Missing the good old days

_Aphrael_ - Sanctuary wrote: »

Am i the only one who longs for the way the game used to be. When i first started playing the highest lvl player on sanctuary was only lvl96.

so only one with access to high level gear/weapons e.g. oht/tt90

Hypers didnt exist, BH didnt exist, FC and nirvana didnt exist lol even the tideborn didnt exist.

sounds like a grindfest

Yes every quest had you killing 30-80 of the same mob for only 15-60k exp and yes there was a lot of grinding but there were hundreds of people doing the same quests. You left west archo to do the dozen quests beween there and the mines and there were so many players there you couldnt find any mobs to kill.

and not being able to find a mob to kill is fun because,,,?

I am not saying all the new additions are bad, i quite liked nirvana when it 1st came out,i was working on my TT99 armour and it gave me another level to work for afterwards.

For me the whole thing started to go south when the 1st packs were released, as soon as the best luck tokens appeared gold went form around 120-150k each up to over a million in a few weeks

I find it hard to believe that considering that gold was around 500k even after tigers (in DW)

and then they bought out rank 9 and made it possible to buy rep in the boutique. Up until then if you had the best gear you had worked hard for it and you knew how to play the game.

do you really believe that? Just because something is not in the boutique doesn't mean that you cant buy it with RL coins. People had r8 before the rep sale, and warsoul weapons when it costed ~6bil and g15 sets. How did people were buying raps/cannies? My theory is that you (and me and everyone that longs for the good old days) were simply low level and nubish enough to not notice the well geared cashopers. plus, pwi already moves towards that direction with r9rr; even if you buy the molds you still have to run a crapload of WS; something that you can't avoid unless you hire someone to play your toon which is way harder than just buying all the 3-3 golds

Plus it was a difficult game the 1st dozen times i took a 6man squad in to TT3-3 we got slaughtered and we enjoyed it, now people just solo it.

and I personally enjoy it. soloing FC I mean. it's way harder to solo it than be a DD behind a kitty. and in the meantime we have other unsoloable instances

In my opinion it should never be possible for an endgame instance to be soloed regardless of how powerful you are.

3-3 is not endgame. it was endgame back when tt99 gear wasn't an oneshot and caused people to mark you as a cashopper.

I would bet that PWE would gain thousands of loyal customers who have never played the game before if they put up a few servers with the game the way it was back then. Keep the tideborn and the earthguard but get rid of hypers(or make them so that once activated they cannot be turned off so they work when you are grinding mobs for an hour). Get rid of FC and roll back nirvana to how it was when first released. Make the quests somewhere between the two extremes by keeping the exp they give now but making them 20-30 kills required.

nirvana wasn't changed, FC was. how about oracles? you do know that people used to spam them like crazy to powerlevel super fast right?

Rant Ends and i am curious how many people would join me if they made such a server.

definitely not me. perhaps killing mob after mob is fun for some people but even if I grinded my way to lvl40 there is no way in hell I would have kept playing without BH and eventually FC after 85.

nom nom

I started playing when server opened on DW and about 6 months before that in MY-EN and Sanctuary.
Yes, there was a lot of population in the game. The bases of this game, the concept, the implemented ideas were quite ahead of their time. At core this game was simply spectacular for 2009.
but that's the very important detail here: 2009

Everyone that played back then feels a bit nostalgic about those times. Gold at 90-110k, squads forming everywhere and for everything, people just had tons of fun.

But times change. Gaming world changes. 4 year is an eternity.

I see here people asking for vanilla servers and stuff. That will never happen, and not because of the fact that the server would not be populated but for the simple fact that it would be absolutely unplayable. Why? Bots and **** that work on those old versions. Exploits we know now about we didn't know back then. Fixing all those, bringing them up to date would require a MASSIVE amount of work and would not make any kind of economic sense.

On top of that, lets make a parallel with cars: Who does not like classic muscle cars? or the classic european supercar of the 80s? Charger, Challenger, Mustang and then over the pond Lamborghini and Ferrari... Even if you never driven one, somewhere deep inside your soul there is a place for them and a secret desire to someday drive one. And wouldn't be that awesome?
But, would you use any of those cars for your daily 50 miles or more commute? Would you still want to drive today a Ford Model T? I doubt it.

2009 was a time when grinding was the norm in MMOs. Now it's not. Times have changed and we need to accept and change with them. No modern MMO (and look at everything launched in the past 2 years) lets the player spend more than 2 to 3 weeks to reach level cap. There is midgame content but the bulk and the focus of the development is endgame. Always was and always will be because that's where money is, and that's where 90% of the playerbase is.
And one other thing, even doing 2-3 big rooms/day + other dailies, lets say a 3h play time, it will take more than a month to reach 100. Try it. I did, recently.

