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Next World of Warcraft Patch Review
Via Penny Arcade, a review of the next patch for World of Warcraft on Blizzplanet. The author takes a look at some of the new art being added to the game and examines details of the new honor system. From the article: "The horde slowly started to show up in the area to attempt to protect their territory. I joined a raid group to counterattack, and noticed that each kill where my Priest character helped with fear, word: pain, or healing counted toward my Honorable Kills, even if I didn't directly caused damage or killed. Healing and Fear count toward your kill points."
Apparently, it matters to Zonk.
This is a pretty big chance of pace for Blizzard. It took 90 days for their first content patch to come out - they had originally promised new content every month.
Additionally, up until now, WoW's PvP system was seen as largely pointless. This provides tangible benefits (and not just OMG POINTS!) to succesful PvP ventures. It should be exciting. Anyone who plays now can test this patch out a bit by copying a character over to the (grossly over-populated) test server. The disadvantage, as I stated, is that there are way too many people on it, and can get very laggy if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn't a major concern for me, though, because the server population is immense compared to an average server, and they've already made another sub-patch to improve performance, with noticable improvement. There's still a LOT of room for more improvement. For example, player corpses should disappear after a certain point, or you should have the ability to not display them. Without that ability, you can run across a field that is just littered with corpses of dead players, and while it's a visceral joy to look at, it's also a huge network performance hit.
Moo
I wish they would just release it already, I'm so bored with my lvl 60 hunter I don't even play anymore. The end-game has very serious hangups. I hope this patch addresses them. If not, I'm probably cancelling.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Is games.slashdot.org going to report everytime a new patch comes out for a game?
This isn't just any patch, it's been highly anticipated for months now. It's supposed to usher in the first massive-pvp 'battleground' within an MMORPG.
Do we live such pathetic lives that this is really News for Nerds, stuff that matters?
Yes.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
First massive PVP Battleground? Dark Age of Camelot has done this for awhile (its one of their major selling points of the game)...albeit the rewards for World of Warcraft seem more enticing to me :)
Like there's anything else newsworthy to post about going in in gaming world? :)
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
Actually, depending on how much you play it, it can save you money. God of War, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Timesplitters 3, Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich, and Jade Empire have all gone into my "I'd like to play them, but I don't have enough time now. Maybe I'll buy them used later" category, saving me from shelling out from $250 for instant gratification. If you look at it that way, my last 2 months on WoW have been a money-saving bargain.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
What about that price makes it so unreasonable?
Seriously, I hear a lot of people talk about how unreasonable it is to pay for a monthly game, but it isn't like there aren't a heck of a lot more costs on the developers end to support an online game than one that they can just slap on a CD and forget about.
I know for alot of people that will just play WoW, and in the long term will save money by not buying anything else...but I've got a short attention span ;) I think if Blizzard offered some sort of WoW Lite plan, I'd get it.... like $10 a month for 30 hours of play (as opposed to the 15 for unlimited). One hour a day is probably more than enough for me. I'm also of the opinion that they shouldn't charge a full $50 for the game since you end up having to pay a perpetual service fee anyway...maybe if it were only $20 or better yet free ;)
I kind of like what the Guild Wars guys are doing with the $50 game but with free online play, but I don't think that's going to be a very successful business model.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
How about the numerous independent games that get overlooked by the mainstream gaiming sites?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
In other news, I can't afford a luxary car.
Every single story about an MMORPG you post how you don't want to pay the monthly fees. GFY. I can't afford an over-priced car, either. But instead of complaining about the people pissing away their money on overpriced crap, I just drive and enjoy my smaller car. It may not be as nice, but it suits me fine.
In other words, just because MMORPGs aren't for you, doesn't mean that other people don't want to play them. Stop telling us how you don't want to pay for the more expensive car. We don't care any more.
It's the first MMORPG to pretend that Faction vs Faction is PvP, and that presenting a little mini-game with PvP with in-game rewards is exciting.
Actually, wait, FFXI has a crappy in-game "PvP" game too. So it's not even the first in that.
From what I can tell, Battlegrounds is basically like a Counter-Strike game (two sides with various objectives compete, have hit points, and can damage each other), that happens to take place within an MMORPG.
