All Posts by Xasapis

Originally posted by fasa

It's certainly much better, pve-wise, than loads of games out there.

Originally posted by Kyleran
... your gaming tastes will mature and you'll understand why people have come to hate it ...

Bad experiences do not invalidate good experiences and vice versa.

What mmorpg.com has to do with logging into World of Warcraft? mmorpg.com account allows you to post in these forums. It has no relationship with WoW account management. I don't know where you live or what version of the game you have (US, EU etc.) to direct you to the proper account management page.

Speaking of which, it's a good idea to use a login and password that you don't use anywhere else, for example in these forums.

There are two fundamental changes regarding PvP on the original WoW and the expansion.

1.
In the original WoW you could purchase PvP gear either by playing and winning enough battlegrounds to raise your reputation with the respective faction. You also needed to devote insane amount of time per day for months in order to become Grand Marshal and have access to the best PvP armor and weapons (I know armor is of a lower rank but you need GM to get them both).
What does this mean? Basically that you had zero time to raid if you wanted to be competitive with the rest of the people in your faction.

Expansion changed that. Now every time you play and you and your team is successful, you gain honour. Honour is a sort of currency for every PvP reward. So basically you can buy both the old GM sets and the new gladiator ones. The big difference with the previous system is that the new one is not diminishing. If you stopped playing for a day, you were losing rank, because the rest of the people in your faction were playing and you were not. Now however, honour is stored, not lost. You can stop and resume PvP at your leasure and at the pace you choose without losing your job and killing your social life.

Whether in the new system the best PvP set worth too much or too little honour is a topic for another discussion.

2.
In WoW, both PvP hungry and PvE enthouciasts were sharing the same game space. In the early days (pre and after MC was introducced), PvP gear were the best gear in the game with a big difference. When BWL was introduced, there was an equalisation between PvP and raid gear. Once Naxxramas was introduced, the scale tipped heavily towards raid gear.

Of course, both Grand Marshal and Naxxramas gear were hard to acquire for different reasons. So, not many people were running around with either.

The expansion brought the best PvP gear back on top. They are better than anything you can find in any instance introduced in the expansion. They are also easier accessible than before (previous system really made people hate the game). Whether this remains true after X amounts of months when a new raid instance is introduced or a new expansion comes out, remains to be seen.

As a raider, I'm happy for PvPers. I don't feel there is a need for competition. Overall PvP gear on a personal level were harder to get compared to raid gear with the old system. Now things are easier on the PvP front (in theory at least). At least people won't burn out now and quit the game after they achieve GM.

The only good thing about positive sales figures is that it shows the game is healthy (aka not dying). Other than that and for the player that is looking for the fun factor, numbers mean little.

Even if the subscribers were 200.000 instead of x million, in the end it would mean nothing if people were not having fun with the game. We are not the company shareholders, who cares about figures. We are in it for the fun.

Depends on your raid mentality.

If people hated raiding and were only doing it to get the loot, I'm pretty sure they will feel disappointed.

If people loved raiding, then gear are only tools, tools you need to push, to progress, nothing more. We needed MC gear to progress (effectively) in BWL. We needed BWL to start Naxxramas. We needed Naxxramas gear to delve deep into that instance. And we will need the expansion gear to tackle with the expansion content.

So no, I'm not sad or angry towards the changes. I'm actually looking forward to the new challenges.

The topic is a bit ambiguous, can mean either positive or negative place (hehe).

I will definitely give it a try (always a good thing to have some first hand personal experience), but only when people start reporting that I'm about to play a finished game and not a paying beta.

Servers in Europe would be nice as well.

So television is supposed to educate me on the ways of proper behaviour? What if I don't watch television? (Which I don't).

Originally posted by Empress_Jess

Originally posted by Riddle
Well I think wow had hoped that the huge raiding would bring people together. It really only made people tolerate others long enough to get their gear and then they were gone.

