"Advanced Classes = Fundamentally Different Class Designs"

If I played football online then yes it would be an MMO.

What does MMORPG mean then? Leveling? Gear Progression? Playing with others? Story? Diablo has all of that.


I just don't see how the game could get much more broken after this Legacy mess. I could see this sort of desperation after steep declines in subscription numbers, but after 4 months when numbers are supposedly holding steady at 1.5 million or so? Is there really nothing to do at 50 (haven't gotten there myself)?



Barely getting a passing grade in class design isn't relevant to why people might want the option to change those classes?

WOW wasn't organized by class.. It was organized by race.. So no.. Not every class in WOW had it's on quests.. In fact no class in WOW has it's own quests or content.. In fact, no MMO in existence has quests and content for every class..

Class is not a factor when designing quests.. SWTOR is the only game in which classes have their own story and content.. The fact that AC's share these stories and content is doesn't mean that the AC is not a class in their own right..

No class in WOW had a story at all.. There was no Warlock story, no Mage story, no Priest story, no druid story, no warrior story, no rogue story, no shaman, and most certianly no Paladin story.. If I missed a class or two, I am sorry.. Been almost a year since I last played.. In either case, story or lack their of, has no bearing on what a class is or isn't..

Baby areas in WOW were organized by race.. SWTOR, baby areas are organized by class.. All Jedi types start on Tython.. Smuggler and Trooper types start on Ord Mantel.. Same is true for the Empire.. All Sith types start on Korriban, and Bounty hunters and Agents start on Hutta I believe.. It doesn't matter what race your character is.. Your starting planet is determined by class.. Where as WOW your starting area was determined by race.. Blood Elves started in a different area as the Undead, or the Orcs, or the Trolls, and of course the Tauren.. Same was true for the Alliance.. Before Cata it is worth mentioning that Trolls and Orcs did share a baby area.. As did Dwarves and Gnomes.. After Cata.. Trolls and Gnomes were given their own baby area..

So.. I am sorry.. Your claim is simply false..

What legacy mess?? It hasn't even been released yet and it has been hinted at since before launch.. The legacy tab was added before the game was released.. It was there for like 3 or 4 builds of the beta..

If the game is broken to you, then why play it?? Why argue to break it for the rest of us.. There should be no class changes.. Period.. There is no arguement for them.. There is no need for them.. There are 16 classes in this game.. You can argue that point all you want.. But that is how it is..

You can't make up standards on your own in attempt to justify your views and opinions.. If you want to believe the AC's are not classes.. Then that is your choice.. That doesn't make it so, nor does it mean that Bioware should allow class changes.. Nor should they reconsider that position..

When are the pro AC swapping crowed just going to be honest about what they are asking for and why.. The only reason to argue that the AC is not a class is because a simple respec is a lot easier to argue for compared to a class change.. That is what you wall want.. You want to change classes..

This game doesn't have a class that can both spec heals or tank, and that just burns you all up.. No do it all classes.. Now you actually have to roll an alt to have all your bases covered.. Oh well.. That is what playing an MMO is all about.. You want both a tank and a healer.. You are going to have to roll two characters.. As it should be..

That is your opinion.. Most people don't share it, nor do they want the option to change classes..

Feel free to look at this thread if you don't believe me.. There are countless others that you can look at as well.. It takes one person to make a thread.. That doesn't mean anyone agrees with him.. Even in the last few pages.. I see more people arguing against AC swapping than for..

It's at this point that I'm positive you have no idea what you're talking about.

Also:

Did anyone else have a '***?' moment reading this quote?


Fixed that for you.

As a genre, Madden 12 or Diablo 2 are not MMO games as it applies as a shortened form of MMORPG. If you have merely been using it as an acronym for any game featuring a large number of players that is played online then you have been using it out of context. Either way, none of the aforementioned games are MMORPGs (or MMO as I have been using the term).

The Legacy additions they're throwing in are absurd at best. On this we can agree.

Should it continue, I don't see how allowing class changes can break the game any more.

You can't assume pass/fail on all classes. Don't grade it like multiple choice - grade it like an essay. There are positive and negative elements of those four classes, gray areas to grade.

Actually, Hunters and priests had a class quest line in which they earned epic weapons through Molten Core. Currently rogues have a questline through which they earn legendary daggers from Dragon Soul. Nothing on the scale of SWTOR and its class stories, but yes - WoW did design some content exclusively for certain classes.

If you look at what is on the PTR for 1.2 (and that has been announced as releasing this month and which already has a game footage promotional trailer) you'll see some of the trainwreck features they're adding to the Legacy system. This includes allowing a character to use skills of an alt class during their Heroic Moment skill as well as leveling any race to 50 and unlocking the ability to use that race to create any class on any faction. Most stuff isn't so bad (I like the family tree stuff they're adding) but those two items have the potential to leap some significant canonical hurdles and not get tested for HGH.


None of this is tied into my opinion about class changing, just some clarifications.

Corellian,

I’m afraid you’re erring here. The definition of MMORPG is a consensus one--it’s not the literal translation of what the acronym stands for, which is what you’re trying to make fit.

An MMO features a persistent online world. It doesn’t instantiate per group or play session; it continues to run whether players are there or not.

In a Diablo group, that instance of the playspace exists only while the group playing it does. Same thing with football, Call of Duty, or any other game that multiple people can play online.

See, these types of games are “Massive” not because of the total number of people playing the game itself. These games are Massive because a large amount of players are in the same instantiated and running copy of it which persists beyond their participation in it, you follow?

