Did anyone else see this interview with Mike Morhaime from yesterday?
Some interesting points about the balance between greater accessibility and the need to make it tricky enough to encourage people to interact with each other.
I also noted, that whilst he is certainly more engaging the Ion, he is just as good as adept at the old ‘diplomatic answer’ lol
It’s a definitely tricky topic. On one hand, you can’t keep the game as restrictive as it was 16 years ago. Accessibility is important. On the other hand, literally nothing outside of world bosses and instanced content requires any form of player interaction or cooperation. Everything is braindead easy, meaningless and on top of it all unrewarding for the most part.
And the most obvious issue is the cross realm crap. It literally destroys the community and makes servers meaninglessness outside of mythic raiding (until the HoF is filled, then even that is cross realm puggable). Instead of making cross realms and sharding, they should do something about the low-pop realms.
How do you create a sense of community and social interactions if:
Most people one plays with are off-realmers via premade finder.
Nothing in the open world encourages social interactions?
I don’t think anything can be done at this point. We’re way past the point of no return.
Yeah, no.
He isn’t now nor was he ever more engaging than Ion.
He would do his Blizzcon opening speech and then that would be it.
I never do like these interview with people after they leave the company.
Same when Ghostcrawler left and suddenly he had a ton to say.
MMO’s should be social.
The game did not evolve, it devolved and they didn’t even realise the downsides to things like LFR until it was too late.
Again it was a tricky path to balance. On the one hand you’ve got a proportion of the playerbase on small, dead or massively imbalanced realms who wouldn’t have anyone else to play with as opposed to the almost complete anonymity of the cross realm group finder.
I am not sure which is the worse evil on this one.
I don’t know, personally I think that Morhaime is the better public speaker out of the two but is just my opinion.
Hehe, it’s a Classic case of no longer caring about the consequences so you feel free to speak your mind sort of thing.
Game’s a loot pinata, it should’ve rolled over and crashed a long time ago, allowing newer games to develop bigger communities and fueling innovation in the mmorpg genre.
Instead the monopoly blizzard has on us demotivates them to ‘stay on top of the game’ cause of no competition really.
I’m looking at you Wildstar, I played you until everybody went back to playing ol’ faithful WoW anyway and left you to rot. Look at the lost potential, look at the loss of innovative gaming experiences, the things we coulda had, it’s turrible. Blame twitch, blame everybody for abandoning the new for the old.
except that wildstar had little to nothing going for it, besides new graphics it was a game of the past with uninteresting lore, boring long grinds, stupidly long attunement quests and a dev team that thought it was the early 2000s and it showed in how quickly people realized HELL NAW this sucks
i did like the housing though, that was dope
Nah, it was fairly interesting.
But they did settle for a way too ancient game mechanic design rather than try to balance it out with a little bit of modern game mechanic design.
It’s always interesting to read stuff like that because for me it’s the opposite. The game as it was back in TBC pushed me out of content and excluded me because it heavily relied on others to be willing to take you with them. I found people to be rude, elitist and had no patience for someone who was new to the game. I didn’t get to see dungeons while levelling until they introduced LFD. Before then I only ever got to experience them when I outlevelled them and could go back and solo. In some respect levelling dungeons haven’t really changed much, some people continue to be that same elitist judgemental unhelpful type of players.
Equally I did not find this amazing social interaction in Classic that was hyped so much. Forming groups was not fun spamming channels. The people in the dungeons were not super chatty. Out in the world people grouped up briefly to be able to group tag a mob but other than that again very little in the way of social interaction.
I think it’s great Classic exists, but beyond a month’s nostalgia trip it wasn’t for me. The combat was super dull and coming back to Retail it made me appreciate how much the game has improved and changed over the years. It’s fantastic those that want to play a game in a time capsule have that option. Long may it continue.
I do miss being server based, I preferred it when we were at least server based in the latest expansion. Obviously then you have the benefit of CRZ if you need to form a group but the people you run into on a daily basis are mostly from your own community. The problem is that they haven’t dealt with dying or dead realms. Or at least they’ve not kept on top of them. I hate that I rarely see my own guild mates because we are always sharded away from each other, let alone others from my own realm.
