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Zereth posted:I dunno if being still standing while WoW shoots itself in the foot counts as "killing WoW". “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
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Sep 12, 2022 07:29
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I like that two entries are posted as "Possibly Chads revenge". It's just such a nice phrase.
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Sep 12, 2022 08:03
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theironjef posted:Isn't Luke Gygax just a veteran that runs a convention? How deep are his pockets that he's got whole rear end guys in there?
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Sep 12, 2022 10:22
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It's kind of weird but also probably says something that these people have apparently been hanging around the industry so long and one of Gygax's kids is literally involved but they're somehow more obscure than the pathetic weirdos grognards.txt used to talk about before realising they were the only ones who still did.
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Sep 12, 2022 11:11
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From what I can tell, Justin LaNasa, Ernie Gygax, and Dave Johnson all have two things in common: they're right-wing bigots, and they write like someone is currently punching them in the back of the head. Who were Johnson and LaNasa before nuTSR was a thing? From what I can tell, LaNasa was some guy who owns a tattoo shop and a vape shop in NC, torpedoed his campaign for the NC House by having his female employees wrestle in grits, and the first Google result for his name is a court document affirming his liability for $44,761.38 due to unpaid sales taxes from his sleazy oxygen bar.
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Sep 12, 2022 16:50
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LatwPIAT posted:It might not be "actively" "killing" WoW but it's providing a high-quality alternative to WoW at a time when people are looking for something new (whether because WoW is just old hat, or because WoW is becoming worse), which is basically how you become the hot new thing. The problem all the WoW killers had was that they were basically trying to be a better WoW than WoW, in a market already dominated by WoW. Which of course isn't going to work, because even if you could offer a technically better product (which you can't, because that costs more money than you have available), all the WoW players are already busy playing WoW. Sometimes doing so hilariously late in the game, like WildStar which was made by some ex-WoW devs. They were so centered on the '40 player raid' market that while they had a decent game mechanics and style wise they didn't realize or didn't care that in large part the people who did that had moved on or at the least no longer had the time for it and that the gaming scene had just kinda... moved on. Things were already trending towards a deeper story narrative (or, I guess, narrative narrative) in MMOs but they had the game they wanted to make, I guess.
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Sep 12, 2022 16:54
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The wildstar devs also fundamentally didn't understand what people missed about classic wow. They loving bragged about having a monstrously complicated process required to unlock the endgame content, for fucks sake
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Sep 12, 2022 17:30
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Dawgstar posted:Sometimes doing so hilariously late in the game, like WildStar which was made by some ex-WoW devs. They were so centered on the '40 player raid' market that while they had a decent game mechanics and style wise they didn't realize or didn't care that in large part the people who did that had moved on or at the least no longer had the time for it and that the gaming scene had just kinda... moved on. Things were already trending towards a deeper story narrative (or, I guess, narrative narrative) in MMOs but they had the game they wanted to make, I guess. There does also seem to be a tendency, similar to a certain grognard strain, for MMO devs to be former players who are obsessed with the harderest of the hardercore, whether it's big raids, PvP or ridiculous hoops to access content, and realise too late that poo poo's niche even within MMOs and they neglected all the things that actually get the majority of players to sign up and stick around. WoW itself seems to be like that now. Also like grognards, feels like those people used to somehow be widely praised and held up on pedestals compared to the filthy casuals but now the narrative has turned and everyone sees them for tedious, irrelevant weirdos who are barely even fun to mock.
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Sep 12, 2022 17:36
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The Wildstar devs were obsessed with how hardcore they were, and stated that they were gonna make a raid that was harder than WoW's, and would take even longer to clear. At least X months. They accomplished this by making the raid literally mathematically impossible to beat, an entire raid running at peak recorded performance all at once would not have enough DPS to kill the bosses before their enrages. X months and one day after the raid was released, they nerfed the raid down to actual playability. When someone finally did manage to beat it the devs mocked them on reddit with this gif.  e: Here's the ludicrous attunement chain for their raids and one thing I found on here that's notable is there's apparently a dungeon where it's a challenge to beat it in under 75 minutes which  
Kurieg fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Sep 12, 2022 |
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Sep 12, 2022 17:57
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WoW also has the advantage of being able to use the failed upstarts as R&D. I remember a few things people liked from Wildstar making it into subsequent WoW patches.
