Santafire
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The following will begin with a pretty accurate description of my first mmo experience. It was world of warcraft and I will talk about what I enjoyed of it honestly. I am not asking anyone to feel the same. Not everyone enjoyed it for their own reasons and I do not intend to dispute those and hope that no one will try to argue that I am wrong to admit my personal opinion. I will describe my experience for a while before I break down that experience and other experiences since to reason how I developed my own opinion of what a good mmo is and perhaps how other people have developed their own. I will try and be as self analytical as possible in this regard. I want to know myself the sort of things I really enjoy most in a mmo and after playing so many my opinions need some sorting. I apologize now for I tend to become very wordy. Please enjoy my post and try to tolerate my talk of wow. I’m not thumping it as the best it was just quite simply my first mmo.
For those of you who have [filtered] to get done here is a TL;DR:
Never played an mmo before wow. WoW was amazing in the first few months, never played anything like it before. Was lots of fun with lots of people who had no idea how to play. I figured it out very slowly and felt no pressure to rush and do anything other than enjoy the game. What follows is this on a more complicated degree of reminiscing back thought detailing actual experiences and then a large bit of anaylsis.
Anyway time to start, don’t worry it will start making sense towards the end.
For the purpose of identifying my own mmo interests and those of others it is important to try and consider something that has a major impact on a person’s opinion of a mmo. For me world of warcraft was my first online game of any sort. Recommended by a friend in high school I remember spending time looking through the screenshot gallery on the community site. I knew nothing of how mmos or WoW worked and this strange unknown left me all the more attracted to WoW. It was a strange unknown for a person who had never been overly critical of games before. The many I had played had been single player console games and I had never been exposed to opinion this way or that on what made a good game. For months before I got this mmo I thought of how it might work, of what class I might play, of what race to choose. My friends lack of much understanding or time spent on this game made my experience going in even more uninformed of the games nature.
It was when I finally got the game that my excitement peaked.
A few hours of patching after many CD issues with instillation left me having to sleep before I could even touch it. The next morning I was giddy as ever and soon was ready to log in for the first time only to be met by world of warcrafts first cinematic. It blew me a way and had me all the more ready to play a mage. The character customization, the music, the colors of Durotar as I first set foot with my troll mage all had me wrapped up in excitement.
I had never played a target and cast RPG before so I was even more overwhelmed with the difference this game held. But what was most fascinating was the sheer scale. Burning with curiosity I had popped open my map and with each right click I watched the world grow larger. I could hardly wait to see it all.
On that first day I made it through 8 levels and all the while I saw random people running around, doing the same quests as me. The voices of the npcs as they zug zugd or ey man’d had me fixed. Seeing higher level characters left me wondering what sort of spells I might get, the constant ranking of the same spells I used made me feel like I was making constant progress. That word, progress, makes me realize that at the time I didn’t really give a hoot for it. I had no rush to level up. I had few thoughts of catching up with my friend for I found he was actually online little, always around level 39. I didn’t mind. I was ready to explore on my own and here and there as quests I was too inexperienced to handle despite the mages excellent crowd control left me teaming up with many people whom I would some time see again at a later time. I felt that there was a community. Seeing people chat in channels, recruiting for dungeons or just exchanging words. In the cities it was too much for me to follow and it left me feeling like even more of a member of this online group.
I remember trying a dungeon and having a group patient enough to try and explain it to me. The first time I saw higher level or elite monsters I was decimated and left eager to become high enough level to kill them on my own. The vastness of the landscape, the constant pressence of cool looking monsters and endless feeling of the Barrens and Silverpine forest. All of that left me quite absorbed with the game. I spent a lot of time on it and eventually hit level 60 where I did few dungeons and even a zul’gurub before burning crusade patch hit and we could get such cool looking gear for a lot of pvp. I didn’t even really understand the importance of the stats at the time, apart from how spell power would make my spells hit harder. I suppose that was enough.
