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World of Warcraft For The Win
In a press release from their website, Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft has won. Or, more specifically, that the game "has surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China - just a month following the game's commercial launch on June 7, 2005. The critically acclaimed World of Warcraft has now achieved another significant milestone as the largest MMORPG in the world, with more than 3.5 million global customers." Relatedly, Gamespy's OnLife column this week centers around the WoW duping story that we touched on earlier. From the article: "Needless to say, many players are a bit incensed that Blizzard isn't taking this as seriously as they feel it should. Others, though, are convinced that there isn't any duping actually going on. It's an urban myth, they say, which gullible forumites are unwittingly perpetuating."
As much as the WoW guys would like for us to believe it not to be true, the duping certainly exists. Guys like MickeyMouse describe the process in great detail. I know that he has buying/selling items for quite a while now to spread the money through the system to prevent getting tagged and booted. He sold several things to me. Heck, before this blew up, several other users reported people just handing them large amounts of money for no obvious reason (to hide the guilty among with innocent.)
Screenshots show this as well.
I know WoW needs some good press to balance out the bad... but don't deny the problem exists.
The chinese connection is even odder... because most of them are FARMERS in WoW. Therefore, they are hurt the most by this dupe bug! These guys have been just working and working to farm-in cash... and others have been just getting the gold for free.
This may be enough to break my WoW addiction... if I don't get booted and banned first.
I thought china was behind a sort of Great Firewall of China ?.
Anwyay, you'll find me a the local tavern where all the chinese play talking about Democracy and Fair market prices. If you visit you'll get a free sword of omens - identical to what I use. I'd like to see WoW ban me or block these chinese yuppies from hearing capitalist propoganda (like Google did).
Face it people, they have the population, they have the money (thanks to US shipping manufacturing jobs there last decade) and they have the market.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It costs ~0.055USD an hour to play. (http://www.blizzard.com/press/chinapatch.shtml)
From blizzard:
"Only players who have purchased an authorized CD key will be able to activate their accounts and enter the game. Each CD key costs 30 Yuan/RMB and can be purchased with a World of Warcraft Points Card. Point Cards also cost 30 Yuan/RMB and can be used at a rate of 9 points per hour (0.45 Yuan/hour) to play World of Warcraft."
I was under the impression that farmed items/gold must be farmed on the server they're sold on. Therefore gold/items farmed on a Chinese server can only be sold to people on that server. Chinese farmers must be on a US server in order to sell items to players of that US server. This is why the 1.5 million players on the chinese servers cannot be farmers, at least not to US players.
Yeah, it's killing Rockstar. And are you aware of how many MMPORGs crash and burn, and how much more they cost to make compared to a regular game?
There's a large gaming market of people like me - people who want to game ~5-10 hrs/week, which isn't enough time to become expert at a game, and who want to have fun without treating a game like a job. I have a job - that's what I'm escaping with the game. I also don't want to subscribe to a damned game.
Put that together and single player games have a lot of life left in them.
Actually, for many of these Chinese, playing WoW is their job. Read up on any WoW forums about the "sweatshops". Excerpt:
In the average sweatshop you have 1 person manning 2 or 3 computers. The first 1 or 2 computers is a charecter being ran by simple macros(and looting programs) requiring minimal player interaction, farming scarlet monestary for example. The final one is usually a level 60 rogue farming difficult mobs, such as the elites in tyr's hand. ( If you go to tyr's hand on any server you will find about 5 to 10 rogues farming 24/7, all chinese)
The biggest issue with the chinese farmer sweatshops where players get payed 37 cents an hour to farm gold, is that there are always employees that speak english near by. These employees who have a degree in english have 3 main functions.
1.) Sell items to players in IF/ORG trade.
2.) Assist other employees with player interaction.
3.) Respond to GM tells.
In China people pay $3.7 for 66 hours 40 minutes. Don't know how much of this amount goes to Blizzard.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Diablo II had a duplication bug as well. The system became inundated with Stone of Jordans and other copied objects.
These duped items, however, had some internal identifier in common. Blizzard deleted all the copied items, leaving a lot of people who had bought them quite sad. I would not be surprised if the same would be true in WoW.
I doubt gold has the same feature though - the stolen gold is probably here to stay. However, I bet there's records of people going in and out of instances - people are going to get busted if this really works.
I haven't seen any sign of this exploit happening on my server.
You can't attack players of your own faction, and my guess is that farmers choose to farm in areas dominated by their own faction so that the chance of any of the enemy happening by is slim. Also, it's a really big game world, and, except in major cities, players are spread out sparsely, so you're not likely to run into someone farming in an out-of-the-way place. Finally, you don't gain gold, items or experience from killing a player of the opposing faction, so there's little incentive for players to target such farmers.
The average person in China could not afford the $15/month that the west can pay. IIRC The game is downloaded for free, CD keys are ~$2USD and $0.05USD per hour (IE: every computer in every internet cafe in Shanghai has WoW installed on it)... Blizzard is probably making 1/20th the amount of $$$ from the chinese player then their making from the US player.... Based on all this, you could expect to see 10M WoW players in China by year end, and Blizzard gets to inflate their numbers! The economics here are very interesting.
$50 per game x 3.5 million = $175 million
$15 per month x 3.5 million = $52.5 million per month
$52.5 million x 12 months = $630 million per year in subscription fees.
I'm in the wrong damn business!
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Personally, I don't see it lasting.
I got into WoW during the CB1 era, and was playing on opening day. Yes, they got caught with their pants down, badly.
