@@IstasPumaNevada Yeah I appreciate that although it's not Woolie's thing AT ALL, he'll listen with interest/horror because it's just kind of a fascinating topic.
@@Some__Guy the entire point there is "do whatever you want, just don't bother people with your bullshit". Which is an equally admirable and hilarious thing to witness.
yea...sometimes its really grating though. I'll still remember his RE6 playthrough as one of the worst ones I forced myself to sit through. By the nth time he repeated x y z criticism my ears were already a blasted hellscape filled with powerful spite soundwaves. We get it pat the thing sucks, at least try to be nuanced.
Man I had a guild leader once who said it was "unforgivable" that Yoshi-P said people should play other games if they run out of content. When I rant about hardcore players, these are the lunatics I just. Don't. Get. I'm SO happy that FFXIV operates this way. SO happy. Because it's not a game for the obsessive, unhealthy players. It's a game for friends to just enjoy, with the priority put on building a cool and healthy community of people - some of whom can play a lot, and there's grindy or highly-challenging stuff for them to get along with primarily cosmetic rewards (like mounts or relics or ultimate glamours) OR you can just play like you'd play the new Assassin's Creed and you'll be just fine. You can enjoy it as a single-player game with new shit coming out every few months. And the game is set up that casuals can play with hardcore players, and not only is it normal but it's INCENTIVISED through the roulettes system, so that everyone can have fun and play together well. Honestly, it is just so rare to see such wholesome, GOOD design philosophy in this modern AAA environment. There's a reason it's blown up.
Instead, Final Fantasy XIV makes those who dont like the story have to grind 300+ hours of story all the while stating that they acknowledge its a problem and one unique to XIV (As almost no other well known MMO literally forces you to play the story to get access to content you paid for e.g taking 200+ hours to reach Shadowbringers) all the while they sell the fix for last I checked, £30 per character per server. You can say XIV is a game for friends to enjoy, but when friends cant join other friends without dropping extra money on top of the expansions they paid for or face 300+ hours of forced almost exclusively single player story, that is no better than people paying raiders to skip content. Arguably its worse as its more up front and blunt with how anti consumer it is. SE knows your average joe cant drop that amount of time to play an MMO, so they monetize it and those that dont like the story but like the gameplay get to eat a fat one. Then lets not forget the metric tonne of other items sold in the in game store for no reason other than draining money out of wallets. FFXIV blew up because the MMO genre as a whole is a cess pool right now and XIV is the least maggot ridden however "Least maggot ridden" is not an achievement.
@@vargushate2763 I dont play WoW and havent for 7 years. I also boycotted Blizz since the Hong Kong situation. I also have over 177 hours on FFXIV so what I'm saying comes from actually playing the game.
@OberonFox I don't think "grind" applies to content you do once and then you're done with, though I suppose it can feel that way if you're not into story. I really don't think not giving a skip is some kind of nefarious tactic though. They WANT you to not skip the story, they want you to get invested and learn to smell the flowers a little and discourage the unhealthy "gotta get current, everything else is irrelevant" mindset. Journey not destination. We've seen countless stories of people just enjoying the journey including the series creator and that's how the game is meant to be played. Not rushed to "clear". When I was playing WoW tBC on launch, I remember my guild leader telling me to "hurry up" and hit cap and that is still crazy to me. Games are meant to be enjoyed. When I hit cap in that game, I quit to play something else. It's just an alien mindset to me and I appreciate that FFXIV is built for people like me. If you don't enjoy it, there are many other MMOs built to promote a more inherently treadmill-like playstyle where you sit at cap and grind things out. FFXIV feels like it manages to be both successfully, but it is explicitly an MMO for 'normal' people first who don't want to play a single videogame exclusively. I won't defend the massively overpriced cosmetics, but that's a whole different topic.
@@baronvonslambert Because what I said was I didnt like FFXIV's story and there are plenty of people who also dont. I didnt say I dont like any RPG's at all. If someone is like me and didnt like FFXIV's story, you are then forced to play it anyway to get access to the parts of the game you do enjoy or pay real money to skip it. Its essentially a gun to the head and being told "You MUST like our story or fuck off" even if you enjoyed the other aspects of the game. If you think that just because its an RPG that everyone must like the story or they are wrong, then you are a clown. Gameplay is also an aspect to consider as to what makes a game enjoyable to some people. FFXIV has stellar gameplay with abysmal consumer unfriendly ideas and a backwards forced story approach that outright locks you from doing what you want in favour of railroading you into doing what IT wants you to do. You dont play the game, the game plays you and if you choose to not let it play you, you dont get to play at all.
I think the stark difference here is WoW is not trying to fix it, and their President/CEO is feeding into it. Meanwhile, FF14 is looking for solutions to the problem. It's the clear design decisions and moral choices that speak to the actual intentions of the company.
Blizzard knows that if they tried to actually combat it, they'd either have to stomach more audience losses or put in actual effort to address the reasons in game that boosting has become such a prominent phenomenon and that's just too much effort to ask of them, clearly.
The problem is that it's pretty much there by design. Alex Afrasiabi is the Creative Director. He was Furor Plainsdefiler in EverQuest and one of the most infamously toxic and outspoken players of the game.
Which is funny because when you look at all the mechanics WoW has implemented to give people gear. Basically all comes back to raiding is too expensive and time consuming for what it actually gives to the players.
@@Azymyth it's toxic and crazy, but dkp for instance is something players themselves came up with, so it's a natural occurrence. Then blizzard added in-game gold buying which is unnatural and discourages interaction
@@neloverg3774 And Furor was a stringent enforcer of the system. It would come to no surprise to me if he had a hand in creating the gold buying system since it follows the line of thinking he had as a player
Crazy Talk activated again, in a way that hid just how heinous this shit is. When Pat describes WoW's raid loot as two pieces for 40 players, he was describing the game as it was 17 years ago. As WoW grew, they added more avenues for players to gear themselves. Added, past tense. That description Pat had of a system where you can just guaranteedly get an item from a raid that won't drop for you if you just ran the content enough to get enough whatever-points? That was a system in WoW at one point that was removed once the Wrath expansion ended. They added more systems to get more targeted gear in the next expansions, as well. To a one, these systems to combat bad RNG have been removed. It's not that WoW won't improve and work to fix its systems while FFXIV will, it's that blizzard activision will actively work to make the game *worse* in exchange for higher quarterly engagement, and no matter how much the players hate it, they can't bring themselves to stop engaging with it.
Atleast it looks like the players have finally caught on and ate leaving wow behind for not respecting the time they put into it. It reminds of what Pat once said about how it's not surprising that games like league of legends have the most toxic playerbase when the whole game is Designed to keep people anxious and on edge to fuel the addiction loop it generates. Some real 4d psychological torture shit that game companies pull to keep you playing their games.
@@aerodblade1601 With games in the dota genre specifically, I think its a problem with the design of the genre as a whole. I'm thinking back to when Pat did his stint in League. Almost the entire reason why people are terrible in dota-like games is because they can't leave. When faced with a situation that is bad for them, whether in real life, or in a game, the vast majority of people will elect to just leave, to extricate themselves from said situation in the least disruptive way possible. Well what happens when you remove the option to leave, but don't do anything to rectify the fact that the player isn't having fun? You get League and Dota 2. The reason why I say its a fundamental design defect in the entire genre is because the 5v5 nature of the game makes winning impossible if one player leaves, so by the very nature of the genre, you HAVE to take actions that foster shitty behavior.
I feel like this is the closest Woolie and Pat have ever been on an MMO conversation. Pat did a really good job framing it in terms Woolie was familiar or already knew and communicating that there are plenty of people that feel just like he does and still find ways to enjoy the game.
Glad you guys finally shortened the dead silent intro on these. Every time I would have youtube on autoplay in the background and one of these came up I always had to go check on it because I thought the autoplay broke or something. 20 seconds was way too long.
Same here. But for me I double tap twice but end up missing the first few words of whoever is speaking. So I have to double tap once backwards and then have to still listen to about five or six seconds of silence.
@@UCannotDefeatMyShmeat literally yes. I had a GF whose entire time endgame in FF14 was crafting armor,weapons, food, and potions for the guild we were in.
@@TurboNemesis This is already sort of happening with me. I actually like all the crafting an gathering things, and even though I'm only level 20-30 in them, I've got some equally low leveled friends who keep paying me gil to give them the HQ versions of the armors and job items they'd get through the MSQ and other quests. We're not even a free company, and I've already become the quartermaster.
I like how pats so excited to explain this to woolie like a kid explaining a cartoon he loves to there parent and just like said parent is only half paying attention and not careing I love it
"I figured that there'd be a support class that took care of that." That was the case in ff14. Originally healers had to cast stone skin/protect on everyone prepull... so encounter designs were built assuming everyone had stoneskin/protect... which defeated the purpose of it since it became less of a "buff" and more of a cost of entry. Eventually they got rid of it because it was just a hassle and a waste of a skill slot. FF11 also had the red mage problem, where a support class was TOO good and had the meta defined around them.
@@aerodblade1601 so much more pronounced. Red Mage was such an incredibly powerful, flexible class that they weren't just brought of their one good buff. They were brought along because they could do basically everything with the right multiclass setup.
The best way I've heard boosting described is that it's like buying a diploma from a diploma mill. You get a graduate who doesn't really know what they are doing and thrown into a specialized field only to fail and give up shortly after.
The WoW hole will never stop being dug. Didn't expect the Inside Job Arc of a dev selling runs but it was interesting to see, guess this means FF14 is gonna get even more people signing up.
@@aerodblade1601 It just had a ton of bought hype at launch since Amazon paid a ton of streamers to play it for a week or so. Once people played enough of it or got to max level they started dying off. It's the exact same as every MMO launch, just with more hype than it could hold. It's by no means even close to Fallout 76.
Also this comes back to a fundamental problem I have with MMOs: They are just jobs. That you pay for. It should come as no surprise that a job you have to pay for the privilege of working at will have people looking for ways to recoup their costs. And so some people have found a way to make WoW their actual job. I guess its better than working a real job.
Just wanna make a little point here: Classic WoW raids can be easily cleared without all the consumable shit. The consumable meta is a min/max speed run way of finishing raids as fast as humanly possible that arose from years of private server play as people picked the game apart to optimize their raids. Ironically, the time and gold spent on all this shit doesn't make up at all for the quicker clear times, but it's an expectation set by the community that you be fully decked out with buffs and consumables to even be in the raid party. The buffs and consumable were just supposed to be bonuses, and a lot of the issue comes down to old design mistakes, but that shit isn't actually required to clear content. The raiding community simply expects it to be able to essentially speed run any raid.
As a relatively recent wow player, I would like to say it's not that we most of us don't look down on buying/selling raids. It's just that there are enough people doing it that they have their own community now, so they can't be shamed into stopping.
11:00, former midcore raider here, just wanting to throw my two cents in. All DPS and Tanks (Depending on physical and magical for DPS too) have a mitigation debuff they can put on that is primarily used to lessen the damage of the boss's big attack, or outright make them take more damage from particular types of damage. Can be the boss's ult, or it can just be a particularly hard hitting AOE as part of a healer check.
I feel like if WoW just went all in and made it a properly supported game feature and called it like, "mercenary system" or something people would have no problem with buying runs. If Blizzard was like "yeah we added a system where players can post bounties on what bosses they need help killing and how much they're willing to pay for someone to help them" people would love it. Throw a few achievements and bounty hunter exclusive gear for the number of people helped or the amount of gold you earned that way. Players would be all over that.
This is kinda like how Destiny 2 used to have people who had businesses where they would carry players through Trials of Osiris (end game PVP where you needed 7 wins in a row to achieve highest level rewards each weekend). They would get on the paying players account and win the games for them. Bungie recently made this a ban-able offense.
