Questing

It has been a long time since I have posted any thing here but I feel the time has come for me to write this.

I have been playing MMOs for a long time. I started with UO and have played almost every major MMO since then.

Questing in MMOs has a strange history.  UO did not have any questing to mention, it was a sandbox game and you did what you wanted to.

Everquest dispite what the name implies also did not have much questing and the questing that it did have was fairly difficult. You had to actually read the quest text and figure out what you needed to do next. Most of the time you would have your browser open and you would alt tab to get hints. Unless you really wanted the reward you pretty much ignored questing.

There were a few other games that came out that tried to improve on the everquest model but all of them were still pretty much like EQ.

The major breakthrough in questing was made when WoW came out. They decided to stop being so hard and put a big fat yellow exclamation point above the heads of quest givers. They also decided to make questing the primary way of advancement. This pretty much eliminated the old grind of camping and made a new grind of running around and completing quests.

This was the greatest advancement in MMOs made in years. This was the creation of the theme park. You were now led by the hand from quest hub to quest hub. It took all of the imagination out of it. I loved it.

Now years latter every game I play follows the same exact theme, quest hub to quest hub, level to level. There is no imagination in it. I long for a game that lets me grind again, like the old days. I want to sit in one spot for a hours and massacre innocent orcs. This gave me time to chat and get to know my fellow gamer. Now I don’t have time to chat because I am always RUNNING to complete another quest.  I dont have time to explore, I have no reason to go off the beaten path.

I want a game that lets you quest or farm and gives you equal reward for each. I want an incentive to explore and not just some stupid badge, reward, or achievement.

I am not sure that the two types of games can coexist.  I am not sure what I even want. I just know that I am very sick and tired of the WoW way of questing. There has to be something better.

Every sandbox game that has come out since UO has been about PVP. Open world PVP sucks no one likes to be ganked and all of their stuff taken. I want a sandbox game that is primarily a pve game with some very structured PVP built in. Like WAR and UO all mixed up into one great a glorious game.

Back To WoW!

I have returned to World of Warcraft after 2 year of being away. I am doing the 10 day free trial and I will decide if I will continue at that point. What brought me to this decision is the failure of Star Trek Online to keep me entertained for more than a few weeks. At that point I looked at my gaming history and noticed that I had given all the other MMOs multiple tries and it had been a long time since I had played WoW for longer than an hour. So I reactivated my account and started playing an old alt lvl 20 Mage.

After hours of getting addons installed and working properly and getting my keybindings just right I headed out on my level 20 mage and wanted to head to Darnassus because I remember enjoying this zone and I think it is close to my level. I head to the docs in the wetlands hop on the boat and end up in Northend. That was strange, so I headed back and tried the other ship thinking they moved it or something. That also did not take me where I wanted to go. At that point I need to cook dinner and logged off.

I have found out since then that they moved it to Stormwind. I will head there today and continue my adventures.

I am really turned off my character models they are just hideous. I had forgotten how big the world is and how alive it feels next to other MMOs.

Horizontal Progression

Source From the guy that inspired me to blog.

Note that adding raid dungeons and gear progression afterwards to a PvP game doesn’t work, and it was Mythic themselves with the Dark Age of Camelot expansion Trials of Atlantis who proved it doesn’t work. Mark Jacobs has been very explicit in expressing that he wouldn’t do that again. I get the impression that Mythic plans to expand the game horizontally, by adding more classes, and ultimately new race combos. I doubt we will see an expansion raising the level cap. But Mythic’s marketing has been sending out hints that soon the slayer and choppa classes would be added to Warhammer Online. It will be interesting to see how in the long term a game with horizontal expansions fares against the vertical expansion model of World of Warcraft. And personally I think that WoW could use a bit more horizontal expansion instead of just adding new raid dungeons and 10 more levels at the top.

The biggest problem with vertical progression is it makes your current content obsolete and useless. By expanding out you do not kill your high end raids. This makes it so they do not have to recreate a bunch of new raids for the new level cap. They can just change current raids a little to keep them fresh.  I do not know another company that has been able to successfully do this I wish WAR luck.

Breaking News: Arenas disabled [Updated] – WoW Insider

Breaking News: Arenas disabled [Updated] – WoW Insider

Breaking news from the Arenas.

All Arenas in the World of Warcraft have been disabled.

We have no official word as to exactly why they’ve been disabled, how long they will remain disabled, and what will happen to this arena season.

Recently a new arena match making system was implemented, and there was a lot of complaining about it on the forums. Apparently some of the complaints were legitimate, and rating discrepancies have caused arenas to be shut down. This is in addition to the other problems with patch 3.0.8 and the dozens of bugs that have appeared.

This is strange for Blizzard usually their stuff is top notch. This many errors in one patch. Does this mean the developers are being pushed harder? Maybe Blizzard will loose that perfect image.