Tentadrilus on: Warcraft, Family Deaths and Nicotine

Tentadrilus

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As you may or may not know (and I sincerely hope you do not), my grandmother died on the 17th of May. She had been in hospital for about 3 days with a cold which had been amplified by her old age. I didn't really get to know my grandma, but she was very active in the community and she had a grand old life (she died at 93 I think) but enough about that. This was a brain vent.

This doesn't lead me onto my next point: World of Warcraft. The gaming version of nicotine. Those of you out there who enjoy the Warcraft saga will agree with me when I say that Warcraft is one of the best gaming series ever. One thing I don't get, though, is why people hate WoW. Most people I meet who say they hate World of Warcraft have never played it, or they've played 2 days of the 10 day trial so they can say to people "Yeah I've played it", i.e. they haven't had any real experience with the game. I sold my soul to World of Warcraft roughly 4 months ago, and it's an excellent game (which unfortunatery I suck at) made by an excellent company, Blizzard, who have brought us gaming classics such as Diablo II and Starcraft. Speaking of Starcraft, the sequel is coming out in X months. Hooray!

World of Warcraft is only a damaging game if you allow yourself to get sucked in by it. I admit that recently I've been tottering on the edge of addiction, but thankfully I can tear myself away from it (and then want to play it again about half-an-hour later). To solve that, I've been doing a bit more scripting for HL2 and am probably going to have a crack at mapping some time soon. But that's probably beside the point. Well, actually, I'll give you £5 if you can find a point to this thread.

What worries me is that Blizzard are hosting a drawing compition. To win, you have to draw an astoundingly good picture of the death knight Arthas holding the Litch King's cursed blade, Frostmourne. Whoop-de-doo. I also read on the internet that there was once a Korean who had a friend which he allowed to play on his World of Warcraft account. As a joke, his friend changed the password. What did the other guy do? Go round to his house during the night and murder him with his dad's combat knife. What happens if there's an addicted WoW player out there who's good at drawing? He'll win the monolithic stainless steel Frostmourne replica and probably go on a killing spree.

Shit.

If you have any thoughts or opinions about death, Warcraft and gaming addiction, feel free to talk about them here. 8)
 

Jelly

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I dislike WoW because some of my friends got consumed by it's limitless hunger for addicted players. :wink:
 

Thraxis

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I've tried WoW on several occasions, and the thing that completely killed it for me was infact, another blizzard game.

Diablo 2 (and to a lesser extent, the expansion).

WoW is very much like a job or a chore to me with it's pace. You hop on, grind some quests or mobs, wait a good 30 mins to a few hours depending on how organized your guild is to do a big raid and to even get to that point takes average players about 6 - 18 months (depending on RL status).

Diablo 2 was very much "Hop in and start killing stuff". If WoW is nicotine, Diablo 2 was crack to me. Anytime I was pissed off about something in life, I'd hop in and within 10 minutes easily have 500 corpses of monsters felled by a spell or skill.

I've yet to find a game with that kind of pace that is online, cooperative and fun (Hopefully Left 4 Dead will give me a bit of that rush) with a community around it that isn't the 1337 kiddies of today

So basically, Wow to me is the other side of the spectrum of Diablo 2. Sure there are AoE spells, and splash damage and such but there just isn't the same level of mayhem and rush that D2 brought me many moons ago.

WoW is by no means a "horrible" game. I can't imagine the hours they have poured into it (probably only surpassed by the amount of time it's most hardcore players have) and in doing so, the world reacted.

My hope is that Diablo 3 doesn't go the way of WoW, or I will have lost faith in Blizzard. I want to like WoW, I have enough friends from RL and Online that play it for me to go and enjoy it with them, however I don't like the game itself and that would kill it for me.

(Yet another all over post to adress your all over post)

P.S. Sorry to hear about your loss
 

J-M v2.5.5

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The best way to vent for me is Postal 2: Share The Pain.
Nothing beats setting people on fire just to see them run around screaming, only to have their heads hacked off by your shovel half a minute later.
Not to mention the cow head filled with anthrax weapon that spontaneously causes twenty people to start puking blood.
Awesome game.
 

Dridmar

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J-M v2.5.5 said:
The best way to vent for me is Postal 2: Share The Pain.
Nothing beats setting people on fire just to see them run around screaming, only to have their heads hacked off by your shovel half a minute later.

