WoW [General Discussion]

[Berkut]

Well nobody had ever combined all those elements together before and they did make for a different game experience than what had come before.

When did you play EQ?  I started playing during the era of the first expansion, The Ruins of Kunark, in 2000 and there were quests then.

1999-2001 I think. There were quests but it was different. They were all repeatable and you had to make your own notes. They also had, as a rule, pretty piss poor rewards because of that infinitely repeatable thing.

EQ was a long, long time ago, so my memory might be faulty.

But quests in EQ were not about leveling, they were about the quest. It wasn't something you did to get a chunk of XP at the end, it was something you did because it provided a structure around your activities.

Same with DAOC, and that was fine. It is like raids in WoW - you don't do them in order to get XP, you do them in order to get other things. Not everything is about XP.

So WoW made leveling via questing kind of a thing, but the concept of quests themselves was hardly ground breaking.

[Valmy]

OK, so just because people are saying that WoW didn't invent sliced bread doesn't mean that anyone is bashing WoW.

They didn't invent sliced bread. They did create the most successful MMO of all time, and possibly the most successful game of all time. WoW was incredible in many, many ways.

It just wasn't particularly innovative in its gameplay. But it didn't need to be in order to be as great as it was, and recognizing that was, IMO, the key to their success. The genre was not lacking innovation prior to WoW, it was lacking professional execution and paying attention to what the customers actually wanted.

I didn't think you were. I was just remembering back when it first came out and how excited I was for a bunch of the features.

[Valmy]

Well nobody had ever combined all those elements together before and they did make for a different game experience than what had come before.

When did you play EQ?  I started playing during the era of the first expansion, The Ruins of Kunark, in 2000 and there were quests then.

1999-2001 I think. There were quests but it was different. They were all repeatable and you had to make your own notes. They also had, as a rule, pretty piss poor rewards because of that infinitely repeatable thing.

EQ was a long, long time ago, so my memory might be faulty.

But quests in EQ were not about leveling, they were about the quest. It wasn't something you did to get a chunk of XP at the end, it was something you did because it provided a structure around your activities.

Same with DAOC, and that was fine. It is like raids in WoW - you don't do them in order to get XP, you do them in order to get other things. Not everything is about XP.

So WoW made leveling via questing kind of a thing, but the concept of quests themselves was hardly ground breaking.

No they were things you did to get faction increases. They generally were like 'bring me a gnoll tooth!' and you got 15 gnoll teeth on that last run so you go turn them in and get some rep instead of selling them all for 1 copper each. But you rarely planned your activities around them.

You could get good experience and loot from questing in DAOC. But it was like WoW questing, one offs generally. Except for the fact there were no quest markers of any kind.

[Valmy]

EverQUEST

Evercamp.

Yep

I kind of enjoyed that part. The sitting around with massive downtime really gave you the opportunity to get to socialize and get to meet everybody in your group. But people seem to prefer actually doing gameplay

[Berkut]

EverQUEST

Evercamp.

Yep

I kind of enjoyed that part. The sitting around with massive downtime really gave you the opportunity to get to socialize and get to meet everybody in your group. But people seem to prefer actually doing gameplay

Yeah, that is something that I do NOT like about WoW anymore. Even the dungeons are so brain dead that the goal is to blaze through them as fast as possible, and people actually get pissed if you try to manage the content in any way - using tactics and actual good strategy is a waste of time! Just kill everything gogogogogogogo.

It turns the other players into meaningless automatons from your own perspective. Why play a MMO if the game doesn't actually require you to coordinate, and in fact punishes you for doing so?

[crazy canuck]

EverQUEST

Evercamp.

Yep

I kind of enjoyed that part. The sitting around with massive downtime really gave you the opportunity to get to socialize and get to meet everybody in your group. But people seem to prefer actually doing gameplay

Yeah, that is something that I do NOT like about WoW anymore. Even the dungeons are so brain dead that the goal is to blaze through them as fast as possible, and people actually get pissed if you try to manage the content in any way - using tactics and actual good strategy is a waste of time! Just kill everything gogogogogogogo.

It turns the other players into meaningless automatons from your own perspective. Why play a MMO if the game doesn't actually require you to coordinate, and in fact punishes you for doing so?