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Sep 12, 2022 18:08
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moths posted:WoW also has the advantage of being able to use the failed upstarts as R&D. I remember a few things people liked from Wildstar making it into subsequent WoW patches. somehow still no player housing
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Sep 12, 2022 18:50
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admanb posted:somehow still no player housing It would suck. If it was player driven it'd just be another source of rep grinding and boss bit collecting for no reason, no one wants to go to anyone else's house. If it's guild-driven it just becomes another thing that punishes the creation of or joining of new guilds when old established guilds already have all the dart boards and mounted dragon heads of +10% XP or whatever. I know it's in FFXIV and all, and I play that, and... it kinda sucks. My apartment is boring, if I could afford a house it would be boring, and it only creates badfeels when there are little benefits I could be getting like the garden but aren't because it's gated behind an insane price and a lottery system.
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Sep 12, 2022 18:59
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admanb posted:somehow still no player housing WoW is like a 2 decade old game at this point lol. It's codebase is made of nothing but hopes and dreams and 18 years of bandaids and bad decisions But yeah player housing requires an absolute poo poo ton of of dev time to initially create it and until recently (they bought a studio this year) the WoW team is nowhere near as large as you think it is. Like they had grand ambitions for Garrison's, realized quickly that oh no even doing the rudimentary stuff that they did took up almost all of the dev time they'd be spending working on later patches. And had to torch patch content. WoW's problem in this case is that they tried to like tell a more "serious" and "nuanced" story like FF14 does, not realizing that they suck poo poo at it until too late and everyone was miserable. Not to mention one of their sex pests pulled rank as the franchise director or whatever over objections of the team to kick off the Sylvanas stuff in BFA. Before he was fired(resigned) a year or so ago. Their Art and Raid design team are still very good at what they do with the tools they have. But yeah, this has been the first time like ever there was two back to back "bad" expansions. I don't think player housing in WoW is something that's needed specifically, but WoW's problem is it's insanely over designed, and almost like fully engagement metrics spreadsheet driven. Everything had to tie into the main like "system" or endgame of power progression It needs more things for players to attach themselves to that they do for just fun and not because they feel obligated because they need a currency to get player power. Player Housing is just one of those things in FF14 and other MMOs that can work.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:16
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WoW has trouble creating content but to my understanding the main engineering team is very good at rewriting the core of the game to keep it up to date with best practices and improvements in design. That's been shown pretty well by the various classic WoW releases, where the original versions of the game from that time were completely incompatible with Blizzard's game services now, and so the projects have consisted of reimplementing those expansions on the modern client with changes to make grogs happy. Why are we talking about this in the TG industry thread anyway?
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Sep 12, 2022 19:28
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WOW is old enough to vote now, maybe it has become a traditional game. I kid, but what were we gonna talk about otherwise, LaNasa's secret enemy list?
