World of Warcraft Open Beta Online
Everyone and their brother wrote in to mention to us that the World of Warcraft Open Beta has begun, breaking Fileplanet in the process. The WoW community site has also been hammered into a whimpering ball, and the normal version is down in favour of a simple black page of text. The torrent to download the game is still up but if you're looking to join you'd best be signing up soon. The Open Beta is a first-come first-serve affair. For our friends across the pond, IGN has details on the European Beta Test, which sounds like it will be a profitable venture for Blizzard. From my experience, if you are at all interested in fantasy gaming this one will knock your socks off.
A bold warrior throws open the gates, and loudly announces "You can all enter now and pay homage and loyalty to....hey,where is everyone?"
*crickets*
Fifteen bucks more out of my wallet per month, and fifteen hours more taken out of my days. Maybe I should just hand in my resignation now and avoid getting laid off like last time. *Shudders about SWG*
Dammit..I really would have submitted the news myself but as I have no brothers, I couldn't participate.
IP Therefore I am.
I've been in the closed beta since July.. this one, unlike other high profile MMOs, is ready as its going to be for launch. And its fun; well worth the 15 bucks a month..
If you are a casual gamer you have to try it out..
The proprietary downloader is going slow as heck. I saw mention of a torrent in the news item, any chance anyone has a link to the torrent file?
If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
If you're a paying customer, you can grab the file from FilePlanet. Alternatively, you can signup for the WoW beta here, and grab the Official Blizzard Download Client from the signup area.
Since the official Blizzard download client is a marvelous piece of BitTorrent shit (the Blizzard forums are rampant with posts complaining of choked bandwidth and horrible download speeds - I'm personally getting about 6 KB/s down and was putting up 70 KB/s before I choked the upload with a 3rd party program.), does anyone have a torrent file for this?
I did find a torrent on Suprnova, but haven't been able to get a decent connection speed.
i've played FFXI for over a year but that's my only MMORPG experience, so my comments about WoW will inevitably have some ffxi-comparison flavor to them. i'm a hardcore gamer other than that though.
... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.
the character customization was a letdown. you can choose skin color, hair color, hair style, and facial hair, but each option has only 10 presets. you can't pick any RGB combination.
it was a little confusing when trying to get in to play with friends. apparently you start in your race's home town, and half the races (horde) start on the other side of the planet from the rest (alliance). so you have to coordinate and have everyone at least on the same island, and same race if you want to level up together.
the first thing i noticed was navigation. there's a little map but it doesn't show anything important. if you get lost an NPC can put a marker on it for you but i didn't see a way to mark it myself. guild wars has an awesome feature where you can draw on the map and everyone in your party can see it. ffxi has a full screen map mode that shows everything in your current zone (although you have to do a quest to get the map). the WoW map was jsut
the next thing i noticed was how cartoonish everything was. not just the style of the models and architecture, but the 3d engine. every surface was flat and shiny-smooth. the characters and monsters moving around didn't seem to inhabit the world - footstep animation didnt match how quickly the characters moved. it looked like a movie made by an art student.
it took me about 2 hours to get level 5. apparently the best way to level up is to do quests, most of which require you to kill stuff. in ffxi, you have to be ok at your job at 10 and good at your job by level 15 or you will die every fight. in wow, i was soloing stuff 2 levels higher and reading the news in another window - it's very easy.
i've only played it 1 day and there's review by people that have played it for months already, but i wanted to comfort the people that didn't manage to get a key yesterday - (for me) it's not addicting and after the first 2 hours i was ready to stop playing because it was boring.
will it be the biggest MMORPG in time? i'm gonna go against conventional wisdom and say No. when i first started FFXI, i immediately felt like i was part of a big complex world and every time i went around a corner there was something really cool to discover. wow just seems antiseptic and empty. then again, when FFXI released in NA, it had already been out for a couple years in japan and for many months in NA beta. this is a fresh new world in WoW so maybe that's how all MMORPG start out.
http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2984/WoW(2). torrent
My wife and I made it in the open beta last night.
FYI -- whichever installer / torrent you download, the Mac *and* PC versions are included so you don't have to worry about sucking down 2.6 gigs for each platform if you've got both platforms at your disposal.
Initial impressions after about 2 hours on my little undead warlock:
- Incredible amount of polish (except for the whole server being reduced to rubble thing)
- Much quicker progression than other MMORPGS -- level and quest design are extremely well thought out
- Seems to borrow from the best of other MMOs, and really polish the hell out of the annoying parts (treadmilling, 'where do I go now?'). You've always got a purpose.
