What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?

[Charistoph]

 

...In addition to the level crunch, one thing they can do is make it take longer to reach each level, and once you start getting in to Legion content, your progression tends to be based more on your equipment then yourself ...

 

 

This is pretty much what I am assuming. If they crunch Vanilla down to 1-30 for example, you'd level to 1-30 in roughly the same amount of time has it used to take to level 1-60, or w/e vanilla caps out at now. Getting to 1-60 (if 60 is the new cap) would take as long as 1 - 120

 

It doesn't have to take quite that long, but maybe a good middle ground.  One reasons for the level squish is to make hitting the final content less intimidating, and not everyone will have access to heirlooms and xp potions to run through the equivalent of 110 levels in 3 hours.

[DR_Mechano]

Yes, nothing at all, that's why it has subscriber numbers in the millions, while free CoX can't bust 100k...

 

Millions eat at McDonald's every day.  That doesn't make it good.

The question wasn't whether WoW is good, but whether it does anything better than CoH. The fact that the food is bad has nothing to do with how good the company is at, say, supply chain logistics.

 

For example, WoW is vastly better at strategically interesting boss fights. CoH barely began to experiment with rudimentary versions of that towards the end of its life; almost all AVs are what WoW players would call "tank and spank".

 

Maybe you don't WANT a cheap greasy hamburger, er, a strategic boss fight. That is perfectly fine. But whether you want it or not, they're very good at making it.

 

I will point out that the initial Raids in Classic WoW were incredibly basic, especially compared to much, much later designed ones. 90% of Molten Core is tank and spank with a single 'watch out for this' mechanic (Baron Geddon being a prime example, tank and spank + Living bomb), Onyxia is a 'avoid deep breath, deal with adds', that's the entire mechanics of the fight. It wasn't, really, until Naxxramas that they started to add in more complicated things since most of the fights usually relied on Resistance Gear (which is going to hit new players like a truck when they go into classic. Not wearing optimal DPS gear (As a hunter I remember wearing the Black Dragonscale set 3 piece for the fire resist throughout molten core or having to run Aspect of Nature through AQ40 for the +Nature Resistance along with additional resist gear especially for the Princess Huhurun fight) just so you can get the most resistances.

 

It took them probably until, realistically, Burning Crusade to actually get down raids that had interesting mechanics. I suspect that CoH, if it had continued development, would have begun to learn how to pull off such things in-engine but the iTrials are basically the same as MC, BWL and AQ40, the very beginnings of learning how to do interesting raid mechanics.

[Williwaw]

WoW has (or had, it may no longer be available) an item named after an IRC roleplaying channel (which is definitely no longer available) and the player name of its owner, does that count?

 

https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Twisted_Blades_of_Zarak

http://www.imperiarp.org/channels/tbi/index.html

[jubakumbi]

I love to see big companies crash, burn, and die and can't wait for companies like EA and Activision perish from this earth. All the big companies are lining up to crash into a brick wall and send shockwaves through the entire triple A industry that have been coming for decades. It's gonna be awesome to see who survives and who dies when the bubble bursts.

 

So you enjoy it when lots of hard working everyday people lose their jobs?

Wow, what an awesome PoV.

[echosam]

I love to see big companies crash, burn, and die and can't wait for companies like EA and Activision perish from this earth. All the big companies are lining up to crash into a brick wall and send shockwaves through the entire triple A industry that have been coming for decades. It's gonna be awesome to see who survives and who dies when the bubble bursts.

 

So you enjoy it when lots of hard working everyday people lose their jobs?

Wow, what an awesome PoV.

 

The hope is that when/if those large monoliths crash they will be replaced with many smaller and hungrier companies who are more in tune with customer need and desires. All of them started as smaller companies, and for many, their best games were conceived and produced while a smaller company.

 

Blizzard was a much smaller studio when they started Warcraft. Bioware was much smaller when they created KOtOR. Cryptic was a small company when they developed this game. All were later bought by the giants. Are the games produced by the giants better, or even as good as those produced by the companies they simply bought out?

 

I was going to say something about how a certain political viewpoint sees the death of large companies as a good thing, not realizing the unemployment involved. But then remembered, their rivals are so entrenched with the mega corporations they don't realize (or care) that they are not the solution.

