Before I start building up this Great Text Wall of China, let me come clean about something to the TL community.
My first MMORPG was Runescape.
As embarassing as this is, Runescape was a game that a few buddies introduced me to back when I was 13 and I played avidly (around 2 to 4 hours a day) for almost 2 years until WoW came along. Of course the same happened once I got into WoW. I found myself playing almost 6 hours a day at some points but since then, that has been cut down considerably, partially from me getting really fucking bored of WoW and MMORPGs in general but also because of getting into SC2 somewhat.
Part 1 - Origins in Runescape
I was but a mere 13 year old boy at the time, happily spending my time in senior school when a friend (Who I will name S) talks me into playing Runescape. After a few hours of play, I get a little bit bored and sort of see the appeal but not too much of it.
And then S gets another friend of his called J to start playing. Me and J began to start training up combat together and damn, this game was starting to get fun with more people around. Hell, you could say I was enjoying the game, even though in reality it was (gameplay wise) like a shittier version of Diablo.
And then disaster strikes. Because I made an error when browsing the web, my family PC (which I had at the time) was infected with a crapton of malware. It was also an old, choppy piece of crap anyways but thanks to the adware you literally couldn't move 5 squares without a gigantic minute long lag spike and then two popups appearing, and this was a regular occurence.
Hence, for about 2 weeks, Runescape was unplayable for me. In those two weeks, S and J also told me they've quit the game for good. J only popped back on so that he could give me his full Rune armor (which he passed down to me as a farewell because I finished Dragon Slayer by then) and then put the game down permanently.
I continued to play and found out there were more people who played. I then had two more friends who played Runescape, O and A. The differecne is they were members and I soon became a member after them.
After a while, I quit Runescape Members because I found a new game to play. World of Warcraft. I would sometimes pop back to see what the fuss was all about but every time I go back, I am just overwhelmed and chased off by the constant tedious backtracking to get items that every single quest makes you do, and the massive amounts of experience required to even gain a level. And believe it or not, there are people with 99 in every skill, who must have committed social suicide in order to do so.
Didn't intend that line as a piss-take towards MMO players, but think about the hours required to gain a level in RS. Now try getting all skills from 1 to 99.
Part 2 - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade:
I joined WoW around the time TBC came out. My brother introduced me to it not long before quitting himself. I made myself a Hunter and along with me, O, A and another friend from school, D started to play the game.
O quit soon after at around level 30, when getting bored. A and D were also hunters and D got to level 70 long before I did. Once I got to 70, I joined their guild until the raid leader poached all the raiders and formed his own guild, taking D with him.
I applied when I was already 70, and was simply told that they had too many Hunters. A week later, A joined their ranks. I called sour grapes and began to quiz them. Eventually, I found out that the raid leader hated me and basically refused to let me into his guild, for no reason whatsoever.
Hence, the one thing that I liked about MMOs, playing with friends was out of the picture. My friends had been poached by a hardcore raid leader who basically flipped me off.
Eventually, I tried to find my own way and here is where the direction led me. Where did it lead me you ask? Through a mountain of shitty guilds run by elitist assholes.
I left a guild over an officer's nerdrage at me discussing tactics for a boss they were doing in guild chat despite not being in the raid, acting like he was the boss and I should have just "shut the fuck up."
I even got booted from a guild after 2 weeks with no explanation, having done nothing wrong, had my public message changed to "Whiny emo faggot" by one of the officers several days before and had said guild trash my reputation on the server over a two year period.
Out of all these guilds, I found one that was truly worthy of my time and actually made raiding fun. It was a guild called This Is Sparta and I was a part of their main team, doing DPS almost as good as their Tier 5 geared rogue GM.
Even when undergeared for Kara, we still took out Nightbane in 2 attempts and had two unlucky wipes on Prince at 1%. And then all good things must come to an end as the guild members got poached and we disbanded.
I eventually formed my own guild going into Wrath, but that fell apart.
