A Positive Review of Wyvern's Magic Item Usage

[igorith]

I have played alot of computer games in my time, and alot that were not so good. Games like Lord of the Rings Online, Demigod, and the Fallout series were among my least favorite, whereas Sryth, World of Warcraft, and Runescape are among some of my most favorite. However, there is one seriously bad re-occuring problem in role-playing games: overpowering and spoiling players. Much in contrast to some of the big-name titles like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings online, Wyvern does a VERY good job of NOT spoiling the small amount of players they have.

That is among one of my most favorite things about Wyvern. The wizards are extremely stingy on magic items. If you look at some of the big-name titles in comparision to Wyvern, like WOW (World of Warcraft) or LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online), Wyvern does a great job of maintaining a balanced game, especially considering the small player population (both in overall players and in people online). I know from experience that the bigger games (especially WOW) have a terrible problem with spoiling players. In World of Warcraft, at level 85 (current level cap), you get the same amount of money for walking across a field and saying something to an NPC that you used to have to spend days or even weeks working for. Whats worse is that while mounts used to be a very rare and hard-to-get thing on WOW, now they hand them out like candy. Most WOW players (myself sometimes included) don't know the value of working hard for a good item.

Now, this is all given the fact that bigger games tend to have much more publicity than Wyvern does, but even so the Wizards of Wyvern do a good job in keeping ther players interest and keeping the economy stable. You may think its almost backwards thinking, but I would much rather have very little magic items and savor what I have than have too many magic items and throw away whatever I don't need. Honestly, I would compare Wyvern's overall stability to that of World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online; for such a basic design and small player pool, Wyvern does a great job of player managment on both a small-scale and large-scale basis.

[Teshuvah]

I just have to add, that the gaming world in general is dumbing down gamers terribly.

Today I see a level 1 with a motorized vehicle and a pet they don't have to feed?!??! This is how they start out...a goblin no less!!

It's really, really sad.

*Shakes head and walks away mumbling*

[Valkon]

*starts quest*
*does not bother to read the quest description, but follows the quest arrow instead*
*starts killing and looting monsters until quest complete appears*
*follows quest arrow again*
*looks for yellow question mark above NPC*
*selects best/most expensive item*
*moves on to next quest*

*yawns*

[igorith]

Haha you both have that exactly right about WOW. Its pretty pathetic.

[Irlazy]

Haha I played a game once that all I had to do was look at the screen practically. I clicked on the quest object and it runs me to the monster/item/location and from there i just keep hitting the '1' key and it keeps killing the monsters or whatever. Anyway yeah I agree I commend the wizzies and R for all the good work on making a game that doesn't cater to the players. I bet on average we die several more times on this game getting to HoF then most games have PERIOD! Some of us even embrace it *coughlogwadcough*...

[Durango]

I agree it's a nice challenging game. I just wish I could get my friend into it. She's made a character on wyvern twice now. The last time was about a year ago I think and she went through the tutorial and I thought she might like to try a quest. So I told her she should do garignors amulet and she ended up dying someplace looking for the quest. The first time she tried a pixie and I told her it might be hard so this time she made a halfling.

Any advice?

[Teshuvah]

Originally Posted by Durango

I agree it's a nice challenging game. I just wish I could get my friend into it. She's made a character on wyvern twice now. The last time was about a year ago I think and she went through the tutorial and I thought she might like to try a quest. So I told her she should do garignors amulet and she ended up dying someplace looking for the quest. The first time she tried a pixie and I told her it might be hard so this time she made a halfling.

Any advice?

I believe the player manual recommends a Rak or Dwarf for a first timer.

[Infinimo]

And yet WoW has 11 million subscribers and Wyvern only has... 100 players? 50?

[Forseti]

WoW also has TV adds, and is the 4th game in a series that has been popular for many many years. Wyvern is retro, and not advertised.

[Clubbz]

First of all Infinimo this was WoW has much more going for it than the game. It's produced by a company with teams of developers, marketing divisions and hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs and maintenance. With amounts of money like that it's easy to advertise even a bad game to the point its popular. I'm not saying WoW is bad, I've never played it, but I never intend to play it for a variety of reasons I don't intend to get into, but with a company like Blizzard backing it, it's only common sense that they'll have a massive audience.