The only reason it's news is because currently WoW has no end-game and thousands of players at the level cap are bored out of their skulls with the game, and this mini-game is supposed to somehow give them something to do.
you mean, "the first massive-pvp 'battleground' within World of Warcraft'
Other MMORPGs have done massive (way more than WoW can handle at the moment, due to lag issues) PvP longer and much, much better, e.g. Shadowbane.
"I kind of like what the Guild Wars guys are doing with the $50 game but with free online play, but I don't think that's going to be a very successful business model."
I think you are wrong on the business model point. I think you will find that the average user, for a subscription based MMORPG is probably 1 to 3 months. After that, the average player loses interest and drops their subscription. Granted, there is a curve there, where addicted players play for the life of the game, but there are also people who buy it and never even open the box. I have done that before myself. Sounds stupid, but it happens. They are extremes though. I think that they will make the same amount of money as a decent subscription model will, if not more. I love the concept of MMORPGs, and have even beta'd some of them. I liked them, but still cannot bring myself to pay a subscription fee every month for a game. It irks me to no end (subscriptions for something I already paid once for) and I can't do it, (yet, WoW was the closests yet for me as I have played all of the warcraft series until now and loved them and I still didn't/couldn't do it). There are a lot of people out there like me that will certainly pay the box price for Guild wars, if for no other reason than the fact that there is no subscription fee after that. The raised revenue ceiling due to that fact alone will certainly outweigh the loss of reoccuring revenue in subscriptions.
Only time will really tell. But I think you will be surprised.
Blizzard is much more advanced than that!
... time passes as hour hero wanders off ...
Waiting in queue: 140, 20 minutes wait
Waiting in queue: 120, 30 minutes wait
Waiting in queue: 98, 45 minutes wait
Waiting in queue: 3, < 1 minute
Waiting in queue: 2, < 1 minute
Waiting in queue: 1, < 1 minute
Connecting...
Disconnected from server.
So far that's happened to me every time there was a queue on my server.
1. Blizzard has always been slow with new content. Even if it's released every month, you can lvl to 60 in 2-3 weeks. Although it may be Blizzard, that so many people love blindly, WoW is a fun and short term designed MMO.
2. Don't like the small monthly fee or have a commitment problem with reoccurring costs? Don't play the game.
3. What will it take you to realize this isn't the ultimate game you had hoped for and move on? Or have you sunk so much expectation into this, that you can't?
$15 is a movie and popcorn. I know I have paid for movie and a popcorn in the past. The question is, would I be willing to give up one movie and popcorn to have gotten back the 2 hours of my life I lost to Troy or Pearl Harbor in exchange for a month of WoW? Hell-fucking-yeah!
$15 a month is pocket change for most people with a job. Hell, a kid can scrape up $15 a month by skipping lunch a couple of days a week or raking a pile of leaves. It just isn't that much, especially compared to the amount of time I can spend enjoying it.
If you think $15 is too much for you, well, don't pay it. A million plus other people seem to disagree, and seeing as how they are shelling out $15 a month and you are not... well, don't be surprised when no one listens.
Personally, I like the subscription fee if for no other reasons then pragmatic ones. Anyone I am shelling out money to each month is much more likely to not piss me off. I recall buying Ultima X and being pissed beyond words with the piece of shit they shoveled into that box. It was by far the worst game I had ever played, and the developers had only a minimal incentive to fix it. Subscription MMORPGs on the other hand need to constantly improve or suffer. That monthly fee is a consumer poke in the ass to keep their game alive and well.
True, there are other monthly fee like models - namely paying per episode / expansion pack, but it just isn't a survivable model for an MMORPG that wants to operate on a massive scale like WoW. A game with massive infrastructure and large core coding team needs a constant and RELIABLE source of cash, and monthly fees are about as reliable as they come.
What I think will be more interesting is when the technology gets to the point when small time developers can develop smaller games with lower requirements and offers a per-episode basis game play. It might usher in an era of more personalized attention and tailored made games. That said, I would be very surprised if these games turned out to be cheaper. Quantities of scale pretty much assures that the monthly fee MMORPGs will be the cost kings.
Except this patch doesn't include the battlegrounds, just the honor system.
Hey, I'm not arguing that MMORPGs aren't worth the money. But there's no point is saying that they're overpriced repeatedly.
