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Previous in Game Reviews: World of Warcraft: Hunter Class | Next in Game Reviews: World Of Warcraft: Server Culture |
I think I’ve finally been with this game long enough to tell the difference between newbie growing pains and actual design flaws. Despite the fun this game has to offer, it is not without its eccentricities and frustrations. This list is long. This is not because the game is rife with idiocy (at least, not more than other games) but simply because the game is so immense.
I actually considered making this a series, but then I decided to just dump the whole thing on you at once. Good luck. This does not mean I won’t write more nitpicks later. All of my efforts thus far have managed to raise a character to level 37, which means a vast portion of the game still remains beyond the horizon for me.
And now begins the nitpicking, which in this case takes the form of a numbered list:
1. Low drop rates for quest items
This is one of the most notorious hassles of the game. If you want me to kill 30 bears, then ask me to kill 30 bears. Don’t ask me to collect 3 bear claws and have only 1 in 10 of them actually drop a “claw”. Like, you want 3 bear claws? Then I should have to kill one bear, because a standard-issue bear has four of them. There is nothing like having a wild bear rend your flesh in battle, only to loot the body and find the animal has… not a single claw? Just like the last 5 you killed.
I’ve killed toothless wolves, headless boars, and clawless bears. I’ve wiped out an entire village of Murlocs, who had not a single eyeball among the lot of them.
Low drop rates are annoying, but they really tend to rile people when they are both low and nonsensical. Ideally the quest should just specify the number you need to kill. Barring that, the requested item shouldn’t be something that is an integral part of the animal. Have me collect Murloc spears or earrings or something.
2. Quest Locations are Vague
Let’s see… the quest giver enlisted me to, “Slay the King of Furbolgs, on the hill north of the ruins”. Do these broken pillars count as “ruins”, or am I looking for like, big stone buildings? That busted statue could count as ruins. I mean, it’s ruined. Crap, is that hill the he was talking about? Or the one beyond? Or was he talking about something mountain-sized? Damn it, maybe I’m in the right spot, but someone killed King Furbolg recently and he hasn’t respawned yet.
Far too many times I’ve found myself slaughtering an assigned wild animal, but finding they don’t have the required body part. Am I fighting the wrong kind? (Fighting “Elder Crag Boars” instead of just “Crag Boars”, which look the same.) Or am I fighting the right monster but in the wrong region? Or is this just another instance of problem #1, where some Tigers don’t have fangs and some Boars don’t have intestines?
Some quests are supposed to be a search, but far too many simply become a search because the quest giver was an unhelpfully vague jerk. This is made worse by the fact that moving around in the game means hacking through the endless waves of monsters that evenly coat the surface of the world. Backtracking and looking for something becomes endlessly tedious when it involves killing the same four bears a dozen times while trying to guess at all of the possible meanings of the directions you were given.
You can get a plugin to pinpoint required locations on the map. I consider the game to be nearly unplayable without this. A less sledgehammer solution – and one which might preserve the intended sense of mystery in the world – would be a button to ask the quest giver for more explicit directions for players who might not have the major landmarks memorized yet.
3. Bag space is outrageously limited
At the start of the game you can carry a maximum of sixteen items. As you progress, you eventually get more bags, so you can hold more items. But the game is mercilessly stingy with bag space, and the price of bags is preposterously inflated. Like, at level ten a formless burlap sack costs more than a dozen sets of armor. One of the best bags you can get early on (via a quest) is a 10-slot container which is a feed bag for a horse for crying out loud. You can afford swords, armor, magic potions, ammunition, and training in any number of professions, but a horse’s feed bag is right out of your price range.
Keep in mind that one of the things that makes this game such a rich experience is the number of different activities – leather working, fishing, cooking, first aid, enchanting, and so on. But these professions take up a lot of bag space, to the point where you can’t participate in the activities because you can’t carry the tools you need.
My guild set me up with a full set of neatherweave bags, which can hold 16 items each – some of the largest in the game. I don’t know what just one of these bags would normally cost, but I’ll bet it’s more than everything I’ve made with all of my characters combined. For one. And I have four of them. And yet space is still tight sometimes. If it weren’t for the generosity of my guild, I’d have spent nearly all of my money just to get bag space that’s about half of what I have now.
I really don’t see the point to any of this. Sure, getting more bag space is a nice reward, but less bag space = less activities, which means less fun. What exactly is the point, here?
Of course, this problem is exacerbated, or perhaps even caused by…
4. The Needless proliferation of ingredients
If you’re learning the cooking skill you’ll want to save the animal parts you pick up. Recipes call for certain animal parts, and you need to have the right parts from the right animals. So you’ll have boar ribs, boar liver, boar meat, boar snout, boar intestines, bear meat, wolf meat, stringy vulture meat, spider ichor. Each of those items takes up a slot.
But there is almost no re-use of items. A vast majority of the ingredients you collect in the wild are part of one and only one recipe.
I wouldn’t need so much bag space if there weren’t so many different types of animal parts. There are even certain recipes that call for meat from a particular breed of animal. Beer-blasted boar ribs can only be made from Crag Boar ribs, and not from the ribs of any of the other hundred types of boar in the game. I have a recipe for “roasted bear meat”. It requires I collect “bear meat”, but it doesn’t work with the “big bear meat” I get off of higher-level monsters. Frustrating nonsense.
The game needs to cut way, way back on the number of different meats. I understand that special dishes need esoteric ingredients, but this is excessive, particularly given how precious bag space is for people that aren’t being subsidized by rich guildmates.
Yes, there are mechanical reasons for this related to how the cooking skill is leveled, but there are a lot of ways the cooking system could be overhauled to be 1) More interesting 2) Make more sense and 3) Have a more acceptable impact on bag space.
The way the system is now, it eats up a lot of space, it doesn’t make sense, and it leads to…
5. The Needless proliferation of food types
There are just dozens and dozens of different foods that all confer the same bonuses. So, maybe a roasted boar leg and a cherry pie (or whatever) both heal the same number of HP when you eat them, but they don’t stack in inventory. So a boar leg and a cherry pie together take up more space than ten cherry pies. Again, it just takes its toll on bag space, which is already scarce and which already limits the number of fun things you can do in the game.
Also: The various food types don’t give you a clue as to which is better. Which restores more health? Roasted wolf burgers or an Apple pie? Well, if you mouse over it you learn that Apple Pie is for high level characters and restores many, many times the HP. There is no rhyme or reason, there’s just this ladder of food types that don’t stack.
The system would be better if larger, more complicated food offered a bigger bonus, so a user could look at two different foods and immediately know which is better without needing to read tooltips.
6. Arbitrary Level restrictions
It has long been a pet peeve of mine: “You must be level 10 to use this item.” This isn’t so much a dig at WoW, but at about half the RPG’s out there that impose these ridiculous limits on otherwise mundane activities.
Yeah, I can see why you’d want this on armor and other combat-related items, but… food? Blacksmithing? Leatherworking? Do you really need to be a seasoned warrior before you can learn how to smelt better? Do you need to have a firm understanding of arcane magics before you can properly command a needle and thread?
