True, it is a problem in the East as well, but in order to be a Chinese farmer for US customers you must have a US account, which means it will set you back $40. I imagine the problem is that much harder to solve in countries where there isn't an upfront cost.
Except that in order to play on the WoW US realms you need a US account, and you can't interact between the different segments of the world (US/EU/China/Korea/etc.), so in order to farm gold for US buyers they'd need a US box.
On the bright side, we won't have to deal with those stupid 5s and 1s, which only serve to get in the way.
On the other hand, this is going to make a lot of rulesets more complicated... ranging from embezzlement to the more common and legitimate Free Parking "put $500 and any taxes/fines in the middle, pick them up when you hit Free Parking" rule.
Have you heard from any alliance raiding guilds? They say the exact opposite.
It's undisputed on the horde side that paladins are better than shamans; it's undisputed on the alliance side that shamans are better than paladins. The grass is always greener....
Funny, even the alliance guilds I've talked to will admit that paladins have far, far more raid utility than shamans. Compare BoW, which one paladin can give to every caster, to Mana Spring/Mana Tide, which one shaman can give to five casters, including himself, and which requires a 31 point talent. Compare BoS to Tranquil Air; the former is not only more powerful and applies to more people, but the latter also precludes giving melee DPS Windfury or GoA; since Windfury is currently the only Horde ability without a superior Alliance counterpart, it's rather jealously guarded. (Witness the huge shitstorm over the proposed nerf to Windfury in 1.12.) Compare BoK to... uh... never mind, your tanks will just have 5-10% less HP, your healers will have 10% less spirit, and your casters will have 10% less mana.
The totem mechanic is broken. Flat-out broken. And how does Blizzard fix it? By saying "wait until the expansion when both sides will be able to not use shamans equally!"
I'm rolling my eyes right now at Blizzard. Over the internet. Can you tell?
WoW's rest system was originally going to do this, but apparently people in beta disliked getting penalized for playing too much, so in its current form it simply gives you bonus experience after you've been logged off for some amount of time. Obviously it's not much of a solution, but it's a step in the right direction.
It's instructive here to note that those two games are the 4th and 5th in their respective series. One is not really known as a multiplayer game, and the other is a fighting game, a genre that's been slowly dying since the mid-'90s. This is not how you make the PS3's Halo.
Of course, I say this knowing that the easiest way to kill off the PS3 would be for Bungie to release Halo 3 the same day the PS3 launches, although I'm not sure if it'll happen or not.
I just remember seeing people go up to the Mario 64 demo at Target and just spend hours running in circles around the courtyard. Not even accomplishing anything, just running in circles. (No, the controller wasn't stuck.) And as far as gameplay went, with the exception of the Incredible Moving Camera (which only hurt you in a few places) was an excellent demonstration of what a 3D adventure game could be (and, interestingly, still is in large part). It may have been a tech demo, but it was a damn good tech demo.
I actually in some ways preferred Maxthon's interface to Firefox's, at least out of the box, but I could never get the Gecko support working, so I switched as well.
Not any more than the assertion that people are playing money not to play WoW by buying gold. Cheat codes allow you to "complete" the game without really having to play it, eBay allows you to reach the highest levels of MMOGs without playing the levels before them. But this isn't a flaw with the game design, as great-grandparent asserts, but rather a disconnect between what the player wants and what the game is giving him/maybe her.
Well; yes. There seems to be a subclass of youths who are socially retarded sugar-rushed mal-adjusted spastics amazingly lacking any empathy whatsoever. They're going to be bloody annoying whatever they bloody do. In a game requirinng social interaction you need social skills, and some people just fall flat there.
Again, this is a bit out of context. This was in response to the idea that there exists some "perfect" MMOG for which no one would buy gold or characters because they would enjoy the experience. Someone else in this discussion brings up the 4 types of RPG players, and suggests that two of them would rather just get to the highest level: achievers looking for an edge, and killers, who have no real desire to level. So in some sense the perfect MMOG is Halo, at which point you've thrown out what people do enjoy about the genre.
40-60 was boring.. so, why is it there?
Well, at some point you do have to actually progress in skill before you hit 60 and go "hay where are my epicz", despite the fact that WoW is forgiving enough that unless you're in an instance group it's difficult to fail at anything. For example, Maraudon (a level 50ish instance) is far more demanding of your group than Scarlet Monastery (a level 35-40 instance) is; the tank actually has to know how to tank, the healer actually has to pay attention, the DPS has to not pull aggro, etc. But the straight answer is that they sort of forgot to add enough content to make 40-50 in particular enjoyable (although it's gotten a little better in the late 40s); after 50 the amount of content grows, even if leveling rate continues to go down.
