god damn these websitesFollow

like ALLAKHAZAM.COM


So I'll share an anecdote before I sink again into non-internet land.

I've been playing Company of Heroes for little bit and got stuck on one mission so I decided to look it up and found a great site that gave a nice description on how to configure your units.
Now I was doing fine up to that point. SO anyway now it seems that before I start to play I find myself unwittingly drawn to looking at that site and reading the entire walkthrough before I even start the mission. It kinda cheapens the whole affair.
I think from now on I won't look at it until I fail miserably on the mission atleast once.

anyway

Does anyone else remember back in the day wehn looking at a Game Guide was concidered cheating?
I only usually would get the guides for games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior for nostalgic purposes and only looked at them after I did the mission. I did that all the way up to FF7 I think. I think it was 8 whose game guide actually encouraged you to go to their website to look for hints.

If I could have seen myself at that time, looking on a website to find every single answer to every single quest and mission and map just because either the game made it impossible to find on your own or you were just too impatient to try to deal with the challenge of figuring out on your own, I think I would be pretty disappointed.
Alas,
It seems that times have changed and waht was once cheating has now grown into it's own sub-culture of geekdom such as this Allakhazam whose very foundation is taking the challenge out of good games.


Although upon reflection, I do realize that MMORPGs are a bit different than any old RPG.. but I don't see that as any reason to cheat yourself of the good challenge of figuring stuff out yourself.
It only further shows the nature of competition and it's effects, as that is waht I would perscribe as the reason that such practices have become standard in the online gaming community.


/off

God yer old. Need help across the street there, grandma?

No.

Old is when you remember disassembling the Z80 assembly code for every new ZX Spectrum game. Search for the DEC HL instruction (53 Decimal or #35 Hex) that was usually used to take off a life, replace with NOP (POKE #0 at the right code address).

Yeah. I'm that old.

EQ1 launched this practice.

with their very poor quest engine, where many times, the only way to complete one was to trip over the quest mob, or spend hours killing stuff without even knowing if you were killing the right stuff for some uber rare drop from an rare mob. you basically had to trip over the things you needed to complete stuff.

the alternative to looking it up on a web site was spending days, or even months killing sthings thatmay not even be what you need.

sooo, people got together and shared info. i really cant say it is totally a bad thing, but, now people are dependant in a quick answer as opposed to finding the solution themselves.

for instance, you go to web sites for EQ2, you can end up with some nice equipment. you dont go to web sites, you may spend hundreds of hours grinding away on quests for flowers that sell for a few copper.

they have become part of the game. i cant say that is a bad thing though, it adds another dimension to the playing experience.

the sad part is, the web sites are dependant on players providing information. and games for the most part have slowed down to the point you dont have tons of people sharing info on public web sites anymore. they usually have a loyal hard core following and share their info now on guild web sites as opposed to public forums.

sooo, it is getting harder to find info for games thatare designed to have that dimension built into the game. EQ2 is a glaring example. EQ1 too for that matter.

WoW quests pretty much have everything you need to solve them within the game, so not so much here, but if your looking to find good quests to getequipment as opposed to grinding out quests for a batch of apples......it is getting harder in this game too.