I am sure that some people met many good friends through raiding. I personally prefer meeting with smaller groups of people, though; I feel as though I can get to know them better that way, and they really stand out instead of being just another 'face in the mob'.

I have nothing against raiding, really---I even enjoyed several raids in World of Warcraft the first few times through. A few people love raiding, and should be able to indulge in such gameplay. What I have a problem with is the rather odd idea that large groups of players ('raid' groups) deserve better gear from their special content which no player can enjoy in a small group. Arguably, in some games, 'raid' dungeons are slightly more challenging than small group dungeons. But that does not have to be the case at all; encounters should be appropriately scaled to the number of players engaging in one, so the challenge is always equal and so are the rewards.

Anyone here who has engaged in much balancing of encounters for D&D or whatnot is well-versed in this type of design. Unfortunately, some MMORPG creators seem to fall into the trap of not figuring out how to tweak the game mechanics in order to scale encounters, so they simply boost some special monster's abilities and therefore require a huge number of people to take it down, and call this 'more difficult'. If the game mechanics were well-designed, then this should not need to be the case, and a solo encounter would be able to be just as challenging, and net just as good of a reward, as a forty-person raid.

Thankfully, most MMORPGs are beginning to shy away from this poor design scheme. I am all for giving raiders content---but they should not receive better rewards than someone who does not raid, who should be able to engage in encounters that offer the same level of challenge.

When you can't balance the things you want from the world with the things the world expects from you?

Anything around us can be seen as an addiction. The question is who sets the standards for a normal behaviour?

To the OP:

I wonder why you even bothered to play the game in the first place. You hate it with a blind passion and no game in any form or shape can deflect such hate. Only sceptical people can be swayed one way or the other and you were obviously not one of them. Which brings me to the following question:

Why did you actually bother posting the whole thing? I doubt you left the beginner's area. I even doubt you gone past level 2.

Your friend is having fun. If this was your best attempt to understand why, then you failed miserably.

"I don't see how  people continue to play these carrot-on-a-stick games such as WoW"
You've just fell into a generalisation pitfall I'm afraid. A good clean interface is far superior than a cumbersome, hard to master interface. An easy to get to but hard to master game is far superior than a hard for the sake of it game. I'm not sure if people actually understand what they want when they stick a tag in a game, either calling it easy or hard. People keep on playing this game because it's fun, or at least, more fun than anything currently out there. I guess it's hard for some people to grasp the concept of fun without a masochistic approach to the gender .

"The fanboys actually believe this game makes them feel above the world"
Actually, this is the attitude of all the niche garage games fan-boys out there. Makes them feel superior playing their "exclusive" stuff.

"It takes no more intelligence to get the "big drops""
You obviously never been there and never done that and it shows. Or, you got invited in a well established guild and got yourself a free ride. Guess what, the 39 other people in your raid put the effort so you can ridicule them with your statements. Makes me wonder on what ground people call themselves hardcore, when they can't even acknowledge the achievements of the people that share your quest space.

"8 million trained apes and growing"
So I guess the people who chose this game and have fun with it are bumbling idiots. I didn't know that such a choice put me in this category. Are there any other choices like this that turn me into an ape? Please enlighten me with your (obviously) higher intelligence.

I was hoping for a Diablo online. I still am. Not for the gameplay (I don't think a MMO needs a Diablo like gameplay) but for the grim storyline and the potential background. It's all hot air of course at this point.

I guess people say Starcraft because it's easier to convert into a MMO. It has a storyline and a world similarly build to Warlcraft. However, I wouldn't want to play Warcraft in space, so I kind of hope it's Diablo with an extended storyline. Maybe having armies of light and darkness fight for dominance of Earth. It would definitely be a deviation from the current fantacy settings.

I didn't bother to read the article. Such articles appear about everything new or out of the common, whatever that is.

