If you don't mind me asking did you play WoW alone or with people you know?
I figure I should answer this first. Most of the people I know are casual gamers, if they game at all. I'm the only one that played MMOs for more than a few days.
You choose a side based on which group you prefer playing with.
But, see, this is what I was getting at. I chose Horde in WOW because I liked that side better for lore reasons. I loved the idea of playing an Orc Hunter, riding on a direwolf in Durotar, clearing out dangerous areas with my bow or gun for future Orc expansion. But that choice did nothing to educate me on what guilds were decent. And it's not like I didn't ask the server-specific board or even try a few guilds myself. But trying to make an intelligent decision on who I'd like to play with is all but impossible in that environment, IMO. And I just got to the point where I didn't have the patience to keep trying new guilds.
This is why in EVE, since there was a PA corp to join, that became my group. Period. I would never have gotten back into the game if Merch were not available, and I would probably not play EVE if I couldn't be in GoonSwarm at this point.
*snip*
This has not been my EVE experience in Merch/GoonSwarm at all, and WoW guild leaders like that are just being douches.
But, to be fair, a lot of the time a group in a game will have as its purpose getting "big" or "meta" things done, and you need to be a little organized and "rig" the game for that stuff to work out. It's a mechanics issue.
*snip*
Good people can be found in the more main-stream games though - even WoW. Especially with these forums as a starting point.
Actually, I did join MerchI, and was in for several months. It just wasn't very rewarding, for several reasons, not all MerchI related:
1. EVE's innate learning curve...or wall. It's hard to figure out how to be useful in any capacity at the beginning. I'm also not fond of tackling.
2. Lack of a big picture summary. The information was on the MerchI boards, but it was never cohesive. I knew that, for a time, we were allied with the Goons, before, apparently, becoming swallowed by them. I knew that Rath was the CEO, and that we were at war with BoB. That was about it. It was basically just "Hur hur, BoB sucks, let's go fuck with them" from my point of view. Not exactly compelling. For someone on the low end of the totem pole, MerchI was more of a vague idea than anything else. That, and a place to get free skill books and frigate equipment.
3. Lack of involvement from my end. I just couldn't join the group during the 'primetime' of operation. Like I said before, my hours are a bit weird, so I can't play after 5:30 PM EST. That pretty much fucked me over for any real, in-game interaction with people.
4. As a game, EVE just isn't much fun. I like the graphics, I like owning a ship, but I hate the combat. I hate the complete lack of somewhat entertaining solo play. I hate mining. I hate that you can't queue skills, or log into the EVE site to train new skills, or have an alt that can learn skills concurrently with your main. I hate that, apparently, there's no real viable way to play a Han Solo type character. I wanted to play a smuggler, running illegal goods from place to place while avoiding CONCORD with my wits and flying ability. From what I experienced, that's not really possible.
I do rely on the PA forums to find people to play with, which is why I joined MerchI to begin with. I also played with a few in Warhawk, and would love to play with more if I get Gears 2 or Resistance 2 for X-mas.
If you don't have a clone or extra ships where you just died. There no fucking reason to ever have a clone 15 jumps away from where you might die. And like I said, you can have replacement ships line up to go and everything with zero downtime, and who said you had to return to where you were?
Um, some of us PvP'd actively, as some sort of pirate perhaps. By being one of these pirates we often got killed 10-20 jumps away from where we had camp set up. There was no "oh new clone jump in a new 1 billion isk T2 ship and look a new target! pew pew!". I fought exclusively in Sacrileges with full T2 gear. Average cost once fully rigged up and such was approx 250 million isk...every time I died, I lost a quarter billion along with an average of 2 hours getting a new ship moved down from empire and set back up (provided I didn't use that time before, moving two down).
It just hit me one day "what the hell kind of time sink is this?" I was chasing some BS down 12 jumps out from where I found him, 2 friends in recons right behind me, I jumped into the 13th jump, BS was sitting there with a few friends...
