Games like WoW will never be fun again.

[starkind]

They are geared around the gear grind.

Most of the buttons you press will just be filler buttons and have no meaningful impact other than sometimes another button flashes and u get to press a different button.

They have overly complex mechanics.

There's very little exploration, just waypoint systems.

Choices like what gear you have and can carry don't matter. People have bags with 600 slots.

Tradeskills are gated just like everything else is gatekept behind mechanics that require simple time.

Eve at least lets your character progress whether you are logged in or not. That's the only way to keep a gated and long running game going. No one wants to endlessly grind bleek zones like the maw just to get AoTC when it's not even mechanically very hard once u get the gear. Or interesting. All the game play is meta and none of it is strategic or learning how the world works.

[BlackBellamy]

WoW is extremely fun for a great many people!

WoW represents a natural evolution of what people want in a mmog. People want to feel validated, so there's tons of effects for everything you do. Blue swirls matter! No one wants to waste their time, so you click on the map and you're there! People don't want to play tetris while playing a mmog, so why limited inventory? There's a million buttons to press because people want a million buttons to press; it keeps them active. No one wants to try out variations of "I will perform this small menial whatever", they want a big yellow question mark and a menu. Overly complex mechanics are only overly complex because you're old and slow and stupid and these games are for people that matter, the ones who spend all their disposable income on video games and feeling sad.

(Disclaimer: The author of this reply has been compensated by Plarium, developers of the awesome and excellent Raid: Shadow Legends! Check it out and subscribe!)

[starkind]

literally grinding through regular quest mobs u can literally just click 1 button over and over and now they have this thing called simcraft which tells you what talents to pick, what gear to wear, and what order to press ur buttons in a decision tree

it's super fucking exciting man

can't wait to simucraft and see if i can beet alextrazsa 3.0

[unsunghero]

Personally I think playing a class like rogue in EQ must be mind numbing. I love EQ but certain classes were just not designed well, unless someone specifically wants to relax by pressing a single button for their entire leveling experience

WoW’s big fault is that it’s too. Damn. Easy. I enjoy telling friends who played WoW vanilla and classic about EQ. Corpse runs that cause dungeons to actually be scary because death is seriously inconvenient? A player-run transportation service to help players because getting around the world can be realistically cumbersome? A leveling process where getting to max level is an actual accomplishment and not inevitable if someone keeps doing the quests in WoW that the game holds your hand for? It’s mind boggling to people who have only played WoW or games after it

It’s always been the case that older games have a reputation for being the hardest, unless we’re talking of new ones specifically designed to be hair-pulling hard like Cuphead

[starkind]

There is no 'hard class' in EQ except maybe sorta kinda enchanter??? every class has it's quirks and every class becomes clockwork once understood.

I think the real challenge in EQ is pacing, pulling, understanding mob spawn times, and agro management tools like root, blind. Clerics using buffs to heal and top off in intervals, etc so they save a little bit of mana.... tricks to soloing like pets or strafe-stabbing stuff on a rogue. Or using a bow. Or using a weighted axe on a warrior. Most stuff bluebies won't ever really experience because they just line up in a group and press auto attack and cast a few spells. How to sneak around with IVU and invis pots, paci, etc. Rooting and camping mobs to split... just a thousand little tricks.

... u know saving/building some mana before pulling 3 hags and having two healers... that is strategy, rooting one out of line of site and spacing out the kills so the next time you just pull one at a time and everything is smoother... a lot of people just dont get it. It's meaningless in wow, you just tab target and spam interupts and focus targets.

The risk is much higher in EQ. Which can be thrilling. Sometimes. You can also die on the wall in a big zone like dreadlands and never really have much risk. And still hit 60.

