It’s like playing Starcraft campaign - and using the cheat codes. It’s one thing to play games that required some sort of higher skill floor. But man, this is an MMORPG.
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WoW and its success has always been defined by its casual nature. If you read and listen to what the original devs were actually shooting for it becomes quickly apparent that they were severely psychologically shackled by the Mariana Trench level of standards the original, trashpile MMOs started the genre off with. Like a grown elephant that will allow itself to be constrained by a rope tied to a post that’s stuck in the ground, because it was raised attached to it and doesn’t understand that it is no longer a calf.
The philosophy behind vanilla’s design was actually amazing, but they failed miserably at executing on that philosophy. But even the attempt yielded an original game that was 100x everything that came before it. EQ and DAoC were embarrassments of game design even by the standards of there being no real precedent to follow. Wrath is much, much closer to what the devs were aiming for than vanilla was.
Most of the tediousness of vanilla had nothing to do with the positive experience it generated. That’s just you romanticizing your nostalgia. There’s a hundred and one things you could have fixed about vanilla that, had that been the case, would have dampened the holistic experience not one iota. It just would have been a better game, and upon returning to it there’d be a lot less “Wow, I forgot how amateurish so much of this was!”
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This isn’t about good and bad - which is what you’re turning it in to. Wrath is much better suited to the current player base for sure. The same argument can be said about Vanilla and Everquest players. Know what Everyquest people I knew said to me when WoW came out? “Hey there’s a game out for noobs like you”. Vanilla WoW was watered down EQ.
While I tried EQ and hated it, I’m not going to sit here and say it’s terrible because it isn’t. If people want to say OG Vanilla is watered down, that’s totally fine because compared to EQ it is. If people want to think Retail is great, that’s cool too.
But, Wrath Babies is a term for a reason. It was the formation of a divide between “new” school and “old school”. I just prefer the “old” school. Tediousness is part of the experience - even the regular old RPG game experience. Even if you play Baldur’s Gate. Games were just made differently. A large part of it was this gradual growing in player power and “coolness”. It wasn’t this instant gratification of being awesome.
Tedious = sense of satisfaction. Streamlined = fun. Fun is empty and hollow but quick. I prefer satisfaction.
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Blizzard should pin this at the top of the discussion board.
Naztor for president
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In fairness, unsubscribing is what happened when Wrath launched. It was the first expansion where as many people were quitting as new players joining.
“It wasn’t hard it was just slow and tedious”
followed immediately by
“If you happened to overpull you would die”
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He said, before using a phrase like “watered down” which has an overtly negative connotation. And Vanilla was not a watered down EQ. It was quite literally less watered down. There was more meat on the vanilla bone than that of EQ, which was hilariously sparse in comparison.
You definitely should be saying it was terrible, because it definitely was. If someone likes a terrible thing that’s whatever, but it’s still terrible when subjected to dispassionate analysis. Some people unironically get off on getting hit in the nuts with a wrench, but we can all still safely say that in general that’s a terrible thing to happen to a person. There are movies that I enjoy but also acknowledge are terrible in an objective sense, even if they happen to please me.
Yes, and that reason is that people are stupid and video game players are incredibly elitist for no reason.
Tediousness is not inherently satisfying. Sometimes achieving satisfying things can mean enduring tedium, but they are not inherently linked. Fun is also not inherently hollow. Grinding a thousand mobs for a title that says you grinded a thousand mobs isn’t satisfying. It’s just dumb. It’s a hundred times dumber to, for example, want to compete in arena, but in order to compete properly you need to keep up with the gear-derived power level (so skill is the deciding factor as much as possible), and to that end you must engage in some absurd grind. Instead of just being a dumb waste of time it’s an intensely frustrating waste of time, and at the end of the rainbow there is no satisfaction. Instead there is just an empty relief at the torture being over.
Conversely, I have spent the last six months playing competitive PvP in Lost Ark. A lot of people don’t enjoy it but I find it actively fun. That being said, the knowledge and skill floor is incredibly high, which means that you are going to eat floor for a good while before you are even capable of feeling like you’re not getting utterly rolled. My road from 0 experience to my peak of Master tier and rank 150 in my region involved a lot of tedium in the form of grinding out practice sessions, and drilling mechanics, and stopping between each game to think about what I did right, and wrong, and to look up the abilities of classes I was having issues with. And then doing all that again, and again, and again. Sometimes I groaned at the idea of holding off my next queue so I could pull up the ability list to refresh my mental checklist of what each ability did, and which abilities had which defenses against which CC tier, and what the common combinations were. That was satisfying. Tedious at times, but the tedium was not contrived. It existed because that was inherent to the nature of the thing that needed be done.
In WoW an equivalent split is between the tedium involved in analog LFG and the tedium involved in raid and guild maintenance. The former is entirely contrived and almost utterly without value, while the latter is neither. I gave my heart and soul running my raid and guild in vanilla, and it drained me, and sometimes I had to do stuff I didn’t want to do and which was tedious, but none of it was contrived. It had to actually be done, and I derived great satisfaction at having done my level best to facilitate the best gaming experience possible for the people who entrusted me to do so. There is zero satisfaction to spamming LFG, or constantly tapping the refresh button on the thin veneer of accessibility that the LFG tool represents, and then throwing my precious life down the drain by having to travel to the dungeon in various states of being alt+tabbed.
