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SweetBro posted:There being an audience =/= something being popular on it's own merits. There's an audience for inserting glass rods into your urethra, which ironically enough is my go-to analogy of playing WoW classic in 2019, doesn't mean the prospect itself is interesting or mertiful for the majority of people. If you enjoy sounding/wow-classic, good for you. But WoW-classic is only popular BECAUSE of Blizz/Twitch, not because it's a good game. Mark my words that in less than a month or whenever the game release drought ends, everyone is going to forget about it and move onto the next thing. Servers will become ghost towns and merged together into a small handful. Lmao what the gently caress
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Aug 28, 2019 21:47
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Biowarfare posted:
Haven & Wurm 2 : Electric Spookaloo
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Aug 28, 2019 21:49
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Zaphod42 posted:Lmao what the gently caress I'm saying you're free to enjoy whatever you want. But popularity WoW classic has doesn't correlate to any intrinsic value it has. Pointing to niche nostalgia bait and saying "look this is popular within its own community" doesn't counter my argument.
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Aug 28, 2019 21:51
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Classic Wurm when?
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Aug 28, 2019 21:52
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SweetBro posted:I'm saying you're free to enjoy whatever you want. But popularity WoW classic has doesn't correlate to any intrinsic value it has. Pointing to niche nostalgia bait and saying "look this is popular within its own community" doesn't counter my argument. This is all super bizarre. That's true of everything? Two and a half men is popular but sucks. But also, value is subjective, so it does make some people happy. Acting like things that don't appeal to you inherently suck is super selfish. EVERY interest has someone who isn't into it. Is wow something every single human wants? No. Neither is any videogame. But according to your logic every book, film, sport, game, etc. Literally every work of art and every activity is a niche. So what? Its meaningless at that point. You're making some weirdly global conclusions from "I don't like this thing other people do"
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Aug 28, 2019 22:02
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Pretty damning that video games are so bad now that one of the biggest events of the year is people flocking back to replay something from over ten years ago, more or less completely unmodified.
Meme Poker Party fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Aug 28, 2019 |
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Aug 28, 2019 22:09
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incidentally I am following this thread because I am also waiting for a good sandbox mmo, and several years of kickstarter has failed me
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Aug 28, 2019 22:09
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Like imagine a national movie theater chain announced "hey you know what, we just gonna show Gladiator in every theater for a month. Not a remake, not a new director's cut, were just gonna put that same exact poo poo back on the screen why not" and because movies suck so bad that ended up being one of the biggest blockbusters of 2019.
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Aug 28, 2019 22:10
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Chomp8645 posted:Pretty damning that video games are so bad now that one of the biggest events of the year is people flocking back to replay something from over ten years ago, more or less completely unmodified. Damning of the state of the industry, absolutely
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Aug 28, 2019 22:34
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Zaphod42 posted:But also, value is subjective, so it does make some people happy. You would be right if I didn't specifically use "intrinsic value" which by definition is not subjective. Game design is as much of a science as it is an art. Classic WoW is flooded with bad design decisions that are counter-intuitive to its own goals as a game that lessen the experience. However, because Classic WoW is fetishized so much by the community (fetishized in this context being used as the sociological term, not the sex-term) it maintains some degree of popularity and enjoyability in spite of it being a bad game by modern standards. Also I'm not sure where "every media is niche" thing is coming from. I called Project 1999 niche because I literally have not a seen single mention of it until you mentioned it (and it's partly my job to know these things), and I'm fairly confident that if I looked up the stats it's userbase wouldn't even hit a fraction of what most mainstream MMOs have. SweetBro fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Aug 28, 2019 |
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Aug 28, 2019 22:47
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mmos are bad still, in my opinion
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Aug 28, 2019 22:50
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SweetBro posted:You would be right if I didn't specifically use "intrinsic value" which by definition is not subjective. Game design is as much of a science as it is an art. Classic WoW is flooded with bad design decisions that are counter-intuitive to its own goals as a game that lessen the experience. However, because Classic WoW is fetishized so much by the community (fetishized in this context being used as the sociological term, not the sex-term) it maintains some degree of popularity and enjoyability in spite of it being a bad game by modern standards. Yeah but real "intrinsic value" for art is almost entirely ineffable. It may exist but there isn't, and fundamentally cannot be a heuristic to determine it. We're all biased. Again, what you just said applies to every game ever made on some degree. That's true of halo and half-life too.
