They say opposites attract, but I’d be inclined to argue that opposites don’t stay together, not for the long hall at least.  As far as things go to be opposites on, gaming tends to be pretty clear cut: you are either for it, engaging in it as a hobby and a passion or you’re against it, regarding it as childish and a waste of time.  Stereotypically, the example always tends to be a less-than-attentive husband and a nagging wife.  But what about couples who are both into gaming?  What about the couple who can both scream a blood curdling war cry and slaughter the enemy and spend tender moments curled on the couch together? Mark and I are this couple, and we’ve learned alot from gaming.

Teamwork- One person takes the hits, the other heals them without running away (not that I’ve ever ran mind you… no seriously).

Trust – Learning to rely on your healer, aka the wife, who has assured you she isn’t going to run away and leave you to die this time.

Respect – You want the acheivement and by God, everyone in the room is staying until you get it.

Communication – “FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST WHAT THE F IS THAT A-HOLE DOING? NEED HEALS NOW PLEASE!”

Compromise – I got the last piece of loot, you can have this one.

Acceptance - You’re far more elite than I will ever be.

Committment- You mean to say we’ve been on this raid for 5 hours?

If you have any to add, share in the comment section!

I went to log into WoW for the last time today, having made the decision to go ahead and cancel my account, only to find that the account was already closed.  I hadn’t logged in in about a week, but I must’ve canceled the subscription right after renewing for three months, preventing it from automatically billing me. It’s funny, a part of me must’ve known then that any longer wasn’t needed.

This was the last of gaming in my life and I feel ready to move on from it.   MMO gaming has been the biggest hurdle for me over the last 10 years as I’ve slipped in and out of addiction with various titles.  Whilst a part of me will always want to renew that old Everquest account, or read about WoW’s next expansion, I know it’s for the better if I don’t.  I feel free from it, in a way I never have before. I’m not giving these things up because I feel some responsibility to do so now that Little Doodle is about to rock my world, merely I am letting these things go as I feel ready to do so, and ready to move on. I don’t think I’ll ever return to WoW, a part of me feels I “beat the game,” having been there, done that, and got the achievement to boot.

But I am very grateful for the time I spent in WoW, because without it I would’ve never met my husband.  Two people, so perfect for each other, on opposite sides of the globe should so happen to meet in an online game and fall in love.  I am very grateful to have met him, and now we are married and expecting a little one and our love continues to grow.  I also met some really awesome people through our guild as well.

It’s a shame it was already closed though, I guess the gold shall be buried with the characters and not given away lol.

Share on Facebook ]]> http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/now-departing-azeroth/feed 0 http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/game-over-20-year-era-comes-to-an-end http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/index.php/archives/game-over-20-year-era-comes-to-an-end#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:24:16 +0000 Nicky http://www.awesomeville.co.uk/?p=307 I didn’t think it was over until Mark and myself got the xbox 360 flashed a month ago… then, I knew:  my gaming days were finished.  Interestingly enough, in large part, it isn’t even due to the impending arrival of Little Doodle, more this unsatisfied feeling and bad taste in my mouth with the current state of games/gaming/gaming community that has left me hanging up my towel.

Like many gamers around my age, the journey began with the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  I was four, and I remember what it was like to engage in that “other world” shown magically on the TV screen.  Now, 20 years later, that magic feeling is replaced with feelings of mediocrity, some of which is the gaming industry’s fault, some of it mine.

We burned nearly a dozen games for our newly flashed 360 and one after the other, as we put them in to play, struck me as being just carbon copies of the last:  Bayonetta, Dante’s Inferno, and the like all felt like God of War rip offs, in which only the character and the setting having changed.  They brought nothing new.  Prototype and games like it felt like I was doing nothing more than transporting the character from cut scene to cut scene, a mere guide inbetween movie segments.  Even the transporting of the character to yet another cut scene wasn’t a challenge, as they conveniently marked where you should be going on the map every step of the way.  And I asked myself what was the point? It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t free roaming, or free will, or even a challenge.  Game after game that we burned went into the 360 and back out again, with nothing but a sigh and shrug.

Of course, there have been a few games which have completely captured my imagination and attention in the last couple years: Fallout 3, Oblivion, Guitar Hero, just to name a few of the games that I truly loved and enjoyed.  I have fond memories of the N64 and older systems. I’ve always loved MMOs and RPGs.  But it now seems so inconsequential, nothing more than a good time here and there.

World of Warcraft, my last gaming hobby, will not last much longer either.  After all, alts can be fun but when you’ve “been there, done that” on your main character you find yourself asking, “what’s the point?”  Lately I have found myself wanting to watching videos on how to bathe a newborn or read an article on breastfeeding than log into WoW.  I want to get out and do things more than sit indoors and get that next level.  I suppose this new evolution was to be expected as the weeks went by in my pregnancy.  I just never thought that I would feel like I’m ready to be done with it, ready to move on and ready to embrace this new phase in my life.