 

Let the mega corps die, they will be replaced by smaller, leaner, more responsive, less monolithic ones.

 

Cars... in the 70s, you had 3 choices, plus a bunch of smaller almost insignificant ones. You could get a GM, Ford or Chrysler (Chevy, Ford or Dodge). anything else was just a niche product and since the companies were not very large in North America, support and parts were a problem.

 

In the 40+ years since, the US auto industry has taken it on the chin, and they claim it has hurt us, the consumer... no, look at all the choices we, the consumer, have now. Legitimate ones. Nissan, Toyota and Honda, VW are not small companies who only make cheap sub-compacts any more.

 

Although they didn't die, their pain and smaller share of the market (loss of their tri-opoly) has benefited all of us greatly.

 

tl/dr Let EA, Activision and NCSoft die, they will most likely be replaced with many more smaller, and probably better, companies.

[jubakumbi]

tl/dr Let EA, Activision and NCSoft die, they will most likely be replaced with many more smaller, and probably better, companies.

 

Wanting the 'state of gaming production to change to smaller companies' and 'wanting all the large corporations to die', IMO, are two different things.

One is an evolution that involves people spinning out/off these smaller companies as they are viable and creating more games, IMO.

The other is simply a irrational, emotion based viewpoint to punish the evil corporations for not giving someone the perfect game, IMO.

 

Project CD Red (I think that's what it's called) shows us this can be done, without the need to put artists and programmers with children and mortgages on the street.

 

How things are done matters, it impacts real humans.

Flippant talk of killing off game companies is silly, it's like ranting about communication companies while using the network all day.

Small companies make bad games too.

 

WoW keeps a lot of gamer geeks employed.

[Abraxus]

I'm always more a fan of evolution to positive change, as opposed to revolution and descent into chaos.  The "burn it to the ground, and what rises from the ashes will be better" approach, while sometimes effective, is always painful for the ones caught-up in it.

 

 

[Charistoph]

On the other hand, you have companies like EA which do little more than use their Madden money to buy out a company, fire the old staff after a year, and put on new staff who have less investment in the IP and make some pretty abysmal doorware then let the IPs wallow.  Ah, Westwood Studios, how I miss thee.  Many of the problems of WoW, and other poor decisions, have been noted as coming from the Activision side, not the Blizzard studio.

 

And those mega publishers have yet to really feel the bite of their remoteness.  It would take all of the sports games crashing to kill EA with any effectiveness.  Depending on how it happens, the death of WoW could put Activision in to the hairs of EA or find itself breaking apart.

[justicebeliever]

tl/dr Let EA, Activision and NCSoft die, they will most likely be replaced with many more smaller, and probably better, companies.

 

Wanting the 'state of gaming production to change to smaller companies' and 'wanting all the large corporations to die', IMO, are two different things.

One is an evolution that involves people spinning out/off these smaller companies as they are viable and creating more games, IMO.

The other is simply a irrational, emotion based viewpoint to punish the evil corporations for not giving someone the perfect game, IMO.

 

Project CD Red (I think that's what it's called) shows us this can be done, without the need to put artists and programmers with children and mortgages on the street.

 

How things are done matters, it impacts real humans.

Flippant talk of killing off game companies is silly, it's like ranting about communication companies while using the network all day.

Small companies make bad games too.

 

WoW keeps a lot of gamer geeks employed.

 

Well said.  CoH might not have made it at all were it not for a big company (NCSoft), hosting and helping manage a small companies endevour(Cryptic).  And had Cryptic been forced to go it alone, they might have just shuttered CoH when the opportunity to developa Marvel MMO came along.

[arcanaville]

Game balance, challenging PvE content for small and large groups, endgame progression, well-polished and distinctive class mechanics, PvP in general, and amount of available content. On the community side, WoW is basically unmatched in terms of guides, databases, wikis, and general min/maxing and quant stuff; when your community is big enough to have a hundred Arcanavilles on pure statistics, remarkable things happen.

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

 

World of Warcraft is typically very good at the things it tries to do. Those simply aren't the things many of us want out of a game. If you don't like Holy Trinity group dynamics in the first place, it doesn't really matter that the game implements them really well.

