Lizard

@Graill440 The key to your statement is "as long as it doesn't affect you" -- but tools like the dungeon finder DO effect the game, forcing designers to contort their design. No one here is saying "I don't want this feature because *I* don't want to use it"; they are saying "I don't want this feature because it will make the game worse." You need to address those criticisms directly if you wish to make a valid point, instead of trying to pretend that it's some kind of elitist plot to beat down the common man. I assure you, they don't get much more common and unelite than me, and I am utterly opposed to the idea of an LFG tool.

I liked the dungeon finger in WoW for a few weeks... and then I realized that as long as it was there, I didn't need anything else. I didn't need to go anywhere. I didn't need to quest. I didn't need to do anything but sit in Ogrimmar and queue up, then do it again and again and again. Doing anything else meant wandering an empty world, because all people did was queue up, unless there was a holiday/event somewhere.

@Spacegrass I must disagree. Even the simple action of having to send a tell to someone, or ask "where do you get that quest?" or say "Sure, I'll be there in a few minutes, I have to get there first" open up more channels of communication than just clicking a button in a dialog and magically appearing insider the dungeon with 5 strangers.

@Spacegrass I have a full time job and a part time job and a wife, so I don't have a lot of time. (I also have other social obligations). Despite this, I oppose an LFG tool. If I only have an hour to play, I do single-player content. If I have a long block of time, I do Heroic quests. Since you only need 4 people, at most, for Heroic content, this is really not a burden. Finding three people is not hard, and the content in TOR is much less "holy trinity" based than in other games. You don't NEED a tank and healer; you can just DPS through it if you play smart and don't overpull. There's plenty of CC powers to keep enemies back. Sure, if you try to do it WoW style and AOE the entire room, you'll be screwed, but it's not the game's fault if people don't now how to play anything but WoW.

I personally hope they never introduce dungeon finders, auto-queuing for everything, and any other "feature" that leads to people sitting quietly out of the way waiting to be magically teleported somewhere.

LFG in chat forces people to COMMUNicate, which is part of COMMUNity. I get more of an EQ1 vibe from TOR than from any other recent MMO, in terms of people talking in chat, and talking to pass time while waiting for someone to run to them, or for something to respawn or reset. And while you wait to find a group in chat, you are running around the world, doing other things, not just waiting for an instance to pop so you can run it over and over until you out-level it.

BioWare needs to not make things too "convenient". "Inconvenience" has its place. Forced downtime and needing to actually travel the world to get to content builds a stronger game in the long, impatient whiny little brats be damned.

I didn't say you'd become jaded... I'm still playing tabletop RPGs and MMOs, and, too, have been doing it for over 30 years... started in 1978. (First "MMO" was Islands of Kesmai; first graphical MMO was the original Neverwinter on AOL) But nothing can recreate that feeling of total newness and discovery and the idea of a vast new world spreading out before you, because your brain has already built the structures it needs and all you're doing is adding in another instance, more specialized subclasses that build on what's already there.

Absolutely, though, the only thing that will give you the "new and fresh" feeling is something which is, in fact, "new and fresh" -- not trying to recreate the past as seen through a cracked and rose-colored mirror. "Going back to the way it was" in order to recapture that "old feeling" is about as stupid an idea as I can imagine.

(PS: I'm aware 'losing your virginity' is probably a poor metaphor to use in the MMO crowd, but it was the first to come to mind...)

You can't lost your virginity twice. Period.

And to the guy who said "remove zoning".... uhm, did you PLAY EQ1? It was/is a massive zonefest... practically every 10 steps, the screen froze, and then you waited, and then you'd be in the next zone... if you weren't disconnected. Remember "train to zone"??? That was because monsters didn't cross zone lines -- every part of the world had magic walls that let players through and kept monsters out.

And also... EQ1 was about interacting with players and not NPCs? Weird, I remember spending a LOT of time playing "guess the word" with the NPCs. "Tell me about the orcs." "Tell me about the northern orcs." "What about the orcs?" "Do you want me to kill the orcs?" (Back in '99, there weren't no fancy Allakhazam to look stuff up on, gosh darn it... or, at least, no one told me about it. Get offa my intertubes, you punk kids! Where was I, again?)