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Aug 28, 2019 22:51
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah but real "intrinsic value" for art is almost entirely ineffable. It may exist but there isn't, and fundamentally cannot be a heuristic to determine it. We're all biased. Just because we're biased doesn't mean it's ineffable. You brought up Two And A Half Men, earlier as a great example. Comedy is arguably more subject to bias than games, yet that show engineered a perfect comedic formula to capture as much of their lowest common denominator audience. Everything from the delivery tone, camera movement, laugh track timing, etc. There is an intrinsic value there, even if most people turn their nose up at it.
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Aug 28, 2019 22:54
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SweetBro posted:Just because we're biased doesn't mean it's ineffable. You brought up Two And A Half Men, earlier as a great example. Comedy is arguably more subject to bias than games, yet that show engineered a perfect comedic formula to capture as much of their lowest common denominator audience. Everything from the delivery tone, camera movement, laugh track timing, etc. There is an intrinsic value there, even if most people turn their nose up at it. I think any kind of absolute value for it is ineffable. Especially if you're going to turn around and say TwoAndAHalfMen has value. Because you're right, but that itself proves that everything has at least non-zero value. Can you accurately say it has 2.3 value or 4.5 value? Does 2 1/2 have more or less value than The Room? I don't see how it can't be ineffable. There's just way way way too many factors to consider, human beings can't do that. Maybe, maaaaybe like a Matrioshka brain that could simulate all life on earth could come up with a calculation for intrinsic value, but it'd require things we're definitely not currently capable of.
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Aug 28, 2019 23:17
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i just find it finally when people talk about how hard classic wow was.
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Aug 28, 2019 23:47
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choosing to wait in line for an hour and a half to finish a newbie quest, when you can just beat up mobs, is a pretty hard choice to stick to. but just think, decades from now you can reminisce to your grandchildren about easy mmos are these days.
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Aug 29, 2019 10:37
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Groovelord Neato posted:i just find it finally when people talk about how hard classic wow was. Yeah lol. It's really not a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, it's just a gigantic, gigantic time sink for any activity by design because they felt the best way to make money in MMOs was to dangle a carrot while wasting your time.
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Aug 29, 2019 14:06
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No one who did all the classic WoW stuff would willingly play it today unless they were getting paid to. I have a few friends who did the HWL grind and cleared all content in a timely manner. Every single one said "I'll go back for arena if they do wotlk" and "maybe I'd play TBC but I probably don't have the time". I don't get all the nostalgia people hold for it, but despite being 15 or 16 when it came out I had already played diablo 2/dark age of camelot/anarchy online to their respective endgames. So I'm not in the "never touched WoW until wotlk or late tbc" crew, and I'm not in "the fumbled around blindly thinking everything was awesome" crew either. Pretty sure I'd rather play 2003-2010 era Ragnarok Online than classic WoW because at least pvp and pvm are fun in that game. Khorne fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 14:14
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Khorne posted:No one who did all the classic WoW stuff would willingly play it today unless they were getting paid to. Baseless generalizations are bad, this is simply not true "My friends who did all the classic wow stuff aren't interested" Okay yeah sure Are you really arguing that things that don't appeal to you are bad and can't possibly appeal to anybody? That's real rude.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:46
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jokes posted:Yeah lol. It's really not a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, it's just a gigantic, gigantic time sink for any activity by design because they felt the best way to make money in MMOs was to dangle a carrot while wasting your time. Its not, but it can be obtuse and not everybody uses the word 'obtuse' so you have to read between the lines on what they mean. It was just time consuming really, but if its your first game of that style you're gonna have to learn a lot the hard way.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:49
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You guys need to stop being weirdos and come to terms with the fact that some people actually like these older, harsher, timesinkier mmos on their own merits. This entire thread is predicated on the idea that for some reason, modern MMOs suck now, and implicitly didn’t always suck. That means something about the old ones was lost and it’s lazy to just put it all entirely on youth and nostalgia. I played project 1999 for a couple hundred hours to the endgame last year. What I loved about it was that everything had weight to it, there was mystery, with certain mechanics and aspects of the game not being well understood or able to be googled to this day, there were harsh consequences to death and exploration, and leveling up/camping an item took a lot of time and effort. This all translates into poo poo feeling meaningful, as opposed to just drowning in risk free instant gratification to the point where everything feels bland and meaningless (90% of modern WoW’s leveling experience, and then max level dungeon/raid finder runs for example). Modern game design in MMOs tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator by making the majority of their game stupidly easy, that’s just loving boring to a lot of people. If your answer is that those people could do mythic endgame raiding, the obvious response is that the entire journey to get there is loving mind numbing and that’s the issue. Games like dark souls are hugely popular, modern so subsequently unable to be dismissed as purely having a nostalgic appeal, and show that some people just genuinely like some amount of masochism in games. retpocileh fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 18:26
