Yesterday I had 2 hours to kill so I figured I'd log on and play around on the Isle a bit. I did my first quest hub pretty slowly, on my way to the second I saw a player in general asking for some help against a group of alliance running around. So I joined up with them and fought some alliance for 20-30 min. When that was done I finished off my second hub. When I was in the crag doing my third set, I saw a dk randomly pull that huge devilsaur elite and start kiting it. So I figured why not and started helping him, then not even 3 min later another 2 joined us. WE ended up pulling to many small mobs while kiting and all died and had a good laugh. We then went back for try 2 and proceeded to kite him around and kill him after 10 min and others helping out once they saw us. The elite didn't even drop anything, he's just meant to kill people in the area, so there is actually zero point to killing him. I ended up being out of time after that and didn't even fully complete the set of dailies before I had to log.
My point of this whole story is don't assume because you can't find and make your own enjoyment(like in vanilla wow) in the game that none of us can't. It's an MMO, you have to put some sort of effort into the game if you want something random and spontaneous to happen like what happened in vanilla frequently. Stuff snowballs, sometimes it only takes one player to start killing a random elite, or attacking an alliance to get the ball rolling and having a huge war. Most players these days though can't stop and take a second to try and create their own fun in the environment and just follow the daily roller coaster tracks instead. Like McCoy says he does in his post you quoted.
They are simply meant to move you through the area while you scope other fun things to do, or people to attack, or elites to kill for runes for even more elites to kill. Even a key for a really fun solo scenario which you can always improve on. The patch has only been out for a few days and I've prob blown a good 8-10 hours on the island doing random stuff not even related to dailies. Some of us are indeed out in the world experiencing it and having/making our fun. For me right now its like I'm back on TBC isle and its great.
Last edited by Duncanîdaho; 2013-03-09 at 08:02 AM.
The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself, "Now what is this thing doing?" -Children of Dune
I'm not convinced that their was a terrible amount of incentive to be in the world in vanilla either. I mean like you had to to get to the dungeons and to meet your friends and explore and things like that but in so far as incentive for reward it was all mostly still through raids. I mean unless your grinding timbermaw or doing world pvp, you were getting gear through raids.
The key difference was that while you were in the world in vanilla (which did happen more often mostly because if you wanted to dungeon you were getting out there) the experience just felt more world like. It felt more alive and organic. It felt more immersive, like you were in a world. Currently the game feels awful tiny and dailies don't solve that. They just force you into one corner of the box. To be honest I'm not sure they can solve it or if they should even bother. The world is tiny for alot of GOOD reasons. They handled it well in the past. By ignoring it as a problem. Attempting to correct what is in reality an issue caused by many of the good changes they released and an issue caused by the wide availability of information on the internet is beyond their ability. In other words, like alot of things it was a non problem that didn't need fixing. It needed further ignoring.
Like Osmeric said, they didn't capture the essence of what it was that made the world more immersive. I'm not convinced it can be captured again or that it should even attempted. What's needed from the developers isn't an attempt to go back and recapture the past, the developers need to forge ahead and make new.
Last edited by Leonard McCoy; 2013-03-09 at 08:07 AM.
There was more incentive to be out in the world in Classic mainly because a lot of people were still leveling their first characters and alts. I started playing in April 2005 and didn't get my first character to max level until somewhere around Summer 2006. It took quite a while longer to level then, and required going through most of the content for any given level range, which may have involved group quests and elite areas (Jintha'Alor, anyone?).
Depending on what point in time you're talking about, players had more or less incentive to go out into the world at max level. There was a time when the LFG channel was global, but otherwise finding groups required players to hang out in cities and spam LFG chat, or try to use the Meeting Stones, which rarely worked and were mostly reserved for last-minute attempts to salvage dungeon runs after a player left to eat dinner or raid with their guild.
For PVP, for quite a while you had to physically queue in front of the instance portals at the BG entrances. After they added Battlemasters you'd go to a capital and queue in front of them. There were also the PVP objectives in EPL and Silithus, though I don't think anyone ever bothered with the one in Silithus.
Otherwise, you'd go out into the world for the usual stuff: farming materials, including rare crafting materials that only dropped from certain mobs (devilsaur hide, felcloth, etc.). Farming mobs for rep or turn-ins (Timbermaw, Argent Dawn, etc.). Working on the extremely long endgame quest chains, like the dungeon set upgrade quests. There were also a lot of other weird little things you could do, like collecting items for the various summonable bosses in Silithus.
Honestly, looking back, I can barely imagine how I managed to spend as much time playing WoW as I did. I suppose I mainly did PVP back in Classic and BC, which was generally more compelling to me than "kill thousands and thousands of furbolgs so you can get that trinket that summons a furbolg to help you fight for a few minutes."
The only thing that has changed in the game in this regard is your perception. The only organic reasons people were there were because the game was brand new and you were leveling and didn't know where anything was. As soon as that first experience was over, tbh that was it. And that is no fault on the game and completely a fault on us.
