Ignacius

Well, I'm looking forward to stuff and gossip! Tell me more! Also, has the Gilgamesh RP scene grown? I recall it being a lot smaller than the Balmung community, and it looks like they haven't had posts on their server threads in a while.

Hi! I'm Ignacius, and I played Final Fantasy XIV a while ago, and introduced myself here. However, I was very excited about Wildstar, a game developed by Carbine that was being published by NCSoft. I was so excited that I thought the game could shake the NCSoft curse. That doesn't look likely, and I feel like I'm paying them to develop a shopping mall. Hence I've returned after nearly a year's absense, because I love this game, because I missed the RP, and because SquareEnix has proven without a doubt that they value their reputation and us as players. The long-term prospects of this game simply look a lot better. Anyway, I was VicVanMeter on the forums there, though I'm going by my character's surname here. I've played a ton of MMORPGs, raided in most, but I really love RP. It's too bad that, as a somewhat prominent community member, I didn't have much time to engage in roleplaying in Wildstar, so I'm really looking to get into more here. I'm really glad to see this site still operating; I really loved this community and they were incredibly welcoming the last time I was around. Anyway, I'll be returning to play on the Gilgamesh server. It's been a year. What have I missed?

Okay, I'll TL;DR it for you. Your idea that boss mechanics make a game hard is wrong. The game has been made substantially easier for you to deal with in your moveset, in your priority system (rather than rotation), and in boss mechanics. The idea that boss mechanics = difficulty is only applicable if you ignore the actual game you're playing, I.E. the mechanics of your class and character. They're exponentially easier now, so those oh so primitive mechanics were nightmarishly difficult. Geddon's mechanics specifically? Yes, today, easy. You've got ways to mitigate the damage and to fix your mistakes. But back then? There's a reason vanilla has that reputation for difficult boss fights. People who weren't very good overcame it with gear, but it was possible (and proven) that some guilds were better than others. But back then, casting the wrong level of spell too often was enough to make your guild wipe. You didn't need better gear to win, you needed perfection. Better gear reduced the necessary perfection you needed. But it never made it easy. Nobody facerolled Molten Core. And remember, that was the first and by far not the hardest real raid dungeon in vanilla. I'm trying to explain, for someone who never dealt with it, what it was like. It's easy to scoff at what you read on WoWwiki now; it sounds easy. I was there. Trust me, it wasn't. I killed Garrosh and Ragnaros in their respective times. I'm very personally aware of what was harder and why. You can turn your nose up at those elements that seem like afterthoughts now, but those things like spell choices, stance dancing (and that wasn't hard because of the button presses, I'll have you know), and rotation maintenance weren't things you ignored on your way to boss mechanics. They were prominent, they multiplied the difficulty of everything you'd ever do, and they weren't just present in one tough boss. They were present in every single fight, boss or trash, you ever did in a raid. They weren't things you ignored so that you could wait for the boss's cast bar to charge an AOE. They were things where you wondered how much AOE you might have to eat to maximize your efficiency.

ROFL Outside of him never having played DPS by the sound of it, yes, this kind of crazy shit happened. This is the kind of stuff I bring up when people want to go back to vanilla raiding. I have a few places I'd disagree, namely about how the lack of mechanics made it easy (he was pretty up front about being in a relatively casual raid), but don't let anyone tell you vanilla raiding was better. A few tidbits he missed! Entire classes had limits. As he mentioned, you didn't need any prot or ret paladins in a raid. Only holy had its benefits. It's benefits were blessings, which lasted 30 seconds. So you never needed more than one or two paladins. So have four friends with paladins? Useless. Level a warlock or a mage, we needed them. He missed the fact that gearing up was bad, but the actual GEAR was a nightmare for a few classes. Hunters especially not only needed to watch their mana, but needed INTELLECT on their gear! That's right, hunters needed to balance their agility with intellect because abilities either used one or the other. And this led to several stupid hunters figuring everything should be theirs, including two-handed strength weapons to use as stat sticks because, "What if I need to raptor strike or wing clip?" That's where "huntard" came from. In that bit, he says you only needed two spells if you were a healer. And he was technically right. However, you needed ALL of your healing spells. That meant you might have all your levels of Flash Heal and Holy Light on two bars so that you could heal using JUST ENOUGH mana, because you needed to conserve it. You could get in serious shit for overhealing, and that could happen solely by using the spell a level higher than you needed it. Yes, warriors needed certain skills. A few of which weren't in their stance. That meant a protection warrior didn't usually use shield bash (because they needed the rage for sunder) but they often had to switch to battle stance to use Mocking Blow, an ability that taunted in melee range when your taunt was on cooldown. This was necessary because, sometimes, if your DPS was high, you couldn't start until there were five sunders on the target. He didn't mention how little threat even prot warriors generated. Healers and DPS pulled hate all the time, so you had to watch your threat meter religiously and know precisely where to restart your rotation. For some classes, like Affliction Warlocks (and they were ALL affliction), that meant that you might suddenly overtake the tank on threat and couldn't dump threat fast enough because your dots were still doing incredible damage. You might get passed over in a raid based on RACE! Racial traits essentially made and broke classes. Hell, priests even had a spell they got BASED ON THEIR RACE! So humans had a heal for themselves only and had a spirit buff. Guess who got invited along to raids most often. Not Night Elves, which had a damage spell and an avoidance spell. Those were wastes of mana! Reroll a human so that you have an instant for yourself that gets you back on the other characters quickest. And you can't race change, so reroll from 1. It is impossible to stress how seriously some people took raiding guilds. This guy was obviously in one that wasn't too serious (they got to play around). There were some hardcore guilds that seriously broke down combat logs after the fact and reported back to you how you could have increased your DPS. And guess what? If you performed everything perfectly, turns out you would have had enough DPS and healing efficiency to kill the boss. Screw whether it was humanely possible, it worked on paper, and it was your fault. And if you were the consistent "problem", you were ejected from the raid. He wasn't joking about being ejected not just for being the wrong spec, but also wrong class, wrong race, having the wrong gear, not being able to demonstrate a certain level of damage on a dummy, being blacklisted in the local community after being ejected from your last raiding guild, for not showing up to a raid even in an actual emergency, or for being friends with someone that was ejected from a raid, regardless of whether or not you disagreed. And yes, of all of those, I have seen examples personally. Of course, if you're friends with the GM, you aren't ever ejected, no matter what. Your numbers have an excuse. But other peoples' numbers? Ironclad proof of failure. "You should have been on the fucking boss, man. My girlfriend was getting whelps." The mechanics they did have were utterly crazy. Take Baron Geddon. He starts pulsing, and in 10 seconds he does 30,000 damage, 500 the first second, 500 the second second, 1000 the third, etc. The tank had 9-10k health if he was really well geared. Imagine this back in the time before internet connections were so quick and reliable. This also meant that the game chugged if you weren't using a high quality machine back in the day. The problem was that the melee had no mitigation. These days, almost everyone has a sort of self-heal, ways of getting out of damage. That leaves survival in your hands. In vanilla, you needed the healers to refill you, and their mana was mana you needed to survive. So it really sucked that another mechanic did damage AND stole mana, and was unavoidable. Unless you had a shitload of fire resistance gear. So you had a whole set of gear specifically tailored to combat fire damage just so that your mana wasn't completely burned. How many mechanics in new WoW require you to have a gear set, then once you have it it's not even a big deal? Oh, but the most fun was living bomb, the first time I remember being sentenced to death. You ran away from everyone else, because when it exploded, unless you'd packed a ton of gear and had the stamina, it killed you. It did a healthy chunk of damage to you, but it also flung you into the air and the falling damage generally finished you off. Which, by definition, you probably did too far away to be healed in midair. Nowadays? None of these mechanics would be a problem. People have mitigation for them, people have mana to heal you, people can prepare. It's difficulty that can be overcome. With the movesets you had? You just hoped it hit your priest so they could cast levitate, and thus they all carried soft feathers. Your survival was almost completely out of your hands. And, of course, if you're airborne and away from the group, you're probably not doing damage. It especially sucks if you have a bunch of melee, who suffer the most from the spells. And I haven't even talked about repairing and what a pain in the ass that was. And did he go over the debuff limit? Yeah, you could be ejected from the raid, or told not to do things in the raid, because you could only use a certain few debuffs before they started erasing the first ones put on. Difficult? Yes, very. Harder than MoP, I certainly think so. More fun than MoP? There are a few things I miss, but don't believe the hype when someone uses the word "better". Harder isn't better, because it wasn't hard for the right reasons. Goddamnit, and I didn't tell you guys about Divine Intervention, the paladin spell that costs a reagent, kills yourself, and gives someone invincibility (usually a healer). But your paladin is a healer, obviously! So it is a healer's job to carry reagents and predict a wipe beforehand, then die by putting it on another healer who, in MC, HAD TO BE IN THE PARTY WITH THEM! Why would you need that when Warlocks had Soulstone? Because Soulstone had a half-hour cooldown. And if neither of those worked, there was a stink because the whole raid had to release and run back to the raid. Yes, that was an admonish-able offense in vanilla. Man, vanilla raiding...