Oh yeah. You will never get the magic back, whether you started with Everquest, WoW, DikuMUD, Island of Kesmai, or rolling D20s on the kitchen table. It's a physiological fact of the reward/response mechanism in your brain's neural wiring. Deal with it.

In both cases, WoW simply eliminated one step -- the step of looking up information on a web site, like Alakhazam. Back when I played EQ1 (Around 2002 or so), I would run Alakhazam on my laptop while I played on my PC. Who had a quest in the city? Look it up. Was this item any good? Look it up.

Now, if you're saying "Get rid of static quest NPCs" or "Don't have 'scaled' magic items, all items are created equal (though perhaps of different utility for different people)", then, that's indeed different from WoW. (And every other DikuMUD clone). But if you have "Fred the NPC will want you to collect 5 weasel spleens", and Fred is always standing there, then NOT putting a shiny punctuation mark over his head just causes players to waste time looking it up on a fan site. Likewise, if the Sword Of Bloody Evisceration does quadruple damage and appears one time in a hundred on a monster, while the Sword Of Mild Discomfort does barely better than normal damage and appears forty times in a hundred on the same monster, you can either color code the damn things, or have the players clog chat with "I just found the Sword of Mild Discomfort... is it any good?" (and then go look it up on a fan site). (Again, if you don't have a loot based game or you don't have different tiers of loot in the same general category, then this is different... but if you do have variable loot, it WILL be categorized, and if you don't do it for the players, you're just adding an unnecessary step for them.)

(I may be wrong, but I *think* marked quest NPCs first appeared in Star Wars Galaxies, well before WoW came out.)

This article would be more useful/interesting if the author specified precisely which systems are "copied" from WoW, as opposed to being systems WoW copied from Everquest and from DikuMUD before it. I am innately distrustful of any article (on gaming or anything) that fails to mention specifics and instead leaves the reader to fill in the gaps with whatever "WoW-like" features he/she personally dislikes, and put them in the "shouldn't be copied" bin of their mind, while leaving any features they do likes as "What WoW does right", and thus, "should be copied". This leads to the phenomenon we see constantly, where people all claim they "don't want a WoW clone", but if actually pushed to describe what they DO want, it boils down to "A WoW clone, but without this one feature I can't stand". (Or, if you're on MMORPG.com, "Ultima Online as it was a week before release but with the ability to rip out someone's eyes while you're raping him with a spiked mace... while he's still on the character creation screen. Otherwise, you're a carebear wuss!")

One reason that class/level, tank/dps/healer remains so dominant is not pure lack of imagination, but the difficulty in building other systems that are actually balanced. Skill-based systems tend to degenerate into "Everyone has every skill" or "Flavor of the month uber-build". So called "player skill" systems (twitch reflexes) are fine if you want to play an FPS, but an RPG is about building up your character, not your thumbs. It's hardly impossible to design a freeform/skill based system that does work and works well, but it's a lot of effort for an unproven reward -- despite all the bitching and moaning, players keep PLAYING the class/level systems. This may be putting effect before cause , of course -- only a company without huge investors backing it will take a risk on a "different" style of game, and such small companies tend to produce games with little marketing and last-generation graphics, attracting few players from the Big New Shiny. (And they often release early out of desperation)

@Protoavis Thanks for clearing that up. I found the interface, overall, to be unintuitive, and since I started online gaming with Island of Kesmai on CI$ back in the day, that takes a lot of doing. It may be that I'm not a console gamer, and it seemed most of the interface metaphors drew from well established console conventions.

Since costume changes are generally a rare thing in comics (the Wasp and Iron Man being obvious exceptions), I think comic-based MMOs should reflect this, as COH/X does, with a limited "wardrobe" of costumes to choose from (but a huge, huge, huge, amount of pieces from which to build each costume).

Not much, if anything, has changed in the "game journalism" profession in the 12 or so years since I wrote this: http://mrlizard.com/OldSite/girlgames.html . I'd go further and say that a tremendous amount of "computer journalism" is simply reposting press releases. I know this because I do software reviews, and I actually test to see if the program WORKS, and sometimes it doesn't, but I can find plenty of "reviews" that are just the publisher's press release surrounded by google ads.