I recently reactivated my old WoW account and purchased Warlords of Draenor out of curiosity, and ended up getting my Orc Death Knight to the new level cap of 100. This article only scratches the surface on why the old worlds are abandoned.
As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.
I think you're clearly correct about the game beginning at max level, but I don't think heirlooms or exp boosts changed anything. Even in vanilla, there were accepted "do this to level as quickly as possible" routes. No one really hung around silithus pre-AQ, with the small exception of people who chose to level there (and there were much better zones to do that).
WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.
The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.
That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
> unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage
This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress.
And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.
This is the opposite of my experience playing multiplayer Minecraft. There are no goals here, other than ones you set yourself. You simply log in, hang out with people, and mess around. Here are some things I've done that were the highlights of my time on this one particular server (semi-vanilla PvE):
I helped a fellow player build an iron farm when he didn't know how.
Helped another player try to debug his auto-brewer setup.
Built a vending machine so new players can get cheap food. Got a full set of diamond armor as payment one time.
Exchanged Christmas gifts.
Helped a new player find a place to live. Upon arrival, we stood at the top of a cliff and admired the view. Then, he noticed a lone chicken and immediately named him "Colin". When the night came the chicken got out, and we both went leaping down the mountain after him. We lost half of our gear, but Colin was safe and sound in the end.
Had a pool party. A player was living in the extreme hills biome. Upon visiting him, I remarked that it'd be fun to jump off the cliff and try to make it into a tiny pool of water. So that's exactly what we did. Invited other people, and spent about two hours climbing up the mountain, then jumping off.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like this all the time, but if you find a good server with good players, it can be a really fun experience.
Reminds me of my experiences playing Ace of Spades before it got bought out. One time we just randomly had a ceasefire on the server. An embassy was built half green and half blue, halfway between the two sides. We built a night club and bar in the basement and everything was strangely peaceful. Unbeknown to us, one rogue player dug all around the embassy until there was just one block holding it all up at which point he collapsed the whole thing leaving a gaping hole. Within moments the fighting started up again and that strange magical moment was gone.
An experience like that is one you can't script and it is richer as a result.
Reminds me of a blog post/article I read long ago about how a group of players sorta discoverd rocket jumping in quake and decided to try and use it to get up this massive unaccessible ledge just for the fun of it. Spontaneous unexpected events like this are turkey something special in gaming, I suppose exactly because they're not designed for. I'd agree that mindcraft is fairly good for these type of unplanned happenings. I suppose you could consider it a culture thing.
This exact reason is why EverQuest grabbed me so much harder than any other MMO since. Another huge reason is the danger factor. In WoW, there is effectively no punishment at all if you die, so there's no fear of exploring new places. In EQ, there are (or at least were) steep penalties if you die in the wrong place. Ignoring the fact that you lose XP that could amount to hours of lost progress, you may compound your woes with continued deaths trying to get the loot that remained with your corpse. The fear-factor had me addicted, and made accomplishments that much more rewarding.
What you said and real nighttime in EQ. I remember being alone, a low level, lost in Karana as night was approaching. I knew if I died that I might not know where my corpse was for the corpse run, so I had real fear, and was real cautious.
And the final element missing to instil real fear? True PvP, where anyone might decide to betray you and kill you while you're resting to recover hitpoints or manna or whatever.
It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success.
Each of those are opposite sides of the same coin. A game like Wow (which I found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent) is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to win.
Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.
The only PvPing I did was on the RvR server over near Freeport, either as a human or dark elf. That was a blast, since there was no instanced battlefields.
Maybe one day a MMO will bring back that magic. Alas, nostalgia wasn't enough to overcome the shortcomings of original EQ with Project99 in 2015.
Well, as I mentioned, from what I hear, Eve has that. It may not have orcs and elves. On the other hand it has big fracking spaceships with huge lasers...
PvP makes things interesting, for sure. I suck a PvP, but I'd never play on a non-PvP server because it adds that spice of the unexpected. If you want to farm mobs, you have to stay viable in PvP, just in case.
Ah, the thrill of sneaking into Lower Guk as a Lvl 19 Bard, only armed with a flute, hoping that a group would camp the Froglok Assassin and they would allow you to loot a Mask of Deception drop.
Totally different genre, but this is one of the things that's great in CS:GO - you level up, but it's not from improving your avatar, it's from improving your own skill level - learning tactics, improving aim etc. Much more engaging than games that reward you for how many hours you sink in. (They do have elements of that in CS but they are entirely cosmetic).
In the end this is why I decided to quit WoW (~2007). I realised that I was not actually gaining anything from it, since the game requires such little skill to play (even in PvP and end game instances). Not to mention the massive time sink. With CS:GO you can play matches which are both smaller time commitments and more challenging.
> and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress.
It's funny. I played a korean grinding MMO which was heavily based around this. But it was also fairly buggy and some of its mechanics poorly designed. The most fun we had was whenever new content was introduced.
Figuring out how things worked and then abusing it.
Once you were near the soft cap - there was no practical exp limit, level requirements just started to increase super-exponentially at some point - you just looked for other things to do. Trying to take on bosses that were considered too hard by coordinating more players than intended by the game system or abusing their AI, using the near-invulnerability one had in lower-level dungeons to lure hundreds of monsters around you, find breaks in the invisible walls to leave the map etc.
I think the sandbox aspects of even the least sandbox-y MMOs make the most fun. Non-intervention by the devs (either by policy or by inability) also helps to provide some feeling of freedom, you just do whatever you want instead of being railroaded into some sort of "intended playstyle".
Good point - Silithus ALWAYS had a low population, because it sucked to get to, and sucked even more to level there. The quests are almost all formulaic, (kill 10 ant monsters, etc.) and there are few plots in any of the quests. Once you hit 60 in the original game, there was plenty to do in _any_ other area that made it worth leaving and never coming back. I did some leveling in all the areas that were available at the time because I liked exploring, but the quests there actively discouraged moving very far from the base, as most of the quests could be completed close by.
I remember playing it over and over. There were a few characters trying to max out their lvl 60 toons. There was some strange quest line that got added before they bumped the max lvl up to 70 (I seem to remember) so some people wanted the quest items while still at 60.
Perhaps you only visited after the gate was opened? This zone was very busy on PvP servers, because of the horde v alliance competition to open the gate to AQ first.
I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
Pre-AQ, he's absolutely right that the place was a dead zone and no 60 would bother spending any time there.
Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.
I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch for GW2, but GW2 pretty explicitly rewards you for exploration. Following the quest chain through an area (to the extent that there is one; the chain is slightly orthogonal) only reveals an incomplete picture of the zone. The zone itself explicitly informs you that there are a number of Things Left To Do Here. Collecting all of those is a necessary component to crafting legendary weapons.