If you keep that definition in mind you’ll correctly separate the nature of games like Diablo from games like SWTOR.

This, and your summation of the initial WoW leveling situation, I couldn’t agree more with. This has been my journey of thought as well, and why I’m now here weighting the pro-AC respec camp under the belief that it might be good for the game. Hopefully that has come through in my previous writings. I may have been…impolitic about it.

I can easily imagine a structure that would support this kind of nonlinear leveling in SWTOR, but there’s no getting around having to put in a ****ton of new content. Like parallel-level planets, such that you could go from level 10-20 on either planet as you wished.

Or completely separated maps on the same planet, and you can only get from one to the other via taxi. The quest hubs in each map would then be self-contained, requiring no crossover into the other map to complete, and each map would have a through-line quest like the current maps each do, which is optional for you to do or not. So you can pick from map A and map B through your journey from 10-20, and so forth, ignoring the through-line quest on that map or not.

All of that is really no different than WoW’s having of parallel-level zones that you could pick and choose from, as you pointed out.

No, my claim is not false. Every class in WoW has content which only they experience. As I said, and you didn’t apparently understand, the WoW class-specific content set is small and has diminished since release, but it most definitely still exists. I am, “in fact”, about to prove it.

Every single class in WoW has class-specific quests; there are even profession-specific quests. If you’ve ever seen the yellow ! appear over the head of the class trainer, you were being offered a class-specific quest. Any time that you opened your quest log and saw on the left a node that said your class name, like “Druid”, with quests underneath it, those were the class-specific quests.

Every class had them. Whether it was the Druid going to Moonglade, the Warrior forging his first rare blade, the Rogue getting poisons, the Warlock acquiring the Voidwalker, the Paladin learning to resurrect, the Mage learning a new Polymorph variant…and so on and so forth (the worst were the epic mount quests for those classes that had them. They were cool quests, but after my 10th assist to players who needed them, I was kind of done).

They got rid of a lot of this, but some class-specific content still exists in the leveling process, post-Cataclysm. All classes still have class specific content; it is undeniably still true and you are undeniably still wrong; even if it were all currently gone, it was there, and that’s enough to invalidate your point, not that it needed much help.

I mean, please feel free to continue to deny it; reality does not appear to present much of an obstacle for you. It’s kind of admirable, in a demented sort of a way.

Still don’t believe me? Go to wowhead.com. On the main menu bar, drop down from Database-->Classes-->[Any class]. On the resulting page, click the Quests tab. You have now drilled down to the class-specific quest content. Here’s a direct link for you to Mage specific class content: http://www.wowhead.com/class=8#quests

Not belief, not an opinion. Objectively true, proof provided, MajikMyst pwnd, check and mate, game set and match, thank you for playing, have a nice day. You used the phrase “in fact” twice in your reality-denying summation. I’m not sure you understand what a fact actually is.

A troll generally wouldn’t admit to being wrong; thus I don’t expect you to. I believe I can predict your probable response: “That’s not what I meant! Those are so trivial they don’t count! They’re not the story! They aren’t a story! And classes aren’t defined by stories or content anyway!” or some variant on that, except double-punctuated and misspelled. Followed by even more poorly written gyrations, completely irrelevant spew, and redefinitions of the issue under discussion.

Seriously, your underlying thinking is as poor as the spelling and grammar you’re using to communicate it. It’s funny how those two things go hand-in-hand so much of the time.

Where you’re misrepresenting, either deliberately or because you’re unable to process anything higher than a mild level of complexity: You appear to have invented, completely on your own, a requirement that unique class content must somehow mean ALL and ONLY the content that the class experiences, and that to have unique class content is also tied to the way that the game is organized. You also imply that any unique class content anywhere has to be in the form of a story, and are apparently arguing a further nonexistent point that classes are defined by stories, and so on.

None of those are true. None of them are what I said. And none of them apply to SWTOR.

Again, (and I tried to give you an out in my last reply to you): these zig-zagging misrepresentations are straw men. They also make you look dumb and dishonest without my even having to respond to them. When the anti-respec camp has friends like you, it hardly needs enemies.

People aren’t responding to you because you’re conclusively proving your points—people aren’t responding to you because you’re not actually responding to them: Your modus operandi is mostly to fabricate one side of a debate by cherry-picking some parts and completely misrepresenting others, and then you write multiple posts responding to these fictions you appear to have created in your mind. Ad nauseum.

I’d like to gently suggest that you go have these arguments with yourself, entirely on your own, without subjecting the rest of us to it. You are contributing nothing.

To recap, the only rebuttal that you’ve been able to make to my last responses was a fantastical misrepresentation. I then disproved it. The rest of my responses you conveniently ignored, presumably because it wouldn’t support this right-all-the-time persona you’re trying to push at every opportunity.

Please stop wasting my bandwidth with kindergarten-level processing, MajikMyst. You’re either way out of your depth here--kiddie pool that this discussion is--or you’re deliberately trolling. You’re making ridiculous and nonsensical arguments and ignoring legitimate responses, just to be able to keep spewing about it. Do you think that nobody else sees that?

I’m inclined to believe that you’re simply intentionally trolling for attention. One hardly even needs to respond; each successive post is like the publication of a pathology. A few posts back I noted that I’d observed that the defenders of no-respec seem to me to more regularly employ bad argumentative tactics. You’re far and away the worst offender.