Part 3 - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
My guild fell apart, and I had joined another one in the process. Eventually, after a good run, I was assigned as an officer and raid leader, but I didn't know what I was getting myself into.
I was running 4 raid nights a week, pushing two groups through to try and get an ultimately good raid team. I was also doing all the work recruitment wise, recruiting players just to have them leave or get poached by a better guild later on.
At the same time, all the other officers and the GM didn't give a shit, they just raided on their geared alts with a high progression guild. So much for caring about their own guild's raid nights.
Hence, I only made it 7/14 through Ulduar-10 and a full clear of Naxx-10, dealing with ragequitters, whiners and DPS who generally were too lazy and stupid to even try (Imagine the DK with Tanking Presence on constantly pulling aggro whilst doing 1.5k DPS. That was my guild.) By then, my real life had caught up with me, I was doing worse than expected in college and I had to quit my role as a raid leader, just to have another guy come in and kick all my friends.
Eventually, I gave up trying to find a new guild as the guild I had been booted from back in TBC had their way, I was blacklisted form virtually every major raiding guild over the lies that have been spread about me, It was time to reroll.
So I went to Emerald Dream, rolled a Paladin and haven't had trouble with crap guilds ever since; Unfortunately, there was still a sense of elitism as I had to be the best to literally get a raid spot.
Some of my achievements on my paladin (I was healing) include:
Clearing Onyxia-10 with the More Dots achievement in a group with 2 healers and gear consisting of almost entirely item level 187 and 200 blues.
Clearing ToC-10 with 2 healers in Naxx equivalent gear.
Clearing Auriaya in Uld-10 (Unfortuantely, the group was too dumb to even handle the tactics for subsequent bosses and ragequit after a wipe.)
Clearing 11/12 ICC-10 (and wiping on the Lich King at 35%), and 3/12 ICC-10 HC.
I eventially quit the game, but came back for Cata. After all, it's a fucking hugely hyped expansion and individuals like TotalBiscuit were lauding the game's changes and new content.
Part 4 - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
At Crapaclysm, I really began to question my enjoyment of the game, and asking the following questions:
Is there really any meaning to completing a tier of content? My progress will just become obsolete with each new tier or expansion.
Is there really any point to going up to the level cap again?
Will i ever be able to clear content like Blackwing Descent, The Firelands. Dragon Soul etc without having to commit time equivalent to a fucking full time job? And this counts for both farming the insane amounts of gear needed just to be accepted by a guild, getting a fucking degree level knowledge of boss tactics in each dungeon and raid and being online for 5 straight hours of hardcore raiding when the raid leader demands me to be on.
Will I ever have the potential to hit 2200 rating, a point where I will actually be ACCEPTED by the PvP community?
Will I ever find an LFG pug where the tank, healer and DPS know what they're doing. Or will I be doomed to wipe, get constantly blame for it and get votekicked by a bunch of morons?
Will I ever enjoy the game again?
Will I ever play a class that doesn't get shafted in terms of PvP potential. TBC and Wrath Hunters were horrible to play and Cataclysm Ret Paladins were horrible too, like a Warrior if you stripped out all the burst damage and utility.
Did I enjoy being forced to do hundreds of repetitive "kill x amount of enemies" quests in order to level up? I mean I like grinding but not being forced to do quests on top of that in order to get an experience rate that wasn't like a drip.
Hence, I have decided that I will probably not be playing in Mists of Pandaria. Blizzard screwed up Cataclysm so much that I don't think their next expansion deserves my time.
I'm hoping the Looking for Raid feature changes some of that, because I am fed up of basically being given a schedule and being expected to adhere to it. It's meant to be a fucking game
Bonus Part 1 - MapleStory
MapleStory always has a place in my heart as a game that's always had potential but met so many setbacks. I started playing GMS back in early 2005 when a friend introduced me to it. I had literally never seen so many vac hackers in my life. And the worst part is that it literally took months for the admins to do anything about them.