So there are a couple levels for exploration: if you don't want to do it, then hurrying through the quest chain gives you lots of XP and you can move on. If you're mildly curious, you can go collect the stuff that interests you, without any real damper on your experience if you decline. If you're gung-ho about exploration for its own sake, there are also plenty of hidden bits and pieces everywhere that aren't necessarily collectibles.
I disagree somewhat. At the very beginning of the game (before any expansions came out), leveling was very slow. It might have been an order of magnitude slower ().
The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players.
The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear.
() Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.
> not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place
For me the only exception was Un'Goro Crater. That was by far the most fun I had in the game apart from PvP arenas. Dinosaurs, cool quests inspired by 70s TV shows I watched as a kid, and just the fact that it was such a beautiful rendering of the real Ngorongoro Crater.
Of course I stopped playing in 2007, so I'm sure there's tons I've missed out on since. But I really enjoyed the early quests and their unique stories, even the hammy stuff like the Edwin VanCleef/Deadmines quests. Given the level cap is at 100 now, I don't see why Blizzard doesn't open up the game as free-to-play for the first 60 levels (the original game before any expansions) instead of just 20, and you pay to play beyond that. I would definitely pick it back up if they did that.
It's important to note that while MMO's don't explicitly incentivize exploration, some of the memories my friends most enjoyed in WoW were glitching underneath Stormwind, into unimplemented areas in raids, all over the place. MMO's are social games, and even if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false.
I mean really, why do you think people get gear? It's so they can play more parts of the game and have more fun.
Personally, I can't really defend dungeon running that much because I always liked PvP more -- having human opponents to fight was always more fun for me, and the game certainly encouraged that. Some of my friends will still talk about how they were the top of their server or server group, and have folders of screenshots of them beating other prominent PvPers.
I never got very into WoW because by the time it got popular with my friend group in earnest I had switched to Linux and wine only ran WoW at about 20fps. But I had plenty of fun playing it and I barely got into it at all. Saying that the game doesn't encourage it is total bullshit. Finding night elf in Warsong, chasing them down, and watching their health drain from my warlock's curses was some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. And I got a shiny token for that, too, so there.
Having played WoW for years and gotten into just about every corner of the maps, almost all the undeveloped regions, and every Easter Egg area I heard about in Vanilla I have to say it was one of my favorite activities in the game and completely unrewarded. Guild Wars 2 rewards just about everything with XP (crafting, gathering, some achievements), but exploration & map completion also come with tangible rewards and enough XP to level a ton just running around. It's a really nice feeling to track down that last hidden point of interest or vista and have the big announcement pop up. There's a big reward for 100% completion of all maps, but not many people make it there.
Basically GW2 is a game that respects your time - waypoint teleports instead of flight paths, no corpse runs, no tagging mobs, per-character (or maybe player?) resource nodes, world events you can just jump into and everyone receives credit based on participation, area quests you don't have to pick up to start getting participation, and a lot you can do at the level cap that's not grinding gear - in fact the best is almost all crafted. I think this has to come down to the game being an initial purchase plus very carefully designed micropayment options instead of a subscription model. The micropayments are pretty much all vanity stuff or conveniences like extra bank slots, there's no gear and the only content options are Living Story episodes you weren't around for. Gold is easy to acquire & swap for the currency.
I think Blizzard tried to introduce some of this stuff in Mists of Pandaria, but there's just too big a gap for them to bridge now. Guild Wars 2 is missing world PvP, but has huge World-versus-World three way maps and team-based PvP. I miss Southshore mass insanity as much as anyone, but WvW is better.
You missed the second part of that clause, which is pretty critical context.
> So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc
PvP most certainly falls under that umbrella in italics. Getting to grand marshal back in the day involved sinking copious amounts of time into battlegrounds in order to get a special title and some special gear. There was/is most definitely a carrot on a stick for PvP as well.
In contrast, players have never been incentivized to explore much. Maybe you get a title nowadays, but it's not going to be anything cool like 'Dreadful Gladiator'. There's no special sword for exploring every sector of Azeroth.
EDIT: Further thoughts
> if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false.
Why do you think it's false? It's implicit discouragement. In the thinly-veiled skinner box that is WoW, gear and tokens and titles are positive reinforcement.
It's not a huge leap of logic to say that positive reinforcement tends to discourage behavior that doesn't lead to the reward.
You don't need to be grand marshall to play PvP. When I played WoW you could just hang out at level 19 and keep playing early-level PvP as long as you wanted to. And the simple challenge that PvP is is always fun. Gear is one part of pvp, but it's fundamentally about beating the other player.
I think you have a very cynical view of video games, and a very simplistic view of human psychology. The mere existence of a reward to do something doesn't make someone want to do anything else anything less -- it just might make someone want to do that thing more.
I think the real problem comes from players, like you, who are literally unable to break the skinner box and are slavishly dedicated to extracting rewards from the system, using only the components of the system. Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you, because everything is reduced to work, the mechanical gaining of utility from authority figures. I blame overprotective parents and overscheduled youth and hope you one day feel better and can explore in MMOs without feeling discouraged.
Having played both WoW and Guild Wars 1 (not 2), I think Guild Wars 1 had the best solution of them all -- virtually all the content in the game is "max level" endgame content. They don't use the mechanic of more and better gear as a reward, so content doesn't get obsoleted by that.
GW1 was amazing for that. Vanilla had you spend some time to level up to 20 (max), and you felt like an adventurer by the time you maxed out.
The next expansions however speeded up the leveling process. You start level 1, do some story mission that kickstart your adventurer into the real world and you are level 20 by the time you finish the prolog (i.e. you start on an island, and by the time you get to the main continent you are max level).
Then, you can play where you want, with who you want. Only your gear and your skills matter.
GW1 was an amazing game. As much as I like GW2, I wish they had kept more gameplay mechanics from the previous game.
> As much as I like GW2, I wish they had kept more gameplay mechanics from the previous game.
This was my biggest surprise with GW2. All the videos leading up to its release had me really excited. The combat looked so much more engaging and interactive. In the end, I found myself preferring GW1. But to be fair, it may just be age. I find it harder to play games for extended periods of time than it was back when I was in high school.
The issue is in essence that GW2 has become overly streamlined for sake of PVP. It is a curse i see with all MMORPGs that provide some kind of "competitive" PVP. Sooner or later the PVE side suffers because of some "exploit" or "OP" combo that makes PVPers cry foul.
I agree. One of the things I love about PvE is the ability to feel powerful, properly powerful. Unfortunately, that can be at odds with competitive PvE, so it's unsurprising that the two goals can affect one another.
Indeed. A classic example is the concept of control. Back in the PVE only days, control was indispensable. Every time you aggroed a mob, other mobs nearby would also tag along. So controllers stepped in to subdue them while the DPS and tanks went to work on the main target.
