You laugh, you lose

[Valerie]

WoW requires little serious time investment for achievement, everything is spelled out for you, and the entire game is geared towards pvp as opposed to raiding, which leads not only to ridiculous never ending pandering to one class after the other for dmg/mitigation balancing, it neutralizes serious raiding encounters designed to take advantage of basic archetypal principles in favor of zerg tactics and everyone just spamming damage and self/area heals.

When the game design is built around pvp, pve cannot help but suffer, and it does in WoW.

You've got the pvp thing backwards. The game was designed around pve with pvp as an afterthought.

Have you ever done any endgame raiding in WoW? There are very few fights where you "zerg" or spam anything. If it was as simple as that, it wouldn't have taken the best guild in the world a month to even get to the final encounter, let alone a month to even successfully complete it.

I'm not arguing that this game is harder than others that came before it, I know it isn't. There are many things casual players can accomplish, but when it comes to getting the best gear and clearing the highest tier of encounters, you still need serious time investment and dedication; the "lowest common denominator" will never get to that level.

 

[waif]

WoW requires little serious time investment for achievement.

Let's look at that statement a little. What you're saying is that it doesn't take thousands of hours of your life just to get anywhere? That's fucking horrible.

 

[Cythraul]

 

[Mort Divine]

WoW IS casual friendly and in some ways the game does get balanced around the arena (though I've seen FAR less of this happening since WotLK), but it definitely takes time and dedication to see the end game content.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

Some website LOL's:

Handshakes
Protest Signs
Goths

 

[Dak]

You've got the pvp thing backwards. The game was designed around pve with pvp as an afterthought.

Have you ever done any endgame raiding in WoW? There are very few fights where you "zerg" or spam anything. If it was as simple as that, it wouldn't have taken the best guild in the world a month to even get to the final encounter, let alone a month to even successfully complete it.

I'm not arguing that this game is harder than others that came before it, I know it isn't. There are many things casual players can accomplish, but when it comes to getting the best gear and clearing the highest tier of encounters, you still need serious time investment and dedication; the "lowest common denominator" will never get to that level.

Maybe the game has changed (I am sure it has), as I played several years ago, and quickly shot through the levels, did some raiding and found it all too easy.

A month to clear an expansion to the final encounter and a month to beat it is too easy.

@WAIF: Sorry, when it comes to MMORPGs, I am a masochistic purist

 

[SweptbackFlame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4DHllroiqM

 

[DarkBliss]

A good one. Those spoofed Banned Book reviews are great as well.

 

[Episteme]

Maybe the game has changed (I am sure it has), as I played several years ago, and quickly shot through the levels, did some raiding and found it all too easy.

A month to clear an expansion to the final encounter and a month to beat it is too easy.

@WAIF: Sorry, when it comes to MMORPGs, I am a masochistic purist

The game has been made to cater to more casual players. I spent so much of my time during vanilla WoW and BC to get to the final tiers of the raiding spectrum. It required a fuckload of work, and I didn't even do arena. The last time the game made encounters entirely zerg based in a raiding instance was Molten Core, you didn't need half a brain to play that instance. It's true enough though, once you achieve top raiding gear you can possibly go into a lower instance and zerg the whole place in less than 2 hours.

I miss those encounters in pre BC such as UBRS where you had to get a decent hunter (I was mainly playing as one) to kite mobs. Gave me something to do other than fire arrows over and over again.

 

[waif]

@WAIF: Sorry, when it comes to MMORPGs, I am a masochistic purist

But you can understand that others might want to actually have fun, right?

Don't try to take our casual-gaming liberty away from us, you masochistic communist nazi tyrant.

 

[Chimaera]

I lolled at these ones.

 

[Valerie]

Maybe the game has changed (I am sure it has), as I played several years ago, and quickly shot through the levels, did some raiding and found it all too easy.

A month to clear an expansion to the final encounter and a month to beat it is too easy.

@WAIF: Sorry, when it comes to MMORPGs, I am a masochistic purist

I didn't say a month to clear an expansion. This expansion has been out for over a year already. I meant a month to get through all the bosses of the highest raid and difficulty to get to the last boss. And this was the best guild in the world. No one else has defeated it yet. Read the last part of my previous post, you seem to have conveniently skipped over it.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

The game has been made to cater to more casual players. I spent so much of my time during vanilla WoW and BC to get to the final tiers of the raiding spectrum. It required a fuckload of work, and I didn't even do arena. The last time the game made encounters entirely zerg based in a raiding instance was Molten Core, you didn't need half a brain to play that instance. It's true enough though, once you achieve top raiding gear you can possibly go into a lower instance and zerg the whole place in less than 2 hours.

I miss those encounters in pre BC such as UBRS where you had to get a decent hunter (I was mainly playing as one) to kite mobs. Gave me something to do other than fire arrows over and over again.

Yeah, one of my biggest complaint when playing and leveling up other characters is how easy it is to get geared for raids once you hit the level cap. I've only been playing since WOTLK came out, so I can't say how this was done in BC and Vanilla. I understand it's all to make it so every person gets to experience the Lich King and the final encounters and bosses, which I am all for, but what about those of us who bust our balls getting geared in raids? Eh, I just really like the satisfaction of fucking up new bosses.

 

[audiophileguy]

 

[Dak]

I didn't say a month to clear an expansion. This expansion has been out for over a year already. I meant a month to get through all the bosses of the highest raid and difficulty to get to the last boss. And this was the best guild in the world. No one else has defeated it yet. Read the last part of my previous post, you seem to have conveniently skipped over it.

I knew plenty of lowest common denominators who were quite regularly raiding top content in BC, just because they had RL friends who were good players to piggyback on.

All in all, the game was made to make Blizzard lots of money, and you can't do that by making it difficult. It has to attract people with ADD and those attracted to shiny moving objects. It has been very successful.

The thing I most quickly became disgusted with in WoW was the near pointlessness of grouping. People would just drop out, and 3/4 of the time players had no clue how to even play in a group role.

 

[Valerie]

I knew plenty of lowest common denominators who were quite regularly raiding top content in BC, just because they had RL friends who were good players to piggyback on.

Couldn't that happen in any MMO?

The game has gotten a lot easier since it was first released. I think the main reason for it was because during the original game, extremely few people ever got to the last raid in the game, because it was time-consuming to get there, it was very difficult stuff to get through, but also because not long after it came out, the first expansion was released, so there wasn't enough time to complete it.

With this expansion, there are different selectable difficulty levels for most raids, which means the casual people will get to see the content, but the rewards from it won't be that great. That means Blizzard can make the normal difficulty moderately challenging so most people can get through it. It also means that the hardest (heroic as it's called) difficulty is actually... difficult. People aren't getting carried through that, not yet anyway.

 

[Valerie]

 

[waif]

awesome.

 

[Valerie]

Death metal version made by yours truly:

 

[waif]

Just saw this. Funniest thing in this thread.