Yes but now imagine if there was no WoW to go back to.Where would the Wildstar players go?
GW2, Black Desert, Final Fantasy?
plenty of options besides WoW
Ew.
Well, Final Fantasy is decent I hear.
You are missing the point.Its not where would they go back to.And if we are talking about 2015 not sure how ff14 was back then.Nevertheless the point is i doubt people would leave the game if there was “the good old WoW” waiting on them,even to the mentioned games.
The game is not anti social because of any system in the game, be it cross realm, lfr, group finder or anything else. It is anti social because the internet is full of anti social trolls, even the US Pres is not very sociable on twitter. 20 years ago the internet was populated by geeks who were excited to be playing games with other people as they’d been playing solo games for years.
Forcing people together in order to achieve a goal just leads to a situation where the nice quiet friendly types are bullied into either shutting up or giving up. Usually the latter, then folk wonder where are all the tanks and healers?
I have done exactly one Island Expedition with randoms as I’d read that the best way to do them was to split up and kill the rares separately. When I did this I was questioned by the others (thankfully wasn’t kicked) but this put me off doing them. I gave up random dungeons years ago.
Grouping should be a voluntary activity. If you have friends or are willing to put up with others than do groups otherwise a solo option should be available.
You can encourage grouping by increasing the rewards for group size. I’d be happy to get a smaller reward but not have to put up with harassment.
If Island Expeditions had a solo option I’d have done them more often to get the transmogs, pets and mounts etc. Even if solo gave 1/4 of the dubloons as with 3 folk.
The flex group sizing in Torghast looks interesting to me. Not sure how the rewards will work there. I know I can do it solo or if any of my friends are around we can group up to do it. I won’t have to do it with randoms.
I’m gonna have to hard agree on this one.
The problem with social MMOs is that people don’t really want to be social. People are more lone wolves, very likely to have no friends or insufficient number of friends to run content with, randoms are often times toxic or elitist, you are easily replaced for any reason whatsoever.
I’d much rather do things solo than having to rely on people. They are unreliable, they can fail and when they do they bring you down with them. When you’re solo your only reliance is on how well you yourself play your own character within the assigned content, when you fail there is no question left, you failed because you did a mistake and no one else is there to blame. At least then you know that because the mistake was yours, you can improve on it.
Solo visions for example were great, and yeah I have a group of friends (incredible I know someone likes to play with me) with which I also did vision runs a few times. But solo is simply better, more fun and more engaging for me.
Solo torghast will also be great for me, and who knows maybe torghast will be another gold mine like visions are.
If Classic today got totally new expansion, that is designed with principles of what WoW was, I would leave Retail without thinking. It doesn’t even matter if it actually was a WoW. If Amazon today came out with MMORPG that does what WoW used to do, then I would have no trouble leaving WoW. WoW these days is designed in a way that it is very easy to leave, because if you decide to come back, the game will make itself up to you. Or you could leave WoW just as a “side chick”, as it is heavily timegated anyway.
Sure exCEO of Blizzard and multiple other developers literaly confirmed fact that system what increases acessability also destroy social elemts but hey its still isnt systems fault. Sure keep that telling yourself.
Yet I wouldn’t. I played Vanilla and loved it yet after trying Classic for a month or two and realised that I Classic and it’s style of play was no longer for me.
Same. Only reason why i dont play classic is becouse it doesnt have new content. But new game with classic systems and desing and i would insta quit retail.
Problem is people like you are minority. Most people what play rather solo play other games and people what like to play and have experiences with other players alredy quit wow or play classic becouse game simply do no support such desing anymore unleas you force yourself into it which nobady will ever do. This stuff has to happen naturaly becouse of game systems and its desing.
Even when player think he would rather play solo such player have actualy far more fun and better experiences playing with other players. No matter what he prefer.
Forcing players to play together does not increase sociability in increases group-play, these are different. LFR is group-play, not very social.
Guilds and Communities can be social but will only work if voluntary. If there is an over reliance on forced grouping the playerbase will shrink to a size where grouping will become almost impossible anyhow simply because the three remain players are on differenct continents.