Time Capsule from PoE Closed Beta -- a classic PoE vs D3 thread circa 2012

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Tagek wrote:

Also, your logic makes no sense here.
Every game tries to copy it, but because they fail, you think wow's basic concepts fail? Ofcourse not, it just means that WoW already exists, and does it's concepts better than games who try to copy it (naturally), so barely anyone will play those games.

After all, would you buy a knock-off cola brand if it had the same price as real coca-cola but tasted nowhere near as good? Ofcourse you wouldn't. And it's the same with MMo's.

Nope, they fail not because "WoW's already there". Though it's part of the reason. Let me explain how I meant it:

WoW had an incredible lucky start. It paired are well-known brand "WarCraft" with the advent of broadband internet for the masses.
And it has strong points: Very responsive, direct controls (which, to date NO MMO I've played could match), a vast, unrestrictive world to name two.

But it had and had weak points. Raids for example. They never were and still are not what most people play. And yet, they get the vast majority of development time and money.


Now, you're correct when you say "others try to copy WoW and fail". That is because they don't get what made and makes WoW successful. It's not the game mechanics of gear progression and end game.
But that is exactly what they copy.


To use your analogy: Of course no-one wants a rip-off coke that has all the calories and none of the taste of coke. Because that new coke capitalized on the wrong features.
They wouldn't even like a close approximation.

Some would, however, perhaps like to taste a sweet soft-drink that isn't coke but has a different taste. Say lemon-y or orang-y.



And that's how I meant that statement: WoW has good points, WoW has bad points.
Companies often come to the wrong conclusions about what players want from a game. Take your example of TOR: It's tanking atm precisely because it's just like WoW in endgame.

@Tagek

It is as you said, if D3 is not expected to have many patches then if a skill is strong out of the box you will look to enhance it. If Blizzard has an, "Oh damn" moment they will look to balance it or maybe do a dreaded hotfix. Either way, it is a rickety wooden bridge balance patches will bring and with PVP added it can become messy very quickly.

As you can tell, my faith in Blizzard is shaken now. To think every skill will be balanced to me is not something I will believe until I see. If there are indeed few patches throughout the lifespan then I'm afraid I may love some skills that are just, well, horrible out of the box.

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Disillusioned wrote:

And finally, I will have to partially disagree with Charan about the WoW view. I think WoW is an amazing game just because it has simply took over the genre it invaded. Before, with RTS games, Blizzard was one of the first that dared go that way, and with Diablo they all but innovated their own sort of genre but MMOs had Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and so forth yet overcame all those and *beat* the franchises that made fantasy (Lord of the Rings, D&D Online, they even trumped Warhammer which WC is derived from) and to this day they're still holding strong over Star Wars and to a lesser extent, Rift. Their dominance is honestly captivating and with good reason: WoW is an MMO that is simply fun.

However! I do think with WoW's gigantic success that Blizzard saw with how they simplified MMOs for people with WoW they could do that with future titles. I cannot speak for SC2 as I do not own it nor have played it but it shows some in Diablo III with how they've chosen to do these select, simplifying decisions that I feel detract from the game and make an already easy-to-pick-up game insultingly easier.

There was never any doubt WoW wouldn't conquer the MMO world. None. It was like when Sony announced the Playstation. Sega and Nintendo were shitting their pants, and rightfully so. Sony had had ages to make a LOT of money doing other things, looked at the existing competition and knew they had a product that would blow them right out of the water. Same with WoW. That doesn't make it an amazing game to me, it just makes it a very obvious one.

Same with Starcraft. We all know Dune 2 came first, but without the infrastructure of Battle.net, Dune 2 was confined to lonely single-player games. More's the pity, I found it inherently more interesting a play experience than Starcraft. But of course Wc2/SC polished the hell out of the RTS, and the rest is history. Starcraft is now untouchable, even by Starcraft 2.

