WoW and mmos in general just don't encourage exploration very much. It doesn't contribute to making your avatar any better. So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc, a lot of these zones have just ALWAYS been abandoned, save for some event bringing people to them.
The reason the population is 15-20 in these zones as opposed to 60+ is because there are better ways to level nowadays, not that anyone cared to visit these zones in the first place and heirlooms ruined that.
That being said, I realize you're not blaming this entirely on heirlooms and exp boosts, I just wanted to clarify on that specific part of what you said.
This is the exact reason why, no matter how many times I tried over the years to play this game with friends, I could never stay attached for longer than a few hours. There seems to be less and less emphasis put on enjoying the experience of exploration and being in a space in modern online games, and more emphasis on rote activities for the sake of progress.
And thus I return to single-player games, which I certainly do not mind. There is a seemingly never-ending stream of creative ideas coming out of that space.
I helped a fellow player build an iron farm when he didn't know how.
Helped another player try to debug his auto-brewer setup.
Built a vending machine so new players can get cheap food. Got a full set of diamond armor as payment one time.
Exchanged Christmas gifts.
Helped a new player find a place to live. Upon arrival, we stood at the top of a cliff and admired the view. Then, he noticed a lone chicken and immediately named him "Colin". When the night came the chicken got out, and we both went leaping down the mountain after him. We lost half of our gear, but Colin was safe and sound in the end.
Had a pool party. A player was living in the extreme hills biome. Upon visiting him, I remarked that it'd be fun to jump off the cliff and try to make it into a tiny pool of water. So that's exactly what we did. Invited other people, and spent about two hours climbing up the mountain, then jumping off.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like this all the time, but if you find a good server with good players, it can be a really fun experience.
An experience like that is one you can't script and it is richer as a result.
Reminds me of a blog post/article I read long ago about how a group of players sorta discoverd rocket jumping in quake and decided to try and use it to get up this massive unaccessible ledge just for the fun of it. Spontaneous unexpected events like this are turkey something special in gaming, I suppose exactly because they're not designed for. I'd agree that mindcraft is fairly good for these type of unplanned happenings. I suppose you could consider it a culture thing.
Ah, the early days of EQ, when I couldn't figure out how people would drag their corpse to safety.
It's only when loss is possible that you can truly gain. It's only when betrayal is possible that you can truly trust. It's only when your character can completely fail that you can truly enjoy success.
Each of those are opposite sides of the same coin. A game like Wow (which I found it very addictive, compulsive even, and did "enjoy" it to some extent) is ultimately totally empty, because there is no way to gain, to trust, to win.
Put that stuff back in, and you get a game like Eve.
Maybe one day a MMO will bring back that magic. Alas, nostalgia wasn't enough to overcome the shortcomings of original EQ with Project99 in 2015.
It's funny. I played a korean grinding MMO which was heavily based around this. But it was also fairly buggy and some of its mechanics poorly designed. The most fun we had was whenever new content was introduced. Figuring out how things worked and then abusing it.
Once you were near the soft cap - there was no practical exp limit, level requirements just started to increase super-exponentially at some point - you just looked for other things to do. Trying to take on bosses that were considered too hard by coordinating more players than intended by the game system or abusing their AI, using the near-invulnerability one had in lower-level dungeons to lure hundreds of monsters around you, find breaks in the invisible walls to leave the map etc.
I think the sandbox aspects of even the least sandbox-y MMOs make the most fun. Non-intervention by the devs (either by policy or by inability) also helps to provide some feeling of freedom, you just do whatever you want instead of being railroaded into some sort of "intended playstyle".
I thought the AQ raids were quite enjoyable also. When else has a warrior tank needed a frost wand?
Silithus was really only busy for those 6 months between patch 1.9 and 1.11. Well, probably a bit longer than that I guess since original Naxx was such a shitshow. At most 10 months, though.
By the way, it can still be accessed, since it looks like for WoTLK they just copypasted the map around: https://imgur.com/a/uRw4V
So there are a couple levels for exploration: if you don't want to do it, then hurrying through the quest chain gives you lots of XP and you can move on. If you're mildly curious, you can go collect the stuff that interests you, without any real damper on your experience if you decline. If you're gung-ho about exploration for its own sake, there are also plenty of hidden bits and pieces everywhere that aren't necessarily collectibles.
