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Old 2008-09-29, 16:01   Link #33
TinyRedLeaf
Moving in circles
 
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Singapore
Age: 49
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xellos View Post
For all the complaints about WoW, it's still a fairly dynamic game and the dev team is fairly good about responding to player feedback. But I came from playing FFXI back in the old days too. And I'm back to FFXI as well recently. Not so much for the content but just to play with people that I know.
Actually, if there's any major MMORPG that's about to die soon, it may well be FFXI. Despite S-E's claim of 500,000 players in its latest census, my server's population (Pandemonium) now stands between 1,000 and 1,500, during what used to be its peak hours. At the height of FFXI's popularity, there used to be nearly 4,000 players on the server at almost any given time.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Solace View Post
I'm happy that Blizzard at least *tries* to make the older areas relevant, through Holiday Events, revamps, quests, or forcing players to go back to old cities by not including vital services in expansion cities (auction house, trainers).
If you ask me, S-E does the above a lot better than Blizzard, with its plethora of level-capped quests and missions. And it has just pulled out what is perhaps its most significant update ever in its latest patch earlier this month — Level Sync. Now, bear in mind that FFXI is really Everquest Lite, with the same emphasis on level-based group play. With Level Sync, it is now possible for characters of any level to form a party, without having to worry about level discrepancies any more. This is a huge improvement that makes it possible for the tiny handful of new players to party with the established base of max-level characters, and better yet, do so in all the original newbie areas that the veterans have long since abandoned.

More so than ever before, there is very little excuse for not being able to form a viable party in the game. As long as there are players seeking a group, someone can always cobble together an efficient team, from the entire server's stable of players.

Pity though, this patch probably comes far, far too late for FFXI. The game's dying very visibly, with most of the original high-traffic areas experiencing very depressing desolation. Server mergers are coming soon, I'd wager.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Solace View Post
I will say this about WoW though - it's probably a bit too lenient about player mistakes but I do not miss Everquest's level losses and corpse runs one bit.
Out of curiosity, how else would you punish mistakes other than with XP or level losses (which FFXI retains from Everquest)? As you've observed, WoW's current system is far too lenient, other than for the inconvenience of doing an optional corpse run (which FFXI forgoes entirely).

And I'm not sure about most players, but I absolutely hate the idea of being "resurrected" from death. It is the absolute-worst way to handle what ought to be an irreversible event. From a role-playing perspective, it opens up various cans of worms that are never properly addressed from a lore point-of-view. (For example, why is it that common villains don't get resurrected while players enjoy that privilege?)

But that's just me and my tabletop-D&D background talking, I guess.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Last Sinner View Post
Lore is a big part of maintaining interest in the WoW universe. They have now played their major trump card in Arthas. They may be doing the Lich King expansion as being the last one. Although they have hinted The Emerald Dream and South Seas could still hold interesting possibilities.
And as for lore, this has always been WoW's greatest weakness, in my opinion. Or, more correctly, it would be a weakness, if the majority of its player base even cares about its lore.

Very little of the game's background story (what little I could find) makes coherent sense. That's even before you consider the regular retcons to correct past "mistakes". And it's very obvious that the developers shoe-horned and finessed various finer plot points just to make them fit their desired gameplay design.

No, in my opinion, lore has never been a big part of sustaining player interest in WoW. Only a very small niche of WoW players attempt to roleplay. For the vast majority, it's just another game. A very fast-paced and graphically-attractive game, at that.

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And that is where I'll readily concede WoW's superiority over most other MMORPGs. The game is very easy for casual gamers to pick up. It has been specifically designed to suit busy people with scarce playtime to spare. It is also clearly designed to appeal to players with short attention spans, those who equate constant action and furious button mashing with a highly enjoyable experience.

Most of all, the game is also designed to appeal tremendously with hard-core number crunchers, ie, those players who typically dominate the top rungs of Battle.net. These are the veterans who love parsing every line of data to decipher the best formulae for dishing out damage, holding aggression or managing crowd control, among many other things.

It's very rare for any computer game to achieve a balance between such conflicting demands, and much as I hate to admit it, WoW achieves this balance brilliantly. So, from this assessment, I'd say it's highly unlikely WoW will "die out" anytime soon, not when older rivals with far less stellar achievements are still around, and especially not when its latest expansion is just around the corner.
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