Is yet again another good MMO but aghhhh where to start on the cons there are soooo many.
1. graphics, while it can run on almost anything they are cartoony and definately a matter of taste.
2. Vivendi fired the original dev team and replaced them with the leads of legacy of Steel and Fire's of Heaven (the us's most successful mmo guilds at the time) just before release. vivendi then released the game early before there was even a nod to class balance and some classes didnt even have half of their skills yet (hunter, shaman). This led to a cycle of enrfs/buffs to classes that continues now.
3. The game had been developed by 2 hardcore (serious hardcore) raiders for their type of pve community however it makes the most money in the far east (due to a different pricing structure they pay by the time played per char not a flat rate) therefor the game is balanced to keep that audience happy. the oriental players tend to love PvP (nothing wrong with that per se) so we have a game developed for PvE raiding but balanced for PvP classes... Never going to work. Leading to encounters being broken and classes not being able to fulfil their main role.
4. Both the main game and expansion were months away from being ready when we got them, even basic instances were broken (e.g. lifts not working) and some are still broken since release what 6 months ago for the expansion, maybe more?
5. The expansion leveling was just to easy, with rewards for instances set a a good level. raiding gear was hardly better than standard gear. So what was the fix, yes we will nerf everything but the raiding gear oh and while we are about it lets buff the PvP gear some to keep that market happy.
6. Raid zones, withe the odd brilliant exception raiding in WoW is tacticless. Get a tank on the mob, get agro, heal tank, dps away. There is a little variation but no way near enough for the amount of money Vivendi could allow Blizzard to throw at it if they wanted. raiding is artificially blocked by Blizzard, we repeatedly see a mob being impossible even to the worlds very best, then we have a patch that is unnannouced but when the raiders try again the mob dies first time. This is simply false control of raiders speed to allow development and testing on the cheap.
7. PvP, is utterly imbalanced. It is not skill vs skill, equipment makes a huge difference. Tier 5 armour and weapons vs even tier 3 isnt bad its laughable. My 10 ten old son quite literally mows down opposition on my main (which is an extremely well equiped warrior and I bite the talent respec costs just to see him laugh his head off at the weekends).
8. Talent respeccing. originally this was designed to allow variation and create classes within classes. What we have found is the bulk of classes have 2 'god' builds that min/maxxers have no choice but to take. The only question is are you raiding or doing PvP.
9. The same goes ofr equipment, if you have the time and the guild to do it you have little choice in equipment. I have hours of raiding on my warrior (sadly more like months) and a few others on the server wear almost exactly the same as me.
10. Raiding yet again.... Its time sink based, clear through 3 hours of trashed for 1 boss and god forbid someone answers the phone and you wipe because that trash is respawning you know...
11. Trade skills, please dont start me on mote farming. What a huge time sink, and its so patently obvious that is all it was designed to do, I mean come on give it even the flimsiest of coverings.
12. Raiding yet again... I am actually in favour of having to use some consumables when raiding, make people do a little stuff out of instances just to keep things sociable. But encounters should not be balanced that for 2 nights and 1 sundays raiding I need 4-6k gold depending on the server to buy the consumables for those raids. Thank god for old guilds who know taht situation and keep the supplies up.
13. Gold sellers and buyers. Grrrrrrr. But the biggest guilds admit openly on the forums to buying 15-20k gold a week to keep their raiding going, taking turns to pay how mad is that buy a game, pay a subsrciption and then buy the bits to do the in game instances. Blizzard know it and cant stop it as they designed the game that way, the game is too complex to change that much now and in truth feel a bit sorry for the players I think. I personally dont, if you cant get the mats in game then dont play, simple as. Blizzard darent touch these people, they could shred their reputation with the 'cooler' elements of the gming population which would soon spread.
14. idiots who buy level 70 characters then sit their and ask 'What does this button do?' /cry
I dont know, WoW opened mmo's to the masses, I am yet to be convinced if this was a good or bad thing. Did it save the genre buy supply new life blood and some good idea's will filter through (because as hard as I am you cant knock 8 million subscibers) or did will it kill the genre through clones and showing the unwashed masses where we are hiding . A few years should let us know.
the points uve made r valid but i think ppl r aware of most of them wen subscribing in the first place
no 1 is perfect but i think blizzard and vivendi r doin a ruddy good job if they hav got 8 million + subscribers
my beef wiv them isnt the games graphics or development, but wot it does to ppl
my m8s made a guild & now i aint had a pint wiv dem in over a month
Ok, I think I understand most of that . As for what it does aye, MMO's can be very time consuming when you are drawn in. Still I dont understand why that is a bad thing really, if someone is playing then they are at home, spending not very much and chatting to people they like talking to. It just isnt seen as the norm here yet. If you put aside £12 a week for your mmo's that will buy a system capable of running them every 3 years as well as paying the subrciptions., a very cheap hobby. As a lifestyle choice it shoulld be incredibly innoffensive.
Meh, I played WoW and I nearly fell dead to sleep - I kept thinking: "There MUST be something cool about this game - or it won't be so damn popular!?". But I just couldn't find its "good". It's now laying at the bottom of a box sucking up dust. Tschuss.
