World of Warcraft Closed Beta Ending

JD-1027 writes "Blizzard is ending it's closed beta test of World of Warcraft Friday at 3pm PDT. Somewhat of an abrupt announcement, welcome by most, that means the release of the game is inching closer." In all likelihood this indicates the imminent arrival of the Open Beta Test.

Comments

Stay tuned...

[HanShootsFirst]

For another stress test. A Blizzard rep posted in their official forums that signups are on the way.

They are preparing for the next stress test.

[Xenopax]

Which will be a slashdotting of their open beta. ;)

been waiting for this since they announced it

[sgant]

It's been what, 2 years since they announced it? I'm really looking forward to it. But I certainly haven't built up my expectations for this, having been let down too many times (can you say SWG?)

WoW, HL2 and LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth are the big 3 I'm waiting for. But here this past week, while I heard of Guild Wars, I never really looked into it.

After the first couple of minutes of "oh wow, pretty" wore off, I learned that it was a kind of boring game while I was playing the World Wide Event that's going on now. I'm talking...snoozer.

But that's a game in progress, so perhaps it will get better and better over time, but it's mainly a haven for Diablo regects at the moment. They REALLY need an /ignore command in that game.

Re:been waiting for this since they announced it

[Godai]

There is an /ignore command. And yeah, there are currently a fair number of Dialob rejects but also a goodly number of good people. Look for that ration to tilt wildly towards the former in the Open Beta :)

Closed Beta was fun

[Godai]

All you guys who end up downloading the Open Beta client are in for a treat. I've played a troll mage (EnSabahNur) through to 57 and had a great time. Still work to be done on it, but a blast nonetheless.

Re:Closed Beta was fun

[Moonshadow]

Seconded. I played a human paladin up to 45, a tauren shaman, an undead mage, and a night elf rogue up to 10-20 apiece, and each one was just fantastic.

Odd as it may sound, I'm highly considering not buying it when it goes retail, because it is MUCH too addictive.

For what it's worth, this is coming from someone that thought SWG was a steaming pile of crap.

I've had no desire to play an MMORPG before, but

[CodeWanker]

It must be a good game; my cube used to be adjacent to some guy in this Beta, and for months he spent more time talking on the phone about... uh... soul shards and necromancers and other esoteric things than he did actually earning his salary. I was preparing to kill him and leave D & D lead figurines stuffed in all his orifices (got a good deal on 25 pounds of them on eBay) when I picked up a better contract somewhere else.

Horray

[jayhawk88]

Dropped FFXI a couple weeks ago after about 8 months of play, and have been really looking forward to WoW.

I really liked FFXI, but in the end the time sink required for this game was just too much for me. SE's insistance on making FFXI a true multiplayer experience was certainly inspired, but in the end was just too hard on the "casual" gamer like myself. Past level 20 it's almost impossible to level efficiently or to get anything meaningful accomplished without the help of 5 or more other players, which really requires a lot of time meeting and maintaining game relationships. Again, for those with the time to do this the game is wonderful, but those of us who can only put a few hours a week into the game, or perhaps have one or two real life friends they only want to play with, really find ourselves at a disadvantage.

It's my hope that WoW is a little better in this respect. From what I understand the majority of experience in the game comes from doing quests of various kinds? Hopefully many of these quests can be done solo if one wants to.

Re:Horray

[Moonshadow]

This is mostly correct. If you like, you can solo most everything easily. The only places these break down are against elite mobs (mobs of a certain level for hit/miss purposes, but which have much more hp and hit harder. These generally take 2-3 people of equal level to take down, at a minimum.) and in instances (which are all full of elite mobs).

I really enjoy both solo and duo play, and WoW does both wonderfully.

One thing of note; groups are pretty fluid in WoW. You might advertise that you're looking for a group for a particular mission in the zone channel. Three other people join up, you go do the mission for 20 minutes, you're done, and everyone goes about their way. It's very nice to be able to find groups easily if you want them, and even nicer to not require a group most of the time.

Re:Horray

[syle]

I was a level 44 rogue in WoW beta as of this morning (level cap is 60) with about 6 days of /played. Most of the quests are soloable, but not all. They show up colored by difficulty, and usually tough ones are much easier if you just wait a couple levels to do them. What may take me a team of 3 at 35 is usually soloable by 38. Blizzard has said explicitly that they want it to be possible for all classes to solo to 60, and from what I've seen they're living up to that. If I just grind xp and don't quest, the 40-45 levels take maybe 3-4 hours a piece (rogues tend to level solo faster than most classes, but not a lot faster). Really though, you usually won't be just grinding because the quests will overlap things you want to kill anyway, and the xp and item rewards are very good.

