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Guild Wars >>> WoW - yes or no?
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shifuimam
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Mar 26, 2009, 10:43 AM
 
Boyfriend is a big gamer and game designer, and one of his friends offered to pay for the two of us to start playing WoW with him and his wife, so I've been playing WoW a little bit.

It's like when I turned 21 and was hesitant to consume alcohol - I feel like if I play WoW at all, I'm going to catch the disease that so many players have.

My best friend, however, introduced me to Guild Wars last night (boyfriend has an old account from four or five years ago that he started using again so we could all play), and it's way better than WoW. The characters, the graphics, the game play....and the fact that there's no monthly fee.

If you're into MORPGs/MMORPGs, what's your favorite? Why?

Also, have any of you bought the actual gaming software on eBay? I'm seeing Guild Wars for like $15-$20 "new in box" or "sealed", although the boyfriend is a bit hesitant to buy game codes on eBay like that. Is it legit at all?
( Last edited by shifuimam; Mar 26, 2009 at 10:52 AM. )
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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:08 AM
 
My suggestion: don't play MMOs. They will suck your life away. Seriously. You may think you're playing for an hour or so and before you know it, the whole damn afternoon goes by.

However....

Guild Wars is a great game. Is it better than WoW? It depends on what you want out of an MMO. I still log into GW but I find that I get bored easily. It's pretty and gorgeous and the music is on par with WoW as the best videogame music on the planet, but for immersion, I'd say WoW is the better game because there's much more of a storyline than in GW, there's a better community, and there's this odd thing about GW which puts you into these single-player instances which I never really liked.

WoW has a trial. Give it a shot. GW is free, but there's more content in WoW.

However, GW2 is supposed to be out soon.

EDIT: if you're going to try WoW, start as a Night Elf. You start in Teldrassil which is gorgeous. If I didn't start in that area, I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with the game as much as I did. Make sure the music is turned up, too.
( Last edited by starman; Mar 26, 2009 at 11:14 AM. )

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boy8cookie
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:09 AM
 
WoW, for me. Started playing it on my Mac, before Intel was around. Stuck with it.

Personally, I can't wait for D3 and SC2. I'm a big fan of Blizzard's games.
     
shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:21 AM
 
I'm not a big MMO person (I think they're kind of dumb, TBH), but the BF and BFF both play Guild Wars, so it's kind of fun to all play together in the same room and stuff.

The graphics are AMAZING in Guild Wars compared to WoW, and the whole world is just more fun to explore IMO than the WoW world.

All the people we play with in WoW are on the Horde side, so we're both Druids (mostly because I wanted to be a kitty).

Guild Wars has a lower learning curve, too. The gameplay is kept relatively simple compared to WoW, which is really nice.
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Mac User #001
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:26 AM
 
I've never played an MMO. I enjoy all other games too much to get sucked in to one certain game for that long. I already waste away insane amounts of time in Fallout 3 and when I first got Crysis... I must've mowed down 500 trees and destroyed every building in sight.

But Guild Wars always had a certain appeal to me that WoW didn't. Given the choice though, I'd still choose WoW, because, well, it's WoW. Actually, given the choice, I'd choose Warhammer Online (WAR) because I love the Warhammer universe and the miniature game. Also, my brother plays WAR and its a darn good game. A lot of new concepts to the MMO genre.
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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:27 AM
 
I don't see how the GW learning curve is lower than WoW. In WoW, it's "kill 8 boars with your stick", etc. If anything Everquest 2 is probably the highest learning curve of all MMOs.

WoW has a sense of scope I never got from GW. WoW also has 80 levels, I think GW still has 20? You'd think I'd play more since I bought the CEs .

WoW's graphics were meant to run on the lowest machine possible in 2004 and they haven't upgraded their engine. GW's graphics are real nice, WoW could adopt a few things for their next expansion.

I have an issue with the horde side. I despise their architecture (or...lack of it). Everyone walks around with a hunched back except for Blood Elves, and their flight points are a mess. (eg: back in the day, going from IF to Searing Gorge for a simple BRD run took 90 seconds, on the horde side you come from Undercity which takes like 6 minutes).

Also, what's the end game in GW? Is it just pvp? Are there dungeons to raid? I never got that high so I never got to endgame with it.

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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:29 AM
 
Originally Posted by Mac User #001 View Post
I've never played an MMO. I enjoy all other games too much to get sucked in to one certain game for that long. I already waste away insane amounts of time in Fallout 3 and when I first got Crysis... I must've mowed down 500 trees and destroyed every building in sight.

But Guild Wars always had a certain appeal to me that WoW didn't. Given the choice though, I'd still choose WoW, because, well, it's WoW. Actually, given the choice, I'd choose Warhammer Online (WAR) because I love the Warhammer universe and the miniature game. Also, my brother plays WAR and its a darn good game. A lot of new concepts to the MMO genre.
I'd steer clear of Warhammer. It has a TON of problems. I quit before my free month was up. It has a broken UI, terrible endgame, stupid NPC AI, broken chat, broken mail, broken classes. Check out the warhammeralliance.com forums and you'll see two common threads:

1) WoW sucks
2) When will this game be fixed?

