This is Very Serious issue. Non-consensual furrydom is worse that getting repeatedly corpse-camped. Think of the children.
unintended consequences.. You put a group of people in a zone, there will be conversation. I pointed out what can come of sharing zones with other servers. For me it is the doom of Moonguard's Elwynn Forest. Though to be fair, that zone is always so heavily populated on MG that it would never fall low enough to be shared. I suppose this could fix the "moar world pvp" problem, but I see far more possible incidents from different server populations culture clash. Let me give a different possiblity.. Remember the Brazilain servers. The ones that are still mostly some form of Spanish/Portuguese speaking folks. They are labled PVE. On a bad day you folks who play on PVE servers go to elwynn and can't get rid of this guy who keeps following you around and tagging your mobs. In an attempt to get him to stop you try talking to them only to find out they are from .. for instance, Quel'thalas. Your options now are to report for griefing and wait 12 days (last time I saw on an actual ticket), try the autoreporting feature for some different infraction or leave the area. So you go to the dwarf starter zone and encounter yet anouther one. It may seem I am picking on that server but after being in the original battlegroup saddled with these guys, then still getting grouped with them commonly in bgs and dungeons, I am pretty familar with the culture differences between what they think is perfectly valid play and what I feel is. I can't change them, they won't change me.. and now I must find some overly populated area of my home server to be rid of the problem. Still , the amount of times this will happen likely won't be as many times as folk find new "real-id" friends to go wander around with. Wow is turning into pick your friends from this list and go do things. huh.. We are back to diablo 2.
I hope so. I simply won't play another MMO where I am arbitrarily unable to play with someone. Oh, you created your character on server B years before we ever met instead of server A and now one of us has to either start over or pay to move in order to play together? Guess we aren't going to play together then. Sure, WoW has made it so you can form groups for instances using RealID, but that's a bandaid, and not everyone wants to play in instances...
I really think MMOs (GW2, D3 and LoL) will kill MMORPGs. Most people want to play with a very close circle of friends and don't like interacting with random players in any possible way. MMORPG future is in niche sandboxes and MMOs will take over ride aspect because they can deliver isolation most gamers want.
I've been doing random groups more than usual lately (I was leveling, and now am gearing, a rogue on Horde side and don't have a core group there). Folks from the Brazilian servers pop up in my random instances a lot. I haven't had any real issues with differing expectations in terms of game play, and actually they seem to talk more than English speakers (including English when I indicate I don't speak Portuguese), which I like. But then my experiences with random groups in general has been pretty abysmal. A "good" group is 4 other people silently playing their roles competently. Might as well be playing Guild Wars for all the value they add to the game play experience. A bad group is people calling each other names because the fights aren't going well or, as in one group I was in the other day, the tank porting out during a boss fight because we had refused to kick the healer at his whim.
I think Sinij is right. I played, and loved (in that masochistic way) the original EQ with forced grouping (if you wanted to solo, you pretty much had to play a druid or necromancer), auctions going on in trade channel, competition for raid bosses which led to guilds either hating or cooperating with each other, bumping into the same poeple in "line" at LGuk, etc. I have a fond, very early memory, of meeting a 10-levels-higher paladin when our newbie group had died deep in Befallen and couldn't get our corpses back, meaning we had lost all our worldly possessions (god EQ was vicious), and deciding to /consent this random player to get our stuff for us. Which in that early phase meant literally looting our bodies and handing over the gear. He came through and we remained in-game friends for many years. But, as I played EQ, they moved it toward a more instance-based world. In every case the changes were a great improvement in quality of life for those of us who don't like competing for stuff (e.g. instead of the one dominant guild getting every Vox, Nag, Plane of Hate, and Plane of Fear, and then every week's primal weapons and dragon raid, and then every week's Emperor in Luclin, for years, all guilds could do instanced versions of Planes of Power raids; guilds even got guild halls so you didn't have to hang around common towns any more; eventually you could even get your corpse without having to return to the scene of your death). But they also got rid of some of the interaction. WoW has always been more instance-oriented and has continued to improve solo and small group play, and I believe that is part of why it was such a hit. The number of people who actually want to interact with others is probably limited to the folks who talk regularly in trade or general, and many of them are, shall we say, jerks.
First they said - they shouldn't be able to ruin my day by killing my character and making me restart my adventure from the beginning. Then they said - they shouldn't be able to ruin my day by killing my monster and making me wait to continue my adventure. Then they said - they shouldn't be able to ruin my day by grouping with me and making me work with others to continue my adventure. Then they said - my own mistakes shouldn't ruin my day, I should never die to monsters no matter how badly I play. Lastly they said - this adventure is too boring because it is too easy.
And they were happy with every change, until that particular form of entertainment ran its course. And the problem with lots & lots of people being happy with an entertainment source for a limited (but very long) time is......?
I think we can all agree that if you don't like pvp, Hello kitty adventure island is the mmo for you. I feel like WoW players use to be crusty gamers, now my little 9 year old nephew plays it to collect pets and mounts. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO MY FAVORITE GAME the horror
I was there on an alt last week and I'm there again this week on another alt. I wouldn't mind skipping it.
I don't agree with that. I played WoW for about six years, pouring well over 100 days /played into it. I hated PvP and never participated in it except for the few occassions where doing something in a BG was required for a holiday achievement. What I enjoyed about WoW was the challenge of end-game raids and the teamwork and coordination required to be successful. I can't think of any other experiences in video games that are more satisfying than wiping to a boss for many hours until everything finally comes together, you beat the encounter, and everyone starts cheering on Vent.