You know I already agree on the forced issue, but to be fair, Pandaria is more engaging and designed much better than any zones ever have been. Aesthetically it's top notch WoW quality. They added lore and explorational details and systems to help foster that mentality, but the playerbase has long since moved past those things.
I don't think they can do anything other than band aid this issue and I also think it's going to play a big part in the eventual slide the game may take. Maybe this is actually a large factor of why they might be losing subs now. Who knows, you know?
BAD WOLF
It's not so much that's it's perceptual, it's just that as time has passed the players are so much stronger now then the world. Like both in terms of characters but also in terms of knowledge and access to tools. You can't go back to being sorta blissfully ignorant and wowed by things you were when you started. That's not our fault, that's just the natural way of things and it's perfectly fine. The developers have responded and handled it well because by and large they've ignored it. Right up until mists.
I don't agree Pandaria is designed better. For one I think the locales and environments are kinda boring. Everything sorta feels the same (with the exception of dread wastes) and theirs no sort of OH SHIT thing to look at. Nothing like stood out as like something amazing to look at. Again it replicates the functions but without the essenece. The essence has left though. A long time ago and were not getting it back.
I don't think they can do anything either but what puzzles me is why they bother? Surely they know this but they seem to want to try and recapture some of that good old days faded glory and it's stupid. If it is a large factor about sub loss then they are boned. And future mmos are boned to.
5.2 is pathetic
I'm enjoying 5.2 quite a bit. Just hate the warlock green fire fight.
I quite like the new daily questing zone, plenty to keep me occupied and it's not quite as face roll as the 5.1 stuff.
Of course the best bit about the zone is the larger of the caves next to the area where the big dinosaur elite patrols. Players tend to go AFK just inside the entrance, probably to avoid the dinosaur elite. What they don't realize is that further into the cave are a couple of mobs, one of which is a caster that does some pretty cool AOE damage, that can be pulled onto the AFK players by any passing unscrupulous person It's not hard to avoid or heal through the AOE, provided your not AFK. I have managed to kill quite a few people in there now, with my most prized victim being a shaman 5 boxer
Only major issue I have is if you choose not to do the dailies, then outside of the raid I'm not entirely sure what else really got added ( from a PvE perspective). I guess you can kill Dino's for days on end, but thats not exactly a ton better imo. Hopefully something more interesting opens up in the next stage, but I'm guessing its just more of the same.
Granted I'm doing it on several toons, but its mainly for the Rep, once thats done I'll stop doing them.
I love it. I do my dailies, check out some scrolls, kill some rares, try to find the dang chests that have the palace keys, and then do that for gold etc... try to find all the rare items in the game.
There is always so much to do. Heck if you are even a mildly balanced PVP server head over to isle of giants and kill the opposing factions, grief them etc...
Try to actually get involved with unlocking the whole island. Look up some ways that Oondasta can be killed and try to form a group for that. They have new pets on the islands, see if you can get the rare ones and not just the green or common ones.
Maybe level that warlock you have at 50 and see if you can do the solo quest content to get him the green fire.
Not a pvper? Well try it out, this season is probably the best season to get into it, get your gear ready for when Tuesday comes!
Other than architecture I think the zones are all very different. It's kinda hard to distinguish when the template is a very small window of Asian influence. Additionally, I have always thought the jarring differences in zones was a little ridiculous in the other lands. It was like a line drawn in the ground and oops you've teleported to a jungle or a desert from a mountain side.
Some upcoming MMOs, like Wildstar, seem to have some good ideas to tackle this problem though. Not only through their path system, but the fact that there will be environmental hazards and interactions in a way beyond what we've seen. At least that part gets you paying attention to what is around you and maybe finding something that looks familiar has become a new idea entirely.
Yeah, that's not really an option by design. If you don't do dailies, you basically don't progress your character. With the fact that they aren't going to give any new dungeons for the rest of the xpac, it is kinda disheartening. I've had to come to a place of peace with the dailies and there are at least multiple ways to earn rep now. Once you've burned all your LFR there is really nothing else except PvP or Dailies.
Other than dungeons being worthless, this isn't anything new.
BAD WOLF
Why are you creating this thread, havent you learned? Watch how many you offended that came to show that your opinion is wrong and WoW is perfect.
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You mean you can have 400 rep PER DAY to ONE faction a day from heroics and you really count that as an alternative?
Yes, it was supposed to be 750 rep per dungeon, but they nerfed the hell of it. Now you have 400 (600 if revered with the commendation).
I find it funny that some people are really using it as an example of an alternative, when in reality is just Blizzard mocking those of us that asked for alternatives.
You're acting like there are only supporters here, there are obviously a fair share of haters too, which is common for every WoW patch. There hasn't been a single WoW patch people didn't whine over, even Ulduar and Karazhan got their fair share of shit when they were current.