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World of Warcraft Open Beta Online

Posted by Zonk on from the we-who-may-be-about-to-level-salute-you dept.

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.

24 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Meanwhile, over in Everquest2 land... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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*

    1. Re:Meanwhile, over in Everquest2 land... by spaeschke · · Score: 4, Informative
      You couldn't be more right. SOE has been outmaneuvered by too many other companies that are better at this than they are.

      Not to say that I think Blizzard is all that great; for one thing they move like pondwater when it comes to updates. Still, they're better than Sony, and having played the EQ2 beta I can say that that game is horrible. In so many ways it's a huge step backward from the first EQ.

      No, the best developer out there right now is Cryptic. They've done everything right with City of Heroes. From the sheer fun, the quality of everything, the great customer service and the continuing updates (which a lot of other companies would sell as expansion packs), these guys are the slickest devs out there.

      SOE can still be competitive, but they're a long ways away from the 800 lb. gorilla that they used to be.

    2. Re:Meanwhile, over in Everquest2 land... by Dachannien · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, I think Blizzard dropped the ball on this one. If they had opened the open beta before this past weekend started, that would have been a ton of people not buying EQ2 and playing the WoW beta right up until late November. As it stands now, a lot more people went ahead and picked up EQ2, and will be far less likely to waste their free month playing WoW instead (and therefore will be less likely to try out WoW unless they decide they completely dislike EQ2).

  2. beta.. by werelord · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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..

    1. Re:beta.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I was in closed beta for several months as well. I quit playing SWG I enjoyed it so much. And other than the servers having issues (which I assume/hope has been fixed by now). The game was fun and enjoyable.
      My only concern is that after playing beta for 3 months, I am not sure if there is any point to buy the game. I feel I have pretty much done all there is to do.....
      And I think that will be this game's biggest problem. It suffers more than other MMORPGs from burnout. There just simply isn't that much to this game at all. Hopefully the PvP (which was only being implemented fully when I stopped playing) will be something worth doing. But otherwise this game will have extremely high churn rates....

  3. Bittorrent? by WereTiger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Bittorrent? by WereTiger · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oh, the proprietary client IS a bittorrent client. Neat. pointless, but neat.

      --
      If you're hearing rhetoric about Linux, open source, or Mac and everyone's bashing Microsoft, you've found Slashdot.
    2. Re:Bittorrent? by Trikenstein · · Score: 4, Interesting
      A BT client with no real controll.
      I had so many upload connections that it choked my download to almost nothing.

      Thankfully someone posted a torrent link and I can use BitTornado.

    3. Re:Bittorrent? by Enucite · · Score: 4, Informative

      How to make a torrent from the blizzard downloader using vim:

      vim WoW-downloader.exe
      /d8:
      d:1
      :w WoW.torrent

  4. BitTorrent by lune+tns · · Score: 2, Informative


    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.

  5. first impression: ... eh. by joe094287523459087 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    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 ... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.

    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.

    1. Re:first impression: ... eh. by Achoi77 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Finally got on the beta last night - here is my first few impressions:

      For those now playing right now, when Blizzard says the game has an emphasis for casual gamers, they really mean it. Certain mechanics of the game are defined so that powerleveling is discouraged - and at times, just plain difficult. In other words, nevermind the fact that leveling up is fairly nice and easy, the actual process of counting heads from all the kills you made is slow. So that means you (by yourself) will not be physically able to empty out an entire zone by ravaging the whole land before they respawn - on the other hand, there is always plenty of stuff to kill, and little downtime. :-)

      I beleive grandparent's gripe is strictly from a powergamer's perspective - trying to find every single gaming mechanic in order to maximize what is perceived as playing efficiency in the quest to try and 'beat' the system. I know I was like that for the first few hours of playing WoW. But gameplay style is completely different than EQ for instance (don't really know much about the other MMOs), and once I realized that the STORY and exploration is as much of the game as leveling, the whole game became so much more enjoyable it's retarded I didn't realize it sooner.

      As for character customization: No more sticking with the few tried and true 'caste' classes, this is the flexibility in a MMORPG I was looking for! I beleive 'cheat sheet' sites like Castersrealm and Allakhazam (are those sites still around?) may begin to become obsolete as this game gains popularity.