I actually like the idea of a character that hangs around town and levels up crafting skills without needing to go out adventuring. For gathering professions you’ll need to have the chops to survive in high-level areas to get the more valuable resources anyway, so I don’t see the need to impose a hard limit.
And to the person at Blizzard who decided you must be level 5 to drink a glass of milk: You are a madman and you must be stopped.
My first character is level 21 now, which means she’s still a good thirty levels from being qualified to eat a pie.
Really. What the hell?
7. The realtime day / night cycle
I usually don’t get to see Azeroth during the day, because I’m at work. The in-game clock runs realtime, so if you play at the same time every day you see the sun in the same position and everything looks the same all the time, which defeats the entire purpose of having a day / night cycle. I’d rather the thing ran on (say) a three-hour cycle, which would let you see a good bit of the change while you’re playing.
Given the distances between locations (towns are a few minutes apart on foot) it’s clear this world is somewhat compressed and symbolic. If it takes (say) half an hour to walk from Menethil Harbor to Ironforge, then that would be four hours of game time, which is a more reasonable distance between towns.
8. Respawning monsters
Again, this is more about MMO’s in general, but we’ve been doing this MMO thing for… what? Ten years? At least? Are we at the point where monsters can stop beaming down from the Enterprise yet? Maybe try to have monsters appear in the spaces where player’s aren’t? At least make it so that a monster won’t respawn if a player is standing within attack range. It’s no fun being in the middle of a fight and having Scotty beam in reinforcements for the enemy right on top of you. Things like that tend to result in unjust player death. This goes double for those that rely on ranged magical attacks to do their thing.
9. Heavy Drinking Mages
Mages have to replenish their magic power by sitting down and drinking water. It takes a while. It’s a constant drag on performance, and means that everything just takes longer when you’re playing a magic user. Worse, you can’t put that time to use. You can’t work on leatherworking, or tailoring, or alchemy, or any of the other secondary activities in the game while you wait. You just sit there.
I don’t see a reason for this, other than as a simple timesink. Mages can conjure water using magic. Then they sit down and drink said water. What exactly are we accomplishing here, except to squander the player’s time?
Any game mechanic that requires you to constantly stop playing the game to do nothing for a worthless thirty seconds at a time is bad game design.
10. Wandering Elites are Asinine
In Desolace a vast portion of the desert is populated by monsters with levels in the low to mid thirties. Except, there are these massive level 39 giants roaming around. Given that you can’t see monsters until they’re thirty or so meters away, and given that you’re peering into the world through a 90 degree viewport without peripheral vision, it’s actually really easy for one of these bastards to get on top of you before you’re aware of him, particularly if you’re in the middle of a fight. What is the point of spiking the lower-level areas with these high-level monsters? Someone that wants to fight level 39 stuff will go to a harder region where he won’t have to wade through a dozen worthless level 34 mobs to get to the giant.
Suddenly being attacked by something you can’t fight and can’t outrun is more or less the same thing as being killed by a random bolt of lightning. Life is random and unfair, but when I’m playing a game for entertainment I’d like for penalties to be related to mistakes, not bad luck. This does not enrich the game experience. It’s just a pointless death to punish the player for… what? Playing the game in the first place?
And speaking of death…
11. Resurrection Sickness Sucks
If you die and can’t recover your body (because, say, four monsters spawned right on top of you and murdered you and now buzz around the corpse like flies) you can choose to re-appear in the graveyard. But you have to endure resurrection sickness, which reduces all of your stats by 75%. Fighting at one-quarter power is simply not an option in this game. There is nothing worthwhile you can fight. You just have to sit there and do nothing for ten minutes.
Ha ha. You were killed by teleporting monsters, or lag, or by one of those roaming elites we like to put in the game just to piss people off. Sucker. Go stand in the corner for ten minutes.
WoW can quickly shift from being immersive and fun to idiotic and dull, and once in a while I wonder if the people at Blizzard secretly hate me.
(People also complain about the length of the Gryphon rides in this game, although I use them to write the epic posts like the one you just waded through. Your mileage may vary.)
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125 comments. Keep commenting and you're liable to break the internet.
[...] write some thoughts about it. First off, what inspired me to write this was a blog post from the 20-Sided blog by Shamus Young. If you’re a WoW player, check it out because it’s a good read. [...]
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[...] Shamus started playing World of Warcraft about a month ago, and has been having the same growing pains many of us rookies did in our younger levels. But since Shamus is something of a name in the pen-and-paper gaming Internet circuit, it’s interesting to see what he has to say in his review of WoW. [...]
[...] Shamus started playing World of Warcraft about a month ago, and has been having the same growing pains many of us rookies did in our younger levels. But since Shamus is something of a name in the pen-and-paper gaming Internet circuit, it’s interesting to see what he has to say in his review of WoW. [...]
[...] Shamus started playing World of Warcraft about a month ago, and has been having the same growing pains many of us rookies did in our younger levels. But since Shamus is something of a name in the pen-and-paper gaming Internet circuit, it’s interesting to see what he has to say in his review of WoW. [...]
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[...] Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » World of Warcraft:Nitpicks [...]
You call them nitpicks, I call them 85% of my experience with WoW. That is why I quit.
The other 15% was when I could adventure with my friends, which quickly stopped as they seemed to just ‘get’ the game and raced past me in levels faster than a… very fast thing. Atleast I can still stomp their eyes out on Halo.
Well, I agree in general however… basically the game is a time sink. Everything you mentioned and complained about being a time sink? Yup, that’s sort of the point. The point is to make it take as long as they can, up to the point just before the player gives up. I agree the bodypartless creatures are rather silly.
And bag space is related. Part of it is a money sink. The other part is a way to limit database size and how many items you can have. If you want more items you gotta pay for it somehow.
Oh, BTW, up until a really recent patch that feed bag was a 4 (or was it 6… I think 4… it sucked) slot bag.
Luckily a lot of that stuff drops away as you get into Outland – generally the newer the area, the better the quests are, as the annoyances correlate pretty closely with older design. Hopefully Lich King will go further towards eliminating them. Blizzard are learning to be better at WoW :)
Some of the annoyances however are directly related to PVP (or at least PVP keeps them in the game). Arbitrary level restrictions and drinking times are a big one. PVP at the sub-70 levels is already pretty unfriendly when someone wearing the best blues for their level, enchanted to the gills rocks up. It’d be much worse if they could also use more potent food to instantly restore health and mana, and equip top-end BoE purples.
Of course, I spend most of my time playing my Enhance Shaman and Paladin, neither of whom really stop to eat or drink outside of instances or battlegrounds, so I may have lost sensitivity to the issue :)
As for bag space: get a bank alt. Keep a character parked near the bank/AH of a major city, and anything you’re planning on saving or auctioning, just send to them. Saves you trips back to the city when you’re out levelling, keeps your money somewhere where you’re less likely to spend it, and gives you access to a full extra bank.
