"The neckbeards aren't gone... they're WAITING."

[Projectmars]

is neckbeard like a catch-word for someone who is willing to put in the work to get ahead in a game, where your not.. so your salty? Or theyre simply better than you?

real question. hate the term.

Ive been called such cause im top AP of my class on my realm, mythic raider, high io score etc. Yet I compete regionally in bodybuilding comps, have a family of 4, and am up at 5am every day for work, and probably had TOO much of a social life pre marriage/family.

Nah, Neckbeards are kinda a proto-incel/nerd kinda thing. Like the stereotype of the fat, bearded guy at the comic shops that goes "Ackshually" before launching into long winded explanations of stuff, wears fedoras, and tips them when saying "Mi'lady".

[tikcol]

just do yourself a favour and stop beating this dead horse

we heared it so many times

we heared it when wildstar was released

we heared it (by asmongold himself) when black desert was released (and he stopped playing it after like what ... 2 weeks ?)

we heared it milion times

and it was never true.

It was never true because the game was never good

[anon5123]

Wasn't W* going to revive the "hardcore" (whatever that means) MMO? That one worked well!

This.

Wildstar specifically tried to be "hardcore", and it flopped hard and went f2p in just a year.

The market for "hardcore" MMOs is very niche nowadays.

[Coombs]

This faggot is trying so hard to be a part of Classic WoW.

People will play Classic, but not a lot of people will be playing Classic at the start of 2020.

[ONCHEhap]

who is asmogold?

https://www.wowhead.com/npc=134041/infected-peasant

This guy

[crono14]

Nah, Neckbeards are kinda a proto-incel/nerd kinda thing. Like the stereotype of the fat, bearded guy at the comic shops that goes "Ackshually" before launching into long winded explanations of stuff, wears fedoras, and tips them when saying "Mi'lady".

Which sure some of those people might play Classic, but the stereotype that anyone who wants to play Classic or play any game 'hardcore' is the comic book guy is dumb. I don't think there are many people that even fit that category too much anymore.

I agree with klepp as well, I hate that term. I have a family of 3, have a career, work out almost every day, and have enough of a social life for me. I just like to play games competitively and challenge myself.

[Nnyco]

ye we saw how much awaited a hardcore mmo was when wildstar got released

[Projectmars]

who is asmogold?

An actual Neckbeard

[Qnubi]

He is correct. I am one of those, I am currently wasting my time with hardcore indie turn based games such as Battle Brothers or grindy skill based RPGs such as Monster Hunter World and Generations. Once hardcore, always hardcore.

[crusadernero]

Cant wait for classic to come out. Im not able to play the hours I did way back then, but i'll play it for sure. Take my sweet time and complete all quest zones with my Human paladin. Will probably take forever lol.

I relaly loved doing Loremaster. Seeing all the storylines etc. Will be nice to experience all of the classic zones again. I have forgotten alot of the quests from back then.

[audyX]

I help moderate a newly formed Discord for Classic WoW Guilds and I can say based on just the discord's growth alone, that players are eager for a good MMO they can trust and standby. Too many MMOs have become major disappointments for people. I think what differentiates Classic from these other titles, is for the most part, players already know what they're investing their time and efforts into. We're still hungry for a a good MMORPG title, we've just been disappointed with too many titles until now (knock on wood).

[Pieterman]

ye we saw how much awaited a hardcore mmo was when wildstar got released

Wildstars problem was it didn't grab people by the nutsack. Not much to do with hardcore vs softcore. The first day of gameplay was just as boring as WoW is nowadays, just without the 20 years of story behind it.

[Deleted]

Wildstars problem was it didn't grab people by the nutsack. Not much to do with hardcore vs softcore. The first day of gameplay was just as boring as WoW is nowadays, just without the 20 years of story behind it.

And the gameplay in classic is in which way better compared to modern games like Wildstar, FFXIV or the actual WoW?

[s_bushido]

Wildstars problem was it didn't grab people by the nutsack. Not much to do with hardcore vs softcore. The first day of gameplay was just as boring as WoW is nowadays, just without the 20 years of story behind it.

I'm sorry...what sort of gameplay are you expecting from classic, exactly? Or maybe a better question would be: What do you think has changed between "the first day of" levels in vanilla vs retail?

[Reivur]

I don't really see why Wildstar keeps being used as an example of a hardcore MMO in these cute witty 'one liners' of how if you'd like something hardcore then YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE HURRR, and its failure means OMG NO ONE WANTS THAT KIND OF GAME.

