Quote (Paintball91 @ Dec 11 2010 11:39pm)
man this i s where i need to step in.
Lets take WoW for instance. Yea u can have gold farmers and casual rich idiots who buy all the best gear they can. ON THE OTHER HAND, you can only get so good with the gear u can "buy". Most of the games GOOD gear is from boss kills and in order to get those kills, u need skill. u can just buy gear and expect to fucking kill everything. lvl 80s still wipe on lvl 70 raids, its a typical thing with noobs who dont understand the mechanics behind the fights. your gear doesnt keep you alive from fucking up your job. it only makes u last .1 seconds longer than you normally would.
/e alot of people take WoW lightly. when infact, its not an easy game at all. if u wanna buy the game to play it casually and run around killing noobs thats all fine. but if u want to do real pvp or Raids, ur either good or bad. if u can understand how things work off the bat you will get far in the game. about less than 5% of people who play WoW are actually good at the game. the rest are just fucking rands.
Not true. The scale of what you can purchase these days isn't just random gear. You can purchase entire characters catered to doing a certain thing.
And If you noted earlier, I stated that content is catered toward these casual individuals, allowing them to defeat said bosses.
And WoW is easy, very easy. Ever since TBC, I'd have to say..
For example, as soon as arenas were released, me and a skilled friend started arenas season 1 and easily dominated with our comp (which was pretty unique) and people bitched about the way we were playing so the key to our comp was nerfed.
Another example....after having not played the game for a year or so, I decided to join a raiding guild with my brother (who is pretty casual) just to help him out. I started from the ground up new in the expansion, worked my way towards a decent set of tank gear, joined 1 guild,
within a week I had completely changed how they raid and was promoted to officer. These people were fucking astounded at the shit I was telling them and doing, like it was a revelation. And these guys were considered a 'good' raiding guild, with a steady in flow of applicants.
I quit that guild because we xferred servers, and did the same thing on a new server. Within 1 or 2 weeks, promoted to officer to lead all the other shitties. (which is no fun by the way, you can't teach a blind person to see if you know what I mean)
anyways, thats that. TLDR: WoW is easy and is catered to casuals.
now, as for the other post @ me...
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yeah, but grind isn't only applicable to xp.
once u cap in lvl, u still need gear, and all that extra shiny shit.
in aion (as the most recent example of p2p mmo), once u capped lvl, u still had to worry about money, enchant stones, manastones, and AP/PVP gear - which should never have been made available thru pve, but i digress.
getting all the extra shit is like a 1+ year grind, even more so because they substitute RNG for content.
wanmei had a decent enchant system, where you could risk enchanting (with a +15% chance stone, or nobreakonfail stone) or pay an ungodly amount of gold for a guaranteed +1. something like this reduces the reliance on RNG, but still maintains cost.
i dont think "skill" can count for everything. play a large part sure, but if you're lvl 80 going against some guy who's lvl 140, there's no skill involved that should let you kill that dude. bending lvl/game mechanics to supplement time invested is silly.
shit gear equal level, sure.
Levels certainly do throw a brick in the cogs, yes. But I was simply referring to the latter....evenly leveled characters fighting each other. I understand that some sort of investment mechanic is necessary, but if you can for some reason make up for a lack of skill with sheer overpowering items, then something is wrong IMO.
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gaming in the west is so incredibly limited compared to the asian countries atm.
the fuck do i care about the 80s or 90s? we're talking about mmos here, which really only started to gain players post 2000, bar EQ/ultima. so leave the 80s/90s out of it, unless you're laughably trying to define the west as having the majority of hardcore gamers based on 2 games that're about as old as the internet.
apart from major city centers, there aren't very many competitive tournaments, meetups, or even gaming cafes.
that shit's rampant in asia. at affordable prices, most importantly. idk bout the states, but netcafes in toronto & van cost you like $40-50/day. a 24h pass in singapore costs me like $6. cafes in china, msia, glorious nippon, taiwan, hk? cheap as fuck, loaded with gamers, and fucking everywhere.
you know all those asian F2Ps that are fucking everywhere?
it's cuz they make assloads of money, more than P2Ps. so now you're saying that, in countries where gaming is practically inbred into modern youth culture, compared to the giant clusterfuck of casuals and the odd oldschool pvper, the WEST is leading?
even though all these hardcore grinders, pvp games, come from the east, and you guys dumb them down for western reception?
sure thing bro.
Limited how so?
And I mention the 80's or 90's because I also previously mentioned 'Real gamers'. I never said specifically MMO players, though I apologize if that confused you?
People who genuinely care about score and winning are real gamers. People who can sacrifice and people who actually give a damn, are real gamers. If you mindlessly click buttons on facebook or if the game plays itself for you, you are sadly, not a real gamer.
And I am basing this on a lot of things, most notably the fact that the majority of good players in a lot of various game types are typically from the west. In my experience, at least.
The problem is that because there are so many casuals in the west, the rampant hardcore population is vastly overshadowed. I believe we still have the most hardcore gamers.
These games might come from the east, the pvp games and 'grinders' but any successful game has a huge North American division and puts a lot of effort into NA advertising and marketing, because we make up for the majority of the players.
I don't include grinders because those games are debatable, as I posted before.
And finally....to go as far as to stereotype the west in dumbing shit down? It's not *my* fault games wind up that way, like I said, hardcore gamers are vastly out numbered by casuals. So it appears that way.
so yeah, bro.