World of Warcraft News

A week's worth of WoW news to share. Last weekend saw the first anti-Ebaying lawsuit as Blizzard makes good on it's claim. This week they've released a patch for the game, adding in new content and unleashing the Holidays on Azeroth. Blizzard has also put up an intriguing preview of PvP Battlegrounds. From that article: "Lower-level players who wanted to contribute in other ways to the battle could also do so by undertaking PvP-related quests, such as capturing wolves or rams to provide mounts for cavalry charges, claiming a nearby mine and ferrying resources back to the main base to upgrade allied troops, or capturing enemy graveyards to lengthen the run back to the frontlines for revived adversaries."

Comments

Great Game

[Manan Shah]

True to its nature, Blizzard has created a game that improves on almost every aspect of the genre instead of trying to be too original. The largest drawback to their game is the lack of meaningful PvP, which many seasoned veterans are drawn too. However, there is some speculation that they will go the DAOC route (with keeps, PvP points, realm wide benefits) that will add some meaning to PvP. Even in beta, it was more polished than most games were after two-three years in the market. Even with a spectacular launch where over 250,000 units were sold in just the first day, and had a record 100,000 playing on the afternoon of the launch, they seem to be commited to improving and growing the game, and that is very good to see. It is not everyone's cup of tea, but game companies can definatly take some lessons from someone like Blizzard. Their reputation is well earned, and they continue to live upto it.

Re:Great Game

[dr00g911]

I've been playing since open beta and launch day, and I have to agree a billion percent with most of your points.

The level of polish in the game, the questing system, the crafting system, the sheer amount of content, the auction houses, almost zero downtime between fights -- it puts all the other games that I've played on the market to shame.

After downloading the latest patch, I was giggling like a kid for hours seeing all the new holiday themed content. I got into snowball fights with alliance members in Ratchet instead of ganking them (Skullcrusher). I ran around hunting for the Greench, and I sat on Great Father Winter's lap. Contrast this to live 'events' in EQ -- you get a spam that a dragon is flying over the zone you're in, and an epic mob is spawned -- vs in WoW: decorations up in every city, new quests, new crafting items -- an absurd amount of effort for temporary content.

Reading the Blizz forums, you'll get a pretty unbalanced picture -- the min/maxers the 'nerf $class!' and '!nerf $class!' people are very vocal and you'd get the impression that the game is falling apart at the seams. It's not. As many, many other have said before: this game was more 'done' during beta that most MMOs are three years after launch. The overwhelming majority of the players are incredibly happy -- and this is the first decent MMO that my Mac-owning friends can play along with me. Suffice it to say there's a lot of WoW boxes under the tree this year. Blizzard has always has a warm, gushy spot in the hearts of Mac gamers because we're treated as equals -- almost always at launch day (Diablo 2 being the notable exception).

One thing I've noticed about the perceived population imbalances: they seem (to me, based on characters I've rolled and servers I've played on) imbalanced based on the name of the servers. Shadow Moon is way imbalanced on the Alliance side, Skullcrusher and Arthas are way imbalanced on the Horde side.

I wonder if the effect of making the new battlegrounds an instance will help alleviate the population problems... ie first 400 players on each side make it into this instance, next 400 into a new instance.

At any rate, I'm having an absurd amount of fun with the PvE aspects of the game right now -- concentrating on getting my stable of characters to high levels, and not really worrying about hardcore PvP just yet. Yeah, I'll go raid Stormwind or Orgrimmar from time to time, but all in good fun (made it to the king once in Stormwind before getting smacked down) ;-)

There's no doubt in my mind that the PvP system (when introduced) is going to rock my world.

New Patch is Excellent

[glowimperial]

A lot of us veteran MMO players place a lot of value on the effectiveness of the first patch, post launch. Blizzard appears to be doing its job well. Many areas of the world were slighly modified (addtional mailboxes, npc with repair capabilities, etc...) to make irritations that don't add to gameplay go away. They seem to be struggling with implementing a satisfying fishing system, but are rightfully concerned with keeping fishing from being a botting paradse. Although there is nothing spectacularily ambitious with the first patch, it shows a commitment to quality playing and a dedication to attentive management rarely seen in online games.

