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Q u o t e:
I just want to reiterate something. I have never said that the ubiquitousness of epics was necessarily a bad game design philosophy in general. I think it's a pretty smart one. What I have maintained is that this was not Blizzard's philosophy when it created this game, and I feel Blizzard has lost sight of that. Blizz has another MMO in the pipeline ready to pop out in another couple years. That would be a perfect to implement new innovative ideas and game designs. This game, however, was based on the concept of a community... a world of warcraft... not a business of Epiccraft.

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You are basing it off of your own experience. If you look at mechanics, it has always been about :

a) leveling
b) getting loot
c) upgrading your character

That is what all RPGs are about. All of them, from the dawn of the PnP D&D games back in the early 1970's.

Now, there requires a social aspect of the game to be there, and there is still one in WoW. My guild on my horde toons is a very tight nit bunch that are very casual about who is in the guild, as long as you have a sense of humor and fun.

But the game itself was never about developing social skills or having a party. In fact, first VanCleef run I ever made someone said "Ill pay 4g if this cloak drops", and this was back in april of '05. Unless, April of '05 was past this 'age of innocence' you are talking about.

Basically, OP youre QQing about playing a game with a huge bunch of lazy spoiled brats, but youre then turning around and saying you want the game to be more dependant on teamwork. ARE YOU SURE?

I sometimes wonder how different the game would be today if ...

~The level cap was still 60.
~Old Honor system was still in-place (along with Arena).

Old content (now) wouldn't be deserted. People would still be running MC, BWL, Kara, SSC, etc ... because the gear actually has use, there would be REAL progression. Sure, there would be a HUGE gear gap but that's what MMOs should be about ... progression.

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Q u o t e:
I am not entirely sure where to start on this, so I'll go with what came to mind.

We changed some of the base design of the game to cut down on the idea of content (and the items come with it) being only for a certain group of the playerbase. We have tried to open up content and give more people more things to do.

I don't have any numbers to share, but we are seeing more people in the raid instances than in the past, so people are running things and picking up as many epics as possible. A lot of players are skipping normal dungeons because it's faster to do so, but they have done it on other characters already so they know the fights and just want to get geared up asap. Sure, we could limit the number of epics to certain content and whatnot, but we don't feel that would be a real benefit to the game.

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Everyone gets a piece of the pie? How dare you be so fair?

other player's gear has no impact on you.

except in pvp. and without easy to obtain quality gear, pvp shuts down.

the argument that more people would raid if other progressions were closed down to them has not IMO proved correct.

the majority of people just shut down and find other things to do.

if some one on a different server gets epicc'd out thru pvp, it has no impact on your raid.

there is a significant portion of the player base they doesn't or can't schedule their playtime to 10-24 other's.

blizzard has offered them a playstyle, altho' grudgingly.

But then youve more or less returned to max level twinking in PvP. I dunno, spreading epics out amoungst the Raiders, who dont directly compete with each other, yet restricting them to the Arena/BG guys seems upside down to me.

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Q u o t e:
What I have maintained is that this was not Blizzard's philosophy when it created this game, and I feel Blizzard has lost sight of that.

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Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The game was the most heavily itemized MMO in history as of opening day.

Nothing has changed at all in that respect, except that we're now seeking L80 purples instead of L40 blues.

Regular dungeons are useful to introduce a couple of fight mechanics that are used later on, in an environment where numbers don't matter hardly at all. If you already know this stuff then you shouldn't be forced to go through them when you level up.

Besides which, a dps that tries at level 80 can handily beat 1100 unless you went out of your way to gear your character badly and passed up a lot of good quest rewards (that you would probably pick up by accident, if you're not grinding instances).

The current situation allows for a little effort to save a lot of time and directly rewards attempts to seek out knowledge by not forcing you to take a lot of arbitrary hurdles to get to where people generally see the game as starting at. Should a budding hero not be entitled to the sweat of his brow?

