Viator

Absolutely. More importantly there's not a single game in development right now that wouldn't kill for 500k steady subscribers; that's an unmitigated success. I'd be shocked if anyone is thinking "Yeah, 10 million! Let's shoot for that!" 500k is second place in the American market.

 

AriasImmortal

A new MMO won't kill WoW unless it's the holy grail of gaming.

What will kill WoW is stagnation. Right now, it's only affecting the relatively few people who are "done" with the game. People who've been farming Illidan for months, people who've gotten gladiator, are getting bored, because there's nothing "new". I don't think sunwell will necessarily change that, just as season 3 didn't really change much. Yes, you see more people playing now, because there's new gear. Once everyone gets that gear and gets their desired rating I doubt you'll see very many people doing arenas.

Blizzard isn't coming up with anything new, anything exciting. It's all just more of the same and that wears on people. My guild is having major attendence issues because people are bored with raiding. My arena teams hardly play more than 10 games a week now because people are bored with arenas.

You raid the same instances, killing the same bosses, that do the same things, every week. You play the same 3 arena maps, against the same team comps, and they pretty much do the same things (with some differences), every week. You play the same BGs, on the same maps, with the same objectives, every week. Nothing changes besides some numbers and perhaps your gear.

So arena season 3 came out. What did it change besides some numbers and available gear? Nothing.
So sunwell comes out. What will it change besides some numbers and available gear? Scenery! I guess there's that whole do dailies and build a town thing, but I bet the dailies are the same as the ones now. Collect some stuff, blow up some bad guys, maybe throw rotten cheese at lazy dudes.

I know blizzard is trying to be innovative in WotLK (destructable buildings, world PvP zone), but I think it's going to be too little too late. Raid encounters have not significantly changed since BC came out, maybe even before then. The biggest change in PvP was not the arena format itself, since they're really just BGs on a smaller scale with different objectives and different maps, but the maps themselves. They're small, enclosed, and they all contain objects that can be used for LoS, which made a huge huge impact on how people PvP, as opposed to BG maps which are all very wide open and offer almost no line of sight protection. Arena MAPS changed how people play the game, but there has been one new map since BC was released. Viable team comps have changed somewhat significantly since season 1 but that doesn't change the fact that now, playing at high ratings, you will see the see the same group comps time after time after time, that play the same way every time.

Arenas have stagnated. Raiding has stagnated. Though the only people who really experience or notice this stagnation are those at the forefront of the game, it is a problem, and I don't know how intent blizzard really is on fixing it. Can we expect there to be new and different bosses in sunwell? in WotLK? Can we expect new and different BGs? New arena maps or gamestyles that change the way we play? Is there going to be more variety among successful group comps? Or are we just going to end up with the same mishmash of boss abilities with a gimmick or two added in and some scenery changes? Is arena going to continue to be the same maps against the same teams, where everyone has the same spec and plays the same way?

That said, there are people out there who still enjoy raiding. There are people out there who still enjoy arenas. I'm not saying that the game isn't (or wasn't) fun. But bosses in BT/Hyjal use similar, if not the same, mechanics as bosses from molten core. High end arenas almost require a specific group comp, played in a specific way, where everyone has to be a specific spec. How is the game fun when archimonde is just a bigger version of magmadar that happens to be next to a tree instead of inside a volcano? How is the game fun when every arena game you play puts you up against priest/mage/rogue or warrior/warlock/druid (yes, this is an exaggeration, but not by much)?

That's why people are making such a big stink about WAR and Conan. The only reason those games could potentially be WoW killers is because WoW is killing itself (and has been for a while) BUT with no actual competition WoW hasn't suffered yet. People are desperate for something NEW, something substantially different. All blizzard has done is give us new gear and new scenery. Something needs to change, needs to breathe fresh life into the game, but I'll be damned if I know what that is. I don't think anyone does, not even Blizzard.