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:36 AM
 
Guild Wards has two play areas - role playing and PVP. The role playing side has no PVP, and instead it's more like a traditional RPG except that others can play with you. There are central towns where you can interact with other players online, but once you go off to complete a quest or do a task that gets you experience or a profession or whatever, you actually go to your own private copy of the world, so you're not constantly being annoyed by other players. You can create a guild or team of players, so you can all share the same private copy, but it's quite a bit different from WoW.

I'm not really interested in PVP stuff, and Guild Wars has a pretty expansive storyline for the RPG part of the game. There are three different story lines and one expansion pack, so there are hundreds of smaller quests and almost as many large quests to complete in the game.

Compared to WoW, GW is just less complex. For instance, in WoW, you can be juggling like twenty different skills/potions/spells/combat techniques at once. In GW, you have exactly eight, and they're all accessed from the number row on your keyboard. You can swap out what goes in those eight slots, but with less to deal with, you have less to worry about. You can also more easily swap weapons, since you can assign weapons to your F-keys and swap them out that way.

I've only given a few hours each to WoW and GW, but my first impression so far is that I'm much more interested in playing more GW than WoW.
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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:45 AM
 
That's what it was...that instanced world. I found part of the fun of other MMOs (EQ, EQ2, WoW, Warhammer, etc.) is finding people in-game to group with. You're not always going to be with your static party. You come across some poor soul who got one too many raptors on him and you can help him out. With GW I don't think you can do that because the outside world is instanced.

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 26, 2009, 11:57 AM
 
Right; you only work with other anonymous players in the PVP area.

I actually prefer this. People online are usually dipwads, so I'd rather work with a small group of people I know IRL than try to make yet another online clique with people in an MMO. LiveJournal is enough for me, on that front.
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exca1ibur
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Mar 26, 2009, 12:25 PM
 
Originally Posted by shifuimam View Post
I actually prefer this. People online are usually dipwads, so I'd rather work with a small group of people I know IRL than try to make yet another online clique with people in an MMO. LiveJournal is enough for me, on that front.
This is what I liked about Guild Wars as well. I'm not into playing with random people much either. Being free helped also, as there is no game on this earth I will EVER pay a monthly fee to play.
     
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Mar 26, 2009, 12:39 PM
 
Originally Posted by starman View Post
That's what it was...that instanced world. I found part of the fun of other MMOs (EQ, EQ2, WoW, Warhammer, etc.) is finding people in-game to group with. You're not always going to be with your static party. You come across some poor soul who got one too many raptors on him and you can help him out. With GW I don't think you can do that because the outside world is instanced.
I'm with Starman. Guild Wars is like an MMORPG minus the MM part.

The monthly fee also doesn't bother me because I spend roughly the cost of a WOW subscription on lunch every week.
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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 12:42 PM
 
Maybe I'll give GW another shot this weekend. I have this level 8 Necromancer which I could never get into playing. I also have GW wallpaper on my two computers at home for several years now.

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 26, 2009, 12:52 PM
 
Originally Posted by exca1ibur View Post
This is what I liked about Guild Wars as well. I'm not into playing with random people much either. Being free helped also, as there is no game on this earth I will EVER pay a monthly fee to play.
Ditto.

To me, Guild Wars is like running your own private gaming server, except that someone else is footing the bill for the hardware and the bandwidth. I just prefer the smaller online community feel, vs playing with eleven million people (most of whom are under eighteen and/or have no social skills to speak of).
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starman
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Mar 26, 2009, 01:00 PM
 
You get 11 million of any group and you're going to find a large number of asshats, especially when internet anonymity is involved.

That said, the last time I was in GW, I was asked if I wanted to give a guy a lapdance (I play a female character. Long story). I wouldn't put the GW community on a pedestal either. Have you seen some of the First name/last name combos people come up with?

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 26, 2009, 02:26 PM
 
Oh yeah, stuff on there is retarded - but since the majority of your time is spent in your private instance of the world, you rarely have to see or deal with anyone else.

Anyone into other MMOs? My neighbor's big into City of Heroes/City of Villains...
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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 27, 2009, 08:06 AM
 
We played for several hours last night on Prophecies - it takes a lot for a computer game to really capture my interest (Portal has, until now, been the only current-generation game to interest me; before then the last game I really wanted to play a lot was Rise of the Triad in like 1996), but I'm really finding this game worth the $30.
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Mar 28, 2009, 03:19 PM
 
I've played both games enough to get a good feel for their strengths/weaknesses. I've had a few characters as high as level 40 in WoW. And I have three max-level (level 20) characters in Guild Wars, and own/play Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, and the Eye of the North expansion. Note that getting to level 20 is harder in Guild Wars than in WoW, but it's certainly easier than getting to level 80 in WoW.

I gave up on WoW eventually. Mostly because it's a tough game for work/life/game balance, and because of the monthly fee.