The vanilla PWI was great. Lets keep it in our memories, and be happy and proud we could actually be a part of it. But in gaming years, it's ancient history.

I agree totally with the OP post and the barb that post below the OP is a *** and really don't know what the hell he is talking about,but hey we need trolls.I wish we could have a classic server I would fold up all my stuff I currently have now to go back to the way it used to be.b:victory

Some time ago I read about a study which reported that ~95% of all memories about childhood of old people are wrong (they checked memories vs facts). If this is true, the brain of many people which play MMOs/PWI seems to get older way faster than it should be on average.

Too many kids (mainly kids between 15 and 30) were/are legends in their own mind.
On lost city server we call it the "Pandora-effect". Some simple minded folk does even support this course of a disease. I blame facebook for this lol.

I'm one of those PWI dinosaurs, like some friends call me, that started playing this game about a month after it was released in NA.

Personally what I miss is the friendly community PWI used to have. I remember people being more helpful, not as greedy as they are now. Of course scammers, greedy people, idots existed from the very beginning but it just feels like the overall playerbase was simply nicer than it is now.

Even back then people found ways to powerlevel, cash shoppers had the advantage, BOTs existed, glitches were abused etc. I just don't see it much different now than it was back then but I can definitely say it's worse. However I know that back then I just played with friends, did my quests and explored the game and the areas I've never been through. I didn't care about PvP whatsoever, I wasn't very competitive and I just didn't care about what happens outside my bubble of friends.

Another thing that someone mentioned is that this game is getting quite old. It's simply losing its appeal to a lot of people and its losing out to the newer games out there. Newer games have more interesting mechanics and features, new ways of gameplay.

There's not much left to add to this game. The way it is designed, or rather changed by Wanmei, doesn't allow for much more to be done at this point. The game would need a massive overhaul but in that case they might as well just make a new game, though I'd have loved to see a PW re-make.

It`s fine as it is now, if I had to squad for every single thing... *shrugs*

and we need to accept and change with them. No modern MMO (and look at everything launched in the past 2 years) lets the player spend more than 2 to 3 weeks to reach level cap. There is midgame content but the bulk and the focus of the development is endgame. Always was and always will be because that's where money is, and that's where 90% of the playerbase is.

Seriously? I HATE MMOs that have such a short window from level 1 to level cap. I don't even like the ones that you can reach endgame in 6 months to a year. Games that focus mainly on endgame, I find a total bore. I guess because I deplore PvP, but again, thats mainly due to the fact the majority of brainless, egotistical twits tend to be PvP (which I find quite comical that they have "skills" with sitting at a computer pressing keys. Yeah, skillfully inept is more like it)

Jarkhen - Archosaur wrote: »

ITT: more overhyped nostalgia

It's never as good as you remember it being.

Not always true when it comes to gaming. I still remember Dec, 1999, entering for the first time in my first MMO, and being slaughtered by snowballs thrown by a level 5 snowman and laughing my a$$ off about it. I still remember many times in that game that bring back fond memories.

I also remember a few fond memories in PWI, though now any possible memories are basically nonexistent. Then again I am a PvE player, and PvE players tend to enjoy the road meandering slowly to endgame, exploring the pixellated world, more than endgame which tends to be more PvP focused. And as I have said before, I hate PvP

I have very fond memories of running the old style FC. Other than that, I can't say that I miss a lot.

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Very well said.

Over the last year I've honestly become disheartened over the future of this game. It's clear that the current servers aren't fixable without pissing off a huge chunk of the population, and that's not a hit this game can take anymore. It used to be possible, a year or two ago, but things aren't looking too rosy for PWE these days. They have no choice now but to cater to the same types of people they enticed into buying their endgame gears four years ago. Too bad those types are never, ever sustainable. At best they're just walking wallets - quick to spend unreasonable amounts of money and then get bored and leave. But you won't get a steady influx of those forever.

The smart thing to do would've been to cater more to the average spender... creating a large base of loyal customers who spend regularly in modest amounts. That would've been much more sustainable than what we have today. Sadly, the F2P games market tends not to follow a sustainable philosophy. It's quite often the same formula: design and code a midly-interesting game. Throw up a bunch of ads to attract players. Sell shiny pixels for lots of money that ruin the game over time. The close the servers, and laugh all the way to the bank. Rinse and repeat.

