[…] So far WoW kept me interested which is unusual. It is even more unusual, because this is a game where you essentially run around like an idiot all day trying to kill X creatures of specific kind for the next quest which is exactly the same as the 10 previous quests. WTF? Why do I keep playing this? […]

Never touched an MMO, so I know little of the esoterics, but the thing with food… wouldn’t a system based on percentages of your max. health work quite nicely?

Everyone gets to eat the various foods without it being unbalancing, and the epic pie of much healing remains the “best” food as you level up… I guess the only gripe then would be reduced variety in the foods you eat since it’s easiest to just carry around a stack of the 100% heal food.

Well… I have no answer to that, but it would at least mean that you aren’t at any point told that you need more experience of killing stuff in order to eat a delicious pie :mrgreen:

@varci – hmm… Good points here. I don’t agree with all of them but I see your side of the issue.

To tell you the truth, the food thing doesn’t annoy me that much anymore. It is a mechanic as you say and you are right – it works. It is a bit silly, but oh well. In fact this is my stance for most of these things anyway.

Those are just minor nitpicks. This is what personally annoyed us, but not to the point where we are about ready to stop playing. These things would make the game better for me personally. But I guess different people look for different things in a game.

I guess the problem here is that I’m a casual player – I play few hours a day on the weekends and at most an hour or two in the weekday evenings. I don’t really want a challenging game. I want a fun, and entertaining experience. I want to use the little time I have to play to minimize the annoyances and maximize my enjoyment to get the most of the game.

What I don’t like for example is aimless wandering. I agree that the world is actually incredibly well done and full of detail. But I get frustrated when I try to find some quest objective and I end up running back and forth through the same area because of vague directions. I want to do my exploring on my own terms.

I’m not really always following the way point on the map, but it is there for me if I need it. Sometimes I see something interesting in the distance and go exploring and discover a lot of new stuff. But that’s because I’m in the mood to mess around and explore. Sometimes I just want to knock off few lower level quests really fast for the XP/money the reward. At those times times I like to know exactly where I should be going. This is just how I like to play. If I don’t have a waypoint or a plugin I just put my laptop next to my monitor and look up the directions for a given quest online. I don’t like feeling lost, and when I can’t locate something I get frustrated.

I guess you would consider it “cheating” but to me this is how I get more fun out of my game.

Oh, and from what I know the death penalty in Everquest was painful, and it would likely make me stop playing that game. To me the rez-sickness in WoW is just fine. It is a time waster, but I actually don’t consider it that much of a deal – I just use the time to go to the town, unload my loot restock on ammo and etc…

I think you are right in that some of our collective nitpicks probably can never be fixed because of game balance issues. Complex systems such as WoW are very hard to balance, and even a small change in a game mechanic can throw it of and create unfair advantages for some people or totally nerf mechanics others relied on for years.

I think normal computer RPG’s are a lot better at masking the grinding. Again (I know I am repeating myself…), Morrowind and even Oblivion are doing this in a much cleaner way. The interactions with the environment and the NPC’s are less violent and more diverse. The repetition exists, but it is less felt. Perception is everything…

[quote comment=”9681″]I can count the number of raids I’ve been on using just my fingers. [/quote]

I mean as a layman would, not a master of binary, by the way :)

First rule: if it’s no longer fun, walk away.

[quote comment=”9677″]It’s a typical fanboi reaction[/quote]

Not really. I read your list of wants and Shamus’ list of wants and almost every one of them made me cringe. I’m not an uber-leet WoW-head, I can count the number of raids I’ve been on using just my fingers. But most of the demands kill something subtle and easy to miss.

The thing both of you are forgetting is there’s a lot of game mechanics involved. Take the food thing – can’t eat a pie, so what? It’s a game mechanic, just like it doesn’t take hours to go from city to city. Does it really make a difference if it’s food instead of an unguent or potion? Would you really like a game where the realism demands that the intercontinental zeppelin took literal days to complete? Do you complain about chess because the castles can move or that queens have incredibly powerful movement that isn’t historically comparable?

I mean sure, there are time sinks and they can be annoying, but on the other hand, your demand for a quest marker that tells you exactly where to go just scares me – so much for the joy of exploring. If you’re watching the minimap to see which way to go, you’re missing the actual zone, and one of the most impressive things of WoW is the immersion of each zone. I’ve had a go at an MMO that had ‘here is the quest dude’ and you just watch the minimap, which isn’t very immersive.

Combining ‘I hate exploring’ and ‘I hate grinding’ basically means you want a game that’s a taxi service – go to point A, then head to point B… but still they can’t win because everyone hates drop or delivery quests regardless of how easy they are. If you want a game that’s just max level PvP, it’s out there and is called Guild Wars.

There’s a lot of subtle game mechanics you’re both missing, largely because you both seem quite new to MMOs (level 37 in a much-accelerated levelling environment is still very much a newbie, especially if someone hasn’t seen many MMOs). A lot of the suggestions made have been tried and failed before. One example is ‘rez sickness’. Coming from other MMOs, the death penalty for WoW is absolutely worthless. It takes a lot of strategy and fear out of the game, and hence a lot of punch. Far from further weakening the death penalty, it should be increased for non-PvP deaths. Yes, you’re probably thinking I’m an insane fool right now. If that’s so, then you haven’t played an MMO where you actually are at risk when you fight – it’s a lot more thrilling.

Early MMOs such as EQ overdid the penalty and it could be crushing, but nothing is at risk in WoW. As for not wanting to do a corpse run and just rezzing… exactly how little challenge do you want out of a game? I’m not trying to have a go at anyone, but the idea of ‘making things easy’ in what is already a fairly easy game is a little odd. If someone’s not going to play because of rez sickness, there’s going to be something else equally minor that’ll prevent them playing as well anyway.

Have a read of some of the responses on twenty-sided and you’ll see a few more in-depth explanations of why things are the way they are. Sure, things can improve and there are a lot of time sinks, but game mechanics and game balance are subtle and elusive creatures.

Oh nice, I refreshed this page to see if there were any new replies and noticed your Twitter widget-thing had updated so having never messed with Twitter, I clicked it and read some of your past updates. Looks like if I had done it a little sooner I could have seen those from the 15th about the WoW patch with mounts at 30 and your then broken Quest Helper add-on. :P

This reminds me that I need to see if there is an update of Titan Panel available because after the patch I have a permanent GM ticket icon next to the minimap which is harmless but a bit annoying.

“Let’s hope next patch …”

Overall, I do think Blizzard’s patches keep WoW evolving in a positive way. Their patches often help keep it interesting and exciting with new content or changes to existing components. The interface updates that they’ve done over time have also been great. When I played again after the expansion, a lot of the addons I used to use were already built in.

Sometimes a ‘balance change’ to your class can be frustrating because a skill you always used is now nerfed or altered drastically but it can force you to keep coming up with new ways to do things with your character. Having half your add-ons not work after a major patch, however, can also be a little maddening due to various interface changes.

It’s a typical fanboi reaction – WoW community is not the only one suffering from this plague. Same arguments are repeated ad nauseum by Microsoft fanboys, Linux fanboys and Apple fanboys alike. Hell, I even heard this argument applied to political discourse as in “If you don’t like what the government is doing, you are unpatriotic and should GTFO.”

In every single case it is a silly knee-jerk reaction – nothing is perfect, and attacking anyone who openly criticizes inherent flaws in the system never really amounts to anything. Discussing flaws is always the first step towards improvements.

If no one ever spoke up Blizzard would never bother actually including all the bug fixes, and small improvements (like the drop of the level req. for the mount). Let’s hope next patch does something about the drop rates, and bag space. :)