      That said, WoW's target demographic is NOT the powergamers, NOT the people already playing EQ or FF or CoH or whatever MMORPG is popular right now. It's primary aim is for guys like me: ex powergamers who are over the top, who need to pay off bills, mortgage, and focus on RL things in general now that I'm old. I feel like I can play an hour a day and not feel like it was a waste of effort (like in EQ).

      I'm sold.

      Oh, is the whole battlegrounds thing up and running? Can anyone clue me in on how that works? That kind of PvP sounds like a blast!

    2. Re:first impression: ... eh. by AuMatar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've played every MMO from EQ to FFXI to Eve to ATiTD. Here's my thoughts on your comments.

      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.

      Funny someone from FFXI complains about this- weren't there 10 or so total choices per race there? This is a good amount of customization. Letting someone pick any RGB would be bad, we'd have pink and purple Taurens which would ruin the atmosphere. Also, WoW has the most important part of customization- skill customization. Warrior A is different from warrior B by more tha just his gear- he has different skillsets and abilities due to race and talents. THis is far more important and fun than just looks.

      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.

      This is a good thing. The game is a PvP game- horde vs alliance. You can't have PvP realms if you're playing lovey dovey in the same city. The racial cities help give the game more of an RP feel (and its all about rp), and a better atmosphere. I really think FFXI would have been better if they had enforced racial starting cities instead of using the weak bonus item thing.

      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 ... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.

      As you explore more of an area, additional information appears on the map. For example when you find a new area, it will color in on the map, mouseover will show the areaname, and additional details will show up (roads, rivers, buildings, dungeons). An FFXI style marking or guildwar style thing would be nice, but it isn't as low featured as you claim. But since you only got to 5, you may still be in your starting town and not have noticed this.

      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.

      The difficulty does go up, but I consider the easy leveling a *good* thing. I quit FFXI not because the game was poor, but because leveling became too much of a pain post 50. ANd I love leveling from quests- it adds so much more to a game then just killing mobs. Wait til you get some of the higher level quests. As a shaman, for my fire totem I needed to find a shrine in the mountains. It required finding a small mountain path that twisted through the zone. If you didn't know a path and a shrine had to be there, you'd never find it. Similarly, I've found quests started by hidden items. If you explore you can find all sorts of stuff.

      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.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    3. Re:first impression: ... eh. by EngineeringMarvel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I played FFXI for approximately 6 months and attained level 40 with my main job. I played WoW during the stress test and attained level 15. I am a casual gamer. I enjoyed FFXI, but I grew bored of leveling, thus grew bored of FFXI.

      If you are a power gamer, you will probably want to stick with FFXI because the leveling and quest system in FFXI is based around playing the game 3-5 hours at a time. If you are tired of leveling or a casual gamer, then switch to WoW. WoW has an extremely elaborate quest system that drives you through the game. Unlike FFXI, you get some small story tidbits while you work on rank. In WoW, everything has a story, and like FFXI, the quests are driven to make you explore new areas.

      Grouping. You know that in FFXI, you can't do anything without a full group. Not to mention a full group of good players. In WoW, that is not the case. You can choose to do solo missions are group missions since the quest are color coded according to their difficulty. I enjoyed doing the solo quests and the harder, group quests. With that said, you have more options with WoW, than you do with FFXI.

      Leveling. After I reached level 10, the level came a lot slower, just like in FFXI. You can work on a sub skills, but you are pretty much stuck with the main job you pick in WoW. FFXI was cool because you could just switch jobs whenever you wanted, you cannot really do that with WoW...but, the jobs/skills in WoW are very customizable and are more detailed, so you have more to choose from. In FFXI, you received ability A at level 10. In WoW, you have to choose what skills you want to concentrate in. Example, mage would choose, fire, water, or earth. In FFXI, you just earned more money to get what you wanted.

      I found FFXI to be too slow and time consuming to get anything done in the end, that's why I quit. I enjoyed WoW because of its casual atmosphere. That and not ever having to wait for a WHM to pop-up and join my group. I suggest you try the open BETA. I think you will find all you need to know and will be able to make a good decision based on it.