I hardly understood pvp at all but I found it so awesome that after waiting a few minutes I would be in some battleground with music and unique maps with cool art fighting other players. I had my [filtered] handed to me so many times it was unreal but I still had fun. Then when the burning crusade hit I was even more eager to explore the even more exotic landscapes, hardly having seen all of Azeroth in the first place it reinforced my love for exploring the game. World of warcraft felt big.
Now is when I analyze my own experience from almost six years after this fact. It is often that I hear people express their love for this or that mmo and recently I am wondering if it is not just a vast difference in taste but perhaps something else in some or many cases. There are many vanilla wow thumpers out there who remain fixed that it was the best time of wow and thinking in my own experience I can agree on some terms. Out of the many mmos I have played it is the one I had enjoyed most, though that enjoyment faded as I began to advance through raiding. Playing with the same people so often in a rather friendly environment as we hunted for people to do heroic dungeons with that had the gear and role to clear it was new and exciting, I didn’t have the time to do it in original wow. Doing those dungeons made me learn my server, there were many people still leveling and many doing other things, it was a rather quiet server too unfortunately, low population. I wonder how I might have felt had it been a much more robust and active server.
But it was one of these words that, in hindsight, describes what left such a big impact on me and let me enjoy wow so much. It is not only allowed me to enjoy wow to the fullest but allowed me to enjoy it more than any other mmo since. New.
WoW was a totally new game for me, one I had never played before, I had no idea of its inner workings, I had no idea of balance or much of an idea of how this or that class worked. I remember seeing a talent calculator on the community site but stupidly thought I could only put points into one tree. In fact I think it tabbed between trees at the time so I didn’t even know of the frost or fire tree. That made a pretty big discovery when I hit level 10.
It is this that allowed me to have such fun with it. I had no desire to competitive. I had no experience with mmos so I had many failures and a very slow learning curve with figuring out wow’s very simple inner workings. I was used to games like Zelda and Mario, I had played few rpgs, chrono trigger and similar. These limitations left me on my own for learning my class. I had few sightings of the highly geared and no encounters with anyone who was not willing to be nice or helpful. I feel that many shared my boat with wow being something of its own. Simply, there was no pressure to level fast or to gear appropriately. I didn’t really figure out how nice green or blue gear was until the mid 40s. I used white items and the like since they had more armor or damage. As a mage. Terrible isn’t it? I didn’t care. I was having fun as it was grouping with people to do quests, seeing late night pvp at southshore and Tarren Mill. Dozens of high level players showed up and it left me amazed and feeling so very excited just dying to these heavily geared people.
Now I would consider myself an idiot, that dumbass who queues for his first dungeon and underperforms. Naturally I would try to help him but the time it would take to explain this and that is too much for such short notice and usually he/she would be kicked from the group.
But this makes me think. Ever since I have never had the same experience. Not with EvE despite it being very different. Possibly because eve was far too complex in some ways and just not quite my game. Not with guild wars. I enjoyed aion for a time simply because it looked so pretty but in its ways it felt lacking. My mind was more sculpted then, I compared aion often with wow and I had read the forums beforehand where there were many dissatisfied players yet enough happy ones to maintain my desire to buy the game. I got disinterested after experiencing enough of its very low drop rates. I do not know how I would handle real grind but I felt having a lack of control over my success was bad. This does not mean always a drop but Aion’s drop rates were so low that the pursuit felt futile. The lucky were few and far between and the pvp was so imbalanced that I abandoned the game. Since then I had tried many free to play mmos but bugs and terrible service produced of a limited budget left me even more disgruntled.
In summary, since the beginning of my mmo experience I have grown much, often coming back to wow in hopes of reclaiming that first round of happy online gaming. I have had mild success and fun with wow, a lot in comparison to other games where fun was only because of the people I played with.
My many experiences as a raider in wow has left me far more capable of breaking down the statistics of mmos. I’m quite ready and often do look up all sorts of information regarding any class that I play or that I don’t. I can no longer have that fresh first time experience with a game. My mind works on its own to figure out the best ways to play and the temptation to level up quickly and see as much of the game as I can is overwhelming. I feel like this ruins my chances to have fun but in return I have become such a better player. I often wonder how the raiders of vanilla I rolled with who spent hours in molten core cleansing curses to defeat one boss or running bombs out of the group for another would fair against zero light yogg-saron or perhaps the most recent expansion of heroic mode raiding. They would have their asses kicked regardless of gear I’m sure. But if they did manage a successful clear they would perhaps be thankfully they did not have to spend as much time on trash monsters.