 

I am not an expert in all online game communities everywhere, but I've had some exposure here and there.  Setting myself aside completely, I haven't seen many MMOs with the same quant community that CoH had.  Games like WoW have very well developed player documentation guides and wikis to be sure: there's hundreds of times more man-hours into that kind of stuff in a game like WoW than we ever had.  But the only time I've seen an MMO community have the same or superior level of quants that, say, the Scrapper forum had in CoH was probably in Eve Online.

 

Maybe I'm seeing this from a different perspective, but as "big" a game as WoW is, it isn't as complex as CoH when it comes to quantitative analysis.  Consider just one thing.  WoW is (like almost all MMOs) balanced with very carefully designed power activation cooldowns that essentially fix the DPS of an attack to some specific value if you use it as often as possible.  There's no way to get more damage than that, which means the DPS of a WoW character is basically the sum of their cyclable attacks.  You do have to factor in various buffs and situational factors, but it takes no time at all to calculate the DPS of a WoW player character.  This is so simple and straight forward that back in the day raid leaders would sometimes use tools to monitor the DPS of individual players to see if they were reaching their DPS potential or not.

 

CoH doesn't have such cooldowns.  We assemble attack chains.  As a result, figuring out the DPS potential of a character build is extremely non-trivial.  It is a task the entire community collectively spent six years figuring out, from Brawl indexes and Topdoc's cast time tables to DPA and Arcanatime.  All of this was invented from scratch, because we couldn't borrow anything from any other game (first, because few other MMOs existed, and then later after they did exist they used combat mechanics that had nothing in common with CoH).

 

If you're a WoW quant, you can become an anything else quant with the same skills just different data.  But you'd be useless in CoH without relearning everything from scratch.  Because our mechanics are, relative to almost all other MMOs, "broken" in a way that the tools used to look at other MMOs simply don't work here.  Here, the very first thing we looked at were DPS guides to attack powersets.  Within a year we were telling everyone how those were good for their time but extremely misleading.  But that's already good enough for almost all other MMOs.

 

This is a bit of an oversimplification to be sure.  But I also think it is essentially true.  We had the best quants solving the hardest problems in any MMO.

[Xaeon]

tl/dr Let EA, Activision and NCSoft die, they will most likely be replaced with many more smaller, and probably better, companies.

 

Wanting the 'state of gaming production to change to smaller companies' and 'wanting all the large corporations to die', IMO, are two different things.

One is an evolution that involves people spinning out/off these smaller companies as they are viable and creating more games, IMO.

The other is simply a irrational, emotion based viewpoint to punish the evil corporations for not giving someone the perfect game, IMO.

 

Project CD Red (I think that's what it's called) shows us this can be done, without the need to put artists and programmers with children and mortgages on the street.

 

How things are done matters, it impacts real humans.

Flippant talk of killing off game companies is silly, it's like ranting about communication companies while using the network all day.

Small companies make bad games too.

 

WoW keeps a lot of gamer geeks employed.

 

CDPR is widely hated by its workers for its low pay and its abusive practises towards its labour.

 

It is not a company to admire nor should it be held up as a standard for anything.

[Belazarius]

I've stopped reading after a while but something poped in my mind yesterday : voice acting.

 

I usually play video games in english both with text or voices (except when japanese is available for the voices) rather than my language.

I must say wow did a really good job on voice acting both in english AND my own language. I loved hearing famous actors I was sued to when watching my tv series too :P

[jubakumbi]

CDPR is widely hated by its workers for its low pay and its abusive practises towards its labour.

 

It is not a company to admire nor should it be held up as a standard for anything.

 

So, workers at a company are not happy...that means the whole system is a failure?

What is your point?

 

I just still see a lot of vague 'corporation hate' in most of the background on game forums...

 

Are we all expecting game companies to become kum-ba-ya machines?

 

Work sucks, and?

[PaxArcana]

CDPR is widely hated by its workers for its low pay and its abusive practises towards its labour.

Yeah, so I've gone and looked at the complaints.

 

The practices described are no different from any other big developer in the industry, for the past thirty-plus years.

 

Looking on Glass Door right now (the source of all these "horrible employer" articles) I see a 3.5/5 star rating, >60% recommend, and >60% CEO approval.  That's .... that's just not indicative of a hellhole employer.  And most of the big complaints seem to be "salary is excellent for Poland but sucks compared to <other place(s)>" ... and to me, that's not a justified complaint.  Not even close.  If you could earn more working elsewhere .... GO, work there.  Otherwise, STFU about it.