The consequence is that people took the time spent leveling seriously at the time; since you'd spend so much time doing that. It made sense to run some low-level dungeons to gear up, since you'd get to keep these items a long time. Before the dungeon finder, people mostly skipped leveling dungeons. After, they kept doing them (easy way to gain experience points) but the difficulty had been brought down to accomodate random groups of rushing players.
The sheer volume of time you spent leveling made it so that people tried to have fun doing it. Nowadays it's something you have to get through. You can even pay Blizzard to bypass it, the message is clear.
() Consider that the leveling record was about 7 days at the time, to go from level 1 to 60. My first lvl 60 character took me north of 16 days. In the latest expansion, some people I know went from lvl 90 to 100 in less than 24 hours, and leveling is supposed to get longer as you increase in levels. I remember the leveling between 50 and 60 during the holidays and each level took me a solid day of ~8 hours.
For me the only exception was Un'Goro Crater. That was by far the most fun I had in the game apart from PvP arenas. Dinosaurs, cool quests inspired by 70s TV shows I watched as a kid, and just the fact that it was such a beautiful rendering of the real Ngorongoro Crater.
Of course I stopped playing in 2007, so I'm sure there's tons I've missed out on since. But I really enjoyed the early quests and their unique stories, even the hammy stuff like the Edwin VanCleef/Deadmines quests. Given the level cap is at 100 now, I don't see why Blizzard doesn't open up the game as free-to-play for the first 60 levels (the original game before any expansions) instead of just 20, and you pay to play beyond that. I would definitely pick it back up if they did that.
I mean really, why do you think people get gear? It's so they can play more parts of the game and have more fun.
Personally, I can't really defend dungeon running that much because I always liked PvP more -- having human opponents to fight was always more fun for me, and the game certainly encouraged that. Some of my friends will still talk about how they were the top of their server or server group, and have folders of screenshots of them beating other prominent PvPers.
I never got very into WoW because by the time it got popular with my friend group in earnest I had switched to Linux and wine only ran WoW at about 20fps. But I had plenty of fun playing it and I barely got into it at all. Saying that the game doesn't encourage it is total bullshit. Finding night elf in Warsong, chasing them down, and watching their health drain from my warlock's curses was some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. And I got a shiny token for that, too, so there.
Basically GW2 is a game that respects your time - waypoint teleports instead of flight paths, no corpse runs, no tagging mobs, per-character (or maybe player?) resource nodes, world events you can just jump into and everyone receives credit based on participation, area quests you don't have to pick up to start getting participation, and a lot you can do at the level cap that's not grinding gear - in fact the best is almost all crafted. I think this has to come down to the game being an initial purchase plus very carefully designed micropayment options instead of a subscription model. The micropayments are pretty much all vanity stuff or conveniences like extra bank slots, there's no gear and the only content options are Living Story episodes you weren't around for. Gold is easy to acquire & swap for the currency.
I think Blizzard tried to introduce some of this stuff in Mists of Pandaria, but there's just too big a gap for them to bridge now. Guild Wars 2 is missing world PvP, but has huge World-versus-World three way maps and team-based PvP. I miss Southshore mass insanity as much as anyone, but WvW is better.
You missed the second part of that clause, which is pretty critical context.
> So unless you're really into just having fun - which the game mostly does not encourage in lieu of running dungeons and getting gear and etc
PvP most certainly falls under that umbrella in italics. Getting to grand marshal back in the day involved sinking copious amounts of time into battlegrounds in order to get a special title and some special gear. There was/is most definitely a carrot on a stick for PvP as well.
In contrast, players have never been incentivized to explore much. Maybe you get a title nowadays, but it's not going to be anything cool like 'Dreadful Gladiator'. There's no special sword for exploring every sector of Azeroth.
EDIT: Further thoughts
> if they don't explicitly give you a token for having fun with your friends, saying that they "don't encourage fun" is pretty false.
Why do you think it's false? It's implicit discouragement. In the thinly-veiled skinner box that is WoW, gear and tokens and titles are positive reinforcement.
It's not a huge leap of logic to say that positive reinforcement tends to discourage behavior that doesn't lead to the reward.
I think you have a very cynical view of video games, and a very simplistic view of human psychology. The mere existence of a reward to do something doesn't make someone want to do anything else anything less -- it just might make someone want to do that thing more.
