Originally Posted by
Eltoronegro
These kinds of topics have a special place in my heart. There are always the cries of "Too easy!", "Now anyone can do it!", and the obligatory "I walked to school, in the snow, uphill both ways!" complaints. The MMO genre continues to evolve based on lessons learned to truly become a better gaming experience. Yes we all have our equally painful and enjoyable moments that we love to reminisce about and say, "Remember when…”. My first MMO was EQ, the game I loved to hate. I could tell you about things called "hell levels", endless corpse runs, top guilds locking lower guilds out of content, 72 hour quest MOB spawns, hours of XP grinding just to get that last bubble to level only to get trained at the zone line, die, lose that level, and have less XP than when the night started. This is what all MMOs were like prior to WoW. On one hand I could get on my high horse and talk about how all you kids have it easy today and you don't know what a real MMO is bla bla bla; OR I could suggest that EQ, as great as it was in its day, had significant design flaws. The game was grindy, the penalties too harsh, and heinous griefing was an every day event.
I started playing WoW in 2004 and I was reinvigorated about the MMO genre. The pace of combat was so much quicker, leveling was quicker but still rewarding, the breadcrumb and theme park approach to questing was fun and exciting, getting “trained” by other players was gone, instancing eliminated guild lock outs of content, and on and on the fresh and innovative approach to MMO design went. Blizzard learned from EQ and other legacy MMOs. They figured out a way to make the game more accessible and enjoyable to a record breaking player base. Overnight the MMO player base for any one game jumped from a few 100K to millions! How...? Why...? Dare I say it was because they made the genre, their game, easier?! But that's exactly what they did. WoW was easier. WoW IS easier, compared to EQ. Easier is a relative term. Easier doesn't mean bad, yet that's exactly how most of these "the sky is falling" posts seem to imply. In the case of Wow, “easier” meant a smarter game design and innovative approaches. They took the painful lessons learned from MUDs, UO, EQ, and a slew of other first and second generation MMOs and made a better, yet easier game.
And so it is true within WoW. I was there on day one. I remember the server issues at launch. Anyone remember when realms were listed by time zone and the player based freaked out? My first class was a hunter; the last class developed and didn't even have a talent tree. I hated PvP in MMOs, but I fell in love WoW’s version of PvP when battlegrounds were introduced. I'm not immune to complaining myself about changes. I for one loved Vanilla WoW PvP and can't stand Arenas, but I keep my complaints tempered by knowing this game has overwhelmingly evolved for the better; maybe not perfectly and without mistakes, but WoW today is a much better game than WoW in November 2004.
Is the game getting "easier"? YES! But once again that does not mean "bad". We as a player base are smarter, more knowledgeable about encounters, gearing, speccing, etc.. Only 1% or less of the player base is truly in a world class guild. Most of us find ourselves in capable guilds that given the time and effort will clear much of the "end game" content. But remember, we are all balancing our own ever evolving lives, and when you bring together 30, 40, or more individuals from around the country or the world, each with their own life, it does become a challenge to bring everyone together to achieve a common goal on any given night; yet we do it time and time again. As WoW has evolved and become "easier", e.g. better, more and more players and guilds have become capable of enjoying the challenges and content developed by Blizzard. That top 1% will still rip through content at break neck speed. As for the rest of us, we'll get there soon enough; and if a lesson learned is applied by the developers in the form of a patch, a "nerf", or a buff that makes the game "easier", e.g. better, then so be it.
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