So, I'd just typed out a needlessly long post responding to the latest variation of the "former-EQ-devs lied to us and are ruining the game" threads that are popular these days, forgetting that it was Tuesday (feels like a Monday to me -- damn holidays). "Login server down." Well, I'll just throw it up here and expand on it a bit (edit: ok, maybe "a bit" was an understatement).

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First off, what I'd originally typed up, to post in response to, basically, "Why can't the game at 60 be what we all knew and loved from 1-59?": Now, some further thoughts. I had a Mac of some sort for the vast majority of my life, and only got a PC in my last year of law school (because they were moving to offering exams on computer and they didn't have Mac-compatible exam software -- fun stuff). So I missed out on the first generation of MMOs (not to mention a ton of other awesome games) entirely. I'd never been on a "raid" as such prior to going to Molten Core in WoW. My first MMO experience was Lineage 2, which I played from 3/04 to 7/04 or thereabouts, but damn did I put a lot of time into it during those four months. And that first exposure definitely shapes a lot of my views about the genre. It's a shame -- after the first couple of patches ("Chronicles"), I think it's actually a very good game now. But it was initially a low-budget localization that clearly was aimed at extracting profit from the NA market with a minimum of investment. The translation was horrible. They didn't resize any of the chat or interface windows so that the English-language text didn't even fit in the boxes that had been designed for the much more compact Korean. There was a bad dupe bug at one point. The interface was spartan, the grind was harsh, and until NCSoft added their much-touted siege/castle system in a patch 3 months after release, there was no point to that grind. Oh, and they had this little problem with professional farmers... Lineage was a game where money was everything. Levels would come over time regardless, but equipment made more of a difference than level for most purposes. Several million adena with which to purchase the shiniest toys would turn a gimp into a god. No better game for money-selling has ever been produced, I think. Over time, the presence of non-English-speaking farmers who monopolized all the major resources and hunting spots just so they could sell the stuff back to you at inflated prices, probably helped drive enough people out of the game that at this point, I think the game is only commercially viable, to the extent that it is so, because of the farmers. It's a freakish symbiotic relationship between the 50% of the playerbase that farms and sells the fruits of that farming to the other 50%, who buy it so that they can stay competitive with each other.

It didn't have to be that way -- it's a lesson in mismanagement for any would-be developers out there. Today, I think it's actually a very good game with an incredible amount of potential that offers something no other entrant in the MMO market does with its PvP-centric hardcore style. But it'll never succeed. The remaining playerbase is worse than the people you'd find in a Gunbound or GunZ lobby, and they relentlessly drive away any decent players that might otherwise consider the game. Take the naturally social nature of an MMO, and the level of personal commitment involved in deciding to play one, and add the natural human desire to feel like one is moving in groups of one's peers or betters, and a bad playerbase becomes a self-perpetuating problem. No matter how good NCSoft makes their game, potential reasonable customers will be driven off, one-by-one, by the culture that has come to pervade the game. (On a separate note, is there any site out there that lists official subscriber numbers or estimates for MMOs in NA only? I know the global figures, but I'd love to see how many active subscriptions L2 has in NA today.)

Now, to bring this horrible tangent back to WoW... you say "Lineage 2" and everyone groans and it conjures images of horrible, endless grinding. Well, how horrible? At the high end, think 30 hours to get a single level. Brutal, right? Well, pause for a moment and think about some of the facets of WoW. I spent easily that long farming gold for my epic mount to enable me to move through the world faster. I'm Exalted with the Zandalar trolls -- that took easily 60-70 hours of real time, apportioned in 3.5-hour chunks, and scheduled at specific times. The difference is that if I'd spent 60 hours of time playing my character in Lineage 2, I'd have 2 (probably 3) levels to show for it, almost certainly some significant gear upgrade, and I'd feel a lot more powerful than I was before. In WoW, I have +33 to healing on my shoulders instead of +5 resists, which is nice, but not really something I'd notice on a daily basis. Or how about people who are Exalted with BG factions? (I'm AV Exalted and Revered with Warsong.) Or those who aimed for, much less achieved, PvP ranks 11+? And people make fun of Lineage for its grind.

Well, I understand the need for it. You need timesinks, as much as players complain, to keep MMOs viable as a business model. When players truly run out of things to do, they cancel their subscriptions. If they have things to do, but those things are tedious and lengthy, some will cancel, but most will grumble and stick around. On some level, that will always happen to the true vanguard of a game's population. The people who can play 80 hours a week will play 80 hours a week, and they will blow through your content faster than you can design it. But they're a small minority. More numerous are those who can play, say, 20 hours a week. Maybe not all in big chunks, but scattered here and there, with the occasional weekend marathon session. I suspect most WoW players fall into that category. That's the player around whom you have to plan your game, and I think WoW has failed in that regard. That player will hit 60 in around 4 months. If he bought WoW at release, he was 60 by the end of March. If Blizzard is lucky, that person will then look at the level 60 content, say "Hrm, looks kind of bleak right now," and start the process anew with an alt. If you play the game for the journey, rather than the destination, then that's all well and good. Those players will be satisfied going back with a new character and doing different quests they'd missed the first time around, or seeing what tanking an instance is like instead of being a healer. They're easy to please. And they're a sizeable group, but I'm not sure I'd say they are the majority.