- Leveling and progression are a little 'odd' right now -- not knowing how to spec, without the massive fansites that Camelot or EQ have make training a little risky. But this promotes a bit of experimentation, and besides -- my toons are gonna get wiped at launch anyhow. I may as well tinker.
- I'm curious about the 'endgame' -- in DAoC it's all about (extremely addictive) consentual PvP. In EQ, it's all about camping. Being Warcraft, I'd assume that the first expansions are going to be seriously PvP focused, similar to what DAoC's got. At least that's my hope.
As a guy with a few lvl 50s in DAoC and an original EQ account abandoned way back around Kunark, I was simply blown away by how much fun I was having. And I loved DAoC.
This is the telling part: I didn't even notice the experience bar in the interface, nor go looking for it until the end of my playtime when I started customizing the interface. It just didn't matter because I was simply having too much fun exploring and doing quests. Yep. FedEx, scavenger and kill quests are fun in WoW and really seem like they're adding to the texture of the world.
This seems to finally be the MMO that my casual gaming friends can pick up along side me.
The last time we tried this was buying about 10 copies of Shadowbane for Macs & PCs, and boy did we get burnt. Badly.
Wow, check out PortForward.com! If you need help forwarding ports for this game, or bittorrent to download it :), this is the place. Found the link on Blizzard's website. Pretty useful stuff!
that you're having to wait for an open beta slot to open up...
(I already have one, having jumped on FilePlanet right as it started giving out keys.)
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
You can't take part unless you live in the US. European gamers have to wait until the European open beta. Because it must take millions of $$$'s to convert American language localisation to English language. Must require an army of coders to add those extra U's.
first of all, i am, unfortunately, totally addicted to this game. it's easily the best MMORPG on the market right now.
secondly, however, i think it's important to realize that we're not really participating in a beta test here. the game's more polished than most MMORPG's EVER end up being. what we have here is a *DEMO*. this is a brilliant peice of strategy on Blizzard's part to get a huge number of people hooked on the game while it's free, while simultaneously upstaging EQ2's launch.
i gotta tell ya, it worked like a charm on me. there is simply a mind-boggling amount of stuff to do, even for the races that are complaining about getting the short end of the content stick (tauren and orc). i'm only level 20, and i estimate i've completed over 100 quests. each new land i eventually make my way to makes me go "oh, COOL!"
the homeland of the tauren are vcriticized for being sparse, but i think it's really pretty. the tauren have sort of a spiritual native american thing going, with totems and feathers and stuff. there home is an expansive green plains littered with lumbering kodo beasts, accompanyed by huge bluffs rising high into the clouds.
my first trip to Silverpine, a town in the land of the forsaken (formerly human farm and township territory, that has fallen to the undead), i was taken aback by how much it really felt like a countryside that had been overrun by the undead. there is a permeating sense of sadness, and decay. really well done, and quite a contrast to the barren orc lands and lush tauren lands.
i've also visited some tropical islands, a pirate town, a deforestation facility run by goblins, and a strip mine run by dwarfs. i've seen a lot of really amazing things, and i feel like i've only scratched the surface. i think i'll try Gnome next, they look cute as hell.
i could live a little longer in this prison
I can't believe Blizzard could come up with such a poor BitTorrent client. It seems they fundamentally misunderstand how BitTorrent is meant to work. From a staff member on the forums I found:
Their client attempts to lock your upload/download speed at 1:1. This is not how BitTorrent should work. Each client should upload at whatever maximum speed the user deems reasonable, and try to download as fast as it possibly can. The p2p network itself is responsible for regulating how fast the user downloads, using a Tit-for-Tat approach. If you cap your upload rate at 1KB/s, that's perfectly fine, your peers will just choose not to serve you as quickly as other more generous nodes. Artificially locking the download rate in the client program itself is just stupid.
In addition to the download/upload ratio being artificially modified by the client, there is no way using the supplied installer to limit the rate. It will saturate the upstream, and at least for me, caused me to not be able to do much else on the net at the same time. I could stay connected to IRC, but I couldn't get to any websites or even ping google.com. This is also stupid.
