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[Jackrabbit]

I vant you to keel seex snow moose

[Dasleah]

WoW costs good money for literally just grinding around. WoW is always a phase. People eventually realize that they are not enjoying WoW. Sure it may look good. But in the end, it's all just mindless grind. What did you mean by "Grinding doesn't feel like grinding."? WoW is pretty much a grindfest. When you're not killing you're grinding. When you're not grinding you're killing. Then again, killing is also grinding! Not to mention that most of the quests are "Go to X and kill Y of Z."

It's not about the process, it's about the journey. It's what you do while you're grinding that's important. If you dilute any game's mechanics to that level, everything sounds boring, but all that falls apart the second you pick the game up and actually play it. I mean, take Team Fortress 2. There are dudes. Your job is to kill the dudes. Rinse, repeat. Most cut and dried premise on the face of the planet, and that's what you've got to do 90% of the time. But as soon as you start playing it, the simplistic game mechanics go out the window. It doesn't matter that you're doing the same thing 10'000 times over.

The game is fun. Fun overrides everything else. As long as a game is fun, it can be nothing more than "monkey pull lever, gets banana". WoW may be many things - repetitive, clichéd, guilty of painfully catering to the lowest common denominator - but it gets away with it because it's the kind of game you can sit down and have a blast with a group of friends for a couple of hours a week. And at the cost of one new game over the entire year, each year, is that really too much of a price to play, even if you only get a little smile out of it?

[Jackrabbit]

Yet you steel have to keel seex snow moose.

[Yanlin]

I'm with Jackrabbit here. In TF2, you get to have actual fun. You're not doing the same thing over and over again. You just dumbed it down to the lowest common denominator. You get to have action. Tactics. Teamwork. Fun...

In Wow, you steel have to keel seex snow moose.

[Jackrabbit]

No prizes for guessing where I got that from.

[Mephansteras]

The problem with MMOs isn't the grind, it's that they're lousy single-player games. With the right group of people, just about ANY game mechanic is fun. And a good high end raid is a lot like Team Fortress 2, in that they both require skill, planning, timing, and a lot of tactics to pull off right. Sadly for me, I don't have the time to devote to WoW my friends do, so I was always behind and didn't get to play with them much. I stopped paying for it once I realized that I probably wouldn't ever really catch up, and that I was just playing a really bad single-player game in the vain hope that I'd get to play with the people I wanted to. So I ditched it for Dwarf Fortress.

My biggest issue with current MMOs is that they generally try to make you feel important with actually letting you BE important. It doesn't matter that you killed the evil necromancer, or slaughtered the mighty dragon. Everyone else your level has done the same quests, usually many times. I want to see an MMO that actually has a dynamic world where you can actually be a hero. Maybe then I'll get into them again.

[Sowelu]

Heresy:  TF2 isn't that fun.  And I say that as a big fan.  Heck even Darklands, the game I'm spending piles of hours in a Let's Play, isn't even that fun.  The fun comes from other incidental stuff.  Like the joy of healing your friend while he splatters like five guys.  Or just enjoying writing something.

Lots of peoples' experiences with WoW are "Hey, all my friends are level sixty.  I'd better make a character and catch up to them".  And then "Well I'm high level.  My guild raids a lot.  I should go on raids.  Wow, it's like I have another day job!"  It is a lot of fun early on and when you're with friends.  Seeing and doing things for the first time with friends is fun, and relaxing with friends is fun.  But yeah.

[Wiles]

What's with all the hate for WoW?

I want to hear real reasons why it's bad.

There's little to no grinding involved, and even when you are grinding, it doesn't feel like grinding.

Are you speaking of a version of WoW from an alternate universe?   

There is a lot of grinding in WoW, especially once you hit the level cap. I remember spending hours in Tanaris killing air elementals for essences of air, or killing Clefthooves in Nagrand for clefthoof leather, or picking herbs to make potions to help the guild get through a raid. The first time through the game is a lot of fun for the most part, though. I have fond memories of exploring when I first started playing, and when the first expansion came out. Eventually it just felt like I was doing the same crap over and over so I quit because I was not having fun anymore.