 

EDIT TO ADD: by the by, there are only seventy-four reviews there.  For a company that currently employs ~400 people.  That's hardly "widely hated" ...

[justicebeliever]

I'll say it again...without Big Corp, there would be NO CoH.

 

Sure Cryptic, a small studio came up with the code, but they had not the ability to host it or manage subscribers...

 

When that Small Studio got a lucrative contract from Marvel to build an MMO, without Big Corp to sell CoH to, the game would have shuttered after 3 years instead of 8...

 

It's easy to hate Big Corp...and Big Corp gives a lot reasons to...but they are *required* to make profits for their shareholders, and many of those shareholders are retirees who would otherwise be left to Soc Sec if the Big Corps weren't provided returns on investment...

 

It's like that crass uncle that you see at family get togethers, you totally hate him, but that one time you were in jail and he was the only one who answered, he showed up paid your bail.  You don't like him, but you don't want him to die...(I realize this is an ANALOGY, corporations aren't family members, but ANALOGIES provide some truth to the matter)

[Abraxus]

All very true.

 

I guess the things that bug me the most revolve around the fact that, the eternal drive for unrealistic profitability on a quarterly basis forces big corp to do things that are morally questionable, and a lot of times, antithetical to the goal of taking care of those very customers who make those profits a possibility.  There are other reasons, but those are among my biggest peeves.

[justicebeliever]

All very true.

 

I guess the things that bug me the most revolve around the fact that, the eternal drive for unrealistic profitability on a quarterly basis forces big corp to do things that are morally questionable, and a lot of times, antithetical to the goal of taking care of those very customers who make those profits a possibility.  There are other reasons, but those are among my biggest peeves.

 

That cranky Uncle gives very few reasons to want him in the family...

 

I totally agree Abraxus, there are a lot of reasons to dislike how Big Corp does business, but there are a lot of reasons to still want them around.  I won't go any further, or I'll step into the RL politics of the matter, but you aren't wrong...

[Snakebit]

 

It's easy to hate Big Corp...and Big Corp gives a lot reasons to...but they are *required* to make profits for their shareholders, and many of those shareholders are retirees who would otherwise be left to Soc Sec if the Big Corps weren't provided returns on investment...

 

 

 

Just a comment:

 

Only 34% of corporate equity is owned by households. Of that 34%, the wealthiest percentiles (90-99.9% of wealth) own 90% of corporate equity that is owned by households. People who rely on SS are in the bottom 50% of wealth and own almost no corporate equity.  The 50-90 percentile ownership has dropped by over half since 1989 and continues to drop.

[justicebeliever]

 

It's easy to hate Big Corp...and Big Corp gives a lot reasons to...but they are *required* to make profits for their shareholders, and many of those shareholders are retirees who would otherwise be left to Soc Sec if the Big Corps weren't provided returns on investment...

 

 

 

Just a comment:

 

Only 34% of corporate equity is owned by households. Of that 34%, the wealthiest percentiles (90-99.9% of wealth) own 90% of corporate equity that is owned by households. People who rely on SS are in the bottom 50% of wealth and own almost no corporate equity.  The 50-90 percentile ownership has dropped by over half since 1989 and continues to drop.

 

Source please? 

 

I'm not doubting the statement, but corporate equities could be defined a few different ways.  Direct equity ownership is probably right where you are at.  But what about indirect, like an annuity, or pension plan?  45% people have a 401K account for retirement, and perhaps many of those shift to bonds at retirement, but not sure if they are being counted either...

 

Regardless, my point is that when the market doesn't gain as much as is expected, and stock prices drop, millionaire/billionaire retirees are no doubt financially impacted the most, but practically, it's all the people who are living on something beyond Soc Sec that can find any kind of an enjoyable retirement permanently destroyed.

 

I want to be clear - I am for Big Corp, it's a reality in this modern, global age.  How they are regulated and taxed is where I'll keep quiet...