Especially when you never touch on why they're overpriced or why they aren't worth any money. Just state "I don't want to pay the fee!"
GFY. And?
So posting about it again is ______.
Choose one:
A) Interesting
B) Informative
C) Insightful
D) Redundant
This is going to be great, this patch will turn PvP servers into roaming gank sqauds looking for players to wreck to increase their honor points.
I expect it will take about 48 hours from the start of the patch for every instance to be camped and the entrances to every contested zone.
Just because you want to act like cattle doesn't mean I can't try and talk some sense into you.
Paying $15 a month for a game that most people play for more than 15 hours a month is a rip off? What other entertainment do you pay $1 an hour for?
"MMORPGs (not just WoW) are over charging us, guess we should just bend over because we have no say in the matter..." Activism is not a bad thing.
Dude, there are bigger issues in the world than being charged $15 a month to play a game that is hosted on Blizzards servers. Hell, go try to rent a CS server for $15 a month.
I'll shut up when I see some change...
The price you pay for the boxed software is for the cost of development, the price you pay per month is for maintainence. Do you think it's cheap for that bandwidth/hardware?
On the PvP servers, maybe. But if you are wandering around without backup on one of those, then you really are asking for a ganking anyway. And remember that Blizzard has implemented diminishing returns on the points you get for killing the same person over and over again. For the RP and PvE servers, I only see good. Remember, except for certain areas, you aren't forced to PvP unless you want to. Ganking a person is hard when they have the ability not to consent to it.
Well, those other topics belong in other threads... Besides this is not just about Blizzard and WoW's pricing... these trends are in all the other aspects of life right now. There's alot of messed up stuff going on around the world, and no one seems to care. That's my problem.
Granted, but do you file WoW costing $15 a month along with "messed up stuff?". What do you think would be the correct price point for it?
The only reason I would pay per month for a MMO is becaue they host the servers and what must be a massive database on the backend. I would never consider paying per month for a FPS.
On the PvP servers, maybe. But if you are wandering around without backup on one of those, then you really are asking for a ganking anyway.
Nah, I'm on a PvP server and I run around alone all the time. There isn't as much ganking as you think. Certain zones are more prone to it (ie Strangethorne vale) while others aren't because they are less populated (Swamp of Sorrows). I think after this patch, there will be a lot more ganking. I'm not complaining, I joined a PvP server for this sort of thing.
And remember that Blizzard has implemented diminishing returns on the points you get for killing the same person over and over again.
Sure, but if you are camping a certain point of interest, why not corpse camp the guy and get the diminished points, while you wait for the next one to fall into your trap? If you are attacking 5-10 levels below you, this is the way to go.
It's going to be a lot of fun to see if the factions work together with in themselves to protect their towns, and points of interest so their lowbies can level up.
I have no problem with the fees, I just think it's a little too high. They could easily afford to make it $10 a month with the million or so subscribers they have...
...and no, this isn't really part of the "messed up stuff", but it's important to me as it's my chosen industry.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
They should have named the game "World of Diablo". That would have saved me from disappointment.
The PvP servers actually have a minimal amount of ganking. I personally found that once I hit about 30 the gankings by people 10+ levels higher then me almost stopped. Generally, the only time I get ganked by a level ?? alliance is when I kill people my level too much at one location and they call in for guild support.
Sure, ganking is going to go up, but I have a feeling most the increased ganking will come from people that are roughly the same level. It doesn't bother me much if I get to a dungeon and find alliance waiting if they are my level. In fact, that sounds like a merry old time with hours of PvP goodness as we struggle to control the area.
I joined the PvP server for a reason. Sure, I don't level up as fast because I spent time fighting over hunting areas, but who in the hell wants to hunt mindless NPCs 24/7?
"these trends are in all the other aspects of life right now. There's alot of messed up stuff going on around the world, and no one seems to care. That's my problem."
What trend is that? Trivial shit you don't need costing less then 3 hours of work a month at minimum wage? Most people make enough to pay off their WoW subscription in the time it takes for them take a shit and go on a coffee break at work.
This isn't the world rolling over while you fight on. This is a million plus people deciding that $15 is an okay price for a months worth of entertainment. Shit, if you are gowing to throw a hissy fit over the price of trivial crap you don't need, I would suggest walking over to your local movie theater.