So much stuff in destiny was like this, most of it being for high end stuff like crucible pinnacle weapons and raid clears, thankfully it’s not really seen anymore
The gold thing is why theft from guild banks was rife - and tbh probably still is - in WoW. But not just that. Other things happen too. Just like the Ninja looting mentioned. Consider this. If the behaviour of the average player is typically that of an untrustworthy OR opportunistic person, then guess what? Literally everyone is possible enemy in hiding. So to say the WoW community is a literal den of thieves and snakes is possibly the largest understatement I've ever made. And worse is that the system indirectly rewards ill gotten gains as there is no REAL punishment for it. You get a good guild and then some fucker will join and rock it to it's core. The guild tries to rebuild or get past it and then it goes REAL sour because the seeds of doubt are planted. Guild dies, members scatter, form new guilds and rinse and repeat. I ran guilds and someone shitty always gets in, I joined guilds and someone shitty always got in. I did this for thirteen years till I quit. The game is SO good when it's good, like the best feelings ever, but there are far too many hours spent when it isn't.
The question is why does this behavior of being an asshole destroy WoW, when it never did the same to EVE Online? In that game you're actively allowed to scam people or screw others over with no repurcussions from the devs, and it still has a community. Why? I think it's because the devs have never punished being a scummy asshole on the grounds that the game only exists on one server, so destroying your own reputation among the community is punishment enough. There are 2 real rules in EVE 1. The undock button is the PvP button 2. The most powerful ship is friendship. When a game is built only around hardcore grognards playing who treat the game like a job, then the smartest thing for you to do is form bonds among those you play with.
I don't play FF14, but the thing that makes it far better, and I do imagine its not perfect. The biggest important thing that FF14 does COMPARED to WoW is that it R E S P E C T S your time, wow does not respect your time, on all levels it does shit to waste it, or makes someone have to cost their time for everyone else doesn't have to. and no bought runs are loathed by everyone who buys that shit. getting AOTC through bought run frustrates everyone and kills the honor system of "Do you know your shit" and still makes people on edge "Is this guy actually as good as he says when we recruited him, or an absolute shitter." It's very frowned upon.
Woolie: "I have no idea how people have fun with this thing but more power to you I guess." Pat: "I don't like this thing and therefore anyone who does is a big dumb idiot poopy diaper baby."
I played Classic WoW and the new thing is GDKP, which is just substituting ingame gold for dkp. So you bring a bunch of rich players to a run, they bid on the items, and then at rhe end the money made is distributed to the people who did the work. They brought safari expeditions to wow. Rich failkids pay experienced hunters to take them to dangerous places and bring back an elephant tusk.
It's so sad that the situation has gotten this far out of hand. Having a food buff, or a potion buff for content was this nice little extra. Exactly as Pat described when fighting Bloodstarved, you learn the fight so that you feel you got it and THEN use the consumable to push yourself over the top. It's such a problem when even an inch of advantage becomes a requirement, and then rather than fight or stabilize the situation the developer actively makes it worse.
As someone who raided in WoW, you absolutely do not need every inch of advantage unless you're pushing bleeding edge content undergeared, which most people in WoW don't. This doesn't excuse the lack of community building/shaping that would help WoW avoid the situation where everyone demands perfect buffs they don't need (plus nobody wants to hit the enrage on a boss and find out someone was missing the percent damage that would have gotten the kill).
Things like yhis happen a LOT in MOBA's as well, there used to be whole websites dedicated to buying an MMR boost from someone bettet than you and they would just take a hold of your steam,account for say a week and just play until youre in higher ranking games
The thing I love most about RPGs is coming to some storylines final boss, and then fighting them 50 times in a row to make sure I get all the drops, cause that surely maintains narrative integrity
Honestly, it's no wonder Woolie won't even step foot into FFXIV (yeah I know that Minh showed him through the Nier raids)... With the way Pat tells these horror stories about these player-run economies, RMT, and other insidious shit people have come up with, the fact that they even exist, and their mere association with the MMO genre outright prevents him from picking up a game like FFXIV. It really cannot be understated enough just how little you have to engage with such aspects in that game. Even the "chore" that it is to do dailies and other things he sees as "obligations" are... really not? I haven't capped tomestones in literally years. I don't particularly care about crafting or gathering, so I don't actively level them, I don't have time for a static, so I largely ignore high-end content like extremes and savage raids... But I still enjoy the game. I like to learn about its lore, I like to roleplay every now and then, I like to level different jobs and explore their intricacies. This game is so... *so* easy to drop and pick up again, but more than that, it really is just what you make of it.
From what I've heard apparently woolie spent anytime he wasn't playing the nier raids just shitting on all of FF14's gameplay mechanics. I feel like the genre just isn't for him unless someone can somehow make a fighting game or devil may cry mmo.
The biggest ethical problem is this: If Blizz is aware of the paid runs, and they DIRECTLY benefit from them, then they have every incentive to crank up the raid difficulties and make the rewards more appealing to the average non-raider. Normally, you'd do that to boost raid participation (which is great!) but if it's there to make people pay money for a run then it's scummy. It's one thing for raiders to benefit from the slightly shitty act of selling runs, it's another for the company to benefit, especially when it has so little content for non-raiders these days.
As someone who used to play Warframe and who experienced, both giving and receiving, taxi runs for newer players this idea of "selling runs" seems very weird and bizarre to me. I mean, is there a way to actually enforce it in these games? Because it just seems strange that you would charge people for doing a taxi instead of just doing it because you want to help.
WoW could do what FF14 does and make it so people get rewarded for helping new players with content, but that would require them to cut down on retention mechanics.
I don't know what you mean by "enforce" but the difference between what you're talking about and selling runs in something like WoW is that in Warframe, nothing is really all that difficult mechanically speaking. A lot of stuff can be overcome with just more damage. In WoW, the content they're talking about selling runs for is quite mechanically difficult, requiring most if not all players to perform their role very precisely and properly. It's the sort of thing where one person making one little mistake means everyone dies and you have to start over. It's not something someone would just do for any random person out of kindness. It takes a lot of effort to get through. Also, this isn't the sort of thing that you can just spam run. The raids are on weekly lockouts meaning you only get to do them once per week. Thus that limitation makes a run more valuable than say a run in Warframe where most things can be spam farmed more.
A taxi run is way different compared to a raid boost where you need to gather enough competent people to carry people for multiple hours vs like 5 minutes that allow a new player to rerun for free.
Use to do that a lot in Destiny 1. Called jt Sheparding, experienced players would run 1 or 2 people that haven't done it or don't have the skill set to do it with a average team. Was fun, frustrating, angering but rewarding at the end. Got to do my weeklies as well help other players get some end game gear.
See I thought this was gonna be about Destiny 2 making you buy the dungeons for the new expansion separately. Didn't expect THIS. Also I love that Woolie's MMO point of reference is freakin' GRAAL (Flash-based Link To The Past-based MMO-ish thing) Furthermore, this reminds me why I love PSO1. Went to a private server with some friends and I really do enjoy it more than its successors (except for Zero, that one is great)...and any other MMO. (FF14 came close though) The simplicity is appreciated.
Pat didn't mention how originally players in wow were meant to go out on their non raiding days/time and farm the herbs/materials needed to create these food/potion buffs for raiding which was viable back in the day because people either 1 didn't know the exact spots for these items 2 there was a much MUCH lower amount of players who actually raided seriously and wanted these items thus decreasing their value compared to modern classic, and 3 their are a TON of bots who are constantly farming these materials themselves to sell. It is literally not worth your time to attempt to fight these bots for materials as you could simply spend 50 for 5k gold from a seller compared to the 1-3 months that could possibly take you in comparison, this is why I don't blame raiders who buy gold because its literally a waste of your time to do otherwise (not saying its good in the first place just don't blame the victims for having to buy into it) I apologize if this seems really ranty but whenever pat talks about wow I just desperately want to scream these things at him to elaborate these problems.
@@1000Tomatoes yeah that is exactly right, every consumable material is spawned in nodes that are all in set locations on the world map, you gather 1 and the node despawns and you go look for the next one which there are many other players searching for depending on what your looking for and EVERYONE already knows exactly what the most optimal roots to farm every type of material so it's a grind to hell. It was even worse back in vanilla classic wow, there was a herb called the black lotus which spawned once every 6 or so hours in one of 3 or 4 different zones of the map and that's only one herb at a time, these were used to make powerful hp buffing potions that the tanks sometimes just required if they wanted to clear the raid so you can imagine how these would be a bitch to get even normally but it got way worse when bots/gold sellers entered the picture. Bots would have multiple accounts of basic characters with the ability to detect of the black lotus spawned or not in a possible area so it was nearly impossible to compete with this "black lotus mafia" that had formed and just to put a cherry on top these gold sellers would artificially inflate the price by holding onto large amount of this lotus, it got to the point where blizzard actually did something and made the black lotus have a timer that was basically a spoiling mechanic forcing people to sell their lotuses. This shits fucked 6 ways from Sunday.
Lol, I recently started a Roll20 AD&D game and this is partly my experience. The group was around level 10 in a tough dungeon. But the DM wanted me to start as level 1. The group is fighting monsters so over my characters pay grade he’s been leveling up ever session for weeks.
I feel like Pat gave Woolie the wrong idea about FF14. You absolutely do not need the absolute best stuff to do high end raiding. I did it for like 6 years and never bought a single potion or food. The people who need this stuff are the people engaged in world prog, the ones who want to be the first and the fastest. Ff14's run selling economy is less a product of necessity and more of a product of emergent gameplay. Wow, on the other hand, I'm not sure. People say constantly that wow content is easy but also I see entire days of realm discord chat dedicated to dunking on "baddies who didn't bring consumables"
Having done raids in the past in WoW, Pat isn’t wrong when he says there’s a chunky in game cost. I was one of the few dudes in our guild who would level alchemy as soon as a new expansion dropped and the week before we were marked to raid I’d essentially just spend every hour of my wow time picking flowers and working the auction house. It did give me a pass for my otherwise lacklustre dps though
The thing is WOW has been shit for decades but now there isn't the inertia from "it's THE MMO" we get to see everyone pounce on what would otherwise be just another WOW thing
@@miguelnewmexico8641 "2004" huh with how long it dragged out and how many games it killed I was sure it was out for 20 years at the very least since 2003 which is only 18 years but eh round up a bit. I guess it's only been out for a decade and a half+ looking back on it
Worse than that. Imagine the only way you get to play a high rank match is if you have enough gold. And the only way to get said gold in a timely manner is to actively boost other players.
The thing about this discussion that makes it so rough is the number of raid sellers in WoW is absolutely a minor population compared to the majority who just raid and don't worry too much about the amount of consumables they use. Partially because the amount of consumables the people who sell raids in WoW use is way beyond the normal amount. They use consumables on every pull to the maximum effect because they're trying to get lucky on a low geared kill instead of the more slow but steady increase of raid progression. It's the world first racers and the first month mythic killers, not the average players fueling this. To be honest they'd probably sell runs even without the current costs of stuff (which is also player set) simply because it's a good way to make gold. It's also less weird than the equivalent in FFXIV where you have to actually break ToS to get Ultimate clears (although the new ToS makes all selling pretty iffy in FFXIV which isn't a bad thing). In WoW if you've got a good guild you likely don't spend gold on consumables because everyone chips in food/flasks to make cauldrons and feasts (which give more out than they take in to make).
@@DerEliteBaum Oh no continue on Blizzard absolutely deserve to be bashed and the Ybarra thing is a laughable joke. Because the game is designed in a way where gold selling is an acceptable expectation of high end guilds instead of something they do by choice. It's like the fact that the Mythic World First raid teams are like, actual e-sports teams that get paid to do what they do. But the people below them copy them without the money and ruin the game for themselves and others, and Blizzard doesn't do anything about either situation (admittedly it's a hard one to fix). Raiding should give more loot, it would lower the incentive for raid selling by making loot easier to achieve. They should probably reconsider the token system (even though it's better than people buying shady gold from third parties with real money). One of the two heads of Blizzard should absolutely not advertise their own paid runs just because he's part of a top end mythic guild.