Well, I have to agree with you on that subjects and there are a bunch more that we could point out. I have played as a mage and I know you pain… and it’s even worse on PvP realms, where mages <40 are so easy to kill that you always have to be on the run!
Having said this, and knowing the game flaws, I’d like to point out what I *really* like about WoW: the instances! The way you have to team up with several other players, each one having one class, and you have to play as a team, doing your job, to finish an instance. Going trow some instances with friends or sparring against players of the other faction are the things I miss.
I played WoW on a free private server, and by the time I hit level 25, I felt like I was wasting my time for mind-numbingly repetitive gameplay, and solely for the far-off reward of “the actual game” at level 70. It amazes me that anyone can derive enjoyment from killing palette swaps for 40 levels, and then claim that randomly combining elements from these monsters (skins, body parts, etc.) constitutes “deep gameplay”. If I wanted to do that, I’d play a bad adventure game. I thought there was hundreds of hours of different gameplay- and really, all there is is a few hours dragged out into eternity. In any other game, time-wasting behavior would be dinged as bad design, but with MMOs it’s heralded as “adding value” or some such BS argument.
Maybe I’m the one person on the planet who is incapable of enjoying WoW. and I’m glad at least that everyone else seems to like it fine.
I actually kind of like the wandering elites aspect. They give you an especially difficult challenge where you weren’t expecting to find them. I’ve never found one again where I left it if I go back to town to buff up a bit. You can take the risk to get the reward with them then. If you defeat them, then you get some especially high quality item for your level (like my shiny new pants), and if you are defeated by them, then at least you were up against a worthy opponent when you were beaten, and not just running in haphazardly or overrun by respawns. I really do hate the respawns on top of you that you mentioned above.
By the way, have any of those sweet ten slot bags you could send my way? Phonar would love a horse’s feed bag to help with his quests.
On some of the items mentioned, I must agree. On some, I must say it’s not the game, it’s you. But in the end, it’s all about how one takes it. Relax, man! Stop with the negative waves!
…That, or just kill a thousand bears and their families, and sell whatever bodyparts you find to that blacksmith who has billions of goldcoins in his pocket and an unsatiable appetite for useful items such as broken sand, rocks or bear gore.
Just remember this: When in doubt, kill your bags full.
You may call me crazy, but I believe if those points you listed would all be NOT in the game, it might suck MORE. ;-)
Now, I don’t want to say that the game is perfect (altough I do like it very much), but there can be found answers to WHY certain things behave like they do.
You only have to look hard enough… *g*
1. The Horde has a quest in Hillsbrad to get vials of cougar blood. Who’d have thought so few mountain lions had any blood at all?
This is one of my favorite parts of Age of Conan, and it’s the first MMO I’m aware of that’s fixed the problem: if it makes sense for the mob to drop at least one of an item, it always does. Early on, I got a quest to get 120 molars from the warrior mobs in a zone, and bemoaned how long it would take, until I realized each of said mobs dropped 4 molars each.
I don’t know why WoW does it this way. At the very least they could tag “pristine” at the front of the quest object more often to indicate that you’re looking for pieces that haven’t been messed up by you chopping up the animal.
2. Sadly, the other side of this is quest locations that are unnecessarily specific. In AoC, an NPC will send me off looking for a mysterious location, and I’ll wonder why he didn’t just follow the exact waypoint he gave me. It’s somewhat immersion breaking to know where you’re going all the time.
3. And when you’re a hunter, one of your bag slots is all ammo.
WoW seems to have designed to make space one of their economy drains. Check out the prices of upgrading your bag slots in the bank.
4. I suspect that this is a database limitation. I can’t remember any WoW quests or recipes that allow you to use a variety of options. Most likely, their database has no way of indicating that items X, Y, and Z are all sub-entries of category A, so all recipes have to reference the specific item.
5. The proliferation of food types seems to mostly matter when you’re a hunter and have a hungry pet to feed. Running around with a wolf that only ate meat, I’d never bother to pick up any other kind of food. The wolf could eat meat, and so could I… apple pie, vendored.
6. As you noted, most MMOs do this to one extent or another. Hell, until they patched it out Neverwinter Nights 1 even did this (even though the campaign was in control of when you got access to higher-level gear). It all feeds into game balance: the designers have tested a challenge with characters using appropriate-level gear, and want to make sure you can’t easily beat the challenge by outgearing it. This mindset spreads to other aspects of the world, like crafting.
I believe earlier MMOs had a huge problem with twinked alts running around in top-level gear, such that no equal-level players could compete. Designers have been trying to limit this ever since.
10. Wait until you meet the Devilsaurs. They’re ninjas.
The reason I quit WoW was quite simple.
The only reason to do anything is to get new loot(as the PvP is mediocre at best, and you can only do so many Kill X for Y drop quests before your eyes scream with rage and murder your mind). The reason why you want new loot? To be able to fight more and varied monsters. Why do you want to fight them? To get more loot so you can… etc, etc.
There is nothing else to the game. The zones never change in any appreciable way, after playing off and on since release, those peasant are still building the Westfall Inn. So the exploration game dies after about 40 hours in. Add to this the sadness that comes with being run through instances(the norm on aged servers, as there are not enough lowbies to actually run instances) and the cool dungeon bits die as well.
So you have a game that makes these great zones that are interesting, fun, and awe inspiring into sources of tedium and lament. Great Job guys.
Shamus, #2 on your list had always been one of the larger problems for me. I would constantly be jumping back and forth between wow and a browser (where thottbot or wowhead were up) just to have an idea of where I was going for a quest. It was always a big wall in the way of my levelling an alt.
I FINALLY found a mod that cuts out the middle man. This may be something you already have, although from what you said I interpreted you were just using a map with loc, and still having to go online to find out what loc you wanted.
Anyhoo, the name of the mod is Quest Helper. It’s been fantastic for as long as I’ve used it, goes well with cartographer, and keeps you pointed in the right direction. It’s also very useful when you’re partied with other people who have it, as you can see what quests they have and how far done they are with them. I strongly suggest picking it up for all your questing needs, so long as you don’t feel it’s too much of a spoiler :)
Almost everything you cite as a nitpick is there as a reaction/evolution of MMO games, or is there as a beachhead against player knowledge.
The nitpicks about quest locations, exactly what animals to kill, etc are things that, as an experienced player, I have no difficulty with. Knowledge of the game space — both where quests are, the best order to do them in, which foods are the most efficient to cook to raise skill, and so forth are an advantage that an experienced player has.
Sure, the first run through and second were harder, but as we played for years (gradually building up high level characters in every class), it got clearer. It also encourages us to form into social groups and guilds as things like bags and gold were passed down to the newbies.
That sort of thing is part of most MMOs, and is the reason for the level restriction. It got silly in EQ where a level 1 paladin is decked out in some level-60s cast offs (which were way overpowered for them). Sure, I could do it in a pen and paper game, but I think this makes it better.