 

And remember, many start up businesses (not small businesses that serve just a local community), but start ups that want to provide products that lots and lots of people need are hoping more often than not to either go( public one day and put on the big corp pants, or to be bought out by a big corp.  Take Big Corp out of the picture and a lot of those startups won't start up...(No Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, etc)

[Abraxus]

 

It's easy to hate Big Corp...and Big Corp gives a lot reasons to...but they are *required* to make profits for their shareholders, and many of those shareholders are retirees who would otherwise be left to Soc Sec if the Big Corps weren't provided returns on investment...

 

 

 

Just a comment:

 

Only 34% of corporate equity is owned by households. Of that 34%, the wealthiest percentiles (90-99.9% of wealth) own 90% of corporate equity that is owned by households. People who rely on SS are in the bottom 50% of wealth and own almost no corporate equity.  The 50-90 percentile ownership has dropped by over half since 1989 and continues to drop.

 

Source please? 

 

I'm not doubting the statement, but corporate equities could be defined a few different ways.  Direct equity ownership is probably right where you are at.  But what about indirect, like an annuity, or pension plan?  45% people have a 401K account for retirement, and perhaps many of those shift to bonds at retirement, but not sure if they are being counted either...

 

Regardless, my point is that when the market doesn't gain as much as is expected, and stock prices drop, millionaire/billionaire retirees are no doubt financially impacted the most, but practically, it's all the people who are living on something beyond Soc Sec that can find any kind of an enjoyable retirement permanently destroyed.

 

I want to be clear - I am for Big Corp, it's a reality in this modern, global age.  How they are regulated and taxed is where I'll keep quiet...

 

And remember, many start up businesses (not small businesses that serve just a local community), but start ups that want to provide products that lots and lots of people need are hoping more often than not to either go( public one day and put on the big corp pants, or to be bought out by a big corp.  Take Big Corp out of the picture and a lot of those startups won't start up...(No Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, etc)

 

True, without big corp, the little start-ups would have nothing to strive for.  The issue for most of them (like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc.) is that even IF their motivation in the beginning was doing something that could benefit people, when they make it big, priorities change, and pretty soon the goals are all about the all mighty dollar.  Most of them advocate less regulation, because those kinds of things cause them to make less profit, but as soon as you take the handcuffs off, left to their own devices, their worst impulses are realized.  In the case of big pharma, big banking, big chemical, they will do heinous things in the pursuit of profit, at the expense of anyone unfortunate enough to be touched by their particular wares, with the mindset that it is cheaper to settle, than to not attempt this way of operating. 

 

Yes, they are a necessity, but only because that is the way our economy (as well as that of most of the world) is structured.  That doesn't make it right.  Just legal.  There is a huge difference.

[justicebeliever]

Most of them advocate less regulation, because those kinds of things cause them to make less profit, but as soon as you take the handcuffs off, left to their own devices, their worst impulses are realized.  In the case of big pharma, big banking, big chemical, they will do heinous things in the pursuit of profit, at the expense of anyone unfortunate enough to be touched by their particular wares, with the mindset that it is cheaper to settle, than to not attempt this way of operating. 

 

I agree that this happens way too often, and is a problem that should be corrected...but honestly, that's the last I'll say on this so I don't get anymore out of bounds...thanks for a good discussion Abraxus (as always) +1 Inf

[PaxArcana]

[...] many of those shareholders are retirees who would otherwise be left to Soc Sec if the Big Corps weren't provided returns on investment...

 

Where "many" actually translates to "nearly zero".

 

Most retirees do not have investments to draw on.  Even those who do, it's typically through a 401(k) plan or an IRA, which do not have the sort of returns you're implying.

 

...

 

Also, NCSoft is a Korean company.  I'm pretty sure most, perhaps all, of their investors are Korean, or at least, "not American" and so, not on Social Security in any amount.

[Charistoph]

True, without big corp, the little start-ups would have nothing to strive for.  The issue for most of them (like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc.) is that even IF their motivation in the beginning was doing something that could benefit people, when they make it big, priorities change, and pretty soon the goals are all about the all mighty dollar.  Most of them advocate less regulation, because those kinds of things cause them to make less profit, but as soon as you take the handcuffs off, left to their own devices, their worst impulses are realized.  In the case of big pharma, big banking, big chemical, they will do heinous things in the pursuit of profit, at the expense of anyone unfortunate enough to be touched by their particular wares, with the mindset that it is cheaper to settle, than to not attempt this way of operating. 