Here are the games' plusses/minuses, that I've seen:

WoW:
+ Great game with amazing depth and a good story.
- Monthly fee means you feel like you always have to play to get your money's worth. This leads to bad work/life/play balance.
- If you want to PvP at all, get ready to get ganked by a player twice your level when you're just trying to finish some required quest. Then watch while they dance over your corpse like it was such an accomplishment for a level 80 to kill a level 10 player.
- Also, plan to get to some boss or end quest and have to wait in line behind other players who are ahead of you.
- It takes forever to get anywhere. It can take an hour to get to where you're going to *start* to play. Less so later in the game if you have an epic steed or something. And since you're waiting for a group, it can take longer.
- Tough to just jump on an play for a little while. Have to play in big groups/raids, so solo is usually not realistic.

Guild Wars
+ No monthly fees! Buy the game once and you can play or not play as much as you want. Guilt free :-)
+ Cheap enough to buy for multiple family members...for the cost of a few months of WoW
+ Being able to jump to any city you've visited instantly.
- Level cap at 20. You'll max out your level far before you hit the end of the game.
- For a ranger, can't have multiple pets, like a hunter can in WoW
+ No ganking
- Players can't join you during a mission/quest...only in cities. No calling in reinforcements if you're over your head.
+ Early in the game, you can play with heroes/henchmen if you just want to quick play without getting a big group together. This gets less feasible later as quests/missions become more difficult.
     
akulavolk
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Mar 28, 2009, 03:27 PM
 
Oh, and a big minus: no Mac support in Guild Wars :-(

It works great in Boot Camp, of course. And works o.k. in Crossover games. In Crossover, it does tend to glitch, at times, which is bad if you're at the end of a mission or something.
     
starman
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Mar 29, 2009, 12:38 AM
 
To clarify your points about WoW:

A level 10 player should never get ganked because you don't get out of the "safe" areas until at least level 14-16, and even then, players aren't ganked much until their 30s in Stranglethorn Vale.

A PvE server doesn't have ganking, and PvP areas are set up in brackets based on level, so no ganking there either.

What's this "wait in line" crap? Every boss is instanced. If it's in the world, they respawn very quickly. In the four years I've been playing I've NEVER waited long. Try waiting a WEEK in EQ1.

It does take forever, unless you're a mage or can pay someone to port you. This isn't WoW-specific, it's like that in almost every MMO I've ever played.

How is it tough to play for a little while? You have a quest log, you run some quests, you log off.

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 29, 2009, 08:46 AM
 
Originally Posted by akulavolk View Post
Guild Wars
+ No monthly fees! Buy the game once and you can play or not play as much as you want. Guilt free :-)
+ Cheap enough to buy for multiple family members...for the cost of a few months of WoW
+ Being able to jump to any city you've visited instantly.
- Level cap at 20. You'll max out your level far before you hit the end of the game.
- For a ranger, can't have multiple pets, like a hunter can in WoW
+ No ganking
- Players can't join you during a mission/quest...only in cities. No calling in reinforcements if you're over your head.
+ Early in the game, you can play with heroes/henchmen if you just want to quick play without getting a big group together. This gets less feasible later as quests/missions become more difficult.
Boyfriend and I usually play together, so needing reinforcements generally isn't all that necessary. Once my best friend moves up here, I imagine the three of us will be playing together a lot.

The warping thing is one of the best things about GW, and there's no real reason why other MMOs can't use that same method of movement. It's worthless to have to spend twenty minutes just walking from one place to another in the world.

Another big plus is that you can jump right in and play, and you don't have to play for hours. I really hate that about a lot of games (not just MMOs)...being able to just complete a portion of a quest and then go do something else is super nice.

I'd say another plus (although this is less critical to gameplay) is that the graphics in GW are much, much more visually appealing than in WoW. I know that WoW is designed to run on a wider range of hardware, but that's a small detriment - I love just exploring the worlds in GW because they're so beautifully rendered.
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Polatrite
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Mar 29, 2009, 09:36 AM
 
World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Guild Wars all have their place for different people. When I first bought WoW, I was your typical addict - come home from work and play for 4-5 hours a night and chat about it all the time with my other gaming buddies. I didn't have any major evening responsibilities (long-distance relationship, just lived alone in my house), so it didn't really affect my personal life negatively.

After about 5 months (level 52 alliance rogue) I just got bored. Leveling took an enormous amount of time - nearly an hour and a half per level. And in WoW, at least with my rogue, I never felt more badass as I leveled - only weaker, as now the enemies took 20 seconds to kill instead of 5, and I still couldn't fight more than 4 at a time. It was really a grind. The quests were typical MMO fare - kill X enemies, gather X items, go to X. In the original WoW game, there were not very many unique or innovative quests - it was just a grind fest up to level 60 at which point you would switch from the leveling treadmill to the equipment-boosting treadmill.

I hate treadmills.

I quit the game shortly after that and didn't immediately take up another standard MMO (I'm a big fan of smaller games and games that are more privately run). About a year or so later, I found out one of my old childhood friends - my twin in terms of gaming skill, as we're both PVP-centric and excellent at developing tactics and working together - was playing on a server as a level 70. I called up another friend who had a level 70 rogue laying around on his unused account, and agreed to transfer it to this new server and I began playing with my buddy. We did PVP arenas, 2v2 dual rogues and 3v3 druid/rogue/rogue. It was definitely the most fun I had in WoW.

The problem was that I still had to walk the treadmill every day to seek gold to feed my PVP and to earn faction reputation to improve my gear, until we had enough arena points to begin purchasing gear. We got up to 1870 rating in 2v2s and then my interest tapered off, because in order to continue much further we would need to gear up in full Season 3 gear (I was in S1/rep-ics).