No, they're not. But remember, it wasn't just logistical. You may have had enough DPS to beat the raid boss, if one or two people in your group just didn't break their rotations and come back in differently than they did. It was that squeeze that was most annoying. People scouring your combat log and calling out the few drops of DPS we were missing, starting huge fights with people for things like that. So you might easily have had the DPS and still couldn't do it because people failed. On that note, why are people bringing up the gear grind so often? I try to avoid it; I don't consider it part of raiding. I definitely didn't think MC was hard because beforehand I needed to get a set of fire res gear. Mostly I don't think that because getting the fire res gear wasn't even that hard.

Oookay, I said it's usually harder for people who started after Wrath of the Lich King. I don't think that's really saying you don't have skill. In fact, I wasn't even talking about raids in that case. I was talking about dungeons, specifically challenge dungeons as compared to vanilla dungeons. You have to do a challenge dungeon to even get near that level of difficulty in an instance. I don't think it's crazy to say that even MoP instances aren't anywhere near that level of difficulty until you get to challenge mode. The skills that you use in modern instances aren't anywhere near what you needed to run Zul'Furrak at level in vanilla. If that's a superior attitude, it wasn't meant to be insulting. Every single bit of trash had to be individually pulled and killed in a marked order after you use multiple CC to reduce the incoming damage. not getting enough DPS from someone could run you into the same problem. I remember having to stop to wait for the healer to drink after every pull or every other pull. That's how fast you could kill mana just healing the tank. Tanking meant single-targeting each target to throw a sunder or using a paladin or druid (which wasn't common, they were less resilient and didn't hold threat as well). Honestly... I did enjoy the instances in vanilla more than the raids, but I still don't think I'd want to go back to them. Whereas I was really disappointed by Wrath dungeons, they are at least more fun and challenging than the two previous expansions. I kind of feel bad for people who didn't get to experience the original vanilla instances (not raids). Not putting one together, though. Having dungeon finder is so amazing if you've ever had to use the LFG channel for your server. Honestly, though, that's what I've dealt with. Most of the people who've run those old vanilla instances were better prepared for challenge dungeons. The skills that you need to run both are more similar than the general LFD dungeons in even MoP. Challenge mode dungeons are much easier to play for people who ran the original Blackrock Depths in vanilla. That's just how I've seen it, and I don't think I'm alone in that. On raid boss mechanics though, if you're judging solely on that, it depends, but that would definitely color it your way. I'd understand that. It's a LOT easier using a modern skillset to kill an old raid boss than it would be to use an old skillset to kill a modern raid boss. Most of the difficulty in vanilla was tied directly to the game, so it came with you from boss to boss. Post-Heigan, that's not so much the case. And that's a good thing. Imagine them releasing a vanilla WoW now. Back then, it was the fast, reactive, action-packed competitor to Everquest and FFXI. Vanilla WoW would fall flat on its face if it were released today. It would be completely boring and frustrating. More difficult, maybe, but people would rightly complain about it, and for precisely the reasons you brought up. It's more fun to fight a complex boss with a flexible set of skills than to fight a simpler one with a more inflexible one, no matter how difficult it is. In the end, that's what's important. WoW has been getting better, and has been regaining its difficulty since Wrath. It's also fighting an uphill battle considering how long some of us have been playing it. Luckily, Blizzard didn't give into their veteran fan base asking to go back to vanilla WoW. That would have been a horrible idea. It was harder for ALL the wrong reasons. I'm not even adding in pre-raid gear and consumable grinding because that was flat out horrible. So WoW getting more difficult (as they have been) is good because they've been doing it not by going back to vanilla's oldschool approach, but stepping up the difficulty of what they've developed. There is every chance that, with the increased boss complexity, the number squish, redesigns of skills to take some of the wind out, a focus on making quick decisions between AOE and straight damage, and more that WoD will exceed vanilla in difficulty and be more entertaining. That seems to be what Blizz is aiming at. Hell, I wouldn't really say you're wrong with MoP's raiding; I thought it was easier than vanilla straight up, but it's hard to say that's as universal a truth as Wrath raiding was. Take it for what it's worth as an opinion from someone who did both. I'm kind of hoping that the basic instances are longer, slower, and harder, though. If there is one thing I really miss from vanilla, it's those instances. That might not be a commonly held opinion across the player base, but there has been no dungeon more fun, more interesting, more exciting, and more brutal than when you hit level 50 and walked into Blackrock Depths. My favorite memories of the original 1-60 crawl were in that dungeon. Since BC's release, though, Blizz has gone out of their way to make the dungeons short and has even chopped up the big ones into smaller parts. They've also taken out and eased up many of the mechanics. Also, the new skillsets and heirloom gear makes instances a complete breeze. Despite how much I hated putting together a /LFG party, my favorite part of vanilla WoW was grinding instances. It's where the game has really, irrevocably, unquestionably gotten soft. I think it's suffered for it. Raiding, though, if you felt insulted, don't. I've done both. I think vanilla was still harder than MoP. A lot of the people that I've stopped and had to explain basic raid mechanics to, people that need the most help, started after Wrath. I know it's probably because they didn't learn the basic skills in instances because they aren't required to clear them anymore. I'll have to go out on a limb and say I just don't run into people who can explain the original rotation of their class from vanilla who fail in modern raids. As a disclaimer, though, I'll say that's not universal. Nothing stops people from Wrath from becoming just as good at raiding as old vanilla raiders and I've also played with plenty of those. It's just a generalization taken from the fact that I don't think leveling via instances and the new blazingly fast quest leveling is generating high-quality raiders who are already familiar with the basics of what they may be asked to do during a raid, and especially would have had to have known just to step into a raid in vanilla. Also as a disclaimer, keep in mind that I wouldn't recommend going back. Most people who started playing after Wrath get told they're missing something. I wouldn't say that what they missed was necessarily good or fun. The things that made vanilla hard weren't just gear and grinding, but the other stuff wasn't that much fun. All I regret newbies today missing is what it was like bonding with people you met on your server in a searingly hot instance dungeon that could sometimes take six hours to clear. As nice as Dungeon Finder has made finding a party and as easy as it is to get a party with cross-realm instancing capability, I think the game lost something when that instancing was gone. That's something I wish we could have back, so that everyone who came in after Wrath could have known what it was like to full clear BRD and ZF in vanilla. That's what I wish Blizz would put into WoD. It'd make better raiders out of people than anything you put back into the new game from vanilla raiding. And sometimes I miss needing to prepare with ammo. Gear grinding sucked, but managing arrows was something you had to keep in mind that wasn't a chore. Also, I have to point out that a vanilla rotation wasn't "button mashing", as defined by hitting everything as fast as you could. There were a lot less procs, those procs weren't always something you wanted to hit, and hitting any key out of sequence was a loss of DPS even if it just spent mana you might eventually have needed at the end. It's what most people could point to as what made anything after BC easier than vanilla WoW. Then again, I've also pointed out to those people (it's weird to be argued with on this side for a change) that you could say that sort of system is fundamentally flawed. My usual argument is, "Yeah, so it was harder. It was harder because the system wasn't very responsive or reactive, and it punished creativity. We didn't know it at the time because all games had that kind of system and WoW's was just the best we had. It's like when people say NES games were better because they were harder, forgetting that sometimes those games were harder because you had one attack that didn't hit what was coming after you. Yeah, it's hard, but that's because the control system is a hurdle to jump over, not an aspect of gameplay."

