Every hard-core gamemode ends up being Player vs Server at the end of the day. It is a fantastic way to get people to make videos/stream and not have their content go stale. I get the business...
Every hard-core gamemode ends up being Player vs Server at the end of the day.
It is a fantastic way to get people to make videos/stream and not have their content go stale. I get the business case for it, but I am done with hard-core on any game that isn't hosted on my local computer.
I loved playing Unofficial Hardcore but my son was born the day the official servers went live. No regrets, but the FOMO is real. Hardcore makes the entire game relevant and forces you to engage...
I loved playing Unofficial Hardcore but my son was born the day the official servers went live. No regrets, but the FOMO is real. Hardcore makes the entire game relevant and forces you to engage and understand all its aspects. It feels like the right way to play the game in it's entirety, it's not just a race to the endgame.
That said, you're totally right, DC deaths are soul crushing. Unofficial has death appeals, Blizzard would never do that. They did reduce the logout timer, and at least you can revive your character for free on another realm.
Yeah, I feel a lot of people miss the point of hardcore. It's definitely not for everyone, but it changes the whole experience. From level 1, you're already in the endgame and are treating it as...
Yeah, I feel a lot of people miss the point of hardcore. It's definitely not for everyone, but it changes the whole experience. From level 1, you're already in the endgame and are treating it as such. Every trip outside of your capital is dangerous, every close call memorable. You care about your professions. You really have to think about how to spend your money. Whenever you exit a cave alive, it's the best feeling in the world.
The reason people go agane is because WoW's leveling experience is fun. It's something retail WoW (and most MMOs) has abandoned.
Very much this. Classic wow's leveling experience lends itself well to a hardcore game mode. None of the buttons or rotations are inherently complex, the game focus is instead the world which can...
The reason people go again is because WoW's leveling experience is fun.
Very much this. Classic wow's leveling experience lends itself well to a hardcore game mode.
None of the buttons or rotations are inherently complex, the game focus is instead the world which can be very deadly. The player has tools at their disposal, but they're often limited in some fashion and positioning and resource management are the focal point instead of the second-to-second game play. So usually when you die, your mistake is very obvious and usually related to a poor decision rather than execution.
I don't really understand the appeal of this, you play for hundreds of hours and if you make one mistake it's all over. You have to REALLY love this game to subject yourself to that kind of...
I don't really understand the appeal of this, you play for hundreds of hours and if you make one mistake it's all over. You have to REALLY love this game to subject yourself to that kind of punishment. It's not like going from 1-60 is a single day affair, it can take weeks if not months if you're not playing it constantly.
That's the whole appeal. There's a risk of losing hundreds of hours of progress, so you play the game entirely different. By contrast, I don't get the people who play normal Classic. It's a solved...
That's the whole appeal. There's a risk of losing hundreds of hours of progress, so you play the game entirely different.
By contrast, I don't get the people who play normal Classic. It's a solved game. You spend dozens of hours leveling to 60, which is worthless if you're trying to play the endgame. In hardcore, endgame starts at lvl 1. Every decision from character creation matters.
I don't really have any expectations that I'll get to 60. But I'm having fun right now at LVL 21, and isn't that the point of games, to have fun? Not to endlessly grind dungeons to get through leveling, as WoW's traditional experience has been? If it wasn't hardcore, I'd be bored, I'd just be doing quests as I listened to podcasts or something, barely paying attention. Hardcore is different. And if I die, so be it.
I think you're half right. Normal classic is fun for the same reason hardcore is; the core leveling experience is fun. The risk dynamic of hardcore certainly increases that fun though, at least in...
I think you're half right. Normal classic is fun for the same reason hardcore is; the core leveling experience is fun. The risk dynamic of hardcore certainly increases that fun though, at least in my opinion.
One thing I will say, after playing for a bit on official servers is that I liked the addon better. I'm having fun and I'll stay where I'm at until I die, but at that point I'm probably done unless people are still playing on BB.
On official HC I find that open grouping in particular cheapens the experience. After the first week or so way less people are dying and way more people are making it out of the lower levels. I attribute that to caves and elite quests no longer being dangerous if you stick with the crowd. I get that it's an MMO but they need to bump open world content difficulty or at least elites if they want everyone to group for everything.
