Originally posted by Rusque

Here's the thing, developers aren't really making the games dumbed down, but they are enablers.

That's a lot of what happened to WoW. Blizzard made the first mistake of allowing 3rd party addons, as soon as that happened it left the players to their own devices to come up with easier and more efficient paths to phat lewts!

People reminisce about Vanilla WoW having less hand holding, but look at how simple 99% of the fights were in Vanilla WoW vs the 3-5 phase 4 abilities per phase with environmentals going on in current day WoW raiding. It used to be you'd show up and unless someone knew the fight, everyone would die repeatedly for 4 hours and congratulate each other on making some progress on the bosses health bar.

But then someone made DBM. All of a sudden you get sounds, lights and messages popping up on your screen telling you when something is about to happen. Because of it's extreme usefulness and efficiency guild masters would require you to install it to raid.

DPS/Healing/Threat meters - also created by the community - REALLY helped to dumb down the game. Back in the day, threat mattered for tanks and good ones had to practice. But then someone made little boxes with numbers and red bars that fill up. Now everyone could measure their threat. Tanking went from challenging to yelling at everyone for making their red bar bigger than the tanks red bar. Not only did it make the game easier, but it made people ruder and less patient.

As expansions came out, people wanted to race to level cap to get their epics faster than other people, so someone made QUEST HELPER!!! O M F G this single add on alone should draw the ire of every RPG gamer on the planet. I don't know how people can point the blame at Blizzard when their intention with questing was to make you read and then discover what you had to do. Quest Helper destroyed that. It got so bad that Blizzard implemented it into the game's UI simply because nearly everyone had it installed.

Most hand holding changes came about because blizzard tracks stats and can see how many people are playing with what. At some point it becomes better to just make it a part of the game instead of making people risk downloading malware from 3rd party sites and claiming they got hacked.

Same thing happened in PvP. There used to be no target of target or casting timers of your oppoenent's abilities. People made addons for those, and Blizzard saw that a 3rd party add on was giving an unfair advantage. Banning it meant having to check everyone in pvp all the time. So instead, they made it standard.

Someone made an addon (forgot the name) that pops up colored lines and whatnot when you have proc effects. Hey look, it made people more efficient and provided an unfair advantage over people who hadn't downloaded those mods. Now it's standard.

 

Basically what I'm saying is that you can trace nearly every little bit of dumbing down of MMO gameplay back to the community itself. Someone made the mods, and then people who wanted an advantage over others downloaded them.

Blizzard should have responded by banning all add ons. Instead they enabled the community and provided the rope by which we all collectively hung ourselves.

 

We wanted cast bars

We wanted quest helper

We wanted dps meters

We wanted to know what every boss was going to do

We wanted dungeon finders

 

Well, now we have it all, only after we made the mess do we realize how far it took us away from what we were enjoying in the first place.

 Good post, props to you, sir.

I bought a Velocity Micro PC in November 2010 from their website. They sell decent rigs at a solid price and assemble them in VA. I've since upgraded the video card and the RAM, not because I had to, but just because I felt like it. It runs pretty much anything I throw at it on max settings.

I'd recommend giving them a look.

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by Dirkin

Originally posted by asmkm22

Originally posted by Dirkin
If you check this again, give VG another shot. They just completely re-wrote the network layer of the engine to get rid of the network lag (ping). It's made a considerable difference. Feel free to look me up if you do, I'm always down to help out if I'm on. Same name.

Are the character animations still crap?  Is combat still crap?

The character animations are not the best, but those are no big deal to me. I like the combat. Anything else?

Nope, those were the main reasons I couldn't get into the game.  There could be tons of other problems, but I never played long enough to find them.  There's no reason for games to continue releasing with bad animations.

 I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was put off by Vanguard's character animations.

MMOs don't require "skill." Stop kidding yourself.

Edit: Although, I will agree with you, manual transmissions all the way!

Warhammer Online can be fun for a month or two, if you don't mind paying a subscription.

Edit: Also if you're just looking for a filler, Steam has a number of free to play fps games and such you might want to check out. I've tried Blacklight personally, it's not bad at all. That way you can just jump right in and don't have to worry as much about progression, especially if you just want a pvp fix.

If its my first play through, yes.

If its a situation where I'm repeating content I've already done while leveling an alt, achievement whoring, etc, then I just click accept.

Originally posted by Fusion

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Muke

 

Ooooh?

WOW is the ONLY sub mmo that has success?

Just a guess, OP is playing WOW fanatically and has only knowledge of the existance of this mmo?

 

WOW is the ONLY sub mmo that has 8M+ subscribers as of now. Isn't that a true and accurate statement?

 

Yes, that is accurate, but what's inaccurate is the claim that WoW is the ONLY successful subscriber MMO

We have a local burger-joint where i live (no franchise) and it's raking in more profit than the 2 local McDonalds' put together. Does it mean they're successful or unsuccessful because they don't have billions, but only a few millions?

What's above the 'water level' is profit and profit in a company is always successful.

If WoW is such a "success", why do we get news like this? http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/29/blizzard-announces-layoffs-of-600-employees-worldwide/

 Don't forget Warhammer Online, still chugging along.

Originally posted by Axehilt

If there was a MMORPG which played better than WOW, I'd have ditched it to play that game.  Sadly there are none.

I have very little brand loyalty, but when no superior games appear I'm stuck playing the same game for a while (which isn't to say I don't play plenty of different non-MMORPGs, but when it comes to MMORPGs I try all sorts of games each year only to return to WOW for being the most polished and elegant design.)

 Pretty much this.

Plus the arenas and the ganking/world pvp never get old.

At this point, I've been playing it for so long that even if I take a break here and there, I will probably always come back just to see it through.

I will most definitely be checking this out.

I bought it on Steam a while back, now I will finally install it!

LOL @ WOW hate.

To answer the question: I can only speak for myself, but I'm playing a slew of single player games, including Starcraft (finally).

@asmkm22

Agreed. Although they have added several open world raid bosses in Pandaria.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Aren_D

 

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That's WoW Vanilla experience

All teleportations skills are best friends and worst enemys for the open world MMOs

There is a reason why open world gameplay is not that popular, except for large scale battle.

Not really. WoW was never a truly open world game. Not compared to older games. There are less open world games because they actually take thought and skill to design, instead of modern MMOs which just churn out garbage.

 Lol, so modern games take now skill or thought to design? Look, I'll get on board with some of the open world/sandbox posts, but this is a ridiculous statement.