All of this to say what, exactly? WoW is a HUGE treadmill. WoW is an MMO that seems quick moving on the surface - and indeed it is until you compare it to a fringe hardcore game like EverQuest. When it all boils down though, the Blizzard business model for WoW is to get you playing, and hold the carrot in front of you for the next 4 years if they can. Frankly, it worries me, because Blizzard has always been a solid developer, but I'm afraid that greed is already beginning to take root with them - look at the StarCraft 2 release plans - 3 separate games for full price each, just to get the same amount of campaigns you got in the original StarCraft for $50.

Guild Wars, on the other hand, is a much different style of game. If you've played any Korean clone MMORPGs, you can tell that Guild Wars is somewhat influenced by the eastern culture of game development. Guild Wars itself is a game that does NOT rely on a treadmill, nor much in the way of character development and progression at all. Once you've gained level 20, the next thing is trying to put together your ultimate weapon and off-hand, and then you put together your ultimate armor. From there, the only thing left to do is unlock additional skills to try out new builds (which may require some light tweaking of your armor or weapon - but usually not).

So what do you do, exactly? In Guild Wars, it's really all about the challenge. The game is IMMENSELY challenging, and the end-game content (of which there is plenty) gets extraordinarily more difficult. The downside is that, unlike in WoW or other games, there is no major reward for downing a particularly challenging bit of content. I think this is really where Guild Wars fell more flat than others - the sense of advancement and accomplishment really isn't there in the end-game. If you like story, or just the satisfaction of completing a challenge, though, Guild Wars will definitely provide.

As a game designer, I'm not sure how I would remedy this particular problem, because infinite advancement leads to the treadmill of WoW, whereas no advancement at all leads to a bit of disappointing in actually completing challenges.

I won't talk about Warhammer quite yet, except to say that in my 30-some levels and multiple classes of gameplay, I have found little to no bugs and the gameplay experience has remained extraordinarily polished for a game that was released not too long ago. The typical MMO - including WoW (goodness sakes WoW was horrible on release, up until 1.07 at least IIRC) has had enormous launch problems and huge game-crushing bugs. The crew in charge of Warhammer has done an impressive job of releasing a mostly ready to go game. It still has plenty of balance issues, don't get me wrong, but judging from my own experience in ORPG development, BALANCE TAKES TIME.

I believe that all three games are good and have their place, but unfortunately WoW drags you on and on, whereas Guild Wars is the complete opposite and doesn't drag you on at all. Warhammer is unique in that the leveling experience is just as good as the end-game experience (which some view as a downside, for some reason).
     
starman
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Mar 29, 2009, 01:35 PM
 
Warhammer is crap. It has no social aspect at all, we had to BEG them to put in zone-wide chat. The RvR is pathetic until you reach level 40 because there's no constant influx of people, so if you're not leveling as fast as everyone else is, you can literally be in a zone with nobody else. That's why I left, there was no RvR at all. I heard they deleted a bunch of servers, but you still hear the same complaints from players that the lower levels are like ghost towns. It's so funny to hear the Warhammer fanboys say "well, that's because you level too slow, noob". In the meantime, WoW has a CONSTANT influx of people so there's always someone to group with (or fight against if you're on a pvp server). Warhammer's endgame is terrible, the mail system is sh*t (to prevent spam), the economy is the most pathetic I've seen in an MMO to date, the crafting system is worthless, base layouts are ridiculously wrong, and classes are badly unbalanced.

Guild Wars itself is a game that does NOT rely on a treadmill, nor much in the way of character development and progression at all. Once you've gained level 20, the next thing is trying to put together your ultimate weapon and off-hand, and then you put together your ultimate armor. From there, the only thing left to do is unlock additional skills to try out new builds (which may require some light tweaking of your armor or weapon - but usually not).
How is this different from WoW, or any other MMO with endgame? At level 80 you raid to get the best gear you can.
( Last edited by starman; Mar 29, 2009 at 01:49 PM. )

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Mar 29, 2009, 02:31 PM
 
I posted this to a developer friend who was asking about Warhammer the other day, and I think much of it is relevant to the conversation at hand.

I speak from the perspective of a game designer, I enjoy looking at game concepts and seeing how those concepts are applied, or could be applied to improve existing and upcoming games.

Warhammer is a good game.

First things first, the visuals are nice. The colors aren't as saturated as many MMOs, and a lot of the countryside fits the theme - wartime. Aside from that, I think the graphics are very well done and the animations are smooth, spell effects are nice.

We'll tackle PVP first - PVP in WAR is well done. The balance issues aren't as greatly exaggerated as the claims I've seen so far, but nonetheless check up on your class before you commit to it. I played an engineer early in my WAR career and it was effectively a waste of time, as other classes we're outgunning my damage by double or triple in some cases, and my AOE utility as an engineer was less useful in the "battlegrounds" that I attended - so I recommend research on the classes.