A solution: I tried searching the web for unofficial .torrents, but the only ones I found seemed to no longer work. Luckily, Blizzard has made it easy to extract the torrent from it's installer executable. It's just embedded as a resource file, so using Visual Studio it's easy to extract them. I found three torrents embedded: bin108.torrent, bin112.torrent, and bin119.torrent. These are all somewhat modified with some proprietary data, but bin108.torrent (which seems to contain most or all of the installer data) seems to work nicely in the original BitConjurer client (with which I can actually cap my upload rate!) Now, instead of down/up at 40/40, I'm doing about 120/15.
Sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me off. I generally expect better from Blizzard :-)
Threads on running WoW on Linux using WineX/Cedega.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Let me say this, I was in FilePlanets 4 day stress test two months ago, I got to level 18 in 4 days, and I loved every minute past level 4 (I was a warrior, they suck quite literally till they get a few abilities). The game is gorgeous. People complaining about the cartoonish looks have obviously NEVER played a Warcraft game. If it looked ANY DIFFERENT it wouldnt be WarCraft.
:)
The game is very simple to learn, and always has me wanting more. I moved from CoH with 3 friends (trying to get my girl to move too grr...) and we all LOVE it. I have 4 characters already, and I dont care that in two weeks I'll have to start at square one on release, THIS GAME ROCKS!!!
Downsides: no talking, well, not like EQ2, but thats okay, they DO talk, just not as much.
Cannot speed up text for quests. I read faster than Blizzard "scrolls" the text, which is frustrating.
Cannot really start in same area. If you're a dwarf and I am an Elf, we can group, but not till about level 8-12 (note this takes about 3-4 hours, which isnt THAT bad, but still, its annoying).
Upsides. everything else. the quest system, the jokes (the human warrior tells a joke about a magical set of bracers, Master of the Bracers, yes, a LotR spoof!!!), the world (peasants, there are PEASANTS gathering wood!!!), everything.
I R BLIZZARD FANBOIII ONCE MORE!!
This game rocks
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
you can get the real torrents here:
r ents
http://wowtorrents.de.vu/
or here:
http://fooey.net/stuff/WorldOfWarcraft/tor
I am surprised that Blizzard lets people to test this MMORPG with stress test, closed tests, open beta, etc. for a long time. I have to give kudos for the company in doing to get rid most of the issues even when 23rd is two weeks away! Good job, Blizzard!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been downloading since late last night, I'm up to about 1.7 GB. I'm positivley salivating.
So, out of curiousity, has anyone been denied an open beta account yet??
Honnestly people, this is a serious issue. Do I leave now? or just stop showing up? Do I milk the job for all its worth, so I'm not forced to go work sooner when my money runs out?
:)
:P
My recommendation? Move to a socalist state, let the state support me! When considering moving, look at if they provide free broadband while they are at it
Hell its what I'm gong to be doing once I graduate with my MScCS
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Pretty please?
If you don't have the client you can get it at: http://bittorrent.com/
I've been following WoW since the beginning as well as having played in the stress test and all I can say is: IT ROCKS!!!!!!!
I hope this thread hasn't already died... but... I'm getting an odd error message (see comment subject), and nothing's downloading...
::sigh::
Did I miss out on the damned beta *again*?
I played the first stress test, but opted out on playing again (I want some other gamer to have the chance playing). Like several of my friends, I thought the game was too cartoony, but after an hour or two of playing, you get over it. It still has nice, smooth graphics. Throw a couple of spells, and you'll see what I mean.
;)
I had gotten a couple characters to lvl 12, and tried every race/most classes. The geography is well planned, each race having a starting city (with orcs/trolls sharing, and dwarfs/gnomes having the same starting zones). And the dark elves are very secluded.
For the stress test, I was plesently surprized at how finished it was. I only ran into a couple of visual issues with the world map. Its quailty as an unfinished product was shocking... certainly compared to say...swg.
Im not an EQ/2 player, but compared to CoH, it offers that same kind of group or independant mission-running fun, plus has PvP right off the bat. And the PvP looks well planned out, including ranks/rewards for those who do well in PvP. Only downside was the limit on how custom the character could be. After CoH, having so few options was a disappointment. WoW didn't have the crack-like addiction of some other games, which was a bit of a relief, but I think I will eventually get into WoW... after I get some HL2 gametime taken care of.
This signature is part of a balanced post.
It seems the link is to a bad downloader version.
n =w ow-tech-support&t=34903&p=1&tmp=1#post3490 3
See this page.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?f
just to keep u informed . The way death is handled got changed during the last patch. If you die now, you can either go back to your corpse and lose 10% of all items durability or rezz at the graveyard and loose 100% + exp loss. Sry to disappoint all casual gamers - its still beta - but that is the last status.