What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?

[Seroster01]

Eeeeeeh, no, I think the idea was okay.  It's the execution that really fell apart.  People have been asking for multiplayer Fallout since F3 (even while the "old-school" Fallout fans largely panned the idea of Fallout as a first-person shooter).

 

What was poorly conceived was much more how they went about creating multiplayer Fallout than any issues with the basic idea of having a multiplayer Fallout game.  They basically took a genre (RUST clones) that was over-saturated & wasn't super popular with their core fanbase, put a FO skin over it & thought it'd sell a gajillion copies.  If it were more akin to a traditional RPG w/ real NPCs, towns, etc. it might've worked.  Even something like a combination of Borderlands co-op with a Fallout skin would've been a much better option.  As it was they created an empty game that was fundamentally built around the settlement building system from FO4 (which wasn't super popular to begin with) and thus it flopped massively.

[adarict]

Now that I’be made the obligatory snarky answer....

 

I do have to admit that WoW loves its players and has more tributes to them.  My friend, who loved WoW, passed away and we petitioned and they put a sword in game named after her.

 

https://www.wowhead.com/item=90388/greatsword-of-kofinna-kottr

 

The great sword of Kofina Kottr.  I had to make an Alliance character just so I could have it.  WoW’s landscape is littered with little tributes.

 

While WoW may have more tributes, I have to point out Coyote in game.  He is my real life brother's character.  When he died, they put him in the game.  It was the reason I started playing.  And it wasn't just some line item thing that got added.  I had many good conversations with a number of the devs regarding my brother, and all of them felt strongly that it was right to put him in the game.  Jack Emmert and Castle in particular personally knew my brother and told me stories of his time on the beta forums. 

 

It wasn't in the GAME per se, but I believe several players were featured in the comic book for CoH.  The devs were very personally vested in the forum community, and often called out players from in-game, such as Ascendant.  Arcanaville may as well have been a full-time dev.  The Devs for CoH were by and large, pretty close with the community.  I didn't see that with the WoW devs.  Granted, WoW's population made the ratio between players and devs far more lopsided, meaning it was likely harder for those WoW devs to have as much direct involvement with players.

 

And yes, I am aware that since my brother was the recipient of some of that Dev love, I am more than a little bit biased on the topic.  :)  It also doesn't hurt that I truly enjoy CoH, whereas with WoW, I just couldn't get into the game itself.  I disliked the forum community intensely, and every time I TRIED to play WoW, I was hounded non-stop by people wanting to duel me.

[Sura]

 

It wasn't in the GAME per se, but I believe several players were featured in the comic book for CoH. 

 

Coyote was my first thought when I read that post too.  And Coyote wasn't/isn't in a small out-of-the-way spot either; it was a great tribute.

 

I have a character that was in both editions of the CoH comics.  Not prominently of course, and I wish I had a cooler costume, but he's there in both just the same.

[StarseedWarrior]

If we're playing that game, the faux-medieval european fantasy genre is dying in video games.

 

People hate Bethesda so much and have largely grown wise to how stagnant Bethesda is as a developer that they've turned TES VI into a scornful meme and TES VI is expected to finally break the trend of each TES game outselling the last by leaps and bounds, World of Warcraft has been withering for years and is down to only 1.6 million subscribers, dark souls is a concluded trilogy, CDPR is moving onto other things after the Witcher, and nobody is expecting good things out of Bioware for Dragon Age IV after so many disappointments in a row. The genre's not quite dead yet, but it's on life support and while Japanese fantasy series like the Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, and Final Fantasy are doing okay; the sword and sorcery RPG seems to have seen the sun set on it forever.

 

What is popular?

 

Stuff with guns, people love shooty shooty bang bang settings with dakka galore. Post-apocalyptia, scifi, technothrillers, space fantasy, modern fantasy etc; medieval fantasy is almost quaint and passe and the genre as a whole is often scornfully mocked as dated and goofy compared to the kinds of settings used in shooters. Even in the RPG genre; aesthetics that allowo for the usage of guns are increasingly crowding out swords and sorcery. CDPR is moving onto Cyberpunk, Bethesda's heavy into fallout and is moving into space with Starfield, Obsidian is going for the space western and so on so forth. 

 

I expect swords and sorcery fantasy to largely disappear from the triple A space in the 2020s and most future RPGs to move onto shooter rather than melee focused gameplay to follow the zeitgeist.