Actually, the problem you're suggesting is with the player. Why do you think cheat codes exist? Because people want instant gratification. Analogy: FPS games tend to have cheats like invulnerability, all weapons, and infinite ammo. People use these. Therefore all FPS games are inherently flawed, because people want to bypass the content. The perfect FPS would have these things enabled by default, so there would be no need for cheat codes.
What you're suggesting about a "perfect" MMO is impossible. Why? Because people always want to have the best character, if for no other reason than to buy a level 60 warrior in full epic gear, then go and Heroic Strike someone in PvP with their Ashkandi. (Yeah, HS. I'm sure you've encountered these people too.) And this segment will be there whether your leveling content is absolutely breathtaking or a mindless grind.
Honestly raiders aren't producers any more than anyone else is. The things raiders "produce" can only be used by themselves (since they bind on pickup), while the things they consume (potions, repair costs, reagents) are the same as any other player. Sure, you'll make money on an instance you have on farm status simply by the gold dropped by bosses, but not a whole lot, and when you're learning new dungeons you'll burn through gold faster. They may not consume high-priced items the way that non-raiders trying to stay on top of the curve do (although this is impossible, because the items available for auction are still way below the curve), but they're not producers.
Really. The number of exploits jumps by orders of magnitude anytime you allow the client to be trusted to do anything. Example: Diablo 2's "Open" online play mode, where characters are stored client-side.
To be perfectly honest, if you were expecting a paladin to be simply a warrior with healing spells, that was never the case to begin with. Paladins sacrifice the damage of a warrior to gain quite a bit of survivability: healing spells, an invulnerability shield, immunity to most kinds of debuffs, and a short range stun. Yes, paladins can dish out some decent damage with the right gear and spec, but part of playing a character is playing to their strengths as they are. The paladin class hasn't changed significantly since release; their review merely shuffled some talents around.
As for your assertion that shamans are superior to paladins...
In the PvE game, paladins are far superior to shamans. Four paladins can give more mana regen, more threat reduction, and more attack power to EVERY MEMBER OF THE RAID with blessings than eight shamans can with totems, and even without the greater blessings the blessings last longer than the totems. Paladins themselves have the most efficient, lowest threat heals in the game, and can remove three different kinds of debuffs with one fairly cheap spell. About all shamans have going for them is Windfury/Grace of Air, which only apply to the shaman's group and cannot be used at the same time as the threat reduction totem or each other.
In PvP, they're opposite sides of the same coin. Paladins are by far the dominant PvP healer class simply because of their survivability, and can leverage their heals and Cleanse to make their group that much more powerful, even if a paladin by himself isn't much of a threat. Shamans are an excellent offensive class with some capacity to heal and (against bad opponents) buff their groups.
The reason so many people think shamans are more poweful than paladins is because 90% of paladins keep thinking they're a warrior with healing spells, instead of using the rest of their abilities. It's like playing a hunter in PvP without a pet, or a druid without using forms.
Um, not really, just that most paladins don't know how to play their class... including the guy above you who somehow thinks paladins are damage dealers, and that hate means anything in PvP.
Could it possibly be that the reason WoW is so popular is that it doesn't hate its playerbase the way that "serious and hardcore" MMOGs do?
No, of course not, that'd be silly. 1.5 million people will gladly give you money to play a game which requires as much dedication to get past level 10 as WoW's endgame does...
I hope you're not comparing the architecture of a MMOG like WoW to a web-based system. I really do. There's a world of difference between those two things.
By far the best quest I've found in WoW is a quest that starts by talking to an old man named Tirion living off by himself on the edge of the Eastern Plaguelands. After a few "go decimate everything in the area" quests, he decides to trust you with his story, which involves his and his son Taelan's involvement in fighting the Scourge as part of the Silver Hand (in the Warcraft 3 era). Eventually he tells you Taelan joined the Scarlet Crusade, a fanatical organization that thinks everyone who's not a part of them is allied with the Scourge. To redeem him, you retrieve some various articles from Taelan's past, then enlist some help to disguise yourself as a member of the Scarlet Crusade. When you show these to Taelan, he decides he wants to be with his father again, demolishing anyone who stands in his way. (And unlike most escort quests in the game, you don't have to do anything because he hits like a truck.) [massive spoilers] In the end, he dies, and his father arrives and pledges to reform the Order of the Silver Hand. [/massive spoilers]
Because that doesn't work either. Take WoW: a whole world of interesting content that people still want to rush through, because all that matters to a large fraction of gamers is the achievement (being level 60, or having the coolest loot), not the journey.