**edit** My post was not really meant as a complaint, simply an observation. I enjoyed the game, and still do. I also think blizzard has done a good job with BC and WoW in general, so this isn't supposed to be slight against them. Yes, they could have done more, and better, but all in all I think WoW is a great game. It's just 3 years old now.

 

Tunch

There's one thing in your post that I'll agree wholeheartedly with, and that is the number of available arena maps. That shit is incredibly easy to develop and test. It's even smaller than FPS shooter maps, with the same type of development process. There is absolutely nothing stopping them from throwing a team into a room and telling them to come up with a package of 12 new arena maps over the course of a month or two, and then releasing them all.

The rest of it, though, doesn't make much sense realistically. Games don't revolutionize themselves very often. You'll see expansions with cool new shit, and very occasionally fantastically awesome new mechanics/goals/whatever, but the latter is much more rare, and cannot be expected to happen on a regular basis. WoW is WoW, play it if you enjoy it. For a lot of people, they enjoy the "more of the same" type of expansion/content. Same rules, new content to explore and enjoy. It's the same way the very vast majority of games expand, more of the same. REALLY NEW SHIT is saved for ... really new games.

 

Tyrian

... And thats exactly what players wanted , judging by the reception->success of TBC. I never bought TBC expecting or wanting some sort of revolution to WoW or the MMORPG genre, I just wanted more content. Ill buy the next expansion on the same premise ("I just want more content") and probably the one after that, too...

How long that will last before enough people start to demand more innovation to the genre instead of just settling for 'just more content' remains to be seen. By that stage, im sure wow2 will be deep in development anyway.

 

AriasImmortal

I can agree with both your points that people do enjoy the treadmill, at least people who play MMOs. From the average players point of view, they're just in it for fun. If they get bored eventually, they don't think about changing the way the game is played. It's like, after running shadow lab a bunch of times, an average player will still enjoy instances, just maybe not shadow lab. So they go do a new instance, and to them it doesn't matter if the bosses in this new instance are pretty similar to the ones in shadow lab. It's still a new instance, that looks different, and gives different loot (though even that might be pretty much the same). And you can apply that to pretty much everything.

It's surprising though, the amount of people who really play just for the content and don't play for the game. New content is great, but when it's just old content reskinned how great is it really? Though as I type this, I think about how I mostly play RPGs for the story and not the gameplay so I'll admit I do it too. But 3 years of what is essentially the same game? People can stand that? Kill magmadar in MC in february 06, only to end up killing archimonde years later and having it be the same goddamn encounter, and you're still pushing the same buttons you were back then? If those eredar twins in sunwell turn out to be Twin Emps clones, how will that be fun aside for nostalgia?

Still, Blizzard can do some things. New arena maps, for one. A lot of new arena maps, with different layouts, and new obstacles. Why there haven't been more is beyond me.

I still think a significant amount of people will jump ship as soon as there's a decent alternative to WoW, whatever their reasons for playing are. The game is old, getting older by the day, and it's beginning to show. For now, new content is enough to keep people playing rather than just quitting. Will that be the case forever? No.

**edit** Blizzard IS capable of innovative raid encounters (ala naxx, RoS, c'thun) so why aren't we seeing more?

 

Ghando

I think it should be noted that the leveling changes have made bringing new characters up to speed a lot more fun and rewarding than before. My Priest will probably hit 70 this evening with less than 9 days played, done almost exclusively solo and with zero "financial aid" from my main...tradeskills maxed, and all that. It's been by far the best leveling experience I've had and it's definitely re-invigorated my love for the game. Maybe you've seen the content already, but learning a new class from the ground up absolutely qualifies as content as well.

edit: I think calling Archimonde a reskinned Magmadar is a stupid oversimplification. Especially with his "hard-mode" incarnation, Archimonde was a very fun, dynamic and stressful encounter. It would be like calling Patchwerk a reskinned Golemagg just because they both involved a ton of damage on your tanks (contemporarily) and an endurance trial. Anyone who thinks raid encounter design hasn't improved by leaps and bounds since launch day hasn't been paying attention.