 

I hate to break it to you but people are becoming more open minded to fantasy and evolving it into sci fi mixed with fantasy and etc, it seems to me you much prefer that yourself so your kind of expecting it to change partly from a bias, just as the entertainment industry as a whole has change so will the gaming popular genres, if anything there has been more paranormal/fantasy/fiction type of tv shows and movies lately then anything.

[Charistoph]

Ironically, two of the most popular "future" franchises involve a mix of swords and guns: Star Wars and Warhammer 40K.

 

And a lot of the Fantasy movies were just simply not picked up by big money, so that's why they fall flat.

[Transhumanish]

Ironically, two of the most popular "future" franchises involve a mix of swords and guns: Star Wars and Warhammer 40K.

 

And a lot of the Fantasy movies were just simply not picked up by big money, so that's why they fall flat.

 

Star Wars was even explicitly made as space opera/space fantasy. Lucas was not vague about this. It intentionally had fantastical, magical elements, because he'd recently seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and thought that was likely to be the best hard sci-fi film ever made for quite some time at the least. And a lot of other sci-fi would follow in its footsteps. So he quite purposefully went the opposite direction, to old sword and sorcery, pulp magazine, Burroughs style space fantasy with mystical, magical elements. He himself consistently uses the terms space fantasy and space opera and quite intentionally does NOT use science fiction when talking about SW.

 

His own words, in 1977: “Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, "You know there's no sound in outer space". I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.”

[Charistoph]

Kind of my point: Fantasy isn't a dead end, it's just poorly produced more often than not.  Heck, for every sci-fi video game out there, you're going to find about 3-4 times as many fantasy games, especially in the MMORPG environment.

 

Interestingly enough, my first MMORPG was a sci-fi game made by Westwood Studios (long may EA burn) called Earth & Beyond.  The closest to it nowadays would be Eve and Star Trek Online (it's more of a mix of the two).  Much like CoH here, it has had a group or two working to allow people to play it again.  EA shut it down because it wasn't matching Everquest's numbers.  This was announced before CoH went live, much less WoW.

[EggKookoo]

Ironically, two of the most popular "future" franchises involve a mix of swords and guns: Star Wars and Warhammer 40K.

Star Wars was even explicitly made as space opera/space fantasy. Lucas was not vague about this.

 

I forget which publisher said it (maybe Del Ray, maybe Jim Baen), but I read once that "genre is trappings." Meaning, if it has the idioms and vocabulary of a particular genre, it is that genre. That puts SW pretty firmly into the "science fiction" genre even though we all know it's a fairy tale under the hood.

 

Of course most works draw from multiple genres, but you can almost always distill a core genre it "really" belongs to. Star Wars is science fiction. Spaceballs is comedy.

[MajikMayhem81]

If you listen to half the people who played BFA modern Blizzard couldn't even find its own arse with a map and a flashlight. It's not even sure if you have phones.

May that meme never die.  And yeah they are more Activision then blizzard these days.

[MajikMayhem81]

Really CoH isn't in the same league as WoW to even compare the two.  CoH was my first mmo, and I only started playing WoW when the servers shut down.  For those that play or played, yes I'm a MoP baby.  I've played that significantly longer than CoH, and I feel like WoW just does everything better except for one thing and that's the community.  I have yet to encounter a bad team, only a few bad apples.  I'm finding it hard to go back to WoW, especially since this expansion is such a dud.  You guys are awesome!

[arcanaville]

On 7/17/2019 at 6:34 PM, Obitus said:

 

But however much credit you want to give Blizzard for making their own luck, once the momentum kicked in it kicked in hard, and every subsequent attempt to recreate their success on a traditional MMO subscription based model has failed, in some cases spectacularly.  I don't think it's selling Blizzard/WoW short to argue that the cultural moment has passed, for games like that.  Perhaps more to the point, the cultural moment for that sort of business model appears to have passed.  Now we live in what some call "the attention economy," where publishers have more or less given up on trying to cultivate a solid base of loyal customers.

 

Instead, they go for a whale-milking F2P model: you create a wide-but-shallow userbase by releasing your game for free, and then you bombard your players with overpriced microtransactions to exploit the much smaller segment of compulsive spenders among them.  This is appealing because it basically sidesteps the stunning amount of competition out there today; you don't have to spend wildly on marketing because the game itself is an advertisement - and your product doesn't need to shine particularly bright because you only need to addict a small percentage of your players.

I would argue that the F2P model is not a new model, but an old one wearing new technological clothes: the shareware model.  You give the game away for free, then you see how many people are willing to pay for a better experience.  It is just a much more refined version of that.