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Q u o t e:


Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The game was the most heavily itemized MMO in history as of opening day.

Nothing has changed at all in that respect, except that we're now seeking L80 purples instead of L40 blues.

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Hi, I'd like to remind you that tier 1 caster gear originally had agility on it. Mages had agility on their tier gear. A lot of specs were only in for "levelling" and some were thrown in with zero purpose, let alone gear itemized for them or any clearly defined role at all. WoW really has changed drastically in terms of what classes and specs can do.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find a link to an old, old version of the tier sets to prove it, but itemization was and to an extent still is pretty whack. It's getting better.

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Q u o t e:
Since the advent of the burning crusade, the curve on which gear has scaled and been made available has gone off the charts. Once upon a time the focus of the typical level 60 was twofold... to group with others in raids to clear Strat, Scholo, (eventually MC, then BWL etc) or to group with others to do PVP. With the proliferation of the epic, arguably beginning with the removal of PVP ranks and the implementation of an honor+token system, the paradigm has subsequently shifted from MMO to MSO (Massively Singleplayer Online Roleplaying Game).

I believe that this fundamental shift in design philosophy on the part of Blizzard has changed the game for the worse. While some might say it's been changed for the better (lots of gameplay options), stalwarts like me decry the loss of, essentially, this game's innocence. To the contrary, I believe that the game has been made more linear. The epic (along with the Individual WoW Trophy Case... I mean Armory) has become the sole motivation for today's WoW playerbase. The problem has been completely exacerbated with Wotlk. Literally, epics are everywhere... but there seems to be no souls to use them. It's like an online pyrrhic victory... yes, you got your epic, but what now? It's hollow.

Players seem to have an epics first mentality anymore; appreciating the social aspect on which this game was founded is merely ancillary to that goal... and in fact a hindrance to many. This is evidenced by the fact that players now desire to completely forgo regular dungeons and dash straight for the heroics to rack up their tokens. Others attempt to slip in Naxx groups rocking 1100 DPS. Still others will claim to want to PVP, but in reality their grind is no different from the heroic or raid junkies.

I know plenty of people will flame me because they think, oh well, another nostalgic poster who can't accept that times change! Others will say, how dare you question Blizzard, creators and stewards of the most popular online MMO of all time! Clearly they know something that you don't! The fact is that I have no problem with times changing but I don't believe that design philosophies should. I also question the motives for why these particular philosophies were forced to change. Sure businesses exist to make money, but even this goal can only be attained with sound philosophy in mind. I believe Blizzard has lost a bit of perspective, and generally lost its way, in this regard.

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I came to WoW from a game more like the one you want. IMO for a game like that to work you need a slightly different playerbase, one that will never be as big. If the bnet kids hadn't flocked to WoW the way they did it'd be a completely different game.

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Q u o t e:
Hi, I'd like to remind you that tier 1 caster gear originally had agility on it. Mages had agility on their tier gear. A lot of specs were only in for "levelling" and some were thrown in with zero purpose, let alone gear itemized for them or any clearly defined role at all. WoW really has changed drastically in terms of what classes and specs can do.

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But we're not talking about what classes and specs can do.

We're talking about player's greed for gear upgrades (see first post in thread) and how Blizzard making upgrades available is ruining the game.

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Q u o t e:


People do this because it works, and is the most effective way of gearing up as a new 80. Basically, blizzard copped a lot of flak because casual players in vanilla and bc had their gear names in blue, and hardcore players had their gear names in purple. So blizzard fixed it by changing casual player gear names to purple, and using a stat that wasn't so obvious to the regular player, ilevel, to differentiate them. Now hardcore players still get better gear, and the casual crowd doesn't know any better

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quoted one more time because it's so very very true.

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Q u o t e:


But we're not talking about what classes and specs can do.

We're talking about player's greed for gear upgrades (see first post in thread) and how Blizzard making upgrades available is ruining the game.

