MMO Developers, please stop remaking World of Warcraft...

[warmonkey]

I disagree; go into it expecting EXACTLY the "EVE = EXCEL" crap you've heard.
I wish I had.
I went into it thinking there was an option or skill I could eventually get so I could actually pilot my ship, as in with a joystick... there's not, so I quit, because that's what I was looking for and hoping for and I don't settle for less than what I want with MMOs anymore. too damn expensive.

 

[Nouw]

Okay, to keep myself from getting a probation I shall calm my self down.

So what if it looks a bit like WoW? Thats like calling any RTS that follows the similar GUI of games like Starcraft and Dawn Of War a rip off! They're not trying to make a WoW-Killer. They're just trying to make a decent MMO. Since when was that such a crime?

There is also type 3: Those who likes MMOs but don't like WoW. How is that possible? Because WoW isn't perfect

 

[TerranReaper]

*Snip*

Sorry for any double post here, but PLEASE check out EVE Online.

Do yourself a favor, don't be swayed by the masses of "AHHH EVE = EXCEL AHHHHHHHHHHHHH BAD"

Check it out. It is exactly what you are looking for.

One thing I never liked about EVE Online was the fact you can never catch with people that have been playing longer. I always like games that favour skill over stats, but then again, I probably shouldn't play MMOs....

 

[Deef]

APB will probbaly beat it.

Have you played APB? Theres not a chance in hell it will beat WoW. It's too repetitive, not enough actual gameplay to keep players coming back, and the gameplay that is there is unbalanced and generally frustrating.

 

[Carlston]

Oddly DDO took a fresh step right from the book of MUDS. To keep the game moving.
Reincarnation.

You hit 20th, you reincarnate... your level 1 with bonus stats and your old gear stored. Were you a caster? You get past life feats. Fighter? Str bonus clickie.

Wanna be hard core repeat till you made one guy all 8 classes get even more base power points.

Each time you get ass ton less exp for dungeons...and it is funny to whip out a level 12 lit2 bow most people don't have till 18 or so mad and ready to kick the hell out of the easier quests.


The point is to keep people playing. And keep them there. WOW if you hit 70 restarted with slightly better stats, promise to get your old gear back out of storage and a special past life fear...the nerd grind would be amazing. Nothing like a 5 past life level 30 kicking your level 60 rump...and you thought you were ganking a nobody...

 

[Coldie]

MMOs need to do one thing for certain; stop raising the level cap. You effectively destroy all of the previous endgame content you had by doing this.

I don't see how you can make such a game playable in a long term. Once you hit the level cap (and any alternate level-like caps, like professions), the only way to progress further is to get new better gear. That's great. But eventually you get the best of the best and the developer releases a content patch with gear that's twice as shiny - and, naturally, requires the previous top gear to acquire. Skip a few years ahead and you've got your tier 100 Supernova gear and are farming tier 101 dungeons for that fancy new Hypernova stuff.

What can a new player do to catch up? Nothing. Nobody is running tier 1, 10, or 42 dungeons. In PvP he gets utterly annihilated if someone so much as sneezes. You could ask your high-leveltier friend to run you through some to get a bit of gear, but still, all the old content is dead. The developer might even out the curve somewhat, but that will accomplish the same thing - content that is abandoned as either pointless or redundant.

That's where the level cap increase comes in. It's a reset. If you had top gear, you'll get to the new cap faster, but in the end everyone is in the same boat and has the same power. If the developer can count on all players being thiiiis tough at a certain point, they can better tune the new content and they can be sure that more than a handful of top-tier players will see it.

And that is today's word: Tabula Rasa.

 

[Bat Vader]

I think Star Wars: The Old Republic will do a good job of competing with World of Warcraft. From what I have seen at E3 the game-play looks pretty nice and the way story will evolve seems quite new for an MMO.

If anyone can program a good story driven MMO than I am pretty sure it is Bioware.

