I just found this video on youtube talking about world coherency and it's impact on meaningfulness inside the game world. The guy did an outstanding job of putting words to something I realized a long time ago. The first time sharding started to appear in retail WoW, the fact that I was no longer seeing the same game world as other players really bothered me. I couldn't explain why, but I knew it was chipping away at something important.
The video is 30 minutes long but I think it explains a lot about what I like about classic vs a lot of more modern games.
Likes: 45
You found that on the Classic WoW subreddit. You've been cheating on barrens.chat just admit it.
Yea, because bringing back valuable info and adding to the conversation is cheating, but sharing poorly thought out ideas that irritate the community is valuable. Hahaha. The nerve. Behave @RedridgeGnoll and get back to your airdrop thread!RedridgeGnoll wrote: ↑5 years agoYou found that on the Classic WoW subreddit. You've been cheating on barrens.chat just admit it.
Shoe, shoe, you get back in there! Our ugly little red-headed shit poster.
2000 IQg0bledyg00k wrote: ↑5 years agoNever making a single investment again until I 100% know it pays off.
EvE Online got it right with having a single server with 30,000 people on it at once. That was true world cohesion and it made for the most unique experience in any video game I've ever played. Vanilla wow comes close to this but not quite all the way.
It meant that every action that took place in that game reverberated, quite literally, around the galaxy. So you're a miner just getting some ores from an asteroid belt, a pirate comes in and starts attacking you and asks for a ransom rather than destroy your ship. He gets the money eventually and lets you go, and uses part of that money to pay off the bigger pirates in the system who are demanding tribute. Those bigger pirates actually trade with the miner's corporation for raw ore so that they can build their ships locally. When the mining corporation hears about the ransom attempt they bring their ore prices up with the pirates in revenge. This affects the local supply of ships, meaning that less people visit the region to purchase equipment. A rival corporation in a nearby constellation capitalises on this and gain a lot of money. Carrying their materials through the pipeline of the constellation however they get ganked on a stargate by another group and lose everything in one go. Etc etc etc it could go on endlessly like the butterfly effect.
Interactions like this ^ which are real and dynamic are happening literally all the time in thousands of different places, every minute, and create a vibrant world full of villains, heroes, controversies, battles and an absolutely tangible sense of a 'living world' created entirely by players which I've never really seen anywhere else.
As soon as people are separated from each other that interactivity is lost. With layering out of the picture after the end of phase 1, classic will recoup the MMO in MMORPG.
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Pippina • snickerwicket • s1atan • couchatron • Erik • pan0phobik • Dolamite • Selexin
Eve online has produced some of the greatest in-game stories I have ever heard. I have never played it, but have some friends who do. From what I understand, there really isn't that much structured story, right? It seems like it is all player driven, one big sandbox of a universe.
All of the best memories that I have from this game involved other people. We placed significance on things in the game because of the shared experiences.
I think this is one of the biggest things lost on retail. Back in the day we all gathered in ironforge, or shattrath and we could see all of the other players coming and going from dungeons and raids and flowing around the cities to auction halls and banks. The place felt alive. Compared to legion, where I just sat in my garrison all by myself. Leaving my garrison on foot, I'd phase out and into the outside territory and see other players phase out of thin air. It felt lonely.
I've posted about it before, but on my old vanilla server one of the big raid guilds didn't like the drop they got from an outdoor world boss once so they organized a raid on orgrimmar so large that the server crashed and rolled back a few hours. They were able to respawn the world boss by crashing and rebooting the server, lol. There had have been hundreds of players on both sides. I joined in on the raid and my framerate dropped to like zero FPS the entire time until the server crashed. We basically performed an in-game character based DDOS attack on the server and won. Things like that just don't happen where everybody has their own special loot and special shard. One big layer, lots of players all experiencing the same thing. Lots of good memories.