*Lock*
*Scram*
*BOOM* 250 mil gone for me
*BOOM* 200 mil gone for my friend in the pimped out falcon
*BOOM* 175 mil gone for my friend in the pilgrim
Me: "Hey guys, THAT WAS FUN, whose going to log in the alt to move new ships and mods down for us?" (was some heavy sarcasm in this on TS)
Friend: "Not me man, I quit, that shit was it...I am done, sick and tired of that shit"
Friend: "Me to, I am out, bye bye Eve"
Mind you, we played for about 3 years each, did every aspect of eve, and had a small 4 man corp (+ cap alts and trade alts, 4 PEOPLE corp) where we got some 700 kills in one month, just logging in each night buzzing around and killing some people, we almost never gate camped either.
I love Eve, but the fact that you can spend HOURS getting something set up, or move to a new place and in 15 seconds get sent back and all your effort is lost? Shit gets old. I like to play games, not work at them.
Okay, now that I've responded to everything I wanted to, I want to say something else on what I look for in a multiplayer game and where most MMORPG's have totally failed me:
The bizarre and/or fucked up hilarious shit happening randomly factor. For example when I used to get LAN games going, this primarily dictated the choice of game (along with system requirements and technical issues, fuck PC gaming seriously). The line-up usually looked like Starcraft (if you can get a group that won't play it Sim City style), Myth 2, and Nox. If you draw a venn diagram with hilarious games intersecting with easy to set up, low-req, cross-platform LAN games, that's pretty much what's left.
So basically when I play a multiplayer video game, I'm looking for a dynamic, generally joyful experience to share with my friends. The absolute epitome of this was Nox, a top-down fantasy action game withfast-paced explosive action, three classes (warrior, wizard, conjurer), five hotkeys, a book full of spells, and lots of opportunities to be creative. Multiplayer had all the standard modes that are familiar from FPS's like deathmatch or ctf.
When playing this game as one of the caster classes, you have a "trap" ability - something that you can put any three spells in and let loose. (A wizard has literal "traps" - hard to see things that are stationary on the ground, and you can be a total bitch by hiding them behind doors or standing on one while invisible and casting "Swap location" on somebody running by. Whereas a conjurer has fewer spells, but can summon creatures, and his traps are little imp-like things called "bombers" that chase people.)
So join this ability system with a surprisingly-robust physics and line of sight engine, and you have a game that feels like you have just stepped into a world of infinite possibility, where every hilarious thing is happening at once, and where you can choose to be a prick and go around using insta-kill moves or just try to annoy everyone as much possible by summoning bombers with confuse, poison, and blink in them (make it so they can't run in a straight line, poison them, then teleport them at random). And that's to say nothing of items.
(Warriors were just warriors.)
I don't think Nox was balanced at all, but it sure was fun. It felt like you could do anything and that it might actually work (e.g. snipe someone out a window with a bow and arrow).
Tbqh when people describe classic UO, Nox is what I am reminded, and no MMORPG currently on the market comes close to duplicating this feeling (even though I would think the genre would be the perfect opportunity to duplicate this feeling) except possibly EVE, which has its own flaws, though I enjoy what the game offers in this respect and the group of people I play with well enough to remain an on-and-off player.
I was chasing some BS down 12 jumps out from where I found him, 2 friends in recons right behind me, I jumped into the 13th jump, BS was sitting there with a few friends...
*Lock*
*Scram*
*BOOM* 250 mil gone for me
*BOOM* 200 mil gone for my friend in the pimped out falcon
*BOOM* 175 mil gone for my friend in the pilgrim
This is called rolling the dice. I still enjoy it quite a bit tbqh. If I'm the guy that got killed, the other guys sure had a lot of fun setting up the trap and laughing at how dumb I was to get caught in it, and next time I'll be the one with the trap so vOv.
Also notice how no other MMORPG has these kinds of stories.
I love Eve, but the fact that you can spend HOURS getting something set up, or move to a new place and in 15 seconds get sent back and all your effort is lost? Shit gets old. I like to play games, not work at them.
Yes I admit the time involved is why I stop playing EVE for months. Still, I don't mind losing my shit when it could just have easily been the other guy if I were a little better at the game. And I don't really get the "never gonna come back to this shit!" attitude a lot of people have with games, I just play whatever I feel like and if it's something I quit in a huff three months ago so be it.