Truth ^^
But you should get the week in paradise (or whatever it's called) mod. It makes the game more fun. :mrgreen:
 

Shurik3n

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In my opinion World of Warcraft did almost everything right for an MMO and thats why it has done so well. The only real flaw from a gaming standpoint is that they added a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be there and only wastes time (for example: the gryphon rides, rez sickness and rez timers). Everything about the game is a time sink in reality. Leveling is almost pointless since any item you get or anything you do is worthless once you hit the level cap and the real game actually starts. I have 2 70's, a human paladin and an orc warlock, both on different PvP servers. In my opinion the game is horribly imbalanced as far as solo grinding and leveling goes. The paladin took me months of casual playing, the warlock took about a month, with more time invested, but the /played at 70 was still only ~12 days.

But like I said, the game doesn't start until 70. You really get 2 options, to start raiding or to start doing arenas (people who get far in both usually play too much, or have reached the furthest of endgame in raiding and get ezmode 2k ratings with their PvE gear). Unfortunately for raiders, the game is entirely balanced around PvP. Blizzard makes more money that way, raids and instances take time to develop. They have gotten lazy and just recycle old recolored models over and over. So rather than focus on PvE, they take 20 seconds to poorly balance classes and throw them in an arena. Plus, they get to have arena tournaments which cost $20 to sign up for. Raiding is the biggest time sink of all, you get gear to get better gear until you reach the end... then you wait till something new comes out and upgrade your gear. Never really accomplishing anything. The only time I had fun with raiding was when I was the guild/raid leader. I've never been in a fair guild since then, I always see retarded DKP systems where the officers magically end up with 3x whatever everybody else has.

Arena PvP (the only PvP that counts) is probably the worst thing about the game. 2v2 and 3v3 is entirely based around what class combo you are using. Equally geared healer+warrior will always lose to druid+warrior because druid just has the better (overpowered) skills for small matches. Skill is barely involved, unless you're fighting a mirror team. You could do everything right, but if their combo beats yours they have to f*ck up really bad or you will lose every time. I didn't do much 5v5, but in season 2 I got to 2010 in 2v2 and 1900+ in 3v3 on my paladin. I basically quit healing in season 3 because paladins just get owned by a priest or a druid, or any CC really. So I went Retribution and nobody wanted me on their team, but at least I had fun with it. That was basically the end of it for me, until a few months after 'quiting' some RL friends decided to play horde somewhere else. We all got to 70 again and raided for about a month before quiting again. I ran out of things that were fun to do in the game, but I know when the expansion comes out I won't be able to turn down playing again (and eventually quitting, again).

Like I said at the beginning of this post, World of Warcraft got almost everything right when it comes to MMOs. Though every new MMO to come out claims to be the WoW killer, I doubt any of them will be 1/8th as successful as WoW has been. Even though I now find the game to be an imbalanced time sink and endless grind, it still kept me playing for a long time because it IS a good game.
 

Tentadrilus

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Well, I don't really think that WoW is biased towards PvP. They released the Isle of Quel'Danas recently, and by the looks of things they're working on the Wrath of the Litch King raid dungeons before they go on to the battlegrounds. I haven't managed to get to level 70 yet, but I'm getting there (just under a level a day right now - I'm really on fire :roll: ). I'm having fun as a Druid Warlock who's currently at level 56, but I haven't touched any battlegrounds since I was level 27. As I'm writing this, I'm in dire bear form in the corner of Marshall's Refuge because I just pissed off the entire Alliance community in the area because I keep biting them in the ass whenever they try and hand quests in.

Good times, good times.
 

Thothie

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It's not that I hate WoW - it's that I hate what it does to my friends and, more importantly, MSC developers! ;)

WoW's only real flaws are those that are inevitable with the genre, and the fact that it makes people vanish. >_>

Now how this went from the death of a loved one to a critique on WoW, I've no fragging clue. :|
 

Shurik3n

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Tentadrilus said:
Well, I don't really think that WoW is biased towards PvP. They released the Isle of Quel'Danas recently, and by the looks of things they're working on the Wrath of the Litch King raid dungeons before they go on to the battlegrounds. I haven't managed to get to level 70 yet, but I'm getting there (just under a level a day right now - I'm really on fire :roll: ). I'm having fun as a Druid Warlock who's currently at level 56, but I haven't touched any battlegrounds since I was level 27. As I'm writing this, I'm in dire bear form in the corner of Marshall's Refuge because I just pissed off the entire Alliance community in the area because I keep biting them in the ass whenever they try and hand quests in.

Good times, good times.

Quel'Danas is a joke tbh, I look at it as the developers chance to release a "tier 7" so they can make season 4 gear and the raiders wont get pissed off.
 

Blasto121

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I just found WoW plain ole boring in my books, nothing about it seemed fresh or new, I enjoyed the many races to play as. Gnomes where fun to play, but in the end it always came out the same I beat a monster to raise my level. Maybe it would have been more fun with other people around but even then I didn't really like the terrain all that much, it mostly seemed rather bland in a bright way.
 
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