I think you have identified what caused me to lose interest.  Whether it was because we were just learning the content or the game mechanics were more difficult, there was a time when party members needed to communicate and strategy was required.  That was a lot of fun. 

[Valmy]

Old man grumpy story time:

So in the weeks leading up to the release of Burning Crusade a buddy of mine desperately wanted something off the Emperor in Black Rock Depths...or whatever it was called. The instance in Blackrock that ended with the evil dwarf emperor. Now I had no interest in running this instance, it had nothing it for me. But I was running that damn instance a few times a week because he needed it and I was the tank and I just loved running dungeons with him and the others who made up our regular five person group. When LFG hit he would have just run it over and over again with some randos. He never did get the item, we had the worst luck.

Oddly the thing I most fondly remember from WoW was running BRD over and over again with him and our group. It was a fond farewell to vanilla WoW.

Back in my day things were so great. Where did it all go wrong? 

Punk kids and their LFG.

[Grey Fox]

@Berk.

I think WoW invented sliced bread, it didn't invent bread or a slicer.

[Sophie Scholl]

I remember running a group of 3 or so quests in Qeynos ungodly amounts of times to raise my shadow knight to be in good standing with the good Qeynos guards.  I would shout alerts for the boat and guide people around who didn't know where they were going while doing so.  People would toss me tips and an occasional piece of armor.  I loved the need to interact with npc's at the time to obtain quests, but I'm unsure if it I would enjoy it now after being spoiled by WoW.  Speaking of WoW, I make an effort to offer full SFC clears for groups when I tank so they can see everything it has to offer.  I also offer the Ogre King of Feralas option if people want to see how things can be run in a fun way.  Having played for a very long time and leveled ungodly alts, I enjoy sharing the small things like that to players who never got to experience the old in-depth nature of the game from Vanilla and BC.  Surprisingly, a lot of people appreciate the additional effort in those cases, as it breaks up the monotony of endless speed runs I presume.

[Jaron]

WoW had really good timing too. I think a lot of households from 2000-2005 were still using dial up technologies but by 2005 and onward it was becoming more and more common for people to use broadband technologies and be able to fully engage in an online world like WoW.

I remember trying to do Ironforge on my 56k.

Haha, I met Berkut there to exchange items and I lagged so bad I fell into the moat. I think he said something on guild chat like "You're not very bright, are you?"

[Martinus]

WoW had really good timing too. I think a lot of households from 2000-2005 were still using dial up technologies but by 2005 and onward it was becoming more and more common for people to use broadband technologies and be able to fully engage in an online world like WoW.

I remember trying to do Ironforge on my 56k.

Haha, I met Berkut there to exchange items and I lagged so bad I fell into the moat. I think he said something on guild chat like "You're not very bright, are you?"

Classic Berkut.

[Jaron]

WoW had really good timing too. I think a lot of households from 2000-2005 were still using dial up technologies but by 2005 and onward it was becoming more and more common for people to use broadband technologies and be able to fully engage in an online world like WoW.

I remember trying to do Ironforge on my 56k.

Haha, I met Berkut there to exchange items and I lagged so bad I fell into the moat. I think he said something on guild chat like "You're not very bright, are you?"

Classic Berkut.

Haha, well it was more of a "WTF are you doing?!" moment. I can't remember if we were exchanging an item or if I was signing the guild charter. May have been the latter.

[Berkut]

WoW had really good timing too. I think a lot of households from 2000-2005 were still using dial up technologies but by 2005 and onward it was becoming more and more common for people to use broadband technologies and be able to fully engage in an online world like WoW.

I remember trying to do Ironforge on my 56k.

Haha, I met Berkut there to exchange items and I lagged so bad I fell into the moat. I think he said something on guild chat like "You're not very bright, are you?"

That sounds like me - the giving people free stuff to help them out part, anyway!

I was always the nicest of guildmates.

I remember Strix calling me a Hunter "scrub" when I got the first Horde Black Bow of the Betrayer on our server. That was pretty funny.

Good times. Good times...

[Grey Fox]

I remember Berkut not answering me all the time. It's like I was on ignore.

[Valmy]

I remember not playing with you people because I preferred Horde.