Wyvern is a free game, developed and maintained out of pocket(I say out of pocket for development because of the massive amounts of time required to write that much code) of Rhialto himself. He never intended to make a MMO like WoW, he intended to make a graphical MUD with a moderately small community. For those of us who play wyvern and have played for a long time, we're for the most part glad that it's not being swarmed like WoW, or RS. The larger a community grows, the more rude and ignorant the general population gets. If you don't like wyvern, that's fine, but there's no merit in an argument of comparing it to WoW, when it was never intended to be anything like it. It's like comparing a Radio to a television, there can be several similarites pointed out between them, but when it comes down to the details, the only big thing they have in common is they both provide entertainment/news in different ways.

[Arilou]

Originally Posted by Infinimo

And yet WoW has 11 million subscribers and Wyvern only has... 100 players? 50?

World of Warcraft has how many servers that can support how many people?

Btw, the last time stats were compiled was 5 years ago (when average highs were in the 60s) and...

"Some people create more than one character. If you look at people (basically, email addresses) instead of characters, over 150,000 people have created an account. Over 75% of those people have active Wyvern characters."

[Infinimo]

Don't get me wrong, I think Wyvern is a great game. I don't like WoW, but I wouldn't say it was dumbed down, it is just too grindy for me. My point is that it is stupid to sit around insulting one of the most popular games ever, and even more ridiculous to sit here congratulating ourselves on how great Wyvern is. While that may be our opinion 11 million people would disagree.

[Teshuvah]

Originally Posted by Infinimo

Don't get me wrong, I think Wyvern is a great game. I don't like WoW, but I wouldn't say it was dumbed down, it is just too grindy for me. My point is that it is stupid to sit around insulting one of the most popular games ever, and even more ridiculous to sit here congratulating ourselves on how great Wyvern is. While that may be our opinion 11 million people would disagree.

But you came and did the same thing, go you....

These folks play WoW so they have as much right to their opinion as you.
Its not insulting, its their business plan. Read up on it. They want to make it "easier". Some players find that insulting.

[Irlazy]

I played a little WoW and it is an easier game to play that assists the player. It is somewhat casual but with WoW though they dont really limit one to casual play. If you want you can go kill something that takes hours to kill so thats not casual. BUT they intended the game to be easy to play and when a game is easy to play you attract a wider range of people to play it. With WoW you get people who only have an hour a day to play after work to rewind and people who will play for several days straight with minimal rest. So to stay with the point WoW IS an easy game to play but that in no way means we are insulting it. We are merely congratulating the people who put time and effort into making this game a game that does not play easily. We play this game for the challenge or the community not because we want to grind on boss monsters or run from one place to the next doing hundreds of quests. So where any game got insulted here is beyond me. Unless you mean people saying something likes its pretty pathetic in context to the ease of the questing system. That still though does not bash an entire game/series/studio just the ease that people can do something that is generally considered a challenge.

[kiez]

This is probably of very little constructive help, but yeah - play WoW and similar titles, and you will soon find out why Wyvern is addicting. It isn't so easy its boring.

[Lanterra]

Idk much of anything about WoW, but I will say that I have always and will always love wyvern due to the fact that it's easy on hard drive space and memory, it's the fist MMORPG I ever played, and it still feels like a great fit to me. I've played RS and several of the other games (not WoW, unfortunatly) but this is the one I've always come back to.

[Speci]

You could say Diablo II played on this idea of making it very hard to acquire items, especially good ones. Not trying to compare Wyvern and Diablo II directly, but those have both been games I just can't let go away, even if I don't touch it for a year, I simply have to start playing it again. Wyvern is great in its minimalistic style and relatively large world. I will admit, I miss some of the pre-balance things because making crazy combos was more possible which I thought was awesome, but I like it as it is now. This past week of it being down has driven me crazy, good thing I don't have school this week ^_^ (Assuming the server is back, please?)