 

Yes, they are a necessity, but only because that is the way our economy (as well as that of most of the world) is structured.  That doesn't make it right.  Just legal.  There is a huge difference.

 

Oh, it's much more than that.  Big Corps provide the basic funds the banks use to create loans.  No big corps, no money bags to get loans from, no loans for start ups to work with.

 

Not to mention, Big Corps advocate for specific regulations, usually ones that they can diversify around and smaller businesses cannot.

 

Big Corps are fine so long as there is somewhat of a leash on them.  The biggest economic travesties in the past involved big businesses with government interference.

[Abraxus]

True, without big corp, the little start-ups would have nothing to strive for.  The issue for most of them (like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc.) is that even IF their motivation in the beginning was doing something that could benefit people, when they make it big, priorities change, and pretty soon the goals are all about the all mighty dollar.  Most of them advocate less regulation, because those kinds of things cause them to make less profit, but as soon as you take the handcuffs off, left to their own devices, their worst impulses are realized.  In the case of big pharma, big banking, big chemical, they will do heinous things in the pursuit of profit, at the expense of anyone unfortunate enough to be touched by their particular wares, with the mindset that it is cheaper to settle, than to not attempt this way of operating. 

 

Yes, they are a necessity, but only because that is the way our economy (as well as that of most of the world) is structured.  That doesn't make it right.  Just legal.  There is a huge difference.

 

Oh, it's much more than that.  Big Corps provide the basic funds the banks use to create loans.  No big corps, no money bags to get loans from, no loans for start ups to work with.

 

Not to mention, Big Corps advocate for specific regulations, usually ones that they can diversify around and smaller businesses cannot.

 

Big Corps are fine so long as there is somewhat of a leash on them.  The biggest economic travesties in the past involved big businesses with government interference.

 

Not to belabor a point, but what about when big business (auto industry, and banking industry) were both teetering on the verge of extinction, consequently taking our economy down with them, until the government bailed them out?  Does anybody conceive, or accept that the "too big to fail" situation we had then, and coincidentally still do, is a good one?  We have crafted ourselves a nightmare where these huge entities have made themselves the necessary evil that they are, and any efforts to even attempt to pull back from that are met with the resistance that such power entails, and painted as "un-American" to the populace, so that we tend to actually side with the entities that care nothing for us.  I personally could not imagine a more dangerous, and yet pathetic symbiotic relationship.  No easy solutions to be sure.

 

But, this has drifted a bit from the OP subject matter, so I digress.  CoH is great for what it is, and WoW is great for what it is.  If that is the last comment on this thread, I think it sums the situation up nicely.

[arcanaville]

The hope is that when/if those large monoliths crash they will be replaced with many smaller and hungrier companies who are more in tune with customer need and desires. All of them started as smaller companies, and for many, their best games were conceived and produced while a smaller company.

 

Blizzard was a much smaller studio when they started Warcraft. Bioware was much smaller when they created KOtOR. Cryptic was a small company when they developed this game. All were later bought by the giants. Are the games produced by the giants better, or even as good as those produced by the companies they simply bought out?

 

This seems to me to be an extremely oversimplified view of those companies.  For example you could argue that Blizzards eternal claim to fame is World of Warcraft, and that was created prior to the Activision merger.  And by then Blizzard itself was a pretty large company that grew through acquisitions.  In fact, Blizzard acquired Condor (aka Blizzard North studios) and they did all their best work while owned by Blizzard - the Diablo series.

 

Cryptic is an even worse example.  Cryptic has three games on its resume as an independent studio: City of Heroes, Marvel Universe Online, and Champions Online.  City of Heroes was almost a disaster: they had to completely reboot the development and push out two thirds of a game in an extremely rushed fashion.  It almost didn't launch.  MUO became a smoking crater of development that didn't launch at all.  And Champions Online, well, it is decent.  Post acquisition by Atari and later Perfect World, they did Star Trek Online, Neverwinter Online, and apparently are working on a Magic game.  Really, STO and Neverwinter are better games than CO in my opinion, but you certainly can't see a marked drop in development quality over time.  Cryptic games are just Cryptic games.

 

Bioware, I think, is a bottomless pit of discussion.