Let's compare early WoW with early TOR

= lost on too many.

What are your favorite video/computer games of all time? What games are you playing right now? What game should the reader be playing if he’s not?
Starflight, Starflight 2, Ultima IV, Ultima VII, Ultima VII part 2, Ultima Online, Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2, Command and Conquer Red Alert, Unreal Tournament II, Bauldur's Gate, Bauldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights.

I am currently playing Burning Crusade and just finished Lord of the Rings Online.

I played WoW on release, and although it did have some bugs it didn't have nearly as many problems as SWTOR does. SWTOR problems include everything from light rays shooting through the world, becoming invincible in combat by dancing, glitching mana to have infinite healing, duping items in your mail box, all combat actions delayed by half a second, having high-res textures vanish, etc.

There is a difference between having some bugs and having a BROKEN, UNFINISHED GAME.

god i hate this comparisons, its a game that came out in 2004 vs a game in 2011 that's a HUGE difference. Yes MMO launches WILL have bugs at launch, no denying it nor getting around it but its been 7years to learn from those mistakes. I for one am not mad cuz SWTOR is buggy as **** but cuz they left out so much that is common ground in mmo's. Stuff like combat log, customizable UI, guild banks, weather, water physics, AA, a freaken endgame. I mean this is stuff that already exist in other games, and it works, so that should be your base line. Now all they had to do was make it better. Instead they cut corners and spent it all on VO. now they have and a stellar RPG with co-op. Then they have the audacity to want us to get excited about guild banks and AA that are coming in a few months?, woot! amazing!. Seriously BW, miss the 2007 boat there.

TLR version:
Players expectation values are much higher now then 2004 and MMO community as a whole is far less forgiving.

If u go buy a phone today and they give u a brick size cell phone and tell u , "its cool man, no worries in a few months with upgrades you'll catch up to everyone else, just stick with it" you shove that phone so far up... well u get it.

ALL mmos need time to get better WoW just happen to be the MMO most forgiven its problems right now people are seeing the truth about WoW now and quitting the game and it is not even burn outs the raid content sucks and pvp is so bad it is almost at the level of vanilla right now blizzard gave clear signs cataclysm is a failure even their lead dev stepped down (ghost crawler)

I'm not going to read through all of this, but in case someone has not already mentioned it.

Everquest was released in Nov of 1999, and was the dominate MMO when WoW released in Mar 2004. Not only was WoW better then EQ straight out of the box, it absolutely blew it away. EQ had 4.5 years of "polish" but it mattered little.

SWTOR should be compared to current products, and it fails to offer as much as WoW atm.

I think this is a good comparison to make- not just from a SWTOR vs. Vanilla WoW, but MMOs in 2004 vs. MMOs in 2011/2012.

First, WoW was not really very innovative. WoW has never been innovative. WoW has been very good at stealing and improving on ideas from other games.

Flight paths are very similar to Luclin and PoP ports. Everquest had mounts before EQ. Instances were in Everquest before WoW. I'm pretty sure DAOC had quest markers above NPCs before WoW did and changed up the quest system from Everquest's /say based system before WoW. On that note, it's actually good to look back a bit further. Everquest was basically a MUD with graphics. WoW, on the other hand, wasn't.



1.) In terms of game orientation, there are a lot of similarities between Vanilla WoW and Everquest that are radically different from modern MMOs. Everquest had camps. You basically camped NPCs until they dropped the gear you wanted. This isn't too far removed from how WoW was at release. I was a maintank and helped out with raids in Vanilla WoW for a strong raid guild. I had to gear people up. I basically had a list of what ever class BIS was for 5 mans. We went to those zones- you had to travel and while it was no epic journey like cross continent travel in Everquest- it took a lot of time. We ran the same instance repeatedly until the target gear dropped then moved on to the next one. Gearing up in 5mans was frequently a multi-week at least process. Gearing up in raids was significantly longer. If you were casual, it was going to take you a very long time to get in all blues unless you were lucky and then they wouldn't all be good blues.

2.) Guilds mattered. You can say they matter in the modern MMO, but guilds are less than a shadow of what they were. My guild in Everquest had somewhere around 100-120 active members. Raids were almost always 70+. The guild was really your attachment to the game more than anything else. I think that's why so many people go back to Everquest only to be disappointed. There were different types of guilds- cutting edge raid guilds, casual raid guilds, family guilds, PvP guilds on Rallos, recruit guilds, etc. Your guild really was the single most defining aspect of your gameplay. This really wasn't that different in Vanilla WoW. Like in Everquest, if you weren't in a guild that raided, you weren't doing any raid content that was completely outdated. The raids guilds I was in for Vanilla WoW all had well over 50 active members. It wasn't uncommon see more than 50 people logged in. You could do /who on many guilds and have too many members to list. This hasn't been the case in a long time. TBC really started the change although you could Bliz's direction shift with ZG and AQ20. By continually pushing content to be available to the greatest number of people, guilds were essentially shattered.