But while it is fun to keep a mob helpless for minutes in PVE, being at the receiving end of it in PVP is no fun at all. So these days control has pretty much gone byebye, or is heavily curtailed when applied to characters rather than mobs.
Another thing is that in recent years games has gotten more "furious". Back in the day a fight good fight could drag on for minutes, with each side trading blows and coming up with strategies and counter strategies as the fight ebbed and flowed. This put brains ahead of player brawns or reflexes.
But now it is all interrupts and twitch. Dodge this, block that, constantly moving out of fields and looking for "tells".
Progression through Guild Wars rewards you with access to new skills. At any given time you can only bring 8 of those skills (and only 1 of them can be elite) with you at any given time. In addition, your character is limited to using skills from 2 classes. Many of the skills have specific interactions or triggers. Some skill specifically counter, defend against, or take advantage of other skills. Mobs have a set of skills (including some mob-only skills). The result is a logic puzzle that may have many solutions, left for the player to figure out.
Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
Guild Wars focused on your synergy with your party. The content got harder but your character stats didn't improve. You got a few new skills at your disposal (and eventually 1 elite skill) but mostly it was about understanding the game mechanics and how to work as a team better.
This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
I didn't like how GW1 did this at all. As they added expansions and more content, the game's population appeared to grow thinner and thinner, because the same number of players were spread out over more areas of the game. I really hope they avoid this with the new expansion for GW2 somehow. The "megaserver" system they use will probably help quite a bit.
I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities (to level up the ultimate weapons, basically). It also has far less areas (although I think bigger zones), and almost each zone has content for a wide swath of levels. There's also quests (again for the ultimate weapons, mostly) that make max level people redo the older dungeons, and they're often quite helpful for the newer people doing them for the first time - without those players being too powerful (level sync mechanics).
TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests.
This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
Except FFXIV hasn't seen nearly the massive expansion that WoW has. Heavensward will give some indications of things to come but I see them following WoW extremely closely, almost methodically. Some examples:
- For the longest time in FFXI equipment was golden; not in WoW and not in FFXIV
- "Gear Score" / "Average Item Level"
- Instanced-only endgame content
- Instant travel to every zone for all players who've been there before
- All content is beaten before the end of a content cycle
- No very high-end content which goes months or !years! without being taken down (Vrtra:~2yrs, AV:~4yrs, PW:~3yrs, etc.)
- General fight mechanics and style (don't stand in the poo, tankbusters, buff-type mechanics); not really many new ideas at all
- Flying mounts added in first expansion; unavailable in first-version areas, only in expansion areas
- Character jumping in a FF-series game! Heresy!
FFXIV is a WoW clone in just about every regard, it's just young. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's quite hard to say there's much of anything being done differently.
Regarding FFXIV relics and revisiting zones; relic quests will be nerfed into oblivion with the expansion, just like all previous relic chains were when subsequent content was released. WoW used to make you run around areas and talk to people for legendary weapons too[1], even some of the areas mentioned in this article like Silithus. Then the level cap went up and people had little use for those items anymore.
This all boils down to MMOs lowering the entry bar by allowing new players to catch up with the most experienced players at a casual pace. You're never very far behind the bleeding edge, could be caught up in a month or two. Whether or not that's a good thing is opinion and perspective; FFXI required a very substantial commitment to compete in endgame and it definitely bordered on unhealthy obsession for many max-level players. That said, it'd be great to see some seriously difficult/"unbeatable" (preferably open-world) content, even if they use the old zones to make it happen world-boss-style.
> I think FFXIV has a great solution for it - at various stages in the endgame content you need to revisit all of the areas to perform your MMO regular kill ten rats activities
Compare and contrast Super Metroid, as discussed recently, which sends you back to areas you've already visited once you have the equipment to experience them differently:
the issue with a guild wars 2 model is that you can never really feel like the hero as no matter how low of zone you go to you are not more powerful. There is something visceral about mowing down opponents who only mere levels ago would strike you down if you were not careful.
wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
Both styles have their merits, as evidence by WoW beginning to implement a 'timewalker' feature where players will be able to run old content dungeons with properly scaled stats (it will offer rewards useful for max level characters). There's just so much content in the game now, glad to see them making the most of it in a relevant way.
That's correct. Although looking into it more, it appears the revamps of the old world dungeons which made them much easier and less time consuming didn't happen until later expansions. (E.g Scarlet Monastery and Blackfatom Deeps two expansions later.)
But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.
There's a side effect to the downscaling of all content in that all content feels the same.
Guild Wars 2 has public world events, where large numbers of players (50+) team up against a boss or a mob of enemies. Almost all bosses are HP sponges, so it gets repetitive very very easily. (ArenaNet attempted to make more complex areas, which mostly just added grind.)
In terms of world exploration, Guild Wars 2 has a few unique ideas there with Vistas (get to a certain point of the map and get a nice view) or Jumping Puzzles (platforming challenges), the latter of which I am not a fan due to the wonky controls.
The core issue why I don't play GW2 anymore is that it gets pretty samey. They did add episodic content for free which is pretty nice, except the plot was completely incomprehensible.
Their problem is that so much of the defensive options in game are active ones that avoid or nullify all incoming damage. Mobs don't do that, so instead they are given a massive health pool.
This in effect turn every fight into a fight between mob health pool and how many active defenses you brought along.
On top of that, anyone can "heal" someone that has gotten defeated and so bring them back into the fight.
WoW's world > Guild Wars' world. In terms of gameplay, I definitely prefer GW. In terms of story, world, characters, Wow blows it out of the water. I just struggle to care about anything that's going on in Tyria
The scaling zones of GW2 were not very popular for those of us that played in the beginning. Traditional MMOs allow your character to gain power. The power gain of your character is a large reason for many of the game systems to exist. To develop a system that takes away all this character power that you've gained felt boarderline 'slap in the face' like. Stripping character power is never a proper solution for an MMO.
GW2's scaling zones were exactly what got my friend group playing the game, and kept them playing. With every other MMORPG we'd played up to that point -and every one of the very few we've played since GW2-, our group would inevitably do one of three things:
1) Never start playing together, as the level gap between the newbies and the more veteran players meant that challenges were either impossible, or impossibly easy.
2) Rarely ever play the game because a) the group wants to avoid 1) and b) it's hard to get five friends spread across four timezones together on the regular.
3) Play the game as often as we want, as we each have "regular" solo characters, and "play-with-the-friend-group" characters, but get far less than the regulation amount of fun out of the group games, as all-too-often there's only like one set of low-level story content, so playing with the group causes to to re-run stuff for like the billionth time anyway.
And, really, even with the level scaling, your skills don't go away. Having a character in the party that's five or ten+ levels higher than the zone content makes it substantially easier than a character that's at-zone-level or just a few levels higher. (It remains quite satisfying to drop an offensive golem on some level one goblin and splat it in two hits.)
I agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I enjoyed Guild Wars 2.
However I'd like to add that the scale-down isn't at all that dramatic! I can kill a Moa or a bandit in Queensdale with 2-3 hits on my level 80 Mesmer (and he is a condition-based build), while it takes much more effort as a level 3 Thief.
Also the traits, and gear stats remain, to an extent; they are maybe scaled down but they are still present.
Furthermore, it also depends on the class you're playing. If you're a heavy-armour character with attack-centric stats you'll easily 1-hit anything, but if you're a healer engineer, you'll need to invest more effort.
I agree that one's scaled-down is a fair bit more powerful than the effective character level would lead one to believe. Indeed, that was the point that I was trying to get across. :)
But you've got to admit that the scale-down is substantially more dramatic than in pretty much every other MMORPG, no? I mean, if you've forgotten, like spend a week or so with Firefall, then come back to the starting area. :P
Moreover, a scaled-down level 80 will get level 80 gear when killing creatures. For folks who are invested in gear collection, but have low-level friends, this makes them far more likely to play together. (Wish I'd mentioned this in my original post. :P )
If I'm level 100, I should be able to go into a level 5 area and kill everything with one hit, but I wouldn't get any XP because it wasn't challenging.
However, if my low level friend is playing and they want a buddy to help them with low level content, it would be nice to have the option of scaling my character down to my friend's level where I would be challenged by level 5 content alongside them (and even gain some degree of proportional XP or maybe scaled loot from it)
Apparently there is a class-specific (monk) 50% EXP boost¹ too. Also you can pay $60 for a character boost² to lvl 90.
I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.)
Of note with the 90 level boost, you get one for free when you purchase the expansion, which makes it easy for returning players to skip the content! (I ended up taking my 80 Death Knight through to 90 the hard way so I could see Cata/MoP content)
God that was painful :-). I lost a lot of time in WoW, perhaps it was an escape, but I spent hours learning the various nooks and crannies, leveling up over 3 dozen characters of various types to the max level. I had people I never met that I felt were good friends, shared battles and triumphs and failures. Laughed at the sometimes incredibly subtle in game humor, and sometimes not so subtle. Collected odd recipes to cook, outfits to wear, and trophies and achievements. I loved having the 'two ring' which was one better than the One Ring.
But as others point out, the 'traditional' way to build an MMO is 'learn skills by levelling up / start playing at max level' The game set a number of challenges for 'max level' characters which depended on gear, group composition, and various strategies to overcome the game mechanics. That is where it failed for me.
In WoW while leveling you often needed to join up with groups to run through a local dungeon together. It was fun when you had a good group, annoying when you had children in the group. There were too many ways for 10 - 12 yr old boys to grief people.
In an effort to increase its appeal, Blizzard changed it again and again. Skill changes, techniques, complexity was removed, buffs and nerfs to various skills. Lots of change and slowly less and less appeal. All of the components were there to make it better (arenas were a great testing ground for devs to evaluate PvP changes).
I stopped playing when Mists shipped. It was just too stupid at that point and the similarity to kung-fu panda to stark. Oddly, if you could provide servers that stopped at one of the expansions (Wrath or maybe even Cataclysm) I would still be spending money with Blizzard, but now not so much.
I look at it periodically and see the makings of a durable world/gaming simulation environment. I hope someone picks up the challenge.
Lot of nostalgia and time lost. My wife and I played together before we had kids so we could stay up to 2-3 AM on weekends and 40 man raid Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. We were lucky to find some married people who played and/or some more mature players. We stopped after we had kids (time crunch LOL) but we still keep in touch with some of our guild mates.
Folks mentioned the time lost. Honestly, if you keep journals of your time in Azeroth, you'll see that they rival any life story. I think the memories gained far outweigh anything "real." I think there are a few fiction writers that owe a few plot twists to what's happened in their game play.
I once went as far south as I could, I was determined to find something new. There were mountains, so I spent hours trying to climb them, using a combination of jumping and my horse I did eventually get to the top!!
It was all WEIRD and FLAT!! The textures were stretched really really long, you could see the pixels. And the textures seemed random, from different realms and stuff. There were deep valleys in places, but you could run around them given enough time. I took a bunch of screen shots, eventually I fell off the back of them and had to swim four hours to get back to land. WoW is a crazy game.
You can swim around very outside edge of the continents, even where all the mountains were. Somewhere miles away on the backside of nowhere there was a little dilapidated house.
In vanilla, I spent one full night just swimming around the Eastern Kingdoms on my druid. I'd recently heard rumors about the Ashbringer possibly existing in the game, just waiting for some wandering soul to come across its incredibly well hidden home, possibly requiring high level fishing skill to attain. Despite the fact that the scenery was mostly repetitive and to most anyone else should have been incredibly boring, I really enjoyed the evening.
I later became a Game Master and had the ability to fly invisibly through the terrain on live servers and occasionally would make a point to travel to random nooks, either not normally accessible or else very hard and time consuming to reach by legal means, and that was fun too. This was before flying mounts: characters would appear to swim through the air and could be made to travel very fast indeed.
The best hidden secrets in the game were things like The Chair, at the base of The Room, an underground dungeon that could only be reached by flying through the terrain of a castle that stood on Game Master Island, which itself could only be accessed using Game Master powers. Rumors were that early rule breakers in the game, perhaps in beta, were transported into The Room where all they could do is sit in The Chair or not. I don't know if that's true.
Probably people discovered all this on private servers as well, but there was definitely something magical about doing it on live realms - at least for me.
GMs used to teleport people to GM island on my original server for fixing various things WAY back in the day. There were a few exploit mechanics that enabled regular players getting there. (Briefly via teleport hack but I think there were 'legit' methods for a window of time with spirit regen + low level rogue maybe?)
I regularly play private servers with friends for the nostalga. They will have 10+ times the XP and gold rates so you don't grind pretty much at all, and it is nice having persistent characters that you can come back to after a while that are not tiers of content behind and obsolete.
I think Blizzard is on a path to at least making level 60 the free to play level cap of the game soon, though. It just makes way too much sense not to. I know I'd have to problem running the old 40 and 20 man raids with pugs (because the way the game mechanics have changed, those raids are now trivial with even half the number of people it took in 2006) for fun. That actually sounds like fun. The current game sounds like the most auspicious waste of time sink, which is why I got off that merry-go-round in Wrath of the Lich King around the time where they stopped doing tiered progression at all and made every patch effectively a game reset.
So how do you script the raids (or do you?) When I last looked at private servers all of the scripting for the boss mobs was unavailable so you basically had every boss be a simple spank and kill fight.
