A Not So Soothing Nerf

[Kevin]

Feeling like a broken record here, but how in the world did anyone here come to believe that D2 was complete when it was released?  And for a bigger crime, take a look at the release version of D2: LoD. Those two games were pieces of crap when they were released and both needed huge patches to make them even remotely balanced or playable.  (And D2's end version of "balanced" was hardly anything close to it.  I mean, when mobs in an 8-player hell game have no chance against a solo player, that ain't balanced).

By contrast, despite clear missing items in the game, WoW is by far more functional, bug-free, packed with stuff to do, and far and away better balanced than those two crappy games ever were.  And this is coming from someone who wasted 3 years of his life playing those two crappy games.
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Whole hearted agreement (though I wasted nearly 5 years on them). People seem to forget that Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Broodwar, and War3 were made by Blizzard. Diablo II was made by Blizzard North. Blizzard makes solid games thet play well out of the box and generally only need minor tweaking (though pre 1.03 protoss can be said to be the exception that makes the rul). Blizzard North puts out addictively fun, but highly problematic pieces of software. In my mind they have always been two companies with North being the worse for quality control. WoW was a Blizzard product. It acts more like a Blizzard product. The biggest issue was that it looks like they wanted to be out the door with EQ2 and that hurt them I think. They didn't get all the tweaking they wanted. Though it might have just been the early Christmas crowd and not EQ2.

By the gaming industry standards it was releasable and by the precedent set by Diablo II and LoD it was certainly releasable. But it still isn't finished and may never be. Blizzard has the added joy of hiding behind the MMO banner that claims "MMO's constantly evolve and you add content as you go". That is fine by me as well since in my limited experience (only 5 MMO's) WoW is more solid than any other MMO I have played. The "fun factor" is still way up there. Sure it is missing things that I want and sure there were fundamental design decisions that mean things that I would love to see will never happen because there is no mechanisms for them. But they are getting their monthly fee out of me, and no other MMO has done that. They've only gotten the free months and other trials and such (playing on locally maintained servers and such).

I've been a Blizzard fanboy since WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, and I've played every single game they've released since then, and all of them have been great games. They've all had issues (except StarCraft, which is - beyond even a shadow of a doubt - the most perfect game ever created); rampant hacking and duping in Diablo, less-rampant hacking and duping in D2 (even on their hyped Realms), hero-rushing in War3, and boredom in War2. WoW is the first time, as far as I can recall, that they've ever released a game when it wasn't complete. If you think WoW is complete, you're an idiot. Blizzard was too busy with the idea of raking in the cash to take the time and properly analyze the "extensive" in-house testing and Beta-stage testing.

Warcraft II had 5 patches. Starcraft/Broodwar had at least 11, and go back and look at balance before the 1.03 patch. War3 is up to 7? Sure I said they were solid games that just needed a little tweaking and now I'm saying look at all the patches they had to try and indicate nothing was ready for retail. That isn't it though. WoW is as ready as any of the previous games and more so than some. There were some major changes to how the game worked in some of those SC/WC/War3 patches, they weren't all just exploit changes and a few damage here and there on some units. The things that have been done to WoW as far as changes are all less significant in terms of game balance.

The big difference is you are now paying a monthly fee for WoW and you weren't for those other games. I can agree with a some disappointment in how some of that has been handled. They are making more money they should be providing more support. Of course the monthly fee isn't just for support. It is to pay for the larger bandwidth that WoW takes up (OC3 lines are only something like $5,000 a month now, but still dedicated bandwidth isn't cheap) and it takes more than D2 realms ever did (and for SC and Warcraft B.net was just a match making service the games were hosted on the game creators machine with just a small bandwidth connection to the B.net servers for data transmission and to keep the chat up and a few other things). But I can see issues with how the support has been done since they are getting more cash in. Of course I do think the support has been better. The servers have been a lot better than the D2 realms were. But I wouldn't mind seeing better care applied with support. There were some things that could have been handled better.

It also appears that this latest thing was an admitted bandaid by Blizzard and that they will fix it right in the next patch. At least that is the impression I got from the Blizzard posts. I still don't see it as that big of deal, but as Mongo pointed out to me earlier, I was seeing things a bit wrong at first too.