I recently came to a realisation that i hardly play a team game anymore, the side i am on doesn't matter.
Its all instances , some are with random people , some are with friends. But in the end wow is nothing more than a bunch of instances + shatrah.
If you want to pve - you have just forgotten the Tempest keep , you do on weekly basis Black temple and Mount Hyjal and you think about hitting the Sunwell the moment "all thouse newbs on the realm realises that daily quests for the new instance is the thing they MUST be doing".
If the pvp is what you want to do - well there is arenas and battlegrounds - and of course you don't need to travel anywhere - you just sit in your <capitol_city_of_choice> and spam queue for an instance.
When i ask or i am asked "what are we gonna do tonight" , the answers doesnt realy differ - they always circle around - "lets do X instance".
The open world is crap - static mobs that just wait to be slain and are always at the same place, quests are always the same (after leveling few 70s i can tell you wtf you need to do at any point of leveling).
Its all instances guys , nothing new but the next instance - and everytime you reset it - it will come with the same architecture , with the same pack of mobs , with the same boring predictable reaction and moving patterns.
I know its just my perception of things . Anyone want to discuss this ?

Well there isn't really much to discuss. It's a discussion that's been done to death. Non-instanced non-trivial/non-levelling content comes with it's own problems: monopolization of spawns, inability to schedule raids independently of spawn timers, random people messing up fights, balancing issues (to avoid zerging), etc. As for pvp, I guess we'll see more non-instanced pvp in wotlk with the new pvp zone.

If I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that you're tired of seeing the same thing every time you zone in; the same mobs, the same packs, and that you want a bit of surprise thrown into the mix. As well, you also want the game world itself to be a constantly shifting realm.

If that's the case...I'm not thinking that you're ever going to find it in WoW. Diablo & Diablo II had what you're looking for, I think, at least in part. (Not sure about the multiplayer landscape...never had the chance to try that out.) But here, you're dealing with an actual world environment. There's a lot of artwork and design that goes into it, and I'm not sure that you could have the current game's richness of detail and have it be random every time you walk in. Not only that, but how do you randomize world content for 10 million subscriptions? At best I could see people zoning into one of 3-4 different layouts for an instance...but that really doesn't help either, because people will simply zone out and back in until they get a map they like. As far as random world content? Perhaps you could have wandering rare elites that are more globe-trotting, rather than just staying in one area or making one small loop around a zone...I don't know. I'm not really coming up with any ways to randomize content without breaking the game beyond repair.

I got a head ache from reading the original post.

I'm having a hard time picking out exactly what point you're trying to make. Is it that the concept of instanced content sucks? Is it that the instanced content we have at the moment sucks? Or, is it that the mob AI in the game is too predictable? There are a lot of other random thoughts thrown in there as well: raiders look down on casuals, you don't have to travel out of Shatt to queue for PvP, leveling is always the same. You might consider explaining your concerns a bit.

I'll just point out that you personally have the ability to avoid a lot of these problems: you can do Halaa PvP, you can fly to Blade's Edge and queue for arena there instead of Shatt, you can kill DLK and Doomwalker instead of Kael'thas, you can try something silly while leveling, like using no weapons.

One of my favorite things about WoW is that it is extremely freeform, and I can do whatever the hell I want to. The Devs don't push you in one direction or another. Just because 95% of players do a few select things doesn't mean you have to, too.

Not trolling. Just pointing out that a fully dynamic world is possible in an MMO and that someone else is working on one.

Http://www.darkfallonline.com

From a developer:

In DF, a lot of the spawns are dynamic, which means once a certain type of creature has been driven to extinction in a certain area in a short range of time, they'll "migrate" to some other part of the world and a new type of creature will take it's place.

Let me elaborate on this.

Let's say there is a certain cave close to a settlement that is being occupied by a red dragon.
This red dragon has a bunch of lizardmen slaves which are constantly looking for food for their master and serve him by either bringing it to him or being it.

This might cause a good deal of trouble for travellers and nearby cities, since they are generally good sources of food.
Now, eventually a brave(and big) group of adventurers might hear about this and decide the dragon needs to be removed. So they venture in there heroically, kill it and claim the mound of treasure it, being a dragon, obviously has.
They return home with more glory and more riches than they had before, and maybe even shiny armour and weapons that are ever so slightly better than what they had(I refer to "loot" once more for further details.)
What we have now is happy traders, happy villages, and an empty cave.

Any would be dragon killer that camps the cave for several hours will be sorely dissapointed: the dragon will not return.

Now, let's assume that eventually, a group of 30 goblins(the cliché fantasy type of goblins, not the wow "merchant with bombs" type) become the new denizens of the cave. Their numbers being too few, they don't do much more than hang around the cave entrance and killing off some of the wild life when it gets too close.