 

[RadicalDreamer90]

I don't know why people point a finger towards a single MMO dethroning WOW when it's never truly one, its dozens. One person who commented stated that WOW was a jack of all trades, master of none, so in order to truly beat that, you'd need several MMO's that cater to players needs on a level higher then WOW in their respected area. I couldn't play WOW even though I admired parts of the game, just on personal GP.

The game is in no sense casual so If your not into it, your missing out, and the fact that the level cap is so low takes away the achievement and mystery of ascending to the highest pinnacle of the game. There's no accomplishment with it, some guy prob hit max level within a day. Style wise I don't find most of the art appealing, and the interface isn't too friendly coming in to browse either, but those are personal things that turn me off from the game itself.

Other then the fact that Blizzard is trying to be James Cameron with Avatar, WOW could lose alot of fans to it's spiritual sequel in the near future, and people will get sick of seeing the same stuff. The next generation of gaming is right around the corner, and WOW is starting to look dated. Take into account that games like AION, and several other fan favorites are sweeping in with a vengeance I don't see WOW being on top too much longer. It's how people were about Halo 3 when it came out, stealing all of those world records like an ass pirate. Give it another generation and WOW gone and forgotten.

 

[Korten12]

My thoughts on MMOs are as follows;


- MORE INFLUENCE ON THE GAME WORLD. This really, really bugs me. I hate killing the same bosses time and time again only for them to rise up the next week. If you want to use a reset function, why aren't there villages being attacked by orcs that take a week to rebuild if you don't defend it successfully, or even take it over and loot the villagers yourself? Maybe they move to a location the next week, or hire some tougher guards(meaning more loot inside!)

There needs to be a more dynamic world outside of the raid instances. What happened to random encounters? Does every dragon that attacks the land need to have a 20 page backstory? Did player housing suddenly become too difficult to control? I think an MMO that finally manages to make the players feel like they're having a large impact on the world will be a huge success. WoW's phasing doesn't cut it for me, neither did Warhammer's Sieges/Keeps.

MMO developers could save themselves work if they just put the fun in the player's hands. Their content can be amazing, but the best stories are the ones people make for themselves.

I think you will like Guild Wars 2 when it releases as you do have an effect on the world. they even talked about the same issues with bosses, when you kill them they just respawn later and nothing happens. Guild Wars 2 plans on having a dynamic world. you should read up on it on Guildwars2.com

an example of the dynamic system if you failed to stopped an army from attacking a zone, then that army will now occupy that zone until kicked out. you fail a quest, it has repracusions (sp) on you.

 

[warmonkey]

Take into account that games like AION, and several other fan favorites are sweeping in with a vengeance I don't see WOW being on top too much longer. It's how people were about Halo 3 when it came out, stealing all of those world records like an ass pirate. Give it another generation and WOW gone and forgotten.

Yanno, that makes me think.
There have been a few games that've come out recently, MMOs, "WoW-killers". Of course none of them were, and not just that but they all turned into flops.. Age of Conan, Warhammer, I'm looking at *you*.

But.. they had HUGE launches. There's a massive market of dissatisfied WoW players out there willing to go with something *different*. Warhammer failed because it turned out to be to much like WoW. That's what everyone who played, and quit, and told me about it has said, and that's why I quit. AoC had its own reasons, many and varied, but that was a truly huge launch and there for a good week looked like it might've been a success.
But all anyone wants to do is emulate WoW, even in the face of huge numbers of people who have put money on the line to support a NON-WoW mmo and who then fled not back to wow but away from a game that was butchered back to one that, while they don't like it, at least is well-built.

so mmo makers? WRITE THAT DOWN. Don't make your game like WoW. JUST MAKE IT GOOD.