I think they both have their benefits. In official, I can play with my 4 friends. And yes, this makes things easier, but I value spending time with them more than the difficultly. And it's also...
I think they both have their benefits. In official, I can play with my 4 friends. And yes, this makes things easier, but I value spending time with them more than the difficultly. And it's also not risk free, our arrogance has let to a few close calls. On the other hands, you're right, the add-on method makes the world a terror. There's no help coming.
I think it'll be better once Blizz introduces a SSF mode to the game. That won't take care of everything, but it'll be pretty damn close.
Yea that makes sense, I'd definitely prefer being able to group if I was playing with friends. I don't necessarily even care about SSF, I'd just like a game mode where 60 feels a bit more...
Yea that makes sense, I'd definitely prefer being able to group if I was playing with friends.
I don't necessarily even care about SSF, I'd just like a game mode where 60 feels a bit more difficult. Some sort of scaling difficulty option would be nice, something like lotr's landscape difficulty system but in a hardcore/ironman game mode.
Man, every MMO should have LOTRO's landscape difficulty, especially with leveling experiences being such a snoozefest in so many. I wish I liked LOTRO more than I do. I've tried it three times,...
Man, every MMO should have LOTRO's landscape difficulty, especially with leveling experiences being such a snoozefest in so many.
I wish I liked LOTRO more than I do. I've tried it three times, and I'll probably do so again, but it's never quite captured me.
All I know is this: Back in the day, Everquest deaths could cost you hours and hours of leveling progress to recover what the death took away from you. And people flew off the handle. Everyone...
All I know is this:
Back in the day, Everquest deaths could cost you hours and hours of leveling progress to recover what the death took away from you. And people flew off the handle. Everyone wanted to micromanage every other character anywhere in the vicinity of them, and if you were in their party it was worse. There was zero allowance for exploration or learning or testing/trying things out.
One misstep in a pull, a bad event in a party, and faced with having just lost an evening's worth of leveling progress tells and any available chat channel, including zone-wide or even city public chats, became open season on "so-and-so is a fucking n00b loser" and "no you, nah ah your fault, fuck you, up yours" and etc...
When WOW came along and removed that XP death cost, among other things that reduced the hardcore zero-sum nature of MMORPGs that had dominated up until WOW, it was a breath of fresh air. I think there are some folks who've forgotten just how brutal MMORPGs design used to be, and there's a whole generation (or two) of players who never really had to deal with the way Everquest or Ultima Online would punish players in the name of "consequences = fun."
You, anyone, can certainly play how you want. But I can already see, without reactivating my WOW account and logging into a hardcore server, how toxic some shit is going to be. What happens if two someones farming in their upper 50s in the Plaguelands drift too close to each other, and their pulls/fights cross up, and after the dust settles from the chaos one or both of them is dead? Toxicity.
Trying to think about grouping up ... forget about it. Not in open groups anyway, no PUGs for sure. How would you trust anyone to be "good enough" in a dungeon? What about raids? Maybe the raids are "easy", but are they easy when no one has gear and is nervous as fuck after having just finally finished hardcore leveling to 60?
I'm sure there are some people who do find that sort of "one mistake and you've lost weeks" gameplay fun, but what's actually going to happen more than occasionally is a hell of a lot of screaming and vitriol. There was a lot of it already just in the regular Classic servers a few years ago, on this "solved" game. And that was when a death just cost you a couple of minutes runback. Hardcore?
And I don't think it'll be much better even if you do have a big trusted guild to play with. How forgiving will anyone be, even if they know each other IRL, if one of those mistakes happens and they suddenly have a level 1 toon again while their "friends" are still going? What happens to a guild if eight or ten of their raid group is wiped out, and now they can't field a full 40?
Hell, maybe I should start reading forums again. Just to see how sticky the floors get from all the bloodletting.
I think what you're missing a bit is that hardcore has been going on for, like, half a year now. There's an established community. And if anything, there's much less toxicity. Like, take your...
I think what you're missing a bit is that hardcore has been going on for, like, half a year now. There's an established community. And if anything, there's much less toxicity.