I think the real problem comes from players, like you, who are literally unable to break the skinner box and are slavishly dedicated to extracting rewards from the system, using only the components of the system. Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you, because everything is reduced to work, the mechanical gaining of utility from authority figures. I blame overprotective parents and overscheduled youth and hope you one day feel better and can explore in MMOs without feeling discouraged.
Like:
> Organic play and indeed, fun, is lost on you
Really? That's the only explanation here? Not that I might be right about Wow?
You're clearly upset about something else. Let me know when you're ready to have a real conversation.
The next expansions however speeded up the leveling process. You start level 1, do some story mission that kickstart your adventurer into the real world and you are level 20 by the time you finish the prolog (i.e. you start on an island, and by the time you get to the main continent you are max level).
Then, you can play where you want, with who you want. Only your gear and your skills matter.
GW1 was an amazing game. As much as I like GW2, I wish they had kept more gameplay mechanics from the previous game.
This was my biggest surprise with GW2. All the videos leading up to its release had me really excited. The combat looked so much more engaging and interactive. In the end, I found myself preferring GW1. But to be fair, it may just be age. I find it harder to play games for extended periods of time than it was back when I was in high school.
But while it is fun to keep a mob helpless for minutes in PVE, being at the receiving end of it in PVP is no fun at all. So these days control has pretty much gone byebye, or is heavily curtailed when applied to characters rather than mobs.
Another thing is that in recent years games has gotten more "furious". Back in the day a fight good fight could drag on for minutes, with each side trading blows and coming up with strategies and counter strategies as the fight ebbed and flowed. This put brains ahead of player brawns or reflexes.
But now it is all interrupts and twitch. Dodge this, block that, constantly moving out of fields and looking for "tells".
Interesting. What do they use instead?
Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).
Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
You collect a bunch of cards (skills) and then build a deck (skill bar) from that.
This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
TL;DR: WoW needed to do more to encourage people to revisit all existing areas four expansions ago. I tried to get back into it a couple of years ago (WotLK era), and I was just put off by how few people were everywhere - and if there were people, they were ignoring you and just grinding through quests.
This contrasted my initial experience with WoW quite a bit - that was either BC or even before that. Lots of people questing, and it was before the dungeon finder so people actually still had to physically form a team of players at the actual location (and spam the chat channels) to get into the dungeons, making it much more of a challenge - and more importantly for an MMO, a social endeavour.
Compare and contrast Super Metroid, as discussed recently, which sends you back to areas you've already visited once you have the equipment to experience them differently:
- For the longest time in FFXI equipment was golden; not in WoW and not in FFXIV
- "Gear Score" / "Average Item Level"
- Instanced-only endgame content
- Instant travel to every zone for all players who've been there before
- All content is beaten before the end of a content cycle
- No very high-end content which goes months or !years! without being taken down (Vrtra:~2yrs, AV:~4yrs, PW:~3yrs, etc.)
- General fight mechanics and style (don't stand in the poo, tankbusters, buff-type mechanics); not really many new ideas at all
- Flying mounts added in first expansion; unavailable in first-version areas, only in expansion areas
- Character jumping in a FF-series game! Heresy!
Regarding FFXIV relics and revisiting zones; relic quests will be nerfed into oblivion with the expansion, just like all previous relic chains were when subsequent content was released. WoW used to make you run around areas and talk to people for legendary weapons too[1], even some of the areas mentioned in this article like Silithus. Then the level cap went up and people had little use for those items anymore.
This all boils down to MMOs lowering the entry bar by allowing new players to catch up with the most experienced players at a casual pace. You're never very far behind the bleeding edge, could be caught up in a month or two. Whether or not that's a good thing is opinion and perspective; FFXI required a very substantial commitment to compete in endgame and it definitely bordered on unhealthy obsession for many max-level players. That said, it'd be great to see some seriously difficult/"unbeatable" (preferably open-world) content, even if they use the old zones to make it happen world-boss-style.
[1] http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019/thunderfury-blessed-blade-...
wow mediates the issue of content going stale by allowing people to mow through, especially older raids to get accomplishments and gear; mostly for transmog of current gear or mounts and pet. This to me is a better solution. The GW2 solution leads to a more annoying world, where everything has to be taken into account and there is no breezing past low level content on your way to more excitement
But things were already being nerfed in Wrath -- For example, a Gnomeregan corpse run was of several minutes while an ICC corpse run lasted a few seconds.
Tyria is not as robust as Azeroth.