And then there is gaming as a whole.  At the risk of sounding like a hipster, a part of me feels done with it now that it’s become “Like totally awesome, dude!” to everyone.  Everyone has their own podcast, everyone has their own website (including me, at one point), 12 million people play WoW, and sometimes it all leaves me wondering if people are actually enthused for the release of the next mediocre title or are they just playing it up in order to match the status quo? Gaming since you were born? Step in line, so was everyone else our age into gaming.  It’s become too chic for my tastes, too mainstream.  Release parties and the like are for movies and vapid celebrities, not the things we used to play in the dark by ourselves.  Not the things we were picked on in school for liking.   Mainstream gaming ruined the MMO genre in my opinion.

And then there is my fallacy, as well.  I’ve been an MMO addict for the last ten years.  I regret my senior year in high school because, instead of hanging out with the people I was about to move 1000 miles away from, I spent most of it locked in an addiction to Everquest.  Countless sunny days and opportunities have gone by in the last ten years that were completely missed. I don’t want to continue making this mistake.

I won’t be getting rid of my things, and it’s not like I think that I’ll never ever play again.  Who knows, once Little Doodle is a bit older and that next hot MMO comes out I may give it a go.  But the days of marathon gaming,  late nights and morning energy drinks, the obsession with the next level,   the new game release must-have, the ten thousand gaming community boards,  are over.  And I am not sad in the least.

Life is moving on, in new and exciting directions.  92 days to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line.  But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.”  And these are my thoughts.

No other game can thrive in the shadow of WoW.

It’s true:  with WoW having the monopoly on MMO players’ hard earned subscription money, it’s near impossible for other games to sustain a large playerbase.  What’s more, with the pressure of Blizzard expansion releases and major game updates, many competing developers find themselves racing to push out a near finished or half finished products, just to contend with release dates.  When a player then leaves WoW to try out a newly released MMO, and finds that it’s buggy or doesn’t have much (if any) endgame content on release, they leave and go back to the familiar.  Which leads me to my next point:

The new-to-MMOs player that WoW attracted.

With twelve million subscribers, there are quite a few MMO newbies who have recently discovered the niche genre over the last five years thanks to WoW.  Many of these players did not start at launch either, and instead came into the game with Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King. They started their MMO careers in the middle of a well established and hugely popular title, one that had years of post release development to make it as rich as it is today.  Polished leveling, massive amounts of endgame content, well balanced classes, casual player content, achievements…. these are all things that come with time with an MMO.  Those of us who played WoW from day one know that this hasn’t always been the case.  WoW has undergone years of post release development to get to where it is today.

Now, when you have a player who has only ever known a polished, impeccable WoW for an MMO go and try another game JUST released in the genre, you’ve got trouble.  They expected a myriad of endgame content, polished gameplay, and a flawless experience.  What they got was horrid latency, bugs, crashes, falling through the world, and areas of the game lacking all content.  They pack up their toys and go home, because a game like this obviously sucks, right?  No matter that it’s just been released.  They tell their friends and guildmates upon their triumphant return about what a terrible experience they had with the new game and loe, the new game gets a bad rap on the web just weeks into it’s launch.

WoW has set the bar for easy and casual content.

Does anyone actually remember a time when MMOs had some challenge to them?  I do.  WoW has a second monopoly: the monopoly of the casual player.  Let’s face it: WoW is easy.  It’s so easy you can practically beat the entire game solo simply by rolling your face across the keyboard a couple of times.  Leveling takes no skill, and you can do virtually levels 1 through 80 entirely solo.  Once you reach 80, a day or two of easy heroic dungeon grinding and you’ve got a full set of one of the latest tiers of gear.  Raiding was taken down from 40 to 25 man dungeons, and all current endgame raid content can be PUGed (Ie. pick up groups aka not guild organized).   Where did the challenge go?

This has been a debate amongst the MMO community for some time: What constitutes “hard?”  For MMOs, it’s mostly time investment and group organization.  In Everquest,  raids took up to 72 people, and were done on world bosses (ie not instanced, most world bosses would not reappear again after being killed for days, some a week or more).  In WoW, everyone can have their piece of the pie in a minimal amount of time with virtually no challenge.

Let’s take another example: Dieing.  In WoW, dieing is a momentary inconvenience. You die, you spawn at the nearest graveyard, you run as a ghost back to your grave, and you resurrect.  A small amount of damage is done to your armor.  In Everquest, death carried actual penalty. You died, you spawned buck naked at your bind point (which, if you forgot to bind close to where you would be hunting… could be a few HOURS away), you had to make it back to your corpse to retrieve all of your armor and stuff, whilst things could attack you in your defenseless naked state, and if you made it back to your body alive without a cleric friend to rez you, you also just lost a couple hours worth of experience.  If you had just dinged to the next level before you died, you probably de-leveled as well.  If you died on the way back to your body, you lost more experience. In the early days of Star Wars Galaxy, if you spent months of your life building your character into a jedi all it took was one death.  Die one time as a jedi and your character was a ghost permenantly.  You were done, finished.  No more jedi for j00! (of course, subsequent SOE patches have changed this to make it easier/less harsh).