NPC actions (actions in general besides movement, particular to WoW) are server-side. Most WoW private server cores come able to handle player interactions and the "default" mob pathing / behavior AI, but it is generic to every version of the game. The server maintainer than overrides the default behaviors for every NPC they or object they want to script. IE, cast X spell, or use Y item.
There are servers for every version of the game that I know of that at least strive to be "blizzlike" with mob and world behavior. It can get pretty complicated, for example the Icecrown Citadel Lich King fight, which I know works pretty well on Molten but I have never tried it elsewhere. It has environment destruction, player teleportation, mob spawning, player movement via mob interaction, and multiple NPC interactions. That would be a bitch to reimplement, I imagine.
Interesting note: every ghost-town of a zone in WoW, and some of them were ghost-towns immediately, cost N fully realized software startups to develop. (Like, mid-single-digit million dollars per zone.)
It's one of those things to keep in perspective when folks say "Why did anyone sink $1.2 million into $A_FIELD_I_DON'T_CONNECT_WITH?" I don't know, but that's literally less than it cost to put that mid-30s swamp level in Ogrimmar that nobody ever went to, so don't fret too much about the misallocation of society's resources.
The whole game cost somewhere between $50 and $60 mil, so individual zones were not quite as pricey.
Additionally, it was specifically designed to avoid dumping lots of players into chokepoint zones (what they called 'player collision') and providing multiple paths for progression.
I imagine they were quite aware some places will be less populated than others, from the get go. Still, on high population servers, it was perfectly normal to run into random players in the middle of nowhere.
Goes a long way to show the "power of juice". WoW is game that just feels good on the keyboard, and is intuitive. The controls and the UI are pretty great. It did not have, even at the time of the release, any new features, quite the opposite in fact. The graphical style was cartoon-ish, which accomodated older machines nicely.
Wish MMO developers would take a page out of Blizzard's book instead of trying some crazy arm's race of graphics/voice-over/what-not. There's definitely space for novelty, but in gameplay rather than gimmicks.
They were used and played to death. I remember getting so bored of them, and they are still there for other people to discover. It makes the world feel so big, part of the compellingness of wow.
I was also thinking about how... if you've ever been invited to a rich-person's event, like a glitzy fashion show or something (I got a media invite for one once), there's all sorts of free drinks and food and chocolate and what-have-you.
But all that expense is justified because if they win you over and have you buying whatever they're selling, they recoup all their losses.
I suppose it's the sheer scale that's staggering. Some people are playing at much higher stakes, and it hard to really grasp how things are.
WoW uses a tremendous amount of recycled assets, and however Blizz is budgeting their dev team allocates them to basically do all the work for years at a time at once before reassigning them to other things.
The most explicit example would be in vanilla, where in 2004 they had already created every zone found in the game that would be used up until the Burning Crusade released in 2007. They even had prototypes of a lot of places later added to the game (Outland, from the aformentioned expansion, the Emerald Dream, which is still not in the game, and several other zones). They took those prototypes and reused the assets in various places.
They also heavily reuse models. The same animated skeleton is used for everything from giants to bog monsters to undead constructs or how almost every dragon in the game shares the same model with a retextured skin. When they introduce new bosses, they almost always are reskinned old models.
Individual zones of WoW are not that expensive to develop - consider how hard it is to produce a static 3d geometry map today, period, and that is effectively the cost, albeit the tooling for WoW is almost twenty years old and assuredly less efficient. They will take the same portcullis used in a thousand other places, maybe swap the color palette, and use it again. They make a few novel set pieces per area usually, but the vast majority of the work is copy paste from assets made years ago.
Are you saying that a team is assembled to do something and then builds up a big buffer of work. Then they move onto something else?
So if they needed boss fights, a team might produce 150 pseudo-unique boss fights that are 90% complete. Then when they actually need 2 or 3 for a new dungeon they just grab them, finish them up quickly, and incorporate them into the game?
A WoW zone is, like a webapp, very cheap to build except for the team of professionals that you have to pay to type things into a computer every day for six months.
I played wow from beta. I quit in Cata, came back in Panda and have quit again in WoD. In vanilla I saw that there was much money in the game and lo, I did say, arriveth the $$ arriveth the MBAs.
And so it was, much sadly for all when Tigole went off.
But here are the sums.
They've lasted for (on average) 5 years. 30 * $10 * 200 = $60000pcm * 60 = $3,600,000.
My WoW experience started with Vanilla. Long hours were spent but I had so much fun. Looking back, I had so much free time and no concept of getting older. MC raids were a blast and getting ganked in STV was a daily occurrence.
Today, I'm nearing my thirties and can't seem to get into the game for more than an hour at a time. I'm a very happy homeowner, married and kids are in the plans in the next few years. I have other interests now that take up my time and grinding for drops for hours on end isn't in the cards anymore.
I logged in recently and found it so different. Cataclysm was my last true experience with WoW. I played MoP, but only for a few weeks. The magic was lost for me with flying mounts and easier grinds. It's heartbreaking to a degree because I loved this game and really want to get back to it. I suppose those years are long gone, but it's fun to think about.
Only played during the original WoW days, but from what I heard things are so different now. I remember the days of hardcore 40 man raids, I hear it's not as much as a thing anymore. The game is more catered to the casual gamer. Then again, that makes perfect sense. When I started, I had hours and hours to devote on the game, these days, I can barely find any time to play games.
There are private servers that try to be as close to Vanilla as possible, however that does mean that you have to put in the hours to get to level 60. Valkyrie is fairly populated. https://valkyrie-wow.org/
Thanks for the link. I dabbled with private servers a bit, but that was when BC came out and still retained some Vanilla feel. Might pop back on one now that Vanilla WoW is so long ago.
As someone who plays a lot on private servers, you might find the nostalgia goggles to be a little tinted if you try playing vanilla or even Burning Crusade. The game mechanics back then were just tremendously backwards to a degree anyone who has played more recent iterations of the game will be frustrated by, unless you really have some hardcore nostalgia going on.
I've played WoD and really enjoyed it, after Cata beat the fun out of the game for me. No flying mounts and the story on both sides is really compelling. Nothing gets my blood flowing like some good old fashioned orc warmongering.
Almost two months ago, an unofficial (completely reverse engineered) Vanilla WoW server called Nostalrius launched. I had a blast reliving the time I spent on the original game as a teenager, but had to wrest myself away after sinking a few too many days into it...
Last I checked, the server was averaging between 4000-6000 players concurrently, so I had quite the opposite experience from what the author was describing: for the first day or two after launch, it was very difficult to find mobs to kill at all, when you're sharing starting zones with literally hundreds of players! It got better over time, as people grinded at different rates, distributing their numbers more evenly, but even when I quit, it was pretty rare to find a zone without a decent number of players.