In general, I guess I am still willing to put up with EVE's time sink mechanics to get what it offers that no other game really does. For example, in goonswarm at the moment we have a nice player-created shipping service that you can use to save the hassle of moving everything around yourself, or work for if you fly a freighter and need isk. Hell, one could probably use this to turn a profit doing empire -> 0.0 importing with half the usual effort. Sometimes, this kind of thing is just really exciting to me, shitty boring game mechanics be damned. I don't necessarily mind playing spreadsheets online if, by my own cleverness with spreadsheets, I can get ahead.
If you don't mind me asking did you play WoW alone or with people you know? I find in all the mmo's I have played that this above all decides if the game is good or bad. Really all games with online in general. Personally Counter Strike is junk imo. Why? I tend to prefer deathmatch games in fps's for one, but bigger then this NONE of my friends at Counter Strikes hayday played it. We were into Starcraft WC3 Diablo 2 mostly which also goes a long way to why I like WoW. It's really about finding games you have a good time with your friends in no matter how good bad or otherwise it is.
I was able to get an okay group about 25% of the time. A friend sent me the trial invite but the jackass never played with me. Grouping seemed primarily to make the game less wrist-slittingly tedious (I like how everyone calls WoW a solo game when motherfucking EVE online is less painful to solo). It didn't make the quest system less immersion-breaking, the monsters any smarter, the gameplay any more exciting, or let me leave on mark on a virtual world.
Anyway, I wanna fucking stop defending EVE because we have another topic for that. If you want to rebut me, post in the general EVE discussion thread. This is sort of my last word on the subject:
Suffice to say I am of the opinion that all the boring time sink mechanics and the real-asset loss mechanics, which all suck for PvE and earning money (though I like how it's a game where time is worth real money), make the game one of the most exciting PvP games I've ever played. Warping around is a wait mechanic when you are just ratting, but when you are in a fight, that wait mechanic and whether you minimized it by getting aligned etc can be an important deciding factor in the outcome.
Also, I like that I don't have to be married to it to progress i.e. the skill system. That's pretty big if I'm going to be paying by the month. With a game like WoW I feel like I need to play all the time to get my money's worth.
Edit: Okay my brief response to nightslyr will be my last word
But, see, this is what I was getting at. I chose Horde in WOW because I liked that side better for lore reasons. I loved the idea of playing an Orc Hunter, riding on a direwolf in Durotar, clearing out dangerous areas with my bow or gun for future Orc expansion. But that choice did nothing to educate me on what guilds were decent. And it's not like I didn't ask the server-specific board or even try a few guilds myself. But trying to make an intelligent decision on who I'd like to play with is all but impossible in that environment, IMO. And I just got to the point where I didn't have the patience to keep trying new guilds.
Just pointing out that imagining the kind of sense of adventure you are talking about seems really wishful thinking with WoW, which is why I started this topic in the first place.
Actually, I did join MerchI, and was in for several months. It just wasn't very rewarding, for several reasons, not all MerchI related:
1. EVE's innate learning curve...or wall. It's hard to figure out how to be useful in any capacity at the beginning. I'm also not fond of tackling.
Not liking the gameplay is fair, and EVE is a bitch to learn. On the flip side, it means there is always something new to learn.
2. Lack of a big picture summary. The information was on the MerchI boards, but it was never cohesive. I knew that, for a time, we were allied with the Goons, before, apparently, becoming swallowed by them. I knew that Rath was the CEO, and that we were at war with BoB. That was about it. It was basically just "Hur hur, BoB sucks, let's go fuck with them" from my point of view. Not exactly compelling. For someone on the low end of the totem pole, MerchI was more of a vague idea than anything else. That, and a place to get free skill books and frigate equipment.
For me, "hurr BoB sucks" was actually pretty compelling since I don't get to do that any other game.
We rely pretty heavily on goonswarm resources to educate our newbies though (but those are quite good).
3. Lack of involvement from my end. I just couldn't join the group during the 'primetime' of operation. Like I said before, my hours are a bit weird, so I can't play after 5:30 PM EST. That pretty much fucked me over for any real, in-game interaction with people.
This would be, in general, the reason you had no fun. Most of the stuff you are lamenting - learning curve, no big picture - was taken care of for me by the stimulating corp chat conversation and the goonfleet wiki.
