Death by lag or any other uncontrollable problems

Precisely right, if you ask me. I think the thing with Blizzard is that they don't really care that much about WoW any more. They can make a lot more money with a lot less investment (money/resources/time/effort) via other games in their arsenal. WoW is old and huge and takes a lot to make it good. They are coasting on this flagship game now. I expect it to go "free to play" (or more accurately pay to win) before too long. They want in on those easy cash shop profits, so I expect that to expand while they run the rest of the game on a shoestring budget.

What little quality content Blizzard does provide these days is stretched to its limits too, so I doubt they will spend much on care/maintenance... as little as they can get by with.

 

To be honest what you say is probably right, and if that IS the case then I would rather just let the games die a dignified death, and not see them be dragged on and on when the game developers don't care about them anymore. Having said that, some of these older games still have millions of loyal players, and when gamers are loyal to a game and for so long, the least we should be able to expect is a bit of loyalty the other way as well.

 

Oh, I definitely agree with you. In fact, it made me a bit angry. I had invested a lot of time, money, loyalty, into WoW (like millions of others) only to watch it become something completely different.

I love WoW, and I probably always will, but it's sad to me. Now, if they ever release legacy servers, I'm there. I'd play the heck out of that again. I'd even be willing to pay for another copy of the original version, since they would apparently have to redo it.

 

This happened to me back in the days when I was still playing MMORPG games in cafes. Most kids would play videos on Youtube and all of the people playing the same game I am playing would suddenly get mad including me of course. You're in a middle of a boss fight when suddenly everything freezes and once everything is okay, your character is lying on the floor. the best part is, all of the experience you have gained for 3 to 4 days of playing the game hardcore style went down the drain. You would spend the next 3 days rgaining the lost experience.

 

I've done the dying during boss lag thing. I've also suffered some resets when I've been playing an MMORPG. Thankfully, I've never lost that amount of time in a game yet. I'd be a bit frustrated if I lost 3-4 whole days of game time and had to go back. That's a lot of wasted time and effort in an MMORPG. You might have leveled a few times by them or got some great gear or earned a lot of gold. Yeah, it's just a game, and you can mostly get those things back eventually, but you can't get that time back.

 

Absolutely true, I can live with not having to kill the boss and not acquiring a rare item, but experience reset is a different thing. At a time I when I was still playing RF online, once you reach level 35, it would take you hours of killing monsters just to get 5 percent experience. Being in level 45 to 47 is a different story. Killing monsters for a whole day might just give you around 5 percent, and if you die, you would lose around 10 percent of your experience.

 

Ouch. That would totally suck. It seems like a lot of MMORPGs are set up that way, although I question it. The early levels seem to fly by, yet later, when you're starting to burn out a bit on leveling, the levels take forever to get anywhere. I get that they want to encourage new players to keep going, but I think they could create a better balance. I'd be annoyed if I lost a lot of hard-earned experience.

 

The way that a lot of MMORPG's are set when it comes to the difficulty as been an issue right from the start as far as I'm concerned, and you are right when you say they go from being too easy to ridiculously hard all of a sudden.

I'm sure that we all like a challenge but sometimes the latter levels can be almost impossible, and it seems that the game developers start to run out of ideas so just make it a lot harder as if that's the challenge, rather than the actual level or the game itself.

 

I do agree that the developers must balance the experience rate in the game. I remember when the highest level was just level 47, we had a hard time to reach level 30. but when the max level was around level 55, you can reach level 30 with full stats in just 2 weeks. Once you reach level 47, you would be having a hard time gaining experience.

 

In WoW you can gain the early levels in literally minutes. The later ones take forever.

I do like a challenge, but not the artificial challenge of grinding. I get bored then. I want real challenge, complexity, and that should be rewarded with high experience gains in my opinion. If others want to grind it out, fine. Just throw in some tougher challenges that grant more XP as well.

 

I do agree, like slaying a pit boss must give you and your party tons of experience since it isn't easy taking one down. Aside from that, hunting for a rare item which you can also use would also be a good mission, it would give you a big experience and a rare item at the same time.

 

I agree with that. I'm afraid we've wandered off topic though. Maybe we should start a new thread to talk about the leveling experiences and whatnot in MMORPGs.

As for dying to lag and stuff like that, it's happened to me countless times. What other issues have you had that are associated with lag? Was the issue on on your end or an issue with the game itself?

 

Sorry for that, well back in the days when internet connection was not as good as what we have today, my character always dies due to poor connection. Since I was playing in cafes where a lot of people use the internet, just two or three customers watching videos online would cause my game to lag.

 

In a way I think that's where the problem lay, but luckily the technology and internet connection that we have available today is far better than what we are used to, and also a lot more advanced than what the actual games are used to also so we will very rarely have to suffer from this sort of problem again.

There will still be times when a game will lag or throw you out completely, but where it used to be a regular occurrence, it happens to me maybe once a week, and that's only if I'm unlucky so it's certainly not something that I tend to worry about much now.

 

At one point, I'm sure some of my issues were due to my connection. When I was going wireless, it was a problem. Once hardwired, much of it cleared up.

There are, however, times when the problem may not be on your end. Lots of people would have lag and d/c issues right after a new patch. This sucks, especially in an MMORPG when you're playing with others and they're counting on you. The game makers would always say it was nothing on their end. Then, later things would suddenly improve even though users hadn't changed anything. Hmm.