3.) Bugs and downtime. I don't know what people are talking about when they say WoW was down for 20 of the first 30 days or that it was completely bugged. A few years from now we're probably going to hear how WoW had a bug that infected you with AIDs, caused unwanted pregnancies, or killed your first born child. There were bugs. There weren't THAT many bugs and few if any real deal breakers. There was a tremendous amount of lag in most areas and on most servers. This is what happens when your sales and subscriptions increase at like a million every months or so and you aren't expecting it. SWTOR doesn't have a lot of "bugs." Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't feel that the stutter bug is so much of a "bug" as it is a design flaw. I guess it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but there was nothing like this in WoW Vanilla. There were issues. They were FAR less irritating issues. Latency issues are very frustrating, but at the same time, very understandable. Ability delay not due to delay is very frustrating and not earily forgivable.

4.) Add Ons, UI, Macros. All of these were in WoW at release. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. I used Satrina's combat parser far in advance of BWL to parse out a single roll hit table. It would be a complete and total nightmare to do this in SWTOR. Even if you don't like the ability to use macros for abilities (which honestly, I do mind to some extent), you should want them for superior targeting options. I'm a minimalist when it comes to UIs. I think it comes from PvP roots in RZ where you had to be on your toes all the time. Playing on Illidan sure didn't help the paranoia. Seriously, how many people actually bind camera reverse (to quick check behind you)? It's very cluttered, disorganized, and takes up far too much space on the screen. I've already played more SWTOR with the default UI than I did in WoW and I played WoW for 5+ years.

5.) Far superior and greater content. This is counter intuitive to a lot of people. There's more group instances in the game. The difference is that Vanilla WoW content did not just "get cleared." Raids were a combination between careful military like planning and sychronized swimming. Those of you who did Garr with nothing but Hunter's Mark probably know what I'm talking about. First, you had to organize 40 people. This wasn't nearly as hard as people like to claim it was if you weren't in a casual guild. Second, you had to have prepared for the raid too- flasks, potions, etc. Third, you had to discuss the fight which before something was on farm status could sometimes take a while. This was also found to a large degree in 5mans albiet on a much lesser scale. You didn't just "pull." You assisted off the tank for the kill order or Hunter's Mark if you had one. CC was coordinated in advance without the use of marking for the most part. This plays into content because it made things take longer. I can do three flashpoints at least in the time it took to clear a Vanilla dungeon before grossly outgearing it. MMOs are easier. Content goes faster.

6.) Here's a big difference. Player orientation. If you don't think WoW was in tune with it's player base in Vanilla, you are just wrong. It was. It was an MMO designed by MMO players for MMO players. I hate Furor and Tigole. I played a hybrid in Everquest. You can talk about the "whiners" and "ragers" all you want. WoW was very, very largely influenced by two of the biggest of them in gaming history. Furor was banned from EQ forums. He organized server crashes when he felt Warriors were getting shafted (granted, they frequently were).

http://forums.evercrest.com/cgi-bin/...ic&f=1&t=43271

Here's a post about one of his epic tantrums.

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-r...frasiabi/#7018

Another interesting post about him.

Say what you want, but he knew the MMO genre inside and out.

Compared too Gabe Amatangelo.

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/de...Amatangelo.php

The difference here is very simple. Look at his favorite games listed:


I'm not saying he's a bad guy or isn't smart or anything like that. Furor (aka Alex Afrasiabi) was a tantrum throwing MMO addict who despite being a complete expletive has a tremendous (or at least had) wealth of information on what makes an MMO excellent. Gabe is a marketing guy- and he does that exceptionally well. It just don't think he's ever really been immersed in the gamer side of the culture. It shows.

I played WoW on release, and although it did have some bugs it didn't have nearly as many problems as SWTOR does. SWTOR problems include everything from light rays shooting through the world, becoming invincible in combat by dancing, glitching mana to have infinite healing, duping items in your mail box, all combat actions delayed by half a second, having high-res textures vanish, etc.

There is a difference between having some bugs and having a BROKEN, UNFINISHED GAME.

wow is still heavily populated dunno what ur talkin about. i play both and even got ppl comin from this game saying how awful this is