Likes: 45
Nice TBC plug. ShattrahPippina wrote: ↑5 years agoEve online has produced some of the greatest in-game stories I have ever heard. I have never played it, but have some friends who do. From what I understand, there really isn't that much structured story, right? It seems like it is all player driven, one big sandbox of a universe.
All of the best memories that I have from this game involved other people. We placed significance on things in the game because of the shared experiences.
I think this is one of the biggest things lost on retail. Back in the day we all gathered in ironforge, or shattrath and we could see all of the other players coming and going from dungeons and raids and flowing around the cities to auction halls and banks. The place felt alive. Compared to legion, where I just sat in my garrison all by myself. Leaving my garrison on foot, I'd phase out and into the outside territory and see other players phase out of thin air. It felt lonely.
I've posted about it before, but on my old vanilla server one of the big raid guilds didn't like the drop they got from an outdoor world boss once so they organized a raid on orgrimmar so large that the server crashed and rolled back a few hours. They were able to respawn the world boss by crashing and rebooting the server, lol. There had have been hundreds of players on both sides. I joined in on the raid and my framerate dropped to like zero FPS the entire time until the server crashed. We basically performed an in-game character based DDOS attack on the server and won. Things like that just don't happen where everybody has their own special loot and special shard. One big layer, lots of players all experiencing the same thing. Lots of good memories.
Yeah, if I remember right the LFG tool added in burning crusade only put people in a group. It didn't port people straight to the instance yet. I think that started to happen in wrath. LFG porting everybody to the instances started really chipping away at the shared world. TBC was the tail end of it.
Likes: 45
The LFG tool was the best part of TBC.Pippina wrote: ↑5 years agoYeah, if I remember right the LFG tool added in burning crusade only put people in a group. It didn't port people straight to the instance yet. I think that started to happen in wrath. LFG porting everybody to the instances started really chipping away at the shared world. TBC was the tail end of it.
No. Come on man - I keep telling people you're not a troll. You can't be this obvious about it. You gotta be more subtle.
Amen to this.Pippina wrote: ↑5 years agoI think this is one of the biggest things lost on retail. Back in the day we all gathered in ironforge, or shattrath and we could see all of the other players coming and going from dungeons and raids and flowing around the cities to auction halls and banks. The place felt alive. Compared to legion, where I just sat in my garrison all by myself. Leaving my garrison on foot, I'd phase out and into the outside territory and see other players phase out of thin air. It felt lonely.
Interestingly it seems, from the latest eurogamer interview on 30th July with the Classic devs anyway, that they were over-doing the layering thresholds in the closed beta in order to test that they were functioning correctly more quickly (by lowering thresholds they'd have more opportunities to be able to see if people were being layered correctly etc.)
Full interview in text is here for anyone interested.Blizzard Entertainment
The only thing I really want to call out on layering is a lot of people were wondering if the population thresholds in the beta were accurate, and they're not. There were some people who said, 'Did they just turn this on to test it functionally to make sure it worked?' That's accurate. We set the thresholds much lower on the beta than we would for live because we wanted to make sure we were actually testing the feature. There were other things people pointed out as bugs we were not expecting.
I hope that this dispels the sensationalist 'layering will kill classic before phase 2' stuff which is based on impressions from the closed beta. I really hope that layering will not have a huge effect, and that server cohesion will not be affected too badly, if at all
There isn't a story to the game, no. EvE's history is just a long tapestry of all of the wars, politics, subterfuge, spying, industry and ingenuity that just ended up happening between the players themselves.
It all comes back to server cohesion again because it's all on one server. People who have played EvE know famous players like TheMittani or Santo Trafficante because they are actual legends in the game and many people may have even interacted with them. They know groups like Goonswarm and what they were able to achieve by taking over almost all of territorial space. They know the names of the major wars that occurred, who they were fought between, the reasons for them. It's really quite a fascinating trait of the game that I haven't seen anywhere else in my experience.