4. As a game, EVE just isn't much fun. I like the graphics, I like owning a ship, but I hate the combat. I hate the complete lack of somewhat entertaining solo play. I hate mining. I hate that you can't queue skills, or log into the EVE site to train new skills, or have an alt that can learn skills concurrently with your main. I hate that, apparently, there's no real viable way to play a Han Solo type character. I wanted to play a smuggler, running illegal goods from place to place while avoiding CONCORD with my wits and flying ability. From what I experienced, that's not really possible.
Not liking the game is fair. For me, I actually do like the combat and sandbox aspects, and the way its progression mechanics differ from other games, enough to put up with all the other shit.
I dunno what kind of game mechanic you want to be Han Solo. Just fly some cargo around 0.0, that's a pretty good Han Solo experience. I used to do some pretty risky shit on a weekly basis importing stuff from Empire. I can't imagine a way in which the game could somehow provide you with the risk all on its own and not have the experience be a joke.
For what it's worth, this thread has motivated me to jump back into Ultima Online on a private shard. Never really played it a lot, but it was a memorable experience from the little I did.
ttvp on
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INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
If you don't have a clone or extra ships where you just died. There no fucking reason to ever have a clone 15 jumps away from where you might die. And like I said, you can have replacement ships line up to go and everything with zero downtime, and who said you had to return to where you were?
In WoW there's just no good choice. Run forever back to your corpse, or resurrect and pay a penalty.
EVE was all about contingency planning, WoW....not so much planning....some might even say none at all
once, i got yelled at for 'wasting' a Divine Intervention.
For what it's worth, this thread has motivated me to jump back into Ultima Online on a private shard. Never really played it a lot, but it was a memorable experience from the little I did.
For what it's worth, this thread has motivated me to jump back into Ultima Online on a private shard. Never really played it a lot, but it was a memorable experience from the little I did.
How does this experience work? Is it worth doing?
Its pretty straightforward. Every now and then i get an urge to play UO again, and do the private shard thing. Each shard tends to have their own instructions on how its done, but its usually as simple as creating a login and modifying a txt file.
If you're just after a touch of nostalgia, then yeah its well worth doing. Also, theres a lot of shards with vastly modified rulesets, which can be interesting.
I macro'd most of the time in order to raise all my skills so I had a chance of living in PvP only to be attacked and killed by a dexxer or poison archer and lose all of my armor and shit and then forcing me to get that stuff back by raising my blacksmithing alt only for her to die all the time and lose the ore she carried.
edit: oh and going into town and having my shit stolen out of my pack without me noticing at all.
Fun!
I don't mind some consequences when you die, but losing all of your shit when you die and not being able to do a damned thing about it because they have a perfect build is not what I consider a good time. I was a macer with a shield and heavy armor, yet I still got raped in the ass by dexxers, poison and mages.
Nox was awesome. For a long time I would load it up and just play the single player campigns again since they were awesome. Fuck the mage tower as a warrior, that place was nuts. An mmo with that type of freedom, fun gameplay and general madhouse feeling would probably hook me for ages. UO never quiet met the nutty combat and random shit you did in Nox.
I had a moment of why I play WoW still last night. Wrath has really made the game into what I think it should of been when it came out. Every quest I do has a purpose or reason to it. Its not go collect these green stones cause they are shiny, no its go collect these green stones so I can use them to make plague virals to carry this biological warfare weapon you have helped create and use it on the undead army that is attacking us. If it works great, and don't worry about the collateral damage. But the real kicker is the new battleground. Strand of the Ancients is playing Warcraft for me. I am attacking a base, I am knocking down doors using Horde demolishers, blowing up Alliance tanks and in general just having a damn good time fight a war with artillery exploding, enemies casting spells and protecting a single objective. Lake Wintergrasp is like that as well with the tanks and catapults and having to attack a bases doors and able to destroy buildings and and such. It is a what WoW should of been from the start. I am doing quest that change the world around me, have a single forward reaching goal and I am fighting in pvp that is awesome and feels like a real battle.
I think all an MMO needs to do is make you feel included. WoW has finally done this for me. And with my guildies on vent last night that felt the same way. DAoC was able to do it in RvR, WoW is doing it with pve now. Just wish War actually made me feel proud of my side and its community the way DAoC did. But I think that also had to do with in DAoC as you leveled you group with the same people all the way through and you knew them before you ever hit the battlefield.
