Former WoW team lead Mark Kern - MMO's have become too easy

[GrieverXIII]

What on earth are you talking about? Hint: new players dinging 90 don't have the commendations and the bunch of gold to buy the high level items. So no.
MOP rep grinding, for instance, is far more time consuming than Cata or LK. There are no 5-man catchup etc...
All of that repulsed quite a lot of casual players.

---------- Post added 2013-07-01 at 01:06 AM ----------



Top guilds disagree with you. And guess what, I believe them.
Also, TBC raiding wasn't hard except for a couple of bosses. It was comp- and class-reliant, which is not the same thing.

In what world do you need gold to gear an alt outside basic enchants/gems or even reps? Quest greens allow you to get into LFD, in a few hours you can easily get to ilvl 460 to do MSV LFR that basically rain 476 gear on you, then you're in HoF and ToES and by the time you're done most likely able to queue for ToT LFR. All of that doable in a day, or a week if you're "casual". No research required, no skill required, no communication required. Nothing.

[vesseblah]

but I think his points are what a lot of posters here have been saying.

A lot of whiners.

Unfortunately at the end of the article he goes into a sort of commercial for his latest project, which a lot of people will focus on,

"In our own game, Firefall, we try to focus on the journey, not the end. We work hard to create a beautiful world, and you never out-level a zone since the dynamic events scale to players."

Can be also read as "we don't have any endgame and are repeating same mistakes as GW2 did."

[Aeula]

There's plenty of genres that caters to people like you. Ever heard of Angry Birds? Not like it matters anymore since Blizzard is bending over to your kind just for money.

I can't roleplay in that game.

[Wildberry]

It's not up to the devs to decide what customers want. This is the job of CEO and Marketing.

---------- Post added 2013-07-01 at 01:00 AM ----------



Right, Ragnaros in vanilla was so much harder than in Cata. Oh wait, it's actually the other way around.

If you're simply looking at the fight from a mechanical perspective sure, but if you're looking at time investments etc. I'd say it's the other way around, anyway, it's common knowledge that Naxx 40 was the birth of Modern Day raiding as far as mechanics in fights go.

I've played since PreBC and still continue to do so, I think that despite this game's flaws it's still much better than any other on the market right now, however, I do think there is quite a bit of truth in the article (Not including the pitch at the end)

[mickybrighteyes]

Right, Ragnaros in vanilla was so much harder than in Cata. Oh wait, it's actually the other way around.

actually.... yeah vanilla rag might actually have been 'harder' than cata when you add in the original limitations and restrictions players had to work under.

[Gilian]

Well, he's a bit biased

.... then who isn't biased?

[Tomana]

In what world do you need gold to gear an alt outside basic enchants/gems or even reps? Quest greens allow you to get into LFD, in a few hours you can easily get to ilvl 460 to do MSV LFR that basically rain 476 gear on you, then you're in HoF and ToES and by the time you're done most likely able to queue for ToT LFR. All of that doable in a day, or a week if you're "casual". No research required, no skill required, no communication required. Nothing.

Yeah. You have to queue for MSV LFR. Do you have an idea of how fast the queues are recently? No? Well, I do cause I tried today. And it's not pretty. It will take a new DPS players hours to go through the MSV wings.

By contrast, in Cata, you could run the 5-mans. Hence, it was simpler and more attractive to casual players.

[vesseblah]

actually.... yeah vanilla rag might actually have been 'harder' than cata when you add in the original limitations and restrictions players had to work under.

Biggest challenge (after grinding fire resistance gear) was not falling asleep while doing 2 button rotation.

[eronen]

I just find it crazy that people still think that one man's opinion is enough to describe the health of a genre.
#JustSaying

[Okacz]

"Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost? Sometimes I look at WoW and think “what have we done?” I think I know. I think we killed a genre."

Wow. Just wow. This statement can be both the most tragic or the most nerdy thing ever said. Hell, it can be both.

Gotta say, WoW has changed radically. It's hard to say whether it switched the genres or created a new genre itself, but it's not the same game as it was before. Vanilla WoW was indeed about exploration, and the sense of discovery in your journey. Everybody sucked, nobody knew what the hell to do, raiding was an urban legend until you got into a group by mistake, realising you're dead at the very start... It was a mess, and a lovely mess. Nowadays, WoW is way more tidy, but also very appealing, with a lot of activities that can be done. Players are indeed being guided, but ther are the same players that those in vanilla. While being guided, you can improve yourself gradually and learn new skills, making you a better player - and it is a great thing.