Then in 2006, there was an outburst of float/attack anywhere hackers. I saw one big example of a Warrior spamming an area bsaed ability and literally instagibbing everything on the map. They also used to hide off the map with their Float hacks, making you unable to report them.
I came back to GMS in 2009 when the 4th Job, Cygnus Knights, Aran and Evan classes were around. The game had improved but the servers were so buggy.
Then I played the Big Bang update. Oh god, my mind was fucking blown.
The game was literally transformed. Rather than either grind for 10 hours to go from level 30 to 31 in a safe place or go to a place where you'd be instagibbed for more XP per hour, they streamlined the content so much, and literally shortened the levelling time to a fifth of what it was.
MapleStory had actually turned into a passable game. And then I realised the game was buggy under WIndows 7, causing things like system crashes and full on keyboard lockups. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Bonus Part 2 - Final Fantasy XI:
I only briefly played this game. I think it could have been great if the graphics weren't so dull and almost borderline grayscale, if the grind wasn't astronomically big and if the travelling time wasn't so great (It took around 25 minutes to run across South Gustaberg.)
It was also one of the only games where levelling as a group was beneficial, a game which other MMOs like WoW, MapleStory etc haven't quite sussed out yet.
And so I leave it to you, the readers:
If you made it this far without thinking "Oh for fuck's sake" and closing your browser then thanks for reading this gigantic wall of text. I now wish to open the discussion about MMORPGs to the readers.
What do you all think of them?
What new MMORPGs are actually good?
Is my attitude towards MMORPGs not actually being a game and more of an overscheduled timesink accurate?
My roommate is fighting Rag as I write this. I never played top raid content in WoW but I can understand your frustration. I wish I could give you some advice but im not that experienced in time consuming MMO's (just time consuming RTS'), I hope that you find a game that you can enjoy with good friends. for what its worth my roommate seems to be able to run firelands without playing like its a full time job, although he has wiped on rag about 5-6 times now :p
I actually liked Cataclysm a lot, but they just dumbed down PvP (really the only thing I play video games for) way too much. If you want to do the more social raiding aspect, or just the playing by yourself PvE, Cataclysm is AMAZING. If you haven't checked, look at the new stuff they are about to release. I don't even like raiding and it almost made me renew my account.
In answer to your questions: 1. I kind of like MMORPGs, but the problem is they are too much of a time sink. When I sat down to play WoW or LotRO, it would be a good 2 or 3 hours gone and not much would ever get done. However, they tend to be more fun than most other games, mostly because of the alternate reality aspect and because it is just so open ended.
2. My dad plays Rift, and he says its pretty good. Personally, WoW is still the best, but the PvP declined pretty rapidly, while the PvE is at its best ever. From what I've seen, the rest are pretty bad, excluding LotRO, which was decent.
3. If you care about the game, yes. If not, no. You can either sit down, do a BG or two and be done in like 45 minutes, or you can play 6 hours straight doing random shit all you want.
On September 26 2011 10:34 Torte de Lini wrote: Where the fuck is Ragnarok Online?
Seriously, how can you miss that? It's great animations, absolutely gorgeous and memorable soundtrack, funny creatures and decent quests.
A bit of a grind? Yeah, I guess. But the PVP was awesome [WOE], the different classes were a nice twist (dancer, monk, etc.) tier classes.
My God, the card system and classic leveling?
Classic. I'd go back in an instant.
I never played it but I heard about it. I did play a few other MMORPGs I didn't mention like:
PristonTale - This was before WoW actually, but me and my bro stopped playing it when it turned pay to play.
Knight Online - It was okay. There wasn't really much point to it and it was confusing. The ironic thing is that when I was playing, it was supposedly a F2P game but you couldn't get on a server because it was over capacity without subscribing.
Fly For Fun - Felt kinda dull. Level 15 turned from spamming 1 ability to spamming 2 abilities, and level 20 is like HORRAY I CAN FINALLY FLY....and 5 minutes later getting bored because there's no content apart from grinding mobs that did nothing but attack you.
Dofus/Wakfu - The most boring game I had ever played, and yes, I am listing them both as one game because they are basically the same near identical game.
