Explain various MMOs to me.

The Game Room
21

Ah yes, my “favorite” aspect: whiny and stupid

players.

It’s everywhere. I didn’t say it, but this is probably why I cancelled several accounts over the years. I’m no tactical genius, but I damn well pay attention and bark out orders, and I expect people to do them, because I know what I’m doing, and I’ve played every darn near every class.

FF11: When the White Mage won’t listen to me when I f**** tell her not to sit and rest five feat from the yagudo, I get PO’d. I wanted to like that game, but I hated the people in it.

I often do a lot of damage (oh, how the Wizard was ticked I out-damaged him as a Hunter at level 50!), but I work on group survivability. If you don’t let me pull aggro we die. (Let’s face it: you’re an idiot and you can’t do it. Ever. I have been in a group with a good puller precisely once, ever, unless I was doing it.) And if I say we’re dead and tell you to flee while I take aggro, F**** listen to me! No, we are not going to kill those 10 elites (WOW), those 5 Yagudo warriors (FF11, those - eh, you get the idea. So let me take the hits and either die or Feign Death or whatever and you can rez me later. Better all around. But they never, ever do this. They just come up and start wailing and pulling aggro left and right until we all die, and then we have to restart. At which point I leave, because we ain’t never getting down to the bottom.
Also: I hate playing mono=healers. But you can have a class which does just as well as a healer six ways from sunday, and they will not take you. MMORPG’ers can’t seem to understand that there are things other than Tank, DPS, or Heal.

Example: Everquest 2

I was playing a Shaman. This is a great class. They can heal decently, but their big thing is the Wards. Think of it as a Hit Point buffer, which takes damage before you do. On my own I was almost exactly the same as a cleric, just adding buffers instead of health (this is better at the start of combat but got worse in long fights).

But OOOOOO! When combined with a Cleric, we were unstoppable. I put up wards before battle and as people started taking damage, which gave the healer time to always keep them in the pink. When she needed a minute, I could pop the group ward and hold the line. If needed to pop a big ward on the tank, I knew she would keep the others from kakking it off general area damage.

However, people DID NOT GET IT. Why U n07 c13r1c, you’re not a cleric? FU n00b. L0l that nt h0w u p1y.

Idiots.

Then in WoW. Shaman are arguably the single most baddd(ddddddddddddddd) class around. They can do, depending on spec, massive single-target massacres, or awesome buffing, or great healing.

Guess which one is in demand and which one nobody else touches? Or Shadow Priests are incredibly fun and useful, even in raids. But just try playing one and see how many invites you get. Yeah, maybe you get someone who knows their stuff, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Fighter type? Learn the tank, since that’s all anyone wants. Unlress you’re a Paladin, in which case you could also heal! :rolleyes:

22

As much as I want to love TR, I have to agree with this assessment. The replay value is not high, either. There’s not enough diverse content, and some of the missions are so grueling that when I think about redoing them with a different character I want to cry. I got to level 33, then let it go.

Yes, yes, and yes. I’ve seen games where you can be a pyromancer, hydromancer, aeromancer, and ten other -mancers, but when you actually look at the spell lists, you see they’re all exactly the same spells with the same effects. Very depressing. In City of Heroes, a lot of work has gone into making each set distinct from the others. A Fire blaster plays very differently from an Ice blaster, and a Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation blaster plays very differently from a Fire Blast/Devices blaster. You could max out your character slots on one server just from trying all the different combinations of a single Archetype. I’ve been playing for 10 months now, which is the longest I’ve been on any single MMO with the exception of Planetside, and I’m nowhere near tired of it yet. I fully expect to get at least two years of enjoyment out of the game before I’m sick of it.

23

People really do miss the great class combos. My main is a frost mage (everyone wants fire for groups) and my top alt is a 67 shadow priest. You put my shadow priest in with a competent warlock, and the damage we’ll deal together is insane! And we can stay alive, too. It’s fun to play, but nobody wants to give up two slots in a 5-man for a warlock and a shadow priest.

