Man’s not wrong, though yea this is nothing that’s not been discussed before.
Maybe this time we’ll see actual discussion of the game’s flaws, and how AO addresses some (but not all) of them.
nah who am i kidding
who else is excited for another 126 post AO circlejerk including a 600+ word response from vetex
actual opinion
I’m seeing a lot of people confident that AO is going to fix all of WoM’s flaws, but taking guilds as an example, even with building and point capturing, guilds still don’t actually provide any incentive for people to play together.
In v1.5 vetex removed Team’s teamwork system, which was the only aspect of the Guilds Update that was actually about people playing together (though it might as well have been removed from the start because it was complete garbage). But hey, at least we have a robust, well tested and future-proof guilds backend.
You can’t just add teams and guilds and call it a day. That’s not encouraging people to play together, it’s just a roundabout way of removing friendly fire.
There needs to be rewards or actual content for you to do with your friends. Aside from a maximum 1.2x XP/Crowns multiplier from levelling up your team (the best way of doing this being to get your friends on the same server and then all grind solo), there’s nothing that promotes teamwork. Doing quests together is slower (even with the teamwork system). Doing bosses together is slower. Going chest hunting together is slower. Fighting threats together is harder. Going fishing together is the closest thing this game has to teamplay because at least that’s not actively kneecapped by the presence of friends.
Guilds are riddled with bad design. Aside from the absolute dumpster fire that was the original infamy system (and the mess it still is), infamy being required for guild growth actively killed the guild scene, as almost every guild in the game suddenly found they were hard-capped at 25 members unless they capped themself by only allowing sweaty PvP tryhards to join. A single bad member can undo hours of grinding for the guild, and they don’t even have to be malicious - just inexperienced.
If infamy had just been a leaderboard thing, I doubt anyone would care, but actively preventing any guild from growing unless they were very infamy positive meant that the guild scene was doomed from the start. So many merchant guilds, fishing guilds, good guilds, evil guilds, all kinds of guilds just up and left the moment they got the update they’d been hyped for since release because of one poorly thought out requirement.
WoM’s got way more design issues than just “laggy NPCs bad, dynamically generated quests bad, continent bad”. It’s not just incomplete.