Thursday, April 14, 2011

The World feels Dead

Please have a look at "The World feels Dead".

It is a highly rated post on the WoW-EU forum by the hunter Dergas. The title says it all. You can read comment after comment on this. It is remarkable how many intelligent people share his view. And these are just the players who can still post at this forum - that is, they still play WoW!

I ask you to rate this post and add your comment over there, if you still have an active account. Most of us don't at this time.

Of course, you won't see a developer response. They are too busy thinking about how to bribe players to behave the way they should. The most recent iteration: If you walk around the world for 1 hour every day for 1 week you get a pet. /irony

Edit: A video was posted among the comments. Do you remember players just doing stuff for fun in that awesome engine that WoW was at that time? This should have been built upon.

Also check out Raging Monkeys, We fly Spitfires and Player versus Developer, MMOMeltingPot, Dead Good Tanking or a lot of other bloggers I probably forgot.

10 comments:

  1. WoW still has kick ass engine .Every time I check some interesting wow emu project it kills me how much potential it has

    Unfortunately have to give up that idea cause of precedents with blizzard shutting down successful server (and successful server = lots of work and money spent in advertising)

    Also this thread is only like 15 pages long .Class rants are way longer than that. WoW still has 13 mill subs and zynga is most profitable game company.

    Masses like purples and achievements - businesses will provide

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  2. I applaud this WoW player's enthusiasm and fervor, he's obviously still hoping. too bad he won't be noticed.

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  3. It's not so much a failure to notice as a failure to care. Why should Blizzard care if a few old players leave? They keep bringing in new ones. At this point they barely even need to bother to make a good game; WoW is the game that everyone plays, so if someone is going to start playing a MMO, they'd have to go out of their way to not play WoW.

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  4. Have a look at this. Another WoW-EU post that is highly rated. (Both are recommended by the system to forum visitors, due to very high rating.).

    Also remember that few people post in WoW-EU forums considering that they are in English, just like the US version where developers actually respond.

    Also read the comments. They are even more interesting than the posts.

    I don't buy this pessimism all over the bloggosphere right now. Where there is demand there will be supply in a market economy.

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  5. Oh- missed another one.

    All available as highest rated posts here.

    Please don't mistake this for WoW-bashing. I don't wish Blizard any harm. But WoW has paralyzed this business for too long by now. If WoW has to die so that innovative MMORPGs find good financing again, then so be it.

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  6. "Walking out of Stormwind will now award players with a goodie bag with a small chance of a random epic mount.

    We may have designed away any point to our world but we can still bribe people to enter it!"

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  7. It hurts my head that some people seem to feel entitled to be entertained by WoW without putting in any effort past pushing a few buttons.

    I call these people DPS.

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  8. Coreus, please restrain from cheap propaganda on my blog.

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  9. In the past, being part of a virtual MMO world was about immersion and adventure: it was about exploration, combat and challenges. Now, it's about progression, measured with single numbers: average item level, achievement points, dps, arena rating, number of mounts etc.

    People visited dungeons to experience adventure: to explore them, to combat monsters and overcome challenges. Now, they visit dungeons to get reputation, loot and badges/emblems/points.

    We substituted immersion with numbers. No wonder some modern MMO worlds feel dead.

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  10. Leskopet, I agree with that. The main evil that is behind most of the smaller ones is the one-dimensional metric of achievement: itmlvl in WoW.

    Equipment should play a role in MMORPGs. But it shouldn't dominate everything else. If you change guilds simply to get better equipment, something's wrong.

    Moreover, it is hard to make an interesting decision, if there's only one measure of success.

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