Originally posted by Wumi

First of all i WAS a harcore player... spent alot of time in WoW everyday... made several lvl 60s

Only did random raids now and then call me a casual harcore player then. I did some PvP but lacked the interest to get the big grind and have all the respect to all who did make it all the way to the end THE OLD STYLE! Today any 9 yr old newbie can get same stuff within a week if he wanted to.

But worst of all (for me) the free epix killed crafting. Who wants to buy crafted gear when you can get it for free. With all my chars i got alotta 300 skill crafting in allmost all crafting classes. Stocked up MATs for a year and its all useless now. All the time and efford wasted over a night. Same story was told when SOE killed crafting in SWG and see how that ended up. (And everything else in the game.. i know)

I feel high end rewards/drops/gear in MMO are MEANT to be hard to get! Thats what so awesome about it. In SWG it took up to a year to become a jedi... it was "the carrot" most players where all hunting for and kept loggin on to get.

The people that whined, and in the end, made the developers change the game to please. Was the casuals!

I truly feel that if people dont wanna work for it... they dont deserve it!

Theres room for all of us, but changing a game for the casual "1 hour a day"-gamer, ruins it for everyone else.

Wumi - EU-Kazzak (Havnt been on since the free epix... but whats 1 guy with 5mill. players around *sigh*)

First of all, there is a general misconception about online games here.

A game is meant to be FUN. That is its primary purpose. I repeat: not WORK, but FUN. If you have fun because of the quests, the challenges you face while you level your character to lvl 60 (or 70), the diversity that PvP presents by throwing unknown enemies at you on the BG's - it does not really matter. As long as you have fun, the game is OK for you.

However, there is a conflict of interest here. Players want fun. Companies want income. So they invented time sinks and grind instead of coming up with creative ideas that entertain you in addition to offering a challenge.

Grind and raiding instances till your eyes bleed are NOT challenge. It's a time sink that was created to make you spend your money on the next month subscription. A dungeon may be fun until you figure out how to beat it. From that point it's nothing else but DKP grind, and ceaseless re-runs, unti everbody is geared well enough for the next instance levels.

If you want to get rewarded according to the time you spent in the game -why don't you play EVE? There you can increase your skill, even if you are offline.

You mentioned SWG. and Jedi as a big carrot for people. True it was a big carrot but why. Because - if you were not a crafter - all other parts of the game lacked content, and that was the only viable goal that drove people. And belive me, subscription numbers started to drop before they introduced the Combat Upgrade.

Unfortunately, designing time sinks like grinding and raiding for the slim chance that the boss will drop the item you want and you'll be lucky to have enough DKP or to roll the highest to get it requires much less creativity (and therefore it is much simpler and more cost-efficient) than desining fun, challenging - albeit difficult - ways of getting the same items.

I have not seen any statistics about the gaming habits of the 7 million WoW subscribers but I doubt that the hardcore gamers represent the majority.  So Blizzard's logic will work this way... we will rather sacrifice 1 million hardcore gamers to retain 6 million casual gamers. If you have issues with that approach, blame it on them and not on the casual players who love this game as much as you, but have different ideas about having fun.

Originally posted by Vinadil

I wonder what game you can name that gives an EPIC reward for anything less than an EPIC time commiment?

Take... Football.  What is the time commitment to win the SuperBowl?  Heck, what is the time commitment to win a High School championship... or even one GAME?

Basketball, Soccer, Baseball... yea just about any other game that is Multi-player is the same story.

Even games like chess require a large time commitment in order to achieve any sort of good victory or skill.  And some might consider playing chess a "grind", I mean you do just about the SAME THING every time you play right?

The term "grind" should not be defined by the task alone, but by a measure of a) How enjoyable the task is, b) How MUCH of the task you have to do to achieve the reward, and c) The reward being significant enough.

So, A + B = C means that I am not experiencing a grind.  That means I would be willing to do an UNenjoyable task for a SHORT period of time to obtain a GOOD result, or a semi-enjoyable task for a longer period of time to obtain the same result.  But, I would NOT be willing to do an unenjoyable task for a long period of time for said result.

If you are looking for some story-book ending where a hardy group of adventurers go out and slay the dragon in a 1 in a million fight... then I can suggest LOTS of good books to read, perhaps even some singly player games that might work for you... but there has not been ONE mmo that has done this, and I don't even know if it fits the genre.  If a game DID attempt it, then by default 1 million people would try the encounter and only ONE would succeed... giving them the epic story and the rest the natural defeat.  It is just not so EPIC if everyone can do it every time without any work.

