Addicted to Warcraft for 16 Years | Design Delve
Added 2024-09-06 15:03:06 +0000 UTCThis week's episode of Design Delve is now available!
Comments
Many of the faults of WoW were essentially inherited from Everquest - along with some of its strong points. Grouping is pretty much mandatory for endgame EQ content, with some classes (e.g. tanks and clerics) being essentially useless otherwise, to the extent that they introduced a mercenary system so those players could do something useful when they couldn't find a group. I suspect levelling is also much slower; not sure how long it takes in WoW, but in EQ endgame it takes days to gain a level. The addictive qualities were/are also there; I've seen the game referred to as EverCrack. Sounds s little like your end spiel... There was also the continual layering of new systems with each expansion. I suspect this is/was to add bullet points to the expansion to give people one more axis to grow their character, away from the grind of accumulating AA points (which can be spent on various class abilities.) I mean, yes, you want the numbers to go up, but adding entirely NEW numbers to go up will generally be a plus for existing players. And let's face it, very few people are joining WoW as new players nowadays, so that's not exactly a design focus.
Ronny Cook
2024-09-09 17:32:44 +0000 UTCI think James Rolf had a video on this which takes a somewhat different view (I think it was called “Why it’s rude to be bad at World of Warcraft or something), but maybe I just want to believe the worst having never played WOW for more than a couple of hours and never wanting to touch an MMO with a barge pole since. Clearly they’re beloved by millions but it never seemed healthy to dedicate that much of your life to something that could change or go away on a dime. Great video either way though, it’s nice to see things from the other side sometimes :)
Tim Wilson
2024-09-09 12:54:22 +0000 UTCYou’re right, it’s not. Sometimes we can just talk about games we like.
Nick Calandra
2024-09-09 11:48:54 +0000 UTC*not sponsored by Blizzard or Blizzard subsidiaries*
Michael Alicea
2024-09-09 07:23:03 +0000 UTCFor YEARS I played WoW. I jumped in at the beginning of the Nax raid introduction in vanilla WoW (before expansion packs). And played through a blur of years building a guild that eventually became number 3 for raid progression world wide. But the day came when it was taking so much of my life just to afford to raid (being the main tank is expensive), and I experienced burnout. The thought of grinding for gold to repair my armour made me feel physically ill, and I couldn’t be a responsible guild leader anymore, which made it all the more worse. I’m glad they are slowly making changes and got rid of daily quests, but I can’t ever log back into WoW and start over again after so long. Players need to look after their mental health with games that make you invest so much time into them. When I left the 10 and 25 person raid system was long established, and frankly it was a welcome relief. The days of getting 39 other people to move in the same direction was over, because it was like herding cats on crack lol.
Horus
2024-09-07 17:31:09 +0000 UTCWe started playing WoW around the same time. Neat. Also love you calling the Alliance out on their fucking bullshit.
Skylar Ross
2024-09-07 00:15:15 +0000 UTCI'm a Guild Wars 2 fan. A lot of what was said applies to GW2 too, but some of it does not. GW2 has been described as the MMORPG "Disneyland" with lots of fun things to do, none of which you have to do unless you want Legendary Weapons. I've also seen the complete opposite in games like the Lineage series often described as "hard" MMORPGs with nearly always on PvP. WoW sits between Disneyland and Hard.
Ariane Barnes
2024-09-06 21:22:33 +0000 UTCWell, it's nice to see you are a Horde player and hate Hunters, everything checks out.
Envihon
2024-09-06 16:47:42 +0000 UTCI think it’s time for an intervention
Jam
2024-09-06 16:40:47 +0000 UTCDo drug dealers sell crack in injectable form in Britain?
Russell Schafer
2024-09-06 16:07:09 +0000 UTCAs for WoW embracing less predatory practices, my guess is that they have so much complexity and back-content that it's extremely daunting for someone who's never played (like me) to start. They need to retain their existing players, even as they age and have other things to do with their lives.
Max Goldstein
2024-09-06 16:06:29 +0000 UTCI like the shorter, transparent SW title card.
Max Goldstein
2024-09-06 15:52:35 +0000 UTC