I wouldn't mind giving a hardcore mmo a shot in this day and age; it doesn't mean its presentation has to literally be a Saturday morning cartoon kids club from the 80s/90s. I mostly agree with @MoanaLisa 's post earlier. There's a lot of subjectivity involved that makes it hard to market for. You can't just slap a sticker that says "WE ADDED TIGHT ATTUNEMENTS AND DIFFICULTY" and call it a product that people who want a hardcore experience automatically flock to. There are different reasons for everyone, and because of this its a risky investment, plus it very well probably is a smaller group it splits even further. The same reason any game with a queue system or dependency on others is conservative about adding modes or dlcs that split community nowadays.

I know people call Blizzard's style cartoony, and to a degree it is, but Wildstar amped that shit beyond eleven, and its cutscenes, story, presentation and style literally reminded me of my childhood but without the nostalgia to let me really hug it. I would not have been surprised if the Dancing Raisins came in to play their sax anytime you leveled. I just wasn't into it. I also found class design kind of obscure. Engineer, for example, looked like it might have been a pet class but in practice I don't even know what the fuck it was the more I used it and I didn't invest enough time to figure it out because it was already losing me on the style. Its failure does not suddenly translate to me suddenly hating attunements based on clearing stages and check-list style progress or wanting difficulty before max level cap.

[Beerbill Society]

Game genre evolved so much and MMOs still feel lackluster compared to it, many single/multiplayers have more interesting mechanics and often feel more rewarding.

There are many factors why MMORPGs were successful but fail to achieve the same effect today:

Game Companies are more greedy than before, which means more mechanics are done thinking in financial return instead of enjoyment, the grindy nature of MMOs make it a easy target to infest with "cash shops".

We have a saturation of "social" in internet today, a few years back social networking was not so prominent, while today we never disconnect. This feeling overburden this kind of genre, people may feel less inclined to be "social" all the time.

People how played back then will remember that feeling of wanting to get home to "connect" again. This may have lost a lot of value recently.

RPG usually require a lot of time and effort something that people are less inclined to put in today. Also development wise it's harder to balance or create content too, for example Overwatch has a much more simple structure than WoW, making balance be easier to archive, and using the same example those games require a different amount of 'time', you can easily play a few rounds of Overwatch in 30 minutes but hardly do any meaningful content in WoW.

They also will have to fight to stay relevant, because many game modes just keep showing up everyday, how well could it adapt to changes?

Lastly, people will crave different gigs, MMOs require a broad public to stay alive and relevant while it's hard to please everyone with a single genre, especially since, you may have to restrict content based on age and each year your current playerbase will want new things.

(Kid wants something, a teenager wants another, a grown person will want another and maybe he/she has kids, so maybe it will have to please kids too.)

I don't think Massive Multiplayer will still be a thing, I believe we will see much more of Supportive Multiplayer endorsing initiatives they believe in and crave, with services like Patreon being more common.

And maybe much more of Cash Roulette Multiplayer, that we have already today.

[Mayia]

I would've loved for Starwars the old republic not to have been a bag of cats on fire, sadly that wasn't the case.
I've tried many of the "new mmo's" but they are all pretty similar to wow, and Wow really being the first one it has all my stuff here, but i think if an mmorpg came along that drastically appealed to the gamer i am, i would in a second drop Wow like a bag of rocks i just don't see that happening because nobody is willing to take a risk.

[Pieterman]

I'm sorry...what sort of gameplay are you expecting from classic, exactly? Or maybe a better question would be: What do you think has changed between "the first day of" levels in vanilla vs retail?

Significantly slower pace, more of a challenge, gaining items that matter and meeting people that I'll be playing with at max level. There's a huge difference in level 1-30 on vanilla vs live. Last time I lvl'd a character on live it took a day or two of /played to get to the latest content. I had died exactly 0 times, met 0 people, got 0 items of consequence. It was unengaging and ultimately meaningless.

- - - Updated - - -

And the gameplay in classic is in which way better compared to modern games like Wildstar, FFXIV or the actual WoW?

I won't comment too much on FF or Wildstar as I haven't played much of those, but as for current WoW; leveling will give you no gratification at any point, meeting people is meaningless and gear doesn't matter unless you're doing the highest level of content (which is an upscaled version of content you can already do).

Things you did mattered in Classic.

[Deficineiron]

We had a phase where big companies spent big money on casual pve / pvp theme parks. While most of them survive in some form, how many of them would have spent that kind of money up front for those results. There's no question what genre of mmo has the worst results. The good news is, the lower the numbers for each new mmo, the more developers have to appeal to the core mmo audiences who actually like them.

Everyone wants to talk about Wildstar because they were very loud about hardcore! - whatever that meant. Thing is it was a themepark mmo, 10 years in development, tried to appeal to about everyone from casual and hardcore pve to pvp arena, switched to an action mmo mid stream, and having followed it a couple years before release I can tell you they did not talk about hardcore! until the last year. I assume they switched to that tagline because Rift was quite the success using this strategy. Remember "we're not in Azeroth anymore" video?

this is the question - right?