Some people argue that this is making a game unnecessarily hard, but I disagree.  People work harder at their roles in a group when dieing poses a real threat.  Death loses it’s meaning in games like WoW because their is no penalty.  So instead of grouping with another player to beat the pack of three mobs you need to kill, why not just rush in, kill one, die, respawn, kill another, die, respawn, and then kill the last one.  See what I am saying?

There is also no real reward for beating the top of the top dungeons, either.  So you’re in a full set of teir-du-jour armor?  So is everyone else.  Because the content is easy enough anyone can experience it.  In Everquest, if a player walked into a city with the top gear you knew about it, you could see a crowd of people gathered around him or her, drooling over how elite this person was.  Because it meant that person went to near inhuman lengths to get that armor, and people knew it.

I recently debated with a WoW player about hard content.  His argument was why would a company create a game where it’s top echelon of content was only experienced by 1-2% of the playerbase, as that’s not what someone pays for in buying an MMO.  I say that’s incorrect, as most people who buy MMOs are acknowledging in their purchase of the game that X amount of time is going to  need to be invested into the title to achieve Y goal.  It’s not the makers of the game who are at fault if that person’s expectations are unrealistic.  You need to have top content for top players or else there is nothing to aim/work for.  MMOs are a time sink.  Making them into something that can be done on a casual player’s two hours a week is making them easier.

Thus, all games post WoW launch have been suspiciously easier, perhaps to compete for the casual player subscription base.

Chuck Norris, also known as “there goes the neighborhood.”

Any player across the realms of WoW can tell you that trade channel chat is perhaps the most intellectually devoid verbal diarrhea one has ever had the pleasure of reading.  Simply step into any major city at any time of day and your once peaceful chat box is instantly filled with a cacophony of retarded children on the topic of the moment, anything from religion, to politics, to your mother, to Chuck Norris, to the latest internet memes and, as always, an update on who’s a ninja.  WoW brought MMOs mainstream and, as such, you have more people than ever in your personal playing space… and there goes the neighborhood.

MMOs used to be a niche appeal sort of thing.  With the advent of MUDs, to Ultima Online, on through to the first 3D MMO experiences like Everquest and Asheron’s Call, most of the playerbase were twenty and thirty somethings, and the type of people who grew up on pen and paper RPGs and Magic the Gathering.  This group of people held these game experiences with high regard, an online social experience coupled with a living, breathing world much like those in fantasy novels or in the tabletop RPGs. General chat channels were usually filled with people exchanging information about aspects of the game, helping each other out, etc.  Occasionally you’d experience other people roleplaying and, whilst I was never a roleplayer myself, I could appreciate what RPers added to the overall environment.  People were patient with each other, wanted real adventure, and took their time with things.

In WoW, when not expressing their horrid political views (which always end in a punctuated “lulz”) we have players who are impatiently tapping their foot over a new-to-dungeons players, calling them a noob and telling them (helpfully) to “learn to play, lulz.”  Ask a question in the channel about a quest or item, and you can be sure to be greeted with a “Check wowhead.com, fag.”  More under 18s than ever are playing MMOs, particularly WoW, and the mature, respectful, roleplayers seem to have all but disappeared.  Most stayed behind, loyally, on MMOs living past their prime like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The failure of other MMOs.

Over the last couple of years a few games have been released worthy of mention: Vanguard and Age of Conan.  These should’ve been top contenders to share in the MMO glory at the top of the food chain alongside WoW or, at the very least, not crash and burn.  This wasn’t the case sadly.  When I canceled my WoW subscription I thought I’d go see what Vanguard had become.  I downloaded the game, renewed my old account, and logged in.  There were FIVE people on the ENTIRE continent.  No more than TWENTY on the entire server. What happened?

The Vanguard forums were dead, and according to those still around SOE was concentrating it’s business on developing an MMO for 2014, rumored to be Everquest 3.  The game was no longer receiving regular updates, and it appeared as though SOE had simply put this glorious-in-concept MMO out to pasture to live out the rest of it’s time and die peacefully.

I had high hopes for this title before and after it’s release.  It was an AMAZING concept, a rich world, a Brad McQuaid creation.  And it’s not to say that WoW was Vanguard’s failure, because it wasn’t.  After all, you can’t blame WoW that Sigil developed a game that would run on a computer that was invented two to three years in the future (and even my current beast of a laptop could only run it on low settings).  And you also cannot blame WoW that Vanguard still lacks endgame content three years from release.  But this is the state of MMOs that are not WoW. They lose subscriptions, they lose funding, and eventually they fade into being just another dead title in the genre.