 

Incidentally, I would also argue that even the F2P model is evolving into something else, which ironically also existed once before.  When the subscription model MMOs decided to adopt microtransactions and the free to play model, they had all these subscribers to deal with.  Rather than jettisoning them, many (like CoH) implemented a hybrid model where subscribers could get "VIP benefits."  So you had free to play players and VIPs, and then on top of that the F2P microtransaction model.  This was seen as a way to transition from one model to the other, but not the ideal model.  However, over time I've been seeing the hybrid model make a come back as an evolution of the F2P model rather than just a hack to the model.  Especially when an F2P game reaches about three years old and the playerbase starts to mature, the hybrid VIP model seems to become more common.

 

The F2P model is more complicated than I think most game players give it credit for.  It is not just about milking whales, it actually does in the monetization space what leveling does in the gameplay space.  You have the noobs at the start, then the midlevel players, then the high tier players, then the endgame players, and each of these groups (and even more microslices of them) wants and needs different things.  You also have the free to play players who never spend, the tee-totallers that spend a buck or two, the small time minnows, the mid range spenders, the high tier spenders, and the Godzillas.  Each of them is like the different tiers of players: most players start as noobs and eventually some fraction move upward towards the end game; and most players start as free to play players and some fraction move upward towards Godzilla.  Not everyone makes it to the end game, and not everyone becomes Godzilla.  But you need monetization tools to deal with each kind of player just like you need different gameplay tools to deal with each kind of player, and I think microtransactions and VIP subscriptions are tools that can coexist in the same game.

 

Incidentally, one think I think people don't realize is that most microtransactions are "overpriced" not just to milk whales, but actually to improve the game for the people who don't spend.  For every cash offer, there's players who buy and players who don't.  Thus, some get an advantage and some don't.  The more value is in that offer, the more the game edges toward pay to win.  The less value, the more the game edges away from pay to win and the more valuable gameplay itself becomes - but the less money you generally make, because fewer players are buying it.  A good F2P game tries to balance the two, deliberately giving the paying players as little as possible so they don't hurt the non-paying customers too much, while giving them enough to think it is worth spending at all.  In that way, we make the spenders into patrons: they spend to keep the game alive, and in return they ask for relatively little.  On paper at least, that's actually what *everyone* wants: the spenders get some value for their money, while the non-spenders don't think the spenders are getting too much for their money and the game operators keep the lights on.

[arcanaville]

On 7/17/2019 at 6:34 PM, Obitus said:

Speaking of cultural moments, it's pleasantly surreal to be back on a CoH forum debating Arcanaville in 2019 😄

It is like we've been rebooted, only we're all still here just older.  Kind of like Murphy Brown.

[RikOz]

Something I posted about in another thread about combat "RNG" was that WoW's combat provides better feedback that helps avoid the frustrating feeling of constantly "missing" like we have in CoH.

 

In WoW, there are visual and audible cues when your enemy dodges, blocks, or parries your attack. Your attack may have been unsuccessful, but at least you made contact. Combat complaints on the WoW boards tend more toward "my class doesn't do enough damage" rather than "my class can't hit anything".

 

In CoH, an unsuccessful attack, regardless of why it was unsuccessful, is represented with a "whiff". Kind of like a basketball player shooting an "air ball". It's that constant "whiffing" that leads to people complaining that there's something wrong with the combat system. In reality, they're probably not missing any more often than the WoW player, it's just that it's made more blatantly obvious.

 

Think of a fight scene in a movie - the scene wouldn't be very impressive if one of the fighters kept throwing punches that never landed. Star Wars stormtroopers, anybody? They're joked about because of how often they completely fail to hit what they're aiming at. Another example would be a fight in a slapstick comedy or cartoon, where a short character is trying to punch a tall character, and the tall character "defends himself" by placing his hand on the short guy's forehead and simply holding him at arm's length so that the short guy can't reach him.

[DR_Mechano]

On 7/19/2019 at 2:26 AM, RikOz said:

Somebody once decided to calculate the size of the Eastern Kingdoms by literally running on foot from Booty Bay to Silvermoon City, in the most direct route possible, estimating the character's running speed, and timing how long the trip took. His ultimate conclusion was that the continent of Eastern Kingdoms was about the size of ... Manhattan.

 

Of course, it was designed without flight in mind, and so they were able to use tricks of geography and terrain to make the whole thing seem much bigger than it actually is, as long as you're ground-bound. I was rather gobsmacked one day when I happened to be in that demon-infested canyon in Ashenvale (can't recall the name off the top of my head, but it's where you have to kill a couple big named demons) on a character capable of flight. I flew straight up out of there and realized I was like 200 yards away from Orgrimmar, as the crow flies. But when you're ground-bound, it feels like those two points are a long way apart.