Many touted or let themselves be touted as 'wow-killers' but I don't think most or all of the companies involved took that seriously or believed it - they had a number for development/advertising, etc., and they needed to beat it substantially. I assume some of them did.

I recall seeing some numbers about swtor which suggested it had been a big winner financially for EA - not saying wow-size, just 9-digit size. maybe I am wrong? been a long time since I looked at this.

how about other similar mmo's that launched post-wow? any total dev/adv. numbers + total revenue and income from them? any educated guesses out there?

money>fun as far as corporate goals go. was wildstar profitable (are there any numbers out there to suggest either way?) games that were poorly received according to MMO-C might have made some folks in offices very, very happy when they went to the bank.

the biggest mmo I know of since wow is swtor - EA made this with a property better known that WoW, arguably one of only a few fiction settings to meet that criteria and possibly appeal to gamers. what I read at the time and in discussions later was that EA seemed to want to tune the game along the general difficulty of wotlk - that is to say, very little actually hard, and a lot that you just went through without much risk. is this a fair characterization?

could folks who played swtor early on describe how it was tuned, both in leveling and group content?

[CostinR]

People talk about Wildstar and it's failure as some evidence that there's no hardcore audience that wants a hardcore MMORPG...well hardcore in the sense of a challenging and difficulty end game?

Wildstar died not because it was a hardcore game but rather because it was pretty terrible. Yes the combat system was amazing, yes the raids and dungeons were superb....but the rest of the game? I'd throw it in the trash in heartbeat.

Uninteresting lore, story with too much of a focus on the comedic elements of the game
Uninspired look to the game, I'm not talking here about technical graphics but their artistic choices left a great deal to be desired.
Bugs, glitches and HORRIBLE performance. I played this game on a high end computer at the time, it ran like trash and it most certainly wasn't some technical marvel to somehow justify that.
Idiotic raid system: Hey guys let's bring back 40 man raiding, but let's force guilds to go through 20 man first before they enter, I'm sure that will work out well for them: Hint it wouldn't. Having 40 man raids is very good, I enjoy it, what no one enjoys in a guild especially as an officer is being forced to recruit a large enough roster for 40 man and then have to split that in 2 20 man raids in order to even enter 40 man. This screws over guilds to no end....well that and every member of the guild being forced to do the equivalent of WOW scenarios almost perfectly.
Extremely broken crafting system: Best armor in game? Crafted, and not through some raid materials oh no, but regular crafting. So an enormous part of your raid gear is useless if you are a DPS.

I can go on. Wildstar had enormous potential and interest in it to make it work, but their horrible decisions led to a broken game and an extremely frustrated community. Best part was the overall attunment system. To give a perspective attunments in TBC: Kara requires some leg work and merely 4 normal dungeons, the ones designed for level 70s but too not too hard. SSC requires Gruul and Nightbane, TK requires Magtheridon and a long and involved quest chain that requires several very difficulty 5 man heroics, but this is for the SECOND raiding tier in the expansion.

Wildstar? Get the equivalent of 150 Badges of Justices, get EXALTED with the equivalent of Orgrimmar/Stormwind, do a number of events, do every adventure ( equivalent of MOP scenarios but considerably harder ) on the 2nd highest difficulty, do every 5 man Heroic on Silver: A Speed Run, brutal in almost every case, with EVERY Bonus objective as well and then you get to every World Bosses.

All 10 of them. Yeah sounds fun camping for world bosses that everyone wants. Then have a special 5 man boss and you are able to do...the 20 man raid...before you can get into 40 man.

I'm all for attunments, I think Vanilla and TBC worked well enough...but this is the equivalent of getting exalted in TBC with every faction, farming for weeks for badges, hunting for world bosses, doing 5 heroics on a SPEED RUN ( think TBC heroics were brutal and murderous? Wildstar were far, far more difficult ) and then you can enter...Karazhan.

Even so there were plenty of people eager to jump on Wildstar, it just alienated them through a combination of plenty of the things it did badly. I'd say one of the great reasons TBC is remembered fondly is you had so many things to do at once once 70 and attuned to Kara: 5 Man dungeon farm, rep grinding, badge grinding, working on crafted gear, doing lengthy quest chains, finishing the zones you had skipped while leveling.

This took months of work to actually do. I was well into tier 5 before I finished it.

In Wildstar your path was quite narrow and you only had certain things you could do at any time. This is what you want to avoid. TBC was a harder version of Vanilla so I can hope that if Classic is successful other MMOs would learn.