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Sep 12, 2022 19:33
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Dexo posted:WoW's problem in this case is that they tried to like tell a more "serious" and "nuanced" story like FF14 does, not realizing that they suck poo poo at it until too late and everyone was miserable. Not to mention one of their sex pests pulled rank as the franchise director or whatever over objections of the team to kick off the Sylvanas stuff in BFA. Before he was fired(resigned) a year or so ago. No, Steve Danuser is still employed at Blizzard. Their previous lore guy quit because he stood up for an abused woman and got harrangued out of the company by HR because he didn't have receipts to back it up. The first lore book produced under Danuser's tenure rectons most/all of the lore and gleefully mocks the playerbase for actually caring about lore at all.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:34
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Halloween Jack posted:From what I can tell, Justin LaNasa, Ernie Gygax, and Dave Johnson all have two things in common: they're right-wing bigots, and they write like someone is currently punching them in the back of the head. Dave Johnson published some OSR things on his own before this. If he'd kept his head down he could've continued being a monstrous bigot on his social media accounts to his heart's content. DriveThru removed his entire catalog of work now that people are paying attention to the poo poo he posted on twitter and all the nazi stuff in his Star Frontiers book. Art credits pop up for a "David Johnson" on DriveThru still, but that's a separate Dave Johnson who's a professional illustrator and comic cover artists nowadays. LaNasa seems to just be a roving scammer chasing progressively dumber marks with increasingly flimsy rackets.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:40
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LaNasa definitely flamed out too brightly, he could have had a pretty solid career of taking angry-eyes webcam pics and making youtube header images juxtaposing those against She-Hulk.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:43
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Kurieg posted:No, Steve Danuser is still employed at Blizzard. Their previous lore guy quit because he stood up for an abused woman and got harrangued out of the company by HR because he didn't have receipts to back it up. The first lore book produced under Danuser's tenure rectons most/all of the lore and gleefully mocks the playerbase for actually caring about lore at all. I was talking about Alex Afrasiabi. Danuser, I don't think highly of, but uh no allegations of sex pestery.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:43
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Kurieg posted:No, Steve Danuser is still employed at Blizzard. Their previous lore guy quit because he stood up for an abused woman and got harrangued out of the company by HR because he didn't have receipts to back it up. The first lore book produced under Danuser's tenure rectons most/all of the lore and gleefully mocks the playerbase for actually caring about lore at all. They're talking about afrasiabi reportedly making sylvannas go full warcrimes because he knew he was getting the boot even before all the poo poo hit the fan. Not danuser.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:44
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Kurieg posted:The Wildstar devs were obsessed with how hardcore they were, and stated that they were gonna make a raid that was harder than WoW's, and would take even longer to clear. At least X months. My favorite story about Wildstar is apparently on that or another supposed-to-be-unbeatable raid a bunch of players worked out an unintended strategy to actually down the boss, but failed because a dev literally logged into the instance as an invisible GM and adjusted the boss's health upwards in real-time to keep it alive.
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Sep 12, 2022 19:47
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the other thing is that WoW is/was, for the most part, not that buggy; Wildstar not only had that ridiculous attunement path, but there was at least one case where a player visible in their community ran into a bug that killed their ability to complete the attunement, and the devs just shrugged and told them to reroll a new character from scratch.
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Sep 12, 2022 20:01
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Just got a notice from DTRPG that they're switching their black-and-white POD from 50-stock paper to thicker 70-stock, which would be kind of nice. Particularly it might be nice for buying White Wolf PoD books, since the thinner paper was the main thing, aside from the full bleed issue, that stopped them from being just as nice or nicer than the originals. Unfortunately it seems equally likely that they'll all just disappear from PoD altogether because nobody at Paradox is going to bother doing the conversion process.
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Sep 12, 2022 20:21
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Did they get full bleed pages yet?
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Sep 12, 2022 20:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:the other thing is that WoW is/was, for the most part, not that buggy; Wildstar not only had that ridiculous attunement path, but there was at least one case where a player visible in their community ran into a bug that killed their ability to complete the attunement, and the devs just shrugged and told them to reroll a new character from scratch. Now now, that's not what happened. What happened was they told the players they were somehow unable to resolve the issue so they had to start a new character from scratch BUT gave them a a minor XP boost potion. That made it totally okay </s>
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Sep 12, 2022 20:47
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moths posted:Did they get full bleed pages yet? No, someone would have to go through and do that as well.
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Sep 12, 2022 20:54
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theironjef posted:It would suck. If it was player driven it'd just be another source of rep grinding and boss bit collecting for no reason, no one wants to go to anyone else's house. If it's guild-driven it just becomes another thing that punishes the creation of or joining of new guilds when old established guilds already have all the dart boards and mounted dragon heads of +10% XP or whatever. honestly this was just a joke about how Wildstar -- a game built around making the best possible inaccessible content they could -- had an well-implemented high-effort player housing system. (though I also felt that way about FFXIV's housing until I got lucky on a plot and immediately started obsessing over designs.)
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Sep 12, 2022 21:09
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I used to like Rift a lot but then they layered a whole bunch of weird bullshit over it (like player housing).