I don't really understand the argument "ho hum another 20-man and another 40-man but a 5-man dungeon I could get excited about". A 5 man dungeon is going to get cleared and mastered even faster than any larger size dungeon, simply because every raid guild out there is going to send half a dozen groups through it. And there's a severe limitation on what you can require a 5 man group to do; worse, many of those permutations have already been explored in pre-60 content, meaning anything new is going to have to look even harder to find something interesting and yet new that can be done with a 5 man group without unduly requiring a specific set of classes.
Blizzard is in something of a tight spot right now if they're trying to please "casual" players. Consider that all of the following are considered "casual" by different people: 1. Anyone who cannot or does not do 40 man raid instances. 2. Anyone who cannot or does not do 20 man raid instances. 3. Anyone who cannot or does not play for more than X hours at a time. 4. Anyone who cannot or does not play for more than Y hours in a given week, although at one stretch they may play up to Z hours.
So if you're trying to appeal to these people, what do you do? Thus far 20 man instances have been the response; personally I enjoy them, but judging by the huge outcry this doesn't appeal to everyone, and worse people feel marginalized by them because they think Blizzard assumes more out of them than they can get. (Either that, or they insist that they be able to play the game with only their 4 closest friends, without ever having to resort to any other people.) The other response is faction grinding, which is doable by anyone but boring.
So imagine the response to a 5 man dungeon. Either it's a huge step up from Dire Maul, in which case categories 3 and 4 will complain about the length and/or difficulty, or it's not, in which case categories 1 and 2 will complain that they're being marginalized again.
The bigger problem is that Blizzard made a game that's so appealing to such a wide range of players from 1-59 that they didn't think about how to somehow appeal to everyone once they hit 60... which most of them did 6 months ago.
I doubt they'll kill it off completely, as it's a great selling point for the game. They've already put a great deal of effort into making it impossible to write a full-on bot using UI mods (the main reason is that UI mods can't move you, and they can only cast one spell per button clicked).
(I remember a very confusing statement by Blizzard about how mods that allow people to do something that people without the mod can't do are considered too powerful - but isn't that the entire point of a mod?)
Not really. These are just UI mods; the intention is to allow you to reconfigure your UI and see information which is given to you, but not in a useful way by the default UI. I'll take the Decursive example. Decursive looks at your party/raid, finds a debuff that you can cure, and uses the correct cure spell on that person, all with one button. Notice there's only one spell being cast for each push of the button, and notice that nothing in there is something that a human player cannot do by himself. The reason people don't like it is because it's pretty brainless to use something like this; similar mods exist for selecting the correct rank of healing spell to not waste any healing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
True, it is a problem in the East as well, but in order to be a Chinese farmer for US customers you must have a US account, which means it will set you back $40. I imagine the problem is that much harder to solve in countries where there isn't an upfront cost.
Except that in order to play on the WoW US realms you need a US account, and you can't interact between the different segments of the world (US/EU/China/Korea/etc.), so in order to farm gold for US buyers they'd need a US box.
On the bright side, we won't have to deal with those stupid 5s and 1s, which only serve to get in the way.
On the other hand, this is going to make a lot of rulesets more complicated... ranging from embezzlement to the more common and legitimate Free Parking "put $500 and any taxes/fines in the middle, pick them up when you hit Free Parking" rule.
The totem mechanic is broken. Flat-out broken. And how does Blizzard fix it? By saying "wait until the expansion when both sides will be able to not use shamans equally!"
I'm rolling my eyes right now at Blizzard. Over the internet. Can you tell?
WoW's rest system was originally going to do this, but apparently people in beta disliked getting penalized for playing too much, so in its current form it simply gives you bonus experience after you've been logged off for some amount of time. Obviously it's not much of a solution, but it's a step in the right direction.
It's instructive here to note that those two games are the 4th and 5th in their respective series. One is not really known as a multiplayer game, and the other is a fighting game, a genre that's been slowly dying since the mid-'90s. This is not how you make the PS3's Halo.