I'm sorry for asking, but as someone who's barely touched an MMO, I still dont really get how this "unethical" process that Pat talks about works. Is it like a low level player paying other, more experienced players to "carry" them through hard a mission so that they can reap the rewards?
Paying to skip your way through content progression and then cash in undeserved tokens of supposed skill (clear achievments + Gear) in a meritocracy based community
Higher level players sell carries to lower level and/or rich players to make money for their raiding. The person being carried is typically given all loot they can use and depending on the difficulty of the raid they'll earn a title or mount for completing the raid. Gold can be earned in-game and bought by paying real money to Blizzard.
It's unethical because to pay for that carry the lower level player would have to pay real money for a WoW Token to sell for gold for that service. It's unethical for an executive member of Blizzard to be encouraging Real Money Transactions for Boosting when it has been an established problem for much of the playerbase for years.
Pat I get what you’re saying about how buying runs goes against the principle idea of MMOs that they’re a small community based on meritocracy, but I’ll say (and I’m sure a lot of WoW gatekeepers would agree) that the pure meritocracy of the WoW raiding scene started to decline over a decade ago during Wrath of the Lich King where you started getting raid tokens. And I’m not being a gatekeeper, I slowly got a lot of my best gear that way ☺️
So what I’m hearing is that the president of blizzard, is selling raid boosts in exchange for gold, which is equivalent to play time outside of a subscription.
You know... MMO's aren't my thing, but whatever you know? So WOW was always just "eh, not my thing." But now I learn the people running it are legitimately scummy from the ground up (cue astronaut "always have been"). Bleh.
Blizzard and Activision are profitable dumpster fires that need to be put out, but every big company runs things scummy. It's just much more obvious with Blizzard because they have the largest MMO in the west. Ubisoft or EA aren't much different.
Back when I was playing WoW, I unfortunately had to make use of this Pay2Raid stuff, because the WoW community is extremely toxic, and most don't care to even try to strategize or explain encounters prior. Not to mention the limited time mounts that most of these Pay2Raid things are after. While I don't have the funds to support FF14, I would much rather play with FF14 players from my experience playing early level dungeons. And the crafting system is definitely fun in FF14, cause there is literally a minigame that you play so many times before getting to auto-craft an item, and even then you can do the minigame if you want to, which I do.
Speaking as a new sprout, yeah my rate of "Enjoyment to Pain" is like 90:10, and that 10 is waiting in queues to do msq trials and dungeons mixed with tankxiety.
Can I just say...I do not understand pats obsession with drk. I play dark knight and I like it but I played warrior first and like it a lot better and feel a significant difference in how this tank works. I haven't tried paladin yet but I'm fairly certain it's big draw is being the tankiest of the tankers but where does that leave dark knight? I even recall the "Pick a Top Tier" segment when pat described it was so much better it was the difference between clearing the raid or not and all can wonder is "how? Unless it's numbers were just better on release without needing to do anything unique." Btw yes I know the dark knight storyline is the best I will never argue that.
>"A better design is not necessarily a more profitable design." It's funny how the opposite just turned out to be true. WoW is a game that holds your time hostage. It jails you into its cycle by dangling that WoW token just above your head, that you have to scrape for every last gold just to keep your sub running. FFXIV, meanwhile, is a game that respects your time, gives you activities that you actually want to do, and won't punish you if you choose to put the game down at any time. So in practice yes, a better design will also result in a more healthy and loyal playerbase, whereas WoW is designed to guilt players into continuing by preying on FOMO, sunk cost fallacy, and pure copium.
But the opposite DIDN'T turn out to be true. WoW was the number one dog for decades doing this shit and only started sinking when a scandal with the devs happened
@@cyberninjazero5659 Ostensively untrue. WoW has been having a dwindling player base and poor sales figures for the past few years, it’s just that the drama exploded and exasperated the situation even more. People were already upset about the recent expansions and content already and were leaving.
@@cyberninjazero5659 It only seems this way because the Blizzard meltdown is causing more people to abandon, but the truth of the matter is that WoW has ALWAYS been a bad game that incentivizes unhealthy player relations. Long before there was boosting and WoW tokens to reup subscriptions, there was DKP, raid ninjas, dispel bombs on world buffs, all sorts of toxic bullshit. Pat even goes at length to describe the corporate nightmare of guild DKP, only to punctuate that it's happening ALL OVER AGAIN in Classic servers!
@@cyberninjazero5659 It's difficult to look at how WoW has been hemorrhaging money and players over the past five years and call it "profitable", especially when that same passage of time has shown explosive growth for FFXIV's playerbase, to the point where NA servers simply couldn't handle the staggering masses of new players. The mass exodus to FFXIV isn't the first sign of things changing; in fact, this is hardly the first exodus of its kind (though it certainly is the largest). If there's any "profit" to WoW, it's because the remainder of its playerbase is clinging onto life support from a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and highly concentrated copium. But FFXIV proves the opposite; that being the better designed game that actually respects its players time has won it not only the loyalty of its current fans, but also the attention of those who are walking away from WoW after years of abusive design.
I think Wooli is misunderstanding that "spending resources" because he is just thinking that fighting is all there is actually 'fun' in an MMO. It's not. Many games features more or less of the scale of preparation before tackling actually challenging encounters because it just makes sense to do so. Bashing your head against a wall in a game that has numerical differences its a fools errand, so you diversify your time and do other activities beyond endlessly fighting. The comment is not regarding selling raids, tho, fuck that lol. But the idea of levelling a crafting to prepare for a hard raid in any MMO is just... logical.
while i really enjoy them talking about mmo stuff like player behaviour and economy considering i've been playing wow over a decade and now dipping my toes into ff14. It can be incredibly frustrating to see pat talking about wow when he is misrepresenting aspects of it and its clear that he hasn't played wow in a very long time. in wow: Yes boosting is a thing and has become more and more prevelent in the game, but yes people do get shamed for it or actively being avoided when people find out they have been boosted. NEEDING to sell boosts in order to be able to raid is simply untrue, the only time where you could make the case is for the world first guilds where generally at most 3 guilds (usually 2) are competing for that top spot. And that high gold cost doesn't even just comes from consumables, they are really cheap except the very first raid of an expansion and even then its only for them a high cost because they are raiding for 12+ hours every day for nearly 2 weeks straight while most other guilds raid for around 6 hours per week. The main cost for them is because they are buying BOE's which are tradeable gear rare-drops from raid trash that these guilds are buying up for insane prices. But yes many high end skilled guilds do boost runs for a simple reason, it is BY FAR the simplest and efficient way to make gold because these boost runs are being sold at insane high prices it doesn't even come close to other ways of making gold like farming crafting materials ,playing the AH by flipping items or just doing quests/farm old raids or any other old fashioned way to make gold in an mmo The reason why there is such high demand for boosting runs. 1: over the past couple expansions they have continually added more and more systems that give player power that are either very grindy or timegated which is almost acceptable on your first character but becomes a pain in the ass FAST if you want to play your alts, in the old days you could just lvl your character to max, hop into dungeons getting gear and then move to the raid, But now there are so many steps/chores added before you are 'raid ready' that more and more people will just say fuck it i cba doing all that stuff just to do what i enjoy in the game and skip all that busywork/chores by simply buying a boost 2: its always been the case but recently even more so that the community has become more toxic and selfish only caring about themselves and fuck everyone that makes a mistake and fucks up MY raid or MY dungeon, no one has the patience to help each other out and learn from others unless you are in a healthy guild. people don't want people in their group that haven't already cleared the content they are hosting so if you haven't cleared the raid already and have the achievement to prove it well get fucked you're not getting any invite so buying a boost can be a key of some sorts in order to get into future groups easier. 3: due to the wow token allowing players to basically straight up buy gold it has become more accesable for players to buy boosts instead of before where you actually needed to actually make the gold in-game the old fashioned way before you could buy a boost. pat is right that the game is designed to push people into buying or selling boosts but not because of the reason he stated, it is because wow has an ever increasing amount of daily/weekly chores that aren't even fun to do on their own but rather exist to keep players subscribed and logged in every day because otherwise they'll be missing out on a huge amount of player power over time. And if you don't keep up with that relative to the rest of the playerbase it will get harder and harder to get accepted into random dungeon or raid groups Also its not allowed to buy or sell boost runs with real money and can get you banned, these big boosting organisations are maintaining spreadsheets and logs to provide evidence that its all being done legit and have offered help to blizzard in case they found some shady stuff but they said that blizzard often ignores it and isn't really investing into enforcing their own rules Advertising boost runs in things like group finder is also not allowed but again blizzard isn't putting in the effort/resources to actually enforce their own fucking rules to the point where its not uncommon to look for a group for a specific raid or dungeon and literally half the groups listed are boost advertisements.
Wow has run the gamut of gearing systems. Points, class coins, random, meager drop, gear flood. I started in legion and I liked it at the time. I would imagine WoW copied the gold bonds from RuneScape after they saw it’s success in order to help the gold inflation/bot issue. Paying for a run with whatever way you personally generate gold makes sense to me when you still need multiple runs to fully deck out yourself, mythic raiders dump an ass ton of gold to raid prep, and so many people can’t be bothered to actually find the time and group of people that they could play with otherwise. They need a massive overhaul of systems and economy for things to change. It’s been precariously stacked for a long time and the player base has been disgruntled for the same period. The player exodus happened from more than just the dev misbehavior. I don’t play it much after legion. Other games feel less time-wastey.
EVE had a way to earn game time in-game with ISK, and the economy eventually started to revolve around it IIRC. I don't play EVE, but I used to follow the news around it pretty closely for a few years. I think the game is dead now though. I think its admirable to offer players a way to earn game time within the game itself, but you can always count on Blizzard to do so in the worst way possible.
Pat's constant misremembering of that pithy Churchill quote about democracy as being about capitalism has probably had catastrophic knock on effects on his political literacy.
There will be a day when a mmo that has gameplay like devil may cry or just the best action it can deliver instead of just number go big or hp go down, and legendary drops could change your character in a real way, like from yamato and soul edge to agni and whatever moveset. On that day my priorities will be texted because mmo games seem to me like hell on earth but if I could really change a character to be better in a real way...oh boy(if that game is already on this world, fuck you don't talk about it, please)
Game already existed. It was called Rusty Hearts and it was cool in concept and dogshit in execution, because latency will always fuck you over on your combo/parry execution. You will never see another full character action mmo unless we find a way to make information transfer faster than light.
There likely won't be a day like that. If it could have been done (and done well), it would have been done by now. For one, you would have to be able to have many players on screen at once doing all that, which would be a visual cluster. Also, having many drops like that which VASTLY change how you play would be vastly overcomplicated. It works in DMC because there's only a few weapons, and it's a single player curated experience.
You know, never was able to play any of these true MMO's as a kid. Closest was Warframe. I think that counts. But man I fucking learned about this stuff from watching Log Horizon and hearing my friend who played original WoW and yeah no, it's a job. I fucking listened to a dude talk about I think it was Star Citizen or such where they had fucking guys who were just the intelligence and counter intelligence people who would fucking hack peoples shit, doxxing, cause blackouts of peoples houses and shit and I'm like: "Man, MMO's are wild yo."
Selling runs is the same in wow and ff14. its just like putting items on the auction house or any other profession for making gold. Using other accounts is against TOS, and real money transactions are also TOS.There is no scam or shadiness unless they want to go around ingame chat/ingame gold and use discord/paypal but that could be for any exchange of goods or services. Advertising in the group finder is banned. as long as its gold for service deal made ingame chat advertising in trade chat or just yelling on the street, there is no scam possible. Either side can report the other if they try to take their gold and run after getting what they want and GMs can check the logs. No idea why people rage over selling runs any more than buying an epic off the auction house. The problem is wow's gold economy generated from the game is intentionally made trash for years now so gold is made by squeezing other players and people paying blizzard microtransactions for gold.