As far as the drinking mage goes, I dunno. The mage always seemed like a tactical character to me. Deciding when to drink, where to drink, and how to pull monsters in the most efficient ways possible. I spent most of my points in mana-boosting abilities, and at level 70, I drink a lot less.
But every class is like that, one of the things that Blizzard got right was that it feels different to play a Mage, a Rogue, and a Warrior. They fit different playstyles, and that’s a good thing.
Not that I want to be a WoW apologist, I’m the grumpiest WoW player in my group, and have cancelled my account several times just because I got bored with it. It’s a fun game, but it’s not the be-all end-all in this space. I look forward to the MMO that does to WoW what it did to the EQ and the others in that space:)
I read complaints like yours and wonder why people play the game at all. I guess there must be rewards to the game that make it fun in spite of those flaws, because otherwise you’d be doing something more rewarding with your time, like poking yourself in the eye with a sharpened pencil…
Excellent post, and of course, spot on.
These problems seem typical of MMORPGs in general and, like Mengtzu said, are mostly related to the PvP aspect of the game.
Ironically, the only really fun part of WoW is PvP. I really enjoy the capture-the-flag and hold-this-zone games, but I really really really hate all the twinks who play in those games. That’s why I prefer PvP games that have the players on a more or less equal footing, like Halo or Quake.
Or, if you want MMO, like Jumpgate Evolution ( http://www.jumpgateevolution.com/ ). Man, I hope I get into the Beta. The first Jumpgate was slick but slow, and they promise to really pick up the pace with the new game.
Helge —
There are rewards. As I mentioned in my last post, PvP is actually usually pretty fun, provided you have a decent team and aren’t going against mega-twinked bastards. Unless you *are* a mega-twinked bastard… ;)
The fun aspects of the game are the social aspects of the game. The rest is just a grind to get there. And a grind it is, too. :(
I am so with you on most of that… Though just as a suggestion – when I’m stuck with rez sickness, I take that as an opportunity to head to the nearest capital city, visit the bank and the auction house, train up any professions, restock on trade gear, etc. (Don’t forget to get armor repaired, either!) By the time I’ve done that, the 10 minutes of rez sickness are done or close enough to hop that flight back to where I was questing.
Well, it’s annoying, I’ll agree, but a lot of things you just have to tack up to ‘that’s the way it is.’
I mean…take your pie-based complaint. There has to be some way of making food items that work rediculously well not function for characters with less HP. Yes, it’s silly that you can’t eat a certain pie at level 37. But, this also keeps people below the intended level from getting huge heal-quicks out of food, thus negating strategy.
But, the food had to be something. And, no matter what the food was, pie, or cake, or roast duck, or whatever, it was going to be silly that you couldn’t eat it. It’s food. In real life, it’s fairly simple to eat just about anything.
When food can magically heal wounds, convey temporary super-strength, endurance, or cure cancer…maybe the process becomes a little more complicated than “grab food, stuff face.”
It also makes no sense that certain boars and what-not don’t have fairly vital organs in most of the species, and those quests could be reworked a little, but in the end, it’s sort of the thing to make quest-length have a little variety. some people will pick up claws on the first three bears. Others will ave to work a bit harder.
Quests, especially in Darkshore, are excessively vague, especially given the vagueness of the landscape, there can be no argument there.
Bagspace….ah, well. If you’re playing a hunter, bagspace is always going to be a bigger issue than otherwise. Quiver, leather-bag, quest-items…yeah, it fills up quick.
Bag-growth is better if you start out in a Draenei or Blood-elf zone. You get some good bags quicker.
…and not to nitpick on your nitpicks, but was it really so long ago that you were begging for items and armor in games to be easily described on tooltips? No, the heirarchy of food makes no sense, but it’s only food. It’s obvious via the tooltip whether you should eat it or not. If you can’t be troubled to move the mouse a few inches to hover over the icon, then there may be other issues here.
Requiring some specific level before you can munch on apple pie is a clumsy solution to a real problem described above. It would have been considerably better to set a cap on the maximum amount of health you can regain by eating food and base it on your level. There’d be no WTF moments when a lowbie finds out he isn’t allowed to eat a food by some mysterious, unexplained reason, but he might as well eat the dishes intended for his level, because he won’t be getting the full benefit.
The real time cycle annoyed me too. Since I usually play in the evenings, I have no clue how some locations actually look in the daylight.
The bag thing is stupid but I think all RPG games have this. Some games like Morrowind keep weight of all the items you carry, compare it against your strength, and put penalties on you when you are encumbered. WoW took a simpler way and made you purchase bag space.
In general WoW seems to favor simple solutions over elegant or realistic ones. That’s where the thing with food comes in. The hierarchy makes no sense, but the food/drink really merges 3 separate systems into something very simple to grasp and use:
1. healing and buffing (which in many games is based on potions and/or rest)
2. feeding Hunter pets (and some eat only certain types of foods)
3. mana restoration (which in many games requires potions, rest or meditation)
It is all rolled up into a nice and easy system of “food heals and drinks restore mana”. And you can use the same food to feed pets, use as ingredients for various stuff and etc. Simplicity trumps logic in this game a lot.
But you are right – bag space is silly. I used to carry wood so that I could cook in the field, but I no longer bother since the extra bag slot is much more useful. Besides, I hardly ever actually use food for anything other than feeding my pet. And so far it has been perfectly happy eating raw fish I catch for it.
Steven mentioned the quest in Hillsbrad. It’s funny because I went from level 22 to 23 the other day doing practically nothing but killing those damn cougars and occasional bears that. Perhaps 1 in 20 dropped blood.
The other funny thing about quest item drops is that the creatures may not drop certain items until you have a quest that requires them. Also, some drops that look like they would be quest items may never get used. When I started playing I tried to be smart and hold on to sets of claws, or beaks hoping there will be a quest for them in the future. There usually never was.
Spawning points are unrealistic and I always wondered why can’t there be a better way to represent this. For example Quillboars usually spawn around little settlements they build in the hills. Why couldn’t they emerge from the huts instead of beaming down? Same goes for harpies who usually hang around nests hanging from big trees. Why not have an animation of a creature emerging from a structure then run to the assigned “post” in evade mode?
Shamus, Try Runescape, It has no restrictions on combat levels for other skills. If you want to craft, than just craft, cooks can just cook, fisherpeople can just fish, etc etc etc…
1. This annoys me to no end as well. Drop rates should be reserved for loot, not quests. Tell me to kill 30. Be a man about it. ;)
2. I’ve run in to extremely few of these, personally. There’s one in the Barrens that I can never find (a peak of some sort) and just ignore, and I get very lost in Stonetalon, but beyond that, I never have any real problem finding them. And it is a balance – if I’m just gonna get a waypoint to run to, why not just make it right beside the quest giver?
