WoW will start losing population fast eventually...

...when Blizzard releases it's new MMO.

i don't know if i actually like blizzard's games, honestly. lots of people are into starcraft and diablo II and WoW but those games really don't appeal to me because i feel like there's no actual depth, just a lot of grinding and number crunching and metagaming. diablo II is just clicking and looking at stats, WoW is basically the same except 3D and with a slightly expanded social aspect), and starcraft is very mechanical and seems to rely entirely on knowing numerical/statistically-based counters to each unit. i've never seen any AMAZING INNOVATIVE STRATEGY with starcraft; it just narrows itself down to KNOWING WHAT UNITS HAVE WHICH STATS and clicking really fast.

this is why games like TF2 or Age of Conan or World in Conflict seem to appeal to me a lot more i think, because it's so much less about metagaming or WHO CAN CLICK FASTER and more about immersion. my girlfriend used to play WoW a lot and said it was because she could basically TURN OFF while playing it, which i guess is fine, but it's not the type of game i enjoy! i like playing games that require my attention and try to make me feel like i am actually in the situation presented rather than clicking around a program trying to prove i'm better at metagaming than the other guy.

any game people PLAY WITH A SPREADSHEET kind of turns me off to it

Any game can be played with a spreadsheet; it's just more helpful for some games than other. You could make a spreadsheet for Super Mario Bros. for calculuating the best speed running jump pixels and shit if you wanted to.

also it's like...

what do you expect dude it's vidya games in the end it's a limited amount of code and there will always be x>y

Well maybe the problem is that everything in MMOs are called grinding these days. Grinding used to mean killing single mobs in one area until you reached level x or found item y. These days people tend to call anything you do more than once in a MMO a grind. Sure you do lots of quests in games like WoW but is it really grinding? You have a purpose and you have a reward, and you're not locked onto one single mob type in one single area of the game. We could every single FPS ever a grind because all you do is shoot stuff all the time.

Yeah but there's a huge difference - you may just shoot stuff in FPS games (and this also gets stale btw) but you experience a much more dynamic or interesting story, or at least some neat gimmicks like realistic physics or tense gunplay. In MMORPGs, story is reduced to quest log text 99% of the time (with a few "cutscenes" for special bosses or quests) and combat often just comes down to tapping 1-2-3 on your keyboard. I feel a lot more engaged killing Nazis in CALL OF DUTY than I do killing boars in WoW. People say grind a lot because that's what you're doing - grinding mobs for exp, grinding mobs for a quest, grinding mobs for ITEMS for a quest, grinding mobs for reputation. If quests were more diverse or interesting, it'd be different. But nearly all of them boil down to some dwarf asking you to collect bear eyes for some arbitrary purpose. Unfortunately, they will never be more interesting or diverse - outside of a few exceptions - because of the sheer number needed to pad a game. That said, I still prefer it to the old Everquest alternative, where grinding meant exactly what you said - killing X number of mobs to level. At least with questing there is SOME semblance of story and progression outside of simply hitting another level. But to me, it's still part of a grind, the leveling grind, and something I just end up doing over, and over, and over.

The thing is, at least in WoW's case, is that when it came out, it was hailed as the MMORPG that completely removed the need of grinding but a few years forward and people are calling it the prime example of grinding. I guess the word has just evolved into a bigger meaning than what it originally was.

nah thats not necessarily true and is kind of an absurd oversimplification of the medium/coding in general

at present i bet you really couldn't prove me otherwise! imo this is a reality of present vidya development. and i'm not saying CODE or whatever system the games are built around aren't capable of these things! it's just developers do not have the time/capacity to really go for that.

it's possible... but it's just not practical at all. i didn't oversimplify, though i guess it came off as me sayin code can't be complex or flexible in the realm of a game which i didn't mean at all. i just meant to use the word within the sphere of practical use that most developers tend to employ

tired posting

i think projects like LIFE prove you otherwise.  you're looking at organized developers employed by enormous publishers and being like heh....its all there is but you're ignoring the entirety of indie game dev which is actually pretty substantial and usually in no way motivated by the same factors that drive commercial game development.  why is it not practical?  do you really know enough about various coding languages to say what is and is not practical in regards to all video games, and not just mmos?

no!!

but what are we trying to prove here anyway?? i said it's vidya games and they're limited, you said i'm being too narrow when i talk about code and what is possible with it, i said i just meant in the practical sense most developers would use. now you say this. there is no GOAL we have defined to then prove doable or undoable. i assume we're talking about some very high level of depth and immersion within a game, but i can't be sure.

if we are (i think we are) please feel free to point out games that go past what i said is practical. and i didn't ignore indie development where did you get this?? i'm not really HIP to the indie gaming scene but i'd be fairly comfortable saying that any games that go after what we're talking about just kinda PUSH THE LIMITS more then anything and do something that is yes unique and interesting but is in other extents limited.

what i'm getting from your post is that there is this other plateau of games out there that goes beyond standard conceptions of what kind of mechanics can be in a game that is entirely practical in production?? why have i not heard of this.

i'm really tired and this is probably super incoherent but basically you should post examples (what is project LIFE?? see dude i dont know gaems you're right) that prove me wrong!! because that would end it really quickly now wouldn't it

shitpost

there is also the part where something isnt necessarily impractical simply because it's not being done.  you say this kind of thing is impractical but you haven't offered any explanation as to why, exactly, this is the case or how you have come to this conclusion with no knowledge of coding.  the fact that you just don't see it is in no way an indication that something isn't practical, especially when you just said you even don't pay attention.  in this situation you're really the one who needs to be providing proof or substantiation of some kind.

this is very true and i almost put it in my post.

i think we're just on two ends of the stick here. you put a lot of weight on new, awesome things that can be done and are being done whereas i am putting a lot of emphasis on the natural limitations of time, resource, and knowledge. i think they are both two valid perspectives, it just depends which angle you want to approach the question of WHAT IUS POSSIBLE? at.

also this is totally relative to the level of realism we're talking about here, which between you and I could differ a lot. this is a big problem!