And it's thanks to server cohesion that this is possible. I think this will make a big comeback with Classic WoW, where server identities are forged, reputations are at stake, and both heroes and villains will arise from the chaos.
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couchatron • Erik • Selexin • Sporks
Yeah, and that's kind of what I meant. There was no official story to the game, but one emerged from the playerbase as they played around in the galactic sandbox. There was definitely a good amount of this back in vanilla WoW as well. The current retail version of WoW seems to try to force its lore and story to the forefront, and tries to make the game all about the official storyline, like a big single player game with an in-game chat feature. I really like how classic WoW's story is just kind of there in the background, but nobody really even knows what it is because they're busy working with each other. I really hope it does well and hope it impacts future game development, allowing us to see new games built in the future designed around the gameplay features of classic WoW.
@Teebling Maaaan... You make me want to play EvE with only a couple of days left for Classic, that's just rude.
I never got to play Eve, I know my brother did though but for the 12 seconds I watched him play it looked super boring (alone in space, just mining). However my interests in games have changed alot since I saw him play and now I really wish I played it. I should've read up on the game instead of just dismissing it instantly. #ragrets
However I think Classic Wow will be insanely cool and like in the old days once layering is removed. I don't even think layering will be that bad in the first phase. I'm all for #nochange but I don't think Blizzard (even though they have a rep for being a bit stupid at times) will purposely make layering have such an impact on the MMO vanilla feel that we all miss. Sure it can probably be abused but there will always be a-holes, no matter what corner of the world you are in. Even if they would have layering through all phases, I'd take a layered vanilla wow above retail wow any day.
So all in all, I don't think I've ever been this psyched about any release ever, not even close. So I'm going to set my mind on just enjoying the game and think about all the good things about the game instead of the bad ones. If you can't handle layering in phase 1, stay on private servers until phase 2 hits.
Ten Storms EU Alliance
Finnigan - Dwarf Hunter Lvl 30
Portalmaster - Gnome Mage Lvl 19
Shaelur - Dwarf Paladin Lvl 22
Shaelus - Night Elf Druid Lvl 50
Likes: 45
Very good video. For me, this is one of the main reasons I'm looking forward to play classic. You will see cities full of people to communicate with. It brings so much depth and feel to the game. And interacting with certain elements of the game affects other players and forces some sort of contact - either friendly or hostile.
I'm kidding with the troll thing btw.
What do you think about the LFG tool porting people directly to the instance? Do you think that is a good idea too?
Likes: 45
No. Porting to the instance is bad. I think porting into battlegrounds from Capital Cities was also bad. However, the lack of LFG tool in Classic WoW was a flaw. It was one of the first things added with TBC, but it also let you teleport to a summoning stone, which I don't agree with.
I had to think about this for a while, because I wasn't sure what I thought about a no-port LFG tool.RedridgeGnoll wrote: ↑5 years agoNo. Porting to the instance is bad. I think porting into battlegrounds from Capital Cities was also bad. However, the lack of LFG tool in Classic WoW was a flaw. It was one of the first things added with TBC, but it also let you teleport to a summoning stone, which I don't agree with.
I agree with you that porting to the instances is bad. I also think that porting directly into battlegrounds sucked too. Feels like the more you have to go out on foot and go places, the better. But let's not talk PvP here. I wanna focus on instance groups for now.
Going everywhere on foot is pretty boring, too. And that's one of the paradoxes of the old game. The original game had a lot of boring stuff that added to the feeling of meaningfullness. Lots of features designed to 'remove the boring parts' and 'streamline the game' were added over time, but just ended up making the game worse.
I think the difficulty to find players for dungeon groups was a good thing. Once you spent the time and effort to create a group, the group became important and had value. The easier it became to replace people, the less patience people had. I remember seeing people getting kicked in retail instance groups in later expansions over the stupidest shit. They weren't going fast enough, or didn't already know the boss fights, etc. It kind of encouraged the gogogo mentality. If you weren't performing at maximum then you could be kicked and replaced very easy. When there was no guarantee you'd be able to replace somebody, people worked more closely with each other. Communication improved so the group could be successful.