More to the point, WoW is not exploiting the masses. They are selling a luxury at a price that well over a million don't mind paying. I personally hope they are making hand over fist. To me, that just means that they will be putting some of it away in the bank to make another great game that I will be happy to pay a monthly fee for.
"The fipside of this coin for a game designed to take awhile is that it takes awhile to occomplish things."
Translation: You know all that shit that made you leave EverTreadmill and go to WoW for? We have.
Fine, how about gas prices reaching all time highs? You think it's silly of me to try to walk or ride a bike instead of driving whenever possible too?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
I agree... I mean if this was mmo.slashdot.org or something then fine, but we're not showing patches for SWG, FFXI, EQ2 (heck when was the last /. story on EQ2 anyways?) or single player games either.
No, but I would think it's silly if you repeatedly spent time trying to convince the same group of people that gas costs too much and that they should get rid of their cars.
Nope, but it might be a little silly to wait by a stoplight and proceed to tell every motorist with their window down about your decision.
This isn't battlegrounds. It's simply the PvP honor system that affects Factional PvP throughout the world.
Battlegrounds is still in development/testing.
Gas prices are at a all time high... if you blatantly ignore inflation. Prices need to almost double to reach the peak. Further, I would be annoyed if while I was driving into work someone on a bike stopped by my car window at a red light and started bitching that gas costs too much.
Finally, this isn't about gas prices. This is about a VIDEO GAME. A luxury. This is something that could disappear tomorrow and no one would care beyond a few annoyed addicts. It is something that no one cares if you don't get enough of it, nor do they care if you think it costs too much. It is like bitching about the inflated price of yachts. You can bitch, but no one really cares. Just do what everyone else who can't afford a yacht does... live a happy and normal life without a yacht.
It is one thing to bitch and moan about stuff that matters, like gas, food, water, and things of that nature. You just sound like a spoiled prick though when you bitch about trivial shit that in truth costs less the three hours worth of work at minimum wage. There are people in the world that don't even get the necessities while some spoiled prick is crying about the trivial cost of his luxury goods.
And for the record, realize that they are selling WoW in China. Yeah. China. If they can scrape up enough to buy WoW despite having wages that can't even sit on the same scale as American and European wages, so can you.
It's like a popularity contest, really. People post articles about things they care about, and if a lot of people also like the topic, the topic keeps coming up.
This is just a long way of saying "World of Warcraft gets news articles because more people care about it, and it matters to more people than those other games."
Eve just patched yesterday, and completely overhauled their Electronic Warfare system. Should I submit that as a story?
I've seen so many posts (even articles) about how WoW is going to fail because you can get to level 60 in 2-3 weeks, and then you've done all there is to do. As others have said, while doable, this requires some serious power-gaming. First of all, I get the impression that there's a lot more gaming to be gained by playing alternate characters and Horde instead of Alliance, not to mention PVP, but more importantly, I think 90% of the people who play will not be doing this kind of power-gaming. Rather I suspect a major portion of their player base is a much more casual gamer, and in my opinion, the game caters to them for the very reason that it is not an incredibly long process to reach level 60.
In other words, the fact that you can log in for an hour or two and make some notable progress, makes it much more likely that the non power-gamers will stick around as opposed to games like EQ where I could log in for 2 hours and not see a change worth mentioning in my exp bar.
So the power gamers (smaller percentage of player base) get bored and move on to other games, while the casual players (larger percentage) have their interest held and continue playing. I think a year from now, those saying WoW will fail because it's 'too easy' are going to be surprised.
Of course, I don't see numbers, so maybe I'm wrong and everyone but me and my three buddies play 10 hours a day. Could be.
It's funny how much point of view means....If I had to come up with an idea of what is "messed up stuff" GNN's anti-americanism would be up there on the list.
Sucks to be on a server with queues.
*connects to his server on first try*
*plays game*
*briefly wonders what the queue screen looks like*
oh the irony.
Sure !
I miss Eve, I just don't miss the griefers who like to park battleships by gates I need to use.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
We see this comment everytime a new revision of OSX comes out. Or a new version of Firefox. Or the latest WinXP bugfix. Does anyone care?
