To me these are extremely essential elements in a game. Maybe my vision is too single player one-sided but I cannot imagine investing years in a game where any of these design elements was lacking. Maybe that's why I could never get into any MMO (not just WOW mind you). I guess for those of you who do, the community aspects are good enough to outweigh whatever is lacking in the mechanics or design departments - kinda like enjoying Arcanum for what it does really well despite the combat?
Well, I'd say it has something in common with how many on Codex perceive older RPGs - many will say they have shit interface, are hard to get into, many mechanics are clunky and undeveloped, and there's a ton of bugs, but there'll still be an
experienced group that will say that it's possible to look past the issues and find a gem underneath that. I'm not saying WoW was a gem in Vanilla - but otherwise, the situation is kind of similar. And yeah, many people were frustrated with Vanilla class toolsets, but I was actually not one of those people.
however, lack of LFG, LFR and various other search tools meant that the players had to interact with each others.
This is something that frequently comes up from one of my friends actually. He really does miss the community aspect that you describe (he was a p. good healer apparently, and was well known on his realm) but according to him the pre-dungeonfinder (not LFR; whatever it's called, the one that lets you find others for non-raid dungeons) days frequently involved sitting on your ass trying to recruit people for your group, then as soon as your group is ready someone has to go, then you spend another 5 minutes filling in that spot, then your tank leaves and you spend another half hour finding one.... honestly it makes it sound like the most boring waste of time ever. And keep in mind this all comes from someone who
liked the game as it was and still misses the community aspect.
Well, thing is, if you were in a nice group, you'd frequently not
mind that you're wasting your time waiting for a group to gather. Some of my most fun dungeon experiences came from spamming Trade with various witty variants of "Rogue looking for group", which were in fact so successful that my prior-to unknown rogue alt quite quickly became a welcome guest in any dungeon, lots of random whispers to join BRS/Strat/Scholo runs as soon as I'd log in, even. Then it'd be shooting bullshit with guys in party chat, and then the mandatory half an hour gryph flight to the dungeon with more chatting. I dunno, to me it was actually kinda fun. Hell, sometimes we'd kick out an obvious douche and wait another half an hour til someone's friend would come along. Granted, I had a lot more time back then, but meh - one fun but slow run per evening, or six boring bland banal shit ones, I might still take the first option. Gear's still not that much of a factor. In fact, this is why I don't consider Challenge Modes at all - there's absolute zero of communal activity there, just rush rush, usually done by a preset group on voice chat. Meh.
You had to get yourself attractive to others in order to come to L60 runs that wouldn't suck massive cock unless you wanted to be that last-moment filler; failing that, you had to actually have friends that'd take you along. Point is, you do not have this aspect now. It's not an MMO, really. It's a hub for a set of minigames based on the same mechanics without really having the "massive multiplayer" bit. The last time I made random friends with people was basically in WotLK
Ok I think I understand you now. It's interesting, he never actually formulated it as "it's not an MMO anymore" but he does complain often about how everyone now sits in the town hub, that there's no real world pvp anymore (he showed me some, uh, pretty impressive videos of old game pvp), he doesn't meet many people out in the world, those you do meet ignore you and don't even try to interact, and so on... in other words exactly what you said, the elements that
make it "massive multiplayer". I can see why it'd be disheartening, especially if this used to the most enjoyable aspect of the game.
Yeah, it's the massive multiplayer bit that I'm missing from this whole thing. I used to run a huge invite-only RP guild, lots of nice folk just randomly met by interacting in the world or dungeons, some occasional dumbfucks too, but those got quickly weeded, now, my social interactions in WoW are pretty much limited by the raid group I'm in - the RP scene on my server
was retarded and now
is dead, even the Trade chat is pretty much just the occasional guild ad, everything's atomized and between those atoms is a huge goddamned void. So why am I paying a sub to what boils down to be a non-MMO?