I think you've misconstrued my posts. I wasn't too specific about rotations at first because I didn't want to assume you weren't aware. I brought up farming for mats (not specifically gearing, that wasn't me) in a sentence talking about why I disliked it. I brought up the rotations when you discounted it because I had wrongly presumed you were aware of how they worked in vanilla. Which does explain why you were confused by my posts. I just took that we'd rehashed the skill changes so often that it was common knowledge. I thought that was the general argument for why things got easier in Wrath. It really was what I thought you meant by the "Did you seriously just pull the "wrath baby" card?" comment. That's usually what I hear about Wrath, that in that expansion skillsets were streamlined and pared down to a very easy rotation paired with an extremely strong ability to AOE. You might not then remember that, during BC, the comment was that it was less difficult because of the nature of the boss fights. Fights like Kael'thas in the EOTS were less dependent on rotation and more on mechanics, which some players felt made the experience easier. Wrath's major criticism, especially at the time, was that alterations made to specs and class mechanics made the game extremely easy. The counter argument to that was that the boss mechanics were supposedly harder to compensate. I assumed we had taken that argument as read. I apologize if that wasn't the case. I only figured that you didn't take the rotation into account after you said so.

Woah, you didn't raid back then. Mastering rotation back then was actually a VERY serious problem. Remember that old vanilla raid bosses were tuned to a nigh perfect rotation, especially the first time you cleared it. Synth brought it up, how much HP they had compared to the amount of mana healers and caster DPS had before they went OOM. Nowadays, a lot of changes have been made to DPS spells so that interrupting your rotation isn't so huge of a difference in the long run. That didn't used to be the case. Literally, clearing a boss sometimes was predicated on whether DPS could do things like affliction warlocks never repeating a dot or refreshing before it ran out. There were times that, if your best geared DPS had to stop for whatever reason more than a few times in a fight, you simply did not have enough DPS to clear the enrage mechanics or to DPS down a boss before the healers went out of mana. That's not something that exists anymore in modern WoW, and was the source of all of the game's personal tactical difficulty at the time. There were times you had to decide whether you were going to obey a mechanic or just try to survive it in order to keep DPS on track. Nowadays, with mana able to be regenerated quite a bit faster and more reliably, that's not a problem. In fact, that was corrected by many abilites as early as BC, which showed you how necessary it was to the entertainment of the game. But my God was it hard. It wasn't just healers or DPS worrying about their own mana, it was everyone having to worry about everyone else's mana. Constantly. If DPS blew their mana and didn't maximize their DPS for the amount they had, you failed the DPS check and you wiped. If healers ran out of mana, there was no recourse and you wiped. My Raid leader literally went back through combat logs looking for people who had casting downtime or looking for rotation gaps. It very often meant you had to maintain a completely perfect rotation and even if interrupted you had to know precisely where in the rotation to jump back in so that you don't waste damage vs resources. I remember having to manage mana on my hunter and being called out because I'd dropped serpent sting after having to move instead of jumping back in on arcane shot until it had fallen off. Mistakes like that in your rotation meant the difference between wiping and winning. It's not as easy to tell people who weren't there how it worked, but imagine the most stringent raid leader you've ever met. Mine was worse and he was considered nice. He explained nicely at what point I should jump back into my rotation on any skill, what I needed to do even if it meant taking massive damage to maintain that DPS, and what circumstances it was considered acceptable for me to break my rotation. Most raid leaders just kick you, pull in a backup, and never invited you again until you could prove you could do a skip on a dummy. Believe me, those boss mechanics may look less complicated these days, but your skills are not what they were in vanilla. They're much easier to handle now. Hell, I still remember prot warriors having to stance dance and thus having full sets of skills and/or macros so that they could access the battle and fury stance abilities they needed to tank. But you couldn't do that when you had rage, because stance dancing wiped rage. If you did it at the wrong time, you might not have enough rage to continue. And this was all during a time when any old DPS could accidentally do too much DPS in a burst, pull hate off the tank, be killed, and if they were good in the first place it might wipe the raid. Even healers could pull aggro off an otherwise decent tank. Threat wasn't normalized; at first that seemed like a bad idea but non-normalized threat these days would be ridiculous. Imagine doing some of those "simple" raid mechanics when even minor lapses in your almost mind-numbing concentration were enough to fail the DPS check. No, it's not nostalgia glasses. My friend, I wouldn't want to go back to those days. And trust me, neither would you. Some people say they miss it, I'm not one of them. The gameplay has gotten so much simpler and reactive; Hell, everyone in every spec has a couple of procs they can use and resources are fairly easy to come by. The new warrior specs have a priority list where they pool rage for Colossus Smash; that would never have happened if you had to change stances to hit different abilities that you couldn't access in other stances. Imagine keeping that up during a fight like Geddon. I cannot possibly describe to someone who wasn't there how inviolate that rotation was and how, even with 40 people, you could maybe carry 5 who weren't perfect. Last time I did Garrosh, one other person and I handled his shaman adds to interrupt his healing (we ended up killing one with two on the floor and he summoned another). I was charging and intervening to interrupt the adds because the PUG DPS wasn't interrupting the MC mechanic. Imagine not only having to get the interrupt right, but knowing that every time someone interrupted and broke their rotation, they risked blowing vital DPS you needed to clear the boss. So you had DPSers who were told not to even bother with mechanics; their DPS was too vital. You'd have one guy cross a room and nearly miss it to handle a mechanic so that a high-DPS mage didn't move. That was when there was anything you could even do about it. It was crazy. That's why you heard about such violent guild blowups. It wasn't just the 40 people, it was that raid leaders had to squeeze so much DPS out of their members that everything that everyone did was under scrutiny. Those stories of people getting yelled at and losing their DKP for loot because they lapsed and missed a raid mechanic (even if the raid won) are very much true. Not in all cases, but really hardcore raid guilds were horrible to their members. I was lucky to escape a lot of it. I don't look back on vanilla raiding very fondly. Having done both, vanilla was almost certainly more difficult. I have no idea what you think could be nostalgic about that.