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retpocileh posted:You guys need to stop being weirdos and come to terms with the fact that some people actually like these older, harsher, timesinkier mmos on their own merits. I can get it. Personally I have been in the “That’s how it was because there was no one else doing it/technology limitations at the time, nobody would ever want to go back to that” camp, but I realized that’s only because I don’t gel well with the harsh punishment gamestyle in an MMO context. Outside of that, in Dark Souls or other single player games, I’m down with that challenge. For myself, I think I just dislike the idea that I’m to be “punished” for following my interests, whether that’s doing something risky, or even doing something non-productive-but-fun like rolling an alt. It’s mainly because I don’t want to fall behind my friends, something that’s just not an issue with a game like Dark Souls. If I wanna faf about with two shields and a dumb hat, I am free to do so and will fall behind exactly nobody. In an MMO, that would be time my friends or guild mates are likely using to advance their character, or if I decide to do some risky exploration and wind up losing a level. That can end up quite the gap! I can’t say that I still appreciate the classic WoW model, at least not as much as I do the P1999 model. But yeah, there’s definitely an appeal. Not for me, but I cannot deny that it’s there. i am tim! fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 18:45
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imo the most critical aspect of old MMOs is the also the one that cannot be reproduced: the mystery. You can revert as many mechanics as you want. You can remove group finder and all that poo poo and to force social interaction. But you cannot bring back the mystery. You cannot get rid of the wikis, or the data mining, or the helper mods, or everyone having excellent and convenient voice communication. That's the secret of the old MMOs, and it's all poo poo that isn't actually part of the game itself. It's like with Magic cards. You could never recreate the experience of the old days, with people trading cards back and forth and researching sets. Because it doesn't matter what you print on the cards, you aren't getting rid of the internet.
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Aug 29, 2019 18:55
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Chomp8645 posted:imo the most critical aspect of old MMOs is the also the one that cannot be reproduced: the mystery. I think you can actually do a decent bit with server-siding as much as possible - I know a few smaller games store all quest text and etc serverside so no mined translation files containing what you need, sending fake/garbage/random 'data' for data miners to discover and don't ship real updates until actual patch day or mix them in with a lot of crap fake quests/characters/items. It would at least make new content challenging for a day or two after a new content patch. Though this would also increase server load significantly, probably, and also cause a lot more work than necessary. And players would probably dislike insane amounts of RNG rolls to frustrate walkthroughs/guides
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Aug 29, 2019 19:31
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Woah woah woah Dark Souls is at least fun. I refuse to believe that anyone wants to play tab combat with hotkeys anymore
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Aug 29, 2019 21:42
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Chomp8645 posted:imo the most critical aspect of old MMOs is the also the one that cannot be reproduced: the mystery. You can never bring back the near-total lack of knowledge that the early internet conferred, but there's still a lot that can be done to bring back mystery. Even though every Rust server runs the same game, the rules can be wildly different, and any two servers can have wildly different terrain. Even though the procedural generation in No Man's Sky has it's limits, you can get through a good number of hours never seeing the same alien twice. The path to reintroducing mystery in MMOs relies on these two key pillars, procedural generation and player agency. They're super hard to do at all, and even harder to do well, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, but as the outside world becomes increasingly terrible, the market for a virtual world is only going to grow!
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Aug 29, 2019 23:03
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Zaphod42 posted:Its not, but it can be obtuse and not everybody uses the word 'obtuse' so you have to read between the lines on what they mean. i meant lol if it wasn't your first mmo. wow on launch was a loving cakewalk compared to eq. Glenn Quebec posted:Woah woah woah my dream back in the mmo heyday was someone making one with actual combat. alas.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:04
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Groovelord Neato posted:my dream back in the mmo heyday was someone making one with actual combat. alas. They did, it was called Tera.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:45
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I agree with the mystery being the biggest “secret” of old MMOs. The real draw was the sense of exploration and accomplishment. Hard, but not impossible, to get that back these days. The next biggest thing was sharing that sense of exploration and accomplishment with friends. That’s even less likely to come back because I’m no longer a middle schooler with friends who want to talk about crap they did in MMOs at lunch.