I will also point out that it is confirmed, by the devs, that the ingame version of Azeroth is MASSIVELY shrunk down for obvious reasons. The expanded universe stuff makes a point of mentioning that Stormwind is a huge sprawling city the size of a modern American city and that it takes, many, many DAYS of flying to actually get from Silvermoon down to Booty Bay or at least a week to go from Ironforge to Stormwind via non-deep run tram route (aka through the mountains).

[EggKookoo]

 

1 hour ago, RikOz said:

In WoW, there are visual and audible cues when your enemy dodges, blocks, or parries your attack. Your attack may have been unsuccessful, but at least you made contact. Combat complaints on the WoW boards tend more toward "my class doesn't do enough damage" rather than "my class can't hit anything".

 

In CoH, an unsuccessful attack, regardless of why it was unsuccessful, is represented with a "whiff". Kind of like a basketball player shooting an "air ball". It's that constant "whiffing" that leads to people complaining that there's something wrong with the combat system. In reality, they're probably not missing any more often than the WoW player, it's just that it's made more blatantly obvious.

While this doesn't contradict your point, I think this because there's less ambiguity when you whiff than when you hit with no damage. I think if you did the latter and some kind of "NO DAMAGE" text floated above your target's head, you'd be just as frustrated as you would be if you were missing. Case in point, I get that same frustrated feeling whenever I attack a MOB in CoH who has some kind of "no hit I" buff up, and I see "UNAFFECTED" float above their heads. I didn't miss, I hit but did nothing.

 

When you hit but do no damage, it's not always clear if you didn't deal at least 1 HP. You know you probably didn't, but it's not shoved in your face.

 

34 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

I will also point out that it is confirmed, by the devs, that the ingame version of Azeroth is MASSIVELY shrunk down for obvious reasons. The expanded universe stuff makes a point of mentioning that Stormwind is a huge sprawling city the size of a modern American city and that it takes, many, many DAYS of flying to actually get from Silvermoon down to Booty Bay or at least a week to go from Ironforge to Stormwind via non-deep run tram route (aka through the mountains).

And Goldshire is supposed to be a full town with thousands of people, and it's three buildings in game.

 

My guess is the "real" Azeroth is at least 100 times larger in the cardinal scales and somewhere around 10 times larger vertically. How tall is Blackrock Spire?

Edited August 6, 2019 by EggKookoo

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, arcanaville said:

I would argue that the F2P model is not a new model, but an old one wearing new technological clothes: the shareware model.  You give the game away for free, then you see how many people are willing to pay for a better experience.  It is just a much more refined version of that.

I disagree.

Shareware, really, is more akin to Demo versions of a game.  It's not that you can pay to get faster levelling or better gear, with Shareware.  It's that you can pay to keep playing the game at all.  Big, classic series of originally-shareware games:  Spiderweb Software's Avernum games (classic cRPG stuff).  The "free" part of the game was absolutely huge, easily twenty or thirty hours.  But eventually, you'd run into that paywall .... which was only "if you'd like the other two-thirds of this game, go to <address> and buy the full game for only <price>".

F2P is, simply enough, A CANCER ...!!  Nothing more, and nothing less.

[RikOz]

10 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

I will also point out that it is confirmed, by the devs, that the ingame version of Azeroth is MASSIVELY shrunk down for obvious reasons. The expanded universe stuff makes a point of mentioning that Stormwind is a huge sprawling city the size of a modern American city and that it takes, many, many DAYS of flying to actually get from Silvermoon down to Booty Bay or at least a week to go from Ironforge to Stormwind via non-deep run tram route (aka through the mountains).

Indeed. One of the novels, set during the Second War, had a scene where the characters flew on gryphons from Southshore to Wetlands in order to infiltrate Grim Batol. Flying across Baradin Bay, in the book, was an overnight flight taking several hours. In game, it takes about two minutes.

 

The condensing of the world down to the necessities is definitely a good thing. One thing that quickly killed Aeon for me when I tried it was getting to the capital city. My goodness, it was gorgeous, and massive, and sprawling ... and I couldn't find a damn thing I was looking for because the necessities were so spread out and getting from one place to another required such convoluted routes.

[justicebeliever]

16 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

F2P is, simply enough, A CANCER ...!!  Nothing more, and nothing less.

That seems like a lot of hyperbole with nothing stacked against it...