3. I like d2. That being said, bag space is a limiter, but it’s a personal thing. My wife never runs out of space – she only picks up magic stuff, never worries about vendors, and has a couple food items. And she’s just fine. She doesn’t have as much money as me, she doesn’t do the tradeskills – she just plays. So you bring that on yourself, to some degree. Sure, that cougar claw might be used in some recipe, somewhere. But you know what? It’s not one of yours. Toss it. If you have to keep it because it might be useful, that’s your (and to be fair, my) own issue. ;) The bag space game tells you how you’re doing, and gives you something to aim for. Unless you’re just buying them with friend’s/main’s money. It’s a bit annoying, but it doesn’t really bother me.
4. Again, you do it to yourself. ;) Why carry earthroot if you’re a skinner? Plus, if everyone could pick up and carry every item, then a bit of the value is lost. If everyone can very easily be a master cook, then why do I care about becoming one? But if it takes a decided effort, and sacrifice, then making master cook means something (and means my wares have a bit of value as well).
5. Agreed. I understand that they want it to be interesting and varied, but then each one should be different.
6. That’s never bothered me. If you haven’t been to Warsong Gulch in the mid range of your level, and fought people that were X9, with perfect gear, you should try it. Gear restrictions mean that you can’t just drop the uber equipment on your alt, and be a master at PVP and PVE. It also gives you that “DUDE! I hit 34, I can wear that headgear!” And makes a nice “what should I be wearing?” filter. Is that pair of pants worth it? Oh, min level is 5, and I’m 22. Probably not.
7. I can honestly say I have *never* paid attention to the time of day cycle. I honestly didn’t know it was there for quite some time.
8. I would definitely like a “zone of control” type of idea – granted, you could probably abuse it by getting enough players together, but saying that monsters can’t spawn within X feet of a player isn’t a bad idea. Maybe put a preferencing on it – they try not to, within Z feet, spawn within X feet of a player. If they can’t spawn anywhere else, they spawn within Y feet of A players. The issue that could come up, though, is clustering. If there are a lot of players in the area, either mobs aren’t respawning at all, or they’re *all* respawning in one isolated area. “Sure is empty out here…I wonder where all the OH GOD OH GOD THE RAPTORS ARE EVERYWHERE THEY’RE BITING ME OH GOD OH………..”
9. Wah. ;) Mana management is how good mages learn to be good mages. Anyone can spam mage skills over and over. “Fireball, Fireblast, Fireball, Fireblast” until it’s dead is a way to play. It’s also gonna mean you drink every 2-3 mobs. Whereas “Frostbolt, crit frostbolt, wand, wand, wand” means you can keep killing, albeit slightly slower. My frost mage drinks once every 15 mobs or so, at most. If I have to take one 3 mobs at once, it means I’m probably thirsty, but that’s about it. Plus, I have evocation and a trinket to fill me up. To me, that’s sort of like warriors saying “Man, I have to heal up after every 2-3 mobs. That really sucks. I shouldn’t have to worry about my health.”
10. My only beef with wandering elites is that they shouldn’t attack you other than in a very limited range, and should show on the map. I remember the first time I saw a Son of Arugal, and it slaughtered me (they wander in the undead area). Then I got to SFK, and went “OOOOOH! *THAT’S* one of those things!”
11. L2P n00b. ;)
Rez sickness does suck. I’d like a better mechanic. It hurts the casual player more than anything – often times my wife will simply quit playing, rather than wait – she’ll try a run a couple times, give up, and then rez, and log out, because she’s frustrated, and doesn’t want to wait to play the game.
Re: Crafting/level limits – again, I think that’s to prevent people from making 1st level alts, sending them full supplies, and having a master everything on their accounts. You can have master everythings, but you’re gonna at least have to commit the time to level them. Otherwise, go interact with other players. You’ll looking at it from the point of view of an RP’er, or a non-combatant. I look at it from the PoV of a power gamer. If all it would take to have a master enchanter on my account is cash and skill grinding, you can bet I’m gonna pay my daughter $5 to sit there and get me up to max skills.
Re: Food/level – look at it from the Power gamer’s PoV again. I’m level 25. I have 750 hp. I can get an item that heals 800 hp/20 seconds. Or I can get one that heals 7500/20 seconds. I can do math – in 2 seconds, I’m fully healed. Food goes from an out of combat item to a 2 second full heal. Why *wouldn’t* you carry high level foods on everyone? Healing potions? Those have a cooldown. I’m just gonna eat my mystical nether-ray gullet surprise!
I agree with the comment about the devilsaurs. Thirty foot thunder lizards that can sneak up on you and tromp you to death in a second flat.
I completely agree with the time-sink issue. My suggestion? Get Jame’s Leveling Guide for Alliance (or Horde), get the QuestHelper add-on, Cartographer and Auctioneer. They make your life a lot easier.
As for the collection quests? They suck, and should be taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot.
Obviously they are *epic* pies (and glasses of milk), which will instantly kill any mere peon of low level who tries to ingest them! The sheer magnitude of the surge of vitality you get from these foods will make your brains leak out through your nose if you’re not ready to handle it.
1-2. Yes.
I agree with a great deal of what you’re saying. In most cases the issues you’ve encountered can be worked around with a little metagaming or skill, or are better than the alternative.
3-6. Crafting is expensive and time-consuming to level even with a guide. If you try to do it without one, full bags will be the least of your worries. I know you want to experience as much of the game as possible, all at once, but it wouldn’t hurt to leave one or two things until you’ve seen some of the (early) endgame.
Buy a stack of appropriately-levelled food or water from an innkeeper. When you ding and lvl%5==0, sell the leftovers and buy a new stack. Remember, full bags = more trips to town. Buff foods are not, imho, worth the trouble until L70.
Bandages rock. For warriors and rogues they’re essential but even mana-dependant healers can save time.
I love the many varied food types. It gives the world some colour. It would have been very easy to make “Iron Ration: restores 2% total health per second for 30 seconds”, instead they chose to make all kinds of cheese, bread, meat, fish, more types of water than an associate marketer on speed, even lollipops and icecream. Don’t pick up, or drop, random bits of food off monsters. You don’t know where it’s been anyway.
“Do you need to have a firm understanding of arcane magics before you can properly command a needle and thread?” – yes. You’re creating *magic items*. Similarly blacksmithing has a rich mystical tradition in RL lore. The greatest weapons were made by GODS, surely L50 is not too much to ask?
The vendor bag prices are hyperinflated, this is true. This creates a rare market for player-crafted items.
7. The plaguelands are strangely beautiful during the day. When you hit 60 or so, log on at the weekend and go gryphon touring. Your wife might enjoy watching, I’ve done this for a couple of non-wowhead ladies and they both thought the world was beautiful.
8. Yes, it’s unrealistic and kinda sucks. Your suggestion though makes it impossible to camp spawns and allows players to deny others spawns. If they spawn anyway, but outside aggro range and walk towards their spawn point – that would still be unfair to melee classes and could cause even larger groups to chain-aggro onto you.
If you can think of even a vaguely realistic solution for infinite spawns, which doesn’t encourage goldfarming or griefing, Blizz would like a chat I’m sure. Ultima Online tried the ‘living world’ thing and afaik the results didn’t merit the investment.