I recommend anyone with fond memories of Vanilla turned off by newer versions of WoW check it out. Or, maybe I shouldn't, having experienced first hand just how great of a time sink this 10 year old game can still be...
Blizzard has a long history of lawsuits to prevent such a thing, starting with bnetd in the 2002. Scapegaming was the target of the first WoW-related lawsuit in 2010 for running their own server, but certainly not the last.
As long as they're not making money they'll fly under the radar just fine. Every private server that got shut down were taking "donations" in return for in-game items.
I played WoW a lot when I was in University. I find it really incredible how much nostalgia I'm feeling looking at these screenshots. I reactivate my account once a year or so just to fly around for a couple hours.
I'm glad I can still do this, but it concerns me that this generation of online-only games won't be relivable decades later like the games of my earlier childhood will always be.
A bit sad/cheeky story from me, but still relevant I believe. The time was around TBC, I think right in the middle of its launch, I managed to hack an account back then of some characters, and thought I'd log-in to have a good time. It was my first experience of the game, granted I never did destroy any characters or items, since it was my first time playing the game, but I did spend a reasonable amount of time in-game -- killing mobs, checking out gear of other people, seeing the chat activity, even the character activity in the World (haha, wow, such a rush of feelings), only a few months later when I got my own account to play with, did I realize what this game is and how magnificent it is -- I'm so, so lucky to have had the pleasure of playing during the original TBC when the game was booming with players and such pleasurable soul, one of the best times of playing any video game in my life, hands down.
You can't replicate those experiences, because for the most part -- it was the people who were passionate about the game, that made it what it was.
I'm sure we all have some stories like this, but I did fucking love this game with my whole heart. From a creative Mage to a passionate Druid.
I think there's a lot of us that get misty-eyed on TBC. There was a lot of opportunity for just funnin' around. I was surprised Halaa wasn't shown in the article; I consider it some of the best landscape and I had a lot of fun there. It was the sort of game where you'd say in Org chat that you were putting on a fireworks show in Halaa, and people would switch to characters in the other faction to keep the Halaa battle ballanced. (And it was nice they were there: my bank alt toon was very low level.)
WoW at the least is far too large to ever die. There are private servers for every version of the game except WoD, and that is hopefully for legal reasons - of course I'm not a lawyer and the law here is a fucking mess especially if you live outside the US, but there has to be an abandonware case for every version of the game that is not currently available on Blizzards servers.
A decade from now there will still be WoW private servers, and there will still be the opencore-esque projects providing the server infrastructure to run private instances of it. Albeit I wish the private server community shared source more, but I'm not really involved in it so more power to them for putting in the scripting effort to make all the mobs work again.
I hear you. I played a lot of Star Sonata and Phantasy Star Online. I can still relive my PSO (BB) days, SS, not so much. (it's still around but it's gotten a huge overhaul, it's a different game to me). A tale in the desert was amazing, too, although a big part of that was community-driven gameplay, something as impossible to recreate as your particular childhood community even if you provide the same gameplay mechanics.
I'm not much of an emotional guy, but looking at those screenshots from way back when I was 15, about 9 years ago now, hits me 10x harder than your typical tear-jerker movie/book. It's definitely a shame that never comes back beyond the few screenshots.
I don't think you should be too concerned. For WoW specifically, there are private servers available which allow players to experience Classic again. There's also servers concentrating on the other expansions. Runescape also has a healthy server emulation scene. There's work being done to bring back the original Star Wars Galaxies. There used to be private servers for Ultima Online and I suppose those are still out there.
I think if something has at least a minimum amount of popularity, and a portion of the software (the client in this case) is still available, then enough people will find a way to keep it alive even when it's been abandoned by its creator.
The 'level' thing is something inherited from old RPGs and computer RPGs and reused to death. It is nice for a sense of progression, but ultimately leads to all sorts of issues.
Why can a 99 level whatever kill dozens of level 1 charaters effortlessly, by mistake even? Why does it have N times more health? Makes no sense.
One of the first successful MMORPG games was Ultima Online, which didn't have any levels. Just skills. And they didn't matter all that much. Equipment did to a degree, but noone was walking around alone with a +9 weapon for fear of losing it. So it was relatively even.
It was FUN. All areas mattered, even if they didn't have as much variety as WoW. Monsters didn't give XP, so they were mostly killed for resources. And some tiny skill increase, sometimes.
Honestly, that was what I loved about EvE: no levels. Pick a goal and the skills to get there. Enjoy the journey along the way.
Edited to add: There was once the perception that if you weren't an older player you could never catch up with them because of the first-come nature of skills, but that was demolished long ago (for better or worse) by blobbing with Caldari battlecruisers. Sheer numbers will beat anything, and if you are losing it is because your sheer numbers aren't big enough.
If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts.
Which really isn't too different from not having good enough gear in WoW and so on, the only difference is that in EVE you level up even when you're offline. And you don't have to fly anything, you do whatever you want to. Brave Newbies is probably the most famous for flying what ever the hell they could.
And they're still effective. Skills determined what roles you could perform well, but not that you couldn't participate.
I personally loved flying support, and knowing that not many people wanted to (or could!) gave me a valuable niche that not only made me feel important, but made me valuable in the eyes of my fleet mates as well. Hearing the FC call out "Hey guys, we actually have a logi in our BS fleet tonight, so be sure to call for reps" was great.
Those "newb" roles often have their own perks. You'll hear many a veteran speak of how a new player gets to enjoy certain things a veteran can't. We quite enjoyed bringing a new player on and explaining to them that these first days were their best, for now that they were in a corp, their costs were taken care of. Loss in EVE is the biggest, most stressful thing to manage, and it's fantastic telling a new guy "Look, you're inexpensive, so just tackle anything you can, we'll pay for your clones, buy you a stack of frigates. Enjoy these days you're expendable, and have fun while you're waiting for your skills to train up."
Those guys come in at a couple of months and tackle some Vindicator, and get on a 3bil ISK killmail. Show me a WoW level 10 that does that.
There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money.
So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted.
The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS.
I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.
It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that WoW is vastly more popular than UO ever was -- UO peaked around 250k subscribers, WoW peaked around 12 million (~48 times the population). This presumably indicates that far more people found it "fun".
This makes sense to me, since pre-Trammel UO was a griefer paradise, as you hinted at with your "for fear of using it" comment. :)
I don't know that the peak subscriber comparison is fair, UO was released in 1997 when a far smaller portion of the population had the computer hardware / internet to even consider it compared to WoW in ~2005.
I wonder how much of WoW's popularity is not just from mechanics, however. Ultima Online is rather boring to look at: it's a 2D game, and not a particularly good-looking one at that. World of Warcraft is a beautiful 3D game - even for boring "kill X enemies" quests, there can be a lot of enjoyment simply from looking around and exploring the world.
