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World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, Chinese Launch
World of Warcraft continues its roll across the globe, with a successful Chinese launch of the MMORPG. More than 500,000 players participated in the beta test, and the launch statistics are expected to be impressive. Meanwhile, those of us who've been playing for a while have much to look forward to as the Battlegrounds of Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch move into production. From the press release: "World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds are PvP-enabled zones where players compete against each other to achieve victory, Honor points, and valuable in-game rewards. Each Battleground has different goals and gameplay styles, providing an addictively engaging experience for participants. The two initial Battlegrounds now available to the public are Alterac Valley, a high-end zone designed for large groups of experienced players, and Warsong Gulch, a more casual zone designed for all players level 21 and up."
I wonder how long it will be until games like WOW are required by control-crazy governments like the PRC to alter content. Something that commands the attention of youth for multiple hours per day is likely to come under attack eventually, just like books, music and film have in the past. But in the case of a movie, the officially released version can simply have some edits. It will be harder to "edit" WOW content, I think.
The honor system is actually a system now. You lose honor for dishonorable kills, instead of only gaining for honorable kills. It didn't make sense to me that this wasn't part of the system to begin with, since the honor system was touted as a means to punish people who slaughter players 20 levels below them.
FYI, my next update on my web site will have WoW at 2 million subscribers according to inside sources.
Bruce
http://www.mmogchart.com/
ferst pohst
will all gold collected be evenly distributed among
the players for the greater glory of Chinese WoW players?
Here's to wishful thinking!
Dec 2004 or earlier
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6667257/
Does anyone have a mirror for the patch? The Blizzard downloader is the worst thing in the world, and never works for me regardless of the countless amount of time I've spent messing with it.
WoW for me is one of the biggest dissapointments. Not because it's bad, but because it's very well done if you're willing to play hardcore. There's certainly a beginner's game in there, but if you want to seriously compete in the battlegrounds you'll need equipment, and for that you need many instance runs a week for a few months. There's no way I can manage another full-time job like that, so I can't participate.
Run-on paragraph, blech.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
Having played on the test server for a bit, I can tell you that the battlegrounds are a BLAST.
The 10v10 CTF are a blast (especially as a rogue) and the 40vs40 maps are seriously epic, with quests that can turn the tides of battle.
They allow you to upgrade the levels of npc defenders, summon epic mobs (around MC trash difficulty) etc. Reminds me of the ToB, DoTA maps I loved on battle.net. Good stuff!
Can't wait to get home to try this thing out, since I never bothered to get on to the test servers. (Don't like being a beta-tester, what can I say.) Looks really exciting.
:)
Been reading the Blizzard forums to see how people are reacting.
Apparently there are some huge queue problems with people waiting to get in to Battlegrounds. Hopefully Blizzard'll fix that soon, but it's probably just because there are so many people waiting to try it.
And, then, of course, there was this post by a Whinelock who apparently is upset that despite the fifteen or so large buffs given to the Warlock class, they fixed an exploit that Warlocks could use. I just found that funny.
See you in the Battlegrounds!
"World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds are PvP-enabled zones where players compete against each other to achieve victory"
Good thing Blizzard specifically added that the goal of the competition is to achieve victory, cause for a moment I thought the goal was to lose.
Interestingly, most players up through now have been playing the Alliance side - Humans and Night Elves being the most popular with Dwarfs and Gnomes coming in later. On my server, the ratio is at least 3:1 Alliance versus Horde. This is going to be a problem on the WoW Battlegrounds. For every Horde player who wants to get on the battleground, there will be three Alliance players waiting to play. Since these areas are balanced (you only enter when both sides have equal numbers), Alliance players are going to find it harder to get into the battlegrounds - there just won't be enough horde players to fight against them.
I expect that you're going to see many players re-rolling Horde alts so they can PvP.
LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEROY JENKINS!
To confirm you're not a script, please piss in my ear.
...if they could keep the fucking servers online.
Quit in April when it became obvious that Blizzard didn't take any pride in their work (or at least one specific glaring flaw in it), and didn't care about me past my subscription fee.
Paladins got completely remade two weeks before release. Their design leaves extremely little room for interaction. Combat consists almost exclusively of buffing yourself and auto-attacking. I kid you not. There are two kinds of buffs you can cast: blessings last five minutes* and seals last 30. Seals can be "judged" onto the target for 30 seconds for what is frequently more mana than it's worth. Paladins have a 6 second stun on a one minute timer, a 12 second invulnerability on a 5 minute timer, a couple heals, cleanse which removes debuffs, and a few other spells.
Normal fight, solo (assume blessing is down, which it usually won't be): cast blessing, cast seal to be judged, judge, cast seal. Wait 30 seconds auto-attacking. On tough mobs you may need to stun + heal. Reseal, rejudge, reseal. Wait 20 seconds. Collect loot from mob's corpse.
Tougher fights might involve divine shield (12 second invuln) + heal. Some builds may use one or two more abilities, but they are deluding themselves: they would be more efficient saving the mana to heal and thereby reducing downtime. If it's more fun for them, more power to them, but knowing that I'm gimping myself instead of helping myself by managing my character generally makes it slightly depressing for me, not more fun.
I re-rolled a warrior and got it to level 48. My subscription that I didn't renew ran out the day before warriors got buffed. Nevertheless, my warrior was actually fun and actually required some measure of skill to do well. Go figure! Despite having fun with my warrior, I quit because Blizzard's attitude to me (and a large fraction of their *paying* playerbase) in not just not changing paladins, but not even looking at them, and even failing to tell the community to stop waiting and hoping for changes that wouldn't come until nearly a year after release (or more!) disgusted me.
*Blessings are a huge fun destroyer in raids, where you are expected to keep up to 40 people blessed continously - the class is never described as a buffer, let alone a *dedicated* buffer, and moreover Blizzard said early on that there would be no pure support classes - in high end raids, paladins are not even allowed to melee in many fights, and paladins have no ranged attacks, how's that for a support class (paladins are described as fighters first, and support in a pinch... ha. Funny. All of their descriptions of paladins are wrong in that perverse way)!