Yeah, when it comes together on a hard fight it is something. I remember when our guild downed Kael'thas the first time - that was a damned hard fight to master, everyone had to know what to do. It took months but it felt great when he finally went down. That's the part of raiding I miss sometimes, that and the weird and wonderful people you meet up with in a raiding guild.
My raid guild stayed together even after we all finished raiding. A few guys still did some 10man stuff, but the majority moved on to other games. We have a website and coordinate playing other games/MMOs together even if its not WoW anymore.
Outland's fine - two zones and you're done. Now a 'skip Northrend' or (even better) 'skip Cataclysm' option, OTOH, sounds a lot more appealing.
It's a lot better now you can start with a fast flying mount. I think it's good - Zangarmarsh is a neat zone, that first zone is a bit too big but has lots of cool stuff in it (and great Floydy music).
I never got very far into WoW, I think I had a lvl 52 Draenei pally and a lvl 20-ish Blood Elf Hunter? Admittedly, I only started playing because my then-GF was playing, and she wanted me to try it out. I think I never got much into it because, coming from FFXI (back when it was still social and not the abyssea-barf it is today), WoW was very...solitary. There was never any player interaction apart from joining a group for a dungeon run, and while it was much more solo friendly at the time, I think it contributed to my feelings of "loneliness", I suppose I'd call it. Unlike what some people have mentioned, I don't like sticking to just my tiny circle of RL friends whenever I play a MMORPG. Needless to say, when we broke up, I deactivated my account, and never really looked back. *shrug* WoW wasn't -terrible-, but it wasn't my kind of game.
Lum the Mad: An Ex Por Sinij: You are frozen and cannot move. Lum the Mad: Vas Ort Flam Lum the Mad: Corp Por Lum the Mad: Corp Por Sinij: You have been killed by Lum the Mad!
Going strong.... and looks pretty good.* I'm continually amazed at Blizzard's skill at using stylized graphics to keep their games looking good way longer than they should. *I know, they've done graphical updates since that trailer. But that trailer looks pretty good IMO.
Cataclysm. The quest where you throw bears from trees onto a trampoline. That's where I said, "You know what? Screw this game." I played for a few days longer, but I was done. I just got tired of it. Tired of the whole thing. I don't like the gimmicky minigame things, and they seemed to be introducing more and more of them, and I don't like cutesy-stupid, which they seemed to be introducing more and more of. I also wasn't a fan of the addition of cutscenes, and I didn't like the move to completely linear questing. The whole expansion felt kind of Disney to me, and I was over it. ...and the players, man, they just wore me out. Seriously. Shut up about your "rotation".
LOL, I liked dropping the bears. But then I'm in a guild called Drop Bears, so it was sort of our official guild quest. I'm on a break at the moment due to having completed every possible thing in game that sounds like fun. I'll be back before Pandaland though, I'm sure.
Playing with the Drop Bears kept me playing for a full raid tier after I would otherwise have quit. <3 Bears.
Maybe it's gotten worse since I played two expansions ago, but I usually liked the gimmicky minigame quests since they broke up the monotony of the regular quests.
I thought Peacebloom vs. Ghouls was pretty fun. What were some of the truly annoying minigame quests? Jousting in WotLK springs to mind, but other than that?
Oh, I don't know...OCULUS. (I never went back there after we got all the achievements. Also, I never mentioned this, but I was totally recording all of our achievement whoring to make a video when we were done. I'm still kind of bummed that things went to shit.) See also: Eye of Eternity. There were several Daily quests for rep with those ice-giant dudes that drove me insane. The dragon-rodeo and the saboteur-sniffing dog quest in particular.
I don't think of Oculus as an annoying quest but rather an entire zone of fail. ;) And yeah, I'm also sort of bummed out that we never finished all those achievements. I eventually got them all as one-offs with various other people, but it wasn't the same as doing the entire meta achievement together as a dedicated group. :( [Edit] And that video would have been sweet. I still have fond memories of all the various kiting strategies and other different approaches we tried to finish the first boss in A-Z without killing his adds. Didn't we eventually get it by just brute-force dps'ing it without any kind of strategy at all?
Someone Australian. It's a great guild name, Drop Bears are the most vicious Australian carnivore in existence. It's a name that inspires true fear in The Outback. Besides, you hate everything.
It wasn't so much that it was boring, although that really is the closest option. It's too damn easy. You can't lose, really. I like games where I actually have to try.. WoW just doesn't do it for me anymore.
They tried designing around the style of play you are asking for in early Cataclysm. It lost them three million subscribers, so don't expect it to return. Other than the challenge modes, of course.
No they didn't. Cataclysm wasn't harder than Wrath; in fact it was one step easier. I very occasionally died while questing in Wrath. But I never once came even close to dying in Cata. Cata dungeons were similarly easy, although they at least presented *some* challenges. The exception was how difficult healing was in the beginning of Cata, and that was pretty much an effect of how badly they fubarred mana costs & regeneration.
The Cata heroics were definitely a step more difficult than Wrath heroics. Although two steps less difficult than BC heroics. All that is based on their initial difficulty. Obviously gear upgrades and nerfs made them easier over time, and the later Cata heroics were jokes.
Now that you mention it... you're right. But I got the feeling that PersonaSummoner was referring to the single-player game: questing & whatnot. But your points re: Cata heroics are well taken.