Of course not. These things are commonplace, they're expected (well, perhaps not so expected with WoW since the game has changed so little since release compared to other MMOs). But still, the games section needs stories, no matter how trivial. And WoW is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds. So who cares, if you don't like it, let the few who do get their jollies off.
Is games.slashdot.org going to report everytime a new patch comes out for a game? Do we live such pathetic lives that this is really News for Nerds, stuff that matters?
Are we going to see somebody bitch about a story being newsworthy every time Slashdot puts a new story up?
[shakes the Magic 8-Ball]
Signs point to "Yes."
Blizzard does a lousy job of communicating with their player base.
I used to have a paladin (I suppose he's still there with my other characters, but I no longer subscribe and don't plan on reactivating). Paladins got almost completely changed something like one week before the game went retail. They had literally no wide scale testing of the mechanics or balance of their new paladin before the game went retail - just something like a week or two of open beta and however much internal testing they did. That's also when paladins got their talent system (they didn't have one at all through the entire closed beta) - the only part of your character that you can customize, other than armour and appearance.
Paladins have had next to no developer posts in their community forum. No solicitations for feedback about the class at all, nothing about the direction the devs plan on taking the class. Nothing of any substance - nothing for more than four and a half months.
The class is very poorly designed. I've played a high level warrior, and it was quite fun, and always involved. On the other hand, the paladin plays almost the exact same way in nearly every situation in solo (or pvp, but different tactics) with generally very slight variations depending on build... you might press one or two more buttons in a minute of fighting (that doesn't sound like much, but with a paladin that's at least 50% more). It's also quite slow. The entire class is generic and very un-polished. There is no tactical depth.
Now the devs are adding paladin and warlock epic mounts (no other class has their own, unique epic mount). Epic mounts are just faster mounts. The paladin and warlock epic mounts will end up costing in gold and materials from very slightly less than normal epics to slightly more. There is no advantage to them, other than their look. Paladins and warlocks are not restricted from buying the normal epic mounts. And yet... they'll both cost mana to cast. For a paladin, about a quarter to a sixth of their entire mana pool. What a fucking waste of the devs time. Not that I value a retards time at much.
That'll probably end up being the last time I ever bought a Blizzard game. Too bad... they used to be a good company.
The increased box sales are never going to pay off more than monthly fees for any popular MMORPG. There are two reasons...the total market of people who will play an MMORPG isn't of unlimited size...and four months of subscription is better than an extra box sold.
But more importantly...costs per user are ongoing. You'll never make money that way...the hardware and bandwidth are just too much.
Guild Wars isn't trying to make all their money off the initial box sale, however. Not at all. They're going to make it by selling expansion packs or "chapters".
They claim that you won't be less powerful if you don't buy the chapters, but then they use Magic: The Gathering as an example. And as I imagine most of the Slashdot crowd knows, that person with a suitcase full of Magic cards doesn't just have 'more options' than someone with one pack of cards. They have 'better combinations' which are indeed more powerful.
All the same, I wish the Guild Wars people luck. A new model could shake things up nicely.
Ok, there's so much wrong with this post that it's hard to know where to begin.
I know people have already made remarks in this thread about the costs of developing and maintaining a MMORPG, but I'm going to elaborate this a bit. Quite frankly, the fact that you can walk into a shop and pick up a copy of WoW, FFXI or EQ2 for $50 is in itself pretty striking. This is the kind of price you would expect to pay for a normal, non-MMO release, yet the amount of time and money that has gone into developing the MMO will be vastly, vastly higher.
Take World of Warcraft and compare it to Warcraft 3. Both of these hit the shelves without about the same initial price-point. Here in the UK, you could pick up either for £30-£35 on the day of release, or indeed a bit less if you knew where to shop. Warcraft 3, while a good game, basically only contains 35 or so singleplayer missions and a couple of dozen multiplayer maps, made up from a handful of different tilesets. It features graphics and models for... at a guess... around 60 types of building and unit. It's multiplayer has been extensively balanced, via a prolonged large-scale beta phase, but all of the "servers" for the beta games are hosted on your beta testers' PCs and home connections. Once your testers have downloaded the beta from you, your bandwidth charges are limited to just running battlenet, which is basically an IRC server with game-launching functions tagged on. Once the game is released, you put out a patch every few months (which will generally focus on adjusting existing aspects of the game, not adding new ones which would require new artwork or sounds) and put out a paid-for expansion after a year. It's a simple model; if the game sells well, you make a nice big profit.
