icemann on 15/11/2015 at 10:46

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I can't even remember the last time I did that. Games aren't meant to just be played for an hour or under anymore.

Not on PC anyway.

Sulphur on 15/11/2015 at 11:58

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I think you guys are taking a jajaz:d post a little too seriously.

Gryzemuis on 16/11/2015 at 11:04

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All games mentioned are single-player games. You play a single-player game for a few weeks, and then it is over. I can't see how that can be a tragedy. Certainly not "the worst tragedy in gaming history".

Now MMOs are different.
People play the same MMO for years. Sometimes 10, 20 or even 40+ hours per week. They have fixed times of raiding with a fixed group of people. Like how others go to football-practice every Thursday night from 20:00-24:00 and play a game every Saturday morning, for years and years. Almost a way of life.


And then the developer turns your favorite game into a pile of shite. Because they think easier game-play will bring in more players. Or because they put all the fancy stuff in the real-money webshop. (10 Euros for a pet or 25 euros for a sparkling pony mount). Or they merge your server, and it goes from a nice calm server to a hell where you get ganked every 3 minutes, because suddenly there are 10x more players of the opposing faction on your server. Or because they make major parts of the game suddenly irrelevant (professions). Or they totally "revamp" the class you've been playing for a decade. Etc, etc.

I thought I would be playing MMOs after I get retired. I could picture all these old men and women, 70 or 80+ years old, who can hardly walk around anymore, maybe in wheel-chairs, who are half-blind and half-deaf. Sitting behind their computers and playing MMOs together. Spread all over a continent. Playing together, exploring worlds, having adventures, listening to stories. Chatting over voicecom, while playing. That would have been awesome. So much better than sitting in the cafetaria of your home for the elderly, listening to demented boring folks blabbering about their grand-children all day.

But that's not gonna happen. The suits took all the fun out of MMOs. It's about creating addiction, maximizing short-term gains, and trying to milk your customers. It's not about entertainment anymore.


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Stop reading now !!
Unless you are interested in my ramblings about WoW.

I've played a lot of World of Warcraft. I started playing when the game was released in Europe in Feb 2005. The first 6-12 months were one of the best gaming experiences in my life. I played with 3 friends. And after a month we joined a guild where everybody was 25 years or older. (I still played in that guild last time I played, which was last year). The first expansion (The Burning Crusade) improved a lot of gameplay, lots of quality-of-life enhancements. And the third expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) was pretty good too. But halfway WLK things changed. A few key-developers left the game, to work on another game (which flopped even before release). A downward spiral started. It was obvious that Blizzard thought they had reached the end-of-life of WoW. They released a 3rd expansion (Cataclysm). Cataclysm was crap. It was just a bunch of old, unrelated, unused content they had on their shelf of "not good enough". They packed that together, with very little story, and released it. It was terrible. I played it for only 2 months. Cataclysm lasted 2 years. During the first year there was some new content. But in the 2nd year, nothing changed. People were running the same dungeons and raids for a full year. The 4th expansion (Mists of Pandaria) was pretty good again. I started playing during the 2nd year, and played for over half a year. Again, no new content in the 2nd year, but there was enough to do to keep me entertained.

Last November Warlords of Draenor was released. One week of fun while leveling from 90 to 100. Then another week of fun running heroic dungeons with my guildies. After those first 2 weeks, leveling was out-dated, and everybody out-geared the dungeons. Blizzard added something called "the garrison". Which completely killed interaction between players (everybody stays in their own private garrison). It killed professions. The garrison gives you so much gold and other stuff, it changed the economy. No need to go out of your garrison, and play the game to collect gold and other stuff. Oh, and the things you can do in the garrison is more of a facebook game. Click a UI, and send your followers on missions. 24h Later, you can collect the rewards. You don't get to play the game anymore, your followers do that for you. All that's left is raiding. And even that is fucked up now (LFR raiding is too easy, Mythic raiding is too hard).

All the fun is gone. They changed the graphics of the models. And the animations. I don't even like anymore how my character is looking or how she looks when running around. There's nothing to do besides raiding twice a week. Professions are dead. Even doing "old content" has been trivialized (you can now solo raid-bosses at level-100, that used to require 25 players at level-90).

So I stopped after playing WoD for a month.
Sometimes I think about installing WoW and playing my rogue again. This usually lasts for 10 to 20 seconds. Then I think about what I would actually do in the game. And immediately I am reminded that I don't even like the game anymore.

I used to be an addict. But Blizzard themselves cured me.

Chimpy Chompy on 16/11/2015 at 14:26

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However WoW may have gone wrong, I don't think improving character graphics is one of the problems. It was about time my Troll stopped looking like something out of 2005.

icemann on 16/11/2015 at 17:01

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I played WoW from the original beta up to the start of Cataclysm. For me Cata killed it. I absolutely loved Wrath over all the other expansions. Yes it made casual play more do-able which the more hardcore players hated. But for me, I played casual even in vanila WoW and ran a guild that emphasized on that style of play (Called "Beers'n'Bourbons"), which we used to get laughed and ridiculed for. But that was the game for me. Loved it. That said, the guild probably kept me "in" to the game.

But then Cata came out and it was just crap. Wrath had fucking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT8maUTzE48) Ozzie Osburn taking on the the prince of darkness. Cata was bugged to hell, and just really boring.

Wrath also finished off the Arthus story arc that had been present ever since Warcraft 3.

So yeah I quit after that, and didn't come back until Warlords of Draenor. The thing with WoD was that it was awesome at the start. Like really good. Brought in some of the RTS stuff from Warcraft with the garrison, going out into the world to harvest lumber etc. All great.

But then development just stopped. And the focus was 100% on raiding instances for a LONG time. That was never what I played WoW for. So yeah, eventually I got bored to hell again then quit for good. I'm done with that game now. Soooooooooooo many great games on PC to play nowadays (MGS 5 alone has been keeping me busy to the max as it is for like a month or so now).

Story wise WoD makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Somehow via time travel the orcs never joined the burning legion, which is fine. BUT THEY NEVER EXPLAIN IT. Never. Or never did in the time I was doing all of the damn raid instances. I kept waiting for the cinematic or quest explaining it all, but nope never was. Grrr. They just do a Red Alert and change everything time events wise.

Was great while it lasted in the Wrath days. Still miss those times. Having 200+ members in the guild I ran helped as well :).