I have been brooding on a long post about these games for a while now. Several of my friends don't quite understand why I'm into these games so much, and sometimes I have trouble understanding it myself. But let's face it: hobbies (whether it be MMORPGs, geocaching, larp, costume-making or tinkering with electronics) become more interesting when they are challenging and complicated.RPGs have always appealed to me because they are games that require more intelligence than they require hand-eye coordination and quick reflexes, and less strategy than real war- and strategy games. I may be smart, but my coordination is not all that good, and I have no strategic insight whatsoever. I'm not going to try to explain my fascination with video games in general, because it's just there and it always has been. Being a hero on a screen is fun. 

RPGs combine the fun of being the hero who saves the world with a character progression system that gives you the option to choose which powers to learn and make a hero that feels unique and yours. And MMORPGs have both these qualities and the added fun of playing with your friends and/or in a team.

Now I have tried quite a number of MMORPGs and this morning I saw a news article about a new boss in Final Fantasy XI that was so incredibly hard, that after a group of people had wailed away at it for almost 18 hours they still hadn't beaten it. It incited a horrendous rant in me about how impossible that game is, a rant which I have added at the end of this post at the *. fub once remarked to me that a game is supposed to be fun and sometimes stories about MMORPGs really sound like work. He's right. Final Fantasy XI is hard work from the beginning to the end and that's why I will never be trying that again, no matter how much the pretty graphics and Square-Enix's quality try to lure me back.

I quit playing FFXI when World of Warcraft was released and I was so relieved to find that game to be much more fun and much less work. I made a sidetrip to Guildwars when Paco was really into it, and I met Plym and Theo there, the only friends I ever made over the internet, so that was good. But GW too was imho too much grind and not enough fun. I made a vow to myself to never grind again and I returned to WoW.

WoW kept me amused for a long time until our guild Nuts kind of fell apart and I started looking around for other games again. I strayed to Dungeons & Dragons Online (which was pretty much a really big let down on all accounts), I tried out Ryzom and met the people of The Second Sun, who took me out to try Vanguard too. DDO had a really small game world that had me bored with the same dungeons over and over within a week or two. Ryzom was the greatest innovative game I had ever seen with its class-less system and its creative crafting, but to play it I would have to break my no-grinding-vow and I just wasn't prepared to do that. Vanguard was pretty, but it just didn't seem to be able to keep my attention. I wanted to play with my friends again.

We started Crossfire and that brought me back to WoW. I was happy to see that this game just had all the things I was missing in those other just-not-good-enough-games; a huge game world and an easy way to travel around it, a working economy that makes crafting and trade with other players interesting and fun, the option to play casually by yourself for a while without having to spend hours to get anything done, and with Crossfire the fun of a challenging activity in a team. 

I have been playing WoW ever since the start, and I have no desire to do any real end-game raiding, because I think it would turn the game into work with the obligations and all, so I was getting a bit bored again. Then Age of Conan was released and I couldn't contain my curiosity. As far as I have been able to see now, AoC has all the good things WoW has, with as added plus the great graphics, and minus the working economy because there is something wrong with the crafting system, which I will explain at the **.

So that's my lengthy explanation about why I love MMORPGs so much. Any questions or remarks are welcome.


*I'm going to be frank here (and probably get my head bashed in, but wth) but everything about FFXI is scary and painful! Any mob in this game that be killed by yourself, doesn't yield any xp.

The only way to level up is to get a full group (and my god people are picky! No group would take my Warrior/Monk, because Ninja/Warriors were so much better tanks, but guess what? I don't have money coming out of my ass!) and find a safe place in an area that's much too dangerous for your character alone, then pull one much too dangerous mob at the time and kill it with the full group. If anyone made just one mistake, the mob (and/or the adds) would kill the entire group and people would get really upset at each other the because the experience penalty of death is just not funny and the res point is nowhere near.

And at later levels, it just keeps getting worse, because certain skills require very specific techniques (yes I played a rogue, and I spent three weeks in the altepa desert, having to explain how to position the party to make Sneak Attack and Backstab work properly) and specific enemies require people to perform their special attacks in a specific order to get the desired effect, which meant that once you had finally found a full party, another hour would be spent on argueing over which mobs to pull and which skills to use in which order.

Nothing in this game can be done without spending hours and hours of hard work, mostly in six man groups. I really wonder how the producers of that game could ever think they created something fun; I think it's torture!


**In AoC you can start harvesting resources in the wild after you have left the beginner's area, which means around level 20. The first big mistake the makers of the game made was the fact that everyone can learn to gather every kind of resources, which basically means that no one needs to buy resources. The only reason to buy them from other players is because you have money to spare and don't feel like going out there to gather the resources yourself. So there is virtually no demand for resources, and that makes the prices drop.

The second mistake they made was that you can't start crafting anything until you're level 40, which means that everyone who is under level 40 and has gathered resources has no use for them except save them up for later, or sell them, which makes the prices drop even further.

The third mistake was made with some decisions concerning item drops in the game. Originally items and equipment could be sold again after use, but that mistake was soon corrected. (I still think they should have given it a different name than soulbound to make it less obvious that they stole the idea and more fitting to Hyboria, but at least it's fixed.) Still, the drops are ill-managed. Some special monsters, like the bosses in the destiny quests, always drop the same item when killed. 

The demon in the level 30 destiny quest always drops a very cool magical shield. Which is cool, but not very well-thought through. Let me explain. Every character needs to kill this demon, so every character will receive this shield. But of all twelve classes, only two or three actually use shields, which means that the rest of them can't use it, and they will try to put the shield up for sale. But no one wants to buy it, because everyone gets it as a drop. See my point?

I still have hope that these mistakes will be fixed, because AoC is still a work-in-progress but it's a pretty serious flaw in the game economy.