Comment by 0xAFFFF
3 years ago
> You can never again get an un-jaded MMO population. Players have since been transformed into minmax ultragreedy automatons. No game can simulate the old players.
World of Warcraft Classic is an excellent illustration of this. Players trained by playing on retail or private servers for years and an unlimited supply of information, strategies and minmaxing guides have radically changed the experience.
For most guilds, the first contact with Molten Core was a difficult one, brutal even, despite having decent gear. Classic guilds can clear the raid with subpar stuff and even underleveled players at speeds we couldn't reach at the time.
So yeah, something died along the way of people discovering, playing and mastering MMOs and that's not coming back.
This is so poetic I feel like it can apply on a lot of things aside of games... everything is optimisation and min/maxing these days. And along the way we lost our soul doing it for the wrong reasons...
> For most guilds, the first contact with Molten Core was a difficult one, brutal even, despite having decent gear. Classic guilds can clear the raid with subpar stuff and even underleveled players at speeds we couldn't reach at the time.
This was only true at the very beginning of the original launch.
My guild played on the last set of servers released just before Naxxramas was released and on the very first raid timer with a shorthanded raid full cleared MC and cleared all of BWL except for the last boss. Even by that point (essentially the end of Vanilla World of Warcraft) the strategies for every encounter was known. Our guild's only stumbling blocks were the actually difficult mechanics that required coordination (Twin Emperors) and gear-check fights.
It's a hard thing to do though, designing a game encounter that doesn't have one optimal strategy.
Something I would like to see is an MMO built around the randomizer. There are for example Pokemon hacks that have randomizers so all items, pokemon, etc are in random locations with some guarantee that things are available for the story mode. It helps break up that "follow the guide" mentality. What if you made it so every dungeon was randomized within some degree, so paths are not set, some monsters are harder or weaker. Make it so that "follow the meta" just isn't a thing. Maybe it wouldn't be financially successful in the current market, but it would help replicate that old school experience. But this new mindset of players as seen in WoW classic is what really kills the experience for me. The minmax everything I find boring and doesn't create the felling that games should.
Society evolved, but the theme park ride didn't evolve along with it (which was kind of the point of Classic).
MMOs as we know them make no sense as a genre today, but trying to farm theme park ride MMOs for nostalgia must be the epitome of Doing It Wrong. You already know the ride; it can never be like your first time.