Like, take your example. A lvl 50 in WPs pulls a group of mobs, another lvl 50 dies. How's toxicity going to happen? He's dead. He'd have to maybe find the guy's name, which might not be possible. Most likely, the player is going to scream into a pillow, take a week's break, and then either quit or start again at lvl 1, extremely far away from whoever for him killed. So what, is Is he going to take it out on trade? Maybe. He'd have to create a new char, appearance, class, name. Then he'd have to leave the begginer area, and walk all the way to the capital. People just don't do this after losing a lvl 50.
Or take PUGs, which do happen, and there's specific rules around them as far back as SSF. Sometimes, someone causes a party wipe. And yeah, there's anger around. But that's it, it's over, everyone's dead. There's not really much of an opportunity to be toxic, because everyone needs to make new characters, and no one will know anyone. Won't even remember their names.
Retail WoW players get angry when someone slows them down for half a second. Raiders get angry when they wipe 10 times. These just aren't factors in hardcore. Someone who thinks a tank is shit isn't going to harass the tank; they're going to leave the group and hearth out, because they're not going to risk their character on a tank they think sucks. No one's going to be upset that things are going to slow, because whoever's trying to play gogogo like in retail died at lvl 7. Everyone's taking it REAL nice and slow in dungeons.
I wouldn't go as far to say that the community is nice. It's still WoW players. But it's much different from what you're thinking.
I've seen many, many, many, many videos of deaths. The toxicity you're thinking of just doesn't translate to hardcore. The incentives here are just totally different.
Having played both Unofficial and Official now... yeah, shit happens sometimes, but your concerns are exaggerated. My experience in both was very wholesome.
Having played both Unofficial and Official now... yeah, shit happens sometimes, but your concerns are exaggerated. My experience in both was very wholesome.
Just a side note: I play Everquest as it was in 1999 on a private server, and while losing your experience and de-leveling is as extremely stressful as ever, people aren't quite so toxic about it...
Just a side note: I play Everquest as it was in 1999 on a private server, and while losing your experience and de-leveling is as extremely stressful as ever, people aren't quite so toxic about it in chat on my private server. Maybe that was unique to Live in some way. My experience is of folks being chill, although at the highest raid levels there's bound to be toxic behavior.
People are usually very chill in WoW Hardcore as well, I guess they were talking about toxic behavior when shit hits the fan, for example, when a healer screws up and perma kills the entire party....
People are usually very chill in WoW Hardcore as well, I guess they were talking about toxic behavior when shit hits the fan, for example, when a healer screws up and perma kills the entire party.
But people are always nasty when shit hits the fan, even without permadeath.
99% of the time hardcore WoW is super chill. It's a fairly easy game.
Rogue started this forever ago and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something earlier. The glory of getting far in any dungeon crawl is so nice, and it actually makes characters feel unique. I...
Rogue started this forever ago and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something earlier.
The glory of getting far in any dungeon crawl is so nice, and it actually makes characters feel unique. I suspect this is somewhat the same with any MMORPG. Games like Hunt Showdown thrive on this same concept as well.
I kinda wish someone would shoot for a smaller scale slightly more skill based (rather less stats/cd based) game for the kind of people who love the rush. I feel like Realm of the Mad God had a really good idea with how quickly you can max a character (level wise, items take forever) and perma death.
I think that there's a really interesting, if much smaller, niche there if you do it right, and with a smaller focus you can maybe do a lot more combat styles (traditional stat based RPG style all the way up to something closer to DarkSouls pvp).
Buuuuut doubt that's happening anytime soon. The dozens of us who might care aren't exactly launching a genre.
Every hard-core gamemode ends up being Player vs Server at the end of the day.
It is a fantastic way to get people to make videos/stream and not have their content go stale. I get the business case for it, but I am done with hard-core on any game that isn't hosted on my local computer.
I loved playing Unofficial Hardcore but my son was born the day the official servers went live. No regrets, but the FOMO is real. Hardcore makes the entire game relevant and forces you to engage and understand all its aspects. It feels like the right way to play the game in it's entirety, it's not just a race to the endgame.
That said, you're totally right, DC deaths are soul crushing. Unofficial has death appeals, Blizzard would never do that. They did reduce the logout timer, and at least you can revive your character for free on another realm.
Yeah, I feel a lot of people miss the point of hardcore. It's definitely not for everyone, but it changes the whole experience. From level 1, you're already in the endgame and are treating it as such. Every trip outside of your capital is dangerous, every close call memorable. You care about your professions. You really have to think about how to spend your money. Whenever you exit a cave alive, it's the best feeling in the world.