And what gets to me the most is that PWI had potential. Its original predecessor was P2P, and it came with all the solid design and themes you'd expect from a good P2P game. You could tell that the original devs put a lot of thought and care into designing it, and there were plenty of openings for CS items which didn't break it. In short, PWI had all the ingredients to become the most successful and sustainable F2P game on the market, and therefore to challenge the belief that F2P games are just quick-burning cash grabs. Unfortunately, wanmei and PWE didn't seem to have much interest in bucking that trend.

Really, the only thing that will save PWI at this point is making a new (official) server without all the broken ****, and letting people play both versions. People will gravitate towards the new servers over time, and eventually, the CS on the new servers will pick up the slack left by the big spenders on the old servers.

Exactly this. I think had PWE focused more on non gameplay affecting cash shop items, the longevity would have increased. As I see it now, PWI is losing more players than it is gaining. And that is sad. The game had excellent potential.

Think of it like this. You have a cup that is 3/4 full (playerbase at its peak), you set the cup on a stand, poke 1 hole in the bottom, but turn the faucet on so for every drop from the bottom, one is replenished.

Add packs, rank in boutique, r9, so now another hole is poked in the bottom because many either thought the inclusion of those items created a strong imbalance, or were way too pricey so people began to give up and left. Slowly the cup leaks more water than its taking in. Eventually its half full.

An expansion comes about, tape over one hole, and for a time water entering matches water leaving, but the cup is still half full. It's not more than it was...expansion gets boring, remove tape. Make the game focus so much to endgame, hypers, skipping all content and poke another hole in the bottom. Eventually you will have a cup with no water. Right now, compared to a year ago, the cup that was half full, is barely a quarter full.

WC during euro hours is all but dead, and only during a few hours during peak NA times is it busy, but that tends to be all BH100 squad requests, low levels wanting heads, high levels selling heads, or PvPers acting like complete idiots.

If I was a gamer dying of thirst, it would be better to find a fresh cup without holes rather than PWE poking more holes in the gaming cup.

No i wouldn't join you on that server because that sounds really boring :DD!!

1. Will never happen so don't even dream
2.Grind fest games die off really easily and people go and play a better game
3.Dont like it dont play it
4.dont like csing dont do it
5.dont like soloing dont do it
6.??????
7.PROFIT

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Quiet, little one, the adults are talking now. ;]

thats the date when you join the forums, ive been here a long time.

I've been playing PW for 6 or 7 years. With breaks, of course, but still I was there when there wasn't even PWI. I played on a Malaysian PvP server (there were only 2, I can't remember the names though). Which includes dealing with those horrible lags. I was there when Holy Hall of Dusk was the only hi-lv instance (that's PWI's Twilight Temple, younglings).
I levelled when noone could dream of hypers, lucidsilver/gold chests, dreamchasers, supply packs, elders' blessings. There were no genies and the only thing which was flying around you was a 89 culti fairy/hamburger - and people with those were one of the best. People with 99 fairies were all well known on the server and, well, they WERE the top players.
Rank 8 was something very few people could achieve. There weren't Wraith badges, there were only those **** wedding candies (after weddings got introduced, of course). I remember the server's top guild(WarLord)'s leader, NeoNe0 being the first to ever get R8 equipment. Some time later WarLord held the ENTIRE map. Everything was bloody red and noone could hope for a single territory, because there were no resets.
I remember when there were only 2 sets of smilies - regular ones and piggy. Bears were the third ones and we use them right here, on these forums.

I could continue on that matter, but... Why? I miss some of the things, especially that there were no sins. But I honestly think if these times were suddenly brought back here, only a few people would stay. I suppose their attutude changes and there are more people attracted to the modern state of the game than people who wish to play the old version.
I've never done FC in my life. Thank you.

PS: There was also PW-MS - multilanguage service, which was en european version. It waned completely. Still missing my EA (that's Elf Archer) and the effort I put into getting dozens of bronze and silver dragon tablets for my dark purple pony. QQ

Edit: why is it saying I joined in Sep 2013? Give me a break, my acc is 5 years old on PWI.

Selak - Dreamweaver wrote: »

It must be a wrong memory then when I think MMORPGs were meant to be a grindfest and you HAD to WORK for achievements.

I must have missed the memo where MMORPGs became MOBA/FPS and where everything is given to you so you can get to end game ASAP.

Eh... news flash for you... this is no longer 2009. While its true that some grind will always be part and parcel of MMO's, if you think that today's gaming culture will accept taking 6 months to a year of "grind" just to get to end game, you are either naive or clueless (or both).

Perhaps that level of grind may still be acceptable in certain Asian markets. But any MMO with plans to make it big in the NA market would be courting financial disaster if they tried to go that route.