to post-60 content. You do one dungeon to get the gear that effectively lets you into the next dungeon, etcetera.
Also, Lum, you’re critically wrong when it comes to time invested in learning a skill being in any way equivalent to time invested in your character. The former is a fluid process, and one where you literally learn by doing; there is no mandated rate (or direction) to your learning. It’s a player-directed, player-centric process. As a result, it’s something people take to with gusto. I’ve never met anyone who’s felt put off by a fighting game just because other people knew a ton more combos than they did.
Raising your character’s skills via XP earned by foozle-bashing or whatever is not a fluid system. It’s arbitrated by the game developers.
The result is a feeling of relative powerlessness and pointlessness, and one of the major reasons WoW is a terrible game.
It’s the difference between growing wings and learning to fly, and riding a rollercoaster on a track from beginning to end.
Rollercoasters aren’t bad, per se, but I’d rather have the wings.
#44 by Krakrok on February 23rd, 2006
The problem was Sirlin thought if he road the rollercoaster it would give him wings. He got stuck trying to explain why the rollercoaster should have wings to people who like the rollercoaster just fine. Instead, he needs to go play Planetside and EVE where you can at least deceive yourself into thinking you have wings for a little while.
#45 by Kalain on February 23rd, 2006
Hellfire: “I already said as much earlier on – the depth of an expected raid force frees the encounter designers to put in very challenging stuff that they can then reward the player for appropriately.”
Plus, you mention sulfuras, which isn’t epic, it’s Legendary.
Now, I will argue that Lucifron is as difficult an encounter as the DM king. Both are relative jokes with extremely minor technical aspects. Heck, Mar’li is easily 5x harder than anything pre rag in MC. But that’s the rub: Molten Core is too Easy to deserve epics off anything except Rag and maybe Domo if we’re going by “must be harder than 5 man content”. The fights simply aren’t difficult, half the raid can be afk, and if you really know what you’re doing you don’t even need 30 people for the first half of MC. Yet it drops gear that’s massively better than anything in an equivalent personal difficulty (meaning the amount of effort each player must put forth) encounters in the game.
Heck, Mar’li and Jin’do don’t even always drop epics entirely because they’re only 20 man raid mobs, yet skill wise they require FAR more effort to kill than anything in MC (domo and rag come close). MC guilds were wiping like mad to ZG until they started to wake up and not afk through the fights like they did in MC.
Blackwing Lair? AQ40? Epic worthy if you want to talk skill based fights, and needing to put forth more effort and a larger depth of encounter. But Molten Core alone blows a giant gaping hole in the idea that raiders put any more effort into getting the encounters that drop their tier 1 sets than 5 man players put into DM North and West. Or even ZG players who only get a garunteed epic off of Hakkar, versus the multiple epics off the easy bosses in MC, and random epics (about the same chance as getting a halberd of smiting..) off the TRASH.
I was a raider. I liked Raiding with my guild, they were great people. But implying that clearing MC requires the players to be at the top of their game is blatantly false. You need to pay far more attention to successfully run DM north than you do to clear up to and including Golemagg. But if you run both of those activities for 4 hours (average guild time to clear up to and including golemagg), I wonder which group pulled out 14-20 epics, and which didn’t.
Now, I’d totally agree with you if blues dropped off every MC mob, and Rag dropped a single epic per kill. But as is, they’re handed out like freaking candy for encounters that are not in any way shape or form difficult. And they’re not even minor epics, they’re full on badass compared to anything a 5 man can pull off. At least some of the ZG blues (emphasis on SOME) are as good as a low end epic. But those ZG runners put a heck of a lot more effort into getting that item than the sunday afternoon MC flatten.
#46 by Joe on February 23rd, 2006
“The problem was Sirlin thought if he road the rollercoaster it would give him wings. He got stuck trying to explain why the rollercoaster should have wings to people who like the rollercoaster just fine.”
Heh, fair enough.
The problem with this, though?