[Servant Corps]

If the grinding didn't involve killing your OWN PEOPLE to support an unjust regime, then sure, I would love grinding. As I had to kill CIVILIANS in my first mission (the civilians wouldn't swear loyalty to the regime, so my boss told me to kill them), I hate WoW with a passion.

[Mephansteras]

What starting area has you doing that?

[Puck]

I vant you to keel seex snow moose

That was the FIRST thing I thought of when I read the WoW discussion. But it's pretty pointless to discuss with WoW fans why the game sucks.

And in the end it doesnt really matter all that much, let them play what they like...

But on the other hand, well, actually it does matter. Publishers look at sales and choose what to shit out next from there, so no wonder we get so many simple and dumbed down games these days.

Anyway, WoW is the McDonalds of videogames. It sells a LOT, but it's barealy the zenith of culinary evolution.

[Virtz]

My biggest issue with current MMOs is that they generally try to make you feel important with actually letting you BE important. It doesn't matter that you killed the evil necromancer, or slaughtered the mighty dragon. Everyone else your level has done the same quests, usually many times. I want to see an MMO that actually has a dynamic world where you can actually be a hero. Maybe then I'll get into them again.

This.

This especially irked me in LOTRO and SWG. They took it to a whole new level with instanced story-based tutorials.

In SWG, at the beginning you're rescued by Han Solo and Chewbaca aboard the Millenium Falcon. What? Am I supposed to believe that I'm special and this only happened to me? Or did they just decide to throw coherency out the window and accept that the Millenium Falcon runs back and forth rescuing random people off of space stations (and has done so over a million times now)?

Similarly in LOTRO. You get rescued by some ranger guy, he gets injured by a ring wraith, you're supposed to feel special (read: treated like an idiot). To further add insult to injury, the ranger guy is a quest giver in the starting town and he's just slouching on the ground, obviously still in pain, while being accosted by dozens of players simultenously. It looked truly pathetic.

MMORPGs should give randomly generated quests another go. If people were able to play and enjoy the limited amount of randomly generated quests in Daggerfall or Darklands (single-player RPGs), then having such quests + quest templates, plot twists and outcomes being added with updates would more than suffice, I think. Of course, a dynamic world to go with it would be even better, but who are we kidding?

[Sowelu]

Well, I really like Love's take on it (the MMORPG that will quite likely never be released, but which will be awesome if it is).  Skillions of servers that each only have like a hundred players on them, so the randomly generated plots ARE world-changing, without poor newbies being totally left out of the loop.

[Cthulhu]

If the grinding didn't involve killing your OWN PEOPLE to support an unjust regime, then sure, I would love grinding. As I had to kill CIVILIANS in my first mission (the civilians wouldn't swear loyalty to the regime, so my boss told me to kill them), I hate WoW with a passion.

Are you sure you were playing WoW?  Nothing like that is in any of the starting areas.

Also, it's just a game.  If unjustified killing in a video game bothers you, maybe you should have a less aggressive hobby, like gardening or something.

[Redd]

There's little to no grinding involved, and even when you are grinding, it doesn't feel like grinding.

There is a lot of grinding in WoW, especially once you hit the level cap.

QFT.  This is exactly what I was going to say.  Capping xp takes only a few weeks of play, and is probably the most varied part of the game.  After that, you're in for some SERIOUS repetition, whether it's for reputation or loot or whatever.  Even thinking about it makes me want to thrash my legs about under the desk in frustration.  No thank you.  It is simply not engaging enough to be enjoyable at that level.

Whoever said that TF2 or similar boils down to the same thing is taking the mickey.  Those kind of games ARE engaging.  You don't sit there wishing you were doing something else, somewhere else, as you pretty much don't have time to think about anything else but survival.  Which is precisely why PvP centric MMOs > WoW et al.  At least when you're wired the way I'm wired.