WoW and gaming in general

[Allen]

I'm a big hater of WoW. To me it's a rip of good MUDs in the past with no due credit given. The player base, to me, is too chock full of stupid kids whose parents only subscribe to keep them out of their hair. My claims are substantiated by my first and only foray into the game which consisted of 5 hours of patch downloading, followed by an hour of "Wtf? This is retarded" followed by 20 minutes of being called a newb by little idiots after asking for help in finding a quest location. So you could say my experience was tainted by the little idiots, but the issue is more widespread than that. WoW has millions of subscribers, but American Idol has millions of viewers, and to me, it's just a steaming pile of crap that people only watch because, well, there's nothing better on these days.
The issue really is that people are being shoveled crap games and accepting it as the standard because that's what it's become. The focus is no longer on quality gameplay or a truly deep gaming experience, so much as making the games look pretty. There's a few games worth playing over and over here and there, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is pretty close to being the second coming for me xD. I actually felt like I was Batman, which is awesome, but truly awesome games like that are far and few in between. I remember a time when awesome game releases were a bi-monthly event, and it was hard to keep up with it all. No more! Awesome games are plagued with little, easy to resolve issues, and good games are plagued with stupid kids online. Take Halo 3, for instance. It is by NO MEANS an awesome game, but it's good. Good story, good gameplay, decent challenge on the harder modes, voice acting is spot on, but when you go online... Dang man, the idiots make me want to shoot myself. You have any skill at all, and you get called a hacker. You're just learning, and people scream n00b into the mic like it's the latest fashion trend. I refuse to play most games online due to this. Same with DOA4, a good fighting game by any standard, yet plagued by little kids with squeaky voices who seem to think that insulting people is the latest fashion trend. I'm starting to think that online gaming should have a minimum age of 18, enforced with a genetic imprint scan or something. Mass Effect, an awesome game, plagued with little problems that are easily fixed. They could start with throwing in a coop mode. Easily done, easily resolved via storyline, yet they haven't even contemplated implementing it. The vehicle controls are crap. Utter crap. And there's little map glitches everywhere that need to be fixed so very badly. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten stuck in place on a map and it's gotten me killed. Fallout 3. Another awesome game that's A) Plagued with little problems and B) it just feels left unfinished. For example, the vac mode or whatever you call it, doesn't work properly 3/4 of the time, so I end up with a bunch of shots that either don't get the close-up they deserve, or miss entirely, even though I have a 95% chance hit rate. Plus there's a bunch of little map bugs that need to be fixed, a ton of crash issues that have yet to be resolved. Plus there's no vehicles. That's my biggest gripe. No vehicles. I end up spending 2 hours walking across the map to a quest location, and it annoys me. True, the landscape is beautiful, but, all those derelict cars and motorcycles and yet you can't drive them? What the hell? Starcraft. A game that became the standard for years for the RTS genre. Awesome game, great story, great voice acting, plagued with multiplayer issues. I refuse to even play the game online now. Every patch after 1.13 did more to screw the game up than it did to fix it. 1.14 introduced increased dropped games, new bugs to use in hacks, and screwed up path finding. Did nothing to fix current issues, such as the map max, which zerg players abuse rampantly within the first few minutes. 1.15 introduced a bug where wins count as losses for some odd reason, and replays no longer work the way they should. 1.15B fixed the replay bug and nothing else. 1.15C made it possible to play the game without the disk, and yet fixed nothing else. Is Blizzard smoking crack or are they betraying the gaming community intentionally?
Something needs to be done. Gamers should have a voice once again. Speak out! Down with Steam! Down with crap games! Down with little kids screaming into the mic! BE HEARD! REFUSE TO BUY THE CRAPPY GAMES!
(Yes, I pasted this from the War of Winds forum) :P

[Ceridwen]

I started playing WoW when it first came in stores, so I have played from the very beginning (being able to say that you remember a time before BG's and when Horde-raids on Astranaar was the closest we got to PvP makes you older than the trees in that game nowadays). In the start the game was in my opinion very awesome, but we were all newbs back then and asking for help was easy because people were really eager to, well, help out. I got some very good gaming friends very quickly and I enjoyed storylines and quests. But it is a few years ago now, and I think it is pretty unavoidable that this stuff changes. Cause I see the same problems you mentioned now and it's not really many who play for the same reasons we did anymore. (That sentence made me feel old..)

I quit playing quite a long time ago, if I still drop by it's only briefly. That game is not for casual gamers like myself anymore. I mean people who pop by, do a few quests, chat with a few people and then log off because they just can't be bothered investing 5-6 hours with raiding to get up and ahead. But now you kind of have to.

The last game I played that I really, thoroughly enjoyed was 'Dreamfall'. It was a follow-up game for one that came out quite a few years ago called 'The Longest Journey'. Now that was an amazing game storywise and graphic-wise. Not that it was immensely hardcore, but beautiful nonetheless. Also, you could take it at exactly your own pace and the satisfaction at solving a riddle on your own will forever be awesome.

To finish off, long live the good old Sierra games like King's Quest. Oh, and Monkey Island forever!

[Sar-fitb]

I feel your pain. While not a big fan of FPS games, I feel the same way about WarCraft 3. It was completely ruined for me by making it an online game. The Myst games - they look as if someone died and took us to heaven with him. And then they made it an online game without nearly enough support for the shear amount of fans that wanted a piece of it. Thief 1 and three were awesome and worth the cost, and there were some great, original fanmade quests, but you had to wade through every hundred or so "evade the guards to kill the big cheese" ones. I won't even go into Thief 2 except for this:

*Man with sinusitus and a serious lisp* "Pwaise Kawas"

We should just go back to text games, the ones where they kick out the little pimples when they start interfering with OUR gaming.