Pragmatically, try to keep moving and remember which groups you killed. Mistrust clearings next to mobs, camps or caves. Pull mobs away from their spawn points. Usually you get 2-3 seconds to scarper, if you aren’t in combat.
9. Kind of. At some point mages get evocation, which restores all their mana very quickly, in combat (6m CD). Druids and especially priests get a lot of mileage out of Spirit, with the right talents. I view drinking as kind of a punishment for screwing up and spanking all my mana inefficiently.
Having said all that, yes mages have to drink too much. This is partly to compensate for the speed at which they kill. Most classes become less dependant on drinking around L40-50.
10. You’re gonna love Un’goro. Really tho, maybe look around a bit (with left mouse)? They do help build character… I mean environmental awareness, which will serve you well when you start instancing.
The real issue here is the clipping distance. Large mobs move faster but seem to clip at the same distance. You have to be quite spry to dodge some of them. Good ol’ Tyraninjasaurus Rex.
11. You can res quite some distance from your corpse. This is actually quite innovative and helps prevent corpsecamping by mobs or players. If you can’t make it to a cleared area, res, run, die and res again. It costs less. Spirit rez is rarely necessary, last time I genuinely needed one I just got a mate to fly out and rez me instead.
Thank you, Shamus. You post makes me somehow feel…vindicated.
I’ve been complaining for years that drop rates for quest items should ALWAYS BE 100%. Period.
There is nothing fun about standing around for an hour killing the same monster over and over again, waiting for them to drop an eyeball. Or a gizzard. Or whatever.
When drop rates for quest items are less than 100%, the game begins to feel more like a job than a source of entertainment.
1. One of the things I hated about Everquest, and why I loved DAoC. In EQ – You get a quest to get an item off of something, you go kill ten of them to get the trophy. Or you’re farming said mob and you accidentally get a drop. You search Allakhazam to see if said drop is useful for any quest you might ever get so you never have to farm said mob again. Oh, and you’re competing against other people who know mob’s usefulness and are farming just so they can sell said drop.
In DAoC – You get a quest to kill something, you go kill it, you get the trophy. If you have the quest, you get the trophy. You don’t have the quest, you don’t get the trophy.
For many of these peeves, be glad you aren’t playing Everquest 1. Specifically number 9: if you think down time is bad in WoW, Everquest made you (apparently) sit for 15 minutes at a time. Doing nothing.
You should be able to level your intestinal fortitude stat separately just like any of your craftsman skills.
I know there isn’t such a skill.
Also: Imagine a world where pie eating contests are decided by level of experience!
Having been introduced to WOW with a free trial a couple weeks ago (I’m Beruthiel on Kirin Tor), I’m seeing a lot of the same problems. From the popularity level of WOW, I didn’t expect to see a game I would be unfavorably comparing to Dungeon Siege.
4. I suspect that this is a database limitation. I can’t remember any WoW quests or recipes that allow you to use a variety of options. Most likely, their database has no way of indicating that items X, Y, and Z are all sub-entries of category A, so all recipes have to reference the specific item.
Perhaps they should be less “creative” with recipes and more “logical”. Is it really necessary to have 4 types of wolf meat? Do they really taste so different?
6. As you noted, most MMOs do this to one extent or another. Hell, until they patched it out Neverwinter Nights 1 even did this (even though the campaign was in control of when you got access to higher-level gear).
Which was a terrible thing, given that D&D controls it via access, not some stupid arbitrary limit. If you found a Hackmaster 9 and the DM said “Sorry, you can’t swing that your level isn’t high enough”, somebody is going to get a book to the face.
There’d be no WTF moments when a lowbie finds out he isn’t allowed to eat a food by some mysterious, unexplained reason, but he might as well eat the dishes intended for his level, because he won’t be getting the full benefit.
That would work really well. Just have it be percentage based (off your total), but also capped numerically.
Regarding spawn points, wouldn’t it be better to have them not spawn if somebody is nearby? That prevents camping as well… have the respawn timer tick down, but not actually pop until someone else further away. Although that could lead to packs of mobs popping up for highly populated areas…
I can understand all of the nitpicks you listed since I have plyed enought to have a 70 warlock (still hoplesly squishy) and a lvl 20 warlock (working at not being so squishy when he’s a 70)
The food issue confused me for a while but I figured it out. If I am a low level toon with 800 HP and eat a pie that grants 3500 HP in 18 seconds I am at full health almost instantly, but when I drink a glass of milk it takes the full 30 seconds to get to full health.
I do think the “Hey! This pig has no liver” problem should be investigated by the ingame EPA and maybe we’ll have to put a ban on DDT.
Ugh, collection quests. The level 50 rogue class quest is especially nasty, because you have to collect a certain bag from a certain ooze in Azshara. Thing is, there’s maybe 5 of these oozes in the world, and I’d be amazed if its drop rate was as high as 1 in 20. That was not a fun several hours.
[...] write some thoughts about it. First off, what inspired me to write this was a blog post from the 20-Sided blog by Shamus Young. If you’re a WoW player, check it out because it’s a good read. [...]
Reading through these nitpicks, I don’t disagree much; one thing that’s worth noting is that for the most part the section of the game currently being experienced (1-37) is years old, mostly unchanged since the game originally launched.
While not perfect, the newer content (Mostly from the Burning Crusade Expansion) have resolved at least some of the more annoying issues. Not all though. I tend to just skip parts of the game that irritate me now instead of slogging through it. :P
Level restrictions deserve a special note: They’re a solution to a problem, that being of low level characters getting way out of scope gear and trivializing content, not just in PvE but in PvP as well. Better discussions and comments about it have already been made however, so I won’t rehash them further.
Cheers,
You know what I’d be interested in? An MMO where there’s NO PVP AT ALL, or where what PVP there is is resolved through roleplaying (faction politics, etc) as opposed to the combat system. It strikes me that if they yanked PVP from MMOs then half the problems with them would evaporate instantly.
Dang it, Shamus, you went and made me fire up a WOW trial. I quit in late 2005 to avoid what had become near-complete mind control. I ran into some of your cool guildies on KT, P&W does seem like a really great guild.
I know what you mean about the unchanging world. It was funny to run through Dun Morogh and be like, dang, you STILL haven’t gotten Gol’balar Quarry cleared out? How many troggs could there possibly be down there?
Not that it was terribly surprising, but there could be some kind of update after 3 years. Of course, with 80% of the population at the end game, why bother?
I got my dwarf up to level 17 and am feeling your pain. You will learn grinding techniques that maximize your uptime as you go along. But there’s no escapin the meatless crocolisks and other non-dropping hacks. The dude at the Farstrider lodge wanted 5 chunks of crocodile meat. You’d think I could get that without having to clean the whole island out, like twice.
My metaphysical thoughts about why my priest is such a bloodthirsty psychopath are beyond Blizzard’s control, of course. But really, does he not ever need to spend time pondering/meditating/praying (sorry, not real tuned in to his religion)? Some priest.
