Does instant transportation effect game immersion?

[Konachibi]

It's a shame to hear people and more so friends being negatively affected to such an extent by World Of Warcraft.
Kinda beats the point eh.

Fixed it for you (b'.')b

Personally if I had been the owner of Blizzard Entertainment I'd have stopped game development at the end of The Burning Crusade expansion pack when I saw that it was turning many people in the real world into mindless vegetables.

Although it's not the games fault and I can't blame really Blizzard for it, they didn't really do anything to try and stop people sinking into a meaningless life of 'wake up, turn on computer, play WoW, use toilet and eat food when necessary, turn off computer, go back to sleep, repeat x infinity', in fact they tried to make the game MORE addictive than it already was, only worsening the situation.
They must have seen and realised that their community was becoming corrupt and rotten, but never tried to stop this from progressing to the point it's at now, where 90% of the games player-base is a bunch of spoilt ignorant brainless little brats that will cry, shout, complain and insult ANYTHING that differs even 0.000001% from what they think.

Did you know there's a Widows Of Warcraft website? It's where wives and ex-wives complain about how the game has sucked in their husbands/ex-husbands and ruined their marriages.

Also if you were to try and have a debate about immersion on the Warcraft forums, you wouldn't get people argue with you, you'd just get about 50 "STFU" replies. That game lacks any possible form of immersion at all. Sure it has a plot, but no one cares, the players and the developers have made the game so easy that being in one zone is exactly like being in another, eventually you tunnel-vision and all you can see is enemies to kill and quest giving NPCs, you stop noticing the world you're running around because you're too busy aiming for more XP, loot and gold. And once you hit end-game there's no point leaving Stormwind because you can access every heroic dungeon through the LFG tool, then you sit around argueing with other people in trade chat till your dungeon invite pops up. The game world is huge, but nowadays you're lucky if you even see 5 people outside of Stormwind or Orgrimmar. That's not immersion, that's the most broken online roleplaying game available.

Surely Blizzard could have done SOMETHING to the game to try and reduce the 'hardcore elitist' attitude that it promoted so much, and try and twist the game more in the direction of a social thing.

This is why I love FFXIV, you can be as hardcore elitist as you like, but you won't get to the end any quicker than a social player, because you're restricted to 8 battle leve's and 12 crafting leve's per reset no matter how much you try and do more, the only way to continue levelling is to just go out and keep killing monsters for hours on end. Elitists don't want that, they want to gain 10 levels NOW and they want dungeon loot NOW and they want all the rest of the games content NOW, so this game pretty much repels them.

However that also could be the reason it launched so badly. After 7 years of WoW dominating the top spot in commercial MMO's and affecting millions of online game players worldwide, a rather large portion of people who would have been fine 7 years ago have become the hardcore elitists my ex-friend also became. Because of that, there was a smaller overall online game player-base that would enjoy a game such as this, and when the elitists tried it and hated it because they couldn't do everything NOW they went off to review websites, forums, social networks and other forms of internet communication and raged that the game was terrible, simply because 'it isn't WoW'.

Before joining this game I heard a lot of complaints about it from friends, reviews and many other information highways. I can quite honestly say after playing for 3-4 weeks now, not a single bad thing any of those 'sources of information' told me about this game is true. This game is beautifull, it's enormous, it has an amazingly in-depth crafting system, (Something I'm INCREDIBLY gratefull for after 5 years of *collect copper ore* *smelt copper ore* *turn copper bar into sword*) it has quite honestly the most impressive graphical rendering I have seen in any MMO (And I've played Age Of Conan and EVE Online quite a bit) and it simply bursts with potential to be an absolutely mind-blowing and wonderous online adventure.

And another I'm gratefull for in this game, because it deterred most hardcore elitist, I was able to find and join a Linkshell full of really nice, kind and friendly people that have similar interests to me, and enjoy the game even more so.

So really all this talk about 'lack of immersion' in this game actually makes me giggle. I've SEEN and EXPERIENCED a game that truly has a lack of immersion, it's called World Of Warcraft, in comparison, Final Fantasy XIV has immersion coming out of it's miqo'te-shaped ears!

[AngryNixon]

They must have seen and realised that their community was becoming corrupt and rotten, but never tried to stop this from progressing to the point it's at now, where 90% of the games player-base is a bunch of spoilt ignorant brainless little brats that will cry, shout, complain and insult ANYTHING that differs even 0.000001% from what they think.

This is an absurd exaggeration. You need to do your homework before you throw these baseless accusations around here. It's 0.000002%.

Also everything Quanta said. Especially the very last paragraph in regards to the way elitist players handle loot distribution. Elitists worth their salt take their loot distribution seriously. And by seriously I mean fairly to a fault. Any reasonable elitist knows that the progression of the whole is inseparable from the progression of the one. If you want to be the best in an MMO (where one might assume progress requires a group) then the entire group has to be the best, not just one person in that group. Only a selfish prat (who would have been a selfish prat in any situation), not an elitist, would act that way. I do wish people would stop confusing hardcore players and elitists for these crazy selfish anti-social instant gratification players. "Elitists don't want that"... You must have run into a great many douchebags as Quanta put it... A great many indeed.