      --
      I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
  6. blah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2984/WoW(2). torrent

  7. Got in last night by dr00g911 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Port Forwarding by hords · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!

  9. not really a beta. by pezpunk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:not really a beta. by jorenko · · Score: 3, Informative

      Day/night is on a 24 hour schedule, matching the time zone that the server you're playing on is in. Although dusk does last longer than it should. You don't really see stars until about midnight.

  10. Downloader idiocy, and getting around it by Noah+Adler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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:

    'The dev team continues to work on the Blizzard Downloader to ensure that the difference between upload and download rates are as small as possible.'

    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 :-)

  11. Second Time Through... by LordYUK · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Second Time Through... by Ghent99 · · Score: 2, Informative
      Cannot speed up text for quests. I read faster than Blizzard "scrolls" the text, which is frustrating.

      The UI for WoW is completely customizable, including the quest text speed. There are a few mods out there, but only recommend one:

      CTMod

      The install is easy, but you'll need to read the forums to get it work with the current patch level. (There's a number to change in a few files). I'm sure the guys over there will release an updated version when retail ships.

      This mod is fantastic, it adds many hot bars which you can turn on and off, several features, and a quest text fading enable/disable feature. Turn it off, and bang, quest text appears in it's completeness, instantaneously :)

      Check it out, I can't play WoW without it :)

      --

      - Ghent

  12. the real torrents are embedded in the downloader by Fo0eY · · Score: 2, Informative

    you can get the real torrents here:
    http://wowtorrents.de.vu/

    or here:
    http://fooey.net/stuff/WorldOfWarcraft/torr ents

  13. Great game by jgoemat · · Score: 2, Informative
    This comes from an EQ background (played DAOC for a while too)... Some of the things I like about WOW:
    1. No exp penalty for death - I don't think a game should seriously punish you for wanting to explore. If you die in WOW, your ghost appears in a graveyard in the area and you just have to follow the mini-map back to your corpse. You get resurrected with 1/2 mana and health for free. The only penalty is the time it takes you to get back to your corpse. A game is supposed to be fun and exciting. In EQ I found myself killing safe mobs because if I died I would have to spend an hour or two getting that experience back. Now you can actually feel more like a hero and take a chance every now and then.
    2. MINIMAP! - You have a map of the large area with roads and rivers displayed on it, as well as a mini-map showing exactly where you are in the local area. People in the next stage for your current quests are shown on the minimap, as well as your party members and (hopefully not) your corpse. Also you can ask guards in any town for directions if you want to find your trainer, someone to do with tradeskills, the bank, or other things, then a marker is placed on the large map and the mini-map.
    3. QUESTS! - You don't have to walk around to every person and talk to them to see if they have a quest. If someone has a quest for you, a yellow exclaimation mark is over their head. Now you don't have to search the fan sites to find out what the quests are, you can just play the game. Also they quests are fun and plentiful, and actually give you good rewards (exp, cash, and items)
    4. Tradeskills - So far at least, you just get trained and have recipees for things you can make. If you want to make something, you click the tradekill button and pick a recipe. If you have the items, hit 'Create'. You can even batch create a lot of the same kind of item if you have the materials. I hated having to look up or find the formulas for things in EQ and then having to deal with failures. The free tradeskills cooking and fishing look interesting too.
    5. Downtime - So far at level 8, it only takes a short while to regenerate health and mana while sitting, even less time if you eat or drink something. I hope this continues into higher levels, I hated meditating for 5 minutes after each kill in EQ.
    6. PVP - One thing I liked about DAOC was the feeling of being on a team and being able to engage in PVP if you wanted, or be safe if you wanted. I've only seen one member of the horde and chased him out. In normal servers in WOW, you are safe unless you attack a player of the other side, then you have a PVP flag set for 5 minutes during which the other team can attack you. If you don't want to do PVP, just don't attack anyone.
    7. Items - EQ was all about camping monsters to get that uber-item or an item you needed for a quest to get an uber-item. I don't think WOW will be like that, the equipment doesn't seem to confer that much of an advantage.