PvE bosses are defiantly tougher than they used to be if you use the amount of threats that you have to be aware of as a comparison. And yet is it really tougher? I feel that my capability to learn out stripped the game play difficulty. The only thing that makes raids challenging now is coordinating 24 other people. Perhaps that is why I stopped raiding. I think I just lost interest. Too competitive, too much time in one sitting.
In the end of this monstrously large post I realize that I only enjoyed wow in the beginning for two reasons. My own ignorance of how mmos worked allowed me to have fun just figuring it all out on my own in a time where most of the players were doing the same and willing to help each other out. But also because the world was large enough to make me feel like there was always more to see. It was a reason to wonder around and see the varying environments of wow as I went all over. The presence of multiple starting zones and paths made it easy to do so, the world was not linear like aion which had clear cut paths for the player to walk if they wanted to level up. To me wow felt much like exploration I not only had those optional zones to go back and forth between whenever I got bored of one area but just the sheer amount of new and treacherous territory I had to cross to get to my destination.
I wonder if I would enjoy having to spend so much time traveling now? If trainers were restricted to my race’s home city or if I had to cross higher level zones to reach a zone also for my level. It would be a waste of time wouldn’t it? Instead of all that walking I could be doing quests, slaying monsters, getting items. I could be making my character stronger. That is what my gamer self says.
I wonder if it had been a different mmo would I have enjoyed it as much? I might have. If it had exploration like wow I think the rest of the gameplay would not have matter much. After all original wow was very time consuming indeed with little ways to make money.
I think with Tera I will try to spend more time looking around, more time exploring. The map I have seen as well as the zones seem to be angled towards open exploration. I hope that I will be able to explore because that will allow me to get at least that much closer to my first gaming experience.
So I ask in this thread that people share their own first mmo experience. Were your reasons for enjoying it similar to mine? What mmo was it? Any fond memories? This is not a place to debate what made your first or any mmo better than mine or anyone else. It is simply a place to share that first mmo experience. Oh and I apologize again for typing out so much. With 4 pages according to my word document I hope it is not too long to be ignored. I think I’ll punctuate as much as I can to give pit stops between my reminiscing.
For those of you who have [filtered] to get done here is a TL;DR:
Never played an mmo before wow. WoW was amazing in the first few months, never played anything like it before. Was lots of fun with lots of people who had no idea how to play. I figured it out very slowly and felt no pressure to rush and do anything other than enjoy the game. What follows is this on a more complicated degree of reminiscing back thought detailing actual experiences and then a large bit of anaylsis.
Anyway time to start, don’t worry it will start making sense towards the end.
For the purpose of identifying my own mmo interests and those of others it is important to try and consider something that has a major impact on a person’s opinion of a mmo. For me world of warcraft was my first online game of any sort. Recommended by a friend in high school I remember spending time looking through the screenshot gallery on the community site. I knew nothing of how mmos or WoW worked and this strange unknown left me all the more attracted to WoW. It was a strange unknown for a person who had never been overly critical of games before. The many I had played had been single player console games and I had never been exposed to opinion this way or that on what made a good game. For months before I got this mmo I thought of how it might work, of what class I might play, of what race to choose. My friends lack of much understanding or time spent on this game made my experience going in even more uninformed of the games nature.
It was when I finally got the game that my excitement peaked.
A few hours of patching after many CD issues with instillation left me having to sleep before I could even touch it. The next morning I was giddy as ever and soon was ready to log in for the first time only to be met by world of warcrafts first cinematic. It blew me a way and had me all the more ready to play a mage. The character customization, the music, the colors of Durotar as I first set foot with my troll mage all had me wrapped up in excitement.
I had never played a target and cast RPG before so I was even more overwhelmed with the difference this game held. But what was most fascinating was the sheer scale. Burning with curiosity I had popped open my map and with each right click I watched the world grow larger. I could hardly wait to see it all.