Feeling like a lot of MMOs should occupy you with other things that are less grindy. Feel like they need to add a side racing game like a Goofy's Speedway.
All the grind in xiv is completely optional for optional content. You can level 2 to 3 whole jobs just doing the game story, and there's a TON of side content. From mahjong, gathering, fishing, chocobo racing
I know we are long, long past the point of it being a thing. But hearing MMOs and other high budget games using F2P mobile game monetization methods will always feel incredibly jarring. You can buy your way to more, or you can just grind the hell out of it and earn it!
When you see the profits, youll believe otherwise. For example, Genshin Impact's successful model is something companies like EA and Activision has been doing for a long time but also in their pay 2 play games.
To me, it's consistently fun to pull off a rotation even after the 1000th time, no different than people who like playing rythim games clicking circles or hitting notes for thousands of hours. I like completing encounters, easy or hard, they're just satisfying to go through. I still queue for boss fights every day and they're still fun. I also like the established world, the story, the setting.
The real answe will always be the social aspect. Seeing thousands of people on their own adventures with their own groups, guilds and raide groups and eventually finding friends that may or may not last for life. It's legit the friends we made along the way.
I only play FFXIV so it's specific to that, but I like mastering the dance of the fights in that game, especially when it requires coordination with my team to get there. Also the story and the social aspect
largely half true what pat is ranting about in WoW, it's largely made up by players who want to protect their RMT hustles and GDKP grifts, if you look up old kill videos of bosses in vanilla you see how most players aren't using optimal gear setups and are barely using consumables outside of the ones that are absolutely neccesary at some points (this is only a fraction of the costs demanded by weirdo guild leaders today), today the standard of raiding introduced from retail and private servers onto a 15 year old 'solved game' is honestly weird and at no point was ever needed to beat the content as is evidenced by 15 year old videos showing people today described by players of the classic version of the same game as clowns using only a fraction of the costs to clear content players today for some reason cannot do without massive stat increases. it is true however that these shady practises are facilitated and enabled by blizzard entirely, they have the resources to crack down on what is on paper against the TOS of their own game however they always for some reason fail to do so, weird how that always ends up working in favor of the top brass of the company in terms of subs paid by bots, as well as in retail selling gold themselves which enables RMT to spread to classic as well because people trade gold between retail chars to essentially buy gold for gold you can buy with real money, this allows them to monetize these grifts that again are on paper against their own TOS.
@@bargaintuesday812 In this video, Pat says it like Reeyu. I've also heard it pronounced like Raiyu. The correct way is with no vowel, just the sound of the two consonants
MMO’s have fun moments, and ffxiv’s story in later content gets legitimately amazing. The grind to get to the good shit is about as fun as a trying to snort cobblestone. So, the fact some people are trying to buy their way through the current content doesn’t really surprise me. You know that a game is real good when you can literally just skip most of the content and can go right into a raid, are bad because you chose not to learn, and fuck up everyone’s night because you’ve go no clue how basic mechanics work. Fuck MMO’s and everyone involved with that Pay 2 Win shit.
Yeah I didn’t talk about that too much. My bad. Pay 2 Raid Clear is just as bad as Pay 2 Win. A actual dev who’s okay with Pay 2 Raid Clear proves that point and blurs the line of difference between the 2 “gameplay” philosophies. Again fuck MMO’s. I like FFXIV, but it’s unfortunately still an MMO.
Yes, they have basically forced high end guilds to sell runs in WoW in order to fund their raiding because it is so expensive to purchase the materials needed to do cutting edge raiding. The game is rotten to the core.
a reminder why I loath MMOs, the social part is great, but if being with my friends is the selling point, you aren't selling a game you are selling a task to do with my friends. These games become tooo much like a damn job rather than something to enjoy.
I mean, by that logic you could say the same thing about literally any multiplayer game? Which is illogical. It's a game. Games are fun. Playing games with friends who you can share an experience with is even more fun. Also, mmos in general are not always like a job. The bad ones are but there are ones that don't do that.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 FF14, GW2, WoW before all the superfluous external systems (so basically pre-WoD). And those are just ones I have experience with.
For just a second I thought pat was going to concede that there was an alternative to capitalism. It's my fault for hoping, but when someone leads a statement with "MMOs are like capitalism . . ." it really isn't entirely my fault. At least we have the observation from Woolie that "more profitable" is very different from "better". Then again, gamers always make these gripes and then not really question if things can be changed on a systemic level.
I mean there are 2 main alternatives to capitalism (well I guess 3 if we include pre-capitalist feudal economies), and neither were pretty in their results.
Well, bringing up [alternative to capitalism that's the cause of infinite boomer rage] would kind of be missing the point. The discussion is on RPG economy, and as Pat pointed out, each and every one of them are based on the capitalist meritocracy ideal that would've made Ayn Rand sploosh, on a fundamental gameplay level. They both kind of have a policy of not addressing the fuckfire unless the flames happen to be particularly hot that day. You're probably not gonna hear them support the proletariat revolution til the thing actually begins. Or Bezos reverts the world back to feudalism, whichever comes first.
@@sharkodile22 It's very easy to want to support what you call a proletariant revolution when you've never experienced communism yourself. I was born in the DDR (aka the German name for Soviet-controlled East Germany, before some smartass makes a Dance Dance Revolution joke), I got to experience the Soviet Union life firsthand. After literally 25% of its population left for the west, it got manageable. Problem is that their leadership tried to make the entire industry focused around the heavy industry, right after the war, which destroyed any sort of services, so for almost a decade life was hard during my father's time. After that, it got somewhat stable, but it was boring. I was lucky enough to be born in the tail end of it. Sure, you've had work (by law you had to work, the Soviet Penal Code made being unemployed when not disabled a criminal offense that you were imprisoned for on the grounds of being a parasite to the system the workers pay into), you (usually) had enough to eat, and some sort of entertainment was provided to you. But nothing more than that. Your salary could provide you basic food items, but not much more than that. You were able to get a car, but you'll wait anywhere between one and up to ten years to get one, and you had no choice when getting it - they had an orange one, so you got an orange one. Entertainment had to go through a bunch of party controlled comitees to make sure it's "appropriate" (meaning it was in line with their worldview). Some winters could get worse. At times, heat would go out, as well as electricity. More often than not shops were devoid of basic items and you had to sign up on a waitlist to get them. And of course, after some time Stasi was everywhere, so you would get more and more paranoid because they would torture anyone they believed to be subversive. I wouldn't say it was poverty. It was the lowest, most basic, least luxurious life you could imagine. Enough to keep you at bay and stop from rebelling (at lest in most cases), but nothing else. Of course, it was a bit better if you were in the party, but only the highest echelons could afford an actual luxury - and sometimes, a bunch of oranges was luxurious. The only people actually longing for DDR are post-communist parties and old fucks that refuse to die.
@@SeruraRenge11 The failings of fascist clowns span the economic spectrum. You point to the USSR to say communism sucks? I point to Haiti, Peru (most all of central and South America, really,) India (the entirety of Southwest Asia, really), THE WHOLE DAMN CONTINENT OF AFRICA, and the fucking US it's beginning to seem, and say capitalism sucks. We don't _need_ a guy sitting on a throne playing blackjack and fucking hookers while we pay for the games and diamond buttplugs. WE wanna play blackjack and fuck hookers sometimes, too! That's literally all communism is, that's the whole damn ideology. I vibe with that. Fuck the USSR, but also fuck neoliberalism.
@@sharkodile22 Yes and I'm sure when you do it this time no one will get lined up against the wall to bring about the new order. It'll be different now. All communism ever did was make everyone equally poor with no chance of rising above that unless you kissed enough party ass. But no I'm sure you, someone who probably wasn't even alive when half the world was communist, know it better. That's why you have to deflect and instead attack capitalism, because you know the system that existed under communism isn't defensible. It's just whataboutism.
I always enjoy the recurring segment "Pat rants about MMOs while Woolie looks on horrified"
It's way better than woolie talking about fighting games 😂
@@christiandog6582 Woolie is mostly there to keep Pat on topic
@@christiandog6582 I'm the opposite because I love fighting games, but different strokes for different folks.
@@leithaziz2716 I'm not into either myself but I like hearing passionate, informed interesting discussion on both. :)
Also kites!
@@IstasPumaNevada Yeah I appreciate that although it's not Woolie's thing AT ALL, he'll listen with interest/horror because it's just kind of a fascinating topic.
It's like a musician standing out front of their own concert, scalping their own tickets.
More accurate to say its the record label doing that.
Or the lead singer of metallica
This is the best analogy so far
You mean every small band at the local dive bar?
So what justin bieber did? (He sold his own tickets on a mark up under a different name on ticket master in case your wondering.)
I find it hilarious the next fucking day after the podcast FFXIV banned run selling.
They still allow run buying, which I think is even funnier.
@@Some__Guy the entire point there is "do whatever you want, just don't bother people with your bullshit".
Which is an equally admirable and hilarious thing to witness.
They already had changes in the works by that point, but yeah lmao
@@Some__Guy It's like Japanese anti-piracy laws that focused on punishing the uploader.
Crazy Talk is always active
I love how wildly animated Pat becomes when talking about something he clearly hates.
yea...sometimes its really grating though. I'll still remember his RE6 playthrough as one of the worst ones I forced myself to sit through. By the nth time he repeated x y z criticism my ears were already a blasted hellscape filled with powerful spite soundwaves.
We get it pat the thing sucks, at least try to be nuanced.
@@Sercotani In Pat's defence it's difficult to be nuanced about a game as universally awful as RE6.
To quote Emperor Varis: "It was by DESIGN?!"
Man I had a guild leader once who said it was "unforgivable" that Yoshi-P said people should play other games if they run out of content. When I rant about hardcore players, these are the lunatics I just. Don't. Get.
I'm SO happy that FFXIV operates this way. SO happy. Because it's not a game for the obsessive, unhealthy players. It's a game for friends to just enjoy, with the priority put on building a cool and healthy community of people - some of whom can play a lot, and there's grindy or highly-challenging stuff for them to get along with primarily cosmetic rewards (like mounts or relics or ultimate glamours) OR you can just play like you'd play the new Assassin's Creed and you'll be just fine. You can enjoy it as a single-player game with new shit coming out every few months. And the game is set up that casuals can play with hardcore players, and not only is it normal but it's INCENTIVISED through the roulettes system, so that everyone can have fun and play together well.
Honestly, it is just so rare to see such wholesome, GOOD design philosophy in this modern AAA environment. There's a reason it's blown up.
Instead, Final Fantasy XIV makes those who dont like the story have to grind 300+ hours of story all the while stating that they acknowledge its a problem and one unique to XIV (As almost no other well known MMO literally forces you to play the story to get access to content you paid for e.g taking 200+ hours to reach Shadowbringers) all the while they sell the fix for last I checked, £30 per character per server.
You can say XIV is a game for friends to enjoy, but when friends cant join other friends without dropping extra money on top of the expansions they paid for or face 300+ hours of forced almost exclusively single player story, that is no better than people paying raiders to skip content. Arguably its worse as its more up front and blunt with how anti consumer it is. SE knows your average joe cant drop that amount of time to play an MMO, so they monetize it and those that dont like the story but like the gameplay get to eat a fat one. Then lets not forget the metric tonne of other items sold in the in game store for no reason other than draining money out of wallets.
FFXIV blew up because the MMO genre as a whole is a cess pool right now and XIV is the least maggot ridden however "Least maggot ridden" is not an achievement.