But if you have fun, then keep playing. Gonna stop ranting now.
I macro'd most of the time in order to raise all my skills so I had a chance of living in PvP only to be attacked and killed by a dexxer or poison archer and lose all of my armor and shit and then forcing me to get that stuff back by raising my blacksmithing alt only for her to die all the time and lose the ore she carried.
edit: oh and going into town and having my shit stolen out of my pack without me noticing at all.
Fun!
I don't mind some consequences when you die, but losing all of your shit when you die and not being able to do a damned thing about it because they have a perfect build is not what I consider a good time. I was a macer with a shield and heavy armor, yet I still got raped in the ass by dexxers, poison and mages.
Yeah. I macro'd up pretty much everything I could when I could.
fuck the grind if I can program some mouse clicks...
Posts
I figure I should answer this first. Most of the people I know are casual gamers, if they game at all. I'm the only one that played MMOs for more than a few days.
But, see, this is what I was getting at. I chose Horde in WOW because I liked that side better for lore reasons. I loved the idea of playing an Orc Hunter, riding on a direwolf in Durotar, clearing out dangerous areas with my bow or gun for future Orc expansion. But that choice did nothing to educate me on what guilds were decent. And it's not like I didn't ask the server-specific board or even try a few guilds myself. But trying to make an intelligent decision on who I'd like to play with is all but impossible in that environment, IMO. And I just got to the point where I didn't have the patience to keep trying new guilds.
*snip*
*snip*
Actually, I did join MerchI, and was in for several months. It just wasn't very rewarding, for several reasons, not all MerchI related:
1. EVE's innate learning curve...or wall. It's hard to figure out how to be useful in any capacity at the beginning. I'm also not fond of tackling.
2. Lack of a big picture summary. The information was on the MerchI boards, but it was never cohesive. I knew that, for a time, we were allied with the Goons, before, apparently, becoming swallowed by them. I knew that Rath was the CEO, and that we were at war with BoB. That was about it. It was basically just "Hur hur, BoB sucks, let's go fuck with them" from my point of view. Not exactly compelling. For someone on the low end of the totem pole, MerchI was more of a vague idea than anything else. That, and a place to get free skill books and frigate equipment.
3. Lack of involvement from my end. I just couldn't join the group during the 'primetime' of operation. Like I said before, my hours are a bit weird, so I can't play after 5:30 PM EST. That pretty much fucked me over for any real, in-game interaction with people.
4. As a game, EVE just isn't much fun. I like the graphics, I like owning a ship, but I hate the combat. I hate the complete lack of somewhat entertaining solo play. I hate mining. I hate that you can't queue skills, or log into the EVE site to train new skills, or have an alt that can learn skills concurrently with your main. I hate that, apparently, there's no real viable way to play a Han Solo type character. I wanted to play a smuggler, running illegal goods from place to place while avoiding CONCORD with my wits and flying ability. From what I experienced, that's not really possible.
I do rely on the PA forums to find people to play with, which is why I joined MerchI to begin with. I also played with a few in Warhawk, and would love to play with more if I get Gears 2 or Resistance 2 for X-mas.
Um, some of us PvP'd actively, as some sort of pirate perhaps. By being one of these pirates we often got killed 10-20 jumps away from where we had camp set up. There was no "oh new clone jump in a new 1 billion isk T2 ship and look a new target! pew pew!". I fought exclusively in Sacrileges with full T2 gear. Average cost once fully rigged up and such was approx 250 million isk...every time I died, I lost a quarter billion along with an average of 2 hours getting a new ship moved down from empire and set back up (provided I didn't use that time before, moving two down).
It just hit me one day "what the hell kind of time sink is this?" I was chasing some BS down 12 jumps out from where I found him, 2 friends in recons right behind me, I jumped into the 13th jump, BS was sitting there with a few friends...