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Sep 12, 2022 21:20
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The only thing I know about Rift is that Palladium sued them, because of course they did. Has the thread discussed Darlene denying nuTSR permission to use the "wizard head" TSR logo she designed? I'm bringing it up because this is all very entertaining, and her interactions with them make them sound like the sleazy dumbasses we know them to be. Apparently they tried to rope her into a contract that obliges her to publicly defend them vis a vis the lawsuit with WotC. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Sep 12, 2022 |
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Sep 12, 2022 21:29
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theironjef posted:I know it's in FFXIV and all, and I play that, and... it kinda sucks. My apartment is boring, if I could afford a house it would be boring, and it only creates badfeels when there are little benefits I could be getting like the garden but aren't because it's gated behind an insane price and a lottery system. The story of FFXIV's housing market is as wild as... well, the United States' I suppose. It doesn't seem like there's much to be done to fix the problem either as whenever new property is available you've got shady folks who just descend on it and snap up everything they can. Wait, which was I talking about now?
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Sep 12, 2022 23:02
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Dawgstar posted:The story of FFXIV's housing market is as wild as... well, the United States' I suppose. It doesn't seem like there's much to be done to fix the problem either as whenever new property is available you've got shady folks who just descend on it and snap up everything they can. Wait, which was I talking about now? Housing in the US also has a lottery system, but it happens at character creation with the "Inherited Wealth" perk which is intentional but still extremely poor design.
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Sep 12, 2022 23:36
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Honestly player housing in MMOs is one of those things games have just to say they have it. Unless it's a super RP game, no one ever goes to other people's houses, ever. Back in the early 00's I (briefly) played Anarchy Online and Neocron, both of which made a big deal of having free instanced player housing. The only time people ever went to other people's apartments was when a bug randomly teleported you there.
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Sep 13, 2022 00:21
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Gynovore posted:Honestly player housing in MMOs is one of those things games have just to say they have it. Unless it's a super RP game, no one ever goes to other people's houses, ever. Yeah it's a relic of people thinking of the 'world' aspect of them as the part people are in for. In reality, unless it's the only one, people have very particular sets of interests in what they want in a game and it's not conducive to trying to 'live' in one of these things.
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Sep 13, 2022 00:26
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i can think of a few mmos where people visit each others houses (to destroy and rob them)
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Sep 13, 2022 00:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i can think of a few mmos where people visit each others houses
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Sep 13, 2022 00:50
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Gynovore posted:Honestly player housing in MMOs is one of those things games have just to say they have it. Unless it's a super RP game, no one ever goes to other people's houses, ever. This is not true in FFXIV, but I cannot think of a second counter-example. There are people that spend all their time doing interior design and I know a lot of FC’s host parties in part to show off their housing and decorations.
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Sep 13, 2022 03:21
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Chakan posted:This is not true in FFXIV, but I cannot think of a second counter-example. There are people that spend all their time doing interior design and I know a lot of FC’s host parties in part to show off their housing and decorations. It depends where you draw the boundaries; Animal Crossing and Second Life are both on the ragged edge of MMOs.
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Sep 13, 2022 04:20
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Also kind of on the edge of MMOs but Path of Exile hideout decor is a big deal, the trade economy relies on meeting players in their homes and people absolutely love to show off. I feel like that's actually a relatively unexplored space in tabletop design, some groups absolutely love to acquire a base and deck it out with Cool Stuff but it's usually handwaved or a vestigial/supplemental system, the closest I can think of to a game really mechanically focused around specifically developing that fantasy would be... idk, Ars Magica? Blades in the Dark sort of?
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Sep 13, 2022 04:50
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Beast had a sanctum system or something similar.
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Sep 13, 2022 05:40
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admanb posted:Well... ultimately FFXIV did pass WoW by making a better WoW. 2.0 was explicitly built on the foundation of what WoW defined as a "good MMO." The problem with most MMOs that were trying to beat WoW was that they kept making "WoW but more hardcore" and had no end-game content. People left WoW for Age of Conan in droves, but came back a week later because they either (a) realized they didn't want to play on a FFA PvP server 100% of the time or (b) got to max level and realized there was nothing to do but FFA PvP. Note FFXIV also did something important: it made all of the content barring a few raids soloable. You can play the game essentially as a regular FF game if you want, only dealing with other players on the handful of storyline instances before you get to endgame raiding content. You don't have to grind, the main storyline quests give enough xp to more than max out a class or two.
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