@@OberonFox found the blizz bootlicker
@@vargushate2763 I dont play WoW and havent for 7 years. I also boycotted Blizz since the Hong Kong situation. I also have over 177 hours on FFXIV so what I'm saying comes from actually playing the game.
@OberonFox I don't think "grind" applies to content you do once and then you're done with, though I suppose it can feel that way if you're not into story.
I really don't think not giving a skip is some kind of nefarious tactic though. They WANT you to not skip the story, they want you to get invested and learn to smell the flowers a little and discourage the unhealthy "gotta get current, everything else is irrelevant" mindset. Journey not destination. We've seen countless stories of people just enjoying the journey including the series creator and that's how the game is meant to be played. Not rushed to "clear".
When I was playing WoW tBC on launch, I remember my guild leader telling me to "hurry up" and hit cap and that is still crazy to me. Games are meant to be enjoyed. When I hit cap in that game, I quit to play something else. It's just an alien mindset to me and I appreciate that FFXIV is built for people like me. If you don't enjoy it, there are many other MMOs built to promote a more inherently treadmill-like playstyle where you sit at cap and grind things out. FFXIV feels like it manages to be both successfully, but it is explicitly an MMO for 'normal' people first who don't want to play a single videogame exclusively.
I won't defend the massively overpriced cosmetics, but that's a whole different topic.
@@baronvonslambert Because what I said was I didnt like FFXIV's story and there are plenty of people who also dont. I didnt say I dont like any RPG's at all. If someone is like me and didnt like FFXIV's story, you are then forced to play it anyway to get access to the parts of the game you do enjoy or pay real money to skip it. Its essentially a gun to the head and being told "You MUST like our story or fuck off" even if you enjoyed the other aspects of the game.
If you think that just because its an RPG that everyone must like the story or they are wrong, then you are a clown. Gameplay is also an aspect to consider as to what makes a game enjoyable to some people. FFXIV has stellar gameplay with abysmal consumer unfriendly ideas and a backwards forced story approach that outright locks you from doing what you want in favour of railroading you into doing what IT wants you to do. You dont play the game, the game plays you and if you choose to not let it play you, you dont get to play at all.
I think the stark difference here is WoW is not trying to fix it, and their President/CEO is feeding into it. Meanwhile, FF14 is looking for solutions to the problem. It's the clear design decisions and moral choices that speak to the actual intentions of the company.
Blizzard knows that if they tried to actually combat it, they'd either have to stomach more audience losses or put in actual effort to address the reasons in game that boosting has become such a prominent phenomenon and that's just too much effort to ask of them, clearly.
The problem is that it's pretty much there by design. Alex Afrasiabi is the Creative Director. He was Furor Plainsdefiler in EverQuest and one of the most infamously toxic and outspoken players of the game.
Which is funny because when you look at all the mechanics WoW has implemented to give people gear. Basically all comes back to raiding is too expensive and time consuming for what it actually gives to the players.
@@Azymyth it's toxic and crazy, but dkp for instance is something players themselves came up with, so it's a natural occurrence. Then blizzard added in-game gold buying which is unnatural and discourages interaction
@@neloverg3774 And Furor was a stringent enforcer of the system. It would come to no surprise to me if he had a hand in creating the gold buying system since it follows the line of thinking he had as a player
Crazy Talk activated again, in a way that hid just how heinous this shit is. When Pat describes WoW's raid loot as two pieces for 40 players, he was describing the game as it was 17 years ago. As WoW grew, they added more avenues for players to gear themselves. Added, past tense.
That description Pat had of a system where you can just guaranteedly get an item from a raid that won't drop for you if you just ran the content enough to get enough whatever-points?
That was a system in WoW at one point that was removed once the Wrath expansion ended.
They added more systems to get more targeted gear in the next expansions, as well. To a one, these systems to combat bad RNG have been removed.
It's not that WoW won't improve and work to fix its systems while FFXIV will, it's that blizzard activision will actively work to make the game *worse* in exchange for higher quarterly engagement, and no matter how much the players hate it, they can't bring themselves to stop engaging with it.
Atleast it looks like the players have finally caught on and ate leaving wow behind for not respecting the time they put into it.
It reminds of what Pat once said about how it's not surprising that games like league of legends have the most toxic playerbase when the whole game is Designed to keep people anxious and on edge to fuel the addiction loop it generates. Some real 4d psychological torture shit that game companies pull to keep you playing their games.
@@aerodblade1601 With games in the dota genre specifically, I think its a problem with the design of the genre as a whole. I'm thinking back to when Pat did his stint in League. Almost the entire reason why people are terrible in dota-like games is because they can't leave. When faced with a situation that is bad for them, whether in real life, or in a game, the vast majority of people will elect to just leave, to extricate themselves from said situation in the least disruptive way possible. Well what happens when you remove the option to leave, but don't do anything to rectify the fact that the player isn't having fun? You get League and Dota 2. The reason why I say its a fundamental design defect in the entire genre is because the 5v5 nature of the game makes winning impossible if one player leaves, so by the very nature of the genre, you HAVE to take actions that foster shitty behavior.
That's a good start to a "Pat rants/talks at" segment
That's just called "every time Pat talks" lol
I miss the "How has God blighted Pat Today" segments from the old podcast.
I feel like this is the closest Woolie and Pat have ever been on an MMO conversation. Pat did a really good job framing it in terms Woolie was familiar or already knew and communicating that there are plenty of people that feel just like he does and still find ways to enjoy the game.
Glad you guys finally shortened the dead silent intro on these. Every time I would have youtube on autoplay in the background and one of these came up I always had to go check on it because I thought the autoplay broke or something. 20 seconds was way too long.
Same here. But for me I double tap twice but end up missing the first few words of whoever is speaking. So I have to double tap once backwards and then have to still listen to about five or six seconds of silence.
10:46 Woolie missed it, but that is exactly what happens with someone making raid food.
It's a support job.
So in-game chef build is viable?
Cool
^ yeah that and herb Speculator apparently
@@UCannotDefeatMyShmeat literally yes. I had a GF whose entire time endgame in FF14 was crafting armor,weapons, food, and potions for the guild we were in.
@@TurboNemesis This is already sort of happening with me. I actually like all the crafting an gathering things, and even though I'm only level 20-30 in them, I've got some equally low leveled friends who keep paying me gil to give them the HQ versions of the armors and job items they'd get through the MSQ and other quests. We're not even a free company, and I've already become the quartermaster.
@@TurboNemesis that’s not something I would want to do, but it’s cool that if you wanted to, you can just play a passive role like that
The laughing Kadgar thumbnail definitely set up my expectations for this discussion.
"I know you playing wow makes my money go big up. But make my money go up _more_ and i make your number go up"
-Mike ybara, probably
I like how pats so excited to explain this to woolie like a kid explaining a cartoon he loves to there parent and just like said parent is only half paying attention and not careing I love it
pff, this was Woolie's early christmas gift for Pat, you can just see the joy on Pat's face with that opening XD
The thumbnail is top job as usual X3
"I figured that there'd be a support class that took care of that."
That was the case in ff14. Originally healers had to cast stone skin/protect on everyone prepull... so encounter designs were built assuming everyone had stoneskin/protect... which defeated the purpose of it since it became less of a "buff" and more of a cost of entry. Eventually they got rid of it because it was just a hassle and a waste of a skill slot.
FF11 also had the red mage problem, where a support class was TOO good and had the meta defined around them.
Was the FF11 red mage issue similar to how everybody's rotation was designed around Ninja's Trick Attack in FF14?
@@aerodblade1601 so much more pronounced. Red Mage was such an incredibly powerful, flexible class that they weren't just brought of their one good buff. They were brought along because they could do basically everything with the right multiclass setup.
The best way I've heard boosting described is that it's like buying a diploma from a diploma mill. You get a graduate who doesn't really know what they are doing and thrown into a specialized field only to fail and give up shortly after.
The WoW hole will never stop being dug. Didn't expect the Inside Job Arc of a dev selling runs but it was interesting to see, guess this means FF14 is gonna get even more people signing up.
FF only getting re-Signups from everyone who's watching NewWorld implode like it's Fallout76 all over again
@@iller3 I haven't really been keeping up with new world, what happened with it that's so bad?
@@aerodblade1601 It just had a ton of bought hype at launch since Amazon paid a ton of streamers to play it for a week or so. Once people played enough of it or got to max level they started dying off. It's the exact same as every MMO launch, just with more hype than it could hold. It's by no means even close to Fallout 76.
Gotta love it, when you play something you like, becomes a second job, that doesn't give you food or shelter. But just to be able to play.
Also this comes back to a fundamental problem I have with MMOs: They are just jobs. That you pay for.
It should come as no surprise that a job you have to pay for the privilege of working at will have people looking for ways to recoup their costs. And so some people have found a way to make WoW their actual job.
I guess its better than working a real job.
Just wanna make a little point here: Classic WoW raids can be easily cleared without all the consumable shit. The consumable meta is a min/max speed run way of finishing raids as fast as humanly possible that arose from years of private server play as people picked the game apart to optimize their raids. Ironically, the time and gold spent on all this shit doesn't make up at all for the quicker clear times, but it's an expectation set by the community that you be fully decked out with buffs and consumables to even be in the raid party. The buffs and consumable were just supposed to be bonuses, and a lot of the issue comes down to old design mistakes, but that shit isn't actually required to clear content. The raiding community simply expects it to be able to essentially speed run any raid.
As a relatively recent wow player, I would like to say it's not that we most of us don't look down on buying/selling raids. It's just that there are enough people doing it that they have their own community now, so they can't be shamed into stopping.
11:00, former midcore raider here, just wanting to throw my two cents in. All DPS and Tanks (Depending on physical and magical for DPS too) have a mitigation debuff they can put on that is primarily used to lessen the damage of the boss's big attack, or outright make them take more damage from particular types of damage. Can be the boss's ult, or it can just be a particularly hard hitting AOE as part of a healer check.
I feel like if WoW just went all in and made it a properly supported game feature and called it like, "mercenary system" or something people would have no problem with buying runs. If Blizzard was like "yeah we added a system where players can post bounties on what bosses they need help killing and how much they're willing to pay for someone to help them" people would love it.
Throw a few achievements and bounty hunter exclusive gear for the number of people helped or the amount of gold you earned that way. Players would be all over that.
Man I remember selling runs in guild wars and doing it for ectos, I'd just dervish run through everything. Those were the days.
I think I still could do a UW speed clear
I was going to leave a skeptical/snarky comment, but Woolie really formulated the sentiment better than I ever could have
This is kinda like how Destiny 2 used to have people who had businesses where they would carry players through Trials of Osiris (end game PVP where you needed 7 wins in a row to achieve highest level rewards each weekend). They would get on the paying players account and win the games for them. Bungie recently made this a ban-able offense.
So much stuff in destiny was like this, most of it being for high end stuff like crucible pinnacle weapons and raid clears, thankfully it’s not really seen anymore
The gold thing is why theft from guild banks was rife - and tbh probably still is - in WoW. But not just that. Other things happen too. Just like the Ninja looting mentioned.
Consider this. If the behaviour of the average player is typically that of an untrustworthy OR opportunistic person, then guess what? Literally everyone is possible enemy in hiding. So to say the WoW community is a literal den of thieves and snakes is possibly the largest understatement I've ever made. And worse is that the system indirectly rewards ill gotten gains as there is no REAL punishment for it.
You get a good guild and then some fucker will join and rock it to it's core. The guild tries to rebuild or get past it and then it goes REAL sour because the seeds of doubt are planted. Guild dies, members scatter, form new guilds and rinse and repeat. I ran guilds and someone shitty always gets in, I joined guilds and someone shitty always got in. I did this for thirteen years till I quit.
The game is SO good when it's good, like the best feelings ever, but there are far too many hours spent when it isn't.
