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Agreed.

Personally, I'm an analytical type. I enjoy looking at things and seeing what's good, what could be better, how something might have been done different. Like, man that steak was good, but it might have been better if it was rare instead of medium rare. I'm not bashing WoW when I talk about these kinds of things. But, I'm also not a fanboi and I'm willing to point out things I don't like or I think weren't good for the game. Caveat, I do not look at these things in black and white terms. I'm not saying everyone should think/feel the way I do, I'm just sharing my ideas. And, I think this thread has a lot of good dialog about gaming. It's definitely sparked some thought for me.

You clearly missed the entire point about this being about dynamic content progression and the way that interacts with character progression.

I don't really have any interest in revisiting that particular critique, because I don't have anything new to add to it. If you're not interested in a horizontal content system, good for you. But dismissing it because you refuse to re-examine basic systems is a straw man issue; that's your problem, not mine.

I'm going to point, once again, at EVE as my rebuttal to your argument, and leave it at that.

Now, regarding the WoW-specific stuff, I take issue with the fact that you are discussing WoW immediately pre-BC and extending the state of the game backward. For instance:



This absolutely was not the case at launch. At launch, clearing all the quests in a zone would not get you to the next zone bracket. You either resorted to grinding mobs extensively to make up the gap, or you traveled across the continent to the next nearest zone in your level range. And once you leveled into the 30s range, 30-60 essentially had you visiting nearly every zone just to make it to the end.

Hell, I remember it being true in BC that finishing all the quests in Darkshore would not have given you enough levels to realistically enter into Ashenvale. It wasn't until they nerfed leveling, again, in BC that the process became far more streamlined.

I mean, let's think about what WoW was actually like post-launch. Meeting Stones were introduced 6 months or so after, BGs didn't exist until a few months after that (honor system came the month before), and it goes on like that. The very basic systems we consider central to the WoW experience were added, bit-by-bit, over time. Very few of them were included in the game at launch.

I though there was a leveling revamp, but I'm not seeing any evidence of one until patch 2.3 of BC in November 2007, 3 years after the game launched. Maybe the class revamps that happened slowly, all the time, just had the effect of making leveling easier, without actually addressing exp rates.

But I still remember the days where grinding was far more effective than standard questing. And that definitely lasted for a LONG time in vanilla.

That and a lot of people don't seem to realize, is that losing 1.3 million subscribers (most of which are from Asia), WoW is still at least twice, if not three times, as large as the next leading MMO in terms of playerbase subscriptions.

WoW could lose another 2 million subscribers and it would still be doing quite well. It isn't "too big to fail" (nobody is), but yet given Blizzard's track record, I don't think we really need to be worrying and doomsaying anyday soon. The game is still quite healthy and strong; I (along with millions of other players) are still awaiting each and every patch eagerly.

I hope 5.3 don't take until freaking June, lol. I want it to be done and ready but yet I also want it *soon*. So much awesome to look forward to!

You must have missed a lot of quests. Or perhaps it was the contrast with EQ.

My first impression, back at the very beginning, was how well one zone flowed into another. I remember doing Hogger (when he was elite and difficult and you had to kill him) and then moving on to Westfall without any protracted grinding. Same with Teldrassil>Darkshore>Ashenvale. I remember doing the cat sires and matriarchs for the cloak furs at even level (18/19) and that was just before the move to Ashenvale. There was the escort quest from the Ancient Glade to Maestra's post that was quite doable at that level.

I really have no memories of having to grind mobs for exp until much higher up. Even then judicious use of dungeons could prevent it. Running Dire Maul or ST was I suppose a form of grind but in my head it was a very enjoyable one. Much better than spending hour after hour every evening for a week to get one level in EQ.

I have to disagree. I remember quite well having several points during leveling where grinding was necessary. It was notorious at some points where the quests just weren't available. Look up some of the old leveling guides.

I also disagree with your previous post. Gold was not easy to come by. Plenty of people struggled to pay for a mount. Making money took effort. You couldn't just run masses of dailies. I'm not saying it was impossible to make money, but it wasn't until Wrath, really, that money was so much easier to get. Hell, I got accused of buying gold when I first got my flying mount in BC because for many people 5k gold was out of reach (enchanting ftw!).

As for raiding, I'm pretty sure you are wrong about the number of people that were raiding. It was quite small. It was talked/written about quite a bit. Your personal experience does not necessarily reflect everyone else's.

But everything needs to be taken in context, which I don't think you're really considering.

Enchanting has always been good money, but it's also required a significant investment. Getting to the point where you could produce the materials for endgame enchants meant leveling it up to 300, and that's a LOT of lost gold to reach that point. And you need to remember what item drops/rewards were like when the game launched. Getting a green item was a big deal, let alone blue/purple, so simply GETTING the items for you to sell was not easy. You didn't just scroll through the AH and buy any cheap items that happened to be listed there.