A lot of players are much more ends-based. Take me -- I'm a shameless powergamer. I have no alts, and never really plan to have any, and though I use "oh I'm so busy between work and raiding and guild responsibilities that I just don't have the time" as an excuse when guildmates give me shit about it, if I really wanted to make one, I would've found the time. The truth is that the concept doesn't really appeal to me. I'd rather spend dozens of hours making my main character 1% more powerful than taking a whole new character from 1 to 60, because that new character will never be as strong or useful as my main, so why bother? Anyway, that's the segment of the playerbase that you see largely griping on the WoW forums these days. I at least have the raid game as an outlet for continued growth and enjoyment. I'm two BWL items away from being "done" with all current content, but then I'll have AQ to play with, so that'll be fine. But the people who are complaining are people who are just like me, except without the time or inclination to become part of large raiding guilds. That 20-hours-a-week-in-small-chunks guy who hit 60 in March but can't raid because his schedule is too erratic is a bored and cranky motherfucker right about now. He probably spent a couple of months in Strat/Scholo/UBRS/DM gearing up, and then kind of ran out of things to do. Maybe he's messed around with the BGs, but the upgrades available there are minimal, and if you're on the wrong side of a population imbalance, queue times are a nightmare. And good luck trying to play AB/WSG with a shoddy PUG. So you either cancel your account, or if you're still wrapped up in the vision and memories of the first 5-6 months of gameplay that were so enthralling, you want to hold onto that experience, so you don't cancel... and you instead bitch. You write long rants about casual vs. hardcore players and how Tigole and Furor are ruining WoW and ask for more 5-man and solo content, etc. etc.

Welcome to WoW General Discussion.

At this point in time, Blizzard is doing the best they can, I think. Content takes time to produce. They just need to hang on until the expansion hits, and that'll shut everybody up for a while and let them regroup. But they shouldn't have dug themselves into this hole in the first place.

The problem is pacing. While leveling, I'd spend an average of 6 hours to realize a vast improvement in my character's abilities. While at 60, I have to spend ten times that to see even a small improvement in my character's potential. Why the need for those extremes? It should've taken 25-30 days of /played instead of 12-15 to reach 60. They had the content for it already in place. Tons of quests, lots of instances, a vast world to explore. You get access to all new skills/spells every two levels. A new talent point every level. Access to new gear. A huge jump in power vs. all NPCs near your level because of how combat equations work. The carrot was there, and it would've been quite sustainable. Instead, so many people are 60 but haven't done half the quests out there. By pacing their leveling too quickly, Blizzard effectively wasted hundreds of development hours. How many Horde players have done the quest in Searing Gorge that suggests a link between the Twilight Cultists and Ragnaros? How many got the scroll that drops from the elite alliance outriders in the Barrens ("omg mounted alliance in south barrens") and sends you on a quest deep in Stonetalon? Did you do the Argent Dawn quests in Desolace? Did you solve the mystery of the burned inn in Dustwallow? I've done all of the above, but I'll wager I'm in a tiny, tiny minority of people who did all of that on one character.

Blizzard painted themselves into a corner by making leveling so fast that even the "casual" player could hit cap level within a few months. So now they need to buy time. So we get Exalted faction rewards and the honor system and the rare materials for Z'G enchants and so forth. And people, naturally, complain. They could've avoided this trap by halving the speed of progress pre-60, and doubling the speed of progress post-60. It'd feel more uniform and consistently rewarding, and less like a bullet train hitting a brick wall. And yes, they should've known. They should've seen how quickly people in Beta were hitting the cap, even when they knew their characters were getting wiped inevitably anyway. I'm not sure what they were thinking, honestly -- did anyone touch on this subject at Blizzcon?

So, I don't blame Blizzard for doing what they do now, because they have no other choice than to find ways of keeping us busy while they play catch-up. I have a hunch the Expansion will have a much slower pace in general than the pre-60 retail game did, which is probably a good thing. But it's a shame they didn't pick up on all this sooner.

They've already said that the time it'll take to get from 60 to 70 will be no less than the time it took to get from 1 to 60. So it does look like they've learned. The reason I think for the initial lack of serious grind is due to two things.

One, they knew their audience and it seemed like a lesser of two evils. The average Bnet kiddie isn't the personality type that'd be tolerant of a slow progression. He wants to be bad ass and he wants it now and wtf I have to do ANOTHER quest and why can't I go kill a dragon now if I want to this is stupid Blizz that you'd make me play this game for 6 months and I still don't have enough money to get a mount omg lame.

Second, they saw how tedious EQ was and didn't want their game requiring people to sit in one spot for hours a day just to get 5% closer to the next experience level. So to avoid that, they went to the other extreme to distance themselves from the term "hardcore." WoW was going to be good for the jarshitter AND the casual noob.

I agree that's what Blizzard was aiming for, but I'm not sure about the capacity of the average player. B.Net is the same place that brought you thousands of people killing cows for 10 hours a day.