That's true, but I wasn't counting attunement. I also don't think new fights are really more mechanically difficult. What's definitely changed is the onus of the fight now being on individual players being able to handle themselves rather than operating the raid like a giant 40 man machine. Really, I'm not sure the game has gotten easier or harder, but that Blizzard changed the focus of the raid bosses to a form of difficulty that people find easier to master. On the one hand, take the Ragnaros fight. It was fairly typical for its time. The healers would OOM, that much was certain, and there was very little that could be done to stop that since so much damage was unavoidable save for a few cleaves. That meant everything hovered around two important concepts, gear, position, and rotation. I think it's fair to say that gearing isn't difficult. However, having your rotation interrupted and restarting it at the wrong time could cost you those all-important DPS stats. Really, almost every boss fight revolved around this. What I think people are assuming when I talk about this is that I think we should go back to vanilla-style raiding, and I've already said that I don't. I'm well aware of why the raiding focus changed and most people, even ones who were around at the time, don't always remember why it changed. The reason it changed was the other hand in vanilla raiding, that the most popular boss in a long time, the one we liked the best, was a Naxx boss called Heigan. Heigan wasn't really a gear check. It also wasn't really about position. It wasn't about rotation. No, the Heigan fight revolved around mastering the Heigan Dance, the first real boss-defining movement mechanic. It is impossible to explain, to people who weren't there, how popular and fun this boss was. Raiders were divided into two camps; those who could dance and those who couldn't. It was a sort of out-of-game skill that you had to apply, and at the time people LOVED it. Heigan wasn't the hardest boss in the game for most people, but he was certainly the most popular. Nowadays, people wonder why the game got easier. It's that ever since Heigan, WoW has been focusing extensively on Heigan-style mechanics. Which, honestly, isn't a bad thing. Most people get the hang of the mechanics quickly and clear bosses faster, but nowadays the most boring bosses in WoW are spank-and-tank. That used to be the norm; mechanics were something you had to do that might interrupt your rotations too often or had to do with where you stood. The Onyxia fight, for instance, is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Not for the individual player, but because of how much coordination had to be done between the raid itself. Many characters stood around and just milked the rotation until phases changed. Now, with so many things made reactive and so many mechanics based around dances and specialized mechanics, it's very rare you can just stand around and maximize your damage. Now the game is focused around mitigation. Again, not a bad thing, but a lot easier to do and PUG for most people since you aren't relying on forty people not screwing up on behalf of the group. In that sense, you're probably right that the fights were more logistically difficult, but not solely for gear, but because, in a very EVE sort of way, older raids were based around people being number-factories for their strategist overlords. Now, it's much less difficult per se, but that's because if your average raid boss these days kills someone, it's because they stood in the fire. It's one of the reasons I think it's hilarious to hear people in that Wildstar beta talking about how Wildstar will be a return to hard raids that WoW apparently left behind. It's not hilarious because of the sentiment; from what I've heard Wildstar might be the hardest PVE you can get in an MMO, including vanilla WoW. It's hilarious because, if you REALLY hated the way Blizzard went away from old vanilla bosses, you should hate every second of Wildstar. Wildstar is difficult in the complete opposite direction. It's almost entirely dependent on characters mitigating damage and avoiding crazy mechanics (some of them remind me of old spyrograph drawings). It's entirely dependent on fast-thinking and reaction; essentially it's all the old vestiges of vanilla WoW removed and slapped into a much faster and less forgiving game. People tend to equate difficulty with quality, which isn't necessarily true. I don't want anyone to misconstrue my point, vanilla raids were a lot harder, but I kept playing through Mists because I thought the game was getting better. Easier, yeah, but then again if it wasn't easier, you wouldn't be able to PUG. And believe me, the hardest thing about 40 man vanilla raiding was keeping yourself from strangling the other members who screwed up. I've kept in touch with no one from my original raiding guild, but I've met a lot of people pugging raids in the new WoW. At least we can replace people who suck. So WoW's really benefited from becoming easier; actually becoming a better game. I don't think it's as good as Wildstar, but I'd much rather play Mists of Pandaria than vanilla WoW at this point. Incidentally, I also don't think people give Blizz enough credit for making Mists harder than Wrath. It definitely is, without going back to the old raid difficulties in vanilla that these days seem aggravatingly quaint. I mean, who wants another Baron Geddon fight exactly like that old one? Even if it was harder, we'd be bored.

Hey, I never heard of pugging MC back in the day. *Raises Hand* Usually had to pug for 1-5 people if we were missing them for guild. I may not of killed Rag but we did get up to him. We at least managed to grab people to let them see the content. Oh and I use to go to pug AQ20 and ZG 20 as well as was a pug for AQ 40 first two bosses (Not including the bug family). Really though, the game has gotten at least somewhat more complicated. True some bosses are still super straightforward but first boss of Heart of Fear. http://wowpedia.org/Imperial_Vizier_Zor%27lok I remember wiping more times on him than I did on Lucifron. and for a scale... http://wowpedia.org/Lucifron And the reason why I died more to Viz over Luci? Luci had 40 people and all the fight was is a Dispel convention and add killing due to Mc but you could LOS the MC. Viz you had to avoid ring of shockwaves, deal with a stun channel that can kill non tanks if tanks don't get in it, had to run silencing smoke that harmed you, deal with an AOE pulse by standing in bubbles and MC mechanics...then when he clears the room of the gas you dealt with all three at once in a timed order. Heroic Mode he left projections behind so you had to kill the projection as well or force a raid wipe if no one could tank him. Yes those are first bosses of their respective releases. Heart of fear was the first raid of the two with tier gear. Did you really die that often on Vizier? I don't recall that being very difficult. It sounds complicated to say, but it wasn't really that hard to get the movement pattern down. I remember people not getting the Geddon fight. It might be you're right, and just the easier modes of the dungeon before heroic get people better prepared. There were no heroic modes of vanilla raids, so they were infinitely harder. Your first experience with Rag was walking into the room. Who knows, I know how hard it was playing MC when it was released and I remember doing Heart of Fear once it was out, and MC was definitely a lot more frustrating and difficult for us. Then again, the first time I did heroic HoF, I'd done it normal, so maybe I was prepared? It's all I can think of to explain it outside of the mechanics of an actual raid being a LOT different than today. It's complicated to explain, say, the Shamans in SoO, but actually doing the fight's pretty easy. It's easy to explain Geddon, but it was a lot harder to actually pull off. The Garrosh fight, even on heroic, wasn't nearly as bad as C'thun was, for instance, even though they aren't necessarily more or less complicated than the other. However, that might be because the raid mechanics at the time made healing and mitigation for that fight was a LOT harder to deal with than it is now. There's more add management, I'll give it that, but it's still easier. But honestly, I don't recall either of those bosses you mentioned being exceptionally difficult. I think we downed Lucifron first day. I wasn't sure how widespread that was. I remember Baron Geddon being a brick wall for us, though, in a way no boss post-Wrath ever was. It's hard to describe to someone that wasn't there. At face value, Ragnaros wasn't even the most complicated fight in Molten Core. It was definitely the hardest, because if ANYONE in your raid dicked their DPS rotation, you didn't have enough to kill Ragnaros. Overhealing by the healers meant the difference between surviving two or three waves, whereas now you've got people racing for heals per second. I'll give you that point, though. Fights are more complicated to explain and, honestly, more complicated to attempt. You don't really have to overcome raw numbers as much as learn the fight and you have a lot of opportunity to run an easier version before they toss in a few harder abilities. But if you can't follow directions but you've got a mind like a calculator, modern WoW might well be harder for you. Most people don't have that particular problem, though, and I rarely hear people who honestly raided both say that vanilla was an easier time for raiding. The raw numbers and limits you had made it a lot more difficult to actually play those raids. It may be that having a DF, normal, and heroic mode of MC back in the day would have made it just as easy, though. I can't say. All I know is I raided both, and I know which was harder. After a few runs in modern dungeons, I know where to stand and move to avoid damage and don't have problems finding targets I need to kill and avoiding ones I avoid. It sounds complicated, but most of those fights aren't actually that hard to do. Imagine not being able to clear Heart of Fear for months because there simply wasn't a margin for error in your DPS until you geared up. I can't say any modern raid has been impassible for that long. You just eventually learn the mechanics.