The reason people go agane is because WoW's leveling experience is fun. It's something retail WoW (and most MMOs) has abandoned.
Very much this. Classic wow's leveling experience lends itself well to a hardcore game mode.
None of the buttons or rotations are inherently complex, the game focus is instead the world which can be very deadly. The player has tools at their disposal, but they're often limited in some fashion and positioning and resource management are the focal point instead of the second-to-second game play. So usually when you die, your mistake is very obvious and usually related to a poor decision rather than execution.
I don't really understand the appeal of this, you play for hundreds of hours and if you make one mistake it's all over. You have to REALLY love this game to subject yourself to that kind of punishment. It's not like going from 1-60 is a single day affair, it can take weeks if not months if you're not playing it constantly.
That's the whole appeal. There's a risk of losing hundreds of hours of progress, so you play the game entirely different.
By contrast, I don't get the people who play normal Classic. It's a solved game. You spend dozens of hours leveling to 60, which is worthless if you're trying to play the endgame. In hardcore, endgame starts at lvl 1. Every decision from character creation matters.
I don't really have any expectations that I'll get to 60. But I'm having fun right now at LVL 21, and isn't that the point of games, to have fun? Not to endlessly grind dungeons to get through leveling, as WoW's traditional experience has been? If it wasn't hardcore, I'd be bored, I'd just be doing quests as I listened to podcasts or something, barely paying attention. Hardcore is different. And if I die, so be it.
I think you're half right. Normal classic is fun for the same reason hardcore is; the core leveling experience is fun. The risk dynamic of hardcore certainly increases that fun though, at least in my opinion.
One thing I will say, after playing for a bit on official servers is that I liked the addon better. I'm having fun and I'll stay where I'm at until I die, but at that point I'm probably done unless people are still playing on BB.
On official HC I find that open grouping in particular cheapens the experience. After the first week or so way less people are dying and way more people are making it out of the lower levels. I attribute that to caves and elite quests no longer being dangerous if you stick with the crowd. I get that it's an MMO but they need to bump open world content difficulty or at least elites if they want everyone to group for everything.
I think they both have their benefits. In official, I can play with my 4 friends. And yes, this makes things easier, but I value spending time with them more than the difficultly. And it's also not risk free, our arrogance has let to a few close calls. On the other hands, you're right, the add-on method makes the world a terror. There's no help coming.
I think it'll be better once Blizz introduces a SSF mode to the game. That won't take care of everything, but it'll be pretty damn close.
Yea that makes sense, I'd definitely prefer being able to group if I was playing with friends.
I don't necessarily even care about SSF, I'd just like a game mode where 60 feels a bit more difficult. Some sort of scaling difficulty option would be nice, something like lotr's landscape difficulty system but in a hardcore/ironman game mode.
Man, every MMO should have LOTRO's landscape difficulty, especially with leveling experiences being such a snoozefest in so many.
I wish I liked LOTRO more than I do. I've tried it three times, and I'll probably do so again, but it's never quite captured me.
All I know is this:
Back in the day, Everquest deaths could cost you hours and hours of leveling progress to recover what the death took away from you. And people flew off the handle. Everyone wanted to micromanage every other character anywhere in the vicinity of them, and if you were in their party it was worse. There was zero allowance for exploration or learning or testing/trying things out.
One misstep in a pull, a bad event in a party, and faced with having just lost an evening's worth of leveling progress tells and any available chat channel, including zone-wide or even city public chats, became open season on "so-and-so is a fucking n00b loser" and "no you, nah ah your fault, fuck you, up yours" and etc...
When WOW came along and removed that XP death cost, among other things that reduced the hardcore zero-sum nature of MMORPGs that had dominated up until WOW, it was a breath of fresh air. I think there are some folks who've forgotten just how brutal MMORPGs design used to be, and there's a whole generation (or two) of players who never really had to deal with the way Everquest or Ultima Online would punish players in the name of "consequences = fun."
You, anyone, can certainly play how you want. But I can already see, without reactivating my WOW account and logging into a hardcore server, how toxic some shit is going to be. What happens if two someones farming in their upper 50s in the Plaguelands drift too close to each other, and their pulls/fights cross up, and after the dust settles from the chaos one or both of them is dead? Toxicity.