24

bolding mine. that’s what friends and guilds are for! trust me, you don’t want to join a pug group with that combo. even a decent tank will have his hands full keeping aggro from crazy dps meter hoggers.

25

I can give a positive for Lotro. Lord of the rings online.

First of all, most of the sword and sorcery genre is derivative of Tolkein, so why not just use the original :slight_smile: Although they did only license the Lord of the Rings material, not the Silmarillion so some die hard fans do miss the extra depth that would provide.

It is a fairly adult crowd, particularly on my server(Silverlode). They aimed for a niche of players and I think they hit it pretty well. There were a few of the PowerG@m4r type around at the beginning, but they blew through the whole thing in a couple months, did the big bad guy(a dragon at the time). There was nothing left for them to do, and they were done with the game and moved on, leaving a more casual friendly crowd. They are trying to keep a base of players as they slowly and carefully create the whole Lord of the rings realm, which is a schedule for 2014 or so I have heard. So far we are just up to Rivendell, with Moria and Lorien comming in a big expansion in Nov.

They have done a failry good job of class balancing without twinking or super powering. For example there was a time after the beginning where Guardians(Tankiest Tanks) were feeling left out, and unneeded. Champs and Captains(hybrid tanks) were able to tank things fine, and with their extra abilities they were prefered. Rather than a bunch of class adjustments they started tuning the newer areas so that a real tank was enough of a help over a hybrid tank, that there was demand again. They have done a good job of giving each class valuable skills unique abilities that aresometimes required, without leaving anybody out or getting to arbitrary about forcing it.

There is a PVP element but it isn’t huge. I’d say about 70% of the people never go PVP, 20% do sometimes, and 10% are primarily PVP, but I might be a bit skewed based on my kin.
It is a few zones where people take their normal hero characters and fight other toons that are evil(orc, spiders) that only exist in the PVP(or freep vs creep) zones. They pretty much flat out said that they arn’t making PVP a priority, because its not thier vision.

Along with levels there are deeds. Deeds are accomplishments such as visting certain places, or killing x number of mob. Each has ranks, and depending on class you usually focus on the deeds to rank in the stats you are going to need. It can get pretty grindy to be honest. But a level 50 with no deeds done, is seriously weaker than a fully deeded 50 of the same class.

The carfting system takes a good bit of time, but most everybody who plays gets into it, even though there really isn’t much money to be made these days. The best stuff is about equal between top-crafted crits, and raid gear, and zone sets(these take a bit of repetition in high end zones to get, but not as much time per session as a true raid, just more sessions. Crafting is more about a sence of accomplishment and having fun, rather than making stuff no one else can. Gathering mats for crafting the high levels is a huge grind however.

It is a lot of fun, though I am taking a break to try Warhammer before Moria comes out, but when it does I am back there full time. Like I said it is purposly designed to be paced for adults and casuals to have fun for a long time. And the graphics are great, and lag hasn’t been a problem for me for months, while Warhammer has horrible bad nastly unplayable lag on my same system.

Mostly they have done, in my opinion, a great job of making the Player actions and plot seem relevant to the activity of the Lord of the Rings story, without stepping on existing things, like throwing someone into the fellowship as unexplained badass. That was my biggest worry before it came out. Tolkein was kind enough to leave open ended things around the main story that the players can have fun doing.

It’s hard to figure out what to say, but let me know if ya got other questions.

26

I can only speak for WoW (I tried City of Heroes briefly but it didn’t grab me, and Age of Conan even more briefly and I hated it, while I’ve been playing WoW pretty much nonstop since October '06). Here are my impressions:

WoW is huge. As other posters have pointed out, the world is enormous and detailed and full of all sorts of cool things, some of which are only there because they’re cool. The world has rich lore that you uncover a little at a time as you level up. I play on an RP server, so the whole lore thing is important to me.