There are, however, also travelling groups of NPC in the world, nomads if you will. One such group of 25 goblins might happen upon the 30 other goblins, and be accepted into their camp. And there was much rejoicing.

55 goblins is a large number, and let's assume the goblins needed to have a group size of at least 50 to trigger the next stage in their development. Having now reached this stage, they'll have, for example, a 10% chance to spawn a goblin hero every hour they are undisturbed.

Once that happens, they have a further 15% chance every hour to build an outpost at the cave entrance, and once the outpost is there bigger, badder goblins start spawning regularily which start to raid the outlying settlements. On top of these random occurences, which will be happening pretty much on a daily scale, the world will always be filled. Which will hopefully make sure a new band of adventurers takes care of this problem before they do too much damage.

Or you could farm rep!

Like... like... WSG rep.

...

Dear God help me.

Actually, I could imagine an MMO company investing some time in a "roguelike" (or Diabo-like, if you prefer) instance. It would actually be kind of fun to have a place you could go for a semi-randomly generated hack-and-slash dungeon-delving session with friends every once in a while.

Of course, it wouldn't be able to have any best-of-the-best type gear, or other serious farmable rewards. But it could make for a fun alternative way to do the farming we already do. And if the difficulty level can ramp up in reasonable enough ways, you could even make it able to produce a limited volume of heroic badges or the like once you reach a certain depth. (Very limited, probably.)

But, probably won't happen. People will almost always choose more predictable rewards over less predictable, which means it would see very limited use, and it would require a pretty serious investment of development time.

I'm hesitant to point out other MMOs on here, but I think Darkfall is just vaporware. Mortal Online is the new Darkfall.

It's easy to say that you want to put dynamic content into a game and it's quite another thing altogether to actually implement it. The closest that I have seen thus far would be Eve Online. In that game if I go into a system and strip-mine all of the asteroids in a given field, then the asteroids are gone and take a long time to respawn. Repeat this over and over across many systems and what you find as a new player is that all of the newbie areas have almost no asteroids at all to mine. As soon as any spawn, a huge powerful player comes along and mines them to nothing in minutes.

Dynamic may be a great thing to say on paper, but considering how much effort must go into each and every element of an area, let alone the game as a whole, and how much time each area takes, it simply isn't feasible.

Let me elaborate on that further: say Blizzard has 100 people working on WoW total. Let's say 20 of them are working on what exists currently, fixing bugs with the current client, etc. That leaves 80 people to work on expansions/patches. Let's say you put 40 of those people on patch 2.4 and 40 of them on Lich King. It has taken 40 people what, over a year now to get Lich King to "internal alpha" stage? At some point Blizzard will probably decide "ok we will have no more patches before Lich King" and those 40 people that were working on patches can throw their weight at the expansion. So you have 80 people working on Lich King to get the final push done. As soon as it finishes, your original 20 move over to Lich King and begin trouble-shooting and fixing all its bugs. Your original patch-team of 40 starts working on 3.1 and your 40 expansion devs start working on whatever is coming next.

The problem with the above and why dynamic content won't work is that if you look at it, it took 2 years for BC to come out using the above model. 2 years. BC is pretty huge, you can't deny it. I don't think you truly understand how much extra work would be required to create a dynamic environment. Looking just a mob spawns for example, currently mobs have "set" spawn locations. Sometimes like with a named mob it's 1 spot, sometimes with "area" mobs it will be a large number of random locations, but we all know there are X actual spawn nodes and they spawn at random. Each mob must then be set to randomly move about or not.

I don't know how it could be more random than that. You can't randomize static spawns because for example a static spawn is a mob standing in front of a tent. It's an external world, the tent is always going to be there. So what, you sometimes want the mob to stand a bit to the left? Maybe a bit to the right? Or maybe the mobs should all path around so that at times they're all standing in a circle, impossible to pull? A ton of thought goes into each spawn to make it work exactly the way a dev wants, and to randomize it would only lead to frustration for the players.


TLDR: you don't like it, go elsewhere.

Okay, let's look at your solutions one by one.

Halaa PvP? Are you being sarcastic? Halaa PvP occurs less frequently than Terokkar spirit towers PvP.

I'm not sure if going out of your way to inconvenience yourself really makes the game more immersive.

"you" and 30 random people that you spammed for in general chat?

I'm not sure if going out of your way to cripple yourself really makes the game more immersive.

Virtually any video game allows you to play the game idiotically if you choose to do so. That is not "power of choice".

The OP's point isn't communicated very well, but I think I agree with the gist of it. WoW 1.0 was an interesting world with some intrigue and mystery and danger in it. TBC, by comparison, is thoroughly refined to the point of blandness. 99% of outdoors content is soloable, the rest is carefully designed to be completed with three players, there are a couple of bosses for large raids, and everything is generally carefully partitioned such that you can't accidentally find yourself in a bad spot. There's no exploration of note, because exploration has been trivialized by flying mounts, and that's just how it is.