Also, yeah, there was some amazing world PvP, mostly in Ashenvale, Hillsbrad and Barrens. Again, lacked a lot of tools of today, and you'd actually get permanent "dishonorable kill" points by accident, but it somehow felt at least slightly more relateable than all the instanced fighting going on now. Of course, it was also frustrating for a lot of people that just wanted to level, and had the misfortune of accidentally wandering into a war zone/getting ganked/healing someone and toggling their PvP state/waiting for NPCs to respawn.
Anyway I'm gonna leave the argument, as I don't have much of substance to contribute as a second-hand observer. And I'm more interested in the arguments brought forward by TedNugent.
Well, what he brings up is all valid - the new content obviously gets added, for an MMO in its 9th year, they have to add things to keep afloat, but the issue is that it's often too disconnected from the rest of the game. I'll briefly go through the stuff he'd mentioned and comment
my opinion on them:
1) Ranked Battlegrounds - cool, but I already am done with PvP since Vanilla, from which I hold a Lieutenant-Commander rank, 3 ranks short of highest, so eh. If you're into PvP, you'll be PvPing no matter the system anyway. One thing I'm glad about though is that PvP gear is finally viable in PvE unlike the last 2 expansions where it was completely gimped for anything but that.
2) Brawling - cool, but first of all, SOLO content, this is an MMO, right? Second, I lost my interest in it fairly quickly - it's basically a DPS check in a bunch of gimmick fights that test your ability to deal with one or two special mechanics that are/were present in dungeon/raid encounters before. DPS check aspect is quite high, by the way - you need to defeat the boss in one minute or so, or it's "Sudden death", which means you lose. Not an issue for me since I have raid gear, but eh. One thing I definitely do approve about it is that it's an open-world queue, so while one guy is fighting, everyone else waits/watches outside, awaiting their turn. That I liked quite a lot.
3) Challenge modes - like I mentioned before, I hate timed runs. Only timed runs I kinda sorta tolerated were timed Baron runs in Vanilla, because you could get extra loot for it if you actually got through in time. Plus the timer was still pretty lenient to consider a couple of total wipes and endless drinking on healer part. Poor Vanilla healers, though - their virtual kidneys must be
fucked. Also, why isn't the regular content even halfway this challenging?
4) Scenarios - well, this just a result of friend circles getting smaller. Before, you could get a 5-man, now, you get a 3-man. It's nice enough, but eh. Even heroic scenarios aren't particularly challenging, unless you're fresh and wear all-blues.
5) Arena - never was my thing in particular, I prefer larger teams. But that's my thing, a lot of people enjoy it, and it's pretty good for what it's worth. Was fun to lead AB/WSG pugs back when everyone was from your server - people knew that being a complete dumbfuck would actually backfire pretty harshly.
6) Rares - nice to have them back, though sadly not much use out of them beyond weekly quest tokens and levelling a friend quickly.
7) World bosses - only one worth mentioning is Oondasta because people didn't understand it for the longest time, and it led to hundreds of hilarious deaths and trollery in the first weeks of it being added. The rest, well, pushover. I guess it's more fun on PvP servers with this stuff though, when an opposing faction arrives to gank you.
Added: 8) Pet battled - I just have to ask, WHY? I mean... No, why? What does this have to do with fucking anything? Even adding Hearthstone into WoW proper would make more sense. I mean, it's nicely implemented and has some remastered tracks from WC2 that I enjoy hearing, but why the fucking fuck?
Added: 9) The Farm - cool idea, but oh god, the fucking "minigames" on weeding out the plants is just such a deal-breaker, I don't think there's anyone out there that finds it fun. Find me a person that does and I'll give them a Darwin Award. Also, it's phased out so that your friends can't visit you there like
ever. How am I supposed to
cyber chat in private like that?
Still, it doesn't fix the fact that these are all
elements. Most of these you don't even need to go into the world for - just camp at your capital/Shrine and that's it, it pops.
