Comments | oni_anne: Game Journal Entry 1

oni_anne

Game Journal Entry 1 - Sat, Jan 10: WoW Grind

Feb 04, 2009 00:34

Background Info
I've been playing WoW since Dec 6 with a static group. we decided to to create our characters on an RP server and selected Hoard for our faction. We wanted to create comical evil characters, and so selected Turens as our race for our band, The Nerd Herd. We play every Saturday 1 to 4pm.

Nerd Herd Visits the Orcs
My friend Dennis is ( Read more... )

css 490c, state of play, mmorpgs, game journal, games, grinding, wow

Comments 5

WoW... ugh... irishninja February 4 2009, 14:30:23 UTC

I love it when I find other people who also think WoW is boring as sin. When I played it (in between times when I quit it, which was every few months), my great frustration came not with the grind (for which I have a mild amount of tolerance) but with the inexcusable lack of movement. My experience was spending half my time running very slowly to my where my quest told me to grind monsters and the other half running BACK from the cemetery to where I needed to grind monsters. I realized I was paying Blizzard for the extreme "joy" of steering my slowly running character through their world, and that pissed me off. It would have been mildly tolerable if the community were decent, but frankly, the player base is largely made up of bad people ( ... )

shteevie February 4 2009, 23:00:04 UTC

grinding and travel will always be part of MMOs. The 'Explorer' gamer archetype wants to see new scenery and go places they have never been, and they are part of the primary target for these games ( ... )

sigtrent February 5 2009, 02:01:29 UTC

I was pondering the last bit... what if there was an incentive to talk and RP with people... kind of like a reverse venereal disease, something you wanted to contract from contact with strangers. Pokemon has a mechanic like that.

More practically I could see a system where characters can trade info like waypoints or hidden whatever nodes or secret doors and such. So either you have a skill that lets you find stuff or know someone who does.

I'm falling into the roll of making work for programmers very well these days :)

irishninja February 5 2009, 16:13:36 UTC

"I'm falling into the roll of making work for programmers very well these days :)"

I hear some of them are only working 80-hour weeks. Some might even be... *gasp* sleeping! Screw that, ya slugs, get back to designing the next monster for me to kill... 8,000 times...

;D

shteevie February 5 2009, 16:53:04 UTC

A few games give a lot of content-free ways of wanting to talk to other people in-game. FFXI, for example, had absolutely no tutorials for combat, quests, crafting, or anything forf the first 5 years it was around. I learned everything I know about the game [and I'd like to think that's a lot] from the playerbase.

FFXI also has some quests or areas that can only be completed / accessed by certain races or jobs, so you need to find the right people to help you if you are not what they are looking for. One quest requires that you gather up 5 red mages, for instance, and there are weight-triggered secret doors in one dungeon that the big Galka characters can open by themselves.

Most games provide group content that requires that you go find some people to play with, but that's about the end of it.