Quote:
Originally Posted by Illuminator
I've grinded xp above and beyond most people who think they're hot shit for wanting eternal grind periods, I have room to talk and as much room as I please. Grinding in MMO's the way you think is so awesome, is dead. Rather than appear cutting-edge, you're presenting yourself as a fossil waiting to be discarded.
I am all in favor of instant gratification such that the learning curve and character growth curve is chopped down to the point where you can have a blast from the moment you log in. It's a lonely fucking game between 1 and 80.
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A lonely fucking game? Do you know why it's a lonely fucking game? It's a lonely fucking game because SOE's done everything in their power to promote soloing, so grouping is damn near pointless. Which, of course, was done to please the people preaching they want instant gratification.
When EQ2 first came out, grouping and grinding was actually fun and exciting. You weren't running around with full masters and the best gear you can get right away, everybody in your group was somewhat forced to play to the best of their ability to prevent anybody from dying because it affected them as well. But then, whiners demanded the game to get nerfed, be made easier, and have less "time sinks". And well, we all know how that turned out. I remember in KoS doing Claymore in SoS and having everybody in my group rather wipe and respawn at the entrance because they felt it was a "waste of time" to fight our way back. Seriously, wtf?
Anyway, the number one reason I like MMORPGs? Progression. This of course, includes grinding. It's about building a character from a pitiful guy that dies to fighting weak rats and snakes, putting in enormous amounts of effort while grouping with other people and grinding to get stronger. And while grinding, everybody in your group works to be at peak performance for maximum exp gain, it's fun. Then you slowly conquer more and more things, and even once you get to the cap and start raiding the said progression should continue on and on. Never, absolutely never, should somebody cap themselves out completely and be forced to play alts to progress something.
The concept of instant gratification isn't necessarily flawed, but incredibly unrealistic and impossible for anything long-term. If it were possible to have an endless slew of DMP-quality encounters, all perfectly unique and never broken from the day you start playing to 3 years down the line, I would be on the instant gratification side. However, it's physically impossible to develop that. And this is where grinding comes in, it bridges the gap between development times, while keeping people entertained to boot. You group with friends, face challenging content, shit your pants as you narrowly prevent a wipe. Or rather, that's how it should be, but it's not because the masses want to fucking /claim a capped character.
In EQ2, there's virtually nothing to do once you reach the cap. You raid the same zones over and over again, and inbetween raids you either check the broker for the last master you need, get on an alt, hop around QH/EFP, or just play another game entirely. There's no hundreds of AA to grind out, nothing to progress your character anymore, just sheer boredom that fails to keep people wanting to play long-term.
And this is where my hatred for the people preaching instant gratification comes into full force. Practically every single fucking game released now is a disappointment. Little Billy wants to be able to beat any game on the hardest difficulty setting because it's not fair that other people can do it and it's a waste of time to actually get better at a game! This train of thought leads into myself beating CoD4 on Veteran in a single day, and BioShock, and HL2, and Portal (as well as golds on all the challenges), and well fuck, the only games I haven't beaten in a single day lately have been Super Mario World romhacks that are obscenely difficult and I Wanna Be The Guy. Yeah, the only people making challenging games anymore are indy developers. Fuck that shit.
There's like no fucking games to play anymore because everything is easy and made friendly to "casual" players. MMORPGs used to be something you could almost always find reason to play, but not anymore, because Little Billy wanted to level faster and in result fucked over anybody else that wanted a game to actually last them a long time. I'd be willing to bet around half, if not more, of my /played time in EQ2 was sitting idle in QH.
Oh, what I'd give for a quality game with Maple Story's grind factor. *sigh*
Re: I cancelled my account, and here's why