 

AriasImmortal

Perhaps. It is refreshing to play a new class (or even a new spec) and it will keep you occupied for a while. I have the (mis)fortune of having 3 70 alts that I've arena'd and raided on and I wouldn't mind leveling another one.

That's actually the one thing I'm looking forward to about WotLK. Death Knight may be just what I need to renew my interest in the game, a class that fits into the existing structure BUT (hopefully) plays quite differently from any current class.

Still though, Blizzard can do things to make the game more fun. More heigan, maexxna, c'thun, RoS style fights. More and varied arena maps. More and varied. viable arena team comps. More and different BGs. Maybe a new "mini-game" so to speak (we'll see if the outdoor PvP zone pans out).

 

Skulli

Without alts, i think many people would have quit the game by now. But that only delays their quitting.
I have seen several people that leveled an alt because they were bored and some switched mains. But when they noticed thats the same boring thing then they quitted.

 

Ghando

Everyone will quit the game eventually, so saying something "only delays quitting" is the definition of success if you're trying to keep subscribers.

 

Pyros

It's also interesting to note that, while (some) people are bored to death with wow, when warhammer and aoc come out, if the games suck, or are even barely decent, they'll probably fail quite badly. People will all buy the games, play the first free month, and go back to wow. It happened often in the past with new games being released, and there's good chances it'll happen again.

It's also important to note that whole wow might be boring, it's not BAD. At least I don't think it is, and I guess most people don't either. In the past I remember trying new games because the one I was playing was just plain shitty, and improving wasn't really hard(when I moved from UO to AC, UO had gone to shit, at least from my 16years old pker point of view).

Now, you get the new shiny games, and you think yay, I'm bored, I'm gonna buy the box and play that. After 5mins, you curse the shitty UI, clunky animations, lack of quest directions, stupid class system or whatever else. It might not have happened if you weren't playing wow, but when you come from 2years(more or less depending on people) of playing a game that's pretty much as close as possible to perfect in terms of gameplay/UI, or can be with a few addons; going back in time to 2002 to some crappy looking, not intuitive and not modifiable UI is really freaking hard. If you tested WAR at a booth, you might know what I'm talking about. It's worse than wow beta was, and it'd take a REALLY good game, or really interesting PvP to get me to play something that plays like a dinosaur of mmos.

So just because the grass looks greener from a distance, it doesn't mean you'll stay there once you find out it was just a crappy green colored spotlight pointed at dried up grass.

Just my 2cents, I'm quite jaded when it comes to mmo future which is why I actually started playing wow again a few months ago after having stopped for 8months. I've tested korean games, I've checked various leaked videos and read various leaked info, played a few betas here and there, heard people who got into other betas talk about it, and quite frankly, I'm pretty sure I'll be happy when WoTLK launches and I have 25k gold saved up to buy my underwater/ground mount or whatever the hell they'll add as a giant money sink.

 

Pamine

I think out of all the MMOs Blizzard has been the best at bringing out new ideas. Just since TBC, they've added new quest hubs, like the netherwing line, daily quests, which many people said were a great idea, and in sunswell they will try to introduce the town that gets built by daily quests or something like that. It wont be revolutionized every expansion but there's enough new things to keep most people playing for a long time.

 

weet

Starcraft 2, or other future blizzard games are probably what will lead to a larger drop to wow's playerbase especially the more hardcore people.. which will probably cause other more casual people to quit also. Given the large content gap that is currently in effect, assuming there is a normal time period between Sunwell and WOTLK I don't see wow's popularity reducing much considering how it has only grown during the current period we are in.

Although perhaps a bigger issue in the game itself would be people becoming bored of arena after a certain time period (like myself)- as that is probably the biggest thing to come out of TBC which has grown the game's popularity, seeing as personally I don't really find the current arena format online to be well tuned enough to be a legitimate competitive game, however that probably isn't of great concern to a lot of the masses who play and pvp for different reasons.