I agree that a truly brutal grind while leveling would be a mistake -- I just think you need to strike the right balance, and Blizzard probably came down too far on the "easy" side of that balance. Better than the other extreme, I suppose, from a commercial perspective, which will cost you short-term subscriptions. I guess from a business standpoint, it's easier to retain people once they've already subscribed since they have certain sunk costs (i.e., time and money already invested). Blizzard's approach resulted in nothing but surging subscriptions and uniform praise for the first few months of the game's existence, but the period of time between this fall and the release of the expansion is going to be full of a whole lot of complaining. I guess if it won the war with EQ2 before it even really began, maybe it was worth it?

I think the 1-60 process could be doubled in length without being too onerous. The fact that many "casual" players have 2 or even 3 level 60 characters suggests as much. Anything more than that would probably be too much.

I agree one issue you must realize though is that if blizzard had made leveling take lets say twice as long then you would have the complainers saying it is taking too long to lvl and would get tired of the deadmines,RFKs, RFDs, SMs, and STs of the game. There is no way to make everyone happy. They do need to add a tier above DM. I am not talking about ZG or UBRS. UBRS takes basically the skill of a 5 year old unless you actually try to make it challenging for yourself but that isnt blizzard's intention with any of the pre ZG instances. They need to add 2 or 3 new 5 man instances and a couple 10 man instances and also put more emphasis on the world. There is alot of work to be done and honestly I think it will take till the first expansion for most of it to be realized.

I am a patient person. I enjoy challenges. Whether it is helping a new guild in MC or being the only healer in 8 man UBRS. So I will always be happy as long as I can occasionally get some new loot but not all can say that and some dont even have the ability to do it. DM, LBRS, UBRS, scholo are all great but if you got your character to 60 in april or may then most likely you have all the gear out of those instances you would ever want. Casual players have been kinda forgotten and they do need some help.

Touching on one of the first things you said, I've always thought RFK, BFD and SFK were some of the best designed instances in the game, and even if you were part of the inital wave of sixties on your server, you only went through them once or twice while you were leveling. When I was leveling Stalkman, I'd hear about an upgrade in SM, or RFD that would be great for around level 40. However, if I'd already done the quests and got the exp (which was the real reward for me as far as advancement was concerned) I wouldn't go back and keep running because I was just going to outlevel the equipment I had in another couple days.

I'm not sure if I'm saying too much new stuff or just providing examples, but it would've been nice in the trip to 60 to have to really care about your characters gear advancement rather than just having all your items be very tempoary until you got to 60. Thats one thing I really noticed listening to people talk about FFXI.

Also, how did slug work out ghostwriting for you?

I really never felt RFK was all that extroardinary. Also I found that most instances feel wonderful since you didnt go through them 50 times like you do with your lvl 60 instances. I dont think blizzard ever intended 1-59 to be anything but a means to an end. The biggest problem is they forgot to add enough new content in the end to last long enough to excite people. That all will change as the game matures. The benefit EQ had was it took so long to level that they could add stuff and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to content, blizzard doesnt have that option with how long it takes to hit 60. Hopefully they are gonna do that with the expansion but I dont see anything before that that will be extensive enough to change the fact that there isnt quite enough content to keep people interested if they dont have the luxury to be doing MC/BWL/ZG.

But my argument is that blizzard does not care that much about 1-59. You may say that deadmines and BFD and the such are examples that they do but I just say that they want to hold all instances to a certain standard and that is it. I think they wanted a speedy progression to 60 and then they could put all their time into lvl 60 and beyond. One of my favorite bosses is the skeleton boss in RFD, not because he is difficult but because the first time you pull him and 100 skellies come with him it scares the shit out of ya. Is this as cool the second time? No I dont think so unless you are bringing new people through. so then you have the issue with how many times should a person go through an instance till it loses it's luster and you progress through. Well I dont think after 6-7 times through an instance is it fun anymore and that means that slowing down the lvling wont really help it anyways. I think 1-59 is a fast paced rollercoaster whereas lvl 60 is that car ride through the mountains that can be enjoyable but man it takes a long time. The only mistake blizzard made was that it would have been good to slow down peoples leveling enough so that they could have had more content at 60. Other than that I think it was done about right.

Oh and there was alot of complaining about the uldaman necklace also people hated that it took awhile. No matter what happens people chime up with complaintes.

I've never understood the person spending 30g for a new weapon at level 40, or spending another 20g to have me enchant Fiery on it!?! People who beg or "borrow" gold at level 15 to buy a new chestpiece, only to replace it with something they find in WC the next day. People who run SFK a dozen times to get a certain drop off of Aragul(sp?) and then complain that they didn't gain any XP for those last 4 runs through because they had out-levelled the place, and even the item they were farming for all that time. Heck, I've mailed items that have dropped for me to alts, and have even enchanted a few of them or had a guildie enchant equipement on them, but I whole-heartedly agree that the 1-59 is way too short. And anyone who's 'investing' in this time period is a moron. But yes, it's not all thier fault. They just know there's this awesome edge they could get for thier char and drool over it. But what they're NOT thinking about is that Blizzard messed up and made that content way too short for any type of investment like that.