Originally posted by Vinadil

Originally posted by MillaMerani
I don't PvP so where are my casual epics?  One might say it is not real PvP at all, rather a massive honor farming fest, but still...

There is no part of WoW that does not require farming... so yea that should be nothing new to you.  The issue here is what you have to DO while putting in your time.  For those whose brain's go numb and eyes bleed when they see the same instance for the 20th time... but who don't mind running PvP instances (as they are at least a TOUCH different game to game), well this allows a more palletable grind.

 

I don't know if there is a way to remove WORK from REWARD, even in a game... and honestly I don't know if I would want to play such a game anyway.  The important part is making the "work" side enjoyable enough to do and making the "reward" side worth the investment.

WORK  | GRIND =/= Fun

Many people justify the need for hard work to get an epic item by saying "EPIC means EPIC effort".

I say that's bullshit. EPIC effort should mean EPIC FUN! EPIC should be EPIC difficulty, but difficulty =/= grinding. Grinding is a simple time sink that the companies put into their games to keep you subscribed. Designing something that is based on grinding for honor/reputation/items does not require creativity.

Ok, they designed an armor upgrade quest. It could have been fun if the results were worthy of the effort, but the upgraded stats are just slightly better than those of the old items.

I guess Blizzard is aware of the issue because - as far as I know (I may be wrong, I only say what a guildmate and friend told me about his experience in TBC beta) - some of the Burning Crusade quest items/drops are actually better than T2 items so player like me who don't like the grinding/pvp'ing aspect of the game (I'm a questing freak so bear with me) will have a chance to catch up with the raiding guys.

Btw, I agree this was a positive patch.  The fact that it does not offer anything to non-PVP'ers does not detract from its positive effects.

Too bad, MMORPG's have not evolved to the point yet where dynamic content dominates the max level end-game, offering fun for all playstyles. Hell, people may argue that it is something that is nearly impossible to achieve, but the same could have been said about the MMO's of today just one decade ago.

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Originally posted by Jd1680a
This is sounding alot like a witch hunt for Blizzard.  Anyone who they think is a bot is automaticly banned without question.  That is not a good thing if the customer is legitmate.  I just hope alot of these wrongly banned players were to get together to do a class action lawsuit.  Since they are paying customers and is following the rules, there is no reason for blizzard to kick them off.  It is Blizzards problem and something the need to fix.  EULA is pretty paper thin when it comes between a few hundred people and a good lawyer to sue Blizzard for falsely banning people from a service they paid for.

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That's not true. They are too slow to ban even the most obvious botters. Sometimes they ban a lot of botters at the same time and post an article on their website as a publicity stunt, but as far as I know from various sources on the net, if they don't ban a botter within 9 days, the botter is making profit, so they should do it continuously, and not as a monthly campaign. These gold farming bots are ridiculously easy to spot in WoW, and still some of them are still happily farming even though I reported them almost a month ago. I'm beginning to suspect, too, that Blizzard may have a vested interest in some of those gold farming companies as an extra - and covert - source of income.

Botters do not hurt anybody? Not true. Try to do a quest when four or five bots are farming the quest mobs!! Try to mine resources when automated bot miners mine them 3 seconds after they spawn.

Also, I think, any legal action against Blizzard would be useless, and the reason why there has been none so far is that any lawyer will tell you the same. Blizzard owns the game and makes you accept their terms for gaining access to their property. If they see it OK, they can ban you without giving any reason, they can suspend your forum rights... remember you are accessing their private property where they are entirely within their rights to set the rules.

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Originally posted by Onijin
Dunno about you all but I think that's a crock of horse-covered bull crap. 1) No other MMO states only you or a under 18 trustee or child can access your account. 2) You are paying their monthly fee for their services and mainteance of the server. 3) Your account to access the game is your own property.

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SWG's EULA also states that you cannot share your account. I had a few guildmates in the past in SWG who were banned for sharing their account.

Also, you are paying a monthly fee, but your account is not your property. You are paying fee for being able to access and play the game, so actually you are paying some sort of license fee. Just like software... you are not buying it, you are buying a license to use it.

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Originally posted by Apsylum

Well, the game finally came today. And SO FAR, it's tons of fun. I'm planning on going Rifleman and Armorsmith.

I think the thing that has impressed me MOST so far, would have to be the crafting. My god, it's so in depth and there are SOOO many things to create. I just started making fireworks and that has me completely impressed haha

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Well, hopefully by the time you hit Master Armorsmith they will fix the annoying bug that makes your armor sets come out of your factory in random colors

It's been a known issue for some time (actually, if you check out the bug threds on the SWG offical board, you'll notice much more bugs that are still not acknowledged, let alone fixed by the dev team).