Hey, I never heard of pugging MC back in the day.

Actually, I've read that article, and I really don't have to again. I played WoW from launch to about three months ago pretty much every day. I remember the raids. Old raids were more difficult than new ones, it's just that simple. New mechanics are easily made to get around, and there are two major reasons why. First of all, new players don't have to worry about mana so much. It might seem weird to remember a time when mana and resources were such a big deal, but there were fights that you didn't lose because of a stacking debuff, but because your healers would run out of mana eventually. Ragnaros was the best example of this. You could survive two, maybe three lava waves before you were just flat out of mana and wiped. That was mitigated as early as BC and stopped being a problem in Wrath. Nowadays, if you're OOM, you're doing something wrong as a healer, not coming up against a soft enrage. The second thing that makes it easier is that it's more of a game focused on the trinity now instead of support. I remember having a paladin in our group that threw blessings in rotation and that was all he did. I remember having to have a CC kite you had to race in DPS because if he got back with his mob before the second mob died, you wiped. Things like that were unforgiving and far more difficult than the dual boss mechanics they've had since. I think you're misconstruing my point. It was harder, but I wouldn't say it was necessarily better. Wildstar, for instance, is harder than WoW in a way that's more entertaining. Vanilla WoW was harder than modern WoW in a way that I don't entirely miss. A few things that really sucked were that you had to grind consumables for elixirs and gear even when you had your set. My raiding guild in vanilla was a 3-4 day a week job just to have enough stuff to raid two of those nights. On my hunter, I needed to walk into a raid with all my bags filled full of ammo and I'd need to make a trip out and back to get more. So was it better back in the day? I wouldn't necessarily think so. At least raiding now is something you can do in a pug that focuses almost exclusively on the event itself, not on preparation and bouncing your head off a wall for a month straight. But was it harder? Definitely. I can speak from experience.

As promised, though, I stuck through Wildstar until beta closed. Figured I'd share my thoughts on it. A quick summary is that I've pre-ordered and damn well become a Facebook publicity campaign, and I hate being on Facebook. It's that good as I see it. But I'll give some evidence on why I think that. I'm going to be speaking from the point that everyone's seen the videos on Wildstar's website or have basic knowledge of how the game purportedly works. If you haven't, don't feel like watching, and want to ask a question, go ahead and ask me. I totally get not wanting to wade through Carbine's promotional material for information or to try to sort through a forum full of trolls and fanbois. Wildstar's all-star number 1 reason why I've cancelled my other subs is the combat, which is incredibly quick and fluid. Most of all, it's very easily tailored, giving you no set way to do anything to maximize damage in any instance. This was most easily demonstrated when I was playing my Spellslinger (sort of a gun-toting spell class). I was playing a stun-and-gun strategy from range which worked for me. During one fight, I noticed that another Spellslinger was literally right on top of the boss and was ducking around him. He'd set up his abilities to have a bit more defense and was using a faster skillset than mine, but one that ultimately wouldn't work at range. You can also heal from both ranges as a Spellslinger. The guy I was talking about even told me he'd once had to tank an instance after the MT died (tanking is a much more fluid and a softer division than in other games). That's a lot of variety out of one class that uses pistols. Another thing I like is the extreme customization. I'll not go over all of the stuff Carbine went over in their video except to say you can customize your armor color and visuals, completely customize your (basically free) house, put customized pieces on your mounts, and a few game types, like the mass PVP Warplot gametype, you customize your own environment. More than that though, the game feels custom-fit straight through to your statistics and style. It isn't just choosing and gearing as a tank/healer/DPS. The medic class is actually a short-to-medium ranged healer AND/OR DPS. Just about every class in the game has some utility between healing, tanking, and damage. The engineer class seems perfectly capable of doing all three, for instance, and it's a pet class with heavy armor. Aside from those things, mechanically, it's a flurry of speed and reaction. It plays a LOT more like an old N64 or PS1 game than a tab-targetted MMORPG. The red telegraph bubbles aren't just spheres and lines, they're flying all over the place in crazy geometric patterns as well as having quite a few other abilities. More interestingly, you get used to looking for reactions to being stunned, disarmed, and otherwise CCed. There's usually a way out if you're fast enough, so really good players never have to cry about being stunlocked for an entire fight. That's good because PVP is fast and unforgiving. I like the game's difficulty, which ramps up significantly once you hit levels about 10-15, but it might not be for everyone. Suffice it to say, the difficulty of the game isn't tied up in the grind (at least not that I saw). It's all about being quick on the draw. Honestly, it's the first time in a long time that I was killing the same thing for, as I soon discovered, a half hour and wondered how long the quest had been done. It's just addictively fun. Negative items include me needing to buy a new video card. While, for example, FFXIV is a bit ponderous but doesn't necessarily punish you for moving slow, Wildstar demands precision. Which would be nicer if the game wasn't chewing your resources. You can drop the graphics to a point where pretty much anyone can play, but don't let the game's setting and art style fool you, this game drinks your system resources. I'm now packing a 3.0 GPU and an FX9590 processor on a Formula V Crosshair Z motherboard with 32 gigs of high speed RAM. I can run flawlessly on ultra graphics, but before I put in the new card, the game chopped to 30FPS on my 1.0 card. There are a lot of crazy particle effects, PSO style holograms and neons, and a possible draw distance that can make your eyes bleed. It's not for a 10 year old computer or a netbook; you'll blow it up. Another thing that bothered me was the UI. Apparently, they redesigned the UI from an even worse one, and in the broad strokes it does what it needs to do. Text, however, can be sometimes very hard to read in the default font. Buttons on screen you use to access certain information are very small. Quest tracking text on the right can sometimes be difficult to read. This is a minor gripe, as many issues I had were fixed (probably all the people that complained) and because not only is the UI fixable through menus, but it has a WoW style addon engine. Still, I don't like UI addons, so you'll need to play around with the UI so that it works for you. On a side note, resource nodes can be annoying. Generally, Carbine avoids the trap of making you resent other players by rewarding you for helping them. Crafting is actually really fun, if a bit less intense than in FFXIV. You get quest credit if you and someone else kill something, so you aren't fighting over mobs. Given that, it's weird that mining nodes aren't instanced to the character as in FFXIV. More than that, you can get a lot of ore from a node using a mining laser, but you can also melee it and break it up, then collect less resources without one. That means you've got people who accidentally blow up your resource nodes while fighting (not their intention) even if they aren't collecting the stuff. Things that I don't mind or don't care about that might bother/excite other people include the art style. It's not quite as cartoony in tone as I thought it would be, considering what art presentations you see. It's very often bouncing between being amazingly awesome, hysterically funny, and deadly serious. I won't get too far into the story in case some people don't want spoilers, but there are genuinely heartfelt moments, one of which made my wife cry. Luckily, from there, you're given immediate chance for revenge and your crazy narrator comes in to reassure you that someone is gonna pay. It's a frenetic style that I absolutely LOVED TO DEATH! I can see that it might seem annoying, but seriously give it a shot and play the free month before you condemn it. Another thing people might like or not like, the FFXIV weapon-by-class system. Armor falls into medium-heavy-light catagories (two classes per armor type) and is actually highly customizeable. Bosses drop everyone individual boxes that may or may not contain loot and have low chance of epics, but there's no fighting or ninjaing. You can make weapons look like other weapons of their class and play with their stats. However, what you can't do is make your heavy-armored engineer look like he's wearing light armor through the costume system, and more importantly your weapon will always be of a certain type. Warriors always use great-swords, Spellslingers always use a pair of pistols, etc. Hopefully that will be changed eventually, that warriors might get axes and maces as well. It's not a thing for me, I don't mind. But it's been talked about negatively in beta, so be forewarned that FFXIV's weapon-by-class system is in Wildstar. Character customization seems to be an ongoing issue. I thought Wildstar hit a pretty good balance by making sure all the customization that was important was in the face, but having the body and other features easier to handle. Some people thought it was too little, they wanted more sliders on the body, hair, et al. I get that. It didn't bother me and I got some great looks from what I had available to me. Races are incredibly idiosyncratic and fun. I was pleasantly surprised and felt satisfied, and I really got into the looks of my characters. Some people might not be, though. Another thing is the focus away from grinding by not giving you a lot of class experience for killing things, but for completing quests, dungeons, PVP, et cetera. That shift in focus might annoy some people. I like it and see where it was going. Some people would rather get most of their EXP from the monster kill grind or individual kills As a disclaimer, we didn't all have a chance to do everything. There are things I didn't have time to do as I took most of the classes up a few levels and experimented with gameplay styles. I only ran one dungeon to get a feel for it and only dueled. I got no chance to try their top-end PVE or PVP endgame. Reception on both of those has been positive from what I've heard, but not universally positive. If someone ran to the endgame and can elaborate, please do. While I tried all of the classes and paths (all of which I loved to play; they're all extremely entertaining), I did not have a chance to try all professions. I only got to play with mount and house customization to a very minimal degree since I didn't make it to a capital city until later in the process when I thought I had a good grasp of the basics of all factions, races, classes, and paths. So that's what I think. As I said, I'm cancelling my other subs now and not planning on buying any other MMOs or expansions until I hear otherwise. I'll probably be playing Diablo 3 until then. I'll still be around here to talk about the games for a while and I may come back to FFXIV (who knows? It's not like FFXIV is a bad game, I just don't like it as much as Wildstar). If you want to stay in touch after that, send me a PM and I'll either give you my battle.net ID for Blizzard or a way to stay in touch until early start of Wildstar on the 31st of May (yes, if you preorder, you get to start the game on the 31st instead of the 3rd). Again, if you have any questions, comments, or want my feedback or input, go ahead and ask. I'm excited and really high on the game, but I'm somewhat cynical by nature. I'll try to give you as straight an answer as someone with an opinion on the game possibly can.