*Lock*
*Scram*
*BOOM* 250 mil gone for me
*BOOM* 200 mil gone for my friend in the pimped out falcon
*BOOM* 175 mil gone for my friend in the pilgrim
Me: "Hey guys, THAT WAS FUN, whose going to log in the alt to move new ships and mods down for us?" (was some heavy sarcasm in this on TS)
Friend: "Not me man, I quit, that shit was it...I am done, sick and tired of that shit"
Friend: "Me to, I am out, bye bye Eve"
Mind you, we played for about 3 years each, did every aspect of eve, and had a small 4 man corp (+ cap alts and trade alts, 4 PEOPLE corp) where we got some 700 kills in one month, just logging in each night buzzing around and killing some people, we almost never gate camped either.
I love Eve, but the fact that you can spend HOURS getting something set up, or move to a new place and in 15 seconds get sent back and all your effort is lost? Shit gets old. I like to play games, not work at them.
The bizarre and/or fucked up hilarious shit happening randomly factor. For example when I used to get LAN games going, this primarily dictated the choice of game (along with system requirements and technical issues, fuck PC gaming seriously). The line-up usually looked like Starcraft (if you can get a group that won't play it Sim City style), Myth 2, and Nox. If you draw a venn diagram with hilarious games intersecting with easy to set up, low-req, cross-platform LAN games, that's pretty much what's left.
So basically when I play a multiplayer video game, I'm looking for a dynamic, generally joyful experience to share with my friends. The absolute epitome of this was Nox, a top-down fantasy action game withfast-paced explosive action, three classes (warrior, wizard, conjurer), five hotkeys, a book full of spells, and lots of opportunities to be creative. Multiplayer had all the standard modes that are familiar from FPS's like deathmatch or ctf.
When playing this game as one of the caster classes, you have a "trap" ability - something that you can put any three spells in and let loose. (A wizard has literal "traps" - hard to see things that are stationary on the ground, and you can be a total bitch by hiding them behind doors or standing on one while invisible and casting "Swap location" on somebody running by. Whereas a conjurer has fewer spells, but can summon creatures, and his traps are little imp-like things called "bombers" that chase people.)
So join this ability system with a surprisingly-robust physics and line of sight engine, and you have a game that feels like you have just stepped into a world of infinite possibility, where every hilarious thing is happening at once, and where you can choose to be a prick and go around using insta-kill moves or just try to annoy everyone as much possible by summoning bombers with confuse, poison, and blink in them (make it so they can't run in a straight line, poison them, then teleport them at random). And that's to say nothing of items.
(Warriors were just warriors.)
I don't think Nox was balanced at all, but it sure was fun. It felt like you could do anything and that it might actually work (e.g. snipe someone out a window with a bow and arrow).
Tbqh when people describe classic UO, Nox is what I am reminded, and no MMORPG currently on the market comes close to duplicating this feeling (even though I would think the genre would be the perfect opportunity to duplicate this feeling) except possibly EVE, which has its own flaws, though I enjoy what the game offers in this respect and the group of people I play with well enough to remain an on-and-off player.
This is called rolling the dice.
Also notice how no other MMORPG has these kinds of stories.
Yes I admit the time involved is why I stop playing EVE for months. Still, I don't mind losing my shit when it could just have easily been the other guy if I were a little better at the game. And I don't really get the "never gonna come back to this shit!" attitude a lot of people have with games, I just play whatever I feel like and if it's something I quit in a huff three months ago so be it.
In general, I guess I am still willing to put up with EVE's time sink mechanics to get what it offers that no other game really does. For example, in goonswarm at the moment we have a nice player-created shipping service that you can use to save the hassle of moving everything around yourself, or work for if you fly a freighter and need isk. Hell, one could probably use this to turn a profit doing empire -> 0.0 importing with half the usual effort. Sometimes, this kind of thing is just really exciting to me, shitty boring game mechanics be damned. I don't necessarily mind playing spreadsheets online if, by my own cleverness with spreadsheets, I can get ahead.
Also I am just a sucker for internet spaceships.
I was able to get an okay group about 25% of the time. A friend sent me the trial invite but the jackass never played with me. Grouping seemed primarily to make the game less wrist-slittingly tedious (I like how everyone calls WoW a solo game when motherfucking EVE online is less painful to solo). It didn't make the quest system less immersion-breaking, the monsters any smarter, the gameplay any more exciting, or let me leave on mark on a virtual world.