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Aug 30, 2019 02:42
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Groovelord Neato posted:i meant lol if it wasn't your first mmo. wow on launch was a loving cakewalk compared to eq. I agree. I also think Dark Souls got it the closest with the exploration and the mystery.
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Aug 30, 2019 02:52
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Ruggan posted:I agree with the mystery being the biggest “secret” of old MMOs. The real draw was the sense of exploration and accomplishment. Hard, but not impossible, to get that back these days. He had come a long way to this kickstarter screen and his mmo dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to fund it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the barrens, where the dark shadow of Norrath rolled on under the night.
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Aug 30, 2019 04:15
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Chomp8645 posted:imo the most critical aspect of old MMOs is the also the one that cannot be reproduced: the mystery. I remember this coming up before but I forgot what the answer was: is it not technically possible to encrypt all the client side data so that it can’t be mined?
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Aug 30, 2019 04:35
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not gonna lie the time it takes to form groups for specific dungeons in Classic is starting to annoy me a lot
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Aug 30, 2019 04:43
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lol wow classic is still somehow the best mmo 15 years later
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Aug 30, 2019 05:13
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i am tim! posted:I can get it. Being punished is bad. But actions need to have consequence. That's why so many modern games feel meaningless. Trying to design consequence without being too punishing is tricky to balance, but that's game design. Like in Dark Souls, losing your souls feels awful, but anybody who has beaten a souls game or two can tell you that losing souls is actually no big deal. Some people play the game at SL1 for further challenge, which means you're drowning in souls you don't even need. But if the game didn't make you fear death, it wouldn't be as engaging. You have to put some skin in the game in order to actually get excited about the gambles. So the game takes your souls away if you die, and makes you fear dying and losing your souls, but it doesn't actually punish you that much when you think about it! Dying isn't actually that big of a deal in dark souls. You don't lose any gear or items or levels, all your "banked" souls are fine, only the loose "liquid" souls are risked. That's kind of a magic trick. A psychological one. But if you death zerg your way through dark souls, it isn't nearly as engaging as if you tip-toe around every corner, fearing the next trap that may end with you dead and risking losing all your souls. Modern videogames are like gambling in a casino with monopoly money, knowing that even if you win a million dollars, it doesn't change anything. That's even more boring than gambling itself is! Chomp8645 posted:You cannot get rid of the wikis, or the data mining, or the helper mods, or everyone having excellent and convenient voice communication. You can get around data mining, actually Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Aug 30, 2019 |
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Aug 30, 2019 05:29
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Glenn Quebec posted:I agree. fromsoft has pretty much ruined video games for me due to being head and shoulders above everyone else at it.
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Aug 30, 2019 16:12
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Groovelord Neato posted:fromsoft has pretty much ruined video games for me due to being head and shoulders above everyone else at it. Same. I think I'll play Dark Souls 3 again soon. Make an all Irithyll build. Ice Knight. That sounds rad.
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Aug 30, 2019 16:18
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frajaq posted:not gonna lie the time it takes to form groups for specific dungeons in Classic is starting to annoy me a lot I think that some things should have been kept. At least a party finder system if the dungeon queue is something that's off limits. How can transmog not have been worth keeping?
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Aug 30, 2019 18:34
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Ruggan posted:I agree with the mystery being the biggest “secret” of old MMOs. The real draw was the sense of exploration and accomplishment. Hard, but not impossible, to get that back these days. Oh, that's easy, you just do all the programming in Chinese, then google translate it to English and don't check for errors. That's how Age Of Wushu wound up with a health bar, an energy bar and an "obey the laws of the flying eagle stronghold" bar. Also the default error message was, "please follow the lady to the guestroom"
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Aug 30, 2019 19:44
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I'm having fun with classic wow. I forgot how much more rewarding it is. I wish they would have kept the new graphics. If they actually put time and effort into it they could have completely redone the world in glorious new textures and models. Also with their *huge* library of clothing/armor models they could have replaced every piece and had them all be unique.
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