The PVP mechanics themselves are very solid. There are three unique "battlegrounds" for each bracket, brackets are 1-11, 12-21, etc. When you join a battleground, you're automatically boosted to level X8 (18, 28, etc.) and have stats correspondingly boosted. You won't have the abilities of the higher level characters, but you'll still have the statistical stamina - which is nice. You can queue up for a battleground at any time, from any location. This means, for PVE, you can queue up while leveling. When you get the chance to join, just find a safe spot and jump in. When you get out, you'll be dumped right back where you were.

Each leveling zone has a primary PVP focus point, to funnel players towards the action. The objectives vary from zone to zone, but general involve point capture and holding. In every zone, there is a major castle. When your faction owns (did I mention this uses the Order vs. Chaos methodology as well?) this castle, you can access higher end equipment merchants and a few other NPCs and bonuses that I can't recall presently. There is one problem with these objectives - typically you have higher level players in the area making it harder for characters of the appropriate level to be effective there. WAR tried to mitigate with a "chicken" system, which turns a character too high a level into a 1 hp chicken creature. However, they set the level limitation far too high, so characters up to 9 or 10 levels higher than the zone's highest end levelers can still come in and ruin the fun. I hope this is addressed at some point.

And the last thing I'd like to mention about PVP - it's very good experience, especially if you can win consistently. WAR is unique in that you can select which way you'd like to level - and not just selecting between PVE and PVP. You can actually level just by killing similarly leveled characters "out in the wild" (world PVP) and net thousands of experience a kill just running around the oppositions area and picking off questers. For one reason or another, this behavior isn't very popular so it's not much of a problem when leveling, interestingly enough.

PVE in WAR has two particularly revolutionary features that I would definitely love to see implemented in upcoming ORPGs. These are open parties and public quests respectively.

The first - open parties - means that whenever you form a party with your friends, it is considered "open" unless you manually designate it as closed. Open parties can be joined by any player at any time. If you're anything like me, your first reaction is: "Wait, so idiots can join my party any time, without my permission?" It's not bad. You can still kick trolls at any time. The good thing about open parties is that, when doing routine quests such as "kill X monster" you can pull up a list of open parties in your zone, sorted by distance from you. You can then select an existing party that is already doing the quest, and join up. This allows you to get in on the monsters killed, since each kill applies to all party members. This makes questing much more enjoyable due to increased speed, but it ALSO makes partying much more enjoyable. The nature of parties in WAR, because of this addition, is very free-flowing. There are no nasty goodbyes, no annoying whispers, and very little worries about bad PUG members. You join a party, kill a few creatures, possibly start a conversation, or just don't bother, then leave the party a few minutes later. Nobody is mad, and it leads to a much less stressful communal feeling.

The second revolutionary feature is public quests, they are awesome. A public quest is a quest that all characters in the area participate in automatically. They usually have a basic "kill 60ish of X creatures" initial objective. So as players are completing their own individual quests in the area, they are also completing the public quest. After this first stage is completed, there is usually some cinematic event and then a new objective is laid down. The most common is to kill 10-15 "elite" type creatures that show up. The last object is generally a boss meant for 5-8 people. Many public quests follow this general formula, but a good portion have unique and much more interesting objectives. It's definitely something to take a look at.

The rewards for public quests are participation based, so the player who was there for the longest and contributed the most killing gets a bonus to his/her "loot roll". After the bonuses are handed out, random rolls are performed, and then players are awarded a prize chest based on what ranking they got in the rolls. Usually there will be a first place bag, a 2nd-4th place set of bags, and then some common rewards for everyone else. The prizes themselves are equipment, crafting materials, a gold prize, etc.

All in all, the public quest and open party systems combine to great communal effect - getting players together without the use of a boring, cheesy interface or screaming for an hour in a major city. This allows you to advance your character and optionally make friends and socialize.

I would recommend WAR twofold. 1) You are a game developer working on a solid ORPG. Experience the concepts in this game and allow it to influence your concepts to improve upon your existing framework. 2) If you're getting tired of WOW, or don't have the time commitment that WOW requires, play WAR. The time commitment is MUCH lower, and the majority of the exciting content is NOT at the end of the leveling grind - but rather sprinkled adequately throughout the game.
     
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Mar 29, 2009, 03:00 PM
 
I would recommend GW or EQ2 before Warhammer. Anyone who's played as polished of a game as WoW would not want to play Warhammer.

Other nitpicks: bag space goes up as you level, and ONLY that way. This is retarded. You gather so much CRAP while leveling, and the distance between you and any one vendor is so vast that you have no option but to destroy things in your inventory.

Public quests are great, but there's a bug/exploit in how loot is distributed.

Open groups are a great IDEA, but nobody really uses them properly.

And here's one of the biggest problems with Warhammer: THERE IS NO PENALTY FOR DEATH. This is one of the cornerstones of any GAME. When you die, there are consequences. In Warhammer, when you die, you rez just fine with a timed debuff. It's pathetic. There's no incentive to stay alive.

Another pet peeve: Champion mobs that blend in with regular ones. WHACK! Dead. With WoW, the elite mobs have a different size or color than other mobs around them. Not so in Warhammer.

At this point in WoW's lifetime, I was already into the game a month and a half (I started Feb. 5, 2005). I was in love with the game. Warhammer just annoyed me within 30 minutes of playing because of all its problems. Read warhammeralliance.com's forums and see how many complaints there are about basic gameplay. Mythic needs to pull a SWG on this game and redo it.