The question is why does this behavior of being an asshole destroy WoW, when it never did the same to EVE Online? In that game you're actively allowed to scam people or screw others over with no repurcussions from the devs, and it still has a community. Why? I think it's because the devs have never punished being a scummy asshole on the grounds that the game only exists on one server, so destroying your own reputation among the community is punishment enough. There are 2 real rules in EVE
1. The undock button is the PvP button
2. The most powerful ship is friendship.
When a game is built only around hardcore grognards playing who treat the game like a job, then the smartest thing for you to do is form bonds among those you play with.
You can visually SEE Woolie’s faith in humanity die a slow death in this video and I love it. 🤣
I don't play FF14, but the thing that makes it far better, and I do imagine its not perfect. The biggest important thing that FF14 does COMPARED to WoW is that it R E S P E C T S your time, wow does not respect your time, on all levels it does shit to waste it, or makes someone have to cost their time for everyone else doesn't have to.
and no bought runs are loathed by everyone who buys that shit. getting AOTC through bought run frustrates everyone and kills the honor system of "Do you know your shit" and still makes people on edge "Is this guy actually as good as he says when we recruited him, or an absolute shitter." It's very frowned upon.
Woolie: "I have no idea how people have fun with this thing but more power to you I guess."
Pat: "I don't like this thing and therefore anyone who does is a big dumb idiot poopy diaper baby."
I played Classic WoW and the new thing is GDKP, which is just substituting ingame gold for dkp.
So you bring a bunch of rich players to a run, they bid on the items, and then at rhe end the money made is distributed to the people who did the work.
They brought safari expeditions to wow. Rich failkids pay experienced hunters to take them to dangerous places and bring back an elephant tusk.
It's so sad that the situation has gotten this far out of hand. Having a food buff, or a potion buff for content was this nice little extra. Exactly as Pat described when fighting Bloodstarved, you learn the fight so that you feel you got it and THEN use the consumable to push yourself over the top. It's such a problem when even an inch of advantage becomes a requirement, and then rather than fight or stabilize the situation the developer actively makes it worse.
As someone who raided in WoW, you absolutely do not need every inch of advantage unless you're pushing bleeding edge content undergeared, which most people in WoW don't.
This doesn't excuse the lack of community building/shaping that would help WoW avoid the situation where everyone demands perfect buffs they don't need (plus nobody wants to hit the enrage on a boss and find out someone was missing the percent damage that would have gotten the kill).
Things like yhis happen a LOT in MOBA's as well, there used to be whole websites dedicated to buying an MMR boost from someone bettet than you and they would just take a hold of your steam,account for say a week and just play until youre in higher ranking games
"How do you feel mighty megatron? *kick" that's how this feels.
I hate how I'm like "yea that's MMO's' cuzz like...MMO economy is just like any other; illegal sounding stuff is what it needs to work smoothly
The thing I love most about RPGs is coming to some storylines final boss, and then fighting them 50 times in a row to make sure I get all the drops, cause that surely maintains narrative integrity
"Pay us to not play our game."
Honestly, it's no wonder Woolie won't even step foot into FFXIV (yeah I know that Minh showed him through the Nier raids)... With the way Pat tells these horror stories about these player-run economies, RMT, and other insidious shit people have come up with, the fact that they even exist, and their mere association with the MMO genre outright prevents him from picking up a game like FFXIV. It really cannot be understated enough just how little you have to engage with such aspects in that game.
Even the "chore" that it is to do dailies and other things he sees as "obligations" are... really not? I haven't capped tomestones in literally years. I don't particularly care about crafting or gathering, so I don't actively level them, I don't have time for a static, so I largely ignore high-end content like extremes and savage raids... But I still enjoy the game. I like to learn about its lore, I like to roleplay every now and then, I like to level different jobs and explore their intricacies. This game is so... *so* easy to drop and pick up again, but more than that, it really is just what you make of it.
From what I've heard apparently woolie spent anytime he wasn't playing the nier raids just shitting on all of FF14's gameplay mechanics.
I feel like the genre just isn't for him unless someone can somehow make a fighting game or devil may cry mmo.
The biggest ethical problem is this: If Blizz is aware of the paid runs, and they DIRECTLY benefit from them, then they have every incentive to crank up the raid difficulties and make the rewards more appealing to the average non-raider. Normally, you'd do that to boost raid participation (which is great!) but if it's there to make people pay money for a run then it's scummy. It's one thing for raiders to benefit from the slightly shitty act of selling runs, it's another for the company to benefit, especially when it has so little content for non-raiders these days.
As someone who used to play Warframe and who experienced, both giving and receiving, taxi runs for newer players this idea of "selling runs" seems very weird and bizarre to me. I mean, is there a way to actually enforce it in these games? Because it just seems strange that you would charge people for doing a taxi instead of just doing it because you want to help.
WoW could do what FF14 does and make it so people get rewarded for helping new players with content, but that would require them to cut down on retention mechanics.
I don't know what you mean by "enforce" but the difference between what you're talking about and selling runs in something like WoW is that in Warframe, nothing is really all that difficult mechanically speaking. A lot of stuff can be overcome with just more damage. In WoW, the content they're talking about selling runs for is quite mechanically difficult, requiring most if not all players to perform their role very precisely and properly. It's the sort of thing where one person making one little mistake means everyone dies and you have to start over. It's not something someone would just do for any random person out of kindness. It takes a lot of effort to get through.
Also, this isn't the sort of thing that you can just spam run. The raids are on weekly lockouts meaning you only get to do them once per week. Thus that limitation makes a run more valuable than say a run in Warframe where most things can be spam farmed more.
A taxi run is way different compared to a raid boost where you need to gather enough competent people to carry people for multiple hours vs like 5 minutes that allow a new player to rerun for free.
It's kinda different, boosting is way more time consuming for the "driver" and it requieres more preparation
Uninstallafel blesses Pat's MMO rants. I swear if I had any love at all for MMO's, I'd be on FF14 purely out of spite for Blizzard.
Use to do that a lot in Destiny 1. Called jt Sheparding, experienced players would run 1 or 2 people that haven't done it or don't have the skill set to do it with a average team. Was fun, frustrating, angering but rewarding at the end. Got to do my weeklies as well help other players get some end game gear.
See I thought this was gonna be about Destiny 2 making you buy the dungeons for the new expansion separately. Didn't expect THIS.
Also I love that Woolie's MMO point of reference is freakin' GRAAL (Flash-based Link To The Past-based MMO-ish thing)
Furthermore, this reminds me why I love PSO1. Went to a private server with some friends and I really do enjoy it more than its successors (except for Zero, that one is great)...and any other MMO. (FF14 came close though) The simplicity is appreciated.
Pso1 has aged like fine wine. It's jank in some regards, but fuck...i love it so much.
I LOVE the sci fi western aesthetic of PS0. Reminds me a lot of Wild Arms.
Pat didn't mention how originally players in wow were meant to go out on their non raiding days/time and farm the herbs/materials needed to create these food/potion buffs for raiding which was viable back in the day because people either 1 didn't know the exact spots for these items 2 there was a much MUCH lower amount of players who actually raided seriously and wanted these items thus decreasing their value compared to modern classic, and 3 their are a TON of bots who are constantly farming these materials themselves to sell. It is literally not worth your time to attempt to fight these bots for materials as you could simply spend 50 for 5k gold from a seller compared to the 1-3 months that could possibly take you in comparison, this is why I don't blame raiders who buy gold because its literally a waste of your time to do otherwise (not saying its good in the first place just don't blame the victims for having to buy into it)
I apologize if this seems really ranty but whenever pat talks about wow I just desperately want to scream these things at him to elaborate these problems.
Let's be honest, that's the feeling when Pat speaks on most subjects.
@@Ragnorok64 true it's just that he's chosen a topic close to home for me this time.
@@1000Tomatoes yeah that is exactly right, every consumable material is spawned in nodes that are all in set locations on the world map, you gather 1 and the node despawns and you go look for the next one which there are many other players searching for depending on what your looking for and EVERYONE already knows exactly what the most optimal roots to farm every type of material so it's a grind to hell.
It was even worse back in vanilla classic wow, there was a herb called the black lotus which spawned once every 6 or so hours in one of 3 or 4 different zones of the map and that's only one herb at a time, these were used to make powerful hp buffing potions that the tanks sometimes just required if they wanted to clear the raid so you can imagine how these would be a bitch to get even normally but it got way worse when bots/gold sellers entered the picture.
Bots would have multiple accounts of basic characters with the ability to detect of the black lotus spawned or not in a possible area so it was nearly impossible to compete with this "black lotus mafia" that had formed and just to put a cherry on top these gold sellers would artificially inflate the price by holding onto large amount of this lotus, it got to the point where blizzard actually did something and made the black lotus have a timer that was basically a spoiling mechanic forcing people to sell their lotuses.
This shits fucked 6 ways from Sunday.
Lol, I recently started a Roll20 AD&D game and this is partly my experience. The group was around level 10 in a tough dungeon. But the DM wanted me to start as level 1. The group is fighting monsters so over my characters pay grade he’s been leveling up ever session for weeks.
I feel like Pat gave Woolie the wrong idea about FF14. You absolutely do not need the absolute best stuff to do high end raiding. I did it for like 6 years and never bought a single potion or food. The people who need this stuff are the people engaged in world prog, the ones who want to be the first and the fastest.
Ff14's run selling economy is less a product of necessity and more of a product of emergent gameplay.
Wow, on the other hand, I'm not sure. People say constantly that wow content is easy but also I see entire days of realm discord chat dedicated to dunking on "baddies who didn't bring consumables"
Having done raids in the past in WoW, Pat isn’t wrong when he says there’s a chunky in game cost. I was one of the few dudes in our guild who would level alchemy as soon as a new expansion dropped and the week before we were marked to raid I’d essentially just spend every hour of my wow time picking flowers and working the auction house. It did give me a pass for my otherwise lacklustre dps though
WoW's bullshit has become a constant car crash that you can't look away from.
It's like the car is tumbling down a hill that just never ends
At this point, WoW is more crash than car.
The thing is WOW has been shit for decades but now there isn't the inertia from "it's THE MMO" we get to see everyone pounce on what would otherwise be just another WOW thing
@@cyberninjazero5659 decades?
@@miguelnewmexico8641 "2004" huh with how long it dragged out and how many games it killed I was sure it was out for 20 years at the very least since 2003 which is only 18 years but eh round up a bit. I guess it's only been out for a decade and a half+ looking back on it
19:10 Pat sounds like his stand is margaret thatcher here lol
...so, this is the MMO equivalent of boosting an account in an FPS game? And this was the *president of Blizzard* announcing that he would do it!?
Worse than that. Imagine the only way you get to play a high rank match is if you have enough gold. And the only way to get said gold in a timely manner is to actively boost other players.
The thing about this discussion that makes it so rough is the number of raid sellers in WoW is absolutely a minor population compared to the majority who just raid and don't worry too much about the amount of consumables they use.
Partially because the amount of consumables the people who sell raids in WoW use is way beyond the normal amount. They use consumables on every pull to the maximum effect because they're trying to get lucky on a low geared kill instead of the more slow but steady increase of raid progression. It's the world first racers and the first month mythic killers, not the average players fueling this.
To be honest they'd probably sell runs even without the current costs of stuff (which is also player set) simply because it's a good way to make gold. It's also less weird than the equivalent in FFXIV where you have to actually break ToS to get Ultimate clears (although the new ToS makes all selling pretty iffy in FFXIV which isn't a bad thing).
In WoW if you've got a good guild you likely don't spend gold on consumables because everyone chips in food/flasks to make cauldrons and feasts (which give more out than they take in to make).
Now don't go and ruin our Blizzard bashing with actual facts and logic
@@DerEliteBaum Oh no continue on Blizzard absolutely deserve to be bashed and the Ybarra thing is a laughable joke. Because the game is designed in a way where gold selling is an acceptable expectation of high end guilds instead of something they do by choice.