Now look at World of Warcraft. In its completely un-updated, out-of-box form, this contains an absolutely vast world. Just exploring the whole of the WoW game-world without any monsters would be a major undertaking. The world is divided into a large number of zones, each of which has its own distinctive visual features. While you can re-use a lot of the same monster graphics, albeit with different skins, you still need to put in all the artwork that allows players to customise their avatars to a reasonable extent. The sheer number of features you need to implement goes way beyond anything in Warcraft 3. As well as combat, you have crafting, transport systems, commerce systems, large-scale in-game chat systems, zone transition systems, quests suitable for players at every point in the level range and so on. Oh, and because you view everything from a much closer perspective than you do in an RTS like Warcraft 3, you have to put a correspondingly higher level of detail into everything you do on the graphical front.
Even when you've created all this content, you still have the testing phase. In the case of World of Warcraft, this actually boiled down to allowing a large number of members of the public to download and play the game on servers provided by Blizzard FOR FREE for the better part of a year. These servers aren't simple chat servers like the battle.net system; rather, with WoW's relatively fast-paced combat, they're much closer in terms of bandwidth-per-character to what you'd expect to see for a modern fps. Except while a modern fps will probably see... at most... 64 players in a game at one time, WoW will have tens of thousands of people per server. Hell, they even did a few fully-public stress-tests as the release date came closer. And, let me emphasise this, at this point, Blizzard had made NO MONEY WHATSOEVER from the game.
So, the game hits the shelves. 1.5 million people (or however many the final figure turned out to be) rush out and buy it. Guess what... in reality, once you take out cuts for the publisher, the retailer and everybody else who has a finger in the pie, the proceeds from this almost certainly don't even come close to covering the costs Blizzard incurred developing the game. All it really does is provide a bit of cash-flo
Apparently you are young and single. It shows pretty clearly in your reply. When you get married, have children, pay a mortgage and have to start thinking about college savings, car payments, mortgage, repairing the roof, insurance and even retirement accounts, your priorities changes out of necessity. $15 over the course of a month, regardless of your earnings is a number you pay attention to. You can't just throw money at things anymore, because you want to. You start making educated choices about where to spend your disposable dollars, because you realize they are not infinate.
Perhaps I am jaded by my lifes experiences, but I don't think I am alone nor do I believe I am in a minority. The vast majority of the people in this country earn a middle class to lower class income and hence must watch their dollars pretty closely, simply to survive. To get above that middle class income, you have to cut out 80% of the country's population. US Census numbers confirm this solidly. I would not bank on that 20% having an online rpg as their priority in life. Until those numbers reconcile with each other, the case can't be made for wide spread acceptance of monthly subscription models. 1 million people is extremely small segment of this nations population remember. Once you start dividing that number up amongst a larger pool of available monthly subscription services, diminishing returns kicks in pretty severely and the model collapses. Facts are facts and hard to argue against. Failure to recognize reality is what caused the dot com collapse and the same will happen here unless the model changes and/or growth in the industry stops (which it won't).
ha, you think you pay a lot for gas... come to britain, where its like $2 per litre
Damn, I wish I had mod points... Nice freaking post.
I'm sorry but I'll take my reviews from people who don't use words like 'dramatical'
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
If you are attacking 5-10 levels below you, this is the way to go. Aren't chars 10 levels below gray? If so, doesn't that mean they would be dishonorable kills?
Exactly 10, yes. -3 to -9 levels are green, and are (apparently) considered honorable for some brain-dead reason. Especially because resists against a +3 player are so high as to basically make the loss inevitable.
Aren't chars 10 levels below gray? If so, doesn't that mean they would be dishonorable kills?
It scales as you go up in levels, I think a level 50 isn't gray to a level 60, but a level 30 would be to a level 40.
Dishonor points are only going to apply to NPC kills at first If I read the patch notes correctly.