If you’re anything like me, your priorities will change as you level up. When I first started playing (I had a Night Elf hunter who was replaced by a human rogue when I convinced the spouse to play with me), I heard about this mysterious “raiding” thing and knew I didn’t want anything to do with it. I’m usually fairly anti-social (not unpleasant, I just usually prefer doing things alone or with a friend) so I didn’t think anything that required getting together with (at the time) 39 other people was ever going to appeal to me. So I leveled up, I had no idea what I was doing, I made terrible gear decisions (‘that sword looks really cool! Who cares if the stats are all wrong for me!’) and I got through the first 60 levels while having a lot of fun, doing a lot of quests, and killing a lot of mobs.

Then Burning Crusade (expansion) came out, I discovered blood elves and the Horde, and everything changed. For one thing, leveling was faster because I knew the game by then. I paid more attention to my gear (my blood elf is a mage) and to being effective. I got to level 70 at a much faster pace, and I joined a raiding guild.

And suddenly, the soloing roleplayer became a hardcore raider. I couldn’t believe how much of a rush raiding was, when done with a group of people who are mature and who know what they’re doing. Coordinating 25 people (the raids went down from 40 to 25 in BC) in encounters where, if one person screwed up, didn’t pay attention, or didn’t do their job the raid would wipe, was fantastic. It wasn’t about the gear (that was nice too, but that wasn’t the pull), but about the synergy.

Some people (a lot of people, likely) don’t become hardcore raiders. Some become hardcore PvPers, or do Arena PvP. Some spend all their time leveling to 70 and then hanging around the major cities chatting with their friends. Some roleplay. Some dabble. Some explore. There are so many things to do in this game that it’s just amazing. Every once in awhile I marvel at just how complex it is, compared to the games I used to play when I was a kid/teenager. I couldn’t even contemplate something like this back then.

Does it have its problems? Sure. For one thing, it’s addictive. Very addictive. Once you get sucked in, it’s hard to get out again. I don’t recommend it (or any MMORPG, really) for anyone who has a lot of real-life responsibilities like school, demanding jobs, or small children, unless they don’t have an addictive personality. But, that said, it’s also a ready source of people to talk to any time of the day or night, and a very good way to save money (it costs $15.00 a month, but I’ve saved many times that by playing instead of getting bored and going shopping).

I think a lot of whether an individual ends up enjoying WoW (or another MMORPG) is the people they meet/interact with. I doubt I would have enjoyed WoW as much if I’d been surrounded by nothing but immature kids/teens, and hadn’t hooked up with my 18+, fun but serious-about-getting-things-done guild. There’s a lot of drama, a lot of stupidity, and a lot of crap you have to sort through. But to me, especially if you find your niche, it’s worth it.

27

If played well, though, a shadow priest and warlock can play off of each other, hold back when they need to, and crank it up full blast at the end of the battle. If they could feign death, they’d be unstoppable.

28

ONline games seem to come in to 2 flavors…PvE (Player vs environment) orientated and PvP (player vs player) orientated.

I find the PvE games boring. There is level grinding and collecting of items to make you more powerful. Some of these games offer some PvP but it is not ‘central’ to the game. Games in this category include City of Heroes/City of Villians, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online etc.

PvP games are more fun, IMO…but tend to be ‘twitchfests’…short lives with little ‘point’. Games that have a persistant world tend also to not let you ‘win’…one side can not be totally defeated.

2 games that I play that I think actually have ‘something’:

Eve Online - Has PvE and PvP in a persistant world. No level grind as you learn skills ‘in real time’ so basement dwellers can’t amass huge power just by playing 20 hours per day. Has an economy. I like this game but it is still missing ‘something’ and not sure what it is.

WWII-Online - My favorite…ben playing it for years. No economy…no ‘levels’…PURE PvP. A newb of 2 minutes can kill a vet of several years as it uses realistic physics. Has tanks, planes, infantry, AT guns etc in a persistant world. Better yet, you are allowed to ‘win’…once a side wins the game is reset and a new one begins. Campaigns last from several days to months depending.

I suggest checking out the last 2…but YMMV.