It still surprises me that this game is retaining so many customers, though. Yes, it is very engrossing for 59 levels. You hit 60, though, and there is not much to do, besides PvP and run through the same dungeons over and over again.
Bugs that are a detriment to gameplay take months to get fixed, if at all. A bug that caused players to disconnect if they used a certain core class skill was left in game for over a month. But if a bug benefits someone, you get a hotfix.
Server stability is still an issue, 9 months into the game, and every patch, they act up. Right now, a few days after the latest server maintenence, several servers have population caps lower than normal, because Blizzard can't figure out the problems.
New content is few and far between. They have added 2 instances and 2 battlegrounds in the last 6 months, but not a single new "zone" for players to enjoy/explore. So, all new content is for groups.
It still takes, on average, about 15+ hours to get a response from a GM.
The general forums are a joke. bnet kiddies galore, posting more flames than you can find in alt.flame. Yet, the CMs are more interested in locking posts that has an all-caps title than they are in actually answering questions asked, or removing off-topic posts. Nothing would help more than a sledgehammer approach to moderating those forums.
They don't reply to the bugs forum very often. So, you submit a bug there, and never get any confirmation that it is real or not, unless you see it in the patch notes in a few months.
It took them 8 months to finally take a good look at the Warlock class, which was easily the least played class in the game.
I think Blizzard has gotten a free ride by most of its customers, because they all hold Blizzard on a pedestal, and would rather brush the dust off of it than complain. These same folks would take Blizzard saying [this is fictional!] "The duping issue has been confirmed, and we found out that 75% of the items/gold that was duped was by Blizzard employees, who have all been terminated", and post as a response "Thanks for clearing it up, and taking care of the problem, see, Blizzard always comes through!", instead of disbelief that Blizzard can't catch these things sooner.
My wife and I basically stopped playing when we hit 60. There isn't all that much to do left in the game, and the hassles to get those things done aren't worth the massive effort required. And this, from a person who played EQ1 for 5+ years, and slogged through endlessly repetitive dungeons in the minor hope that I might win a roll on a rare item.
MMOs are, at the endgame, about how much fun you can have with the folks you are with, as you deal with the tedium of the game. Maybe I wasn't surrounded by the right people, but I think my WoW days are pretty much done.
[Note: Apparently they say the duping issue is, and I quote Caydiem, "I have been informed that the investigations have more or less concluded (they'll still be watching, of course, but the labor-intensive scouring of data is complete). It has been determined that there is not a repeatable dupe exploit." I wonder if that means you can only do it once...]
Oh, and there is no monthly fee.
Seriously, you should try it out. You don't even have to go to the store, you can download the client and then use it to purchase your account online.
They said that the game starts at 60. That is such a crock. There are five instances at 60 that are dooable: Scholomance, Stratholme, Black Rock Spire, and Upper Blackrock Spire (which is really the same zone, different parts), and Dire Maul.
There is also Molten Core, and the new Blackwing Lair, both of which normal players like me will never see since they require 40 people and assloads of organization.
But look...
The point I'm trying to make is, someone did the paper-napkin math and came to the conclusion that Blizzard makes 50+ million dollars a month. That is a crap load. That is plenty to hire a slew of people and start cranking out content.
Let me compare this to EverQuest 2 (and no, I am not endorsing EQ2. Just using it as a comparison). Since WoW opened, we've gotten 3 things: Dire Maul, Blackwing Lair, and Battlegrounds. All of which are very cool and well-designed, make no bones about it. But thats it aside from the tweaks and such that are a given in any MMOG.
EQ2 on the other hand came out just 1 month before it. They have had two addon packs, and an announced complete expansion comming out in Sept. that raises the level-cap from 50-60 amongst a lot of new lands/mobs/items/blah/blah/blah. They have a fraction of the subscriber base that WoW has.
I just don't know what they are doing with all the money, but for now, I'm leaving until they expand the damn game!!
++Om
You sir, are moron.
I am duping this statement.
But they'll only be able to sell to other sweatshop farmers, the servers aren't mixable, the North American/Australian/New Zealand server are seperate from the Korean servers are seperate from the European servers, the Chinese servers are sperate from all those other groups.
only if you happen to buy a certain regions edition of WoW. If I went and bought an American copy or Korean even though I'm in europe I could play on the other regions. I play on eu-thunderhorn and there are plenty of chinese farmers on there from my experience.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
It's amply clear you have NO idea how World of Warcraft works, or indeed most other MMORPGs. So I'll cover WoW since it's the one relivant to this /. article and the one I'm playing right now:
No matter how much money you spend on your character, you will never be uber. Period. There are monsters, lots of them, that you will not be able to kill by yourself. Doesn't matter how much of anything you bought, you can have the best equipmetn in the game, you still will die to them in less than 5 seconds. There are monsters that require 40 people to kill, not only that, they require those 40 people to be a cross section of different classes, and to be well coordinated. If you fail to properly execute your strategy, you die.
Now speaking of buying of items, you cannot buy the best items in the game, for any amount of money. Many items in the game, including all the most powerful, bind to your charater when picked up. That means you can never give them to someone else. So you actually have to go out and do the necessary steps to get the item.
And there are no scrool of instant death, or anything like that. No matter how powerful you get, other players will always be a challenge for you. Even low level ones. I've seen a mob of level 10-20 players whack a level 60 player. He killed quite a few of them, but they won in the end. No such thing as irresitable superiority.
Speaking of death, it's no big deal. They don't kill you and you're done, they kill you and you are able to come back after a bit, and keep playing. You don't lose your character or anything.
They are fun, a lot of fun, and though cheating happens some times, generally those that do get their asses banned.