Warhammer Online - I played during the Endless Trial. Jesus Christ that game was near death... There was virtually nobody online
On September 26 2011 10:34 Torte de Lini wrote: Where the fuck is Ragnarok Online?
Seriously, how can you miss that? It's great animations, absolutely gorgeous and memorable soundtrack, funny creatures and decent quests.
A bit of a grind? Yeah, I guess. But the PVP was awesome [WOE], the different classes were a nice twist (dancer, monk, etc.) tier classes.
My God, the card system and classic leveling?
Classic. I'd go back in an instant.
I never played it but I heard about it. I did play a few other MMORPGs I didn't mention like:
PristonTale - This was before WoW actually, but me and my bro stopped playing it when it turned pay to play.
Knight Online - It was okay. There wasn't really much point to it and it was confusing. The ironic thing is that when I was playing, it was supposedly a F2P game but you couldn't get on a server because it was over capacity without subscribing.
Fly For Fun - Felt kinda dull. Level 15 turned from spamming 1 ability to spamming 2 abilities, and level 20 is like HORRAY I CAN FINALLY FLY....and 5 minutes later getting bored because there's no content apart from grinding mobs that did nothing but attack you.
Dofus/Wakfu - The most boring game I had ever played, and yes, I am listing them both as one game because they are basically the same near identical game.
Warhammer Online - I played during the Endless Trial. Jesus Christ that game was near death... There was virtually nobody online
On September 26 2011 10:36 Antimatterz wrote: 2. My dad plays Rift, and he says its pretty good. Personally, WoW is still the best, but the PvP declined pretty rapidly, while the PvE is at its best ever. From what I've seen, the rest are pretty bad, excluding LotRO, which was decent.
Is RIFT any good in terms of PvP content? I heard the PvE was pretty phenomenal and that the game did really well at being a WoW clone rather than trying to innovate.
I was also considering giving Runes of Magic a shot, because I heard it's hands down the best F2P MMORPG ever released.
My first MMO was Tibia, an isometric 2D game. I played it a LOT and I still have a bunch of good memories about it. The game is a bit grindy, as there is no level cap, quite a big death penalty (xp- and item-wise) and there are no instances (at least there were none when I played), so spawns were often fought for, but all those things made the game pretty challenging. PvP was pretty badass as well, unless you wanted real fighting motions (like swinging swords, etc). Unfortunately, all the nice and reasonable people I met there were always quick to quit and I got left with a server full of people who either did not speak English or were too elitist to listen to me. As soon as a server gets old it all devolves into a guild wars, account-sharing, rage-killing, nooby-bashing, power-leveling, twinky hatefest, which is unbearable... game's only fun if you have a premium account and get to play on a fresh new server... until that server gets old again. The fun thing was that up to the point where the elite of the server had established themselves, servers had real history. Fights for dominance. Old players who became legends. Rising stars who made themselves known or fell down again. It was fun. Totally different MMO experience if you ask me. I wouldn't play it today though. Many updates have ruined the game, it isn't cool any more. I also often believe that a lot of what I remember as awesome back then, was because it was my first MMO and my first real online experience.
The next MMO I played was Aion. Nice game as well, even though the crafting system is crap and the quests are either too hard or too easy. PvP is fun, but gets frustrating when you get constantly killed by alts on highest PvP-gear (main reason I quit... gear gave you too much of an advantage over others). If it wasn't for the monthly costs I'd probably get back to playing it though.
Now, something you have to realize and something which is especially valid for MMOs: playing with friends makes a game fun. My cousin got me into Warcraft 3, he also played BW, which was the main reason I got into SC2. Friends of his are playing as well, we got our own TS server where we meet, not just to play but also talk about all kinds of stuff... I probably would have long quit SC2 if it wasn't for them, 1v1 without someone in your ear who's currently laddering as well, is just boring. We all plan together which games are up next and hell, I'd even start playing shooters again (i.e. BF3), because I know they are with me there.
