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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."
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."
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?
Issue 1) seems like a hardware/network related issue that could be highly exclusive to specific configurations - though those configurations themselves may not be erroneous, which would make it even harder to find.
Issue 2) was attributed to 3rd party software. Tricky, but not something any overworked QA department is likely to have a lot of time to troubleshoot variants of.
Issue 3) is one I've noticed several times, but as a priest I hardly ever rez people's pets - the hunters have their own means to do that, and I'm usually low on mana anyway.
Basically, none of these issues seem like something you shouldn't expect to see in an early series of game patches.
There wasn't an underlying change in the work ethic at Blizzard. What changed was that they set deadlines in a different way, such that instead of trying to lump every finished product into one large patch, they began doing rolling patches. This just means if a project isn't done in time for a patch, it's not in until the next one.
Lastly, if their QA department doesn't have enough time to test things, that's a failure of their project management, not of their different schedule. Utilizing a short-term schedule with deliverables that scale down from the original schedule shouldn't result in a dramatic increase in bugginess (though it will result in some, invariably). If it does, this is something that needs to be addressed by proper allocation of time to their QA department (try not to laugh - I work in QA, I know how rarely this happens).
Moo