[unsunghero]

The very fact that EQ mobs become increasingly harder as you go up in levels to the point where only certain classes can comfortably solo without twink gear also separates it from WoW

In fact, all the things that WoW changed were specially to be easier than games like EQ. Rested exp, quest hand holding, much easier mobs where every class can easily solo to 60, etc. And then retail WoW made things easier than that, and lo and behold classic WoW became immensely popular because people actually like those little inconveniences

But yea EQ becomes easy for the same reason any game becomes easy after 20 years: people completely figure it out. The only way to keep a game truly challenging would be to have some sort of new artificial challenge each time, like a randomizer which randomizes dungeons and mobs, or like an artificial dungeon challenge like “buffs don’t work in this dungeon now”, “CC doesn’t work now”. Stuff like that

[Whale biologist]

Originally Posted by unsunghero [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

But yea EQ becomes easy for the same reason any game becomes easy after 20 years: people completely figure it out. The only way to keep a game truly challenging would be to have some sort of new artificial challenge each time, like a randomizer which randomizes dungeons and mobs, or like an artificial dungeon challenge like “buffs don’t work in this dungeon now”, “CC doesn’t work now”. Stuff like that

Spellburst when? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Jibartik]

I know a guy who became a millionaire selling a wow add on isnt that crazy? effn wow man.

[BlackBellamy]

Classic EQ occupies a very special place in evolution of gaming.

Before EQ people mostly played games to challenge themselves.

The overwhelming majority of the games were binary. You either won or lost. So you played to win, and the satisfaction you got was not only from winning but from overcoming the obstacle, whether by skill or by persistence with a bit of luck. These games tended to be brutal. There was no 2nd place, you had 1 winner and everyone else was a bankrupt loser.

After EQ the games shifted to a progress-based model. Now it doesn't matter who wins, there's no winning anyway, it's about progressing, and the game determines whether that's badges or titles or levels or grossly-oversized shoulder pads. Now people are just ticking off boxes. They get more buttons to press, more items to equip, more achievements, cosmetics. Cosmetics! Now that's Progress! Capital pee.

Name me one game released last 10 years that doesn't have some sort of progression system. Every single Steam, Origin and Epic game has them to start. All the mobile ones too; you bake cookies and now you have a high score but also progressed to level 76 baker why? Why not just make cookies for a high score? Oh you want the pink hat...I mean you don't but now you have 250 'cookiecoin' and a pulsating icon to the Cookie Store.

EQ sits right at that intersection. People talk about progress, and there is that. You get your levels and you get your stuff etc. But it's all super hard and everything takes forever, including the reward interval. That's because the original EQ devs were about challenging players. Think about all the hard, detailed quests with mediocre rewards. Not much effort spent there; reward was not a priority.

If you look at EQ dev videos and interviews you can see the mindset behind the product was this: "this is our idea of a fantasy world, come play in it" and for years it was true, we were in their world. It was apparent they were all surprised at how popular their product was. And it didn't matter how hard it was: It was the Only Game In Town.

But that changed. The games that followed EQ had a much different philosophy. In essence it was "let's build a casino". You take the bus, you get off the bus, you hit a bunch of buttons while loud sounds and flashing lights blast in your face, you get back on the bus and you camp out at the senior characters home.

Casinos make a lot of money.

Which is great because developers and project managers expect a of money because players expect outstanding graphics, deep lore, complex character development, fancy skill trees and a lot of other doo-dads. Paid-off streamers also expect money. But most of all investors expect profits. Because EQ showed them that you can have a couple of hundred thousand people paying as much for the product as their internet connection so hey let's make that a couple of million or whatever.

So when you say WoW is designed about the gear grind, or however you want to characterize it, you might be correct. But also the ultimate design decision is based upon monetization. You can be sure that no change to the game is made without approval from Retention. You can also be sure they are running a/b testing to subtly manipulate the reward interval for various sets of their player base in order to optimize retention rate by monitoring their subsequent activity rate. Modern games are exercises in consumer psychological manipulation.

Hope remains for a small studio of idealistic nerds out there somewhere.

Help me Obi Nerd Mmogy, you're my only hope...

[branamil]

they essentially turned wow into candycrush, where you just push the glowing thing 50 times and loot and sparkles spray out.

Each expansion has its own special little currency (or actually more like 12 of them) and you can only earn so many each week. So it's like your super epic sword costs 600 mystical grabarodian points, but you can only earn 15 mystical grabadorian points each week by right clicking a mind numbing repeatable quest.