this is probably going to be just me ranting a lot and might not make very much sense, but I just felt like talking about it, because it's been getting on my nerve recently and i'd love to just let it all out. i'm not gonna lie, ever since i heard about the idea of an mmorpg, i've been fascinated my whole life. i've always wanted to be in an epic & difficult raid against giant monsters with fifty to maybe even a hundred people! i've also always wanted to explore those big huge worlds with people and get a quest to go save a princess in a deadly guarded tower! granted yes of course i got a little disappointed finding out how difficult it is for developers to get every detail right in MMORPGS. whether it'd be combat style, leveling style, quest setup, trying to adjust difficulty for both casuals and hardcores... ect. and there's other things outside the game programming itself that can bother me a lot. obviously the first game that i thought of was to try WoW. I started off creating my character, which is always one of my most favorite parts in a fantasy mmo! most games, your only choice is to be a human. and everything being about humans. ugh. this game threw magic into my heart when there were mystical races such as dwarfs, elves, orcs, undead, goblins! so many cool options to pick from! and each of them having a unique starting area to start your adventure! The leveling system is basically doing quests, which at first sounded like a blast. Later on in the game though, you notice that they tend to overwhelm you with objectives to do. you end up holding like 3-6 quests when i really prefer having just 1-2 quests at a time, but i guess its manageable. usually the task is just straight forward and you no longer want to read quest text anymore. I learned that older (vanilla as they call it) warcraft, the text would slowly write itself like someone was writing on a paper. you can't really continue until it finished, so you went ahead and read it anyway while you waited. very clever and I am not sure why they removed that. to make thing even more interesting, the map didn't tell you where the objective was/suppose to take place in. instead the quest text usually contains the quest giver trying to describe where it was. like "southwest near the frozen lake" kind of thing. and that sounds a LOT funner and more interesting, for I now have to adventure and find that frozen lake on my own! also another mysterious change, for some reason i noticed while i was leveling in newer WoW, i seem to have gotten to a point where I am very over leveled for the zone i'm questing in. and i guess i had to switch to a new zone because it just had better experience and armor for me. very odd because in vanilla, this wasn't an issue, and you could explore every area to it's fullest. It makes me cringe a little on Blizzard's decisions and I start to wonder why this is. to be honest, i haven't got the foggiest. but then i get the appropriate level for dungeons. They too also seem to have quests, and give even MORE experience. I soon realize, that i have to now skip 2 ENTIRE ZONES! weird! odd! strange! i'd love to know the full stories of those zones, but i kinda don't even want to now because I have to focus on getting to maximum level. If the game was designed more properly, i could be doing both dungeons and zones and not have to skip anything. then again, blizzard thought otherwise, because they just wanted leveling to be faster, and to have full focus on endgame. leveling is now just overwhelming and rather tedious, so why have it at all? for casuals? I know for a fact they (for some reason) enjoy this nightmare of game design. hell, the dungeons aren't even all that hard. I ALSO learned that vanilla WoW, you didn't have to lazily queue up and just teleport to the dungeon, you got to go explore and find the dungeon entrance, and when you did, you brought friends and walked inside that majestic portal as fear ran through your spine. because i hear that vanilla dungeons required you to be more careful, not pull to many monsters, sneak around corners, find that boss and slay it! and get some amazing gear to help you level through that tough world. and then when you finally get to endgame, your adventure only gets more AWESOME, when you get to do a BIG, HUGE, HARD, MOTHA FUCKING RAID, BABY! sounds amazing! why did they bash leveling so hard? many developers state that the game isn't about leveling anymore, and that it's all about raiding/endgame now. so... WHY THE HELL IS IT STILL THERE? to keep all that work you've already put effort into? to have a less dis-interesting world where we just grind dungeons because the questing was shit on? absurd! sadly newer WoW has to adjust to casuals, because a business has to make money i guess. :( I still wish they just kept their focus audience for people who want to play a fucking video game instead of having to mindlessly do chores to get to endgame. money>community i guess now. and it sucks because mmo's nowadays don't really have a choice. you're just soloing and stressing yourself out instead of helping/assisting each other in hard tasks. it's a fucking mmorpg for christ's sake. isn't it designed for massive MULTIPLAYER? instead you have unorganized queues with assholes refusing to play and raids being easier just because of that. just to have something for casuals to adore. hell, casuals complain about "not having enough time" for some stupid bullshit. how the hell did you get max level then? where did you get the time to get that gear? how much time did you spend getting those mounts? I claim absolute bullshit. MMO's are time consuming. that's what they are DESIGNED to do! companies shouldn't need to make a game easy just to pretend like it's gonna save alot of time. because it's not! a game should be challenging, fun, full of magic and wonder, and companies just SHIT on that. to be fair, mmo's are quite pricy. you have to pay and maintain huge super-servers to handle everyone. I think there are alternatives they could have done though. just have players run their own instances, have a guy in your guild with a really good inet run your raid, ect. we could just have a forum or some shit to meet people and adventure in the world together, instead of needing to make millions upon millions of dollars just to maintain these pesky servers! and i'm sure there are people out there who play on classic servers of mmo's, back when developers gave a damn. but the problem i have with that is, you'll be playing the same content for the rest of your days. you will always be raiding that same fucking boss, you will be pressing those same fucking buttons for a long while until the game burns you out. it sucks really. I also wished that someone invented some better combat for mmorpgs, action maybe. there have been many articles on why hotbar/20 abilities combat really isn't all that great. hell, you're eyes are always on that damn hotbar instead of getting to watch the fight. it kinda sucks really. to finish this off, I don't really give 2 flying fucks about PvP. that's an entirely different concept that doesn't need to be in the same game. it just cuts a huge line through your entire community and separates it. there are many fantasy games out there, that are solely designed for the PvP community and really isn't necessary at all. you can have a dual system or something small like that if you feel like fucking another player up, but that's just my opinion on that. I would love to have the whole community be excited to raid together with no raid cap on how many people you can have! I would love to quest with a non overwhelming non grindy non bullshit experience! I would love to fight a dragon with 100 people! I would love to get amazing gear that looks incredible and improves my skills! I would love to play a game with a humongous population of people! I would love to create a character with options of so many races and species! I would love to play a game that has that magic and wonder i've always wanted my whole life! I would love to spend months and years on one absolutely phenomenal MMORPG!

cool