Anyway, I wanna fucking stop defending EVE because we have another topic for that. If you want to rebut me, post in the general EVE discussion thread. This is sort of my last word on the subject:
Suffice to say I am of the opinion that all the boring time sink mechanics and the real-asset loss mechanics, which all suck for PvE and earning money (though I like how it's a game where time is worth real money), make the game one of the most exciting PvP games I've ever played. Warping around is a wait mechanic when you are just ratting, but when you are in a fight, that wait mechanic and whether you minimized it by getting aligned etc can be an important deciding factor in the outcome.
Also, I like that I don't have to be married to it to progress i.e. the skill system. That's pretty big if I'm going to be paying by the month. With a game like WoW I feel like I need to play all the time to get my money's worth.
Edit: Okay my brief response to nightslyr will be my last word
Just pointing out that imagining the kind of sense of adventure you are talking about seems really wishful thinking with WoW, which is why I started this topic in the first place.
Not liking the gameplay is fair, and EVE is a bitch to learn. On the flip side, it means there is always something new to learn.
For me, "hurr BoB sucks" was actually pretty compelling since I don't get to do that any other game.
We rely pretty heavily on goonswarm resources to educate our newbies though (but those are quite good).
This would be, in general, the reason you had no fun. Most of the stuff you are lamenting - learning curve, no big picture - was taken care of for me by the stimulating corp chat conversation and the goonfleet wiki.
Not liking the game is fair. For me, I actually do like the combat and sandbox aspects, and the way its progression mechanics differ from other games, enough to put up with all the other shit.
I dunno what kind of game mechanic you want to be Han Solo. Just fly some cargo around 0.0, that's a pretty good Han Solo experience. I used to do some pretty risky shit on a weekly basis importing stuff from Empire. I can't imagine a way in which the game could somehow provide you with the risk all on its own and not have the experience be a joke.
once, i got yelled at for 'wasting' a Divine Intervention.
That's kind of like contingency planning.
How does this experience work? Is it worth doing?
Its pretty straightforward. Every now and then i get an urge to play UO again, and do the private shard thing. Each shard tends to have their own instructions on how its done, but its usually as simple as creating a login and modifying a txt file.
If you're just after a touch of nostalgia, then yeah its well worth doing. Also, theres a lot of shards with vastly modified rulesets, which can be interesting.
It was the best ever. Seriously.
I macro'd most of the time in order to raise all my skills so I had a chance of living in PvP only to be attacked and killed by a dexxer or poison archer and lose all of my armor and shit and then forcing me to get that stuff back by raising my blacksmithing alt only for her to die all the time and lose the ore she carried.
edit: oh and going into town and having my shit stolen out of my pack without me noticing at all.
Fun!
I don't mind some consequences when you die, but losing all of your shit when you die and not being able to do a damned thing about it because they have a perfect build is not what I consider a good time. I was a macer with a shield and heavy armor, yet I still got raped in the ass by dexxers, poison and mages.
I had a moment of why I play WoW still last night. Wrath has really made the game into what I think it should of been when it came out. Every quest I do has a purpose or reason to it. Its not go collect these green stones cause they are shiny, no its go collect these green stones so I can use them to make plague virals to carry this biological warfare weapon you have helped create and use it on the undead army that is attacking us. If it works great, and don't worry about the collateral damage. But the real kicker is the new battleground. Strand of the Ancients is playing Warcraft for me. I am attacking a base, I am knocking down doors using Horde demolishers, blowing up Alliance tanks and in general just having a damn good time fight a war with artillery exploding, enemies casting spells and protecting a single objective. Lake Wintergrasp is like that as well with the tanks and catapults and having to attack a bases doors and able to destroy buildings and and such. It is a what WoW should of been from the start. I am doing quest that change the world around me, have a single forward reaching goal and I am fighting in pvp that is awesome and feels like a real battle.
I think all an MMO needs to do is make you feel included. WoW has finally done this for me. And with my guildies on vent last night that felt the same way. DAoC was able to do it in RvR, WoW is doing it with pve now. Just wish War actually made me feel proud of my side and its community the way DAoC did. But I think that also had to do with in DAoC as you leveled you group with the same people all the way through and you knew them before you ever hit the battlefield.
But if you have fun, then keep playing. Gonna stop ranting now.
Fixed.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
fuck the grind if I can program some mouse clicks...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDy-pbci6_g
All druid 10-naxx