If there weren’t so many simpletons willing to just ride the rollercoaster, the devs probably would have built us wings by now. The two best ‘wings’ examples, early AC1 Darktide and pre-Trammel UO, are both long gone now. We’re moving in the wrong direction rather consistently, it seems, and the EQ crowd – people who will apparently be happy with any old crap – has led that trend with their dollars.
A lot of us who railed against EQ and its ilk weren’t like Lum – we didn’t Rant Because We Care, like EQ was some flawed but enjoyable game. We saw it as the embodiment of everything wrong with this Diku-ified direction of MMOs, wrong down to the core.
Sure, one might counter “You’re telling people what they should want!”, but libertarian as I am, telling people what they want *works*, whether in politics or in culture, if you’re persistent enough and you can get the necessary volume (opinion-makers) and style (persuasiveness) on your side.
Ranting against WoW, just like EQ, is not to get the game “fixed”. It’s unfixable, rotten to the core. The point is, operating on the logic that human beings are social and persuadable creatures (and there’s a whole mountain of evidence to this effect), to drill in the “No, you don’t *really* like WoW, even if you think you do” message until it finally sticks.
Unless the barriers to entry for MMO-making go down significantly (Despite some interesting efforts like Multiverse, I doubt it), those of us who want non-Diku gameplay (AKA a ‘world’), a minority, aren’t going to be much of a draw for game development dollars. Our options are either sit around bored with nothing to play, play games like WoW that are fundamentally contrary to the nature of our enjoyment, or convince other people that they’re wrong to enjoy what they do.
Option 3 is certainly a longshot, but the opportunity costs are low (everyone loves hearing themselves talk on the internet!) and Options 1 and 2 aren’t any good.
The same is true not only for changing what people play, but changing what people talk about. Anyone who writes about how they wish they could have their WoW with a bit more ‘world’ tossed in needs it beaten into their head repeatedly what it takes to have a real ‘world’ in a MMO (And I use the phrase ‘world’ in the fun sense, not in the Hay Guys Let’s Get Fat and Go To A RenFaire For LARP sense… in other words, not in a way that would exclude casual gamers), and how WoW (and EQ, and DAoC, and EQ2) are fundamentally incompatible with that.
#47 by Sanya on February 24th, 2006
So, let me get this straight:
People don’t actually like what they a) say they like, b) pay for, and c) give every evidence of enjoying ? And you reach this conclusion because you don’t like what they like?
Dude. No offense, but do you also think all positions besides missionary should be prosecutable offenses, or are you more of the philosophy that if you TELL people they don’t enjoy the more interesting variations, then eventually they’ll… stop? Or something?
I’m perfectly comfortable believing that some people like WoW, some people like DAOC, and some people like Kama’s Wheel. Mainly because all the evidence available to me on this here internet as well as in my experience would seem to support my thesis. But hey, thanks for tonight’s demonstration of solipsism in action.
#48 by craig on February 24th, 2006
I would love to get people’s thoughts on the second life concept in comparison to WOW. I can’t get my head around whether SL has a chance (in the l-o-n-g term, not today for sure) of creating something as rich and rewarding and popular as a strict game-driven MMO?
#49 by Joe on February 24th, 2006
“People don\’e2\’80\’99t actually like what they a) say they like, b) pay for, and c) give every evidence of enjoying ? And you reach this conclusion because you don\’e2\’80\’99t like what they like?”
No, you misunderstood. I fully accept that people like what they say they like. I’m just saying that with a concerted effort, you can convince people of pretty much anything – in this case, that they don’t really like WoW/EQ. I’m also arguing that the genre would be better for it.
The alternative would be to say that whatever the most people like is best; i.e., Myst and Deer Hunter. Of course, to go that route is to generally reject the idea that there’s such a thing as ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.
“Dude. No offense, but do you also think all positions besides missionary should be prosecutable offenses, or are you more of the philosophy that if you TELL people they don\’e2\’80\’99t enjoy the more interesting variations, then eventually they\’e2\’80\’99ll\’e2\’80\’a6 stop? Or something?”
You can convince people of pretty much anything, given enough effort – to use your example, sex can be pretty hard to enjoy if you drill a kid enough with guilt and shame via abstinence-only education and church.
