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[sorophx]

I don't know who Wildstar was made for, to be honest. it's too similar to WoW in places, where it matters the least, and where it kind of distances itself from WoW it becomes completely unbearable 

[Hurlshort]

 

Voice actors, on the other hand, can pretty much be pulled off the street.  

 

As true as it is for acting in general. You can pull a random dude in from the street, if he's a natural.

 

 

It is more true for voicework in a video game though, where so many components trump the voice acting.  Also you took out my smilie for some reason, which is supposed to be a clear indication that I made the comment tongue in cheek.  

[Amentep]

I dunno, bad voice acting can be distracting (cf many games at the dawn of voice acting in games).

[Malcador]

[Blarghagh]

I don't know who Wildstar was made for, to be honest. it's too similar to WoW in places, where it matters the least, and where it kind of distances itself from WoW it becomes completely unbearable 

 

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success.

[Gromnir]

 

 

Voice actors, on the other hand, can pretty much be pulled off the street.  

 

As true as it is for acting in general. You can pull a random dude in from the street, if he's a natural.

 

 

It is more true for voicework in a video game though, where so many components trump the voice acting.  Also you took out my smilie for some reason, which is supposed to be a clear indication that I made the comment tongue in cheek.  

 

perhaps because he is an actor?

 

 

HA! Good Fun!

[marelooke]

 

I don't know who Wildstar was made for, to be honest. it's too similar to WoW in places, where it matters the least, and where it kind of distances itself from WoW it becomes completely unbearable 

 

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success.

 

 

There being things that are always just out of reach is imho a good thing, it certainly is what got me into raiding, I think a big part of the decline of WoW is that it is much too easy to see everything. For this I blame the LFG-system and the raid finder. The first destroyed the sense of community on realms, the second makes it so that everybody can see all the content without any effort. (Blizzard's attempt to fix this with Cataclysm backfired massively due to the LFG system, there not being any notworthy repercussions for abandoning your team as tank/healer if things don't go super-smoothly literally killed it)

 

Sure you can do the "normal" and "heroic" version of the exact same content but it's the still same content dropping the same gear (with another colour palette) meaning it gets boring real fast since most people do the raids on "raid finder" to get the baseline gear, then do the same stuff on "normal" with their guild and after that the *same* raid again on heroic. If that sounds boring then that is because it *is* boring. I miss when there was a natural progression both in raids as well as in the heroic dungeons (eg. Karazahn -> Gruul's/Magtheridon -> SSC -> whatever the Kael'thas raid was called -> CoT: Mount Hyjal -> Black Temple -> Sunwell Plateau) and if a guild started up later during the expansion they'd still have to go through raids in that order, more or less (our guild started "late" in TBC and we made it to just before that nasty boss in the Sunwell that destroyed entire guilds: M'uru), though generally one could skip the last (and hardest) boss of a raid for progression (eg. since we started up late we tiptoed around Lady Vash for a while...).

By the time I quit WoW when a new raid was released you got handed gear at the level of the last raid for basically free (either through heroic 5mans or through badges earned in said 5mans, later they added raid finder to that list), so there is no need anymore to visit any older raid, and nobody does either, only the current content counts.

 

Moreover since it's less necessary to actually *have* a guild people are a lot less willing to put in the effort necessary to be part of a decent guild (eg. show up on time, or at all), which lead to the top 10 raiding guilds on my realm disappearing in short order (some of them had actually been around to raid Naxxramas in vanilla).

 

That 1% of the players still inspired the rest (or I might be special), certainly the situation in vanilla was far from ideal, but the current situation is entirely the other extreme.

 

Sure we all have less time nowadays (I certainly couldn't put in the time I used to even if I wanted to), but handing everything out for free isn't exactly helping the feeling of accomplishment. I still fondly remember beating Sartharion 25 with 3 drakes (Sarth3d 25man) or even the first time we managed to beat Moroes (2nd boss in Karazahn) before I joined a "true" raiding guild. These kinds of moments are what raiders raid for (Moroes certainly gave met the raiding itch) and really I don't even remember any bosses that came after Wrath of the Lich King, which is saying something I guess...

 

But maybe I'm just suffering from this affliction known to EVE players as "bittervet syndrome" and everything is actually great with how things are in WoW nowadays (though I'd argue that the declining subs are a sign that at least *something* is wrong).

 

PS: the fact that Blizzard still doesn't have a decent grasp on character progression doesn't help any, eg. a paladin in vanilla is so different from a paladin in, say, Cataclysm it's not even funny. The same goes for pretty much every class, Paladins are just the most extreme example. These constant "total rethinks" of classes surely don't help player retention.

[ShadySands]

I don't get the appeal of hardcore raiding but maybe I'm just too casual of a player. That's not to say I've never raided before but I can count the times I've been in raids across all MMOs on one seven fingered hand.