It's like the fact that the Mythic World First raid teams are like, actual e-sports teams that get paid to do what they do. But the people below them copy them without the money and ruin the game for themselves and others, and Blizzard doesn't do anything about either situation (admittedly it's a hard one to fix).
Raiding should give more loot, it would lower the incentive for raid selling by making loot easier to achieve. They should probably reconsider the token system (even though it's better than people buying shady gold from third parties with real money). One of the two heads of Blizzard should absolutely not advertise their own paid runs just because he's part of a top end mythic guild.
The whole time through this conversation I couldn't stop thinking "People pay for this? TWICE?"
In Guild Wars 2 this is really common but there's a lot of factors to it, and a lot of times they're free and are basically training
Like. It's not shamed. At all. But part of why is the FASCINATING dichotomy between pve and pvp communities in this game
Love the thumbnail for this bit
I'm sorry for asking, but as someone who's barely touched an MMO, I still dont really get how this "unethical" process that Pat talks about works. Is it like a low level player paying other, more experienced players to "carry" them through hard a mission so that they can reap the rewards?
Pretty much yeah
Paying to skip your way through content progression and then cash in undeserved tokens of supposed skill (clear achievments + Gear) in a meritocracy based community
Higher level players sell carries to lower level and/or rich players to make money for their raiding. The person being carried is typically given all loot they can use and depending on the difficulty of the raid they'll earn a title or mount for completing the raid. Gold can be earned in-game and bought by paying real money to Blizzard.
It's unethical because to pay for that carry the lower level player would have to pay real money for a WoW Token to sell for gold for that service. It's unethical for an executive member of Blizzard to be encouraging Real Money Transactions for Boosting when it has been an established problem for much of the playerbase for years.
A low level shit player wants the cool sword or whatever from the extremely hard dungeon, so yeah you got it right
9:30 Zangief gets his face wiped down
Pat I get what you’re saying about how buying runs goes against the principle idea of MMOs that they’re a small community based on meritocracy, but I’ll say (and I’m sure a lot of WoW gatekeepers would agree) that the pure meritocracy of the WoW raiding scene started to decline over a decade ago during Wrath of the Lich King where you started getting raid tokens. And I’m not being a gatekeeper, I slowly got a lot of my best gear that way ☺️
What is wrong with the ads in this video? It’s once ever 90 seconds with these, and they’re the unskippable kind.
So what I’m hearing is that the president of blizzard, is selling raid boosts in exchange for gold, which is equivalent to play time outside of a subscription.
This is a plot point in a Cory Doctorow novel if I’m not mistaken
At least food and pots are pretty cheap in xiv and if you don't want to level your crafters, everyone knows at least a friend who does
You know... MMO's aren't my thing, but whatever you know? So WOW was always just "eh, not my thing."
But now I learn the people running it are legitimately scummy from the ground up (cue astronaut "always have been"). Bleh.
Blizzard and Activision are profitable dumpster fires that need to be put out, but every big company runs things scummy. It's just much more obvious with Blizzard because they have the largest MMO in the west. Ubisoft or EA aren't much different.
Back when I was playing WoW, I unfortunately had to make use of this Pay2Raid stuff, because the WoW community is extremely toxic, and most don't care to even try to strategize or explain encounters prior. Not to mention the limited time mounts that most of these Pay2Raid things are after. While I don't have the funds to support FF14, I would much rather play with FF14 players from my experience playing early level dungeons. And the crafting system is definitely fun in FF14, cause there is literally a minigame that you play so many times before getting to auto-craft an item, and even then you can do the minigame if you want to, which I do.
Speaking as a new sprout, yeah my rate of "Enjoyment to Pain" is like 90:10, and that 10 is waiting in queues to do msq trials and dungeons mixed with tankxiety.
Can I just say...I do not understand pats obsession with drk. I play dark knight and I like it but I played warrior first and like it a lot better and feel a significant difference in how this tank works. I haven't tried paladin yet but I'm fairly certain it's big draw is being the tankiest of the tankers but where does that leave dark knight? I even recall the "Pick a Top Tier" segment when pat described it was so much better it was the difference between clearing the raid or not and all can wonder is "how? Unless it's numbers were just better on release without needing to do anything unique."
Btw yes I know the dark knight storyline is the best I will never argue that.
DRK has a really fun and mashy combo and the most satisfying mitigation in the game, that's why.
>"A better design is not necessarily a more profitable design."
It's funny how the opposite just turned out to be true. WoW is a game that holds your time hostage. It jails you into its cycle by dangling that WoW token just above your head, that you have to scrape for every last gold just to keep your sub running. FFXIV, meanwhile, is a game that respects your time, gives you activities that you actually want to do, and won't punish you if you choose to put the game down at any time. So in practice yes, a better design will also result in a more healthy and loyal playerbase, whereas WoW is designed to guilt players into continuing by preying on FOMO, sunk cost fallacy, and pure copium.
But the opposite DIDN'T turn out to be true. WoW was the number one dog for decades doing this shit and only started sinking when a scandal with the devs happened
@@cyberninjazero5659 Ostensively untrue. WoW has been having a dwindling player base and poor sales figures for the past few years, it’s just that the drama exploded and exasperated the situation even more. People were already upset about the recent expansions and content already and were leaving.
@@cyberninjazero5659 It only seems this way because the Blizzard meltdown is causing more people to abandon, but the truth of the matter is that WoW has ALWAYS been a bad game that incentivizes unhealthy player relations. Long before there was boosting and WoW tokens to reup subscriptions, there was DKP, raid ninjas, dispel bombs on world buffs, all sorts of toxic bullshit. Pat even goes at length to describe the corporate nightmare of guild DKP, only to punctuate that it's happening ALL OVER AGAIN in Classic servers!
@@abadidea5984 Yes and all of that proved profitable which was the point Woolie made
@@cyberninjazero5659 It's difficult to look at how WoW has been hemorrhaging money and players over the past five years and call it "profitable", especially when that same passage of time has shown explosive growth for FFXIV's playerbase, to the point where NA servers simply couldn't handle the staggering masses of new players. The mass exodus to FFXIV isn't the first sign of things changing; in fact, this is hardly the first exodus of its kind (though it certainly is the largest). If there's any "profit" to WoW, it's because the remainder of its playerbase is clinging onto life support from a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and highly concentrated copium. But FFXIV proves the opposite; that being the better designed game that actually respects its players time has won it not only the loyalty of its current fans, but also the attention of those who are walking away from WoW after years of abusive design.
Maybe the WoW killer was inside us the whole time.
I think Wooli is misunderstanding that "spending resources" because he is just thinking that fighting is all there is actually 'fun' in an MMO. It's not. Many games features more or less of the scale of preparation before tackling actually challenging encounters because it just makes sense to do so. Bashing your head against a wall in a game that has numerical differences its a fools errand, so you diversify your time and do other activities beyond endlessly fighting.
The comment is not regarding selling raids, tho, fuck that lol. But the idea of levelling a crafting to prepare for a hard raid in any MMO is just... logical.
while i really enjoy them talking about mmo stuff like player behaviour and economy considering i've been playing wow over a decade and now dipping my toes into ff14. It can be incredibly frustrating to see pat talking about wow when he is misrepresenting aspects of it and its clear that he hasn't played wow in a very long time.
in wow:
Yes boosting is a thing and has become more and more prevelent in the game, but yes people do get shamed for it or actively being avoided when people find out they have been boosted.
NEEDING to sell boosts in order to be able to raid is simply untrue, the only time where you could make the case is for the world first guilds where generally at most 3 guilds (usually 2) are competing for that top spot. And that high gold cost doesn't even just comes from consumables, they are really cheap except the very first raid of an expansion and even then its only for them a high cost because they are raiding for 12+ hours every day for nearly 2 weeks straight while most other guilds raid for around 6 hours per week. The main cost for them is because they are buying BOE's which are tradeable gear rare-drops from raid trash that these guilds are buying up for insane prices.
But yes many high end skilled guilds do boost runs for a simple reason,
it is BY FAR the simplest and efficient way to make gold because these boost runs are being sold at insane high prices it doesn't even come close to other ways of making gold like farming crafting materials ,playing the AH by flipping items or just doing quests/farm old raids or any other old fashioned way to make gold in an mmo
The reason why there is such high demand for boosting runs.
1: over the past couple expansions they have continually added more and more systems that give player power that are either very grindy or timegated which is almost acceptable on your first character but becomes a pain in the ass FAST if you want to play your alts, in the old days you could just lvl your character to max, hop into dungeons getting gear and then move to the raid, But now there are so many steps/chores added before you are 'raid ready' that more and more people will just say fuck it i cba doing all that stuff just to do what i enjoy in the game and skip all that busywork/chores by simply buying a boost
2: its always been the case but recently even more so that the community has become more toxic and selfish only caring about themselves and fuck everyone that makes a mistake and fucks up MY raid or MY dungeon, no one has the patience to help each other out and learn from others unless you are in a healthy guild. people don't want people in their group that haven't already cleared the content they are hosting so if you haven't cleared the raid already and have the achievement to prove it well get fucked you're not getting any invite so buying a boost can be a key of some sorts in order to get into future groups easier.
3: due to the wow token allowing players to basically straight up buy gold it has become more accesable for players to buy boosts instead of before where you actually needed to actually make the gold in-game the old fashioned way before you could buy a boost.
pat is right that the game is designed to push people into buying or selling boosts but not because of the reason he stated, it is because wow has an ever increasing amount of daily/weekly chores that aren't even fun to do on their own but rather exist to keep players subscribed and logged in every day because otherwise they'll be missing out on a huge amount of player power over time. And if you don't keep up with that relative to the rest of the playerbase it will get harder and harder to get accepted into random dungeon or raid groups
Also its not allowed to buy or sell boost runs with real money and can get you banned, these big boosting organisations are maintaining spreadsheets and logs to provide evidence that its all being done legit and have offered help to blizzard in case they found some shady stuff but they said that blizzard often ignores it and isn't really investing into enforcing their own rules
Advertising boost runs in things like group finder is also not allowed but again blizzard isn't putting in the effort/resources to actually enforce their own fucking rules to the point where its not uncommon to look for a group for a specific raid or dungeon and literally half the groups listed are boost advertisements.
The only MMO I ever had interest in was the Monster Hunter Frontier MMO and I didn't even get the chance to play it
Dragons Dogma Online for me
Wow has run the gamut of gearing systems. Points, class coins, random, meager drop, gear flood. I started in legion and I liked it at the time.
I would imagine WoW copied the gold bonds from RuneScape after they saw it’s success in order to help the gold inflation/bot issue.
Paying for a run with whatever way you personally generate gold makes sense to me when you still need multiple runs to fully deck out yourself, mythic raiders dump an ass ton of gold to raid prep, and so many people can’t be bothered to actually find the time and group of people that they could play with otherwise.
They need a massive overhaul of systems and economy for things to change. It’s been precariously stacked for a long time and the player base has been disgruntled for the same period. The player exodus happened from more than just the dev misbehavior.
I don’t play it much after legion. Other games feel less time-wastey.
Havent WATCHED the pod streams or whatever in a while
Jesus CHRIST Zangief has enlarged
EVE had a way to earn game time in-game with ISK, and the economy eventually started to revolve around it IIRC. I don't play EVE, but I used to follow the news around it pretty closely for a few years. I think the game is dead now though.
I think its admirable to offer players a way to earn game time within the game itself, but you can always count on Blizzard to do so in the worst way possible.
What class is Pat switching from?
Dark Knight, I believe
From Dark Knight to Warrior
@@Dreamfillah Oh thanks
25:00 sounds like FF14 is the anti WoW and I’m all for it
Pat's constant misremembering of that pithy Churchill quote about democracy as being about capitalism has probably had catastrophic knock on effects on his political literacy.
