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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."
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
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 :)
Except this patch doesn't include the battlegrounds, just the honor system.
This isn't battlegrounds. It's simply the PvP honor system that affects Factional PvP throughout the world.
Battlegrounds is still in development/testing.