 

I don't PVP either but that's neither here nor there

 

MMOs are pretty much large nonreactive ever-expanding single player games for me

Edited September 23, 2015 by ShadySands

[Hurlshort]

Yeah, I'm into MMO's for weird reasons.  Basically I like to slowly develop a character in a persistent world setting while seeing other people but not having to interact with them. 

[Gromnir]

I don't get the appeal of hardcore raiding but maybe I'm just too casual of a player. That's not to say I've never raided before but I can count the times I've been in raids across all MMOs on one seven fingered hand.

 

I don't PVP either but that's neither here nor there

 

MMOs are pretty much large nonreactive ever-expanding single player games for me

 

there is kinda a critical mass for guilds necessary if they wanna enjoy consistent operation success.  unfortunate, that same critical mass guarantees the presence o' a at least a few o' the folks that give mmo's such a bad reputation.  

 

am not a particular fan o' pvp, and we dislike most players who enjoy pvp.  that being said, there were a small group o' players we interacted with a couple years ago and they, as a group, did considerable pvp.  operations take considerable time and require a significant number o' people to all be present on-server for that considerable time. swtor warzones?  even if you only had 3-4 folks available, you could get on teamspeak (or whatever) and do a handful o' warzones as a group and near complete your weekly.  sure, the warzone maps themselves were always the same, but wz challenges were always different 'cause opponents were different.   

 

'course, everything changed with 2.0 and ranked pvp.  bolster were initial extreme bugged (all green gear that were fully augmented made folks super-powered?) and there were other issues, and that led to Gromnir's small group o' fellow pvp compatriots drifting apart.  new jobs. new games. illness in family.  etc.  if you got a small group, is harder to keep 'em together for a long time. so, while we got 100 valor on a couple characters, we hasn't done pvp for a long time, but we can see the appeal... if only in an extreme limited situation.

 

HA! Good Fun!

Edited September 23, 2015 by Gromnir

[Keyrock]

but I can count the times I've been in raids across all MMOs on one seven fingered hand.

 

You have a seven fingered hand?  Badass!  I just hope, for your sake, that you've not done any harm to the family of Inigo Montoya.

[Blarghagh]

 

 

I don't know who Wildstar was made for, to be honest. it's too similar to WoW in places, where it matters the least, and where it kind of distances itself from WoW it becomes completely unbearable 

 

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success.

 

 

There being things that are always just out of reach is imho a good thing, it certainly is what got me into raiding, I think a big part of the decline of WoW is that it is much too easy to see everything. For this I blame the LFG-system and the raid finder. The first destroyed the sense of community on realms, the second makes it so that everybody can see all the content without any effort. (Blizzard's attempt to fix this with Cataclysm backfired massively due to the LFG system, there not being any notworthy repercussions for abandoning your team as tank/healer if things don't go super-smoothly literally killed it)

 

Sure you can do the "normal" and "heroic" version of the exact same content but it's the still same content dropping the same gear (with another colour palette) meaning it gets boring real fast since most people do the raids on "raid finder" to get the baseline gear, then do the same stuff on "normal" with their guild and after that the *same* raid again on heroic. If that sounds boring then that is because it *is* boring. I miss when there was a natural progression both in raids as well as in the heroic dungeons (eg. Karazahn -> Gruul's/Magtheridon -> SSC -> whatever the Kael'thas raid was called -> CoT: Mount Hyjal -> Black Temple -> Sunwell Plateau) and if a guild started up later during the expansion they'd still have to go through raids in that order, more or less (our guild started "late" in TBC and we made it to just before that nasty boss in the Sunwell that destroyed entire guilds: M'uru), though generally one could skip the last (and hardest) boss of a raid for progression (eg. since we started up late we tiptoed around Lady Vash for a while...).

By the time I quit WoW when a new raid was released you got handed gear at the level of the last raid for basically free (either through heroic 5mans or through badges earned in said 5mans, later they added raid finder to that list), so there is no need anymore to visit any older raid, and nobody does either, only the current content counts.

 

Moreover since it's less necessary to actually *have* a guild people are a lot less willing to put in the effort necessary to be part of a decent guild (eg. show up on time, or at all), which lead to the top 10 raiding guilds on my realm disappearing in short order (some of them had actually been around to raid Naxxramas in vanilla).

 

That 1% of the players still inspired the rest (or I might be special), certainly the situation in vanilla was far from ideal, but the current situation is entirely the other extreme.

 

Sure we all have less time nowadays (I certainly couldn't put in the time I used to even if I wanted to), but handing everything out for free isn't exactly helping the feeling of accomplishment. I still fondly remember beating Sartharion 25 with 3 drakes (Sarth3d 25man) or even the first time we managed to beat Moroes (2nd boss in Karazahn) before I joined a "true" raiding guild. These kinds of moments are what raiders raid for (Moroes certainly gave met the raiding itch) and really I don't even remember any bosses that came after Wrath of the Lich King, which is saying something I guess...