There will be a day when a mmo that has gameplay like devil may cry or just the best action it can deliver instead of just number go big or hp go down, and legendary drops could change your character in a real way, like from yamato and soul edge to agni and whatever moveset. On that day my priorities will be texted because mmo games seem to me like hell on earth but if I could really change a character to be better in a real way...oh boy(if that game is already on this world, fuck you don't talk about it, please)
Kind of my issue with MMO gameplay for me it has never interested me
Game already existed. It was called Rusty Hearts and it was cool in concept and dogshit in execution, because latency will always fuck you over on your combo/parry execution. You will never see another full character action mmo unless we find a way to make information transfer faster than light.
There likely won't be a day like that. If it could have been done (and done well), it would have been done by now. For one, you would have to be able to have many players on screen at once doing all that, which would be a visual cluster. Also, having many drops like that which VASTLY change how you play would be vastly overcomplicated. It works in DMC because there's only a few weapons, and it's a single player curated experience.
Dragons Dogma Online? (RIP)
You know, never was able to play any of these true MMO's as a kid. Closest was Warframe. I think that counts. But man I fucking learned about this stuff from watching Log Horizon and hearing my friend who played original WoW and yeah no, it's a job. I fucking listened to a dude talk about I think it was Star Citizen or such where they had fucking guys who were just the intelligence and counter intelligence people who would fucking hack peoples shit, doxxing, cause blackouts of peoples houses and shit and I'm like: "Man, MMO's are wild yo."
Selling runs is the same in wow and ff14. its just like putting items on the auction house or any other profession for making gold. Using other accounts is against TOS, and real money transactions are also TOS.There is no scam or shadiness unless they want to go around ingame chat/ingame gold and use discord/paypal but that could be for any exchange of goods or services. Advertising in the group finder is banned. as long as its gold for service deal made ingame chat advertising in trade chat or just yelling on the street, there is no scam possible. Either side can report the other if they try to take their gold and run after getting what they want and GMs can check the logs.
No idea why people rage over selling runs any more than buying an epic off the auction house. The problem is wow's gold economy generated from the game is intentionally made trash for years now so gold is made by squeezing other players and people paying blizzard microtransactions for gold.
Feeling like a lot of MMOs should occupy you with other things that are less grindy.
Feel like they need to add a side racing game like a Goofy's Speedway.
MMO's giving the player ACTUAL FUN content to grind? Are you NUTS?
All the grind in xiv is completely optional for optional content. You can level 2 to 3 whole jobs just doing the game story, and there's a TON of side content. From mahjong, gathering, fishing, chocobo racing
MMO players are just sickos who love grinding and wanna see the number go up.
if ur shocked by this you should check out what’s going on in old school runescape
I know we are long, long past the point of it being a thing. But hearing MMOs and other high budget games using F2P mobile game monetization methods will always feel incredibly jarring. You can buy your way to more, or you can just grind the hell out of it and earn it!
When you see the profits, youll believe otherwise. For example, Genshin Impact's successful model is something companies like EA and Activision has been doing for a long time but also in their pay 2 play games.
@@JayceCH. I didn't say it's unbelievable, just that it's still jarring because of how naked it is lol
i am right up there with woolie
Pat's right. This just sounds like a pyramid scheme in video game form. I'm so glad I quit playing WoW years ago.
Blizzard really isn’t doing great right now and this is all their fault
No matter what he would get shit for it. He’s in a position where no matter what stance he takes usually will get shit
MMO players what’s so fun about MMOs?
yea, I'm interested too
To me, it's consistently fun to pull off a rotation even after the 1000th time, no different than people who like playing rythim games clicking circles or hitting notes for thousands of hours. I like completing encounters, easy or hard, they're just satisfying to go through. I still queue for boss fights every day and they're still fun. I also like the established world, the story, the setting.
The real answe will always be the social aspect. Seeing thousands of people on their own adventures with their own groups, guilds and raide groups and eventually finding friends that may or may not last for life.
It's legit the friends we made along the way.
@@vaan_ I see the raid bosses are fun to be honest I never found the gameplay enjoyable I can understand how people could find it fun tho
I only play FFXIV so it's specific to that, but I like mastering the dance of the fights in that game, especially when it requires coordination with my team to get there. Also the story and the social aspect
largely half true what pat is ranting about in WoW, it's largely made up by players who want to protect their RMT hustles and GDKP grifts, if you look up old kill videos of bosses in vanilla you see how most players aren't using optimal gear setups and are barely using consumables outside of the ones that are absolutely neccesary at some points (this is only a fraction of the costs demanded by weirdo guild leaders today), today the standard of raiding introduced from retail and private servers onto a 15 year old 'solved game' is honestly weird and at no point was ever needed to beat the content as is evidenced by 15 year old videos showing people today described by players of the classic version of the same game as clowns using only a fraction of the costs to clear content players today for some reason cannot do without massive stat increases.
it is true however that these shady practises are facilitated and enabled by blizzard entirely, they have the resources to crack down on what is on paper against the TOS of their own game however they always for some reason fail to do so, weird how that always ends up working in favor of the top brass of the company in terms of subs paid by bots, as well as in retail selling gold themselves which enables RMT to spread to classic as well because people trade gold between retail chars to essentially buy gold for gold you can buy with real money, this allows them to monetize these grifts that again are on paper against their own TOS.
I'm so glad I quit WoW and moved to FFXIV
Moving one from predatory company to another, same shit different color.
Me too, this Methadone clinic is soooo much more fulfilling
@@Nnyco_ Hur hur no ethical consumption hur hur
Tip for anybody pronouncing Ryu: there is no vowel between the r and the y
What vowel have you heard people use?
@@bargaintuesday812 probably people emphasizing "eee" in Reeeyu
@@bargaintuesday812 In this video, Pat says it like Reeyu. I've also heard it pronounced like Raiyu. The correct way is with no vowel, just the sound of the two consonants
Brb looking for who asked.
@@LtSprinkulz You don't have to make every comment a reply to a question. That's not how comment sections work.
there’s better genres than capitalism and mmorpgs
MMO’s have fun moments, and ffxiv’s story in later content gets legitimately amazing. The grind to get to the good shit is about as fun as a trying to snort cobblestone. So, the fact some people are trying to buy their way through the current content doesn’t really surprise me. You know that a game is real good when you can literally just skip most of the content and can go right into a raid, are bad because you chose not to learn, and fuck up everyone’s night because you’ve go no clue how basic mechanics work. Fuck MMO’s and everyone involved with that Pay 2 Win shit.
They're not talking about paying to skip leveling. They're talking about paying for someone to carry you through an endgame piece of content.
Yeah I didn’t talk about that too much. My bad. Pay 2 Raid Clear is just as bad as Pay 2 Win. A actual dev who’s okay with Pay 2 Raid Clear proves that point and blurs the line of difference between the 2 “gameplay” philosophies. Again fuck MMO’s. I like FFXIV, but it’s unfortunately still an MMO.
Yes, they have basically forced high end guilds to sell runs in WoW in order to fund their raiding because it is so expensive to purchase the materials needed to do cutting edge raiding. The game is rotten to the core.
Sooooooo, from what I got from this is that WOW is just Pay2Play........ OK, I guess
Pay2pay2play
@@Some__Guy oh God, its going Plus Ultra on the Pyramid Scam
Wow, man...
a reminder why I loath MMOs, the social part is great, but if being with my friends is the selling point, you aren't selling a game you are selling a task to do with my friends. These games become tooo much like a damn job rather than something to enjoy.
It's popular with nerds because they are less likely to have friends in real life, so MMOs were a big way to find friends online before social media.
I mean, by that logic you could say the same thing about literally any multiplayer game? Which is illogical. It's a game. Games are fun. Playing games with friends who you can share an experience with is even more fun.
Also, mmos in general are not always like a job. The bad ones are but there are ones that don't do that.
@@omegaxtrigun name 3.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 FF14, GW2, WoW before all the superfluous external systems (so basically pre-WoD).
And those are just ones I have experience with.
For just a second I thought pat was going to concede that there was an alternative to capitalism. It's my fault for hoping, but when someone leads a statement with "MMOs are like capitalism . . ." it really isn't entirely my fault.
At least we have the observation from Woolie that "more profitable" is very different from "better". Then again, gamers always make these gripes and then not really question if things can be changed on a systemic level.
I mean there are 2 main alternatives to capitalism (well I guess 3 if we include pre-capitalist feudal economies), and neither were pretty in their results.
Well, bringing up [alternative to capitalism that's the cause of infinite boomer rage] would kind of be missing the point. The discussion is on RPG economy, and as Pat pointed out, each and every one of them are based on the capitalist meritocracy ideal that would've made Ayn Rand sploosh, on a fundamental gameplay level.
They both kind of have a policy of not addressing the fuckfire unless the flames happen to be particularly hot that day. You're probably not gonna hear them support the proletariat revolution til the thing actually begins. Or Bezos reverts the world back to feudalism, whichever comes first.
@@sharkodile22 It's very easy to want to support what you call a proletariant revolution when you've never experienced communism yourself. I was born in the DDR (aka the German name for Soviet-controlled East Germany, before some smartass makes a Dance Dance Revolution joke), I got to experience the Soviet Union life firsthand. After literally 25% of its population left for the west, it got manageable. Problem is that their leadership tried to make the entire industry focused around the heavy industry, right after the war, which destroyed any sort of services, so for almost a decade life was hard during my father's time. After that, it got somewhat stable, but it was boring. I was lucky enough to be born in the tail end of it.
Sure, you've had work (by law you had to work, the Soviet Penal Code made being unemployed when not disabled a criminal offense that you were imprisoned for on the grounds of being a parasite to the system the workers pay into), you (usually) had enough to eat, and some sort of entertainment was provided to you. But nothing more than that. Your salary could provide you basic food items, but not much more than that. You were able to get a car, but you'll wait anywhere between one and up to ten years to get one, and you had no choice when getting it - they had an orange one, so you got an orange one. Entertainment had to go through a bunch of party controlled comitees to make sure it's "appropriate" (meaning it was in line with their worldview).
Some winters could get worse. At times, heat would go out, as well as electricity. More often than not shops were devoid of basic items and you had to sign up on a waitlist to get them. And of course, after some time Stasi was everywhere, so you would get more and more paranoid because they would torture anyone they believed to be subversive.
I wouldn't say it was poverty. It was the lowest, most basic, least luxurious life you could imagine. Enough to keep you at bay and stop from rebelling (at lest in most cases), but nothing else. Of course, it was a bit better if you were in the party, but only the highest echelons could afford an actual luxury - and sometimes, a bunch of oranges was luxurious. The only people actually longing for DDR are post-communist parties and old fucks that refuse to die.
@@SeruraRenge11 The failings of fascist clowns span the economic spectrum. You point to the USSR to say communism sucks? I point to Haiti, Peru (most all of central and South America, really,) India (the entirety of Southwest Asia, really), THE WHOLE DAMN CONTINENT OF AFRICA, and the fucking US it's beginning to seem, and say capitalism sucks.
We don't _need_ a guy sitting on a throne playing blackjack and fucking hookers while we pay for the games and diamond buttplugs. WE wanna play blackjack and fuck hookers sometimes, too! That's literally all communism is, that's the whole damn ideology. I vibe with that. Fuck the USSR, but also fuck neoliberalism.
@@sharkodile22 Yes and I'm sure when you do it this time no one will get lined up against the wall to bring about the new order. It'll be different now.
All communism ever did was make everyone equally poor with no chance of rising above that unless you kissed enough party ass. But no I'm sure you, someone who probably wasn't even alive when half the world was communist, know it better. That's why you have to deflect and instead attack capitalism, because you know the system that existed under communism isn't defensible. It's just whataboutism.