Have we lost patience?

On a quiet morning this weekend I stood in Felwood and was camping whipper root tubers, night dragons breath, and windblossom berries. These are special plants in Felwood, which you can access after doing a quest there. The windblossom berries aren't really exciting, they work very similar to stamina increasing food. But the whipper root tubers and night dragons breath are highly desirable. The tubers restore health, and the night dragon stuff restores mana and health, and they are on different timers from each other, and also on a different timer from mana or health potions. Map to them is found here, but be aware that these are all just potential locations, plants aren't growing on all these locations all the time.

Many a time the extra boost to health or mana saved me or even my group, so I was stocking up on them with both Raslebol and Kyroc. I knew these plants were on a 25-minute timer, so exactly 25 minutes after picking the fruits from them, they become available again. So I had parked my characters next to a plant each, one in the north moving between two whipper root plants, the other in the south camping a night dragons plant. I had a repeating timer running for one of the plants, and had timed at what times on this 25-minute scale the other plants were spawning. So with little running and switching characters I farmed the plants for something like 2 hours.

The interesting thing was that there was at least one alliance player also looking for these plants, I encountered him several times on the different plant locations. But I beat him every time, because I was just standing still in front of the plant just before I knew it would spawn fruits again, while the other guy was moving far too much, and obviously didn't use a timer. That reminded me of other situations where I was just "camping" something in best Everquest style, and other people weren't able to stand still even 5 minutes, got bored, and wandered off. This is one form of PvP I always win, based on patience acquired in the early days of MMORPG.

I do have the impression that there are few people left with this sort of patience. A 25-minute spawn seems short to an Everquest player, but far too long for the average WoW player. The sort of hour-long camping, or waiting 15 minutes for your mana to regenerate from zero to full, which we endured in Everquest would be unacceptable to the modern MMORPG player.

Now there is a theory that World of Warcraft is a kind of MMORPG-lite, and that WoW players will get bored after some time, quit the game, and switch to new games with a more hardcore attitude. Basically Vanguard : Saga of Heroes is counting on that, designing a MMORPG which combines modern graphics with old-style Everquest game design. And I really wonder if that will work. It has already been announced that leveling in Vanguard will be a lot slower than in WoW, that Vanguard will have more downtime, and that you will have to stay in the same zone a lot longer before being able to move on. Brad McQuaid, the lead designer and ex-EQ developer actually promotes these as features (see quotes here). If people are tired of fast leveling and reaching the level cap too fast, a much slower game might really draw them.

But the other theory is that people never liked downtime, and only put up with it in Everquest because there wasn't much choice. Meanwhile they experienced a game with much less downtime and much faster leveling, and have totally lost the patience that would be required to play a slower game. Which would mean that Vanguard might attract a decent number of bored WoW players on release, but after a short time they would find the game far too slow for their tastes, start complaining loudly, and leave in droves.

Is patience a virtue, or just an artifact of games gone by?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link