These words came back to me recently. And they came back to me with regard to WoW. What kind of a game is it that can bring both friendly fun and frustration at the same time? And you keep coming back to it even after having left and slammed the door on the way out. But that is not the point.
Dps. The ruler of the game. It seems that it is never enough. Stats in general often leave people out of the action just because it is very hard to get into a raiding guild. If your stats don't comply with requirements that some people set for others you are pretty much screwed. The thing is that you have to get epic gear and the best way to do that, to my mind, is running heroics. Dressed in blues and thinking of improvements I was eager to run the instances. Unfortunately the organisation in our guild is on the sloppy side. So I have to get into PUGs occasionally. Nonetheless I'll stick with my guild. We are trying to make things better and I just like my guildies. I'd rather hang out with lay-back gamers than go raiding with people who treat the game as a job.
PUGing through heroics isn't a fun experience. And there will be some guy with the Recount add-on (I believe that is what it's called). This mod has some magical effect on people. As soon as they see that the amount of dps is not sufficient in their judgement, the dungeon run (that was going ok) falls apart. It is like the damage meter tells you to wipe. I remember clearing instances with much less dps than average but with two healers. It took longer but there was no recount to break our run.
If you are lucky, you will find a big guild for all types of players and where purple guys find time to run instances with the blues, thus helping them in their quest to the top. But on my server it seems that the badass guilds are getting better and better and raise the requirements for new recruits even higher, while the lower level guilds find it harder and harder to get their teams together and get the guild running. So the gap between the guilds is getting wider. The raiders get the epics and the young guilds get discouraged.
The new dungeons are very straightforward. Dps is the solution to most of the bosses. That makes the dungeons much easier in regard to brain activity. I'd rather have dungeons where one had to have his/her head screwed on right, where you had to figure out some things in order to make the boss weaker or break his protective shield or something. Instead the game revolves around things getting bigger and more powerful. You cannot raise level caps and dps forever.
Why not make dungeons and boss fights more of a controls challenge? Use vehicles, flying machines or whatever fun toys to defeat the boss. The encounters where you would have to aim, dodge or work some vehicle as a team would be so much fun for me. And it would make more sense. I mean what is up with high-end raids like the old Gates of Ahn'Qiraj or any of the new ones? 25 people defeat some overlord, that eats vast armies for breakfast! Warcraft 3 was a dumb game and the armies were just a waste of time. You could just get 25 guys to defeat the Burning Legion.
WoW will probably be there for a long time even if Blizzard still continues to just raise level caps and the stats along with them. But don't the devs have any ambition? They do want to make the game better, don't they? I'm no dev and I probably don't realise a tenth of the difficulties of making and running an MMO, but still, doesn't implementing some aspects of other types of games into one MMO make the experience much more diverse and fun than just collecting achievements, mounts and epic gear (which will be completely useless with the launch of another expansion)?
Dps. The ruler of the game. It seems that it is never enough. Stats in general often leave people out of the action just because it is very hard to get into a raiding guild. If your stats don't comply with requirements that some people set for others you are pretty much screwed. The thing is that you have to get epic gear and the best way to do that, to my mind, is running heroics. Dressed in blues and thinking of improvements I was eager to run the instances. Unfortunately the organisation in our guild is on the sloppy side. So I have to get into PUGs occasionally. Nonetheless I'll stick with my guild. We are trying to make things better and I just like my guildies. I'd rather hang out with lay-back gamers than go raiding with people who treat the game as a job.
PUGing through heroics isn't a fun experience. And there will be some guy with the Recount add-on (I believe that is what it's called). This mod has some magical effect on people. As soon as they see that the amount of dps is not sufficient in their judgement, the dungeon run (that was going ok) falls apart. It is like the damage meter tells you to wipe. I remember clearing instances with much less dps than average but with two healers. It took longer but there was no recount to break our run.
If you are lucky, you will find a big guild for all types of players and where purple guys find time to run instances with the blues, thus helping them in their quest to the top. But on my server it seems that the badass guilds are getting better and better and raise the requirements for new recruits even higher, while the lower level guilds find it harder and harder to get their teams together and get the guild running. So the gap between the guilds is getting wider. The raiders get the epics and the young guilds get discouraged.
The new dungeons are very straightforward. Dps is the solution to most of the bosses. That makes the dungeons much easier in regard to brain activity. I'd rather have dungeons where one had to have his/her head screwed on right, where you had to figure out some things in order to make the boss weaker or break his protective shield or something. Instead the game revolves around things getting bigger and more powerful. You cannot raise level caps and dps forever.
Why not make dungeons and boss fights more of a controls challenge? Use vehicles, flying machines or whatever fun toys to defeat the boss. The encounters where you would have to aim, dodge or work some vehicle as a team would be so much fun for me. And it would make more sense. I mean what is up with high-end raids like the old Gates of Ahn'Qiraj or any of the new ones? 25 people defeat some overlord, that eats vast armies for breakfast! Warcraft 3 was a dumb game and the armies were just a waste of time. You could just get 25 guys to defeat the Burning Legion.
WoW will probably be there for a long time even if Blizzard still continues to just raise level caps and the stats along with them. But don't the devs have any ambition? They do want to make the game better, don't they? I'm no dev and I probably don't realise a tenth of the difficulties of making and running an MMO, but still, doesn't implementing some aspects of other types of games into one MMO make the experience much more diverse and fun than just collecting achievements, mounts and epic gear (which will be completely useless with the launch of another expansion)?
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