On another board that I lurk someone was ranting on how the current selection of MMORPGs don't do anything for him.
Someone on that thread replied with:
And I thought that he has many many great points. What do you think?
He echoes a couple of things that I have been thinking.
- Balance kills the fun.
Little history, I started playing EQ from near the beginning. I loved being a Necro.
Not because I could solo everything (I grouped as much as possible), but because there was so many options and and ways things to do. I could: Root/Rot, Fear/kite, Tap/tank, heck many times I was the main healer (You've never seen healing till you’ve seen a good NecroHealer)
But now, it seems because everything is so mathematically perfect... There really is only one way of doing things. In Wow.. Every fight is the same combination of buttons.
Same goes with raiding.. It seems now that everyone uses the same exact strategy with very little variance. I've heard it said so many times in WoW that we have to have X number of Warlocks, or X number of whatever. Again because it seems the encounters are so refined that there is only one good way of doing things.
-PvP kills the fun for PvE
I hate the fact that PvE skills are taken out or nerfed to boredom to make them balance in PvP. Old school enchanters could lock down a target forever, but now because of PvP we have things like diminishing returns and selective crowd control.
Thoughts?
Someone on that thread replied with:
The problem is simple: The genre has moved on and old MMO'ers like us don't belong in it anymore.
MMORPGs were fun because so few people played them. They were the secret genre, the one that only a select few could truly master, because only a select few would put the effort in. Player reputation mattered because it took a ---- ton of effort to build up a charachter. Every single player at max level knew the other players of their class at max level, if only a little bit. Now you're lucky if you know everyone in the guilds you're competing against.
The genre is now millions strong. Something like 40% of the engineering college here plays it. Everyone is a WoW player. And everyone is "good" at the game. Everyone succeeds at raiding. PVP is downright repetitive and boring. Uberguilds and the "hardcore" demographic no longer exist, because blizzard has stamped us out of existance. This company has singlehandedly eviscerated us out of our genre by making the difficulty curve plateau after a certain point. There's no competition, and so EVERYONE is the best, which is a nice way of saying nobody is.
Community boards have died under the thrashing of blizzard's forums, as community forums are no longer the main source of information. And when a company tries to involve community sites to breathe life back into them (IE Sigil) they fail to compete with the monster that is WoW (And I'm not going to plug for VG. They failed because the game was not up to par.)
The people like you and I who want something else, something that isn't WoW, not because WoW isn't a good game but because we do not enjoy that type of gameplay for whatever reason, have nowhere to turn to. We see EQ2 and view the Warcraft inside it. We view VG and see a game that could have been but did not deliver, and may have done more damage to our genre than WoW has, because now no one believes that such a game can be successful.
We have seen a trend in MMORPGs where the player's freedoms have repeatedly been attacked, over and over, in the name of balance. Classes are distilled into their roles and even then have hard caps on what they're capable of. A CC ability is now limited in the number of targets it may apply to at any given time. Runspeed is given out in increments so small that they have no real effect on combat. Groups are limited to a set number of people. Raid guilds have 30-40 members not because that's what they need to raid but because that's all they can reasonably maintain due to the 25-man cap.
Frankly, I'm disgusted in general with the state of the genre. Everyone I have played with over the last 7 years is. I technically play WoW, but I cannot log in for more than 2 hours without wanting to log out and warp back 5 years to when raiding was fun, epic and glorious. When servers had those guys, the players that you went to for advice about your class because they were the best at what they do. When you knew at least 20% of the people on your server and possibly even enjoyed the company of half of that many.
I don't know what we'll see out of developers soon, and I find myself doubting that the genre will ever return to the games we used to throw ourselves into for days at a time. I know it's not impossible to recreate the magic that occurred in the early MMORPGs, however no buisness believes that, and so we're doomed to see people trying to beat WoW at it's own game. They don't understand that's not how the market for this genre works. You cannot beat an established MMORPG at it's own style of gameplay. It has more resources and advertising than you. The only hope is to do something new, different, and completely out of left field. And there is no company that is giving us that at the moment, and I don't even have any hope that someone will anymore.
And I thought that he has many many great points. What do you think?
He echoes a couple of things that I have been thinking.
- Balance kills the fun.
Little history, I started playing EQ from near the beginning. I loved being a Necro.
Not because I could solo everything (I grouped as much as possible), but because there was so many options and and ways things to do. I could: Root/Rot, Fear/kite, Tap/tank, heck many times I was the main healer (You've never seen healing till you’ve seen a good NecroHealer)
But now, it seems because everything is so mathematically perfect... There really is only one way of doing things. In Wow.. Every fight is the same combination of buttons.
Same goes with raiding.. It seems now that everyone uses the same exact strategy with very little variance. I've heard it said so many times in WoW that we have to have X number of Warlocks, or X number of whatever. Again because it seems the encounters are so refined that there is only one good way of doing things.
-PvP kills the fun for PvE
I hate the fact that PvE skills are taken out or nerfed to boredom to make them balance in PvP. Old school enchanters could lock down a target forever, but now because of PvP we have things like diminishing returns and selective crowd control.
Thoughts?