I've always been big into alts, had 20 in closed beta (10 normal, 10 PvP), I have 10 chars on Mal'Ganis (all 20+), 10 on Eredar (all 15+), and a half dozen scattered across other realms of various levels. But there's only so many times you can do the same ol' quests over and over again, and I've done my best to make sure I haven't missed any on my main character Witchdoctor. I've just gotten so frustrated with the non-raid portion of the game that I don't hardly even touch any of it anymore. Occasionally I'll get some new loot that needs attention, but otherwise when it's time for BWL, I'm on, otherwise I might stop in to say "Hi" or something, but that's about it.

Well, not sure what I'm trying to say. I love WoW, but like all loves it frustrates the hell out of me sometimes. And the big question is, will I still be playing WoW when the expansion comes out? I'd like to think so, but if something else was to come into my life I don't see WoW as much of a big contender anymore. Heck, if it wasn't for my Shining Force/ Jihorde family, I'm not sure I'd even be playing WoW today.

One thing about the low level instances is that if you have any conception of what's ahead you don't even bother. On my first server I quested and did instances all the way to about 45. Then, for no good reason I started grinding trolls in the Hinterlands. Two days later I had boosted by repuation with the Wildhammer clan to friendly and was level 47. Why? I don't know. From that point on I didn't run any instance unless there was something in there worth keeping for a good long time. On this character I've been on one (disastrous) Zul'Farrak run: the Mason's Ring and Carrot are both viable until 60. I think I'm at 6-7 days played and I'm at level 46.

The problem is a lack of incentive. I saw a rogue running around with a Wingblade at one point, thought, "Wow, that's kind of nice," but then realized that in the 2-3 hours it would take me to run that instance I could just grind to 26 and get a Butcher or 29 and get a Zealot Blade. You encounter four basic issues when you run an instance: 1) gear; is the stuff I'll get in here worth it for more than one or two levels? 2) Time; is it worth spending x-y hours (potentially dealing with fucktards)? 3) Exp; can I make more exp in here than I would grinding solo? 4) Boredom; will this instance get old really quickly?

What I find myself yearning for is the random dungeons of Ye Olde Diabloe One...e. A dungeon that has a basic tileset, monsters and a generic loot table, and have it scale based on how many people are in your party.

It would be nice to have a couple instaces along the way that are random in layout. Having the spawns be random between firelords/LE's, different breaths on Chrom are steps in the right directions. Just need to see this kind of stuff on a grander scale.

Of course there is the downside to random layouts. How man Mephisto runs have you done (without maphack) where all you want to do is get to Meph but you end up having to search the whole level for the stairs.

Personally, I never did instances while leveling up, and I'd have been extremely annoyed if we suddenly became required to. I left FFXI for WoW for WoW's solo leveling system; one of the main reasons I picked a hunter was because it was advertised on the website as an excellent soloer. I loved questing, it was something FFXI never really offered, and questing to level up was great. I wouldn't like it if I ran out of quests every 2 levels and had to grind to the next teir, or worse, run instances. I think that I represent at least some part of the audience: we liked one part of the leveling experience, and were happy to only have to use it to level up, rather than all parts.

That's why I rather liked the 1-60 game. If you wanted to grind mobs to 60, you could, and it wouldn't take an extremely long time. If you wanted to quest to 60, you wouldn't run out for the most part(though originally there were some holes, I believe patches have since shored them up for the most part). And if you wanted to run instances to 60, that's fine too. But if you want to mix them, yes, you're going to get levels quicker than you can finish the content. I don't think you should be required to finish most or all of the content before you outgrow it, that's what alts are for, right? Sure, they could've added a lot more content 1-60 to compensate and then slowed exp gain, but that would've made the game take even LONGER to develop, and I imagine they were wanting to get it out ASAP to compete with EQ2.

I think there were gonna be good and bad sides no matter how they went, and the choices they made were probably the best from the business standpoint. Any game can be made better, no matter how good it becomes, and Blizzard doesn't have a perfect track record with WoW, but I think it's turned out pretty well, considering.

Just my $0.02

Strangely enough, I'm old friends of the US Producers on Lineage 2 when we were all producing console games together. As you definitely noticed, they have extremely limited resources to work with.

Lineage 2 is doing just fine in the US. They have a solid, insanely dedicated PvP base. The game came out of the gate pretty strong in the first couple months in the US its numbers have been consistent since. L2 offers a hardcore experience you can't find in any other MMO in the US. It's made incredible money in Asia, it's consistently profitable in the US due to it being run very efficiently, and everyone is happy.

Having worked on a MMO or two, I'll chime in with some design thoughts when I have the time tomorrow. The 1-59 game was incredibly crafted but flew by. The 60 game was alright to start... but grinding to Exalted with the Defilers as Horde on Mal'Ganis or killing 90,000 Twilight Cultists while waiting for your handful of raid timers to reset? Sweet Jesus, that wasn't what I was picturing the end game would be.

No, no. Believe me, I can feel your pain from the FFXI grind. What I meant was that the instances in this game are far too rigid and the rewards themselves are not very impressive. I'm like you, I'm grinding to 60 with a smattering of quests thrown in from time to time. What I meant was that I'd like to see some kind of reward for doing an instance, be it extra experience, better items, whatever, just something that offers an incentive to go through an instance.