As for why WoW dominates and continues to dominate, I believe there are two different reasons for that. Firstly, I've already touched on why it dominated, but let me elaborate: EQ1, DAoC, UO...they all had a certain arcane impenetrability. Upon logging on, you were confronted with so many stats, options, a huge world...in short, you were bombarded with the cumbersome demands of the traditional MMO. WoW, as you put it, is simply fun. Emphasis there on the 'simply' bit. As early as the beta, it was extremely easy to run around, do quests, kill mobs, etc. Indeed, that's what I loved about the beta the most. It was spectacularly accessible.

And that brings us to why no MMO since has seriously challenged it. Something that easy to play and *that easy to get addicted to* is going to stomp all over anything new, even if that new thing is 'better' or 'more original'. Unfortunately, and here you and Tagek are dead right, anyone serious about challenging WoW made the grave mistake of taking it on on its own turf. WoW-clones and WoW-'killers' feature either too much of what we can call WoWness or too little; the former earned the name 'WoW clone' (and inevitably fell short of the tried-and-true) and the latter made said MMO dismissable by the already happy-with-WoW masses. People refer to WoW as a juggernaut; think about that with the word 'inertia' in mind.

As much as I think Guild Wars 2 is going to be my favourite MMO ever, I don't think even it will 'topple' WoW. And even if it does, Gw2 won't 'succeed' it. I think the demise of WoW will herald the demise of the MMO as a household thing, as something girls in pubs are just as likely to discuss as the football or what they did at work today. That level of social penetration begins and ends with WoW.

As for 'insultingly easier' -- that's how I eventually felt with the WoW beta, when I looked back at other MMOs I'd played. My last feelings of that beta before I uninstalled WoW from my computer forever were simply this: this is easy enough that any old idiot can play it. Is that going to make for a game I want to play?

...now replace 'WoW' with D3 in the former paragraph and you're up to speed with how I feel today.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Are you *addicted* to WoW, Tagek? If so, I say put the crack pipe *down*. I could elaborate at great length how can easily equate a hardcore MMO addiction to drug addiction, and then extend that to point out that WoW is the world's most popular MMO and remains relatively cheap and accessible. Are you going to pretend for one second that WoW isn't made to be addictive? Really?

Also, I find this absolutism of MMOs before WoW and MMOs after WoW quite distasteful. To me, WoW was no more original than Diablo (see bicycle/motorbike analogy before). It took DAoC, EQ, Ultima Online and *any* other half-decent MMOs out at the time, distilled the best parts and used a slightly more impressive graphics engine from Warcraft 3. Did it make MMOs a household word? Did it become the preferred game of millions around the world? Yep. Basically, did WoW bring the shunned notion of the MMO out of the basement and into everyday lexicon? Yep again.

Twilight did the same for vampires.

Whether I'm comparing it to a cheap, highly addictive drug or an equally cheap, highly popular series of books, WoW is undeniably a bad product. Mass-produced, designed to make as much money as possible with little to no regard for the well-being of its users, peddled en masse by people who care only if you pay your monthly bill to get your fix.

Extreme? Maybe. I've known WoW addicts in real life too. Like I said, I played the beta and saw the potential for it.

So before you take any real offence at my analogy, try to keep in mind that not everyone who uses WoW is addicted, indeed maybe not even all that many, and that my original statement merely equated it to a cheap, addictive, and potentially self-destructive indulgence that can readily take over your life, if you let it.

Saying it's undeinably a bad product is ignorant as hell.
I had a ton of fun with it, it's still one of the best games I played to this date (Note, I stopped playing it quite some time ago).

In fact, how can you even claim this? You played the game before it was even finished, how can you possibly give an opinion on the full product, especially when it's an mmo?

Perhaps it's not something you would like to play, but that doesn't make it a bad product.

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Avireyn wrote:

...WoW had an incredible lucky start. It paired are well-known brand "WarCraft" with the advent of broadband internet for the masses.