On that first day I made it through 8 levels and all the while I saw random people running around, doing the same quests as me. The voices of the npcs as they zug zugd or ey man’d had me fixed. Seeing higher level characters left me wondering what sort of spells I might get, the constant ranking of the same spells I used made me feel like I was making constant progress. That word, progress, makes me realize that at the time I didn’t really give a hoot for it. I had no rush to level up. I had few thoughts of catching up with my friend for I found he was actually online little, always around level 39. I didn’t mind. I was ready to explore on my own and here and there as quests I was too inexperienced to handle despite the mages excellent crowd control left me teaming up with many people whom I would some time see again at a later time. I felt that there was a community. Seeing people chat in channels, recruiting for dungeons or just exchanging words. In the cities it was too much for me to follow and it left me feeling like even more of a member of this online group.
I remember trying a dungeon and having a group patient enough to try and explain it to me. The first time I saw higher level or elite monsters I was decimated and left eager to become high enough level to kill them on my own. The vastness of the landscape, the constant pressence of cool looking monsters and endless feeling of the Barrens and Silverpine forest. All of that left me quite absorbed with the game. I spent a lot of time on it and eventually hit level 60 where I did few dungeons and even a zul’gurub before burning crusade patch hit and we could get such cool looking gear for a lot of pvp. I didn’t even really understand the importance of the stats at the time, apart from how spell power would make my spells hit harder. I suppose that was enough.
I hardly understood pvp at all but I found it so awesome that after waiting a few minutes I would be in some battleground with music and unique maps with cool art fighting other players. I had my [filtered] handed to me so many times it was unreal but I still had fun. Then when the burning crusade hit I was even more eager to explore the even more exotic landscapes, hardly having seen all of Azeroth in the first place it reinforced my love for exploring the game. World of warcraft felt big.
Now is when I analyze my own experience from almost six years after this fact. It is often that I hear people express their love for this or that mmo and recently I am wondering if it is not just a vast difference in taste but perhaps something else in some or many cases. There are many vanilla wow thumpers out there who remain fixed that it was the best time of wow and thinking in my own experience I can agree on some terms. Out of the many mmos I have played it is the one I had enjoyed most, though that enjoyment faded as I began to advance through raiding. Playing with the same people so often in a rather friendly environment as we hunted for people to do heroic dungeons with that had the gear and role to clear it was new and exciting, I didn’t have the time to do it in original wow. Doing those dungeons made me learn my server, there were many people still leveling and many doing other things, it was a rather quiet server too unfortunately, low population. I wonder how I might have felt had it been a much more robust and active server.
But it was one of these words that, in hindsight, describes what left such a big impact on me and let me enjoy wow so much. It is not only allowed me to enjoy wow to the fullest but allowed me to enjoy it more than any other mmo since. New.
WoW was a totally new game for me, one I had never played before, I had no idea of its inner workings, I had no idea of balance or much of an idea of how this or that class worked. I remember seeing a talent calculator on the community site but stupidly thought I could only put points into one tree. In fact I think it tabbed between trees at the time so I didn’t even know of the frost or fire tree. That made a pretty big discovery when I hit level 10.
It is this that allowed me to have such fun with it. I had no desire to competitive. I had no experience with mmos so I had many failures and a very slow learning curve with figuring out wow’s very simple inner workings. I was used to games like Zelda and Mario, I had played few rpgs, chrono trigger and similar. These limitations left me on my own for learning my class. I had few sightings of the highly geared and no encounters with anyone who was not willing to be nice or helpful. I feel that many shared my boat with wow being something of its own. Simply, there was no pressure to level fast or to gear appropriately. I didn’t really figure out how nice green or blue gear was until the mid 40s. I used white items and the like since they had more armor or damage. As a mage. Terrible isn’t it? I didn’t care. I was having fun as it was grouping with people to do quests, seeing late night pvp at southshore and Tarren Mill. Dozens of high level players showed up and it left me amazed and feeling so very excited just dying to these heavily geared people.