Some of the best quest XP is from Instances, and some of the best loot you can get while leveling is from Instances. Instances also provide the best source of grinding XP as long as you don't have a 60 run you through or something. The problem isn't that the Instances are useless, it's just anything you get from them you could have skipped and still found your way to 60 before you knew it. The early game Instances are nice, but don't stay with you long enough, especially compaired to the later game Instances that you end up running 50 times either because you could possibly use something from there, or you just don't have anything better to do.

I love raiding. It's the only thing that's kept me playing after hitting 60. But even my love for raiding doesn't make places like UBRS, ZG, and MC seem interesting anymore. If I wasn't still missing 2 pieces of EF and wanted Rag's Choker I'd never run MC. As of now, I run, but if someone I like wants in, I gladly let them take my spot.

I'm actually dreading us taking down Nef. Yes there's that whole "We beat the game!" concept that's gonna' be fun to say (till patch anyways) but that also means BWL for the most part will be less challenging and become more mundane. Even if Nef remains challenging (which I'm sure he will), the pleasure of working my way to him for the challenge will be lessened.

The arguement here I believe is not about Instances, but about the "fun" part of the game (1-59) being too short. Instances was just an idear thrown around about how Blizzard could have done things differently to lengthen the fun-factor of WoW.

Well, yes, it's been established that endgame content is lacking in diversity.

I just realized that it was the only way to progress, and I was in the best damn guild to run those instances with. I mostly ran raid(well, they were raid at the time) instances, large group content had always been a favorite of mine even in FFXI; I ran DM enough to get what I needed and stopped. I loved Dynamis in FFXI, so it was natural that I enjoyed raid instances.

But yeah, I was only referring to 1-59 content. Endgame is different.

The problem with the game right now is the balance between PVP and PVE. The 1-59 game went by way too fast I'll admit. But the serious problem is how they to balance PVP rewards with the PVE rewards.

For example, the faction grinds with all the battlegrounds to get a few epic items can not be compared to the rewards from killing Nef. With the instant attack changes, the High Warlord weapons dramatically decreased in value because they were essentially the slowest weapons out there. They're great for that avid PVPer that plays the game to receive their PVP sets and the weapons but I believe they don't go well in tandem with PVE items. That's just my theory though on the High Warlord weapons, prove it wrong if you like.

Also, there needs to be an increase in customization of your character. Such as being able to find a quest in a secluded area that only one person can do every few weeks. Sure, it sucks if someone that isn't in an uber guild finds it but that's their fault for not exploring the world more.

Not only that but lore needs to be tied into customization. Tauren Leatherworkers could find a quest to make a new skin that needs to be made for the new building or w/e so the Shamans can channel their energies or some other lore explanation. Or Undead Alchemists sometime in the future could find a long quest to develop a way to convert them back into humans.

So yeah, the 1-59 game went by too fast and they didn't have enough time to allow themselves to develop interesting ways of customization for level 60.

It's never been truly stated whether the Forsaken want to convert back into humans. Yet the Taurens have said that they want to help restore them back to their humanity.

Well part of what I was getting at is that keeping players interested during the leveling process is also a lot easier than keeping them interested at max level. Balancing a level progression is also a whole lot easier than any alternate means of advancement you can come up with, be it item-based, skill-based, talent-based, EQ-style AAs, or whatever.

Logging off after a night of some grinding or instancing and being 70% of the way to level X+1, which will make your entire character better, is a lot more satisfying than logging off and being 5% closer to a faction threshold that will give you a temporary improvement to one small facet of your character.

I understand the points above about how the fast leveling was appreciated, and so forth. Of course it is -- on some level it's hard to take a step back as a player and say "this should take longer, it'd be for my own good." We've all seen free private servers of various (usually Asian) MMOs that crank up the exp rates to 5x, 10x, 20x. Because that's the only way the game is "fun." And sure, it's fun, but for how long? No one spends two years on the same private Ragnarok or L2 server. They're fun to mess around on, but you get max level at a ridiculous rate just because advancement is so quick, you see what there is to see, and then you move on. It works fine for hobbyists who are just running private servers in their spare time. But it's no business model. The odd thing is just the dissonance between pre-60 WoW and WoW at 60+. As I stated above, one year ago today I was level 55 or so, less than a week away from hitting 60. I could spend a full night questing in EPL with a group and get practically a full level. New spells, more hp, more mana. Things would stop aggroing me from so far away, and critting me as much. It was nice, and noticeable. In December 2005, I spend an evening in Zul'Gurub for 950 rep, out of the 10500 I need just to get the last half of Exalted, so that I can get an improvement that will affect my character only marginally and that will almost surely eventually become obsolete. Where's the middle ground between those poles? I can understand a game in which progress always comes quickly, and I can understand a game in which every step is a chore and every milestone is to be savored. It's just oddly dissonant to see the two side-by-side in the same game. And, as I also said above, it's interesting seeing how things play out when a sizeable chunk of the playerbase gets a taste of the once-rarified air to which powergamers are accustomed, as they reach max level when there isn't enough there to occupy them.