 

[HyenaThePirate]

The thing I lament is that really the 'wonder and awe' of an immersive game world has been lost to MMO's.
Everything has been pushed into tidy little "zones" that are essentially little valleys with multiple-skinned versions of already existing creatures. Worse, there is little incentive to stray too far off the beaten path on your own... sooner or later a quest-giver in town is going to send you to every single point of interest in the area.

Where is the feel of being part of a wide expansive world? Where is the thrill of exploration, of finding places or vistas that some have never seen and being encouraged to do so. Where is the fun of coming across a cave and upon entering deep into it you encounter some creature that you can battle without a full raiding party with you based on your own skills not the "level difference" and your reward is a chest with a weapon most people in the game didn't know existed?

I think MMO developers need to take a good long hard look back at Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. Those game worlds were more than just an endless chain of mob-killing areas loosely tied together by a myriad of fetch quests. They were living, breathing questing worlds where you could wander (and WONDER!) for hours and days.

LOTRO ALMOST hit upon reviving this feeling of amazement and wonder. But then they fell back on the WoW formula of simple, fetch-quest friendly zones that funneled you unerringly towards the endgame content with few side-stops to appreciate the actual ROLE PLAYING part of the MMORPG.

 

[Nemu]

The only thing tht will beat WoW is WoW itself.

I've played for 5+ years and even when I took "breaks", and focused on other games, I always went back to WoW due to its ease of getting back into the swing of things. As long as it remains a consistent gaming experience, folks will continue to cycle in to play it. Blizzard has made it too easy a game to suck 9:10 players in and keep a majority in to pay for at least a month.


So, despite the fact that I'm chomping at the bit for ToR, I doubt it will dethrone WoW. It looks sexy as hell, tho.

 

[ShadowsofHope]

Well, I quit WoW a long time ago, and the only game I could see dethroning it is The Old Republic, because of how nerdgasmic it is going to be.

Well, that and The Old Republic will most likely take over the online gaming world at some point, and then promote Bioware to Master of the Universe.

..But that's just all wishful speculation, of course.
[sub]Wait for it![/sub]

 

[chiefohara]

I've played wow for 2 years now.

Tried Guild wars went back to wow,
Really tried Star Trek: Online.. went back to wow

The thing that brought me back to wow was investment. I have a lot of time spent on one character (my highest alt is lvl 20) and as a result of that i can't/won't start another MMO because firstly i don't have the time, and secondly i don't have the patience to start something that big all over again.

When my account was hacked and everything stolen. i came within a hair's breath of quiting, because with the loss of all that investment the game simply wasn't appealing to me anymore. The strange thing was i was gutted, but filled with a small sense of relief in that i could just drop this game now. Un/Fortunately Blizz were able to fix everything within an hour so i went back to it.

I won't play any other MMO because im not going to do what i did with my main character again nomatterwhat, but also since Blizzard and wow has turned into this mammoth TiTan of a thing, i know the customer support will be excellent, the fan base although varied will always exist, and new content will always come out to make the game fresh.

The Gear reset thing i don't actually mind. I was a middling lvl 80 till ICC came along with its frost badges, i just collected them and now im a high ranking lvl 80. It made an awful lot of the game available to normal players and forced a lot of previously high geared players to drop the 'holier than thou' and bad attitude act because everyone needed each other again to explore and play the new content.

I know cataclysm is going to undo a lot of the time i spent in ICC and other instances but it won't undo the rep, the achievments and change the fact that i had a good laugh with the guild in these areas.

As for PVP, not my thing, but wow is big enough to ensure there is always something to do, bit it instance raiding, questing, mundane fishing grinding, or Arena's and such. No other emerging MMO will start off with all this available or polished...

As for the Star Wars MMO... i hope for the sake of all the Star Wars fans that its a success. I had very high hopes for Star Trek online, and to be fair i enjoyed some of it, but i just couldn't play two MMO's, i don't have the time, patience or energy and Wow won out because it was at that moment better and mainly because i already have so much time invested on one character in it.