[hofod]

I played WoW and it's not a bad game, but it is very overrated by it's more hardcore players. I was introduced to Wyvern by my brother a few years ago and since I played it the first day and got to level 4 I was addicted to it. Something about Wyvern makes it much more attention-grabbing than WoW to me. I think it's WoW's repetitiveness that gets boring. I mean delivery, kill 8 small snow wolves, delivery, go to another city, start process over... I mean Wyvern is repetitive when you play it every day all day but Wyvern also has a few things that really make it shine. like the first time you have a character hitting Hall of Fame is a big thing (or it was for me) and then once you do HoF who doesnt want a custom image? I've had a lot of characters in my day and nearly all my characters are gone because of my ignorance, but a lot of them were around level 22 if i had to average it. Last Year i started my new E-mail and I came back to Wyvern after a few months and created Hofod the Dwarven Caveman (who went pally on the 4th :'( idk why). I remember I was with my bro trying to go kill the Arch Shoggs again and in the RD I leveled to 25. It was great but eventually that excitement died... Until I started my newest character Riordan. Riordan is my human axeman. I started him because I never saw a human axeman except Cacid but he was pretty much retired when I started Rio. A lot of you may know Riordan... As he is my ace character. I've put a lot of time and effort into him and he got to level 25.... I quested until I couldn't stand it anymore and then kept going and hit 250 QP.... getting all those points I got my HoF image and then i hit level 26... and just to finish up the whole thing i've been trying to say is.... Even after all my success and all the things i've done I still have a lot to do and I still have a lot of things I want to do on Wyvern. Where as on WoW.... My mage hit level 25 and my Pally level 40... And I am completely bored of that game :/

[Kama]

I've really never been able to get into other games; I might play them for a while but ultimately I find myself bored senseless. In that respect, one could say I'm not all that much of a gamer; yet I've been playing Wyvern for near 10 years (started in '01? Got more active/serious in 03'+), and despite having taken a few longer breaks from it, the complexity and challenging nature of the game is what keeps me coming back.

In my opinion, Wyvern is one of the most well-made and balanced MMORPGs out there.

You may think its almost backwards thinking, but I would much rather have very little magic items and savor what I have than have too many magic items and throw away whatever I don't need.

And I wholeheartedly agree with Igoroth on that.^

[Pol]

I have played both wyvern and wow for a very long time and of course are bored with both even though I check back to see whats new every now and then. Personally I think both games present a challenge in their own unique ways. Wow doesn't really get challenging until the end game raids, but I still find it fun regardless. There is always stuff to do on the side, like work on a profession, hunt for rare mounts (I have over 100 which took me well over 6 months), hunt for rare pets, help ******* (which wyvern has made almost impossible, no matter what they try to argue. And in wow even if you do reach the end, and you do get the best gear, then there is room to show it off, and do other things, and usually before you get too bored a new expansion comes out. I personally think Wyvern used to be even funner, but if you want to talk about a straight out grind.. that's what wyvern is now. Other than a few exceptional players that seem to master wyvern, the rest of the population seems to get on hours a day, killing and being killed relentlessly, spending years of their lives to maybe one day reaching HoF. Only to find nothing else to really do, except level another HoF or level further.. for maybe scoreboard glory I guess? That's the way I see it now, even though back in the day, wyvern was much less of a grind, and way more fun. It didn't take half your lifespan to reach Hof, you were able to help people and be helped by trading gear and gold, which made making friends in the game invaluable. I remember Aznassassin was the first that gave me some gold, starting me on the path to glory. Which later I returned the favor to many other players. Then with time we had many HoF's online, and were able to enjoy massive LQ's, and great PK fests, which held a load of excitement, since many players were able to reach HoF within a reasonable time. My whole time playing wyvern I have never seen a big imbalance, most players I knew didn't have a mass amount of gold, and they weren't an insane level. Wyvern changes cause a few players were like that. Like HunterZ, awesome player btw, made for some fun PKs. But the other 95% of us who weren't able to reach that pinnacle, had to keep dealing with Nerfs until the game became almost a 100% grind. That is just my opinion, have fun with it . And don't cry, I am not saying wyvern is a bad game the way it is, it is just for a certain type of gamer. I guess like the 10 people who are on everyday now. The other 90+ who used to always be on, are the other type of gamer. Wyvern definitely knows how to keep a small community lol. and where is the balance? In WoW every race and class can do just as well as each other in terms of leveling, damage output, gold, gear, almost everyone. Wyvern? pretty much none of that. I still notice a couple players on Wyvern who have all the cool items, while poor ****ies and spending days upon days scraping for gold to buy those items, huge leveling gaps, huge class differences. Archers still suck horrible and have a hard time, Nagas seem to have a hard time, now there is no spam healing, guilds with huge hp like caveman have excelled, and mages have always been OP. Just huge class differences, Damage output is all over the place, only the richest of the players usually have the best gear. I mean someone needs to explain where the balance is to me cause I don't see it. I thought balance meant there was a balance between players, not huge gaps, which is what I see in wyvern.