WoW Classic - It Continues Quite Well Thank You (also I cut and paste a lazypost from Discord)

[xyzzysqrl]

[7:19 PM] XyzzySqrl: ... honestly mostly, like... I'm confused by WoW Classic because this is the first time I've seen a theme park MMO operate like a theme park.
People are shouting jokes and encouragement at each other over the loudspeakers.
You get run-by buffs.
People call out rares in chat.
There's a guy selling homemade bags out of a stand.
People forming neat orderly lines to fight bosses.
People agreeing to clump up in GROUPS to fight bosses. Organically.
I just ran through a bunch of caves in a five-man group hunting a boss and it felt like a mini-dungeon.
We all clapped when some dude found a green-quality axe.
If you're having trouble with a fight, a little circle forms up to heal you through it.
A guy just mailed me a decent pair of pants because I finished a pun he made in global chat.

[7:20 PM] XyzzySqrl: I'm torn between "What the fuck is this?" and "Wow everybody's being real nice and trying not to ruin each other's day. ... What the fuck is this, is this still WoW?"

[7:40 PM] XyzzySqrl: .... that said I'm still in the cow starting area. I'm about to leave for the orc/troll "Barrens" land, so I'm expecting to be hit with a fucking wall-to-wall nightmare of Chuck Norris jokes from 2004 and I'll black out and wake up in an hour having uninstalled the game and thrown my PC into the street.



[8:00 PM] XyzzySqrl: ...I'm gonna miss those moos.

Comments

[kjorteo]

I was in the WoW beta, where I naturally was a moo, and I still remember that exact boss you're talking about. We had the same polite neat orderly lines outside their lair back then, too.

Younger me thought it was a design flaw ("This game bottlenecks you by giving every player on the damn server the exact same quest for this exact same mob such that we need to form a line to fight him like we're at the Thunder Bluff DMV??") Immersion ruined, disbelief unsuspended, 0/10 see me after class. I took it (among a few other random nitpicks) as the grand list of reasons why this game was ultimately not worth getting into once it left beta.

Meanwhile, now I went back and got into Istaria again and stories like this are strangely nostalgic and charming.

A good and nurturing community definitely helps the experience, both in actual help (assistance with tough fights, helping you find equipment on your shopping list, etc.) and the emotional support from just having a nice group of nice people to hang out with. The people on our server are pretty much the reason I'm still playing, awkward "I fell in actual love with the one person in Istaria that the other prominent guildies have a problem with" drama aside.

[xyzzysqrl]

Whereas The Secret World had any boss as an instance, ensuing you face it either alone or with a group...
...and Elder Scrolls Online has bosses that respawn so fast you can actually get multiple copies of the same dead NPC sprawled alongside or on top of each other, and if you walk in the room as another player is landing the killing blow, you just plain get credit for doing it yourself. Like your will is an extension of xxxDarkSlayerxxx's mighty sword, so you may as well have the reward.

If you were expecting a "...but then I realized, this wasn't a design flaw" you maybe have it on Secret World but ESO's way is kind of dumb and I still don't like it. It's one of a handful of things I really do dislike about ESO.

Also the line last night wasn't that long, unlike some others I've seen images of.

[kjorteo]

God, it was the exact boss I was thinking of. I remember that tent. Yeah, that's... Classic Thunder Bluff is just Like That and some things never change, I guess.

As to how other MMOs handle it, CoH has the instance model (as you well know,) and Istaria just has all the named mobs walking around in the open like the regular ones. Kind of like the WoW (or more likely given the era and inspirations, EverQuest) model except without there actually being enough population for the need to worry about what if more than one person wants to kill this boss at the same time. Like, "Wow, there are 21 people online [on the entire server, globally]. It's really busy tonight, good to see so many people here o.o" is an actual literal comment that I saw in the marketplace chat once. Boss queues are not a thing.

Another way you can tell: Currently, as of when I write this comment, there is a known bug that Water Elementals (a basic-ass level 15 or so mob, they hang out in clusters on beaches, the kind you get quests to kill 20 of) are using the death animation of Blight Anchors (big-ass endgame Epic Boss raid battles, the kind that are level 130 in a game with a 100 cap because fuck you this is a raid) upon defeat. Think the difference in death animation/effects between defeating a regular enemy and a boss in FF6, only even more dramatic; the sky turns blighted green and the ground shakes mightily. Every time. And I went through twenty of the things in like an hour. In a high-pop game like WoW, the community would probably band together and house rule common courtesy guidelines to help each other out ("don't kill Water Elementals during quiet hours" or whatever) because obviously triggering the visuals of the apocalypse every 90 seconds would risk bothering your neighbors. In Istaria, I genuinely don't think anyone else noticed it happening. I mean, no one was around, so hey.

[xyzzysqrl]

Remind me later and I'll start up a character on the Live server, spend 15 minutes getting to level 10 and pop out to see if that tent's still there in the current release. I think that entire area's a smoking flaming crater or something.