I'm not talking about the speed-running crowd. Those guys all organize separately anyway to reach maximum gogogo. I'm talking about the slower pace RPG focused guys looking for the more casual paced game.
Some of my best memories from the original game came from when we lost a player late at night and had to proceed with only 4 people through dungeons we had no business completing. It was a pain in the ass to assemble the group in the first place, and was also a pain in the ass to get to the instance on top of that. And every time that happened, we put our heads together and decided to slog our way through slow and carefully instead of abandoning ship. We were all invested in that run, and that was only due to the fact that we all invested a lot of time to even get there in the first place. I think the LFG mechanism slowly started to chip away at this and started making people more easily replaceable. And the game seems more fun to me when the individual players in your group are more important.
Likes: 45
I think you make some strong points here. Players in Classic were forced to return to Capital Cities to refill their groups. This might have made group or raid leaders less willing to boot players. The group finder in Classic WoW would not summon players like in retail. You would still have to run to the instance in order to catchup with everyone else. In Retail it will summom the invited player directly to the location of the group. Obviously, that is not good.Pippina wrote: ↑5 years agoI had to think about this for a while, because I wasn't sure what I thought about a no-port LFG tool.RedridgeGnoll wrote: ↑5 years agoNo. Porting to the instance is bad. I think porting into battlegrounds from Capital Cities was also bad. However, the lack of LFG tool in Classic WoW was a flaw. It was one of the first things added with TBC, but it also let you teleport to a summoning stone, which I don't agree with.
I agree with you that porting to the instances is bad. I also think that porting directly into battlegrounds sucked too. Feels like the more you have to go out on foot and go places, the better. But let's not talk PvP here. I wanna focus on instance groups for now.
Going everywhere on foot is pretty boring, too. And that's one of the paradoxes of the old game. The original game had a lot of boring stuff that added to the feeling of meaningfullness. Lots of features designed to 'remove the boring parts' and 'streamline the game' were added over time, but just ended up making the game worse.
I think the difficulty to find players for dungeon groups was a good thing. Once you spent the time and effort to create a group, the group became important and had value. The easier it became to replace people, the less patience people had. I remember seeing people getting kicked in retail instance groups in later expansions over the stupidest shit. They weren't going fast enough, or didn't already know the boss fights, etc. It kind of encouraged the gogogo mentality. If you weren't performing at maximum then you could be kicked and replaced very easy. When there was no guarantee you'd be able to replace somebody, people worked more closely with each other. Communication improved so the group could be successful.
I'm not talking about the speed-running crowd. Those guys all organize separately anyway to reach maximum gogogo. I'm talking about the slower pace RPG focused guys looking for the more casual paced game.
Some of my best memories from the original game came from when we lost a player late at night and had to proceed with only 4 people through dungeons we had no business completing. It was a pain in the ass to assemble the group in the first place, and was also a pain in the ass to get to the instance on top of that. And every time that happened, we put our heads together and decided to slog our way through slow and carefully instead of abandoning ship. We were all invested in that run, and that was only due to the fact that we all invested a lot of time to even get there in the first place. I think the LFG mechanism slowly started to chip away at this and started making people more easily replaceable. And the game seems more fun to me when the individual players in your group are more important.
A concern I have with Classic is the difficulty in forming groups for dungeons during the leveling phase, and the level 60 dungeon phase. Players often find themselves spending upwards of an hour to find a tank or fill their groups. This is could have consequences considering the current MMO crop. There are upsides and downsides to having LFG, but it allows players to more reasonably complete the content. After all, we are getting cross realm capital city bg queues. Which i do not agree with.
Creating a group while leveling is pretty easy; whenever you take over an hour to fill that last spot you are either not using /who or there are simply no tanks/healers online.
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Tank shortages is what Classic WoW is all about.
