Originally posted by Kyleran

You guys are on a roll with this thread, and tossing around some really good ideas.

Despite what some Development leaders have said recently, some folks really do want to be Uncle Owen. (at least some of the time)

Virtual worlds inspire better communities, action oriented combat style game play does not.

 

Even people like me, who don't want to be Uncle Owen, want Uncle Owens in the game and a very good reason for them to want to be there. Comat 100% of the time gets boring, no matter how good it is. Us action adventure types, that like delving into deep and dangerous dungeons DO want something to come back to after our adventure for the day has finished. We also want something more to strive for, a higher cause. Getting the best gear is too shallow of a cause for many of us. We want to help build cities and defend them. Some of us are hunters, and want to provide the resources the crafters need in order to create the armor, weapons, houses, furniture, and etc that we need. After all that, we still want to have a place to congregate to talk about our adventures or anything else that we want. A pub, with player professions that run it would work great, sorta like how SWG did things. 

So yeah, even the non-Uncle Owens want Uncle Owen in the game.

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Originally posted by nate1980

... too shallow ...

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These two words from your post describe why I have given up on the big releases. The gaming industry behaves as if every customer would want to eat hamburgers all the time - that's all what they produce.

Fast food for the millions.

Good thread with some great insight, even if it almost seems ridiculously obvious if you really start thinking about.

And I couldn't agree more.  It's not at all about "bringing old-school back", but opening the worlds back up to a much wider variety of equally viable activites to just plain combat which is where we are essentially stuck today. A lot of people, on both sides I suppose, could be well served remembering that before bashing away at eachother. 

Originally posted by smh_alot

Originally posted by Cuathon

 

The people who prefer old style MMOs prefer them because that game style is more interesting. If I hear this rose tinted glasses bullshit one more time I will have to go out and kick puppies.

So the next time you want to make a stupid/moronic/unsubstantiated argument which has no basis in reality, except apparently among WoW players, go figure, think of the god damn puppies and go post in in the WoW forums. It will be on par with the intellectual level of the WoW player base.

 

I'll bite. Yeah, rose tinted glasses do play a role. Feel free to find some puppies after you're done reading :) Are rose tinted glasses the sole determining factor for everyone? No, of course not. Does nostalgia and a rose tinted look not play a role for anybody at all? The same, most certainly not. Truth lies somewhere in the middle.

 

It'd be interesting if a survey was held or would be held if people thought their first year(s) of MMO gaming were their best, no matter when they started. And if the first MMO they really enjoyed, was still on the first or second spot of best MMO gameplay experience of all their MMO gaming life. I expect the percentage that answers those questions with yes, based on the accounts of MMO gamers on various forums, than a simple 'that 1st game was better' would account for. Ofc, it remains guesswork since there is no such survey.

 

There are research projects however that determined that for most people, their music taste gets 'anchored' in their first formative years of engaged music listening, in their teens up till early '20s. The music trends that manage to steal their hearts in that period of time'll remain their bias and most favored, what comes later doesn't touch us that intensely anymore. Of course, there'll always be exceptions but those were the patterns that those reports laid bare.

 

Personally, I'm guessing it's kinda like with sex: the intensity and excitement peak that each sex encounter delivers in those first years or those first times that you experience something new is higher on average than later years when you've done it a 100-200+ times. Sure, sex'll always be fun no matter when. But man, those first sex partners, or the sex in those first months with your current partner...

 

So yeah, I'm guessing nostalgia and rose tinted glasses do play a role, in how some regard their first year(s) of MMO gaming with later on, how much will differ from one person to the next.

 

There's also the automatic filtering. Some blogs and articles talked about it, how there have been gamers that tried MMO's with UO and EQ, got turned off by the mechanics, left MMO's behind them, only to step in it again and got really excited about them when WoW appeared. Those that liked the mechanics of the UO/EQ type of MMO's stuck around, those that didn't left or got what they were looking for when WoW came around.

 

That's how I see it. Feel free to disagree :)

 

@Beatnik59, great read, good points in your posts! *thumbs up*

Good thread indeed, with nice counterpoint from you.   When I read these types of threads, it often reminds me of people who think no good rock music was recorded after the early '70's, or the Jazz ended at Bebob types.

While the concept of virtual worlds is still intriguing, I was a gamer who watched friends play UO, EQ, and the like, and really did not care for the game play.   Those games had plenty of major problems.    Those old devs were muddling through things far more than some  think.  Lots of more modern developments were attempts to deal with some of these issues, whether you like the way they went or not.  