6. Raid zones, withe the odd brilliant exception raiding in WoW is tacticless. Get a tank on the mob, get agro, heal tank, dps away. There is a little variation but no way near enough for the amount of money Vivendi could allow Blizzard to throw at it if they wanted. raiding is artificially blocked by Blizzard, we repeatedly see a mob being impossible even to the worlds very best, then we have a patch that is unnannouced but when the raiders try again the mob dies first time. This is simply false control of raiders speed to allow development and testing on the cheap.
10. Raiding yet again.... Its time sink based, clear through 3 hours of trashed for 1 boss and god forbid someone answers the phone and you wipe because that trash is respawning you know...
12. Raiding yet again... I am actually in favour of having to use some consumables when raiding, make people do a little stuff out of instances just to keep things sociable. But encounters should not be balanced that for 2 nights and 1 sundays raiding I need 4-6k gold depending on the server to buy the consumables for those raids. Thank god for old guilds who know taht situation and keep the supplies up.
I agree with many of the points you have raised, but I have to state my own opinion on some.
10. It used to be a time sink in some (a limited) number of instance that were being raided by very few. Blizz did at least listen to the community and changed that: trash respawn timers lengthened and the amount of trash changed. But tbh there was only 2 places people complained a little about the trash and these were instances that only top end guilds raided: SSC & The Eye.
12. Consumable use has changed. Blizz got this badly wrong, admited it and made radical changes to consumable use with only one Guardian and one Battle buff being allowed etc. This got rid of the farming problem.
As far as I can tell this solves a lot of the issues you had above, but the one point I seriously disagree with is 6:
6. I agree with the latter point about encounter tuning - they got it badly wrong but did listen and changed it quickly when it was clear they had got it wrong. However, the 'lack of tactical' comment I disagree with. WoW has a clear progression in game from 'noob raider' to 'vet raider'.
In the old school Molten Core was a simple 'tank and spank' as you describe and complain about above
BWL was largely the same, but taught basic aggro control and in a severely limited way, working as a couple of groups.
AQ40 started people workign in smaller groups with different jobs for each fight and by the end of the instance required coordinated effort from 8 x 5 person groups to be effective at the encounter.
Naxx had some early entry tank and spank fights, but progressively required more and more teamwork - the 4H fight was simply one of the best encounters ever designed imo.
Clearly, the above shows a progression, a learning curve for instances from very basic to much more complex where detailed strategies are an absolute requirement, not an optional extra.
In TBC raiding has done the same imo.
You have the basic 'blue' instances to gear up.
Karazhan has a variety of fights, using different classes in different roles and teaches guilds how to operate as a cohesive 10 person group. Some fights have collective responsibility (eg rotations for Nethwerspite beam taking), others a much simpler group goal (Maiden), yet others require indivudual roles to be developed and for individuals to take responsibility for their positioning, their skills etc (Aran or Prince for example).
Gruul's Lair ensures Guilds can operate over 5 simultaneous targets and then closes out with a coordinated spacing dance that is the Gruul fight itself.
Magtheridon teaches yet more coordinated small group work with sub groups for healing, warlock banishes/fears etc.
SSC again requires groups to work in small groups, with specific responsibilites as part of a coordinated whole. Whether it be add tanking at Hydross, island duty at Lurker or coordinating the groups at Leotheras, it is all to do with tactical development.
The Eye, again, other than the ridiculously easy first boss, is all about gorup work, controlling your own group's responsibilties and coordinating them with other gorups to give overall success.
Again, a clear progression from noob to highly tactical is evident.
I'd argue strongly that there is more than "an odd brilliant exception" and tha tmany encounters require a good degree of tactical awareness, otherwise more guilds would simply waltz through them. I'm not a Blizz supporter in general terms, but the 'lack of tactical element' commment was one area where I strongly disagreed with your post. I'm an officer in a successful raiding guild myself (not world-beating, but good enough) and I'd be interested in the specifics of which fights you feel seriously lack any tactical element to them. Maybe playing warrior (I assume prot) you see the same role time and time again on copnsecutive fights, but that does not mean there are no tactics required for the fights or tactical awareness, or strategy or coordinated teamwork to accomplish the goal.
First off I like the sound of the farming changes. Secondly I ought to say I saw the inside of Naxx twice on a serious basis pre TBC and dropped from WoW on a semi raider basis after Gruul. To explain at the rate we raided 2 x 5 hour sessions and 1 x 5-8 depending upon the target. Enough to get a guild full of mum's and dad's somewhere but never at the very top of the curve.
The raid encounters I particularly enjoyed from the smaller zones were in no particular order:
Buru: A very simple fight I admit but the exploding head really did make me laugh. The rest of the ruins didnt captivate me, in fact ughhh.
Jin'do: Just for the randomness and head banging skellies /shrug. The rest of ZG was very well done as a basic training excerise.
Now lets take say AQ40 next for a lack of variation. Fankriss, gather fear, aoe, burn him, aoe fear, aor nuke, jobs a good un, oh and he looks just like Kuri. Visci a giant Ooze with nature damage, they were asleep again. Sartura, seperate from adds and main body of raid, stunlock adds when possible. Again nothing fancy. Princess-kri-vem, interupt heal, fear ward and just take that daft beetle charging people. It just didnt seem enough for me.
