I'm with you on that. The original game had a great base philosophy: working your way through skill trees of your choice, building your character as you see fit, viable non-combat professions, and no levels for characters. The problem was the combat totally favoured 3 or so professions, so the initial re-design was needed. I enjoyed the CU, as it made most professions useful. They blindsided everyone with the NGE, and that was the beginning of the end for me.

A new Star Wars MMO is probably the only game that will make me upgrade or buy a new PC in the near future. Galaxies had so many great ideas, but bugs, lag, implementing character levels, dev ignorance and deceit, and promises that never materialized killed it.

I'm waiting to see how the Warhammer Online thing pans out. Since I'm such a GW junkie, if it seems good it may be first p2p MMORPG (I'm so cheap).

You guys have never heard about Eve online do you ?
A harsh world, epic battles and real pvp.

eve is also very niche and has a fairly difficult learning curve.

world of Warcraft did LOTS of things right.

world design
content
how you play the game

and put the blizzard spin on it.

for the Record. I Played Everquest With Rob Pardo (president of product development for blizzard) I also played Everquest with jeff Kaplan (tigole) main/head producer for World of Warcraft. I also Played everquest with 2 or 3 other blizzard employees. but Rob Pardo is the main person we have to think about

they were HARD CORE gamers. and in guildchat they were discussing things that EQ did wrong and if they made a mmo(at this time we did not know who "ariel" was) they would do this different and that different..

In real life. they took that conversation and went...we Can do better.

what blizzard took is the mantra, easy to learn hard to master.
then they made A game engine.
they made A zone in wow

and played it. tweaked it, learned what worked what didn't work.
then made another zone...and played and tweaked etc.

I followed the game somewhat as it developed, because it Was Blizzard making the game.

then in sept of 03 a friend of mine in my guild- who worked for blizzard- asked me if i wanted to help test the product he was working on (he was an artist for wow, warcraft, warcraft 2 warcraft 3, all expansions- i found this out AFTEr he asked me)

i went Sure (since i was an avid mmo player) and i joined the Alpha team.

downloaded the client - at the time you could be a human.....max level was 10.

started playing the game and it was better in the first 10 levels than ANY mmo i had ever played (and i've played most of them). content was polished, content was well done, quests were not vague, char models were decent, and the game played Great on my machine fps wise...

i immediately said to my friends in my eq guild after ~3 hrs of playing that wow was going to be a smash hit with more subscribers than lineage (which at the time had 2 million players) if they kept the quality of the game as to what i had seen in game so far.

within 3 weeks i didn't even log into EQ anymore i just played the WoW alpha.

I was one of the first orcs in the game, i was one of the first night elves, tauren, undead, i played them all finding things that didn't work right, finding holes in the world etc...

it just WORKED...

then beta came and people were "omfg" crazy hyping the game- since it was an open beta....for almost a year.

then release came...

last year my 5yr old son screwed up his character (deleted his pet) and was upset and my wife- who has hated Every mmo i tried to get her to play- had no clue what he did- i was at work- so she said, i should learn how to play in case he does something like this again- fully intending to hate the game since every OTHER mmo she has hated...

so i went ok i'll help you through the game and was bored for 4 hrs the first night as she played and i helped her when she had questions ..and She Liked it A LOT...

2nd night she played for ANOTHER 4 hrs,,,,and i was bored silly watching her play (one account)

3rd night i brought home a new box of wow/BC and activated a 2nd account so that i could play With her instead of Watching Her play..


we now play wow instead of watching tv/movies together, we are very casual players who play ~25ish hrs a week... our now 6yr old plays still and is learning to read so he can do quests without me helping...

we've done every 5 man dungeon in the game Except for the ones in caverns of time and shattered halls.

we regularly do battlegrounds together (she complains i do not heal her enough)


what Blizzard did is make a mmorpg, that will play on pretty much EVERYONE's computer, one that is Fun to play, with enough carrot/stick stuff to keep people coming back..

Release day for blizzard they had 40 servers (more than any "us based" mmo)
by the end of the first week they had 100 servers
right NOW they have over 225 servers- just in the US...


could i STOP playing wow? sure, but why should i, if you maintain the correct Balance in life.

Family, Work, Games (in that order) you can pretty much have your cake(mmo) and everything ELSE too.

Great post, lenardo.

I think that's the Blizzard formula as I've seen it in Diablo and WC. They've taken concepts that works and then polished and polished.

Yea, I'm really waiting for Warhammer Online, hence my avatar =).  I don't know if I will actually play it though because of my experience with WoW.  I played for over a year and it took over my life >_<.  I use to play UO before that though and it was one of the best games ever.  I'm actually playing on one of the biggest freeshards for UO right now.  I would kinda want to play a console MMO, yes I know thats lame but I don't think it would let me spend as much time as a PC one.

I played FFXI back in the day. Didn't like the combat aspect of it though. There was absolutely no way you could efficiently solo enemies for experience. Quests didn't give you XP either, so every time you wanted to level you had to get a whole party together just to go grind. It was a major turn off.

I also play WoW on and off when I have a lot of free time to kill. In fact, I just started up again a month ago. Hit 70 with my warlock last night. :D