Sandbox MMO turned into a Themepark MMO, thats the easiest guess, and both WoWs are great games - would risk saying equally great. A tearfull statement that "we killed a genre" seems bizzarre. Can't say a genre is killed - it is there somewhere, but the companies making MMOs decided, that what players love the most is the Themepark experiance. And I know where they are coming from - Themepark keeps you interested with updates, promises new content, even if you feel being guided by the hand, and Sandbox, while it can be a glorious adventure, can left you confused, and too confused to continue playing. It's just, well, less appealing, at least by what Blizzard figures out now.

[Tomana]

actually.... yeah vanilla rag might actually have been 'harder' than cata when you add in the original limitations and restrictions players had to work under.

Paragon players disagree. Excuse me, but I'd rather I believe them.

[MoanaLisa]

I guess thats why everything is cleared from day one now compared to weeks / months in TBC.
And thats HARDLY because of not having X class in your raid.

Leaving aside LFR which you don't seem to really be talking about, you betray a singular lack of knowledge about what current raiding is truly like. Not really meaning that as an insult but it's really quite striking. If we'd gotten a bunch of raids in MoP that played like DS, I likely wouldn't be writing this post but the MoP raids have generally been quite good and at the heroic level, generally agreed to be difficult.

So I suppose you must be either some uber-player, in which case congratulations, or are just saying stuff. I'd recommend against that myself.

[Tomana]

Can be also read as "we don't have any endgame and are repeating same mistakes as GW2 did."

I find hilarious how all those supposedly "famous" devs repeatedly walk on rakes. Mark Kern with Firefall, David Breivik with Marvel Heroes. Who is the next one?

[Wildberry]

In what world do you need gold to gear an alt outside basic enchants/gems or even reps? Quest greens allow you to get into LFD, in a few hours you can easily get to ilvl 460 to do MSV LFR that basically rain 476 gear on you, then you're in HoF and ToES and by the time you're done most likely able to queue for ToT LFR. All of that doable in a day, or a week if you're "casual". No research required, no skill required, no communication required. Nothing.

Funny story, a MW in my guild finished ToT LFR the same day he hit 90 on one of his alts.

[GrieverXIII]

Yeah. You have to queue for MSV LFR. Do you have an idea of how fast the queues are recently? No? Well, I do cause I tried today. And it's not pretty. It will take a new DPS players hours to go through the MSV wings.

By contrast, in Cata, you could run the 5-mans. Hence, it was simpler and more attractive to casual players.

Do scenarios then? Free 516 epics ! Oh, sorry i forgot that you need to talk to people to get those done, we couldn't ask that from our dear casuals in an MMORPG right?

By your logic, why even have content if all that matters to casual players is simplicity? You could hit 2 bird with 1 stone, remove bosses from LFR and add pinatas. No healers or tanks needed so faster queues and free purples (not like LFR bosses are anything but pinatas anyway).

[Gilian]

I hear it a lot, but I don't think you can complain about a game being too easy until you are completing it's hardest content. WoW has 3, soon to be 4 levels of raiding, a ton of people protest features like LFR but can't complete a heroic boss. Play at the difficulty you desire, you can sit in the easiest most available content and complain, or challenge yourself. And don't give me that "I don't have time to get into heroic raiding it takes too much time and effort and my RL life is busy", that may be true but you are using the reason for LFRs invention against itself.

Basically people complaining about how easy something is are either not challenging themselves, or spitting on people in lower content out of elitism.

Sigh...

So if one boss is near impossible then 99,9999% of all players can't say it's an easy game while 90% of the game is extremely easy? Yeah, that makes sense. No, it doesn't. None at all. Get it through your skull.
When I am raiding heroic mode doesn't mean I am not playing through any other content in the game. Better yet, I HAVE TO go through all the levels and dungeons and in my case I even had to do LFR to catch up. I had to do the piss easy boring dailies.

Get a clue.

[vesseblah]

Do scenarios then? Free 516 epics !

It's not 100% droprate. Probably same 15% chance current tier LFR bosses have for dropping epics instead of gold. And those have 480 item level minimum which will rule out lowbies and newbies.

[Tomana]

Do scenarios then? Free 516 epics ! Oh, sorry i forgot that you need to talk to people to get those done, we couldn't ask that from our dear casuals in an MMORPG right?

Try getting a HC scenario group on my server

By your logic, why even have content if all that matters to casual players is simplicity? You could hit 2 bird with 1 stone, remove bosses from LFR and add pinatas. No healers or tanks needed so faster queues and free purples (not like LFR bosses are anything but pinatas anyway).

Because an MMO should have content for all levels of difficulty. This also means that casual players should be left out in the cold.

[GrieverXIII]

Paragon players disagree. Excuse me, but I'd rather I believe them.

Tiers usually have one very hard boss on Heroic, in this case Lei Shen. While the other 99.99% of the game is a joke. I guess game is hard then.

[Aaros]

Why doesn't WoW just implement a questing system akin to the Journal system in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - make the player interact with players and NPCs to pick up hints that lead them to their objective?