Levels are an amazing skinner box. You want power, they are literally a numeric increment of power, and the way most of these games work you consistently gain them in regular fashion to reinforce the response to play more to get more levels. It is why a game like WoW ended up being magnitudes more successful than Ultima Online, fundamental enjoyability besides, and it is why mobile games are literally Hitler and some can make boats of cash.
I found an old folder with screenshots of multiplayer maps from Team Fortress Classic where I had played many hours with friends. Looking at the pictures, I realized that I had an emotional connection to the virtual places just as if they were real places.
I've recently started my first adventures in Azeroth, and its been quite an experience.
Being very familiar with the genre I knew what I was getting into, but didn't quite understand the differences of WoW versus Guild Wars, Wild Star, or another MMO.
I really enjoyed how they continue to have players level through the expansions, the over joyous feeling of a new loading screen when I reach the next leveling milestone was super rewarding, but quickly became overwhelming.
There's SO much content in the game, thousands of quest lines you quickly out level and never see, stories told through quest dialogs I had been skipping over. I passed right by the entire culture of this hand crafted digital world in a rush to raid, and now have no incentive to see what I've missed.
I finally got my druid to level 80, and now entering the Cataclysm expansion it quickly shows how much has changed from each iteration of the game. I went from running dungeons over and over in hopes of a single drop, to now being overburdened with item and item, all far superior than my previous expansions hard earned gear (ilvl ~170 to 300+).
It feels so forgotten, what I was first looking as like an archived museum of this game's vast history is beginning to feel like its own changes are detrimental to reliving the experience of a veteran as a new player.
Seeing complex constructed runes, swirling tornadoes out in the distance, living see creatures in the background, all without content or content worth doing makes the game feel vast and empty. Although its still very enjoyable.
You are well beyond the level you can go back and run the raid content from past expansions by yourself. The Blackrock Mountain raids specifically, saw hundreds of thousands of players run through them in groups of forty for hours every night for over two years. You just cannot get that scale anymore, and games that try (hic, Wildstar) don't see popularity like WoW did.
So you don't know empty in WoW until you run up and punch a giant rock monster to death in fifteen seconds that would have taken forty people fifteen minutes of coordinated combat to slay a decade ago.
Yes, one of the more depressing things I did recently was level up a new character in WoD after having not played since pre-Cataclysm, basically. Going back and soloing instances that I remember grinding for months and months, encounters I remember working out for the first time with my guildmates (no videos or strategy guides!), bonds I made and the sense of achievement we all had at the end... totally destroyed by a fifteen second punch to the face by my brand new level 100 character. Though I wanted the gear for nostalgia's sake, it wasn't worth the heartache.
It felt a little like going back to college a couple of years after graduating, where a layer of nostalgia wasn't enough to disguise how much I, and the place itself, had changed. (Because college, like WoW, is a lot more about the people for me than the physical buildings.)
I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.]
I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL.
The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented.
The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.
(the soundtrack of the youtube video, that is. The takeaway being: that video so helped me romanticize wandering a giant, mesmerizing, alien world that I started wandering the giant, mesmerizing, real world, and enjoying that too. With the help of a soundtrack to set the mood.)
On a related note, WoW has plenty of private shards where you can relive old WoW content. Everquest has one too, Project1999, dedicated to the first two expansions only.
It's fun to hop onto random Minecraft servers and explore. You find a lot of abandoned buildings, mining tunnels, pets, etc. Some are recognizable as a player's first temp house they built quickly and abandoned to build something better. Some are players that invested a lot of time to build something nice but stopped playing.
Each server has its own type of abandoned buildings. Chaos servers, for example, have a lot of ruined buildings covered in lava.
I play Minecraft on a small server (semi-vanilla PvE). Some stuff I found can be downright creepy. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/52wZxvp. This was a huge structure in the middle of the ocean that I stumbled upon. The giant sign on it said "HAIL TITO" or some such. The inside was really strange too: dark, with random traps and creatures roaming about (all intentional, such as golems). Abandoned Minecraft buildings in general are really interesting, but this takes the cake.
After some asking around I did find that the person didn't in fact go crazy, and this was supposed to be a temple of sorts, with traps and treasure. But at the time (3am) it really creeped me out.
Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.)
I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:
I have played my fair share of MMOs, and the game I spent the most time exploring the world was LOTRO. (lord of the rings online) It has been 5 or so years since I played, so not sure if it is still the same, but back then they had some deeds system where each region had challenges to kill a certain amount of creatures or explore different locations and would reward you with permanent stat boosts. I remember our guild would have nights where we would group up and tackle these challenges together, those are some of my favourite memories in gaming. Sigh, growing up sucks.
LOTRO also has an equippable item ("Stone of the Tortoise") that prevents a character from gaining EXP. If I had the time to play still I would get this. The low-level content is some of the best in the game, IMO.
I am just so lucky WoW started after I was done with education. In fact I picked it up during a recovery from knee surgery. I figured if I couldn't walk in the real world, I could explore an imaginary one.
It's a beautiful place. The thing is, you can't explore it without levelling. And it's also pretty vast, at least the size of zone 2 in London tube terms. So I ended up spending a lot of time there.
I got so deep into it I even attended a wedding. I mean where the IRL players got married and their characters and online friends got together.
Anyway, there is something about the way it's constructed that gets boring after a few months of playing time. It's as if there's two games: levelling and raiding. Raiding is where your friends are, so levelling is what you have to do to get your friends the Tank/Healer that they need. (Nobody needs DPS).
It would be cool if the content just scaled so you could level everywhere, instead of having a predefined optimal quest/zone path. On your third character it does get tedious, because everyone levels by doing solo DPS.
Perhaps there is also a smarter mechanic for gold grinding. When I was playing there was always some zone that was optimal for finding the best ores, so I'd just fly a loop of that each morning.
Lastly, is it really hard to generate content? I mean of the type "here's a warrior, a druid, and a warlock, find us something to do that can't just be googled". Maybe smarter minds have thought about this than me, but I thought it could be worth a stab.
To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type".
A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.
I got into WoW for a couple months just before the launch of the newest expansion, though I fell out of it in favor of a few other games before the expansion came out. Even if you're not into the endgame grind of the modern MMO (turns out, I really wasn't, as much as I tried to be), there's just a ton of fantastic content to explore as you level up a character. It's definitely worth picking up on sale and just maxing out a character to explore the world. I plan on getting the new expansion and leveling through Draenor next time I've got a lull in my games backlog.
This is nothing new. Even back in the day, the only people playing in certain old zones were people leveling... the goal of the game (for anyone other than the insane loremasters) is to get to max level as quickly as possible so you can raid and PVP.
Blizzard is taking steps to allow people to see old dungeons, but they have not yet created incentives to keep people exploring old content. Arguably, it's not a great idea to spread people out... as the game population dwindles it's better to keep the players in the same zones so they feel like they are in a populated world and not a single-player game.
