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I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player p

by ecdavis 11y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems as though there were ~20 players in each of the zones he visited and 91 zones in total. 91 * 20 = 1820. Are player populations much higher than that on WoW servers? I was under the impression there were ~3000 active players per server at any given time. Evenly dispersing players over the world is a pretty big design consideration when it comes to MMOs. When I played WoW I would actively seek out zones with fewer players in order to level up.

toxican 11y ago
WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of loot and exp depending on how much you helped. And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all. That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.
- danneu 11y ago
  > And because of all that, there's just zero incentive > to quest in WoW with other people. The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game. Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.
  - toxican 11y ago
    Other people have no reason to group with you though. Everyone is perfectly content doing their own thing and will often outright decline party invites. The only place this was ever not the case was on Mist's daily island. I would hardly call auto-grouping dumbing down. It's a passive thing that helps put the "Massive Multiplayer" back in MMO, which is something WoW has been lacking outside of capital cities for years now.
    - danneu 11y ago
      They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin looting for non-quest drops, etc. Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`. What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions from players including the decision to party with someone or not. But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel. I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from different places.
zorked 11y ago
I believe these days WoW merges underpopulated zones so those ~20 players per zone are across a bunch of servers while ~50 players in a zone may be all in one server.
- zanny 11y ago
  It was much worse two years ago before they started having unpopulated zones merge between servers. It was extremely common, especially on low population realms, to find entire chunks of continents unpopulated at all, and that would be on a server with five thousand people on it - they were just all in capital cities or instances.

by ecdavis 11y ago

toxican 11y ago

WoW handles questing/grouping terribly, imo. GW2 (and maybe GW1? Never played it) does auto groups where if you jump in and help someone kill those 20 bandits, you get credit toward your quest for that. Whereas in WoW, if someone hits the bandit first, and you help, they get all of the credit. So there's zero reason why anyone should help anyone at all. And there's also the issue of loot. I can't count how many times I've been in active WoW zones (I'm thinking Westfall, here)and a group of 5 or 6 people are trying to snipe kills off eachother to get that last bore snout or whatever. In GW2, if you helped kill it, you get the exact same loot as anyone else. And to help prevent lazy assholes who do one shot, then sit back and wait, you get varying levels of loot and exp depending on how much you helped. And because of all that, there's just zero incentive to quest in WoW with other people. Maybe you'll have a guildie or friend quest with you, but you're just not interacting with strangers at all. That being said, we have seen Blizz go in that direction in the last two expansion. The daily island was largely dependent on team work (albeit through the archaic manual group forming functionality) and there are a lot of rare mobs in Warlords that share kills/loot with anyone who inflicts damage. So hopefully that'll become the norm going forward.

danneu 11y ago
> And because of all that, there's just zero incentive > to quest in WoW with other people. The issues you outline are all solved by forming a party (thus a relationship) with strangers which is the crux of the game. Auto-forming a party just because two players are attacking the same kobold in the world sounds like the kind of dumbing-down that plagues WoW, like the early death of spontaneous world PvP.
- toxican 11y ago
  Other people have no reason to group with you though. Everyone is perfectly content doing their own thing and will often outright decline party invites. The only place this was ever not the case was on Mist's daily island. I would hardly call auto-grouping dumbing down. It's a passive thing that helps put the "Massive Multiplayer" back in MMO, which is something WoW has been lacking outside of capital cities for years now.
  - danneu 11y ago
    They have a reason to group with you for the reasons provided above: quest-item sharing, XP sharing + party bonus, crush quests faster, round-robin looting for non-quest drops, etc. Forming parties is necessary for optimal play and I never had an issue with forming them. If someone else is in the cave smacking the same quest rats you are, then it was common to send/receive an unsolicited party invite, then split the party as you split ways with a `/wave`. What about the RPG in MMORPG? It's too easy to relinquish all social decisions from players including the decision to party with someone or not. But then again, maybe people don't communicate as much in WoW anymore and zone spontaneity is dead and Blizzard removed the LFG (Looking For Group) channel. I haven't played since vanilla WoW. I'm sure the game is much different now that the 1-60 experience isn't part of the game anymore, so we're coming from different places.

zorked 11y ago

I believe these days WoW merges underpopulated zones so those ~20 players per zone are across a bunch of servers while ~50 players in a zone may be all in one server.

zanny 11y ago
It was much worse two years ago before they started having unpopulated zones merge between servers. It was extremely common, especially on low population realms, to find entire chunks of continents unpopulated at all, and that would be on a server with five thousand people on it - they were just all in capital cities or instances.