I think a lot of the other complaints, be they about lack of customization, lack of 5-man content, lack of crafting diversity, etc., all stem from the initial misstep that is the topic of my first post. Over a year later now, Blizzard is still scrambling to catch up to its players. They can't afford to devote the development resources to areas like tradeskills because they simply need more content in a raw form. More zones, more quests, more instances, more items. Maybe once the expansion comes out, they can pause to catch their breath and turn back to these areas that also are in need of attention.

Now, on an entirely separate note, I think it was Witchdoctor who posted above about a sense of investment. That's something else I think you miss out on in the case of leveling in WoW. I'm hesitant to make comparisons to my prior experience since I know everyone's "first" MMO is always viewed through rose-tinted lenses, but to this day I vividly remember the excitement and satisfaction I felt at various points while leveling in L2, even at early levels, when I'd finally get an amazing new weapon I had spent a week saving for, or when I completed a class-change quest that let me specialize within my profession. It made a huge difference in my character's power and thus my gameplay experience -- I remember going out into the field after making the trip to buy my next weapon and fighting some of the things I'd been accustomed to grinding, and being utterly blown away by the difference. Those moments made the time invested all feel worthwhile. Sure, it's a game, it's bits and bytes on a server somewhere, and it's all illusory. But fuck it, those moments are real and they linger with a player. By contrast, 1-59 in WoW was a blur. I never played beta, so it was all new to me, and I enjoyed it, but nothing really stands out. I got some nice loot here and there that was exciting at the time, but it was all outdated and in need of replacement within a few levels. I can't think of any item that my character has ever gotten that made me say "holy shit, this changes everything." My vivid memories from WoW are killing Lucifron for the first time on February 5th when we hadn't the first clue about raiding, killing Onyxia for the first time after a week of frustrating wipes when we could've been farming MC for easy loot instead, and killing Ragnaros on a night that was supposed to just be a practice run for the real attempts the following day. I've been fortunate enough to have those experiences and to share them with an amazing group of players, but I wonder what my outlook on the game would be if not for that facet of it, which continues to hold my interest.

What are the moments that stand out for you guys? What is it about a game that you think lends itself to the creation of those moments?

Yeah and when the Tauren tried to help we poisoned her instead!

:highfive:

He managed this one all by himself, I'm proud to say; though he did cover the majority of my thoughts on the subject as well. :)

It's interesting how they managed to screw many things up in the same fashion as past games, but through different means. How many people in the later EQ generations ever even knew where Dalnir was or had been there? That was one of the better designed crawls and easily one of my most favorite dungeons in the game, but it just didn't make any sense to go there after a certain point in the game's lifespan.

People rarely went to that place even at the proper levels, but once more expansions came out, noone went there at all. Everyone was on the moon. Why? Efficiency. Efficiency kills gaming over the course of a game's lifespan, because it's nigh impossible to resist the urge to powergame, even if you're a "casual" player. No matter how well a game is designed, it's nearly impossible to balance properly. As gamers figure out what is the most efficient way to play, they will very shortly begin to do nothing but that unless they're insanely bored. (How many people besides myself and Zileas stuck with playing Random or Protoss on Starcraft during the infamous "Godly Zerg Patches"? It was so easy to win as Zerg at some points that noone wanted to play anything else.)

I'll give some further examples of "efficiency ruined gaming" from past Blizzard games and EQ, I suppose, since most will be familiar with those titles easily.

First, look to Diablo 2. The moment people figured out that they could powerlevel by skipping a good 90% of the game on the backs of other characters and doing Baal runs, that became the only way to play. Blizzard ultimately patched the game to try and curb that behaviour, but there were still faster ways to level your characters and gear up than through playing the game straight through as intended.

From the moment a game releases, there is a limited timeframe in which it is pure and can be enjoyed as the original designers intended it. With the advent of public betas, this timeframe has been noticably reduced in modern titles. There will come a time very shortly after release when the gaming public has figured out the fastest and best ways of doing things. (If they don't just hack it and cheat, instead.) The moment that threshold is reached, the game becomes broken and there's nothing you can ultimately do to fix it and restore things to how they should be. All you can do is slap bandaids on and work on the next title.

[top]

You can also think of it in terms of an RTS game's lifespan. When Starcraft was in beta, I remember countless fun strategies that didn't work after people had figured out more of the game mechanics down the road. I remember epic games that sometimes went for hours and involved all the units available for each side. By the time the game released, there were already a lot of things that were core strategies which were pretty much a given with the particular races and there were already established trends. If you saw a Protoss with an arbiter, you were generally wondering if the guy had just gotten the game like 3 days ago or something. Same with WC3 and every other RTS ever designed. But what happens to them down the road? They become simple efficiency wars.

In the beginning of an RTS game's lifespan, you can win with outrageous strategies against skilled opponents. Zileas and other skilled individuals lost to me on occasion in the beginning against some of the most ridiculous strategies. You can get away with a lot while people are just learning the game. I'd say at the beginning of an RTS's lifespan, the rough breakdown on your potential to win a game is as follows:

20% on your initial strategies.
30% on your opponent's strategies or decisions and your reaction to them. (Skill.)
50% on luck and happenstance.

In the beginning, you have a sometimes overwhelming number of decisions to make or things you feel you can try in any given game. No matter how skilled you are, there's still a pretty large chance even the best gamers can lose to a total RTS n00b while they, themselves are still learning the details of the game. Down the road, though? What happens to an RTS?