“It strikes me that if they yanked PVP from MMOs then half the problems with them would evaporate instantly.”
Eh. It’s not just direct competition. It’s indirect. I’m competing with you for AH items, for quests, for drops, for status. If you have an advantage over me, it may or may not hurt me.
If you can get godly loot from a main, and just wipe out Wailing Caverns over and over again, 20 minutes per run, getting all the items you want, the fact that I struggled through it for 4 hours to get an item that I want to put on the AH becomes less important. Etc.
“Not that it was terribly surprising, but there could be some kind of update after 3 years. Of course, with 80% of the population at the end game, why bother?”
Eh. From a resources point of view, why delete a quest that people can still do? There are new players. They can do the quest. And really, it’s a quest. “Kill X Foozles in Y location” is really the baseline of a lot of the quests. Why drop one that works?
“My metaphysical thoughts about why my priest is such a bloodthirsty psychopath are beyond Blizzard’s control, of course. But really, does he not ever need to spend time pondering/meditating/praying (sorry, not real tuned in to his religion)? Some priest.”
You assume that priest == pacifist in some way. ;) When there are wandering abominations about, it’s your sacred *duty* to make them dead.
I haven’t worked out how exactly boars fit in to the equation, but I’m pretty sure they’re abominations in some way….
But it’s a world of WARcraft, man! Ain’t no namby-pamby peace n’ love gods here. You worship ‘em by makin’ things dead in their name! WAUGH!
Wait, I may have just crossed IP boundaries there.
Shamus, I really have to agree with you on most of this. When you decided to take on WoW as your topic of discussion, I decided that I would play the trial once again,in order to:
A) keep up with the rants.
and
B) give the game another chance.
The reasons you list here are some of my main complaints about the game (besides the monthly cost).
I’m used to the drops being inconsistent in games, but in WoW I’ve found that one quest can take hours because the lousy Gnoll Paws refuse to drop no matter how many you kill!
I agree about the bags being ridiculously costly too. In Guild Wars they cost a lot but in WoW they cost a small fortune. For a 6 slot bag you pay something like 2 silver, but you say you want an 8 slot bag, well I’m sorry, you’re going to have to hand over 30 silver. FOR TWO EXTRA SLOTS!
The quest location aspect of the game however is my BIGGEST pet peeve. There is often no way to find some of these places without wandering the whole face of the land and then stumbling upon them by accident. Someone mentioned a 3rd party plugin or some such. In my opinion, if you have to resort to 3rd party software in order to perform basic gameplay functions, then that portion of the gameplay is broken.
There were a lot of good things about this game in my second trial attempt. I was expecting to hate the game completely, but it has some really nice things going for it too. The landscape is a lot of fun and it is huge. At around Level 10 (human), I decided I wanted to go find the dwarf starting location. I tried many different paths to get there (invariably getting spattered by huge monsters) and discovered some really charming locations. (I also learned how to rez in strategic locations) Finally, I just swam up the western coast of the map (which took about 45 minutes) but was neat that it let me do that.
I was almost swayed into buying the game. It has some powerful motivators, but in the end some of the “nitpicks” listed above and a couple of others became the deal breaker.
They were just too annoying for me to deal with. So if I ever get the urge for WoW again, I’ll most likely just pop in a new trial CD and have at it until my time runs out again.
2. Can’t remember the quest, but the quest giver told me to go north east to get what I needed. So I went north and east. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for I pulled up wowhead only to find that what I wanted was in the north east part of the zone, not north east of the NPC’s location.
Concerning food, and drink, and recovery time. In Everquest food and drink were simply required. Your character had to eat and drink on a regular basis. If you did not your natural health and mana recovery just stopped. Fortunately as long as you had food your character would automatically eat and we were never bothered by this mechanic. Unfortunately their was no warning that we were getting low on food or drink, only that we were hungry or thirsty. It made for an annoying and otherwise useless game mechanic.
Coming into WoW its nice to see that food and drink are recovery items. Sit down, eat up, and miraculously recover from near death. Or drink up and completely refresh your magical energies. It gives food and drink meaning that EQ lacked. The other nice thing being that in EQ, we didn’t have recovery items. Or at least those rare ones we did have were extremely rare. Recovering mana took minutes, not 30 seconds while drinking milk, but many minutes in which the caster had to sit down to meditate their mana back. If it was the healer that was low on mana, it could stop an entire group in its tracks. No bandages to help a healer out, no mana or health potions. Just had to sit and wait.
In this way I consider WoW a vast improvement and don’t mind what little downtime there is.
I completely agree with you that there should be a way to allow players to level up in crafting skills separately from fighting skills. There should also be a mechanic that allows a person who is good at both fighting and crafting to make exceptional armor and arms.
I use resurrection sickness downtime to visit town, empty pockets, replenish ammo, repair, and travel. Generally I’m ready to get back into the fight right as its wearing off, so I don’t usually notice it. In either case, punishing us with a little downtime is a far cry better than taking away our hard earned experience, especially when the experience was so much harder to earn as well.
In this way I’m happy with WoW. I agree that level restrictions on food and drink items sucks. I would much rather see them all replenish a percentage of health or mana as appropriate. No need for level restrictions then, and as a social game we can all then have our own favorite foods. The different food types could allow for different bonuses. This is something you’ll see if and when you get to Outlands. The foods there offer bounses to agility, attack power, hit rating, and spell power, not just stamina and spirit. They still require levels, but theres more reason for having so many different types of foods.
I don’t mind the vast amount of ingredients, but I am annoyed that each and every recipe has to have a whole new different set of ingredients. How about using wolf meat with mild spices for one item, wolf meat with hot spices for a different item, and wolf meat with soothing spices for yet another item? This would greatly increase the amount of items we can make while cutting down on the amount of raw materials we need. Personally I’d like to see more of that. With tailoring we could have different shirt patterns, but depending on the type of cloth used we could have different shirts made. But we’d only need one pattern. Makes sense to me.
Bag space to me only becomes limiting when I’m farming. Granted I’m farming for tradeskills, quests, money… its almost a continual farm fest. I don’t mind the limited bag space, but when I’m skinning, I have to empty my kills of all their crap before I can skin the kill. This makes bag space even more valuable. I’ll admit that I’d like to see more drop on from creatures I kill. Regularly two eyes, a nose, two ears, 4 paws and 20 claws. But I’d also like to see more use for each of those parts. Whats with all this grey crap that is vendor fodder? Most of it gets destroyed anyway for bag space, why drop it at all?
And whats with medium leather, heavy leather, think leather? Why all the difference. I could understand medium quality leather and high quality leather. But even then, what does the level of my kill have to do with the quality of its skin? My skill at skinning a creature should determine, or allow me to determine the quality of hide I get from a creature, not the level of the creature itself. For that matter how is it that I can skin a croc and get the same type of leather as I can get off a cat? Why can’t I skin a croc and expect to get scales? I could also understand having different types of leather for different types of creatures skinned, but make it consistent. If I’m going to skin a dragon, I expect to get dragon scales, not more rugged leather.