In the realm of mats, there was also the other gathering professions. Thing is, those required you to invest a lot of time roaming the world for materials, which was time intensive. PARTICULARLY because getting an epic mount was a HUGE achievement (actually "epic"), because they were so damn expensive. Hell, just getting a normal mount was an achievement for most of vanilla.

Also remember that the prices for materials aren't as inflated as they are nowadays. Back then, there was literally only two sources of gold in the economy: Drops from humanoid mobs or chests, and quests. And there weren't daily quests, either. That made gold a premium commodity, particularly since the gold sinks (like mounts, food, and flight points) were a strong balancing force.

So that amazingly awesome enchant that's going to cost you 40g? Yeah, that was EXPENSIVE. And that stack of copper bars? They weren't going to be getting you all that much gold. Actually, more like copper. I can still remember how it was like christmas came early when stacks of copper inflated into the silvers range. Back in vanilla, AH prices sales profits weren't much higher than selling to a vendor.

And since you noted things like recipes: first you have to consider the fact that the majority of the game didn't have an epic mount. That made getting into Moonglade damn difficult. And the market for people willing to spend 10g on a recipe was extremely small, particularly when we're talking about the bulk of vanilla.

As for MC: you do remember how, just to access the content, you had to build an entire resist set, right? And farm the endgame dungeons for months, hoping to get lucky on drops. And be a class anyone was willing to have around (sorry pallies).

I mean, the giant stat jump, change to 25-level content, and introduction of heroic dungeons, was all part of Blizz's plan to make raiding more accessible, and rectify the issue formed by the fact that the number of players accessing endgame content was so small.

[EDIT]

And something really important to note is that "raiding guilds" as a sample size is fundamentally problematic, as raiding guilds are made up of players who have already gained access to raiding content. They've built the item sets, they've found a group of 40 people to play with.

What's far more important is the number of players that were able to join "raiding guilds" and the number of people outside of them able to access raiding content. That was a VERY small minority. I'd wager it wasn't much larger than the percentage of FFXI players able to access its endgame.

That's no longer true, and it's awesome that Blizz has made it more accessible. But it was definitely one of Vanilla's most substantial issues.

Edited, May 18th 2013 12:49pm by idiggory

Hmmm. Create Druid>Level to 10> Port to Moonglade. No epic mount required.
From Moonglade you can deathhop a level 10 to Everlook fairly easily.

While I am happy to accept that my experience of raiding may have been unusual the money thing is just a matter of mechanics.

I did this on multiple servers and it financed 30+ characters.

As for enchanting being expensive, of course it was, but the market for disenchanted mats was still there and in the beginning there was no level limit on DE. A low level bank alt could DE anything. The prices were less silly and maybe a stack of Strange Dust sold for 2g instead of 40g but it still made a big help towards the mount cost.

Even if you had no enchanter any green would sell for 50s or more on the AH as enchanters hoovered them up to DE.

And yes I constantly ran into people who vendored everything and then moaned that they needed gold.

Making gold nowadays is so easy that it removes any sense of achievement. This could also be said of levelling. This might actually be the greater threat to the sustainability of the game. There has to be a balance, too hard and you lose subscribers obviously but also I think too easy and you lose them too.

Download Speed wasn't the issue the first time they released FFXIV.

Its just their own torrent client sat there downloading at 0.01 kb/sec. So what users had to do was copy&paste the .torrent file that it generated, and open it with uTorrent (or whatever client they normally used). Suddenly, it'd take off like a rocket, like it should and download normal speed.

But it sounds like they fixed their stuff.

Hmmm, "Open My Account"? You mean Re-sub for XI? I thought the PlayOnline account in general was always free and never really "Closed"? I get monthly newsletters from them still but none of them ever mentioned XIV.

EDIT: Just took a look at my SE Account, it is still there and working, but since I never subbed to XIV (I only played the Open Beta), it isn't listing any options for XIV. Is that only available to peeps who subbed to XIV before?

Edited, May 19th 2013 10:02am by Lyrailis

I'm more of a mindset that they are merely "shifting" the challenge.

Instead of "challenging" (which isn't a real challenge) us with making enough money to sustain our characters, pay our repair bills, etc etc etc, they give us "challenge" in other forms -- Raids, PvP, Challenge Modes with the 5-mans, etc.

Face it... grinding out money isn't fun. Grinding out XP on mobs is even less fun.

People want to get in to the action. Having to do the 300g+ grind every week before raid night (which was MANDATORY if you wanted to raid) had to have sucked. Constant material farming for ridiculous amounts of potions, wizard oils whatever else people used back then in large quantities. That couldn't have been very fun.