Regarding Magmadar vs Archimonde, given that people who killed Magmadar pre-Dire Maul etc. still find Archimonde a fun and challenging fight, and do take a while to learn/execute the fight successfully, with all the advancements in raiding knowledge - isn't that more of a testament to the boss design rather than detracting from it?

 

Starfire

I think several people hit on the one thing that bothers me the most: the lack of maps.

Not even just Arenas, they did add one new map and I think arenas are slightly different from battlegrounds... but my main point is battlegrounds.

2.5 years of the same AV, and WSG? Boring. Come on, dos omething to spice it up... Raiders haven't been running Molten Core for 2.5 years. Yeah, sure BC changed things slightly by altering spells/skills... but still no scenery change.

I -know- a map would be trivially easy for them and I am utterly surprised they haven't done this yet.

 

PSGarak

Keep in mind also that WoW has three years of WoW to have built on, and this is a very different game (in some sense) than what it was at release, and almost certainly for the better. It is an additional challenge for a game to be better at release than WoW is after three years of refinement, based on the feedback of WoW's particular gaming community (such as it is). WoW had the advantage of being successful immediately, allowing it to mature. Vanguard might have evolved into a good game had it been allowed to evolve in a vacuum, but it wasn't. It was judged in comparison to WoW and abandoned, meaning that it won't get a chance to evolve and mature into a popular competitor. WAR faces the same challenge. Its day 1 has to be compared to WoW's year 3.

Meanwhile, Guild Wars has gone on to be successful primarily by not being the same sort of game at all, catering to a different game audience and with a different playstyle and design philosophy. The moral seems to me to be that success comes not by confronting WoW but by avoiding it and fighting your own battle instead. That means that if WAR is WoW-but-with-more-PvP it will fail, and if WAR is a PvP-oriented MMO in its own right it will succeed or fail on its own merits.

TBC I think was paced poorly. The new awesome content came fast and was gone fast. It was awesome enough that it could have been stretched twice as long, or just the end-game could have lasted longer. Personally, I blame the free-form progression approach. I know non-linear progression paths are all the rage right now, but having a strictly linear tier of progression allowed more control over the speed of content because each boss required more gear than the last and you couldn't sidestep bosses you were having difficulty on. TBC did a lot of experiments with gameplay. Most of them worked, but I think this one has a major drawback that can't be rectified without a development process twice as fast and should be re-examined. The Trio in AQ40 would probably be a better model of non-linear progression that doesn't accelerate progress temporarily and leave everyone in doldrums.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Hate Monkey

Theres a few problems saying that way. What you should be thinking of instead is, what makes content repeatable? Awesome fights with horrible loot? Or awesome fights with awesome loot? Or how awesome the loot is but a horrible fight?

There are about 2-3 items in total from SSC/TK that are worth going back in there to get when full t6 geared. But the problem is, there is way to damn much trash in those zones, the fighting areas are really restrictive. Just the length of the trash alone in each instance, for the number of bosses is a huge draw back from back-clearing content.

The problem with the way the raid game in TBC is laid out, is that there are very few fights in BT/Hyjal that are actually harder than Vashj/KT. Combine the very early difficulty scaling on bosses, with the abundance of trash, and you end up with very little progression. Lurker and Morogrim, supposed to be the same difficulty as Hydross and Leotheros, but are definitely much easier.

Look back to Naxx and what it required:
Anub required 2 nature resist geared tanks, and in order to get this, you've at least got to Huhuran in AQ40.
Patchwerk required 3-4 high health tanks with high armor, minimum of BWL clears several times over, little AQ40 clearing.

Those were entry level fights, high gear requirements, but if you matched that, it means you could clear all the way to Gothik and Thaddius easily. Then needed real skill to progress.

Look at TBC, the ONLY real raid boss with a gear check is Naj'entus, and that is overcome by welfare epics.