Trying to think about grouping up ... forget about it. Not in open groups anyway, no PUGs for sure. How would you trust anyone to be "good enough" in a dungeon? What about raids? Maybe the raids are "easy", but are they easy when no one has gear and is nervous as fuck after having just finally finished hardcore leveling to 60?
I'm sure there are some people who do find that sort of "one mistake and you've lost weeks" gameplay fun, but what's actually going to happen more than occasionally is a hell of a lot of screaming and vitriol. There was a lot of it already just in the regular Classic servers a few years ago, on this "solved" game. And that was when a death just cost you a couple of minutes runback. Hardcore?
And I don't think it'll be much better even if you do have a big trusted guild to play with. How forgiving will anyone be, even if they know each other IRL, if one of those mistakes happens and they suddenly have a level 1 toon again while their "friends" are still going? What happens to a guild if eight or ten of their raid group is wiped out, and now they can't field a full 40?
Hell, maybe I should start reading forums again. Just to see how sticky the floors get from all the bloodletting.
I think what you're missing a bit is that hardcore has been going on for, like, half a year now. There's an established community. And if anything, there's much less toxicity.
Like, take your example. A lvl 50 in WPs pulls a group of mobs, another lvl 50 dies. How's toxicity going to happen? He's dead. He'd have to maybe find the guy's name, which might not be possible. Most likely, the player is going to scream into a pillow, take a week's break, and then either quit or start again at lvl 1, extremely far away from whoever for him killed. So what, is Is he going to take it out on trade? Maybe. He'd have to create a new char, appearance, class, name. Then he'd have to leave the begginer area, and walk all the way to the capital. People just don't do this after losing a lvl 50.
Or take PUGs, which do happen, and there's specific rules around them as far back as SSF. Sometimes, someone causes a party wipe. And yeah, there's anger around. But that's it, it's over, everyone's dead. There's not really much of an opportunity to be toxic, because everyone needs to make new characters, and no one will know anyone. Won't even remember their names.
Retail WoW players get angry when someone slows them down for half a second. Raiders get angry when they wipe 10 times. These just aren't factors in hardcore. Someone who thinks a tank is shit isn't going to harass the tank; they're going to leave the group and hearth out, because they're not going to risk their character on a tank they think sucks. No one's going to be upset that things are going to slow, because whoever's trying to play gogogo like in retail died at lvl 7. Everyone's taking it REAL nice and slow in dungeons.
I wouldn't go as far to say that the community is nice. It's still WoW players. But it's much different from what you're thinking.
I've seen many, many, many, many videos of deaths. The toxicity you're thinking of just doesn't translate to hardcore. The incentives here are just totally different.
Having played both Unofficial and Official now... yeah, shit happens sometimes, but your concerns are exaggerated. My experience in both was very wholesome.
Just a side note: I play Everquest as it was in 1999 on a private server, and while losing your experience and de-leveling is as extremely stressful as ever, people aren't quite so toxic about it in chat on my private server. Maybe that was unique to Live in some way. My experience is of folks being chill, although at the highest raid levels there's bound to be toxic behavior.
People are usually very chill in WoW Hardcore as well, I guess they were talking about toxic behavior when shit hits the fan, for example, when a healer screws up and perma kills the entire party.
But people are always nasty when shit hits the fan, even without permadeath.
99% of the time hardcore WoW is super chill. It's a fairly easy game.
Rogue started this forever ago and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something earlier.
The glory of getting far in any dungeon crawl is so nice, and it actually makes characters feel unique. I suspect this is somewhat the same with any MMORPG. Games like Hunt Showdown thrive on this same concept as well.
I kinda wish someone would shoot for a smaller scale slightly more skill based (rather less stats/cd based) game for the kind of people who love the rush. I feel like Realm of the Mad God had a really good idea with how quickly you can max a character (level wise, items take forever) and perma death.
I think that there's a really interesting, if much smaller, niche there if you do it right, and with a smaller focus you can maybe do a lot more combat styles (traditional stat based RPG style all the way up to something closer to DarkSouls pvp).
Buuuuut doubt that's happening anytime soon. The dozens of us who might care aren't exactly launching a genre.