And face it -- it isn't a "challenge". Doing the same thing over and over and over again tests 1 and only 1 thing -- your patience for doing mundane tasks repeatedly.

Yes, leveling now is easy. But then it was easy back then too, it just took a lot longer. You ran out of quests, and found yourself grinding on mobs. Harder? Not really. Some classes were "hard" to level back then (Warriors sucked, I leveled one during BC) but that's more about having to bandage and eat every other fight which was the most ridiculously unfun thing I've ever had to do in WoW.

They just took some of the mundane boring crap out of the game and replaced it with more varied stuff like Pet Battles, Scenarios, Challenge Modes, etc. Their philosophy is "why make the players do the same boring crap over and over and over again? Couldn't we speed this up a little so players can spend less time doing unfun things and more time doing the things they want to do?".

Sunsong Ranch is another good example. 5min a day or sitting down for 2h+ once or twice a week? Gimme the 5min a day.

It is also economical on their end too -- 5min a day or 2h+ once a week... the 5min a day model is much cheaper on bandwidth.

Not to mention, it is more healthy/easy to maintain an RL lifestyle. LFR is an excellent way to see the content (even though it is much easier than Normal Raids), Sunsong Ranch allows you to have a continuous inflow of materials, Scenarios are a quick easy source of VP and group content... all of these take less than an hour to do. Gone are the days when people have 5h+ to spend on "Raid Night" 2-3 times a week. People just don't have that kinda time anymore. Some people do but most don't.

Edited, May 19th 2013 10:14am by Lyrailis

Honestly I think any mew MMO coming out that isnt F2P or Buy2play doesnt have much of a shot of succeeding, SE is to full of themselves to realize this and are betting on the Final Fantasy Brand to carry it to a point. Problem is the branding is so tarnished because of terrible game play decisions and releases. They may be able to do "ok" off the Japanese market since national pride will sell it there. But over here no.

I played FF11 back when it first released on PC here, I remember thread after thread, complaining how they wasted money and they dont want a sub to play a game. Which to us MMO vets was ridiculous, but a lot of the FF fanbase to this day doesnt include 11 on lists or says its terrible. I played it for 6-7 years before switching to WoW. But with Games like TERA, RIFT, LOTRO, and the multitude of other Pay2 play gone free to play (Star wars doesnt count) on the market unless a game is seriously "the next big thing" its not going to gain much traction.

The problem is Japanese companies have huge egos and dont want to swallow their pride, Final fantasy may eek out 100k people maybe 300k at launch but after that meh. Im basing this on end game, FF11 was pre WoW, WoW changed MMO's big time. FF11 honestly had almost no end game, and the endgame was just a giant RNG grind that lasted WAY to long (when the gear from 2nd expansion is better then the gear in expansion 4/5 you have a problem).

Honestly if FF14 was WoW + FF11 + bits and pieces of other games (GW2 quest system, Rift Trees/Dynamic Events) it would probably stand way more of a chance. But when I look at it it looks like a bastardized FF11-2, I mean they have the same Races (But they have different names so not the same!) there probably isnt any VA in the game, I wonder if they changed the copy pasta landscape (This is a huge one) and made the game more "New player" friendly. FF14 Beta was terrible, and confusing. The whole everything is a mystery and must be worked out by the community is a nice thought but this day and age doesnt work anymore. We live in an age where things are coming out so fast its hard to spend more than a week on one before the next thing comes out.

I'm more bummed that it's not going to be f2p because, from my perspective, they just completely screwed themselves. F2P is a no risk model - you get people in and playing and, before you know it, you're making money.

For a game with such an atrocious launch, relaunching with a sub model is asking your potential customers to make a huge leap of faith.

I'm not comparing, and the qoute you linked im saying I WANT IT TO BE LIKE FF11. FF11 had a good story and a good ascetic. Tossing "All new" on to any title means nothing now days, it a gimick to sell products.

As for nickel and diming, only the worst F2P games do that (Star Wars). Games like F2P TERA they only sell xp boosters and mounts/clothes in their shop. The rest of the game is completely free and the full game without a single penny spent.

As digg said, being F2P allows everyone to try your game so that it can be judged on its own merits, if people like your game they will pay you to keep playing. Asking for 12-15 dollars up front on top of buying a boxed copy is really asking to much. What happens if I play it and hate it and uninstall the next day, Im out how much it cost me to buy the game.

FFXI had a Free Trial though it was only 14 days.

I'm pretty sure they'll have one for XIV too. Though whether or not you have buy the client first.... lol.

Though after awhile they started releasing $4 discs that allowed you to install and get the Free Trial that way.