 

But maybe I'm just suffering from this affliction known to EVE players as "bittervet syndrome" and everything is actually great with how things are in WoW nowadays (though I'd argue that the declining subs are a sign that at least *something* is wrong).

 

PS: the fact that Blizzard still doesn't have a decent grasp on character progression doesn't help any, eg. a paladin in vanilla is so different from a paladin in, say, Cataclysm it's not even funny. The same goes for pretty much every class, Paladins are just the most extreme example. These constant "total rethinks" of classes surely don't help player retention.

 

 

Oh, I do agree with most of what you said (though LFR loot is no longer just a color swap, and it's always below the last tiers heroic so it's not part of the gearing process). It's just that raiding is not as big a part of WoW as people think it is. I was reading about this very subject earlier and I found the actual number of people who did Naxrammas and realized I made a giant overstatement. Ion Hazzikostas didn't say it was 1% of the players, he said it was about 3000 players total made it through Naxx. Back when Naxrammas came out, there were about 7 million players. Think about that - out of 7 million people, 3000 people made it through the raid content. That's less than 0.05%. The reason Blizzard keeps LFR because now at least something like 30% of players (still a minority) sees the raid content so they're actually able to justify making new raid content.

 

The weird thing is that such a majority of MMO players never set foot in raids. It's becoming readily apparent that the reason Warlords of Draenor lost so many subscribers despite the raid content being almost universally praised is because it's got nothing else that's good. Normal (to a point), Heroic and Mythic raids are challenging. But everything else (including LFR) has zero difficulty. Leveling is piss easy - I can solo 5-player designed group quests when I'm level appropriate for them. Professions are pointless and easy and filled with cooldowns where you can't actually craft. Last week, I just did /follow someone in LFR and went AFK to see if that would work, and it did. Hell even heroic dungeons are a faceroll, and I did the relevant rep grinds for WoD in three weeks. And I'm not trying to make myself look awesome here, I'm a TERRIBLE WoW player. I still use the keyboard to turn.

 

Mists of Pandaria did a lot to stem the subscriber loss because it had cool mounts that you could get through rep grinds and professions that took a lot of time and gold and because there was quest and story content in the end-game, and there were scenarios to do, and you had reasons to do dungeons. Even the LFR was a little better in MoP, it was still possible to wipe on it occassionally. But the vocal minority has been saying for so long that the only interesting thing in the game is hardcore raiding, and Blizzard believed them. Now the only thing that is any good is the raiding, and people are leaving the game in droves. I have plenty to do because I started over on a new server, but almost everyone else I know that still plays is out of non-raid content so they don't do anything but log on for raids. I keep seeing the WoW fanboy boards like MMO Champion whining about casuals ruining the game, but in truth the reason it lost 4.5 million subscribers since the launch of WoD is because Blizzard focused on them and their obsession with raiding.

 

EDIT: I got confused on the 1% figure because that was mentioned for another raid, namely Sunwell the final raid of Burning Crusade. It wasn't until Wrath that slightly more than a completely negligable amount of WoW players actually started raiding.

 

EDIT EDIT: I'm sorry about my weird sentence structure in the last few posts, I have the flu and my head's not where it's supposed to be... I recognize some of my sentences are awkward.

Edited September 24, 2015 by TrueNeutral

[Mamoulian War]

Well both of you are right about WoW. I was raidinig in vanilla and TBC a lot, I have never finished Naxxramas, but I have finished Sunwell. But, when I have started WoTLK, our casual guild, was able to breeze through Naxxramas in two days... With green/blue gear. And this was the time, where the game became so easy for me, that I started to quit and resubscribe on a quarterly basis, and I was still able to keep track with SP and MMO content easily.

 

Both raiding and non-raiding content with addition of LFR feature completely destroyed the social aspect of the guild, because no one needed guild for anything anymore and doing content with randoms became so boring that I ended with Buying Cataclysm without ever activatiing the registration key... After that I never resubscribed again. All friends left the game, because of the same reasons. Social interactions was what everyone liked about the game the most... And it was gone...

[Blarghagh]

Find a social guild instead of a raiding guild. I'm in a guild that only just started heroic and that's worked out better for me than hardcore raiding. Met a bunch of new cool people when I stopped caring so much about raiding.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, I'm in a social guild that I co-founded back in '07. Over the years we've raided with varying degrees of seriousness, but the fact that the core membership have largely stayed together through thick and thin (including my own lengthy absences) is a good indication of where the relative priorities are. Building that sort of community is something I'm very happy to have done, but I also know I couldn't possibly do it again.