Guild Wars 2 has public world events, where large numbers of players (50+) team up against a boss or a mob of enemies. Almost all bosses are HP sponges, so it gets repetitive very very easily. (ArenaNet attempted to make more complex areas, which mostly just added grind.)
In terms of world exploration, Guild Wars 2 has a few unique ideas there with Vistas (get to a certain point of the map and get a nice view) or Jumping Puzzles (platforming challenges), the latter of which I am not a fan due to the wonky controls.
The core issue why I don't play GW2 anymore is that it gets pretty samey. They did add episodic content for free which is pretty nice, except the plot was completely incomprehensible.
This in effect turn every fight into a fight between mob health pool and how many active defenses you brought along.
On top of that, anyone can "heal" someone that has gotten defeated and so bring them back into the fight.
WoW's world > Guild Wars' world. In terms of gameplay, I definitely prefer GW. In terms of story, world, characters, Wow blows it out of the water. I just struggle to care about anything that's going on in Tyria
1) Never start playing together, as the level gap between the newbies and the more veteran players meant that challenges were either impossible, or impossibly easy.
2) Rarely ever play the game because a) the group wants to avoid 1) and b) it's hard to get five friends spread across four timezones together on the regular.
3) Play the game as often as we want, as we each have "regular" solo characters, and "play-with-the-friend-group" characters, but get far less than the regulation amount of fun out of the group games, as all-too-often there's only like one set of low-level story content, so playing with the group causes to to re-run stuff for like the billionth time anyway.
And, really, even with the level scaling, your skills don't go away. Having a character in the party that's five or ten+ levels higher than the zone content makes it substantially easier than a character that's at-zone-level or just a few levels higher. (It remains quite satisfying to drop an offensive golem on some level one goblin and splat it in two hits.)
However I'd like to add that the scale-down isn't at all that dramatic! I can kill a Moa or a bandit in Queensdale with 2-3 hits on my level 80 Mesmer (and he is a condition-based build), while it takes much more effort as a level 3 Thief.
Also the traits, and gear stats remain, to an extent; they are maybe scaled down but they are still present.
Furthermore, it also depends on the class you're playing. If you're a heavy-armour character with attack-centric stats you'll easily 1-hit anything, but if you're a healer engineer, you'll need to invest more effort.
But you've got to admit that the scale-down is substantially more dramatic than in pretty much every other MMORPG, no? I mean, if you've forgotten, like spend a week or so with Firefall, then come back to the starting area. :P
Moreover, a scaled-down level 80 will get level 80 gear when killing creatures. For folks who are invested in gear collection, but have low-level friends, this makes them far more likely to play together. (Wish I'd mentioned this in my original post. :P )
If I'm level 100, I should be able to go into a level 5 area and kill everything with one hit, but I wouldn't get any XP because it wasn't challenging.
However, if my low level friend is playing and they want a buddy to help them with low level content, it would be nice to have the option of scaling my character down to my friend's level where I would be challenged by level 5 content alongside them (and even gain some degree of proportional XP or maybe scaled loot from it)
I wind up playing for a few months each time a new expansion is released, sometimes jumping in for a month if something interesting happens. (For example, WoW will be aping Guild Wars auto-scaling in the next patch, experimenting with 'Timewalking' weekends.)
¹ http://www.wowhead.com/spell=130283/enlightenment#comments
² https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft-serv...
This gutted the economy (especially on small-medium servers) and led to me quitting.
Raiding was fun, PvP was alright, but when the economy was mustered into farmville-time gating...I gave my favorite MMO up.
The PVE side of GW2 have a bunch of other issues though.
As with most modern MMOs, the endgame begins at max level. In order to help players level faster, Blizzard added a heirlooms mechanic in the second expansion (Wrath of the Lich King) to allow low levels to have above-curve gear while leveling, with a 30% EXP boost. The third expansion (Cataclysm) revamped Azeroth, making new questing much easier and straightforward, and therefore less time is spent in the old world. The fifth expansion adds Dungeon Finder, which is a faster way to level than normal questing. So there is not much incentive to explore until you hit 90 and can go to Draenor. And then once you hit Draenor, you have access to Garrisons, which is a FarmVille-like mechanic which has the easiest financial ROI in the game, making even less of a reason to just explore period. I did not renew my subscription.
Guild Wars 2 had a great solution to this; all zones have content, which the player downscales to. Unfortunately, Tyria (the world of Guild Wars 2) is not as robust as Azeroth.