If the only way to wrangle some immersion out of the outdoor world is to artificially nerf yourself, then I'd venture to say that it's a design flaw.

I don't see what was so different about the world environment from Vanilla as compared to now. So people sit around Shatt all day while waiting for something they want to do to come along. Only difference in Vanilla was people sat around Org and Ironforge instead. There were more world bosses in Vanilla because of the Emerald Dream Dragons.... but exactly what else was a challenge? There were some non instanced elite areas and people avoided them like the plague. Why? because it was like a dungeon with no reward. They can't give you nice rewards because then people will just brute force the areas with more people than are intended and camp the respawns.

I've heard nightmares about other games with non-instanced raid content and if you've ever tried killing DLK (TBC version which is located in a more highly populated zone) with people either two stupid to stay out of range or are purposely trying to grief you by repeatedly dying or tried in Vanilla to beat other guilds at getting organized and in position to kill one of the world dragons before another guild got the word out and beats you there (especially if you're opposing factions on a pvp realm) then you know what a frustration stuff like that can be.

Having a hard time getting at what you are missing from vanilla and thinking should change with TBC unless this is just a thinly veiled attempt to promote that other MMO.

Except once the dragon is dead, the large guild with all-time-zones members--the ones that wiped the dragon out in the first place--will take turns in shifts farming the goblins and elves and whatever comes next, leaving a nice dynamic developing storyline for the camping group and nothing but corpses for anyone else. Or this all-time-zones group would get their jollies from sitting just outside the newbie zone and descending on the content like locusts, making the post-newb experience pure misery for anyone else.

While I enjoy the thought of dynamic content in a large-scale environment, and I like the theories behind its application, these developers have to remember that they're opening up their amusement park to the public, and I think we can all agree that socially stunted malcontents have a disproportionately negative effect on the social environment. When designing and implementing these games, developers literally have to plan for the worst situations they can think of--knowing that no matter how bad they think it'll get, some players will figure out a way to make it worse. And the more influence a player or group of players has over the shared environment, the worse the behavior that will be exhibited.

Why do they do this? I don't know. Lots of reasons... because they can, because they think it's funny, because they want to see if they can get away with it, who knows. Fact remains is they do it, and unless someone or something prevents them, they will continue to do so.

Dynamic content works great if you limit the amount of time a player can be logged in, or you limit the amount of players on the server, or you limit human interaction in a fairly draconian way, or by placing any number of other limitations on players--many of whom have a very, very, very long history of antisocial behavior. In theory, this works excellently (though putting that many restrictions on behavior and ability sort of flies in the face of "dynamism" in the first place, but that's pedantic, really).

In practice, think about a game that kicks you off the server every day when your 60 allowable minutes of daily play time has expired. How long would that game last?

As far as the overall game design goes, most people on these forums will have it dissected, diluted, and devoured in short order. It's just what we do. For the rest of the game's population though, many still see it as a magical place to adventure and have fun.

I've see this first hand over the last few months, since 2.3 released. Due to real life schedule conflicts and a need to take a break, I bowed out gracefully from a progressing raid guild making gains in T5 content.

I came back after a while, and still felt a need to take it easy, and play more casual for a time before looking to raid again. So, I ended up joining a guild my wife was in, with her parents. There is a majority of casuals in the guild, many still in their 40's on their first character. In short, their lack of knowledge of game mechanics is simply staggering. I had to step back, look at the players, and then take a much larger look at the WoW player base in general. I was so used to being part of a certain group, seeing the reality of the server population blew my mind.

It is not uncommon to find Warlocks who don't use fear because it's too unpredictable, feral druids who spec into insect swarm instead of omen of clarity because they like the damage it does, magi specced 20/20/20 because they like to use all their spells... you get the idea. There are a ton of people out there who are happy playing the way they play, struggle with outdoor elite quests in small groups, let alone solo, and who think instances are some great mystery still. They grind rep because they like the stuff it gives, they do dailies because they are too ineffectually geared to farm efficiently. The game design caters to these people much more so than they do the top echelon, while still providing content for the top tier players these people will never see.

Dynamic content, which can be overly controlled by the top tier excludes a much larger player base than static content which begins to feel repetitive to the top tier does. So while I support new and original ideas, from a business model standpoint, they have something which works, and by all accounts, works very well. Hopefully WotLK will meld some new ideas into a very solid formula and we all can learn a thing or two.

Talk about "dynamic worlds" from developers is pretty much always just a lot of hot air and hyping. I have never encountered a game world that I was not able to figure out how it worked pretty fast, no matter how hard the developers tried to hide it.

Also, there is a point to not allowing the players change the world too much in a MMORPG. If ally players can find enjoyment killing all the quest NPCs in Crossroads for hours, just imagine what they might do in a game world where they could have a much larger impact. How would such a world look for a new player six months down the road?