Anyway agree there are some really cool parts of the game that ANYONE could see... but they get abandoned. I care more about old dungeons and old raids, but really they've done a good job of allowing players to see that content and farm it for transmog gear and nostalgia.
So much nostalgia reading that article. Sometimes I miss playing, but I've moved on with my life. I'm now in shape (I became very overweight during my WoW days), my career is moving better, and I've started a family. But sometimes I wish I could play and talk with the people in my old guild.
Reading this brought back a LOT of great memories.
I remember exactly how I fell in LOVE with WoW. It was f&f, and all it involved was walking from Stormwind down through Westfall to STV. And, then, opening the map and realizing "Shit, this was less than 1% of this world."
That wonder at HOW big and rich a world had been crafted lasted for years. In the first year of release, /played was > 160 days, despite being a leader in a world-first-oriented top PvE guild, 90% of it was world pvp and exploring.
And yet it wasn't actually the environment that shaped the experience, but that we all lived in it.
In vanilla, the world MATTERED. And in a way that wasn't always 'fun' for everyone. (Red is dead bro)
We competed to claim world spawns. We griefed, camped, exploited strange environment mechanics, raided opposing cities and killed world leaders or didn't, set up roaming 5v5s, lagged out in Southshore in 200v200 struggles, denied guilds access to instance zone-ins, cursed when we sometimes got our come-uppance (and we sometimes famously did), and we had meaningful rivalries and camaraderie with other players on our server.
We all had stories about nearly every player you'd meet. Actions of single players had potentially huge social impact.
That disappeared when we all retreated to instances. (Flying mounts were a similar scale catastrophe in world engagement) We no longer really had communal experiences.
I functionally quit WoW at the end of BC. I still played a bit in later seasons and expansions, but just arena selling glad titles primarily, as the magic was gone for me, and not for lack of trying -- I had every possible opportunity and advantage to love the game in the later expansions but never really could.
This sounds more negative than I'd like, because I have really no strong bitterness towards WoW. It was a shaping experience for me. I formed great friendships and memories, learned a lot about myself, and a game like WoW has to grow and evolve and a necessity of that is that some won't enjoy the changes.
Ah, I have played this game a lot... I loved exploring all the zones and levelling up. It's not entirely true that all the game happens 'at the end' I think, there are whole arcs that happened with each expansion but that is lost for a brand new player. WoW caters for the lifers, I think.
Blizzard can solve the problem, they have the brains and the cash. I wish they'd make a new MMO with all their learnings! They could deprecate WoW and start all again. Every expansion you kind of do that anyway.
The thing about all the forgotten content is that at some point in time during some xpac, it was very pertinent and relevant. But now it's still there many xpacs later.
I recall a poll on reddit where the question was: "If you could relive any experience for the first time again, what would it be?"
Playing WoW for the first time was quite high on that list, and I think that would be my answer too.
Ah, those screen shots made me sad. The main reason I played WoW was for exploring, and I left when the only thing left to explore were dungeon raids with huge numbers of prerequisite "keys" to gather, as if it weren't just hard enough to get that many people together for the raid. I wanted to see the dungeon and would have been happy to leave without any loot (because I lacked the keys or whatever) if that was needed to balance the game mechanics. But I left when there was no more land to explore. And now the lands I knew are ghost towns?
If you want to play on those zones, you can resort to a private server with a old expansion. There are very good ones on vanilla where those zones are alive. :-)
I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time. Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration when it comes to MMOs.
When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.
WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of loot and exp depending on how much you helped.
And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all.
That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.
> And because of all that, there's just zero incentive
> to quest in WoW with other people.
The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game.
Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.
Other people have no reason to group with you though. Everyone is perfectly content doing their own thing and will often outright decline party invites. The only place this was ever not the case was on Mist's daily island.
I would hardly call auto-grouping dumbing down. It's a passive thing that helps put the "Massive Multiplayer" back in MMO, which is something WoW has been lacking outside of capital cities for years now.
They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin looting for non-quest drops, etc.
Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`.
What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions from players including the decision to party with someone or not.
But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel. I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from different places.
I believe these days WoW merges underpopulated zones so those ~20 players per zone are across a bunch of servers while ~50 players in a zone may be all in one server.
It was much worse two years ago before they started having unpopulated zones merge between servers. It was extremely common, especially on low population realms, to find entire chunks of continents unpopulated at all, and that would be on a server with five thousand people on it - they were just all in capital cities or instances.
I'm back playing again. I have a few lvl 100's, but I decided to start a new character -- this one would have no weapons and no armor -- just a tabard. I wanted to see how far I could get with just my fists. I'm up to 21 so far. I can take out regular mobs that are 3-4 levels below me with few problems.
But I do die -- about as often as I did in BC, so about 3 times as often as everyone else does these days. The best part is my repair costs are zero gold.
Back when I was a MUD coder, I implemented a neat 'exploration' mechanic: the game kept track of where the characters had been, and displayed it as '% of world explored', which a lot of players had fun trying to get as high as they could. If one wanted, one could further incentivize exploration by actually tying such a '% of world explored' stat to hack-n-slash gameplay.
Second Life is a cesspit precisely because it is entirely user-generated. I'd imagine abandoned areas simply disappear, though, because you have to pay Linden Labs if you want land.
What I love about posts like this one is that they usually result in beautiful comment threads full of nostalgia and memories. And probably a couple of renewed game subscriptions, too. :)
I had a plenty of exciting real life experiences after I quit WoW back in 2010, but somehow I still look back at my in-game experience with an incredible warm and fuzzy feeling somewhere inside of me.
Back in the day I used to farm Azshara like it was my job. that place was desolate back then, it's good to see the developers make attempts to make all of the zones useful, the game has just gotten so massive I can see how certain zones would still be under utilized.
Temple of Atal'Hakkar was one of my favorite places (7-8 years ago - vanilla) in WoW. I went there a lot of times, tanking was extremely fun.
Silithus, Un'Goro Crater and Swamp of Sorrows were my favorite places for levelling.
That made me sad. It seems to me that because there is no way to have a real impact on the world in most MMORPGs, there really is no point to visit those places.
A nice reminder, perhaps. Not much data - more of a screenshot gallery.
Unfortunately no real documentation of things like realm population (or comparisons across multiple realms), changes over time (day of week / weekend, holidays, etc.).
Yes, "the game designers declined to comment" but I was hoping for something with a little more detail. However, that doesn't appear to be in line with the rest of the content on the site.
i shivered with nostalgia thinking about time time i spent exploring and building friendships in azeroth. blizzard created an entire universe, and in some ways it is just as real as this one. very powerful and interesting to think about, thank you for sharing
As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.