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Original post by sunandshadow In some ways Dofus and Gaia Online have better emotes than WoW.

I had always been a big fan of the Ragnarok Online emotes, I thought they were very well-crafted. Then again, Ragnarok Online didn't have scantily-clad night elves totally flirting it up...

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Original post by Wavinator I have no beef with adopting effective UI or even widely desired design mechanics (buffs, for instance, or status effect based combat strategy). As you note, these become expectations and then conventions. I think that you'd have to be careful that a game that felt and looked the same didn't play the same, though. NathanRunge makes some great points in terms of competing with a behemoth, especially because without the resources a game that pretty much is the same in all but content will have less of everything because it's indie. How would it distinguish itself? Why wouldn't players just go play WoW? My favorite motto here would be the African proverb "Stay out from underfoot of elephants."

Totally agree. As you said, for basic UI things I think a level of "standardization" is a good thing. For instance, Age of Conan recently changed the default colors of their chat displays (for tells, group, guild chat, etc.) to be more in line with "what players are used to" a.k.a. with WoW. I don't think thats a bad thing. Same with the question marks for quest cash-ins and the like. I think the problem comes from the fact that they are copying things like the quest-grind system in WoW when the Blizzard folks are notorious for polishing their content to a ridiculous level. Thus, Age of Conan feels like a beta compared to what WoW felt like when it released- Funcom just simply didn't have the resources necessary to saturate their quest-grind system as Blizzard did for WoW. Totally agreed, stay away from those elephants.