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.

Comments

Meanwhile, over in Everquest2 land...

[Anonymous Coward]

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*

Re:Meanwhile, over in Everquest2 land...

[spaeschke]

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.

first impression: ... eh.

[joe094287523459087]

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.

Re:first impression: ... eh.

[Achoi77]

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!

Got in last night

[dr00g911]

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.

Re:Bittorrent?

[Trikenstein]

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.

Downloader idiocy, and getting around it

[Noah Adler]

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 :-)

Re:Bittorrent?

[Enucite]

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

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