Of course, you’re picking pretty much the world’s most hard-wired response to stimuli around. It’d be a lot easier to convince people to drop EQ than it would be to get them to stop enjoying blowies.
“I\’e2\’80\’99m perfectly comfortable believing that some people like WoW, some people like DAOC, and some people like Kama\’e2\’80\’99s Wheel. Mainly because all the evidence available to me on this here internet as well as in my experience would seem to support my thesis. But hey, thanks for tonight\’e2\’80\’99s demonstration of solipsism in action.”
Oh, of course plenty of people do – you misunderstood my point. WoW is the most popular MMO in existence right now, I’m not disputing that, and it’s because people like it.
That said, from the perspective of someone who likes MMOs, MMO development is more of a zero-sum game than single player games; if the devs are making something that WoW players want, it means they’re not making something you want. The much higher barriers to entry for making MMOs, as opposed to single player games, means that your options of where to play are much more limited, and devs are going to go where the cash is.
Thus, if I want something fun to play, preaching to the players is more likely to reap positive rewards than preaching to devs or just sitting quiet and hoping someone will make the kind of MMO I’m interested in again.
Of course, to be most effective, you’ve usually got to make like the LaRouche kids; go about it indirectly, exploit pre-existing fault lines in the community (casuals vs raiders in WoW, for instance), that sort of thing.
MMOs also have a special frustration to them that single-player games don’t; the games you’d love to play have already been made (for me, pre-Trammel UO, and golden era AC1 Darktide), but were then un-made by time and external forces.
It’s like playing Sonic the Hedgehog, and while you’re still in love with playing it, the game devs fly to your house and take back the cartridge. You’re left with a bitter pill to swallow.
#50 by Gawain on February 24th, 2006
I don’t know if they fixed it in the time between when I left and now (approx a year? longer?) but when instead of fixing the problem of people sniping from rooftops where the guards couldn’t get them by either allowing the guards to climb or equipping them with bows, they decided to simply say “don’t go up there anymore or you will get in trouble” I quit and never looked back. That is just pure lazy, and worse, its a horrible way to admin a game. You should never tell your players to quit exploiting a game engine fault, unless in a temporary way until you can fix it, which should be as quickly as possible. Was it annoying getting killed from bastards on rooftop while the guards for the city clustered around the base of the building trying to get at him? yes. But I would rather go through that a thousand times than have the devs simply say “stop it” without actually fixing anything. thats just rediculous.
Additionally, I agree with the original author about the soloing bit, though I am apparently in the minority. I question the truthfulness of anyone who says they soloed all the way to 60. Or rather, I question your memory since you are probably forgetting pickup groups and random raids you were invited to. its possible to get through the game without a guild (though extremely difficult, and becoming more so as time passes) but it is not possible to get through the game solo. It simply cannot be done.
Several of my friends still play WoW, though I have no idea why, and as I understand it currently, if you are not in a guild, you do not expect to go on any large raids… ever. There are no pickup groups, because everyone is in a guild, and their guild has scheduled the dungeon raid for thursday, and non guild members arent invited, and they’re not going without their guild because nobody else is inviting non-guild members to raids either, and the cycle continues.
The biggest problem I have with WoW is that its extremely unforgiving if you don’t want to farm molton core (or whatever it is now) 50 times for the boots your character is required to have or be gimped when compared to characters who HAVE those boots. In the end, you ultimately end up with a character who is identical to the same race/class standing next to you, because you both got the same items, and you both “specced” the same way, and thats just the way it is. The end game of WoW is a battle between cookie cutter-esk players all fighting each other for the title of most generic. There just are not enough item options at higher levels. You pick from one of four “suits” of armor, and that means that one out of every four of your class/race looks just like you. You have several ways to spec your skills, but if you don’t pick the one or two specific ways that are known to be superior to the to the others based on years of testing, then congratulations, you may be different, but now you’re gimped. Good luck in pvp.
I think the idea that WoW is wide open with possibilities is deceptive.
my two cents.