I bet some people out there think it's decent.

Only when it doesn't subscribe to your specific belief of 'decent', is it not decent. Try not to act like it's ever been different

 

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All 4 of you.





It used to be different. There is no acting involved.

 

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Rose colored glasses, sir.

 

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Blind, sir.

26 posts spread over 3 threads today, smokin'. Yea, I can see the rose colored glasses comment is really appropos. There is a reason no one posts here anymore.

 

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VN has been the same ever since I joined it, which was on another account on 10/10/2003. Not sure what VN you've been posting on, but if you think this one has changed then you are smoking some really good stuff and I must insist you share with the rest of us.

 

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The AC boards flew in their hay-day, and it was hard to even keep a post bumped to the first page...but we have to remember also that most of that traffic was item trading.

 

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Leveling was boring. There were just tiny camps everywhere and the quest objectives were 2 feet away. Wash, rinse and repeat for 5 levels. It felt way too streamlined and repetitive.

Dungeons are a pain. I was excited hearing they are difficult again, but I don't play that much anymore and don't have a close group of friends to play with. In vanilla/BC I loved the hard stuff because I always played with the same group. WOTLK made pugs easier which was nice since I was only playing casually. In Cata playing with PUGS is just frustrating.

As to the original topic, while I enjoyed leveling a worgen up through the new old world areas, I spent more time in rnadom dungeon groups then doing the new quests. I did not find them significantly improved over the old, just less time consuming with less pointless traveling back and forth. I was initially interested in seeing how they would put the WAR back in Warcraft, but with a few exceptions have been pretty underwhelmed. The phased storylines are interesting, the 1st time you see them, but man if you gotta repeat the same areas with multiple characters it really feels like work and too firmly fixed on rails. In fact, thats my basic gripe with Cata and recent MMO releases in general, everything is firmly plugged into a narrow path you must follow to advance, whether its plot, linked missions, grinding out tokens etc, makes me nostalgic for more open world games like the original ones.


I still find BGs to be mostly fun, although the outcome is usually pretty predictable depending on whether I queue with guild members or not. Heroics however have long since become extremely tedious and raiding just takes so long now that I rarely have the time. I basically log in, get my daily valors, do a few BGs and am done with WoW. Queued for random this afternoon and upon entering Deadmines was immeditately informed all 3 dps had never been there. We never wiped, but at least for the majority of 2 bosses it was just me and the healer grinding it out. One guy died 4 times in the electric trap portion, so basically your average day in instance random groups.


As to this discussion board, as you can tell by my name which would not convert properly when it changed ownership yeah I found it looong ago. Mostly to discuss Everquest at the time (lasted through till the Planes of Power expansion), but I did try Asheron's Call with very mixed results. I still check up here, only usually while waiting for things at work.


As far as the fantasy RPG genre thing goes, I am finding DragonAge 2 or something more open world like Fallout to be a hell of alot more fun then any MMO currently.

Ironically EQ was the first mmorpg whose population ditched this place for the home boards. The EQ board here went catatonic while it was still at the height of its popularity.

I can't stand the home boards for EQ though; actually, there is something wrong with the EQ board population as a whole. Nest of fanboys, yeah, but beyond that, its the sort of fanboy that doesn't seem to understand the internet at all. Every message board is filled with people who don't like to have their opinions questioned, but in the EQ community the reaction is usually akin to what would happen if you took a newborn baby from its mother and slapped it silly in front of her.

I always derided the WoW community as idiotic arseholes, but I find myself, after returning to EQ after a long absence, that I prefer arseholes to passive-aggressive dorks. Heck, after EVE, I now expect the population to be asshats and wonder what is wrong when they aren't.

 

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blizzard completely missed the mark IMO.


first they only did 5 levels and clearly there was enough areas/content to support 10 levels. you do your 5 levels and really only use like 2 or 2 and a half zones out of the 5 they added and the way they did quests means you had to follow the story line very specifically. i'm all for storylines but i think it shouldn't be so restrictive as they made it. they also went WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY overboard on the phasing with cataclysm. they did some in WotLK and it worked but there were a few hints that it created problems (anyone remember trying to summon for raids when the first 7 people to the stone couldn't see eachother?). also, with mining/herbalism/archeolgy xp my friend literrally went from 80-81 with doing like 4 quests and just mining/archeolgy. i have an alt that did 80-81 by me logging in doing the JC/fishing/cooking dailys and never leaving SW.

they made the instances too hard. while i enjoy a challenge i much rather enjoyed the 10-15 minute queue time as dps from WotLK. hard modes are for the hardcore not heroics and normal raids and blizzard seems to have missed this. now they're nerfing everything after the fact to ease it up for players. they made tanking harder and they made healing harder and really for no reason. I've yet to find a single player to tell me they prefer the healing/tanking in cata than any previous version of the game and that's because it's not. for healing there's a fine line of making it too easy and too hard and blizzard took a sinlge step over the line towards too hard and they shouldn't have.

BG's are the same thing they've been since they were introduced. most people do it for the honor to purchase easy gear. sure there are those that play because they enjoy the pvp but not from my experience. in fact i only have 1 friend that plays that has ever told me he would quit if blizzard removed the pvp everyone else seems to ignore it and more often than not i am told by friends they can't stand the pvp and that it's just a waste of time.

archeolgy - this was awesome at first. the RNG has killed it for me and afterall.. it's just the remnant of the really good sounding path of the titans system which would have been a really good way to expand characters without levels... yet like all the other stuff i was originally excited about when cata announced it was all scrapped/changed beyond recognition.

guild levels was cool until half my guild quit because of cata content - they couldn't get gear fast enough because the content was too hard. we had 2 10 man groups and one finally just quit because they'd grinded everything they could other than the raids within a month of cata's release and the raids at the time with essentially all blues was too hard to make it more than halfway through any of the raids and people got bored.

storyline - this has been the weakest storyline.. wotlk was obviosuly the strongest as is brought the story that started with warcraft 3 to an end essentially. i mean, storyline wise wotlk was the end all be all of the story of wow.. cata feels like they're grasping at straws to give us a story arc and deathwing just isn't all that good. i like the idea of changing the world but it didn't turn out the way i had hoped i guess.


is deathwing still burning zones? i have friends that got killed by him and got the achievement and not me. i was in a zone once too where he struck and it didn't kill me.. not sure why. would be nice to have a way to get the achievment.

the new races... havent had a chance to start a goblin but worgen are really meh to me... no mount is dumb and i'm not sure if they did it for a "cool" factor or because they couldn't come up with a new mount idea.

all i see with cata is this expansion that COULD have been and is now what it is as oppsed to what it should have been. I have hopes for the patches that are coming but i'm not sure how much longer i'll be playing WOW if some things don't significantly improve for me.

 

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