 

I guess that illustrates both the strength and weakness of the MMO, that growing something like that can happen, but also shows how hard it can be to get by without such support. As an example, at one point I levelled an alt of the opposing faction, initially really only to see the new quests on that side. Once at max level (85 at the time), I did a handful of dungeons, a few LFR raids, and after all that, I was still guildless, friendless, and had nothing to do. Fine by me because it was a diversion, but I can easily see newcomers to the game going through the exact same experience and be left to wonder "is that it?"

[Blarghagh]

The newcomer experience for WoW is pretty bad anyway. I wonder how many first time players got to level 60, got thrust back in time into the terrible and outdated questing style of Outland and ended up quitting. Then there's the whole "people only do half zones and half continents" issue. Personally, I think they should retune the leveling zones to cut Outland and Northrend out of the leveling experience so there's a cohesive, chronological experience and then use Outland and Northrend for their new Timewalking rewards. Make what is 1-60 now into 1-70 (make people finish some zones, or do a couple extra) and retool the Cata zones into 70-80 and Pandaland into 80-90. I mean, I leveled the Pandaland content without ever leaving the first zone... that can't be how it's intended. That will also allow them to ramp up the difficulty a bit more since you have less continents to do so the amount of time spent on it will even out. A cohesive experience will go a long way to getting new blood into the game. Plus for the old-school people you can make the Outland and Northrend stuff relevant again through the Timewalking Rewards system.

[Mamoulian War]

I was in a social guild which was raiding once in a while, the LFG and LFR tools destroyed the social aspect of the whole game for most of the people playing. Tanks got their groups after this feature in 15 seconds, healers in 2 minutes, DPS in 20-30 minutes... In the end everyone quit the game because it brought up drama, that tanks are always locked out of heroics and raids :-/

[Spider]

The thing about the different difficult modes is that you're not supposed to do them all sequentially. They're there so people of different interest levels have challenging but doable content.

 

If you're raiding heroic on one tier, you don't have to start on normal the next tier, you can go straight to heroic. Sure you might want a couple of nights in an easier difficulty to get used to fights and get a bit of a gear advantage, but you don't have to.

 

LFR on the other hand most people in my guild avoid like the plague. They're completely devoid of challenge in most cases and offer no relevant rewards. It can serve t help you complete the legendary questline a bit faster (or catch up on alts), but if you're doing regular raiding in any of the otehr difficulties, it offers very little to you. It's there for those that for one reason or another can't or won't do regular raiding. Certainly doesn't have much of an impact on our guilds community.

 

The premade groups tool might have a little more, but with that you still have to interact with other players, so it's just a simplified version of spamming trade chat.

 

But yeah if you like the community aspect of the game, you'll have to find a guild that values that same aspect.

[Blarghagh]

I was in a social guild which was raiding once in a while, the LFG and LFR tools destroyed the social aspect of the whole game for most of the people playing. Tanks got their groups after this feature in 15 seconds, healers in 2 minutes, DPS in 20-30 minutes... In the end everyone quit the game because it brought up drama, that tanks are always locked out of heroics and raids :-/

 

Yeah, there's a definite lack of healers and tanks in the game. Possibly because healers/tanks are hardmode compared to dps.

[Spider]

For the content where you notice the lack of tanks and healers, tanking and healing is typically easier than dps:ing.

 

But it comes with the perception of responsibility which most don't care for I assume.

[Malcador]

Most people like to kill stuff, so DPS is popular or so is my theory. Healing is fairly easy for the most part, you can't handle adds in most fights and just need to pay attention to movement. Just stressful in a way as all the DPS untermensch spit vitriol at you if they die, figuring you their slave.

[Raithe]

That's the thing, to be a Healer in mmo's you generally need to be much more into the social side. But DPS can quite often do a fair bit solo.

[Malcador]

That's the thing, to be a Healer in mmo's you generally need to be much more into the social side. But DPS can quite often do a fair bit solo.

Not really, especially with dual specs in WoW. I solo as a healer, it is doable and is nice to have that endurance as well - even if talents have changed in WoW. I've never been social in guilds - I heal as I like being support, I do my job and that's about it. In pug groups, I am valuable commodity, so if a group of disposable DPS irk me I can just ditch them and find a new group soon.

[Humanoid]

I'd say being a silent healer is easy, but being a silent tank is difficult and relies on the other tank being okay with taking the initiative. For what it's worth, I'm currently a healer with a tank offspec, but realistically I heal more than 95% of the time. That's just current content though and borne of necessity, over the whole lifespan of the game I've probably done equal parts damage and healing. Always been the jack of all trades and have done reasonable raiding (i.e. non-LFR) on nine of the eleven classes over the years.

[Oerwinde]

I wish Blizzard would just take the art assets and such from WoW and build a single player game. I would be all over a single player open world Warcraft RPG