If Sunwell is to succeed and clear the failure of SSC/TK/Hyjal it will need to have stricter dps requirements for the bosses. I mean 15 minute berserk timer on Supremus...you can kill him in 5 minutes easily or less. There are so many fights with are so poorly tuned right now that failing on them for some people is worse than getting hacked.

Overall there is nothing wrong with back flagging for attunements if the previous content is not a bore fest, with horrible loot. If there is still something, or multiple somethings that drop per zone that are very worth the draw, then its best to do them, best example is BWL and the 4 trinkets.

 

mek

The Green Dragons were an excellent content patch and probably the best example of world bosses done right - I'd love to see more of that. They had varying levels of difficulty, provided a tangible PvP goal, filled loot gaps and provided useful resist gear which made them worthwhile even for the highest-end raid guilds. They were also mostly intelligently designed encounters which didn't suffer from the grieftacular mechanics of Kazzak. Kazzak2 and Doomwalker (especially Doomwalker, UGH) were simply terrible by comparison. At the very least they could have added SR gear to their tables.

I hope that in the next expansion, world bosses become relevant again.

 

Reliknom

I have to agree, the greens were a lot of fun, even on a PvP server.

BTW claiming that SSC and TK are a bore because of the amount of trash seems an overstatement, as you can clear both zones in one raid night if you are already farming T6 content.

And a slight correction: Anub did not require 2 NR tanks. Neither of the bosses or trash in Naxx required any resistances up to Sapphiron. The dual gargoyle packs could make use of some NR but didn't really require it.

"Morituri Nolumus Mori!"

 

Hate Monkey

I would of liked to see your raid deal with the 2 spiders with Anub then, because the dot those spiders did stacked very quickly if you didnt wear NR gear, which made healing on them very very hard.

Not saying that SSC/TK can be done both in 1 night, saying that it isnt worth it to go back there for the 2-3 items that have a very low drop rate to begin with. I'd like to see you convince a full T6 geared raid to go back to SSC/TK just so 1 main can get the last item he needs, it aint going to happen. What you get is mains and alts in the raid, and the alts slow down the raid, making it not sensible to clear both in 1 night, and thus not worth the real effort to go back and do.

 

Reliknom

1. The spiders were stunnable.
2. We had 2 tanks taunting off each other if the stacks were getting too high.
Frankly, those spiders never lived long enough to be much of a problem anyway...

"Morituri Nolumus Mori!"

 

• Navaash

Hi. What? No. You needed no NR to kill Anub'Rekhan.

I know that was pointed out already but then I saw this:

I don't know about you but I wouldn't be taking on Hydross without a full NR and a full FrR tank, gimmick 1 hour warlock kiting kill aside.

I had to point this out because it's mindboggling these two statements were within the same breath of each other.

 

Skulli

Worldbosses (especially the greens) were only good for the highend-guilds and it was a pain to farm them.
Having scouts for them and phone-lists to call whole raid middle of the night to kill the boss wasnt fun.
And blizz said, that they wont add important (nr back then) loot on outdoor bosses again.

 

Mideci

WoW has network effects and quite frankly penalties a lot like that CD. Mideci and Leeo are gone when I leave, never mind Exiles and all my friends on Stormrage. I don't think the high enders who do play other games appreciate how powerful WoW is and how largely irrelevant other MMOs are.

Now, that said, the high end of WoW matters a lot to Blizzard. Having a Nihilum to look up to motivates a lot of people who won't ever sniiff Illidan's shoes before the next expansion. But that said, most of those people are not defecting to another game. And I think people who believe there's a WoW killer thoroughly overestimate the chances any game has of scoring 1/10th the market success of WoW.

WoW is approaching, what, 10 million active accounts? What's the second most successful MMO ever? I'll let someone more expert than I fill in the answer and the details, but um, it's not close. And an upstart is going to be lucky to take away 5% of the WoW base in 2008. Given that Lich King is a 2008 product and Emerald Whatever Fill in the Blank is a 2009 one, WoW is going to be WoW for a long time. Maybe you'll be gone. Maybe I'll be gone. Maybe you'll be playing Age of Conan. I won't. This Warhammer sounds awful. It's not going to be mass market. Conan won't be either.

