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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 :)
You're bored because you rolled a Hunter. I had to reroll because we are so worthless in groups and it took me hours to get into a 5 man. Im having a lot more fun with my Priest, and feel way more useful.
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!"
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."
Except this patch doesn't include the battlegrounds, just the honor system.
Even if it's released every month, you can lvl to 60 in 2-3 weeks.
Only if you play non-stop and power level. Normal people (ie ones that put in 15-20 hours a week, and are on their first character) take about 3-4 months to get to 60.
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?
This isn't battlegrounds. It's simply the PvP honor system that affects Factional PvP throughout the world.
Battlegrounds is still in development/testing.
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.
I'm sorry but I'll take my reviews from people who don't use words like 'dramatical'
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?