Mob Tagging

[Imnick]

Mob tagging exists in most MMOs to stop (for example) melee classes with a charge ability seeing your mob at low health, using their gap closer and landing the finishing blow before stealing all the loot.
As that isn't how loot works in GW2, mob tagging is not required.

This was more of a problem back in the days when quests were meant to supplement grinding, but can still be a tiny bit of a problem today in the few games where mob tagging does not exist.

[Merendel]

Other MMORPGs that haven't cloned WoW includes: SW:G, Eve Online, Guild Wars, and I'm sure many other names that I can't remember atm/am not familiar with.

None of those could be wow clones if they tried. The first two predate wow's launch by more than a year and GW was a contemperary of wow releaseing about 6 months later, much too far into development to be retooled to copy wow in that short a time.

Now back on the subject of weather or not the other wow clones faild that depends entirely on where you place the bar. For the most part a majority of the games that cloned wow's model broke even and or made a small proffit. By that definition they did not totally fail. If your looking for a relitively reliable modest return the system works however there are plenty of other safe bets to invest in that do that just as well. Now if on the other hand the investers goal was to make a big return they would be shooting for at minimum seizing a sizable portion of wow's market share. That to date has not happend with any wow clone with tor's chances of reaching that mark dubious at best. No game modeled after wow has even come remotely close to wow's level of success. It's just not happening and its somewhat baffeling that they keep trying the same thing expecting better than modest results.

[Borzo]

None of those could be wow clones if they tried. The first two predate wow's launch by more than a year and GW was a contemperary of wow releaseing about 6 months later, much too far into development to be retooled to copy wow in that short a time.

Now back on the subject of weather or not the other wow clones faild that depends entirely on where you place the bar. For the most part a majority of the games that cloned wow's model broke even and or made a small proffit. By that definition they did not totally fail. If your looking for a relitively reliable modest return the system works however there are plenty of other safe bets to invest in that do that just as well. Now if on the other hand the investers goal was to make a big return they would be shooting for at minimum seizing a sizable portion of wow's market share. That to date has not happend with any wow clone with tor's chances of reaching that mark dubious at best. No game modeled after wow has even come remotely close to wow's level of success. It's just not happening and its somewhat baffeling that they keep trying the same thing expecting better than modest results.

^^^ This.

Those other games aren't in it to make a 10% profit on their investment. The local bank down my street gives 10% to my plumber and my waitress. They're looking for significantly more... and I don't believe they've succeeded. In other words: they failed. Breaking even, keeping the servers up, and making pennies, is not financial success. Even if you've eaten a net loss, you'd still keep the servers up since you've done all the work already and really have nothing more to lose. You can't use that as a sign of success either.

And even then, all the games that at least broke even... how did they do it? Did they make oh so much money because they copied WOW? No, they made all their cash from marketing and advertising. They could have made a very new and innovative game - and even if people hated it - they'd still make at least the same amount of money as they did with their WOW-copying.

[Fencers]

Very few MMOs are "WoW clones" least we call all modern FPS Faceball clones and the like.

[Hockeyhacker]

I can't imagine why someone would hit a mob I'm attacking, and then sit back and do nothing. Wouldn't it be faster if they actually attacked? What's the benefit of of him doing that, and then just waiting around beside me, for me to kill it? How does that help him at all?

In other MMOs, such as for example (since most people have played at least once) WoW, the reason to tag a mob and then let someone else kill is if there are 20 people are all competing for a collect 5 beaver heads from killing 200 beavers, if you go around and tag mobs and let the other 19 people kill, they all get no heads of beavers (why oh why did I pick beavers as a random animal, anyways) while you get the 5 heads in less time since you got the only credit while as had 19 others killing 19x faster then you could do by tagging and staying on that one mob.

[Borzo]

In other MMOs, such as for example (since most people have played at least once) WoW, the reason to tag a mob and then let someone else kill is if there are 20 people are all competing for a collect 5 beaver heads from killing 200 beavers, if you go around and tag mobs and let the other 19 people kill, they all get no heads of beavers (why oh why did I pick beavers as a random animal, anyways) while you get the 5 heads in less time since you got the only credit while as had 19 others killing 19x faster then you could do by tagging and staying on that one mob.

That doesn't work though because you will hit 20 beavers, and the other people won't do anything. They'll just stand by and watch you get swarmed, killed, and eaten by the beaver army that you've pissed off.

[Hockeyhacker]

That doesn't work though because you will hit 20 beavers, and the other people won't do anything. They'll just stand by and watch you get swarmed, killed, and eaten by the beaver army that you've pissed off.

Not if your tagging properly, if you know how to tag in WoW, by the time they see they will not get credit for the kill their medium/high damage spell/ability has already been activated and is on its way to the mob which picks up more threat then the person running around tagging last .05 seconds before another person hits them since in certain games the tagging threshold is extremely low so it is not overly hard to tag something and have someone else pull agro within 1 spell/ability cast.

[Borzo]

Not if your tagging properly, if you know how to tag in WoW, by the time they see they will not get credit for the kill their medium/high damage spell/ability has already been activated and is on its way to the mob which picks up more threat then the person running around tagging last .05 seconds before another person hits them since in certain games the tagging threshold is extremely low so it is not overly hard to tag something and have someone else pull agro within 1 spell/ability cast.

Honestly... this seems like much more effort than it's worth.

[Lolsteak]

Honestly... this seems like much more effort than it's worth.

It's not when it's basically the quickest way to do something in a game, Back in FFXI it was a huge thing for camping spawns

[Rhoe]

I still remember when I was trying to farm motes of air in TBC on my shadow priest... if I didn't pull with shadow word: death (hurts yourself as much as the mob if the mob doesn't die - which of course it doesn't when it's at full health) some lame hunter would shoot the mob I just dotted up and thus get the tag, then feign death or simply stop shooting so I'd get to kill it for him due to my dots. Urgh. I wish more games would follow this philosophy of making players happy to see each other instead of angry.

[Fencers]

One doesn't truly know what frustration is till squaring off with competing legions of Priests & Scouts in Radiant Arcana for dailies 100/100 in an area smaller than the inn interior at Goldshire.

World of Warcraft? Fucking child's play to Asian MMO vets. Utter child's play. Pfft.

[DrunkenBeard]

I saw an argument a couple pages back questioning the motivation of investors to support EQ-clones seeing as only 2 or 3 of them were successful when the vast majority is comprised of failures. I'd like to point out that a lot of the MMORPGs we saw spawning at the end of the last decade and the beginning of this decade have been in development at least since 2005ish, after WoW's success. At that time cloning seemed to be the way to go as investors had no way to know that they would fail, couple years later they failed, now we're starting to see games that are trying different new recipes hopefully because the lesson has been learnt.

[Borzo]

I saw an argument a couple pages back questioning the motivation of investors to support EQ-clones seeing as only 2 or 3 of them were successful when the vast majority is comprised of failures. I'd like to point out that a lot of the MMORPGs we saw spawning at the end of the last decade and the beginning of this decade have been in development at least since 2005ish, after WoW's success. At that time cloning seemed to be the way to go as investors had no way to know that they would fail, couple years later they failed, now we're starting to see games that are trying different new recipes hopefully because the lesson has been learnt.

This makes sense. I didn't really think about it like that. So I guess that means that somewhere about 6 years ago is when people decided to stop copying...

I wonder what that means for the MMORPGs that are going to be coming out in the next 6 years. I'm kinda looking forward to it!