Wolff
2004
Because it is a terrible idea and leads to huge imbalances. One side camps it and the other side gives up.
I’ve enjoyed it in the past. There have been many times when it doesn’t result in camping. I think it’s a bit harsh to say it’s a terrible idea. Players enjoyed it in UO, DAoC, Shadowbane, etc.
Wolff
2006
Which players the ones killing or the ones getting ganked? I personally love pvp but you can’t just have it hanging out in pve space - all combatatants need to opt in.
All I can say is that open world PvP has worked in the past in MMOs. You can have areas for PvP and have areas that are non-PvP like DAoC had. There are ways to approach it. Blizzard’s limitation is that all PvP is either battlegrounds or arena, even on the PvP servers. Players have decided that engaging in PvP in the open world on a PvP server is not worth their time so they don’t. The idea would be to encourage it somehow in a more open-ended setting than you find in BGs or arena to provide a different experience.
Wolff
2008
My argument would be that it hasn’t worked in the past for the vast majority of players. Segregated world v world like gw2 (and maybe daoc?) can work but I don’t think that is what people mean when they say “open” pvp. You can’t insectivise open pve world pvp or player nature will take over. Why fight that equally sized force over there where I might not get the reward, better to gank or fight smaller groups. The result is only the largest group remains - see illum in swtor and war hammer online. Maybe we aren’t talking about the same thing though can you describe some open pvp you wold like to see?
DAoC had 3 factions. I’d argue that’s important.
Syzygy
2010
I’m going to be running a Horde-side flex raid once a week late Friday evenings Pacific. (Saturday morning Australia/Asia and extremely early morning Europe.) We’ll be starting between 9pm and 10pm (still nailing it down) and raiding for about four hours. And if the patch goes forward as planned the first night will be August 30.
The roster is looking quite solid, but I wanted to give any Qt3 folks who may be interested a chance to join cross server if anyone was interested. PM me if so.
This. WoW ends up with a lot of servers where one side is basically non-existent. This is the reason they implemented cross-server grouping in the first place - to try and fix that imbalance. Having played DAoC prior, even before the game released I thought they were making a mistake just having two sides. Alliance + Horde + wtf ever would have allowed a much more natural division of the races, too. Some of the relationships still seem forced and rather unlikely. Heck, I would have left open the possibility of races changing sides as the game matured. But that would probably suck for player retention :)
I’d just remove the race-faction immutable bond. Sure, your -average- orc or undead may align with the Horde and its ideology, or your -average- human or night elf with the Alliance. But it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that every single member of a given race is automatically going to fall in lockstep. One of my great disappointments with WoW is that although they offer a (paid) faction switching option, that option forces a race change at the same time.
Ranulf
2013
Deathwing wasn’t what I would call a compelling storyline. After awhile it became clear it was a love story the devs had for Thrall. Every “big bad” has had horde and alliance working together ultimately to save the planet.
Edit to add: My feelings on deathwing are probably influenced by stupidly running Dragonsoul for far far too long. I probably ran through Icecrown for long and definately with more characters but I didn’t want to set foot at all into DS after MOP was coming out/released.
Isn’t Garrosh also the first real “WOW-centric” top villain? all the others have been holdovers in some form from WC3. Kel’Thuzad, Kil’Jaden (Illidan, Archimonde), Lich King, Deathwing–all of them popped up elsewhere. The first I ever heard of Garrosh was BC. Blizzard may realize that the old stories are really, actuall old. over a decade old now. The link to WC3 that was so strong before are now faded. They may be truing to revitalize WoW by growing it more on its own rather than digging arcs from WC3.
I kind of doubt that, though. They have a lot of material out there to draw on. Trouble is, who but the old timers knows any of it any more?
I’ve actually been reading through all the old Warcraft books and you’re right. I know they mention Grom Hellscream, but Garrosh was a WoW creation I believe. Also, the Warcraft and WoW books are surprisingly good.
Imryll
2016
And presumably will in ESO, which is being made largely by DAoC devs and will also have three factions.
Didn’t the DaoC gang screw the pooch when they did Warhammer Online, though?
If you mean the endgame wasn’t popular, yes. It wasn’t because players didn’t want PvP, though.
stusser
2019
It’s never been entirely clear to me why WAR failed, although I didn’t play it myself. Maybe that’s why. I have that kind of power.
It was just badly managed (it still is), which led to the poor and unpopular choices they made after the game was released. Examples of this include tearing out Forts, which were these massive (instanced) RvR battles, I guess you could think of them like Rvr “raids”. The problem? They were total and utter lag fests. And they couldn’t fix it, so they chopped it out of the game and moved on. Same thing happened with the way tanks could “obstruct” enemies, which was a game changer when holding tight areas. You’d have the tank hold the lines up front. They had all kinds of issues with it until they eventually just cut it out of the game. Of course, they had to cut out 4 of the major cities before launch and didn’t even have the endgame raids of the cities in the game until a while after launch. Many of the rewards for taking and defending keeps were implemented way after launch (yes, defending a keep used to give you NOTHING). The big problem was that they tried to appeal to the WoW crowd by including lots of lackluster PvE content, most of which had BETTER rewards than the PvP stuff, and they didn’t change that until much later. And then the merging of servers not long after launch (which eventually dwindled from around 100 servers to like 1 today) really crushed the community. I mean, it seemed like every week you’d hear about servers being merged. It was always an influx of bad news and very little of the future of WAR (not one expansion pack). They also completely rehauled crafting at one point, which was a total WASTE of resources because crafting was mostly useless. I could go on and on, I’m just remembering this stuff off the top of my head, let’s just say it was poorly managed. :)
I quite enjoyed the PvE content, especially the public quests and the Tome of Knowledge, but that was exhausted inside a couple of months and there were no raids or other meaningful endgame content, just a couple of lategame dungeons gated by tiered gear that dropped a piece or two at a time, completely random, bind on acquire, and single-classed. There wasn’t even a guarantee that it would be a piece of gear that anyone in your party could equip, and actually the odds were against it because there were, after all, twelve different classes per side and only five (or was it six?) in a group.
Wolff
2022
Wasn’t he balance totally out of whack as well for a long time? Bright wizards get brought up all the time in other mmo balance discussions.
Yes, that’s an entirely different discussion. From what I recall, they were very…reserved about making any big changes to the classes. They believed that each class should be different, EVEN if that meant some classes were way overpowered or underpowered than others (2 or more Bright Wizards together usually meant INSTANT death). And crowd control was an absolute MESS. Every class had about 10 ways of making an enemy immobile in some fashion and of course many had various ways of knocking you off high places, which many battlegrounds were centered upon. Early levels didn’t really have those problems, but the high levels were incredibly frustrating. I don’t know how anyone thought that losing control over your character constantly was a good idea. /sigh I had such high hopes for WAR.
