InBlack wrote on Apr 15, 2015, 09:06:
Am I the only one who revels in glorious glee at the failure of all of these World of Warcraft clones??? Because, lets face it, regardless of the setting, backstory etc. all of these 6-months-to-f2p MMOs are just that: World of Warcraft in another skin. Very little innovation in the genre has been made since the days of Ultima Online and Everquest, in fact most MMOs have devolved to become stupidly simple, easy & grindy in a really bad way...
Erm, Wildstar was actually quite difficult in parts. Plenty of more powerful elite mobs mixed in (very few of those "quaff potion X" or "use vehicle/NPC Y" to make elites soloable). I think they spent a bit too much time huffing the fumes of their "hardcore" position, but generally, leveling was fun and fluid, the combat action system was good (unless you had lag or things got so busy that you ended up with 300 telegraphs on top of each other). Dungeons actually required skill again (rather than "heroic" facerolling in WoW). Even crafting felt solid if limited by the stupid advancement system at top tiers. And the storyline/humour/setting was quite refreshing, imo.
I don't think the genre or even the mechanics are the problem these days, it's the player. Most people don't want to invest any time and effort, and we have quite literally thousands of ways to piss away our time for very little cash spent. People laud Diablo 2 over D3 but D2 certainly had huge glaring flaws. But we didn't have enormous amounts of alternatives easily accessible back then, so we played for years grinding the same content over and over again because we couldn't easily jump ship.
The guild I was playing with in Wildstar literally vanished about 2 weeks after a significant portion hit top level. The attunement questline was cited as the major reason most of them left. Getting through that was tricky in spots (the fire salamander guy for example, not sure if you've played) and arbitrary in others (silver rating for dungeons), but pretty doable unless you were a total klutz. There was never a chance of fielding a 40 man raid when most nights, we couldn't even field 2 decent five man groups at that point, so most of us chucked in the towel shortly thereafter.
Reminds me of the fade we had first doing BWL in WoW. Got cockblocked on Razorgore for about 4 weeks, in the end we couldn't even get 20 ppl to show up. We'd abandon BWL attempts and go farm Molten Core and miraculously, 10-15 more people would suddenly log in and want to join up... So we set up a trap, told people on the forums that we were doing MC only, 45 showed up, told em to go to BWL instead and rolled R'gore through to Broodlord in one night. Funny how enthusiasm peaks again once new epic loot starts appearing (although most of the fucks who hadn't been showing up for weeks didn't have the DKP to bid on it /evilgrin).
WoW followed it's customer base, people want easier/faster/more purples. They complain that everything is too easy, but when an alternative which isn't easy presents itself, it's too hard. We're spoiled for choice so we act like brats, never happy.