The strategies become "core" and are almost all the same. In WC2, you would know exactly what I was doing from the start of certain maps and your only hope would be to do it faster and better than I could. By this time in the lifespan of the game, there's very little mystery. From the moment a game begins, you only have one or two major decisions to make and the rest is played out on skill. Luck figures in far less than originally.

Initial strategies generally still count for 20% of your ability to win in a given game, at that point, but for different reasons. There's very little you can do to surprise a skilled opponent by now, but sometimes you manage the perfect build against what your opponent decides to do. Your reaction to the opponents moves and strategies account for at least 70% of the game's outcome, I'd say. No n00b is going to beat a skilled player, ever, by this point. The last 10% still falls to luck and the numbers games. Most RTS games in their "prime" are won by the initial build strat and the subsequent execution of the very first skirmish between the players.

So how does that fall in with MMORPG's?

Games like EQ, AC, WoW all suffer from a manner of these same issues. As the newness and "unknown" factors of a game wear off, the ways in which you may play that game narrow considerably. When the content is new, people are eager to explore. You aren't hard pressed to find people who want to go see things with you, wherever or whatever that may be. It only takes a single trip to some of the dungeons in these games for people to realize the XP and item rewards aren't worth the time spent in comparison to other things they could be doing, though. Over time, the same curse that plagues RTS games will show its head in MMORPG's.

Builds become standard.
Leveling paths become standard.
Dungeons become unused as better items become available through less work.

In EQ, once the moon was in, noone did much of crap on the old continents. There was no point. You could level fast enough on the moon to not need any of the gear you could get through the old dungeons, etc. WoW is the same way, of course, but this is compounded vastly by the insanely fast leveling system in this game. There's literally no sense in actively working to gear up my Priest between the levels of 1 and 55'ish when I start doing dungeons for my blue set pieces. It would be a waste of time I could spend leveling through other means and the greens/blues I get in the meantime will suffice.

The only way to combat this trend would be a perfect system of balance. In theory, you would need all parts of your game to be equally rewarding for the levels they're geared at. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen often. There's no question about what you should be doing to level fastest at most points in WoW, and it generally isn't a dungeon crawl.

The hard parts to balance come in a number of areas, but missing one or more of these "must-have" traits will kill a spot the fastest in these games, as I've seen it:


* Equal travel time and access to comparable areas.

* Lack of PvP related downtime on shared dungeons on PvP realms.

* Rewards per class available from creatures everyone has to kill, but without having to compete for loot interclass. (ie. Noone ever did Jandice unless they had to. Everyone has to get pants off the same mob in Strat. Both of those are horrid design flaws. Compare this to the planes in EQ, where you had to kill pretty much everything to get where you were going, but different mobs dropped different classes' gear. I find that method of distribution superior even to the post-Velious system of boss mobs dropping items any class could turn in for class-specific gear.)

* XP or rewards for dungeon crawls must always be superior to Xp + rewards from soloing if you ever want people to have incentive in the first place.



If even one of those factors is off the slightest bit, it becomes a non-issue. There's no point in doing a dungeon that's less efficient or rewarding than something you can do on your own, if you're trying to do the best thing for your individual character. Noone likes to compete for loot in multi user dungeons. There are a number of ways around this, but it's very difficult to balance these things and still have a dungeon that's both fun and rewarding to crawl.

An example of a potential "fix" in that vein for BWL would be to remove some of the class specific drops from boss mobs and apply them to the trash mobs throughout the zone. Goblins could drop Hunter shoulders while warlocks could drop (gee...lemme think) warlock shoulders. Perhaps you could leave warrior shoulders as a drop from Chromaggus. There are multiple ways to handle these things and leave people with a feeling that they're accomplishing more without having to compete for the drops against every bloody class in the game. Every time a boss drops loot for a class that's not your own, it sucks balls. When there are mobs you know only drop for you and you know you have to kill them every time anyway, it can ease the pain of that wait considerably.

I did over 80 UBRS runs (partly because I was one of the only lvl 60 warlocks around, partly because I never won the roll on the blood for the key). During those runs, I never once saw the warlock robes drop from Drak. That is absurd. It becomes even more absurd when you realize that I've done over 100 runs as my main and alts since retail and have never seen Dreadmist drop a single time in all of those. I was running MC in my gold bloodrobe from level 30, because it was the single best thing I'd been able to get until they put DM in.

That, to put it mildly, is broken to an extreme.

Ideally, I'd have seen my robes drop in about 10 runs max and not had to compete for them against any other classes. Ideally, there would have been some other drop from somewhere...anywhere, that would have tided me over until I got it or in case I didn't. Things like that are why so many people began to go from greens to epics after MC went to farm status. Random drops just aren't worth the effort if you can avoid it at all.

The game will always break in that fashion. All games do, eventually. The hard part for the devs is in slowing the progression to that point. Blizzard boned themselves hardcore out of the gates on this one, unfortunately. They'll be forced to rely on exceptional expansion content if they want to hold interest and get people playing the game the way it is intended. We'll see.