I’ve started playing City of Heroes again after you started this series on WoW (I tried it a couple years ago and didn’t continue in favour of WoW, which I quit a few months later). CoH has none of these problems.
Your quests are to do something in a specific location – a cave, a sewer, a building, a warehouse – or to defeat X number of Y group – no collection to it. And you don’t have to go searching for your mission location; it’s a mark on your map. There’s no equipment, just enhancements – which often you can’t use because of your origin, but sell nicely for influence. No wandering elites – areas are marked by their level even within a specific zone, virtually nothing “wanders”, and most that do only have small patrol paths, and best I can tell things do not spawn around players. Some groups have “Bosses” in them, but the groups pretty much stay put and are generally easy to avoid or flee.
It also doesn’t have as varied a crafting system, though inventions do lead to some interesting searching and combinations. There’s no first aid, cooking, and other such crafts to grind up, but there are badges to earn (and most tell you exactly what you have to do to earn them, if not concretely how much of it you have to do.)
Their “resurrection sickness”, XP debt, also operates entirely differently. Instead of encouraging you to sit around and do nothing for ten minutes, it actually encourages you to go out and keep doing something, because you need to beat some foes to work off your debt. Half the experience you earn goes to pay off debt, and the other half you keep, so you don’t even feel like you’re needlessly filling in a hole; you’re still earning something, if not as much as usual. Plus, there’s a badge for paying off debt, so there’s a reward even for that.
Plus, in City of Heroes, you can fly, from level 6, virtually anywhere you can see (there’s a sky ceiling, but it’s really really high and only the spire tops of the tallest buildings will be denied you.)
CoH is, in fact, awesome. I can fully support that. ;)
CoH is an entirely different beast from WoW, though. One I usually prefer – in CoH I shout “Level 22 scrapper, LFT” and within minutes, I have a group. Or, I simply start hitting up the people flagged as LFT with “Hey, interested in a 21-24 mission team?”
Works really well. CoH is flexible enough that you can really make a team out of any 2-8 players, and have fun.
Course, CoH is really only so good after you’ve spent time in a normal MMO. You won’t find it refreshing that you don’t have to manage drops unless you’ve spent enough time doing so. ;)
The reason for having seventeen different kinds of leather or 17 different kinds of boar meat is you don’t want low level and high level characters farming the same items. I mean, if you kill a level 70 monster and get the same item you’d have gotten off a level 23 monster, it’s pretty sad. In the worst case, it’s an item people actually need and you’d get level 70s farming the level 23 monsters in bulk. That would be very bad.
The problem with cooking is a particularly poor balance of realism and good gaming practice. It’s realistic that each meat makes different foods. It’s good gaming practice to have different levels for meats from the same animal type. What you end up getting is an absurdly large amount of recipes, each of which uses one ingredient. This is an especially large issue when you’re level 25, you have some bear meat, and the recipe for bear meat steak or whatever is only available on the other side of the world.
Also, Shamus, if you’re worried about an item being used for a quest… It’s very rare for an item to be used for a quest if it’s not marked as a quest item / only aquirable after you’ve started the quest. And if the color of the name of the item is gray, it’s never used for anything and only exists to be sold.
I’ll add to Derek’s comment that my biggest beef with CoH is the fact that everyone is looking for teams. It’s virtually impossible to get away from the search for teams; I get asked three or four times a night if I’m looking for a team. The game’s perfectly playable solo (though some power sets and a couple of the classes are much more difficult to play solo than teamed – but there’s also at least one class (the Mastermind, on the Villain side) that seems designed specifically for solo play), and sometimes it’s hard to get a group together for the longer missions (called task forces, actually a collection of missions), but overall it’s a nice balance of group and solo playability.
1. Pure torture. For years now, almost every patch has had an “increase drop rate of quest item X” note, and it’s still not good enough. Stranglethorn probably has the worst of these.
3. Until quite recently, Blanchy’s Feed Bag had four slots. Worst reward ever.
4. I think high-level crafting ingredients should break down into low-level ones, just like you can combine low-level leather to make high-level leather. The big bear meat should be equivalent to 3 standard bear meat, etc.
5. “Oh, great, I’m in an elf town that sells nothing but white wine and canapes, and I’ve still got half a stack of gnomish engine cleaner and two stacks of goblin mystery meat.”
10. Wandering elites give you a long-term goal; there’s nothing like coming back a few levels later for some old-fashioned payback. Anyone up for some devilsaur burgers?
-j
The reason for having seventeen different kinds of leather or 17 different kinds of boar meat is you don’t want low level and high level characters farming the same items. I mean, if you kill a level 70 monster and get the same item you’d have gotten off a level 23 monster, it’s pretty sad. In the worst case, it’s an item people actually need and you’d get level 70s farming the level 23 monsters in bulk. That would be very bad.
Eh, there’s a very very simple solution for that.
Level 1 creature drops 1 tooth.
Level 70 creature drops 70 teeth.
Level 1 necklace of teeth – 20 teeth.
Level 70 necklace of teeth – 1400 teeth.
Same for things like meat.
If the level 70 wants to make and eat Sloppily Made Meat Pies instead of Pies Of The Gods and heal 1hp/tick instead of 700, that’s his business.
wait, level 5 for milk? does this mean babies are born level 5? if not how do they level? and how the hell did all these people survive being babies when they couldnt drink milk? I mean, just about everybody there started at level 1 so they couldnt drink anything besides water.
Clearly the level 1s would be able to drink milk if they had access to boobies.
Some interesting facts:
1) City of Heroes is a low-population game compared to WoW and many other MMORPGs.
2) City of Heroes is over-represented in the people commenting on this blog.
3) People commenting on this blog tend to be more literate and more mature than people who post on other gaming sites. (see previous post that I’m too lazy to link.)
4) People commenting on this blog are more attuned to gameplay flaws than those who post on other gaming sites. (unsupported, but I think the content of the blog gives good empirical evidence.)
So… Enjoy WoW for as long as you can, Shamus, but when you’re ready to move on, perhaps you should look favorably upon CoH.
I’m actually a big fan of wandering elites. They build character.
Just wait until you hit Un’Goro Crater for the ninja devilsaurs. At least the Fel Reavers in Hellfire Peninsula shake the earth when they move. You learn pretty quickly to run the hell away from them.
Looks like most of your points have been addressed. However I would like to add that, while having a large variety of ingredients and food types may be a drag on bag space… It’s a large variety of ingredients and food types! It makes the game interesting. I’m amused to find things like “Mulgore Spice Bread” and “Alterac Swiss”- even if I pretty much immediately trash them because they’re useless. It tells me a little more about the world. Eventually you’ll learn what kinds of things you need to keep around and what kinds of things you don’t, and if there’s ever a question, all you need to do is look it up on thottbot or wowhead. (I realize this “breaks the immersion” for some, but honestly, you’ll have a happier WoW life once you accept it.)
And also, cooking gets a lot less stupid later on. :)