Blizzard seems to be aggressively tackling the PvP system, and players, including PvP endgame folks seem hungry for the content that they are promising, but patient for its delivery. If Blizzard is able to add excellent PvP content quickly, and without bugs or hitches, they will pull off a major coup.

One of the critical issues of several other MMOs is that they are often released with critical issues at launch and have to spend the first 6-12 months addressing those issues, or
inserting launnch content post launch. WoW's launch was so smooth, that they seem able to really dive straight into the management and improvement role that a developer should be in, as opposed to a crisis management mode, as often is the case with ambitious MMOs, post-launch.

Re:New Patch is Excellent

[1001011010110101]

I dont want to get into the Whiner vs. Fanboys war that the WoW forums became, but the game is far from smooth. They are having weekly crashes of at least a couple of hours (last night was like 6 or 8 hours), almost no feedback to the comunity (except for some "servers are down, we are working, no ETA"), some classes have bugs since beta(like vanish in rogues, blink on mages) and a long etc. Sure, the game is still fun, but its far from perfect, and specially not well administered. Each routine projected downtime usually doubles or triples the estimated downtime, there's a lot of unplaned downtime, server crashes, login server crashes (everything goes down), etc.

Blizzard's WoW: Fun +10, Communication -5

[jafuser]

WoW is a great, and addictive game. It has tied together a lot of great ideas that have developed over the years into a casual fantasy game that likes to make as much fun of itself as it provides fun to the player.

I think at the core, a lot of the annoyances of other MMORPGs have been removed or significantly reduced, while at the same time not making it too easy.

The holiday additions are nice, but I expect they will be short lived considering the effort they required to be implemented. I just hope they didn't spend too much effort on content that will probably only be fitting for a week or so, while so many other problems need addressing.

- Some basic powers (ie Arcane Missiles) have unpredictable bugs which can get you easily killed when they simply don't do anything. There are several others which don't do what the description says (Blink should free you from rooting).

- The Auction House and Mail systems have frequent lockups, even at slow times, such as early in the morning. They are often unpredictable too -- for example, you could conduct a series of actions which take only a second or two each, and then suddenly one takes a minute or two, during which everything queues up and happens at once.

- Blizzard's first response to a bot problem (with fishing) has resulted in a wild overreaction which not only took the fun out of playing the profession properly, but now it even *encourages* botting, since that's the only way you could get any use out of it anymore.

- Maintenance windows are inconsistent. Some mornings there's maintenance, some there aren't. And when there's not, it seems like everything is running very slowly.

- Yesterday's major downtime had *VERY* little feedback as to what was going on and when it was expected to be resolved. The nearly complete lack of communication on a downtime that significant is something which needs to be reviewed.

- In fact, there doesn't seem to be much PR presence on the forums, or anywhere for most issues. I don't get the feeling there is anyone listening to our concerns. I get the feeling there is a huge tall stone wall between the players and Blizzard, and occasionally they toss down a message written in blue ink, which has very little value content-wise to assure us of specific resolutions that are being made to the most pressing problems.

Don't get me wrong though. These are minor issues which I have faith will be ironed out with time, and there is still tones of fun to be had. It is still a *very* new game which has a long road ahead of it.

Obviously being this new, I expect there to be some problems. However, coming from a technical background, it can be frustrating when many of these problems seem very simple in nature to fix; and the poor communication makes it all the worse when there's noone to "absorb" our frustrations.

Re:WoW plays badly on iMac G5s, other macs

[BrookHarty]

The G5's have the Nvidia 5200 base, The lapop has (guessing) ATI 9600 or 9700.

The G5's have enough power, just crippled with older video cards, G4's really have it tough. Put in an ATI 9800 or better, and the game should fly...

My G4 with ATI 9000 gets 20fps (low details), my PC with ATI 9700pro gets 60+fps with max details. But then, my gfx card cost over 300 bux when I bought it.

Pick up a high end gfx card for your mac, and enjoy. I'm rather miffed a ATI 9800 for g4 mac is so expensive.