You’ll probably take offense to this, but I’m being quite genuine when I say that if you inherently take satisfaction from just anything that you pour time into then you are a very simple person and you shouldn’t be using your satisfaction barometer as a baseline. Like, maybe you really do find it satisfying to have counted every last brick on that silo, but to turn around and say that we should have everyone count silo bricks would be an insane takeaway.
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lol Wow is an MMORPG. It’s not an RTS or some other thing that requires a higher than average skill floor. I know. I played Starcraft:Broodwar competitively as well as attending EVO for Street Fighter 4. Frankly, it required a ton of nothing but non stop training. When it comes to an MMORPG like WoW, satisfaction will come at a cost of some tedium. Otherwise, it’ll become what casual Retail is today - an arcane game.
Offense? Not at all. Time is inherently correlated with satisfaction. Correlated. Is it more satisfying to take a shrub, take care of it, and watch it grow to maturity? Or just spend a ton of money just to plant a mature shrub in your yard.
What about gardening? Or building car/airplane models? Puzzles? All of these are inherently time consuming. Yet they wouldn’t be the same if they weren’t.
Edit: Here’s another one. Freaking KIDS.
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Correlation is not causation. Just because many things which are satisfying include a time component does not mean that investing time is inherently satisfying. You listed a bunch of activities which support this point: none of them include a time component which is contrived and could be omitted but simply isn’t. The time component in all of them is simply a requirement, but is not itself the source of the satisfaction. The satisfaction in all of them is from an activity and/or result which must necessarily be facilitated by the investment of time.
I also learned you can get banned for playing 2 many BGs.
Ticket Number: US85786752
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I never said it was. What is satisfactory also differs from person to person. But there is some correlation there which can’t be ignored. What you find terrible may not be for someone else. Shrug.
It can be ignored because in no instance is the time investment itself where the satisfaction is derived. The satisfaction comes from the activity, and from the things which the passage of time facilitates, such as meaningful progress within that activity. The right kind of tedium doesn’t need to be forced upon people because it’s just inherent and necessary to the activity. If you want to do challenging content with a large group you must engage with the tedium I described earlier. The only way to get rid of that tedium is to fundamentally change the activity itself (i.e. to, as in retail LFR, modify the raid so that it is no longer challenging to any degree). RDF doesn’t require any fundamental change to the activity it facilitates, and in instances where it would people forgo RDF because of that. No one is going to be using RDF for achivement runs.
And yes, individual differences exist, but we can still acknowledge that not every individual preference is suitable for use as a communal baseline. It’s like how when parsing statistics you lop off extreme outliers in either direction. The baseline activity should neither be hyperinvolved nor utterly and purely tedious. We can quibble between those two extremes, but there should be no debate over the exclusion of the extremes themselves.
Yes, but the converse is that activities that do not require a time component are not inherently satisfying.
Good things take a long time is a valuable truism. It works because “good” is subjective and things that are obtained easily are generally not considered as good or satisfying as things that take a time commitment to achieve. Why? Because everyone already has the easy things which makes them inherently worthless. Things that require a time commitment have an exclusivity (since no one has an infinite supply of time) that makes them desireable.
That’s not the converse. It’s just the same sentiment. Something requiring a large time investment does not make it inherently satisfying, and neither does something not requiring a large time investment. The salient point is that the time investment part is irrelevant, because either the activity is satisfying or it isn’t. An unsatisfying activity doesn’t become satisfying by just pouring time into it, and a satisfying activity doesn’t become unsatisfying by pulling some time away from it, so long as you commit the literally necessary time to actually do the activity.
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And time investment is a key component in feeling satisfied by an activity. If you accomplish something in a game easily and with little effort, it has no real significance. Players get attached to games only after long periods of time commitment after which they have accomplished things that could not be done easily.
It’s why your kids don’t appreciate the value of money. To them it is just something parents use to get them things. It’s not until they have a job and have to invest time to earn their own money do they suddenly value it.
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No, effort is often a key component in feeling satisfied by an activity. In many cases, because of how the universe is structured, effort necessitates that time passes. The time itself is not what is imparting the satisfaction, however. The effort and its results are. Tedium is not inherently effortful. Most of the time tedium is just tedium.
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you can’t separate effort and time investment. something that requires “effort” but can be done in 10 seconds is not satisfying.
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Yes, of course it is. How much effort is it for me to run my druid character across Azeroth to retrieve a token at the bottom of the sea? About zero. But it takes time, much of which is me sitting on a blimp or running across a zone.
Yet getting that aquatic form in Vanilla is far more satisfying than Cata (?) where you just bought it from the trainer.
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The important part is to separate it in the opposite direction. Something that requires time investment does not necessarily require meaningful effort or skill. If you’re going to define tolerating any tedium as effort then the word has lost any productive value.
The first go around sure. The 2nd-Nth time? No. But the first time you did it it wasn’t just a time investment now was it? You were actively navigating and exploring the game world, and scary seal face was your reward for your successful expedition. Trudging the same worn path the 10th time you’re doing the quest is not satisfying. It becomes something you endure for the benefits of the form or to avoid the scratching in your head that comes from not having all your current class skills.
dude, I just picked up seal form last week for the Nth time in my life. That night I remarked to my wife that I wish more druid abilities were gated like this because it really drove home that immersive RPG progression for the class.
Then again, I see WoW as an RPG set in a persistent world with many players – an MMORPG. I don’t just see it as a raiding game or a loot acquisition game.
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And what exactly was satisfying about retreading a quest you knew beat-for-beat by heart?