*********

The moments that stand out for me in games of any sort are almost always the firsts. There are very few experiences that weren't either a "first" for me in a given game or some otherwise unique experience that would remain a "once in a lifetime" event. I think that's the biggest obstacle in game design, these days. The biggest moments can only come so often in a game. You can only see things a couple of times and still be as impressed as you initially were...after which point, you start to find ways around it that are more efficient. At that point in a game's life, it gets all of its remaining life out of how the player plays it. If a game allows for random events, its lifespan can be extended considerably.

Play Toejam and Earl with a buddy sometime. Get rocket skates by accident on a level full of holes when your partner's not paying attention, then try not to fall off before they go out. Now do it while your character is still belching randomly from the rootbeer he just drank. When your friend falls 3 levels down while pausing to belch on occasion, gets run over by a giant hampster in a ball, and curses you for opening the skates, you'll have experienced one of those "memorable gaming moments". Moments of utter hilarity like that are impossible to program and can only come through good game design, randomness, and the individual.

The best games, IMO, are games which allow for situational content. An example, for instance, would be DOA3 or Street Fighter 2. I've spent hours of my life playing those games with friends and alone. No matter how long you play them, you can still be guaranteed that something random and funny/cool will probably happen again at some point. You don't get that from a lot of games once you've played them a time or two. Another excellent example is Daggerfall.

For all of its issues, bugs (sometimes because of the bugs), cookie-cutter dungeons and towns...for all of that and in spite of it, Daggerfall remains the single best game I've ever played. Morrowind, EQ, WoW, nothing else holds a candle to it to this day for me. Here's why.

No game of Daggerfall has ever once been the same for me over a period of about 10 years by this point, but not a single one of them has failed to bring me a great deal of joy. There's so much to do and so many ways to play the game, that I think I only ever finished the plot a single time in all the hours I played. The thing that kept (keeps) me interested was the fact that while everything was a cookie-cutter, it remained expansive and interesting to explore. With a good imagination from D&D days, you can have a lot of fun in a world like that. I could do the various Guild quests multiple times and never get fully tired of "Go to dungeon X, kill mob Y." You could get lost in some of the dungeons for days if you weren't careful.

RPG's on the whole don't give themselves toward repeat performances, as a rule. RTS becomes cookie cutter after a given time period. The best thing a game can have going for it is a strong case of the "randoms". The only case in which I've seen "Loads of content" work, is Daggerfall. Even D2 became hopelessly repetitive after you'd beaten the game a single time. I can't load up most of the games I bought even so little as a year ago and really enjoy playing them at this point. I could boot up Daggerfall this very moment, start a new character of some sort, and play for hours in complete contentment. To me, that says a lot about a game's design. The fact that I'm not the only person in the world with a "Daggerfall Rig" suggests that in spite of the bugs, they got something very right with that game.

Pity they borked most of what was good about it when they did Morrowind. /yawn

Here's a quick list of memorable game moments in no particular order:

* West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
* Sup Pong?
* WTF? Clothes? What are these for? Ah God, snake or dragon or whatever it is! Man, piss on this game...wtf kinda adventure is this, anyway?
* The first time I got to fly a new ship in Wing Commander and saw a different cockpit.
* The first time I conquered the world in Civ I.
* Going to my mate's house and seeing Arena for the first time...then Daggerfall.
* Super Mario Brothers.
* Laughing myself into tears while playing Toejam and Earl with Ex-Jad.
* Laughing myself into tears while playing Super Smash TV with Ex-Jad.
* Playing Bubble Bobble with my little sister.
* Dating a woman that both enjoyed video games and didn't suck at them.
* Finally getting to kill that bloody helicopter in Half-Life.
* Playing Wolfenstein 3-D for hours with my buddy.
* Playing Serious Sam games for hours with the same buddy and his kid, a decade later.
* Thinking Cecil was a pretty cool and off the wall name for a hero character, upon first playing Final Fantasy 4. Thinking it was even cooler that he was a dark knight and kind of a bad guy in the beginning.
* Getting to run over people and demolish cars in Carmageddon.
* Getting to do so very much more in the original GTA.
* Nearly falling out of my chair while playing Doom when I saw the Cyberdemon for the first time and practically got wtfpwned by his first shot.
* Tribes 2.
* The first time I wandered into the Field of Bone on the Kunark expansion for EQ, since it was such a cool looking zone. (Hell, better yet; the first time I ever played EQ, saw a PC run past, and said to myself "Holy shit, that's a real person!")


I could go on for days, but the majority of my moments fall into two categories:

A) Moments I experience for the first time. (Be it first time in that game or first time in any game.)

B) Moments I experience due to quirks, human factors, or just due to enjoying games with friends...even if we're just trading off on a single player game.

I think you can only do so much to purposefully craft memorable games. The best you can ever hope to do is craft a good game. How memorable or special it ultimately is will always fall to luck and individual experience, in the end.

Someday I'll be able to scale a mountain in a mmo that doesn't involve the same running animation while clipping into invisible steep cliffs. Then I'll find a mysterious herb or ore that corrupts my soul and allows me to kill all of my friends. Then what is left of my guild has to kill a bunch of demons and dragons to cleanse my heart.

Someday :(