Now I would consider myself an idiot, that dumbass who queues for his first dungeon and underperforms. Naturally I would try to help him but the time it would take to explain this and that is too much for such short notice and usually he/she would be kicked from the group.
But this makes me think. Ever since I have never had the same experience. Not with EvE despite it being very different. Possibly because eve was far too complex in some ways and just not quite my game. Not with guild wars. I enjoyed aion for a time simply because it looked so pretty but in its ways it felt lacking. My mind was more sculpted then, I compared aion often with wow and I had read the forums beforehand where there were many dissatisfied players yet enough happy ones to maintain my desire to buy the game. I got disinterested after experiencing enough of its very low drop rates. I do not know how I would handle real grind but I felt having a lack of control over my success was bad. This does not mean always a drop but Aion’s drop rates were so low that the pursuit felt futile. The lucky were few and far between and the pvp was so imbalanced that I abandoned the game. Since then I had tried many free to play mmos but bugs and terrible service produced of a limited budget left me even more disgruntled.
In summary, since the beginning of my mmo experience I have grown much, often coming back to wow in hopes of reclaiming that first round of happy online gaming. I have had mild success and fun with wow, a lot in comparison to other games where fun was only because of the people I played with.
My many experiences as a raider in wow has left me far more capable of breaking down the statistics of mmos. I’m quite ready and often do look up all sorts of information regarding any class that I play or that I don’t. I can no longer have that fresh first time experience with a game. My mind works on its own to figure out the best ways to play and the temptation to level up quickly and see as much of the game as I can is overwhelming. I feel like this ruins my chances to have fun but in return I have become such a better player. I often wonder how the raiders of vanilla I rolled with who spent hours in molten core cleansing curses to defeat one boss or running bombs out of the group for another would fair against zero light yogg-saron or perhaps the most recent expansion of heroic mode raiding. They would have their asses kicked regardless of gear I’m sure. But if they did manage a successful clear they would perhaps be thankfully they did not have to spend as much time on trash monsters.
PvE bosses are defiantly tougher than they used to be if you use the amount of threats that you have to be aware of as a comparison. And yet is it really tougher? I feel that my capability to learn out stripped the game play difficulty. The only thing that makes raids challenging now is coordinating 24 other people. Perhaps that is why I stopped raiding. I think I just lost interest. Too competitive, too much time in one sitting.
In the end of this monstrously large post I realize that I only enjoyed wow in the beginning for two reasons. My own ignorance of how mmos worked allowed me to have fun just figuring it all out on my own in a time where most of the players were doing the same and willing to help each other out. But also because the world was large enough to make me feel like there was always more to see. It was a reason to wonder around and see the varying environments of wow as I went all over. The presence of multiple starting zones and paths made it easy to do so, the world was not linear like aion which had clear cut paths for the player to walk if they wanted to level up. To me wow felt much like exploration I not only had those optional zones to go back and forth between whenever I got bored of one area but just the sheer amount of new and treacherous territory I had to cross to get to my destination.
I wonder if I would enjoy having to spend so much time traveling now? If trainers were restricted to my race’s home city or if I had to cross higher level zones to reach a zone also for my level. It would be a waste of time wouldn’t it? Instead of all that walking I could be doing quests, slaying monsters, getting items. I could be making my character stronger. That is what my gamer self says.
I wonder if it had been a different mmo would I have enjoyed it as much? I might have. If it had exploration like wow I think the rest of the gameplay would not have matter much. After all original wow was very time consuming indeed with little ways to make money.
I think with Tera I will try to spend more time looking around, more time exploring. The map I have seen as well as the zones seem to be angled towards open exploration. I hope that I will be able to explore because that will allow me to get at least that much closer to my first gaming experience.
So I ask in this thread that people share their own first mmo experience. Were your reasons for enjoying it similar to mine? What mmo was it? Any fond memories? This is not a place to debate what made your first or any mmo better than mine or anyone else. It is simply a place to share that first mmo experience. Oh and I apologize again for typing out so much. With 4 pages according to my word document I hope it is not too long to be ignored. I think I’ll punctuate as much as I can to give pit stops between my reminiscing.