Out of a community of x millions you are bound to find some not so sensible people. These are all around us, we just don't look hard enough because most of the time, we don't care. In any case, it comes down to one thing? Does one bad politician an excuse to bring the political system down? ... No? ... I thought so.
It's easy for certain people to mistake impulses with addictions. Take our impulses away and all is left is a lifeless shell of a broken human.

All games have their fair share of good and bad apples. If people want to compare communities, I would like to remind that in a community 5 or 10 times bigger, you're bound to find 5 or 10 times more bad apples. But then again, you'll find the same percentage of good apples as well. It comes down at being biased towards the game itself that make people look at the bad aspects and ignore the good ones.

There is another thing. Some people are insecure. The need to be acknowledged as mature by their peers, the don't want to be ridiculed because they play a game, thus they put tags on games, categorising them in manly games or childish ones. There is alot of hate coming out of insecure people that feel the need to look down on WoW, so they don't have to feel childish for playing their, other, niche game. It seems both hilarious and sad.

For the people that play games as an escape of the harsh reality, such notions are silly. I care little whether a insecure youngster wishes to feel mature by looking down on WoW. All I want is to detach myself from the harsh reality for 30 minutes. WoW is good at this and that's all that matters.

[edit]: typos

"This game's community is crap..."
Depending on what you were looking for. If you were looking for crap, they have the nasty tendency to smear your shoes. The game world is like the real world, you got your fair share of good people and a fair share of people you'd rather avoid. The fact that the game is (now) popular, means that the whole thing is magnified in proportions.
In any case, I don't think that I have played a single game where I had the general chat channel activated, especially after I made my ties with the community and the people that I wanted to communicate with.

"Meaningless expansion ..."
If you're complaining that "it's more of the same", I would point you towards SWG or DAOC or AO or any other game where the expansion altered the gameplay in such a profound way that it was like playing a different game after that. In that sense, Blizzard did not make the mistake of trying to sell us a different game in the form of an expansion, and I'm glad for it. As for the expansion itself, I've hardly explored enough to give an accurate representation of it. All I know is that for the moment I'm overwhelmed by the new things.

"Warriors & Priests get shafted in PvP"
This is not an expansion complain but a general complain that I sympathise with (since I'm playing the role of a holy priest). I do like my spec, I don't mind, I make a difference (or at least I was before the expansion) in the battlegrounds. If you hated the healing role and was forced to it due to the raid mindset, I'm sorry. As far as my guild is concerned, it took Naxxramas to really make offspecs shine and show us how wrong the min/max approach was. But that was almost after a year of raiding, so maturity does take a while. You won't find this in your average MC/ BWL guild. You wouldn't find it in the early Naxxramas bosses either.
Bah, why am I talking about raiding when you're talking about PvP?
I guess because you were trying to combine the two, as I did. The difference I guess is that for me PvP was a bonus, while all the fun was in PvE. Thus I did not overly care if I could not do damage in PvP but was rather content to support my team (especially when they were smart enough to support me). My advice would be to focus on the aspects of the game that give you the most fun. Especially with the expansion. The PvP gear are by far the best you can get and surpass anything you can find in any instance. So if you enjoyed PvP but felt you had to raid to compete in the gear level, you don't have to any more, not with the expansion.

One last thing. There are alot of classes that can do an average job and get away with it in guilds that are not, lets say, focused enough. It was easy to identify the need for a max specced tanking warrior, or a max specced healing priest, or druid or paladin. But there is a huge gap in the damage of a full raid specced rogue in comparison to a mixed specced or PvP specced one. The same can be said about any class, with the possible exception of warlocks. But then again, warlocks had their own fair share of problems in PvE to begin with.
I guess it all falls down to the fact that certain guilds are not mature enough to go past the tank/heal min/max mentality and focus on how _everyone_ can improve the raid. But to do that, you need people who love what their doing, not people who do it out of necessity, as a chore and in order to have fun elsewhere in the game. In that sense, I'm glad that in the expansion the best equipment in the game are PvP rewards. It leaves raiding to the people who love it and put their energy into it out of the enjoyment they derive out of it.