Oh man. Did you seriously just pull the "wrath baby" card? Really? Whether you started playing the game in 2004, 2007, 2009, or 2013 really has no real bearing on one's skill. WoW has changed so dramatically over the years that it's pretty much a completely different game - complete with new spell dynamics and intensely more difficult boss fights - than it was 5, 7, 10 years ago. Just going to put that out there. Hey, when I was your age, we had to spend whole days farming consumables for the raid we'd inevitably wipe over and over on because our GM's wife was also the healing officer and was routinely horrible. And we were happy with it! Honestly, point taken, except the intensely more difficult boss fights. Bosses now are definitely easier than in vanilla, though if you played a spellcaster that might be a different story personally. I know affliction warlocks topped DPS charts while barely looking at the boss sometimes; you just had to run the rotation. I was a CC/kiting hunter back in the day, and even I felt bad for the melee back then. Overall, the game's easier all over. I'd say you had to have a bit more skill, in general, to play in vanilla. Now, with that said, in vanilla, you could carry some more worthless people with you because one bad apple wasn't quite so glaring. So the bar has dropped, but if you're still below the bar, it's a lot more noticeable.

In that sense, it's kind of amazing that WoW has survived for 10 years on top. They've had everyone competing with them, and they're suffering the atophy of time, yet they've survived. It's kind of surprising, actually. I mean, EVE doesn't really have any meaningful competition; companies have been trying to knock WoW off the pedestal almost immediately after it was released.

...No man. Challenge Modes are too easy. Sure the gear is scaled down to raid entry levels but even then a lot of people can carry dead weight in those still. Not to mention the majority of those Challenge Modes is Skipping monsters with invisibility pots. The gist is you have to kill a certain number of enemies (you can go over the min you need but it's wasted time) and get to the last boss in a record time. Some makeups use druids for the stampeding roar+Invis pot combo (If you are a mage just use Greater Invisible perk) and any makeup is capable provided you take the time. With a new group it took us only four tries to get silver and eight to get gold in Scarlet Monastery, and that was suppose to be one of the harder gold medals right next to Shado-Pan which kills melee based classes. Getting bronze at all is just impossible unless you REALLY suck at wow...which is hard to do. But the Challenge Modes are fun regardless. Only hard part is getting a Realm Best time now but even then all realm best titles like "Darkmaster" are getting removed and those who had at least one get "Mistwalker" title instead. The hard parts of wow are heroic raids on the patch they were released and finding a stable guild that lasts for more than a year. PVP can also be hard because you need to find a team that will not mock you or kick you out as an excuse for losing one round of rated Battlegrounds. Not to mention the restrictions people put on applications like exact PC specs and even descriptive reasons why you want to join the guild (But that's mainly for the top 1000 guilds of the world really.) ---- Update If you want some neat reviews of free to play games btw, i suggest MMOgrinder http://mmogrinder.net/ He was the one who got me mainly into various games I tried. Though be forewarned some of those reviews are old only due to that specific game being no longer around. Hey, I know it seems REALLY easy, seems harder to me than the rest of the game, though. And I understand that, after ten years of playing, I'm very likely to under-value game difficulty. I just take what I hear from newer players about what's actually difficult, and challenge dungeons consume players with a year or three under their belt. I'm generally fine because I had to grind dungeons in vanilla. That included CC and target marking, often not with the best groups; sometimes, you had to throw together a group with someone using and offspec. I still remember doing the Ziggurat event in ZF, back when you needed to finish it to advance. We died and failed despite brilliant warrior tanking from my brother because our priest decided to DPS and blew his mana pool. Challenge mode dungeons might be easier than that, but it seems pretty difficult to someone who hasn't been playing the game for a decade. It's definitely harder to get gold ratings on those for people who started post-WotLK, though. I mean, I just assume that if you'd played DMC nonstop for ten years, S-rank just wouldn't be an issue if you were in any way competent at the game.