Perhaps you are correct, I didnt see enough of Naxx to take on the really challenging stuff. That is the problem is being a 30 something playing MMO's, there are a lot of us out there . What we want is a way to not skip content but skip difficulty levels. Rather than the huge timesink learning process one must climb each time (MC, ZG, AQ20, BWL, AQ20 again, AQ40, Naxx). A test of some sort to allow a jump in encounter grades from say the end of ZG to the start of AQ40. I know this would be hard equipment wise for the dev's but give us more instant challenge.
TBC raiding I know less about and I'll take your word for it. To be honest I wasnt counting Kara as a full raid, in the same way one wouldnt count UBRS. In fact Kara was good in a lot of places, but it does suit smaller guilds well.
In essence what you are saying is to find the challenge in WoW raiding one must be prepared to slough through months of dross with some good bits thrown in to get to the good stuff. I no longer have the time, nor should it be necessary to have the inlcination, a genre that has been going for 13'ish years now should have this problem ironed out. Perhaps new players to the genre or those who are structuring and working out the lines of communications with in a guild need these steps, but can we just drop the older heads in the deep end please?
wow is awesomee i been playing since closed beta and made this post to see what u guys would say. i play it on my old old dell and it runs ok graphics look fine. i play it on my video editing specced mac with 12 gb of ram and a sex gfx card and it looks incredible. the style of graphics is still cartoony but it looks f***ing fantastic whatsoever!
WoW is very addictive game and it can take up alot of time if you choose to spend that i think the point that its a lifestyle choice is incredibly fair i choose to play computer games with my extensive free time and enjoy it greatly and have made lots of fun friends in diff countries
my old guild was mainly full of dutch people really nice guys after like a year of raiding and lvling with them i went to holland and met up with them had an awesome time.
i really like how everyone here has indepth views on MMO's i have got alot of my friends from where i live envolved with the game and i love being able to mess around with them online and in real life!
Go warcraft! in my opinion the best game in the world. overall its flaws its bonuses are alot more appealing it beats all other MMO's hands down in terms of versatility and how far they have come from it. the origional game was wonderful at the time i was playing Ultima Online another MMO that was totally awful looking but alot of people played it and it was really fun but they totally screwed it up with the expansion.
However warcrafts expansion has been totally amazing they have changed the entire game from lvl 60 onwards they broke down the barriers of the world you can fly ANYWHERE you can fly up in the sky so far you cant see the floor the instances are smart and although they have problems what dosent have problems? at least their delevopment peoples listen to what people complain about in bug reports and even consider what people post on their forums as to what they will change in the upcoming patches.
Agree with you tealeaf its all about the tactics were trying to kill Hydross in SSC at the moment my guild is joint top progression on the server doing pretty nicely i guess. Although its a pretty new server and the progression isnt as good as the server i started playing on at release its all good (i migrated)
what server are you on ?
Ravenholdt euro horde at the moment have been on Hakkar and Ravencrest
Meh, I played WoW and I nearly fell dead to sleep - I kept thinking: "There MUST be something cool about this game - or it won't be so damn popular!?". But I just couldn't find its "good". It's now laying at the bottom of a box sucking up dust. Tschuss.
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the first levels 1-30-40 are crap when you get your mount i think thats where the game kicks off as you have actually played it. my friend did upto level 20 on his 10 day free trial and that was enough for him he had played it on my character seen me play it seen the raid experiences and the stuff that was going on i would say to anyone out there you can download it and get a free 10 day trial from www.wow-europe.com !! sort it out even if ur not guna play it much you might as well try it as when your bored it will save your life.
Meh, I played WoW and I nearly fell dead to sleep - I kept thinking: "There MUST be something cool about this game - or it won't be so damn popular!?". But I just couldn't find its "good". It's now laying at the bottom of a box sucking up dust. Tschuss.
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the first levels 1-30-40 are crap when you get your mount i think thats where the game kicks off as you have actually played it. my friend did upto level 20 on his 10 day free trial and that was enough for him he had played it on my character seen me play it seen the raid experiences and the stuff that was going on i would say to anyone out there you can download it and get a free 10 day trial from www.wow-europe.com !! sort it out even if ur not guna play it much you might as well try it as when your bored it will save your life.
I know this is off topic but make sure to snap some pictures of your new rig lol
. A few years should let us know.
. As for what it does aye, MMO's can be very time consuming when you are drawn in. Still I dont understand why that is a bad thing really, if someone is playing then they are at home, spending not very much and chatting to people they like talking to. It just isnt seen as the norm here yet. If you put aside £12 a week for your mmo's that will buy a system capable of running them every 3 years as well as paying the subrciptions., a very cheap hobby. As a lifestyle choice it shoulld be incredibly innoffensive.
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wow... not be confused with WoW. This is really a serious business. So many good posts.
i have got alot of my friends from where i live envolved with the game and i love being able to mess around with them online and in real life!