So the WoW killer isn't even in really on the horizon yet. In other words, the WoW killer is facing off against not this game, not Lich King, but the promise of the next expansion.

I wish it well.

 

songster

And? Just because WoW massively expanded the market for MMO games doesn't mean that all those new gamers will necessarily stick with WoW. If anything, I'd expect that "extra" 9 million or so people might be more curious to try something new if the "buzz" surrounding it gets intense enough.

Speaking purely personally, I joined WoW in the first place as part of a loost group of RL friends. We don't even all play on the same server, but that's not necessarily important as we keep in touch via other means anyway. It's a shared interest and shared topic of conversation, and a good dose of simple word-of-mouth marketing. Now, the good thing for Blizzard is that this kind of social cohesion means that the whole group will keep playing WoW. However, the danger for Blizzard is that if the group moves on, it will move on as a whole. I'm certainly open to the idea of new games, but it's a chicken and egg situation. I'm not going to be the first to leave, because WoW is more than good enough to keep me interested. But if the friends that got me into WoW in the first place move on, I'll probably end up joining them to stay in touch.

Agreed, with a caveat. I think that taking 5% of WoW's playbase would actually be more difficult than taking 95% of it. Herd behaviour isn't smoothly divisible. If (and presumably when) the herd migrates, it'll go en masse. The WoW-killer's real problem is how to predict that and cope with it. The same problem WoW had in its first year: how do you cope when you expected 100,000 subscribers and got 5 million?

 

Essarhaddon

The raid game in TBC is I believe the biggest failure of TBC. It started out poorly balanced and destroyed a lot of active raiding guilds and the raid "scene" has never recovered. I believe Blizzard isn't really trying hard to get it going anymore, relying on WTLK to revive raiding. I think a reasonable amount of creative thought and energy has gone into PvP, although I disagree with the direction it is going, but I see much less of that going to raiding. For the record here is what I see as the problems with the raid game in TBC:

- T4/T5 is awful and disjointed. Spread between a 10 man instance, 2 mini instances, and 2 T5 half instances. While I am just starting on T6 raiding, my sense is that most guilds see MH/BT as being better put together than SSC/TK?
- Multiple zones per tier is a bad idea. Non-lineraity works outside of raiding, but is linear is good for raiding, at least as far as instances. Naxx style non-linerarity is ok, Kara/Gruul/Mag non-linearity is a mistake.
- Trash, trash, trash. This more than anything makes T5 miserable for new guilds. It isn't that the trash is hard, it is the respawns. 2 hours respawns just don't serve any purpose. Trash should either a)not respawn at all (BWL), b)respawn on a soft reset of the instance, or c)respawn very quickly as part of the boss encounter.
- No "easy" instance. While MC may now be seen as boring I think it played a vital role in getting raid guilds off the ground. Almost everything in TBC is too hard to learn for people just taking up raiding. I find it interesting that Blizzard designers are concerned about new people getting the game for Xmas, but those people have no chance IMO of gettin together 30 similar people and having any raid success.
- Attunements, enough said.
- Poor itemization combined wtih good PvP itemization has made PvE loot much less interesting/exciting. This is not a call to "nerf" PvP loot rather to fix PvE loot.
- Mis-judging the difficulty of encounters in the design. Except for KT all of TK is easier than SSC, despite being intended as the successor instance. Hydross is harder than Lurker despite being the "first" boss. The trouble I think is that Blizzard introduced a lot of new mechanics/movement/styles of fights and couldn't really judge what would be hard and what would be easy.

 

Draele

Going to have to agree here. TBC was sorely lacking an introductory full length 25-man. It's a shame they couldn't have made Gruul's Lair 5 bosses instead of 2. That place was the perfect difficulty and the right feel for the first 25-man, the only problem was it wasn't long enough to fill a night,

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/