Originally posted by Felheart5

Good thread with some great insight, even if it almost seems ridiculously obvious if you really start thinking about.

And I couldn't agree more.  It's not at all about "bringing old-school back", but opening the worlds back up to a much wider variety of equally viable activites to just plain combat which is where we are essentially stuck today. A lot of people, on both sides I suppose, could be well served remembering that before bashing away at eachother. 

That's just it, as an old school MMORPG gamer, I don't want copies of those games to come back. I don't have rose tented glasses when I speak of the virtues of the older games. I recognize and remember the flaws those games had. However, I do think the older games were on the right track for the genre. 

I agree.  There were plenty of things about old games that were unbalanced and frustrating.  Even the features that we miss were often done poorly.  I remember complaining even back then that games were too combat focused and crafters were getting shafted.

But they tried.  That's the big disappointment.  Graphical, mass-market mmorpgs were a new idea at the time, so it was natural that it would take some time to work out the kinks.  Now, we have experienced devs producing nicely polished games, but they've lost the vision that the old devs had.

Old games = great ideas; terrible execution.  New games = bland, mediocre ideas; great execution.

Originally posted by Kyleran

You guys are on a roll with this thread, and tossing around some really good ideas.

Despite what some Development leaders have said recently, some folks really do want to be Uncle Owen. (at least some of the time)

Virtual worlds inspire better communities, action oriented combat style game play does not.

 

Thats probably very true, at least it's true for me.

There probably are people that want to be the uncle owens the majority of the time.  These people are probably very few so I can see why devs don't really cater to them.

However I think the majority of the people, while not wanting to be Uncle Owen most of the time, do want some kind of down time, or just something other than the normal fightint, crafting, at least every once in a while. 

Originally posted by smh_alot

Originally posted by Cuathon

 

The people who prefer old style MMOs prefer them because that game style is more interesting. If I hear this rose tinted glasses bullshit one more time I will have to go out and kick puppies.

So the next time you want to make a stupid/moronic/unsubstantiated argument which has no basis in reality, except apparently among WoW players, go figure, think of the god damn puppies and go post in in the WoW forums. It will be on par with the intellectual level of the WoW player base.

 

I'll bite. Yeah, rose tinted glasses do play a role. Feel free to find some puppies after you're done reading :) Are rose tinted glasses the sole determining factor for everyone? No, of course not. Does nostalgia and a rose tinted look not play a role for anybody at all? The same, most certainly not. Truth lies somewhere in the middle.

 

It'd be interesting if a survey was held or would be held if people thought their first year(s) of MMO gaming were their best, no matter when they started. And if the first MMO they really enjoyed, was still on the first or second spot of best MMO gameplay experience of all their MMO gaming life. I expect the percentage that answers those questions with yes, based on the accounts of MMO gamers on various forums, than a simple 'that 1st game was better' would account for. Ofc, it remains guesswork since there is no such survey.

The argument I have a problem with is that people say that the only reason certain people like older games is that they have rose tinted glasses. If you are not arguing that, which it mostly appears you aren't I am not sure why you quoted me.

I would  argue that the first MMO of a specific KIND you play might be far more likely to be your favorite of that kind than your first MMO over all being your favorite MMO. So people who played WoW first are quite likely, although not certain, to like it far more than SWTOR or a similar game with a focus on solo content and end game raiding and arena pvp.

The reason for this is the games are so similar that even a minimal issue like what you played first seems large in comparison. Whereas if you played ATITD vs WoW its far more likely that the genre you prefer is more significant than what you played first.

You might want to note the large number of people on these forums who say they dropped everquest for WoW as soon as they got their first taste of WoW. Clearly playing everquest first did not deter them from vastly preferring WoW. Thus the rose tinted glasses argument appears to fall short.

Rose tinted glasses only appear significant in the absence of other factors like genre differences or solo vs group focus or long spin up times for content ala Everquest vs instant LFG style gameplay ala WoW.

The problem is that many many people are arguing that its the only important factor in who likes what games. I don't play MMOs anymore because the genre of MMO I like isn't made anymore. Well I actually stopped ATITD to work on some game programming since I couldn't play it any less than 10 hours a day, but prior to getting in to ATITD I was not really spending much time MMO gaming.