OK. These two make sense, and clarify it for me. I started WoW knowing what server to be on because of the thread here. Once I hit 80 (with much help from SDMB members), I found a number of friendly people to play and raid with, and am friends with many more of them now. WoW (and other MMOs) are primarily social games, and I think it’s unfair to judge them without remembering that.
I’ll certainly agree with this: WoW is not a particularly fun game to play at max-level by yourself.
I don’t think anyone’s trying to say that it’s not financially successful. Obviously, it is. And a lot of people like it. Awesome.
That said, WoW sucks. Pointless, monotonous leveling. Who cares? Give me a an old-school limited-resources 4v4 (or whatever) sandbox battle. Much more entertaining.
I noticed that a lot of the reason people hate WoW are exactly the reasons people play WoW: it’s a social game. You play with other people, and you have to live with them good bad and ugly. Even Guild- Wars lovers have far less interaaction and much more single-player-ness. It’s more of a single-player game which happens to have some multiplayer added on. Sure, it’s fun, but they can’t really wreck your day or make it much brighter.
WoW is not that way, and that’s not for everyone, and it’s not for everyone all the time.
I still remember the CPU-killer technique, where you spammed your most graphics-crushing ability… again and again and again. You can’t fight when your computer has melted into a spoking pile of tocix waste, after all.
That’s part of it, but it isn’t all of it.
Movement sucks. You can’t log in and get a group all into the same place easily. You can take twenty minutes just to get your team all at the dungeon door. For a social GAME that’s a big deal. If I’m going to chat with my buddies, I have Twitter.
There is a huge “shopping and acquiring” component. Not having the gear makes a huge difference in the game, and acquiring the gear can be a pain in the butt. “Run this dungeon over and over again until it drops and hope you win the roll when it does.”
Crafting is optional. But it can suck up huge amounts of time (and money) for relatively little gain. As can gathering.
Mounts remain too expensive. Which is why crafting and gathering really aren’t optional. Unless you are going to speculate on the auction house.
Many of the dungeons/raids/quests are just time consuming. Some folks (like me) want a game that has a 20 minute at a time commitment. Its HARD in WoW to even solo in twenty minute increments. And since it takes that long to get your group together before you get to the dungeon (especially in early levels or without a Mage), the social aspect gets lost almost completely for the really casual player.
I’m left wondering when you last played WoW, as many of your annoyances have been changed since I started playing (around 3 years ago now - basically the start of the last expansion).
You can now group up and enter a queue for the dungeon you want (or a random one), and be ported there. The only limitation is that you have found the entrance before. If you are missing a person the queue system will find one for you and off you go.
This is still somewhat true. Improving your character through gear is certainly part of the game. The aforementioned queue system makes the “run it over and over” part much easier, and now much gear can be purchased for generic currencies rather than waiting for rare boss drops.
Still quite true. And, as you said, highly optional for a casual player.
All mounts are way, way cheaper than they used to be. Even flying ones. You can literally earn enough gold in 2 hours to buy a flying mount, only from solo questing.
As I said, the porting makes mage’s somewhat obsolete (at least for dungeons). Most of the 5-man dungeons in Wrath were around 30 minutes. I’ve only done one so far in Cataclysm and it took about 45, with us having never been there and wiping a few times.
Raids, of course, take more than 20 minutes - although the 5-boss one during Wrath only took about 45 minutes once you had learned the fights. Cataclysm is going with more, shorter raids, to address the exact problem you mention.
In the end, whether you enjoy a game or not is an extremely personal thing, and I know I come off like a major fan-boy, but I just wanted you to know that many of these things had changed dramatically.
I stopped playing about three weeks ago. You are right, life has MUCH improved - my previous run at it was about two years ago. But all those things still stand as far inferior compared to CoHs, my normal MMO.
And yet, CoH, by its very nature, is a far narrower game. I’m not questioning your choice: if it’s right for you, it is. But that does not mean it’s the better game.
I’m not saying it is. Nor am I saying that WoW is a better game than CoH. I’m saying that the features of WoW I highlighted are annoying things that don’t fit my play style, which CoH to some extent overcomes.
Aion had a really cool idea about transferring the stats of your best armor to the skin of whatever armor you like. Not the greatest game but they had some cool ideas.
I’m not saying it is. Nor am I saying that WoW is a better game than CoH. I’m saying that the features of WoW I highlighted are annoying things that don’t fit my play style, which CoH to some extent overcomes. Where WoW is deep are areas I’m not that interested in swimming.
Or type, either, apparently. 