Of course, I say this knowing that the easiest way to kill off the PS3 would be for Bungie to release Halo 3 the same day the PS3 launches, although I'm not sure if it'll happen or not.
I just remember seeing people go up to the Mario 64 demo at Target and just spend hours running in circles around the courtyard. Not even accomplishing anything, just running in circles. (No, the controller wasn't stuck.) And as far as gameplay went, with the exception of the Incredible Moving Camera (which only hurt you in a few places) was an excellent demonstration of what a 3D adventure game could be (and, interestingly, still is in large part). It may have been a tech demo, but it was a damn good tech demo.
Karma bonus?
I actually in some ways preferred Maxthon's interface to Firefox's, at least out of the box, but I could never get the Gecko support working, so I switched as well.
Again, this is a bit out of context. This was in response to the idea that there exists some "perfect" MMOG for which no one would buy gold or characters because they would enjoy the experience. Someone else in this discussion brings up the 4 types of RPG players, and suggests that two of them would rather just get to the highest level: achievers looking for an edge, and killers, who have no real desire to level. So in some sense the perfect MMOG is Halo, at which point you've thrown out what people do enjoy about the genre.
Well, at some point you do have to actually progress in skill before you hit 60 and go "hay where are my epicz", despite the fact that WoW is forgiving enough that unless you're in an instance group it's difficult to fail at anything. For example, Maraudon (a level 50ish instance) is far more demanding of your group than Scarlet Monastery (a level 35-40 instance) is; the tank actually has to know how to tank, the healer actually has to pay attention, the DPS has to not pull aggro, etc. But the straight answer is that they sort of forgot to add enough content to make 40-50 in particular enjoyable (although it's gotten a little better in the late 40s); after 50 the amount of content grows, even if leveling rate continues to go down.
Actually, the problem you're suggesting is with the player. Why do you think cheat codes exist? Because people want instant gratification. Analogy: FPS games tend to have cheats like invulnerability, all weapons, and infinite ammo. People use these. Therefore all FPS games are inherently flawed, because people want to bypass the content. The perfect FPS would have these things enabled by default, so there would be no need for cheat codes.
What you're suggesting about a "perfect" MMO is impossible. Why? Because people always want to have the best character, if for no other reason than to buy a level 60 warrior in full epic gear, then go and Heroic Strike someone in PvP with their Ashkandi. (Yeah, HS. I'm sure you've encountered these people too.) And this segment will be there whether your leveling content is absolutely breathtaking or a mindless grind.
Honestly raiders aren't producers any more than anyone else is. The things raiders "produce" can only be used by themselves (since they bind on pickup), while the things they consume (potions, repair costs, reagents) are the same as any other player. Sure, you'll make money on an instance you have on farm status simply by the gold dropped by bosses, but not a whole lot, and when you're learning new dungeons you'll burn through gold faster. They may not consume high-priced items the way that non-raiders trying to stay on top of the curve do (although this is impossible, because the items available for auction are still way below the curve), but they're not producers.
Really. The number of exploits jumps by orders of magnitude anytime you allow the client to be trusted to do anything. Example: Diablo 2's "Open" online play mode, where characters are stored client-side.
To be perfectly honest, if you were expecting a paladin to be simply a warrior with healing spells, that was never the case to begin with. Paladins sacrifice the damage of a warrior to gain quite a bit of survivability: healing spells, an invulnerability shield, immunity to most kinds of debuffs, and a short range stun. Yes, paladins can dish out some decent damage with the right gear and spec, but part of playing a character is playing to their strengths as they are. The paladin class hasn't changed significantly since release; their review merely shuffled some talents around.
As for your assertion that shamans are superior to paladins...
In the PvE game, paladins are far superior to shamans. Four paladins can give more mana regen, more threat reduction, and more attack power to EVERY MEMBER OF THE RAID with blessings than eight shamans can with totems, and even without the greater blessings the blessings last longer than the totems. Paladins themselves have the most efficient, lowest threat heals in the game, and can remove three different kinds of debuffs with one fairly cheap spell. About all shamans have going for them is Windfury/Grace of Air, which only apply to the shaman's group and cannot be used at the same time as the threat reduction totem or each other.
In PvP, they're opposite sides of the same coin. Paladins are by far the dominant PvP healer class simply because of their survivability, and can leverage their heals and Cleanse to make their group that much more powerful, even if a paladin by himself isn't much of a threat. Shamans are an excellent offensive class with some capacity to heal and (against bad opponents) buff their groups.