This is almost entirely besides the point. I was particularly responding to this: Bolded by me for emphasis. This is simply a patently false statement. Whether or not the game requires it is immaterial; the game is STILL more than capable of possessing the same level of skill-based challenge and even more so because the mechanics are actually deeper. It's even false to suggest that Dark Souls is less forgiving; certainly at its base level it is less forgiving for actually getting through the game, but trying to S-rank a Platinum game or DMC is easily a match for a Souls games' level of challenge. The rules change when you make such an attempt: you can only make so many mistakes before you just have to start over. You have to have a level of systems mastery well beyond that which is required to simply 'beat' a game, and to say that the games are easier or cannot have as much skill-based challenge because that baseline exists is simply disingenuous. The Souls games essentially force a rule on the player that says "you can only make this many mistakes before you die" while removing any semblance of 'difficulty settings'; trying to S-rank a character action game is essentially the same thing, only without the sudden death (and even then, there are difficulty settings designed to kill you very, very fast). To put it another way: if you put the same limitations on the player between a Souls game and a character action game (you die in 'X' amount of hits), the latter will easily breach the former in difficulty simply because there are so many more game elements to keep track of, both in terms of the player toolset and in terms of what the enemies actually bring to the party. A lot of Dark Souls' difficulty, for example, comes from the player actually being limited in what they can do. Your weapons only have a handful of attacks; most of these attacks have lengthy windup and recovery times; your roll has a limited number of invulnerability frames; EVERYTHING you do costs you stamina. That's one aspect of difficulty, and it's perfectly valid, but a character action game derives part of its difficulty from the fact that the player has a HUGE toolbox and must learn to utilize it effectively. A Souls game effectively hamstrings the player off the bat in the name of making things difficult (which itself is only a means to draw the player into the world further), which is simply not what a character action game is designed to do. It's because of this that Dark Souls fails to retain any semblance of challenge once a player has attained systems mastery; it's not actually a particularly deep game mechanically, it just does a good job of limiting the player to make things difficult and unforgiving. Anyway, I hope that helps bring across where I'm coming from. From where I'm standing I just can't bring myself to agree with such an absolute statement. Such games can and do have an incredibly high level of skill-based challenge. Perhaps you have to actively seek it to find it, but you can't just deny that it exists. There are hard parts of World of Warcraft, too, like challenge dungeons. They ain't really for the weak. I wouldn't say World of Warcraft is a hard game because you can find challenges if you hit endgame and look, it's not the meat and potatoes of the game. Hell, you could play through Street Fighter only using light attacks and no specials and you would have, by definition, made the game more difficult. The point is, you don't have to, so no, it doesn't really exist in a way we would give it credit for. DMC wasn't made to be a skill-based game at its core, it's meant to be awesome™. Dante was essentially a Japanese goth-metal version of Duke Nukem. There are things you can do in the game that are harder than the base game, but they're not the base game. So no, they may as well not be there. If you couldn't keep track of a million things going on at once and survive, you wouldn't make it past the first level of Ikaruga no matter how many extra lives they gave you. You could tell someone point blank how to beat a boss, and you'll still die repeatedly trying to get up enough skill to do it. Both of these things are devastatingly difficult compared to Devil May Cry. It's why I wouldn't patently say that WoW is harder than EVE even though WoW's endgame stuff is mindbendingly difficult compared to the F1 whoring in EVE. WoW's basic gist of the game, its meat and potatoes, is almost coddlingly simple. Even EVE's meat and potatoes, namely doing missions and cosmic anomalies, is at least more difficult than that. It doesn't matter that the fight with Garrosh is a toothbreaker in a heroic raid, WoW is just plain easier because it's a lot more forgiving when someone screws up in the body of the game. And, again, DMC isn't as heavily dependent on your skills to proceed because Capcom made that game to be experienced and enjoyed, not overcome. Trust me, Capcom can make you weep blood if they feel like it. They've made games where trying to complete ranks is a world away because the game difficulty bashes you on the head and makes you learn to play. Hell, I'd say even Monster Hunter is harder than Devil May Cry on its own because it's ENTIRELY skill based and a helluva lot less forgiving. So, don't get us wrong, it's not like we're saying Devil May Cry wasn't a good game. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was a brilliant fireworks display, but it wasn't meant to be a bludgeon the way some games are. If it was supposed to be, it would be and we wouldn't be having this conversation. On that note, though, I wonder how that Monster Hunter MMO Tencent is developing is coming along. If Capcom will be damned for anything, it's not capitalizing on Monster Hunter by really pushing the series in the States and EU. Still have to call it the best game series on the planet, and I'd pay good money for a subscription to an ever-expanding, ever developing Monster Hunter world. They have every reason to, considering Monster Hunter IV was their best-selling title and their sole representative on the year-end top ten best sellers list last year. God, I hate Capcom's business prick crust. They're in any conversation to name the world's best video game developer and, because of their business wing that markets the games and directs funding, they're missing the open goals. Lost Planet, essentially the Sci-Fi version of Monster Hunter? Floundering. Their Monster Hunter MMORPG? Being developed by a Chinese company for China. Their cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 was a slap in the face to their loyal old-school fanbase that is still getting grumbled about whenever I bring the company up. Their Resident Evil series, once important enough to have movies made about it, is now a magnet for accusations of racism instead of a font of horror. They can thank God Dragon's Dogma turned out better than we thought it might be. Capcom's business wing even admitted that it was their fault that the company missed expectations last year. This year's agenda includes improving game quality by ending outsourcing to other development companies, actually releasing developers to put together some DLC, and retuning their mobile market. It's like their business staff have been living under a bridge. Did they miss the online gaming phenomenon, Steam, the sudden development of DLC on consoles, and the dramatic upswing in high-quality game titles in an incredibly competitive market? Those developments only started in the early 2000s, I guess, so it's not like it's been a decade that they've somehow not grasped the changing nature of what video games constitute. All I can say is that if their games lineup wasn't born of extremely strong proprietary IPs and that they genuinely seem to be able to develop gems in spite of themselves, Capcom would be tanking right now. As it is, they finally saw profits fall and games miss sales targets. They need to get serious.

Having played these games, I can definitely say that Devil May Cry takes far less skill to complete than any of the Dark/Demon Souls games. Even after you learn attack patterns in the latter games, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll time it all correctly. It's much less forgiving than Devil May Cry. To be fair, though, Devil May Cry is meant to be far more forgiving; it's essentially meant to be half spectacle. Capcom weren't trying to make an intentionally difficult game the way From Software was, Capcom just made a relatively difficult game for their time period because they're Capcom and they have a tendency to make games a smidge more difficult than what's out there. From Software were, intentionally, making a hard game thus it is harder, a bit like when Treasure made Ikaruga. Bushido Blade is a very difficult game and requires a lot of skill simply because, in the end, there is almost zero forgiveness. The skills may be different, but Street Fighter's series is definitely easier than Bushido Blade, mostly because if you screw up in Street Fighter, you can fight your way back (usually). In Bushido Blade, screwing up generally occurs a split second before you lose, because you only need to screw up once. On the other hand, that analysis is a little more flawed, mostly because Street Fighter and Bushido Blade are built on PVP, and PVP is by definition hard for about half the people playing. Of the two, Bushido Blade took longer to learn to be successful, but it's hard to judge the difficulty of PVP games because all you have to do to make the game easy is to get halfway up the curve. Still, in the end, while a lot of things can define how hard a game is, ease of gameplay boils down to one, single, absolute value: forgiveness. The less forgiving a game is with your mistakes, the more difficult it will be. While different games may be more difficult in different ways, there is an absolute value of easiness. So yes, because Street Fighter and Devil May Cry will allow you to advance in the game with a greater amount of mistakes, they are pretty definitively easier to beat. That's not to say they're not good games or successful at what they do. A game being harder to beat doesn't necessarily make it better. It isn't like Capcom tried to make a pair of the hardest games ever made and failed, they intentionally designed them to be precisely as difficult as they are. Dark/Demon Souls can become a somewhat joyless and mechanical process; Devil May Cry had an intentionally built-in factor of "Ooooh.... Ahhhh...." And I don't think anyone here is going to say Street Fighter wasn't a good game because you couldn't die in one hit; that simply wasn't the point of the game.

So a F2P game is like an Indian casino? There's no cover charge to get in and you don't have to gamble or buy anything to be in there, but once they hook you in, they get to you gamble and charge you way too much for drinks that you think you'll be able to pay for with your winnings that you'll actually never get because you can't count cards reliably in a six-deck shuffle at the blackjack table and those slot machines are ALWAYS sure they take in more money than they pay out? I mean, I'm assuming.

