This was a good read. As a former WoW addict, I barely stopped myself from undertaking implementing one for myself.
This is not an area I'm familiar with and I always assumed this kind of work would involve concepts that are foreign to me, but upon reading it seems it was not that magical.
Which I feel is a wild take. WoW private servers wouldn't be where they are now without things like ManGOS. Especially with all the infighting and competition between servers and servers being shutdown. It's what holds back private servers the most. You can never build on what's already been done by others. They're all spinning their wheels and reinventing shit people did years ago.
I was interested in contributing to one of these projects but when I realized they were all just keeping everything to themselves, I gave up on that idea.
The Covid lockdown period coincided quite nicely with WoW Classic.
But the experience of Classic WoW now is nothing like its early months (now 20 years ago!). It's a 'solved' game now, everything is known, documented, data mined, and optimized.
Players rush to max level using optimized routes to then join guilds of like-minded players to speed-run the raids. Little tolerance for 'noobs'. The sense of adventure and exploration is long-gone.
I can't agree enough with this. WoW back in the day was a little wild west, you could go to Wowhead or was it Thottbot (?) for information but it wasn't great. You could really explore and forge your own path. I rejoined for WoW Classic and to be honest playing without all my old friends was just quite sad.
I had the same experience with CoD Warzone. It took off during Covid and I could play with a bunch of mates and people could run different loadouts and strategies. By the time Warzone 2 came out, everything is, like you said, optimized and little room for error.
I honestly think streamers have ruined games with progression. There's too much drive to be at the top and too little focus on just enjoying the game.
You’re free to join any guild full of noobs and just ignore guides and material that you deem too optimized for you.
I’m the exact opposite from you, always rushing to the end game content and competing on the leaderboards. I dislike nothing more than updates that dismiss serious end game players because the noobs (99% of the player base in all honesty) dictate the difficulty and rewards of the content.
Every online game with RPG elements devolves into this it seems. The community min-maxes the fun out of it.
Destiny is like this now. There is a cottage industry of Destiny scientists who make YouTube videos that fill in the knowledge gap intentionally created by Bungie's vague descriptions of class abilities and traits. For instance, Bungie might write a description for a class trait like "while you have an elemental buff, your class ability regenerates more quickly". Then the scientists conduct experiments in the game to answer questions like how quickly? Is there a cap on the maximum amount of ability regen? how long does the buff last? does it stack with other class regen buffs, etc. Then the build theory crafting happens based on these findings and the community settles on a few meta builds.
Of course, Bungie will nerf or buff things at will. And so with every new patch, comes a new round of experiments, theorycrafting, and meta builds. The community has little tolerance for those not using meta builds and you'll sometimes be kicked out of LFG if your gear is non meta. Have a build that is fun to play but slightly less efficient at damage output? Too bad, you're kicked.
And because of the super vague descriptions, you can't just reason about builds with only in game knowledge. It requires you to spend a bunch of time on YouTube, reddit, discord, etc and to keep up to date with patches. It's like a part time job.
In a group you could theoretically run an ssf mode where your group is isolated from the rest of the world, and your enjoyment isn’t spoiled by people who have more experience than you.
That's a cultural issue though. All (multiplayer/online) games can be considered "solved" as the practice of min maxing has become the norm.
Sure, there are always a few days to weeks while the min/maxers are figuring things out, but that's generally not enough time for someone that's not a streamer to experience the content before a "solution" is provided.
The future is real time random ai generated worlds requiring quick thinking by variously skilled folks. The environment could respond to the skill level of the folks to give them rewards based on the skill level observed.
I used to play wow a lot, and it was fun… when I was young. When you have few responsibilities, and all of your friends also have few responsibilities you can invest a lot of time into leisure activities like this without giving much up.
The problem I see with games in general is that so many of them are now designed to dominate your time the way wow does. I somewhat recently used to play Warzone once a week (or once every other week) with a group of friends, and that’s a game that you should be able to pick up, play for a couple of hours, and come back whenever you want and play for a few more hours. But it’s not. New content comes out all the time, and a whole new game comes out once a year. If you don’t stay on top of it, you just don’t get the proper experience of the game. So once my casual level of interest drops below the level of time the game demands from you, I just give up playing it.
This trend of a constant demand for grinding and micro transactions has creeped into way too many products imo, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that most of these games are just not made for people like me any more.
I used to feel that way. I recently (well, 2 or 3 years ago..) started playing Final Fantasy XIV. I think a lot of MMOs these days have quality-of-life improvements so that you no longer have to “nolife” the game if you don’t want to.
For example, I knew people who played WoW who joined a guild and then had to keep their weekend evenings open so they could raid with the guild. Nowadays, these games come with matchmaking so you can find a group of players to complete a dungeon with (the only exception is the hardest content, where you are unlikely to find 7 other random players who are prepared enough to play them). It turns out playing an MMO is a lot more manageable now.
I think for a casual player who doesn't want another job to raid in WoW, FF XIV is really nice go your own pace alternative. Plus the 10-year long story arc is really good. You can go as fast or as slow as you want, you don't need to worry about gearing to get into dungeons or raids. There's a ton of content.
WoW has better core gameplay (more fun to click buttons and kill simple mobs), more responsive, much more active open world, better quality of life. Final Fantasy has better boss fights, much more immersive and coherent storyline, no need for alts to try different classes.
Blizzard sometimes launches new classic progress from scratch, right now bit wowed out but in 5-10 years I could go one more round - hopefully this is still a thing in 20-30 years, seems like a good retirement hobby instead of bingo
It's been well over a decade since I played EVE Online, and man, there's so many really compelling gaming-with-other-oeiple experiences I would love to be having there.
But I feel like I'd need some real world friends to be interested, and it's been a significant chunk of time.
That's a lovely vision. If by the same miracle I retire around the same time, I'm in - haven't played since college, so I'm sure its hardly the same game I knew.
> but now it just feels like manipulating a database with extra steps
Well, realistically that is most of software development at this point. Sometimes I get depressed about that, but other times it fades away when an app brings delight to its users or solves a problem - it's a bit more humanizing and inspiring
Sure, after all most of us work jobs to manipulate the number in a database that represents our account balance, but I don't want to do that in video games anymore.
This is not an area I'm familiar with and I always assumed this kind of work would involve concepts that are foreign to me, but upon reading it seems it was not that magical.