Re:Horray

[syle]

There are your garden variety of quests, especially in outdoor zones. For example, "Kill 10 Stranglethorn Raptors" is the first in a series, then on completion you get "Kill 10 Lashtail Raptors," (higher level) followed by "Kill 10 Jungle Stalkers" (higher still). After the Jungle Stalkers, you get one to kill a named high level raptor, with a nice raptor-skin tunic as a reward.

What separates it from something like EQ is that the rewards are always very good xp and often items (sometimes your choice of items). They're things you would be killing anyway, only if 10 kills gets you 2500 xp, the quest reward will plop another 3000 on top of it.

Another thing that sets it apart is that the writing is excellent. They can manage to make basic "talk to these 5 people" quest lines develop into an epic scope.

There are plenty of others, quests that lead to unique boss encounters, saving lost people, etc. Basically, the quests in each zone tell the storyline behind the place. Last night I was solving a murder mystery, the night before I was stealthing into a tower and pickpocketing vital information from a boss that would kill me in one hit. Before that, I was defending a small town in the woods from a huge ogre that walks through and kills people nightly.

And there are a lot. You can only have 20 quests at a time, and it's extremely easy to fill that up if you just accept them all. You often have to pick and choose ones that look interesting.

Re:Horray

[NaugaHunter]

Their were essentially four quest types:
- Slaughter - Kill x of Mob y
- Farming - You need x of object z which drop off of Mob y
- Travel - Go to area m and talk to NPC n.
- Named - Kill a specifically named mob, sometimes retrieving a drop

Any of these could be marked "Elite", though usually the Slaughter and Named only. What makes a quest Elite is the mob will hit as if level L, and will have armor as if level L, but will have a LOT more hit points to out-last soloers. Therefore, if it's something you want to see you can do it alone or at least in a small group at a higher level, you just won't get the experience for killing the mob itself. Note that Farming quests sometimes worked against Groups - you could kill faster in a group, but you'd have to kill more to collect enough for everyone.

Quests are by no means required; you're free to level on your own if you want. But they have two benefits: experience and usually a monetary or item reward.

(Level 43 Undead Rogue, and a handful of lower level characters, for reference.)

Looking forward to the Open Beta

[Xian97]

If nothing else, participating in the open beta will give me a chance to try it out before buying WoW. One of my strongest complaints about MMORPGs is the lack of a playable demo or trial. While you usually get the first month free, you still have to shell out $50 for the game itself without knowing if you are going to enjoy the experience. You have to make your buying decision based on reviews and in-game movies instead of a playable demo. This alone has kept me from trying several games since I didn't want to buy it to find out I didn't like the gameplay.

I am looking forward to this one since I have found most Blizzard games to have great gameplay. I didn't care as much for their older games, Blackthorne and the Lost Vikings, but the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft series rank among my favorites.

Yea, if I was blizzard i'd close down too.

[JVert]

Nobody is going to be interested in taking bug reports this weekend at blizzard because they are all playing guildwars.

Re:Time required?

[urbancontra]

I know I wasted a ton of time playing this game, and I'm a senior in college as well. I don't think you have to devote too much time a week to it to have fun, but it certainly is MORE fun when you get into higher levels. You don't get talent points until level 10, and talents are really where you can start customizing your character. Then again, I can make it to level 15 in one sitting (but I have experience, of course). The best part about leveling in WoW is that it doesn't feel like work. Most of your time will be spent questing, and Blizzard has done an excellent job making sure you don't have to grind through your levels. The quests progress naturally and smoothly throughout the game until you get to about the upper 40s. I'm sure Blizzard is still working on higher level content, though. They're adding a new high level instance with this upcoming patch. Crafting is the latter of what you described. Mining requires you to find different kinds of ore veins scattered across the world. Leatherwork requires you to kill things and skin them. For tailoring, you find cloth on various humanoid corpses. Alchemists can gather herbs from around the world. The only catch is, if you want to gather your own materials, you have to choose the corresponding gathering skill as your second tradeskill, and you can only have two. Of course, you could just buy your materials, but that gets expensive quickly.