It's because Multiplayer does not just equal multiplayer. Multiplayer with friends is multiplayer. The rest is just singleplayer vs. either scripted events and bots or living dudes who are just bots with better A.I.
Edit: lol forgot about Flyff... asiagrinder. I hated it.
First MMO - Runescape. Old school! Played that for 2-3 years with my bros I think.
Then about 4 years years ago to this day (making me nostalgic now) I started playing Twelve Sky in closed beta. Played that hardcore for the full 2 and 1/2 years it was running. When it shut down due to a game-breaking hack I was so sad. (wrote and deleted a paragraph explaining why it was so good, but sadly I can't sum it up in a way that would do it justice)
Only thing I regret about loving that game so much is the fact no other MMO will ever match up. So I've only really played 2 MMO's, tried most of the others but they just aren't fun. And thus I play games like SC2 now.
ICC with 30 percent buff was the biggest joke in the games history and slap in the face to hardcore raiders, i dont know how anyone couldnt clear that content unless they were in pure greens
First MMO, runescape, lol, member for a while, mainly spent all my time dueling. oh well prob about 2 years total.
Then I played Star Trek Online, I played that for so many hours, maxed like 6 characters, still love that game and might go back to it b/c SC2 is too stressful and SWTOR is too expensive, I pretty much only like RTS or MMOrpg's this sparked my interest in Age of empires online, but its kind of gay so I put that on hold for a while.
On September 26 2011 11:13 FinestHour wrote: ICC with 30 percent buff was the biggest joke in the games history and slap in the face to hardcore raiders, i dont know how anyone couldnt clear that content unless they were in pure greens
Believe it or not, I joined loads of groups that couldn't even handle the first 4 bosses of ICC, let alone with the gradual rise of the raidbuff.
I even had a group wipe constantly on Deathbringer Saurfang with the 30% buff up.... God they were bad....
I would consider looking at Guild Wars as well as the currently-unreleased Guild Wars 2.
ArenaNet did a fine job with Guild Wars 1, which is a rather refreshing twist away from WoW and other more conventional MMOs. Its focus on a heavily instanced environment feels kinda weird and a bit stifling for conventional MMO players, though the game's main storyline is done very well with dedicated mission zones and cutscenes. Plus, the graphics aren't too shabby for a 6 year old game, and the awesome music is composed by Jeremy Soule, who has composed for Elder Scrolls, KOTOR, and Company of Heroes.
Personally, I am most excited about Guild Wars 2, which seems to be an audaciously innovative MMO. It takes the vast majority of conventional MMO rules and throws them out the window, instead opting for some rather clever and intuitive alternatives. Instead of standard quests, you have "events" that occur on the map which you can participate in for a bonus, and the outcome of these events actively alter the map itself. PvP also looks interesting, with a standard 5v5 structured PvP as well as a "World vs World" mode where the three global servers play against each other on massive maps that allow for hundreds of players to play on them.
Oh, and Guild Wars has no subscription fee, only a fee for the boxed game or CD key. Guild Wars 2 also plans on having a similar system.
I played Lineage 2 extremely hardcore. Super fun game but HUGE timesink, basically the worst grind of any MMORPG released in the western world, unfortunately that's what made the game good, because it had REAL PvP, and it meant something when you died. It bothers me so much when dying means nothing, much less you can't even talk to your opponents ... (cough wow). The open political system just made the game so fun. Unfortunately it was so time consuming, it got to a point where I just had to say no more. lol.
Either way, had tons of fun, if no one knows anything about Lineage 2, my guild had some pretty cool fraps movies with really nice production value. Feel free to take a peak.
Is my attitude towards MMORPGs not actually being a game and more of an overscheduled timesink accurate?
Pretty much, the problem with MMORPGs is casual friendly games with no grind are just meaningless, and a real grind means... you basically can't have a life outside the game, but the game can be really fun, and you will meet tons of awesome people, even if you're all somewhat demented in one way or another from sitting behind a computer too long.
EPT