The perfect storm. Yes. I recall now I had just gotten decent broadband when it was time to torrent the beta client. It still took *forever* though...

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Disillusioned wrote:

@Tagek

It is as you said, if D3 is not expected to have many patches then if a skill is strong out of the box you will look to enhance it. If Blizzard has an, "Oh damn" moment they will look to balance it or maybe do a dreaded hotfix. Either way, it is a rickety wooden bridge balance patches will bring and with PVP added it can become messy very quickly.

As you can tell, my faith in Blizzard is shaken now. To think every skill will be balanced to me is not something I will believe until I see. If there are indeed few patches throughout the lifespan then I'm afraid I may love some skills that are just, well, horrible out of the box.

The skills scale so none of them will be horrible.
Also, they said pvp is meant to be casual, just like it was in diablo 2. If people whine about that it's just them being idiots.

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Tagek wrote:

Saying it's undeinably a bad product is ignorant as hell.
I had a ton of fun with it, it's still one of the best games I played to this date (Note, I stopped playing it quite some time ago).

In fact, how can you even claim this? You played the game before it was even finished, how can you possibly give an opinion on the full product, especially when it's an mmo?

Perhaps it's not something you would like to play, but that doesn't make it a bad product.

I don't see why you having a ton of fun with it contradicts it being bad. I elaborated on what I define as 'bad' too. As much as I hate doing so, I will repeat myself:

Bad product: "Mass-produced, designed to make as much money as possible with little to no regard for the well-being of its users, peddled en masse by people who care only if you pay your monthly bill to get your fix."

You can refute that WoW is any of these if you'd like, but you can't refute that if I define WoW as that, and that that is my definition of bad, then WoW is a bad product.

I don't need to play it as it is now to know that my definition of 'bad product' applies to it even today.

Would you prefer a different word to 'bad'? Harmful? Not-good? Malicious? Toxic?

(note that I never said other games can't be bad as well. EQ1, for example, was pretty bad in precisely the same way as this. But it was a quality bad. It wasn't for everyone and it demanded a lot of work to get its treasures. I don't think it was 'cheap' or peddled 'en masse'.)

Edit: But in the end, you're the one who played it extensively, not me. I defer to your experience...but good luck using even the entirety of it to convince me WoW wasn't and isn't 'bad'. :)

Ok, but how do you know they don't care about the well being of the users? Sure, they're just people paying money, but in the end, every videogame company's customers are just 'people paying money'.

I guess your bad is a different kind of bad than my bad.
The game itself with all it's mechanics is not (my) 'bad'.
In fact, it's undeniably 'good' given how it dominates the market.

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Tagek wrote:

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Hey Faerie!

It's got two big negative factors, but only one is a negative stat. It did have a speed reduction on it but I got rid of that.

I'm aiming for it to be useful from roughly level 7-8 through to the 20s. Believe me, that wasn't easy. It's a spectacular twink weapon, if you're willing to play by its rules.

Man, the fact that you need a current character to post on their forum is ridiculous. Did they really think it would reduce the trolls? I certainly see no such reduction, and I've only had a glance or two. Very restrictive indeed. Certainly not inviting.

But I do understand. They're huge, the beta's huge, and that sort of thing is really hard to manage and contain.

Goodness knows how many community managers they have by now.

We hardly see ours, but I think that's more indicative of a good thing (we take care of ourselves and the devs respond directly to queries) than bad. :)

Just wanted to note one thing:

They require you to own a game because then your account is actually worth something. If your account is linked to something you care about you will think more before you troll etc. I think it's actually a great idea, but the sheer size of the community makes it impossible for it to work.

You missed my point, ok you need a character to post on their forums, but a character in a classic game like diablo II doesn't count as a character created in game to post. It basically has to be a WoW or SC character. That is what I was complaining about where you have a game linked but it doesn't count.....

Well isn't that because those are the only games that have battle.net 2 integrated?

They have their reasons for it anyway.