[Miele]

Call me naive or just dumb, I don't care, but I subbed for VG forums in late 2004, before they became the cesspool of late 2005 and beyond and as time went by, I got detached from VG direction more and more, despite having called all my friends back from their MMO hiatus or from other games to promote it.

Yes, I knew nothing of PR spin, it was the first time I followed a game development, I was used to play them and nothing else before, so I promoted the game based on a design doc, most of the guys didn't know about VG, some did:funny enough most of them play it now, me and few others don't.

Back then I was promised a game that was nothing like the one is out today, let me elaborate:

- I always thought the vast majority of the MMO population plays the game mostly adventuring, I still think it and I guess I'm quite right. I played some MMO and some variants of MMO ala Guild Wars, but the games I played longer are EQ (4 years) and WoW (just short of 2 years), they focused mainly on combat, in 2 very different ways, I tried at launch for a few months and I'm currently playing now EQ2, another different combat system, which has pros and cons, but doesn't play like WoW and doesn't play like EQ1. Key word: different.

- I was sold on VG for the "slow and strategic" combat system I was told at release, the first comment about it in public post by Oloh, during beta 1 or maybe beta 2, convinced me it could have been another fun and different approach at combat. If it's not yet clear, I'll just state it: combat is all I care about, the rest is there as a mini-game, as important as /gems was in EQ1, basically almost nothing for me.

- What I see now is a WoW system with few variations, a WoW/EQ2 quest system with few (none?) variations and a graphic that reminds me of EQ2 still looking worse for some reason I can't really define. I was thinking like 2 years in advance how awesome would have been to play a wizard as it was originally planned, 4 elemental spheres, combine them to get new effects like water and fire to cast "vapor" (?) spells, etc. All scrapped for fire-ice-arcane... the novelty... not!

- I saw nothing delivered, nothing at all resembling the old outdated original FAQs, sorry but I was deluded a lot. Point after point, every feature that would have made in the original FAQ was scrapped and trust me, I'm not talking of CR and exp loss, I'm talking about the basic premises behind the structure of the combat system, aka the backbone of a MMO.

I still wonder why everyone saw WoW as the huge phenomenon reinventing the wheel: it's an improved EQ1 from the base to almost the top and has a fanbase (Blizzard) behind that was freaking huge before the internet was such a widespread commodity for everyone (and rightfully so, since they always made great games).
It was obvious that a good game with a huge loyal fanbase could easily match Diablo2 and War3 sales (over 2,5 millions each) and with the PC available to everyone and the internet connectivity spreading out like crazy, plus an avid eastern market hungry for "more games with grinding" it could have doubled those 2,5 millions quite easily. Word of mouth made the rest.

Realize now that you pissed off a lot of potential players during late development, you pissed out a lot more with the buggy launch and you're pissing out even more if you "dumb down" the game (I don't like that definition, but it's the most used). Also you literally enraged a lot of "normal" customers, who couldn't ignore the vanboi-idiocy spreading out on the orginal VG boards. Praise the "Vision"! You maybe started doing damage control, but it was already quite late, you're still doing it now in a way.

I'm a BYOG (Bring Your Own Group/Guild) guy in MMOs, so I could care less about LFG tools and long travel distances, but I realize I'm in the minority. It's not my fault I'm surrounded by friends who play more than a full guild by themselves, so everytime I log in, no matter the game, I already have a group and a plan. I'm pissed by the fact I cannot and will likely not anymore play a game different from WoW from the very basic concepts behind combat. It could have been a huge selling point: different is good, even for the sake of being different. People like to try new things, I didn't shelve 294 days of /played on my EQ1 cleric to play a revamped EQ1 starting from scratch, nor I left my combined 90 days /played in WoW to play a WoW clone, I always moved to a different game and like me there are plenty around, just go read some random boards here and there.

When I walked few steps from the Crossroads to the Wailing Caves/Caverns in 2 different games, I grinned, but aside from few other dungeon idea and names, the 2 games I mention are pretty different as much as 2 fantasy games can be.