The reason so many people think shamans are more poweful than paladins is because 90% of paladins keep thinking they're a warrior with healing spells, instead of using the rest of their abilities. It's like playing a hunter in PvP without a pet, or a druid without using forms.
Um, not really, just that most paladins don't know how to play their class... including the guy above you who somehow thinks paladins are damage dealers, and that hate means anything in PvP.
Oh wait, did I say that?
Every time I hear the name Wii, I think of this (possibly NWS, for pictures of gonads and strife).
Could it possibly be that the reason WoW is so popular is that it doesn't hate its playerbase the way that "serious and hardcore" MMOGs do?
No, of course not, that'd be silly. 1.5 million people will gladly give you money to play a game which requires as much dedication to get past level 10 as WoW's endgame does...
I hope you're not comparing the architecture of a MMOG like WoW to a web-based system. I really do. There's a world of difference between those two things.
By far the best quest I've found in WoW is a quest that starts by talking to an old man named Tirion living off by himself on the edge of the Eastern Plaguelands. After a few "go decimate everything in the area" quests, he decides to trust you with his story, which involves his and his son Taelan's involvement in fighting the Scourge as part of the Silver Hand (in the Warcraft 3 era). Eventually he tells you Taelan joined the Scarlet Crusade, a fanatical organization that thinks everyone who's not a part of them is allied with the Scourge. To redeem him, you retrieve some various articles from Taelan's past, then enlist some help to disguise yourself as a member of the Scarlet Crusade. When you show these to Taelan, he decides he wants to be with his father again, demolishing anyone who stands in his way. (And unlike most escort quests in the game, you don't have to do anything because he hits like a truck.) [massive spoilers] In the end, he dies, and his father arrives and pledges to reform the Order of the Silver Hand. [/massive spoilers]
Because that doesn't work either. Take WoW: a whole world of interesting content that people still want to rush through, because all that matters to a large fraction of gamers is the achievement (being level 60, or having the coolest loot), not the journey.
I don't really understand the argument "ho hum another 20-man and another 40-man but a 5-man dungeon I could get excited about". A 5 man dungeon is going to get cleared and mastered even faster than any larger size dungeon, simply because every raid guild out there is going to send half a dozen groups through it. And there's a severe limitation on what you can require a 5 man group to do; worse, many of those permutations have already been explored in pre-60 content, meaning anything new is going to have to look even harder to find something interesting and yet new that can be done with a 5 man group without unduly requiring a specific set of classes.
Blizzard is in something of a tight spot right now if they're trying to please "casual" players. Consider that all of the following are considered "casual" by different people:
1. Anyone who cannot or does not do 40 man raid instances.
2. Anyone who cannot or does not do 20 man raid instances.
3. Anyone who cannot or does not play for more than X hours at a time.
4. Anyone who cannot or does not play for more than Y hours in a given week, although at one stretch they may play up to Z hours.
So if you're trying to appeal to these people, what do you do? Thus far 20 man instances have been the response; personally I enjoy them, but judging by the huge outcry this doesn't appeal to everyone, and worse people feel marginalized by them because they think Blizzard assumes more out of them than they can get. (Either that, or they insist that they be able to play the game with only their 4 closest friends, without ever having to resort to any other people.) The other response is faction grinding, which is doable by anyone but boring.
So imagine the response to a 5 man dungeon. Either it's a huge step up from Dire Maul, in which case categories 3 and 4 will complain about the length and/or difficulty, or it's not, in which case categories 1 and 2 will complain that they're being marginalized again.
The bigger problem is that Blizzard made a game that's so appealing to such a wide range of players from 1-59 that they didn't think about how to somehow appeal to everyone once they hit 60... which most of them did 6 months ago.
Yeah, I was starting to get irritated at Firefox over that. That, and you can't uninstall the old ones because it'll break all of them.
Not really. These are just UI mods; the intention is to allow you to reconfigure your UI and see information which is given to you, but not in a useful way by the default UI. I'll take the Decursive example. Decursive looks at your party/raid, finds a debuff that you can cure, and uses the correct cure spell on that person, all with one button. Notice there's only one spell being cast for each push of the button, and notice that nothing in there is something that a human player cannot do by himself. The reason people don't like it is because it's pretty brainless to use something like this; similar mods exist for selecting the correct rank of healing spell to not waste any healing.
Er, I probably should have included Akama (leader of the Draenei) in that first statement.