Warhammer, a game that tried to be so much like WoW they even went to great lengths to completely copy the design style, is also dead.

Age of Conan is fairing a bit better.  Servers had been merged but it at least created a sense of a living world, as you can see other players quite frequently going about their day.  There is still an active community and an active development team.  My Laptop had no problems running it flawlessly on the highest settings,  and I was surprised to even hear about an expansion due out this year.  AoC may still have a hope for not completely failing but again,much like Vanguard, it’s lack of content at release and the bad press it got for it has really put a dent into what it COULD achieve. You can see it’s still in the recovery phase from a poor launch and, whilst you do see oter players in the world enjoying the game unlike Vanguard, it’s not the bustling metropolis that is WoW.

Oddly enough older games have an easier time holding on to  loyal subscribers than do newer, failed MMOs.  You still have loyal, active communities in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, as well as a scattering in Star Wars Galaxy.   Vanguard is a ghost town, as is Warhammer, and Age of Conan looked to be going the same way at release but make actually make a comeback in the coming year.   I think it’s hoping to much to herald any game awaiting release as the “WoW killer.”  WoW isn’t going to die.  No game will ever be released that will simply overtake WoW and pry it’s 12 million subscribers from it’s cold, dead fingers.  It will be interesting to see if WoW can match the longevity of the previous most successful MMO, Everquest, still going in it’s 11th year.

I think all that will simply happen is a developer will create an MMO that serves to satisfy another niche MMO desire other than high fantasy, and this game will do well as it will provide different content.  Not because it’s better or more successful or destined to be a WoW killer, simply because it’s different.  Many MMO players are looking towards Star Wars: The Old Republic to achieve this niche position, due out in the next two years.  We will have to wait and see.

Until then, you’re either playing WoW or playing by yourself.

I has received cash for my birthday and insisted my mother take me up to Best Buy as quickly as possible in order to buy the same game I had seen my cousin play.  But when I got to the games selection for MMORPGs, I hesitated.  Next to Asheron’s Call was another game, one that I had never seen or heard of, titled Everquest.   I had unfolded the flap on the front of the box and gazed wonderously at the artwork of strange and fascinating fantasy characters battling it out.  The back of the box promised an expansive world, a large community of fellow players, and hours of enjoyment.   So I bought Everquest instead.

Ten years later I’ve played a total of eleven different MMORPGs, with the current one being the very game I also met my husband in: World of Warcraft.  I went from being the complete noob to veteran player over the years and I am still going, still leveling characters, still doing quests, gaining armor and raiding dungeons.  But why?

My love for MMORPGs exist for the constant world.  A living, breathing society of players, some nice and others rude, some well played and other noobish, some neurotic and some just your average people.   A true spread of all walks that make up our actual world.  The world in which we play does not simply shut down when you stop playing.  It continues on, grows, expands, and changes around you.  Players selling and buying goods form a real working economy based on supply and demand.

MMOs cannot be beaten, they cannot be fully conquered, and you never truly reach an end point.  Whilst with single player game experiences you play a game that may have 5 to 10 hours of gameplay or, if you’re lucky, on upwards to 40 hours or more.  But regardless of the amount of hours of gameplay promised on the box, it will end.  You will eventually leave the world and the characters behind, possibly to never return to them.  With MMORPGs, the “magic” of the game experience continues, the characters you get to know and love are other people from around the world sharing in the same interests you have, and the world will continue to be persistant, ever changing, always there.

For the last 3 to 4 years my gaming experience has run along side my guild: Fist of the Empire.  The very clan I met Mark in.  I’ve not only had the privledge of meeting a bunch of these characters in real life, but also forged friendships with them.  this is part of what makes the MMO gaming experience so rewarding.  A group of people, of friends, can come together in a game and work with each other to accomplish goals, to raid dungeons, or to build up the guild.  Many who don’t game this way may never fully understand the dynamics but, simply put, do you know how much it takes to get 40 people together and focused for a couple of hours, each doing their own individual role, to accomplish a task?  It’s no easy feat, not even in the real world.  But when it happens, it’s simply amazing.

I’ve bounced between titles over the years,  returning to Everquest a number of times but never for very long, and then onto the next title.  But one thing was always certain: I’ve always has a subscription set up to one game or another.  I’ve never lost that desire to be apart of that fantasy world, to log in and assume the role of the valiant knight or illustrious elf,  to meet new people and play with the ones I’ve grown to know over the past couple of years, and to make my own character the best it can be.  This is why I pay, this is why I log in, this is why sometimes, I may even go to bed at unreasonable hours.

This is why I love MMO gaming.