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Well if we're discussing gear upgrades, then we're naturally talking about the stats on said gear which leads to what classes and specs do with said stats. I guess I made a logical jump in my head that probably didn't make much sense, sorry. Anyways, my point was more that the way you progress through this game via gear has changed significantly since the start of this game, and that itemization has frequently made zero sense right from the beginning. There's still progression, but the major difference is that content is more accessible on the ground floor, with progression being defined not by gear or where you toon "physically" stands in an instance but what you do in the instances.

Naturally, gear is going to be rewarded more liberally but the best gear is being restricted to hard modes now. The fact is that more people are raiding because they are more able to raid, with progression being more based on skill than skill and gear (with gear being a requirement for hard modes). I don't see the game being ruined at all, and I still see a clear progression in raiding. Nothing's ruined, there's just more purple text.

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Q u o t e:
Sure today people have fun with the phrase 'molten bore' but it only became 'boring' when it was made obsolete by the bigger and tougher dungeons.

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yeah.... no. It was boring because you could /follow a guy next to you, make a sandwich, take the dog for a walk, come back and eat said sandwich and discover you've killed 5 trash mobs and you had 30 more to go to get to a boss. And you pretty much had to do the same thing every time because you had little to no flexibility in what direction to take in that instance.

Talk about linear.

And by the time you finished doing all that, those 10 missing players finally decided to show up.

Yes... Molten Core. The first thing to make me take an extended break from WoW.

OMG the Jones are catching up!

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Q u o t e:
Since the advent of the burning crusade, the curve on which gear has scaled and been made available has gone off the charts. Once upon a time the focus of the typical level 60 was twofold... to group with others in raids to clear Strat, Scholo, (eventually MC, then BWL etc) or to group with others to do PVP. With the proliferation of the epic, arguably beginning with the removal of PVP ranks and the implementation of an honor+token system, the paradigm has subsequently shifted from MMO to MSO (Massively Singleplayer Online Roleplaying Game).

I believe that this fundamental shift in design philosophy on the part of Blizzard has changed the game for the worse. While some might say it's been changed for the better (lots of gameplay options), stalwarts like me decry the loss of, essentially, this game's innocence. To the contrary, I believe that the game has been made more linear. The epic (along with the Individual WoW Trophy Case... I mean Armory) has become the sole motivation for today's WoW playerbase. The problem has been completely exacerbated with Wotlk. Literally, epics are everywhere... but there seems to be no souls to use them. It's like an online pyrrhic victory... yes, you got your epic, but what now? It's hollow.

Players seem to have an epics first mentality anymore; appreciating the social aspect on which this game was founded is merely ancillary to that goal... and in fact a hindrance to many. This is evidenced by the fact that players now desire to completely forgo regular dungeons and dash straight for the heroics to rack up their tokens. Others attempt to slip in Naxx groups rocking 1100 DPS. Still others will claim to want to PVP, but in reality their grind is no different from the heroic or raid junkies.

I know plenty of people will flame me because they think, oh well, another nostalgic poster who can't accept that times change! Others will say, how dare you question Blizzard, creators and stewards of the most popular online MMO of all time! Clearly they know something that you don't! The fact is that I have no problem with times changing but I don't believe that design philosophies should. I also question the motives for why these particular philosophies were forced to change. Sure businesses exist to make money, but even this goal can only be attained with sound philosophy in mind. I believe Blizzard has lost a bit of perspective, and generally lost its way, in this regard.

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I think its like that now because so many elitist jerks are worried about what gear you have before they even consider you for a raid. It's like theres a "if your gear isn't as good as mine you fail" mentality. With everyone wanting to take part in end game content, but being rejected because they don't have "this peice or that peice" of gear, it pretty much changed the mindset from "ok, I have to level up so I can run, to ok, I need to get as much epic gear as possible so so and so can let me in the raid group". Atleast that's my perception of it.