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Mar 29, 2009, 05:05 PM
 
There's no real death penalty in WOW either.
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Mar 29, 2009, 05:56 PM
 
I tried playing World of Warcraft. I just couldn't get past the idea of having to first pay $60 for the stupid game, and then pay $15/month just to play it. The very concept of buying a game and having to pay to play it just seems completely ridiculous to me.

After playing it for about 4 months, I just gave up on it. It was too similar to Diablo II. You click around looking for loot, and every 10 minutes some jerk who's 50 levels higher than you runs by, kills you, then camps your corpse until you leave the game in frustration. I found the quests to be extremely repetitive, and the game got really boring really quick for me.

Not worth paying a monthly fee to be frustrated in a game you can't even play offline or in a single player mode.

On the other hand, some people think it's the best game ever. They like the mundane snow moose hunting, collecting 50 mushrooms, and killing people 50 levels lower than them with a rewards system that actually encourages it.
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Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
There's no real death penalty in WOW either.
Uh, what? You have cumulative damage to your gear, and you have to walk to where your corpse is.

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starman
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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I tried playing World of Warcraft. I just couldn't get past the idea of having to first pay $60 for the stupid game, and then pay $15/month just to play it. The very concept of buying a game and having to pay to play it just seems completely ridiculous to me.
I don't understand why people can't get past this. It costs a lot of money to run servers. How do you think Blizzard pays its employees? Do you pay for Xbox Live?

And when did WoW cost $60?

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Originally Posted by starman View Post
I don't understand why people can't get past this. It costs a lot of money to run servers. How do you think Blizzard pays its employees? Do you pay for Xbox Live?

And when did WoW cost $60?
I don't doubt that WoW is a huge cash cow for Blizzard. Yes, it costs money to run servers. But when you have eleven million players worldwide paying $15 a month to play, that's $165,000,000 minimum PER MONTH - or nearly two billion dollars annually. Then you have software sales, at $50-$20 (depending on when you purchased) MSRP each, which adds up damn fast (especially when you have a single player with more than one account, which means another $15, plus another $40 for the initial purchase of the software. Boyfriend's friend is paying for four accounts. Blizzard makes $720 annually on that single person, and I imagine there are plenty of players with multiple accounts.

Plus will all eleven mil players buying the latest expansion pack at $40 each, that's another $440 mil in less than six months.

No, Blizzard is not dying for cash. They aren't charging as much as they do because they have to. They're doing it because they can and it amounts to a shitload of easy revenue.

I saw the telecom bill from AT&T (who also is the ISP) for the corporation I used to work for. It was roughly $300,000 a month, IIRC - which is only $3.6mil. That's only 2% of Blizzard's annual revenue from WoW alone. While I'm sure that Blizzard's bandwidth costs are much higher, (a) you can't deny that this is a huge profit source for Blizzard, and (b) it isn't the company's only source of income.

Not to mention that there are other games - like Guild Wars - that can obviously afford to continue the pay-once-only model. Now, with the instanced method of play in GW, I'd imagine the bandwidth costs are significantly lower. But I can guarantee you Blizzard isn't jonesing for enough money to pay their monthly bandwidth bill.

From everything I've seen of the two MMOs so far, WoW is a massive ripoff.

WRT xbox Live - while I personally wouldn't pay, it's a single fee per month for a huge library of games that support online multiplayer functionality. The comparison would be better if you had to pay $15 a month for each individual game. It's not even close to being the same thing.
( Last edited by shifuimam; Mar 29, 2009 at 06:49 PM. )
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Mar 29, 2009, 06:41 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I tried playing World of Warcraft. I just couldn't get past the idea of having to first pay $60 for the stupid game, and then pay $15/month just to play it. The very concept of buying a game and having to pay to play it just seems completely ridiculous to me.
This is a concept I definitely cannot see changing. This is the same as buying your cell phone then paying each month to use it, or purchasing your cable modem then paying for internet access, purchasing your television, surround sound, and DVR and then paying for cable, etc.

I, for one, am far more interested in paying $15 a month for an online game that could provide hours of entertainment a day/week/month versus paying $40-60 for cable television that I never turn on, because I am just not a fan of TV. Unlike single-player games, multi-player games do have substantial overhead involved and the fee is understandable.

Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
After playing it for about 4 months, I just gave up on it. It was too similar to Diablo II. You click around looking for loot, and every 10 minutes some jerk who's 50 levels higher than you runs by, kills you, then camps your corpse until you leave the game in frustration. I found the quests to be extremely repetitive, and the game got really boring really quick for me.

Not worth paying a monthly fee to be frustrated in a game you can't even play offline or in a single player mode.