 

If F2P brings in subscribers, then there must be something to it...

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, justicebeliever said:

If F2P brings in subscribers, then there must be something to it...

Except, it doesn't.

You're not "a subscriber", if you aren't paying a subscription.

And a whole lot of people can be drawn into supporting and participating in something that is, on any objective measure, BAD for them, because they don't personally see the consequences.  SMOKING, for example.  Most people who're smokers now, got addicted to them when they were teenagers - just 13, 14, or 15 years old.  They had no idea they'd have mesothelioma, throat or lung cancer, and so on forty to sixty years later.

...

I will repeat: "Free to Play" is a cancer.

[justicebeliever]

3 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

Except, it doesn't.

You're not "a subscriber", if you aren't paying a subscription.

And a whole lot of people can be drawn into supporting and participating in something that is, on any objective measure, BAD for them, because they don't personally see the consequences.  SMOKING, for example.  Most people who're smokers now, got addicted to them when they were teenagers - just 13, 14, or 15 years old.  They had no idea they'd have mesothelioma, throat or lung cancer, and so on forty to sixty years later.

...

I will repeat: "Free to Play" is a cancer.

Except, subscription does not imply payment...I subscribe to several mailing lists...I subscribe to several news feeds, etc...

 

What is your objective measure?

 

And it's still hyperbole, regardless of how much you repeat it...

[Blackbird71]

On 7/22/2019 at 3:26 PM, Charistoph said:

Interestingly enough, my first MMORPG was a sci-fi game made by Westwood Studios (long may EA burn) called Earth & Beyond.  The closest to it nowadays would be Eve and Star Trek Online (it's more of a mix of the two).  Much like CoH here, it has had a group or two working to allow people to play it again.  EA shut it down because it wasn't matching Everquest's numbers.  This was announced before CoH went live, much less WoW.

EA shut down E&B because they never wanted to run it.  As part of their acquisition of Westwood, EA was contractually obligated to run and support E&B for two years.  During that time, they provided only token support, and as soon as the two years were up, down the servers came.  E&B could have been so much more, but this was in the early days of MMOs (pre-WoW), and EA failed to see the potential in a game like this.  All they wanted from Westwood was that sweet C&C IP license (and look how that turned out), and they never had any intention of supporting a new and untested IP beyond the requirements of their contract.

 

Fortunately, there is an E&B emulator up and running.  While the game was amazing in its day, some aspects don't hold up quite as well, but it's still a great nostalgia trip.

[VanCorp]

On 7/14/2019 at 12:47 PM, Charistoph said:

Depending on how it happens, the death of WoW could put Activision in to the hairs of EA or find itself breaking apart.

Actually, per their own investor reports, WoW hasn't been their big money maker, nor tent-pole title for a couple of years now.

Activision-Blizzard has too many of their eggs in the Overwatch basket now, and with the mega-investors for the Overwatch League. And they're expanding on that League format next year with the CoD League in the same OWL format. Some team slots have already been sold for the CoD League to mega-investors for $25 million per.

If either of these Leagues fall apart too early for investors, then they might be in trouble. If both do, then we might see some very serious issues for Activision-Blizzard. 

WoW, though, is no longer in a position to sink them.

 

Edited August 6, 2019 by VanCorp

[Charistoph]

3 hours ago, Blackbird71 said:

EA shut down E&B because they never wanted to run it.  As part of their acquisition of Westwood, EA was contractually obligated to run and support E&B for two years.  During that time, they provided only token support, and as soon as the two years were up, down the servers came.  E&B could have been so much more, but this was in the early days of MMOs (pre-WoW), and EA failed to see the potential in a game like this.  All they wanted from Westwood was that sweet C&C IP license (and look how that turned out), and they never had any intention of supporting a new and untested IP beyond the requirements of their contract.

 

Fortunately, there is an E&B emulator up and running.  While the game was amazing in its day, some aspects don't hold up quite as well, but it's still a great nostalgia trip.

I was stating the reasons given by EA, I wasn't going to bother delving in to all the nitty-gritty of the boardroom rumors and theories.  It wouldn't surprise me if they pulled a Firefly on it at all, though.  EA is definitely one of the companies which demonstrates the more evil side of corporations.

[Lunchmoney]

1 hour ago, haleszarz said:

Dota is better than Warcraft.

You join the forum just to necro a two year dead thread?

[Hew]

Cox is a horrible Cable and Internet provider from what I know. But its better than delivering packets on 20 minute long "flights" across whatever you call WoW land.