"So, yes, MMORPG players are almost all young and single. The fee has nothing to do with that. The design of the "game" does, because it requires so much dedication to playing it that everything else in life has to suffer."
I think that is a pretty jaded view of the world and the people that occupy it. I would seriously question your viewpoint that 'almost all' of the MMORPG players are young and single. I think there was a study done by PEW or one of those major research groups that recently showed that on-line game players average age is in the mid-thirties. I would call that approaching middle aged rather than young and single. As far as having to spend an inordinate amount of time to be able to play MMORPG's, that's just not true. I play on-line games almost constantly when I have free time. I make free ttime to do it. It's no different than the guy who goes out of his way to fish all of the time. When it's your passion, it will be serviced and you can still get life's requirements satisfied. I shudder at people's comments that suggest on-line game players are not productive members of society. It's simply not true. I am sure there are some out there, just like there are some who have gambling problems. But the vast majority are able to juggle life just fine. The point is really how much those same people value their cash. There is a limited supply of that available to each person and choices are forced in many areas in that regard, leaving a small percentage of dollars in the disposable column. My point was that the young and single have a much greater percentage of those dollars available to them and tend to make judgements in that regard based on perception rather than fact.
I believe the majority of the people playing MMORPGs are also responsible people too. To paint them as irresponsible people who can't prioritze their activities without causing life problems is very biased and nearly bigotrous. Most of the people who gamble do not have a problem with it, only a very small percentage can't stop when they reach their preset limits. Same goes for game players. Unfortunately the steriotype seems to persist. Don't believe it, it's not true.
I bought the game at the end of January. I've built my Paladin up to 34 or 35. No alts except a very low-level gnome Mage I use as my auction house/additional storage mule. Although I'm single my job requires crazy hours so I don't get to play much; maybe two hours all this week. Some weekends I get to play more.
(Parenthetical comment to those who gripe that they were able to get to 60 in WoW in two weeks: Don't assume you represent most, or even many, of WoW's 1.5M subscribers. Most people in real life aren't unemployed, or perpetually hunkered down in their dorm rooms.)
My plan is to get to 60 while questing in just a few zones. Then I'll repeat with other characters, then I'll switch factions, until I finally see all of Azeroth. I figure it'll take me a couple of years, and by that time there will be even more content to work through.
As such, what's the point? There's functionally no difference between a char 9 levels lower than you and a char 40 levels below you. Hell, not much difference between -9 and -3, other than just mana/hp usage.
I guess they justify this as a community-building feature. Makes sense, assuming you are constantly part of a group in non-aligned zones.
All I know is I'm ganking everything I see once they put the stats in. I know they have said there would be no negative effects for having dishonor points too, so I figure I might as well rake those in one way or another.
This game probably saves me money. I pay $15/month for entertainment. I probably save $1000/month in other crap I would normally be doing.
"They claim that you won't be less powerful if you don't buy the chapters, but then they use Magic: The Gathering as an example. And as I imagine most of the Slashdot crowd knows, that person with a suitcase full of Magic cards doesn't just have 'more options' than someone with one pack of cards. They have 'better combinations' which are indeed more powerful."
Very true. An intelligent player will be able to come up with new combinations that work well, but in general with Magic I've seen people just rehash known good deck builds.
I tried Guild Wars but it really felt more like a super Diablo than an MMO. I hated the fact that you had to choose a small set of skills before you left on your quest. Juggling which powers to take and which to leave is a pain.
Supposedly the expansion packs will also have new character classes to play as well as new quests/zones.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I'm in pretty much the same situation. Currently I'm at level 39 and I hardly ever get ganked anymore. It's worst when you're in the 20s, because you're in places (for Alliance) like Redridge Mountains, Duskwood, Wetlands, Hillsbrad or (god forbid!) Ashenvale, which just attract lamers looking for easy PVP kills. Now that I've moved on to areas like Desolace, Thousand Needles, Dustwallow Marsh and Arathi Highlands, the ganking has gone down significantly.
/wave when you see the horde person. It'll be interesting to see how this changes when the Honor system comes in. I guess introducing a benefit for PVP means I'll probably fight a lot more often.
I encounter horde constantly, we just leave each other alone. Essentially, you're both there for questing, and if you leave each other alone you get the quests done without frustration. Easiest thing to do is just