I think I brought that up a few times earlier in the thread. I loved Bushido Blade, not just because of the pace, but because of the finality of the fight. It was great knowing that, even when your opponent was down, one false move could kill you instantly. So you had to be wary at all times even in combat. You know, like in a real sword fight. Another game I liked for something of the same reason was Tenchu, a ninja game series by From Software a long time ago (I think PS1). Tenchu wasn't a ninja game like Ninja Gaiden. You were pretty worthless in a straight up firefight, especially against the enemies you were up against. So the game focused heavily around stealth mechanics and ambushes. You had to infiltrate castles by climbing the walls and avoiding detection, hiding in shadows, and silently dispatching your enemies. You know, like a real ninja. I think that's why I liked Steel Battalion so much even though I still think Armored Core was a better made and more fun game. Steel Battalion had a massive control panel for a controller, the mech you piloted felt massive. Turning too quickly destabilized you. Your windscreen could be cracked and dirty, forcing you to wipe it off. Components of your mech would be damaged, forcing you to shut them off and do without. Mechs aren't real, but I imagine that's what really being in a mech would be like. Not entirely sure how concepts like that would work in an MMORPG, where latency is such a big issue. Bushido Blade-style vulnerability might not be possible until the whole civilized world is connected by fiber optics.

Holy shit, are people dropping that much money in those games? How frequently are they doing that, do you think? I mean, yeah, in that case, if you're bitching about subscriptions yet tossing more of that into a F2P game for gear, you need to reevaluate your reasons for playing. F2P games have one and only one advantage over the subscription games I've played: they're FREE-TO-PLAY! If you're actually dropping more money in a F2P game than 15$ a month, you've somehow missed the point.

Look, let's be fair, subscription games aren't an endagered species. There SHOULDN'T be a lot of them out there. F2P MMORPGs suck for a reason; the companies that develop them really have very little reason to keep you playing. Like traditional games, they make money selling the product, so once you buy it they make another product. Subscription MMORPGs NEED you to continue to play month after month to make the rent. With that said, how many games can any developer continue to develop at a high level of quality for years on end? MMORPGs aren't like normal games that are sort of one-and-done, then you move on to the next. A good MMORPG can fund your company for over a decade if you do it right. So I'd say any company can maybe keep one going at a time and only the best of developers can maintain that standard for very long. Given those two factors, it's a small wonder that there aren't many that remain; most developers simply do not have what it takes to keep up and many of the developers that do simply aren't prepared to commit yet. It used to be that there were more subscription MMORPGs, but even companies with as good a track record as Bioware couldn't pull off what Blizzard pulled off. As it stands, we're probably looking at a sort of caste system, with F2P games sort of absorbing people with less money who simply can't pay for subscriptions (but can drop a few bucks every now and then for P2W gear) while people with more regular income will play the better subscription games. The trouble is that you'd better be damn sure you can hang with the big kids on the playground if you want to go that route, because subscription MMORPGs are resource hogs and you're trying to slug it out with Blizzard and Square. Of the games out now that are subscription only, I've played WoW, EVE, XIV, and I'm beta-ing and have pre-paid for Wildstar (which I'll probably relate the rest of my experience with at the end of beta). I've had fun in them all to some degree or another, but it isn't like I'm going to pay sixty dollars a month to play them all (or not, considering how much free time I actually have). I limit myself to two, which at present is going to be XIV and Wildstar (until Warlords of Draenor comes out, in which case I will probably swap whichever one is less interesting for WoW again). Then again, maybe that's just a bias. The F2P games I've at least tried out over the years haven't been all terrible, but they dry up quickly. I simply see that a game is free to play and have my usual cynical reaction. "Nothing is free. How are these people going to try to get my money?" That might not be fair, but it's simply an ingrained reaction from having played a few F2P games and instantly getting the idea that you need to spend money to have fun rather than have skill. But I asked the question a while back in this thread. What development companies out there have the juice to make a high-quality MMORPG and develop it for years that aren't already in the arena? From Software? Nintendo? Rockstar? It's not a long list of people that could make a great MMORPG that we could feasibly play for years. Everyone else might as well not even try; most people can't afford more than one subscription at a time and most companies can't really hope to make a game better than World of Warcraft for any length of time. So subscription games might have to fill niches, with EVE filling their own small corner of the market, Square getting their Japanarpeegee people together, and Wildstar looking to be the game that scoops up the disaffected hardnosed leeters WoW shed when they went a lot more casual in Wrath of the Lich King. Lord only knows what cracks in the pavement there are left to fill; and everyone else might as well sit back and wait to see how it plays out. It looks like WoW is going to finally disappear not due to a WoW-killer, but simple time and erosion. Maybe, with Titan being sort of hinted at turning away from an MMORPG and with WoW probably on its last expansion or two, another company can make a play for the top spot. Then we can all hate them instead of Blizzard.

Ants influence the planet in more ways than you're clearly aware. They are architects of entire ecosystems, upon which many humans depend. It's all a matter of perspective. [edit] Oh god, I'm extolling the virtues of my greatest nemesis... the world is surely ending. Also, I think I lost the point of the argument at some point and now I'm just trying to counter a human-centric perspective. I don't think comparing F2P mmos to insects is a very good comparison anyway, as insects are absolutely vital to functioning ecosystems and do us a great deal of good. F2P mmos... while they may be important, they've overrun the market so much that they're more like cancer. Ants function essentially as insectoid garbage men, literally. That's sort of their great purpose in life. I don't think we can safely say they dominate society until we open up an anthill and find out they opened a Chipotle. Without Chipotle, you simply can't be considered a civilization.

And yet you will never be able to eliminate even a tiny fraction of all ants. You're powerless before their combined might. Ants don't dominate the planet, though, they just annoy us by feeding on the scraps of food we drop. I just think that free-to-play sounds like a better concept than it actually is logically. Games are made specifically so that companies can make money and to operate an MMORPG does take some upkeep per player. So they have to go where the money is. Subscription games, as a business model, are rewarded by keeping people playing the game and paying for it month to month. Free to play tends to focus on selling stuff to us. What aggravates me is that subscription games are ALSO doing microtransaction stuff now. That's one of the things that REALLY pisses me off about Blizzard. I pay a subscription to a game company so that I get content they develop continually and at a high level, ostensibly. Instead, they like to advertise content that we should buy as a microtransaction. It doesn't matter if that stuff is optional, just pets and mounts. I'm like, "I PAID YOU TO DEVELOP THAT! DON'T MAKE ME PAY FOR THAT!" CCP, for its part, at least doesn't make you pay for the expansions they develop the way Blizz does in addition to their subscription... but that's because they're doing that "I'll buy game time for real money and sell it on an auction house so I can P2W." Carbine already pissed me off by saying they're copying that model, no matter how much less important money is in that game. I mean... it's a subscription game! That was the point behind paying a subscription, so that I don't have to deal with F2P and P2W bullshit and instead I get a steady stream of development. I think every developer should pick which they're doing. Are you making people pay for the game without a sub so you just throw a slew of expansions at us, making people pay for other crap so that people with money can chew on fourteen year olds who don't have the money for a sub, or make us pay a sub. Don't mix and match.

Well, if you had four big dinosaurs and thousands and thousands of tiny rodents in your planet, which one would you determine as the 'dominant' species? I guess that, because we are talking about what is essentially a service, we can understand dominance in two ways: quantity of consumers, and raw quantity of offers. I'm not sure all the subscription games together would ammount to anything as the majority of MMO players. They certainly have a lot, though, but it's hard to determine that thanks to F2P games being kind of volatile in the matter. What we certainly have is a 'dominance' by F2P in the offer side of things, however. To whit, on planet Earth, for every human on the planet, there are a million ants. I defeated their dominance in our office with a bi-annual chemical spray.