On the other hand, some people think it's the best game ever. They like the mundane snow moose hunting, collecting 50 mushrooms, and killing people 50 levels lower than them with a rewards system that actually encourages it.
The interesting thing about the above is that, if you take any of the three MMOs we've primarily talked about on this thread, and look at them from the perspective of a single-player game, World of Warcraft is definitely the worst of the bunch. World of Warcraft is very dependent on the community, because collecting 18 leopard pelts and killing 16 water buffalo is an outrageously boring game mechanic compared to just about anything on the single-player market these days. Guild Wars definitely stands up the best here, because Guild Wars is practically a single-player game as it is, with the purely instanced content.
     
olePigeon
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Mar 30, 2009, 04:41 PM
 
Originally Posted by starman View Post
I don't understand why people can't get past this. It costs a lot of money to run servers. How do you think Blizzard pays its employees?
I would imagine from the game sales. You know, how companies used to do it.

Originally Posted by starman View Post
Do you pay for Xbox Live?
No. Another thing I'd never pay for. I already pay for my internet access, now I have to pay more money to play a game on the service I'm already paying for.

Either make internet access free and sell services to use on it, or stop charging everyone to use services on top of a service you're already paying for. All this double- and triple-dipping is just wrong.

Originally Posted by starman View Post
And when did WoW cost $60?
I bought a Battle Chest that had the game plus some expansions. It was $60.
( Last edited by olePigeon; Mar 30, 2009 at 05:50 PM. )
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Originally Posted by Polatrite View Post
This is a concept I definitely cannot see changing. This is the same as buying your cell phone then paying each month to use it, or purchasing your cable modem then paying for internet access, purchasing your television, surround sound, and DVR and then paying for cable, etc.
I guess I'm a product of the 70s. I don't pay for TV, it's free over the air and I get 50+ channels with it. I have an extensive DVD collection for all the movie watching I want. The original point behind cable was that it was commercial free, that's why you payed for it. Now it's like over-the-air TV chalked full of commercials, and you have to pay extra to get the commercial free stuff. I want to watch the History Channel, not the Bow Flex Channel.

Don't get me started on cell phones and internet access, because those two items are completely overpriced. $60/month for freakin' cable internet that is completely useless from 7:00PM to 3:00 AM. 3000 ms pings. Yes, you read that right. No, it's not a typo or an exaggeration. Comcast is "working on it," but you can't fix an overzealous company that wants to oversell their product on an infrastructure that can't handle the volume they want to push.

So this all swings back to Blizzard. A company that pays some programmers and IT staff to keep servers running. You know, like AT&T. Except Blizzard doesn't have to contract with engineers to lay down cables and wiring to houses and run out with a construction crew every time a tower falls in a storm.

Blizzard is raping every single person on the $15/month thing, and unfortunately, you're correct, it's not going to change because people are content in paying for it. Just like they're content in paying three times as much as they used to for Cable TV with commercials.

Unfortunately it seems like the entire computing industry is headed that way because they can get the most money out of it. Microsoft would love to move to a pay-to-use service for Windows, you can already see what a heck of a time they're having trying to convince people to move from XP or to upgrade their Office software. If people have to pay-per-month to use Office or Windows, Microsoft gets to decide when and what is upgraded, and the end user pays for it whether they upgrade or not.
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starman
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Mar 30, 2009, 06:45 PM
 
Ok, wtf is your hate with BLIZZARD? They are NOT the first company to do this.

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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Blizzard is raping every single person on the $15/month thing, and unfortunately, you're correct, it's not going to change because people are content in paying for it. Just like they're content in paying three times as much as they used to for Cable TV with commercials.

Unfortunately it seems like the entire computing industry is headed that way because they can get the most money out of it. Microsoft would love to move to a pay-to-use service for Windows, you can already see what a heck of a time they're having trying to convince people to move from XP or to upgrade their Office software. If people have to pay-per-month to use Office or Windows, Microsoft gets to decide when and what is upgraded, and the end user pays for it whether they upgrade or not.
I agree with you all the way on that. I have no problem letting a game go no matter how good it is suppose to be. I have enough monthly payment from companies as it is. I can do without the corporate leash for gaming. Bring on Diablo 3, they can keep WoW.

If we are lucky, Battle.net will survive the 'nickle and dime era'.
     
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Originally Posted by exca1ibur View Post
If we are lucky, Battle.net will survive the 'nickle and dime era'.
Guess what...?

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Mar 30, 2009, 07:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I would imagine from the game sales. You know, how companies used to do it.
Right-o. I'm sure all those people who bought WOW would have run out and bought useless second, third, fourth…twelfth, thirteenth… copies just to make sure Blizzard got paid for introducing Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Silithus, Ahn'Qiraj, Zul'Gurub, battlegrounds, new spells, new items, world bosses, world events and the thousand other things that got added for no extra charge.

If WOW isn't worth the money to you, that's fine. It isn't to me anymore either. But they are giving players something for their money, and from WOW's success, it's clear that most people feel WOW is a better value than, say, Guild Wars.

Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
No. Another thing I'd never pay for. I already pay for my internet access, now I have to pay more money to play a game on the service I'm already paying for.
This is a bizarre way of looking at things. That's like refusing to pay for groceries because you already paid for the car and gas to get to the store. Blizzard doesn't make a red cent off your ISP fees.

Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
Either make internet access free and sell services to use on it, or stop charging everyone to use services on top of a service you're already paying for. All this double- and triple-dipping is just wrong.
Are you under the impression that everybody else in the world is some homogeneous entity that charges you money? Maybe your employer shouldn't have to pay you because he already pays rent on the office space. You're "double-dipping" him just as much as Blizzard is everyone else.
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Mar 30, 2009, 07:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
This is a bizarre way of looking at things. That's like refusing to pay for groceries because you already paid for the car and gas to get to the store. Blizzard doesn't make a red cent off your ISP fees.
Since we pay for the bandwidth we use, why shouldn't they do the same? If anything I wouldn't doubt if they wrote it off anyhow.
     
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Originally Posted by exca1ibur View Post
Since we pay for the bandwidth we use, why shouldn't they do the same? If anything I wouldn't doubt if they wrote it off anyhow.
I don't follow what you're saying at all. My assertion is that just because you pay for an Internet connection doesn't mean that everybody on the Internet is obligated to offer you their services for free. I don't see how what you said relates to that at all. (And besides, I'm sure Blizzard does pay its Internet bill, so I have even less of an idea what you're talking about.)
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Mar 30, 2009, 09:26 PM
 
Anyone who prefers *lol* Guild Wars over WoW are they type of people who brought the game down. Good riddance, I say.

They probably played hunters and mages.

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shifuimam  (op)
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Mar 30, 2009, 11:28 PM
 
Originally Posted by Randman View Post
Anyone who prefers *lol* Guild Wars over WoW are they type of people who brought the game down. Good riddance, I say.

They probably played hunters and mages.
What makes you say this?

I mean, really - what would you say is so superior about WoW that would make you indicate that anyone who prefers another MMORPG is somehow a moron or a loser?
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It was partly in facetiousness. But in all seriousness, GW is a pale comparison to WoW.

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Originally Posted by starman View Post
Ok, wtf is your hate with BLIZZARD? They are NOT the first company to do this.
As I already sated, I have a problem with paying per month to play a game. My dislike for the concept is not exclusive to Blizzard.

Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
Right-o. I'm sure all those people who bought WOW would have run out and bought useless second, third, fourth…twelfth, thirteenth… copies just to make sure Blizzard got paid for introducing Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Silithus, Ahn'Qiraj, Zul'Gurub, battlegrounds, new spells, new items, world bosses, world events and the thousand other things that got added for no extra charge.
If I had to buy an expansion, I'm fine with that. Diablo II did that. But to perpetually pay $15 every month seems ridiculous to me.

Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
If WOW isn't worth the money to you, that's fine. It isn't to me anymore either. But they are giving players something for their money, and from WOW's success, it's clear that most people feel WOW is a better value than, say, Guild Wars.
It's passive pricing. I'm willing to bet if you broke the game down by how much people have payed for it, and how much content was actually delivered, they'd be paying hundreds of dollars for the game plus hundreds of dollars for expansions.

Since the prices aren't broken down and it's "just" $15/month to play, it psychologically feels like a good deal.

Originally Posted by Chuckit View Post
This is a bizarre way of looking at things. That's like refusing to pay for groceries because you already paid for the car and gas to get to the store. Blizzard doesn't make a red cent off your ISP fees.
I think I messed up my examples. It's like paying $60/month for cable TV, then after you buy a TV, the TV manufacturer charges you $15/month to watch cable TV on your television.
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starman
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Mar 31, 2009, 12:35 PM
 
That's a poor analogy, and your logic is flawed. You're not paying for a game, you're paying for a SERVICE. It's no different than paying for GEnie or Compuserve or AOL or Comcast or your gas or your electric. You're paying to use their servers which they have to maintain.

Too many people look at it as a game. It's a client/server and someone has to maintain the server.

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olePigeon
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Originally Posted by starman View Post
That's a poor analogy, and your logic is flawed. You're not paying for a game, you're paying for a SERVICE. It's no different than paying for GEnie or Compuserve or AOL or Comcast or your gas or your electric. You're paying to use their servers which they have to maintain.

Too many people look at it as a game. It's a client/server and someone has to maintain the server.
If it's a service, why charge $40 (or however much it costs) for the game?
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starman
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Mar 31, 2009, 01:35 PM
 
For the same reason Comcast charges you for your modem.

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Mar 31, 2009, 01:57 PM
 
Originally Posted by starman View Post
For the same reason Comcast charges you for your modem.
I can agree to a point, but with Comcast you get hardware. Wouldn't you think this would be more like AOL, back in the day, with the free disks (software) and you just pay for service?
     
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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
If it's a service, why charge $40 (or however much it costs) for the game?
In reality, I suspect it's just a way to make money. On a practical level, though, it also limits the number of accounts a person can have — which both eases the server load and makes it somewhat impractical for a person to keep getting banned and coming back (unless they're willing to pay 10 times what everybody else does).
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Originally Posted by starman View Post
For the same reason Comcast charges you for your modem.
I bought my modem, I don't rent it. Comcast doesn't charge for the modem to access the internet, it's a support plan to replace the hardware if something goes wrong. You don't have to use Comcast's modems.
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starman
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Originally Posted by olePigeon View Post
I bought my modem, I don't rent it. Comcast doesn't charge for the modem to access the internet, it's a support plan to replace the hardware if something goes wrong. You don't have to use Comcast's modems.
But they charge for the internet service.

You bought the modem, you buy WoW. You pay a fee to Comcast, you pay a fee to Blizzard.

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