 

[SwitchUK]

Sorry to hijack your thread but I was put on probation because I told a mac user to buy a PC and this thread has the single most trolling flame ridden title I have ever seen. Report much anybody?

 

[LethalBargi]

I quit WoW, because to play PvE you had to get into a good guild and this guild had to like you and then they had to want to gear you up and then decided if you should go or not, i really dont give a crap for PvP in WoW because i have games like L4D and TF2 for PvP besides others, the whole idea that i was at the mercy of other people to get to experience the full content of the game really screwed me over, i played for 2 and a half years never got to see BT never got to see most major bosses because i wasnt the right class and wasnt goody goody with the officers even after all the help i helped so Screw you WoW, cant wait till Old republic comes out...

 

[Jinjiro]

Sorry to hijack your thread but I was put on probation because I told a mac user to buy a PC and this thread has the single most trolling flame ridden title I have ever seen. Report much anybody?

No.

*snip*

I think you will like Guild Wars 2 when it releases as you do have an effect on the world. they even talked about the same issues with bosses, when you kill them they just respawn later and nothing happens. Guild Wars 2 plans on having a dynamic world. you should read up on it on Guildwars2.com

an example of the dynamic system if you failed to stopped an army from attacking a zone, then that army will now occupy that zone until kicked out. you fail a quest, it has repracusions (sp) on you.

Guild Wars 2 sounds interesting, at least some of the things they plan to do. It'd be a nice change to see a game world that was more than just a rigid structure with quests that repeat themselves. Now what they need to do is step away from the inherently good/evil races and let players build houses and form factions with real power in the world.

(Also, Guild Wars had a tad too many instanced parts of the world for me, which rather borked the immersion side of things. Let's hope they stray away from that a little.)

 

[warmonkey]

Sorry to hijack your thread but I was put on probation because I told a mac user to buy a PC and this thread has the single most trolling flame ridden title I have ever seen. Report much anybody?

Sorry to continue the hijack but at least personally I never, ever report anyone for flaming and rarely for trolling, unless the trolling becomes a shitflood that impairs a forum's normal functioning. Because it's the internet, and you'll never be able to shelter yourself from flaming trolls. The only way to survive is to develop an immunity.

Anyway, re: GW2
I've heard a little about it, and it sounds nice.. I've not kept up with GW1, though. The beta was amazing, less so at release. The forced PvE turned me off. I just wanted the MOBA game that was really all that existed in beta.. game went live and a few of my skills required me to steal them from bosses, bosses I couldn't even get near solo, while the rest of my pals were content with what they had or could buy. Acquiring skills through PvP came later.. too late for me to still give a crap.
'course, I am a crankypants when it comes to my games. I don't want PvE! The only PvE should exist only as a glorified trainer to give you an idea what skills will do what and in what ways they can interact, so you can understand what's going on. After that, all I want to do is fight other people. Any gameplay that doesn't end with me or my opponent getting teabagged is gameplay that flat out does not interest me.. and if at any point in the game it becomes necessary to group up with people to kill some NPC to get a random chance at loot just so I can remain competitive I will not play it. A promise I made to myself, because when that happens even if infrequently at first it always winds up escalating to the point where every bit of my time in the game is spent trying to reach that top-tier "level playing ground" so I can enjoy fighting people again, and I'm left with no time to fight people, and inevitably I give up for a while and then don't even have the option of fighting on a level playing field against other people. nevermind the sense of obligation to play to help others reach that level playing field. That's not fun for me. Even if the game itself is fun, jumping through hoops to get to what I actually enjoy is not something I ever will do again -- money where my mouth is and all, I'm just not going to support MMOs with gameplay I do not enjoy. A few of my guild mates have said the same.. but then, a few of them reneged and are back playing WoW. Heh. Oh well.

Here's to hoping GW2 delivers the game *I* want. I really couldn't give a rip if anyone else likes it or not. Cater to ME. I'M special!