bill0527 said:Instead of coming up with new and creative ideas for people to do once they hit max level, he just basically copied and pasted the Everquest end-game template.
Just an honest question here. What kind of ideas do you think would work here?
While there are certainly a lot of aspects from EQ in the game - especially on the raiding side of things, but there are quite a few other activities to do as well. Its always good to have options. IMO, WoW has really blended a greater variety of things together much better than any other MMORPG to date.
Most normal games I play I am happy with 20-30 hours worth of gameplay. In WoW you are talking about hundreds of hours of gameplay just to get to 60, then you go into the thousands of hours if you talk about the "end game" activities. If you take a less cynical approach, its actually amazing that WoW entertains people for as long as it does without becoming stale But intrinsic in any kind of long term game like this are timesinks because there is simply no way you can create enough content for people to play through on a regular basis. Especially considering that so many of these people play an extreme amount of hours a week. How you approach the end game is very much dependent on the type of person you are and what you enjoy. Most people who continue to play WoW (or any MMORPG) for long periods of time usually do it for the social and/or competitive aspect of it. Raiding can be a semi-challenging activity that you can enjoy while hanging out with your friends for instance. Its a big reason why a lot of the end game type things start to focus on more group based things rather than solo activities. Since a single player RPG will have better gameplay than a MMORPG, it makes sense to me for a company like Blizzard to not try to duplicate that kind of experience and go in a different direction.
One thing for sure though, eventually EVERY game you play will get old no matter what game it is and it will be time to move on. That definitely doesn't mean the game sucks, it just means its time for something new. It always blows my mind how someone will play WoW for like 50 days, then go on to proclaim how bad the game is - hello, it entertained you for over 1000 hours! What kind of expectations do people have for these games? Blizzard may have some good devs, but they aren't GODs!