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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."
I'm not saying you're wrong or that the dupe doesn't exist, but screenshots are hardly proof, especially with the prevalence of Photoshop these days.
One would have to try the process themselves, and, in so doing, risk getting banned by Blizzard. I don't think this bug (if it does indeed exist) is going to have as big of an effect in the end as people think it will.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
Maybe that's why they've got their own servers, wouldn't want to get any new and exciting words such as 'freedom' slipping in, now would we?
That screenshot looks photoshopped. Pull it into a paint program and increase the contrast, you can clearly see the same background texture copied on every line, and at the very bottom there's a horizontal line where the background doesn't match up. I'd post a link if I had the cohones (and bandwidth) to take on a slashdotting.
But then again, that's not proof that it DOESN'T exist.
I don't know how they should fix it, but its like opium and any other drug.....completely removes the desire to work or do anything else.
I've seen too many people waste hundreds and hundreds of hours on it....neglecting other, more important things. I'm not even going to touch it.
I see people going on and on about Chinese farmers. I see this in game too. It's really sad. Yes, there are chinese farmers. It does not mean that every chinese person playing the game is a farmer. Recently I left my guild because of this kind of racism. Of course, it always starts with chinese farmers and then it leads to more controversial types of racism about jews and blacks.
Honestly, I'm very close to quitting the game over this kind of crap. Every guild I join is litered with racists and the leaders don't do anything about it (some even join in).
I reported a guy for racism in barrens chat and I got flamed to high heaven for it. Pathetic.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
You first start out acting like you've never played these but only "seen" them. Then you claim that the PvP in WoW is pretty lame...but if you've never played it, how would you know? Just wondering, not making a judgment.
But any game like this is what you make out of it. If you really want to play WoW and never ever ever talk to anyone else or even acknowledge anyone else and that would be ok. Or you could be totally social and go on PvP raids, join and guild etc etc. You can do what you want really.
But these type of games don't appeal to everyone, like CS and UT2004 don't appeal to everyone. Hell, some people just want to play Tetris. I kind think you personally wouldn't like WoW.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Useless without pics from the game as well.
Also... if you don't trust the original picture, how you can trust these "new" pictures... which have obviously been photoshopped!
I don't know what to believe anymore...
Head spinning. (grin)
This is exactly why I like Guild Wars so much. All of the battle areas are instanced for each player or group of players, so you can form your parties in towns, and go out to kill or complete quests without having to worry about some other yahoo screwing it up for you. Also, the missions are set up so you can play only 1 or 2 hours at a time and still progress through the game. This and the fact that it has no monthly fee makes it the perfect game for people like me, who can't spend 6 hours at a stretch playing these things.
Die-hard WoW players see the instanced battle areas as Guild Wars' biggest weakness, but I see them as its biggest strength.
have you even considered the entertainment to expense ratio? It's perfectly okay for you to say that it's not worth it for you personally. Some of us would rather play WoW than, ie., watch what nowadays passes as movie, though. Just playing 4 hours WoW will break you even if you compare it to cinema. Every minute beyond that can then be considered 'free' enterainment. Don't go around calling people addicts just because the activity they happen to enjoy is performed while sitting at a computer.
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No power in the 'verse can stop me
For these occasions Imageshack is a quick and easy solution.
What do you expect from a gang of suburban, socially reclusive white kids who probably only see someone who isn't their race at the mall, or the one neighbor that mommy and daddy don't talk to? Do you expect them to believe the propoganda they hear at school about tolerance? That's just about as effective as telling them to abstain. Those that do don't do it because some teacher told them too.
SAILING MISHAP
Yeah, it's killing Rockstar.
.25 years ago!
And UbiSoft. Hell, just look at how many millions of copies of the Splinter Cell series were sold with their strengths as compelling, single-player games. And the most recent came out years ago - about
Same with the Thief series which has no multiplayer (although joint missions on that would be very cool if done like SC:CT coop multiplayer). Of course, Valve's Half-Life 2 was incredibly strong in its single-player method which killed it. {/sarcasm}
Obviously, single-player games are still very much in demand if they're made properly (unlike classic blunders like Ultima: Ascension).
Yeah, MMORPGs are just the only way to go. I've never understood that mentality. It's just as invalid now as it was over five years ago when the death of single-player was also held in strong opinion by many.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I think there will be a lawsuit. Gamers demand that the people running the games keep play within the rules.
Personally, I never liked the on-line games. I preffer to play single player games. Back in the day, Bards Tale, Wizardry, Might and Magic were all awesome games that did not need 20,000 on-line players to make it fun. There were puzzles, you built your team, and if you could, you beat the game.
What happens with on-line games? Somebody with more money than brains goes to ebay and buys a FireSword +25 fire damage, and DiamondHelm -15AC, he also buys 5 bottles of healing potions. He then sets out, and defeats monsters that should be a challange, he does quickly. He advances a few levels. Then he meets some other character owned by a real person. They are the same level, so it should be an even fight, the one who plans better should win. But it is not a fair fight when the ebay buying guy whips out his Scrolls of Instant Death, and kills your character that you spent a month developing. Gee, I did not see a level 3 character unleashing a scroll that does 150 points of damage.
What can a player do to get even, go to ebay and cheat too. Let the black market take over.
And what is even worse than the ebay people who buy stuff for their characters they should not have, are the ones who find exploits in the game, ways to manipulate it. I've read reports of people running scripts to advance their characters. The human owner does not even have to be at the computer. They just run the script, go to bed, and wake up with a character that gained 10 levels.
Games are only fun if everyone plays by the rules. It is like baseball, it stops being fun when you catch the pitcher rubbing the ball against sandpaper in his glove. Or when the batter corks his bat. Then it becomes a cheater who makes the game frustrating for everyone else.
There should be some way of keeping track of human players honor. If someone is caught cheating at one game, they are not allowed in another.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Back in the early UO days I went off the deep end and published one of the more infamous dupe bugs in UO. Got banned for it and eventually reinstated by a VP at Origin.
The thing was, the instructions I gave were so convoluted that anyone attempting to follow them would have been blatantly obvious. Of course it actually did work. Back then the only way to get the UO team to jump was to light them up in the forums. Even UO's Green Acres got clamped down after hounding the team in the forusm
Yet at the same time many other postings were just bunk. You get copy cats who with just a slight variation manage to start wildfires that have no basis. This is best done on fan sites where certain words are known trigger fanatics into waves of frenzy. It is even easier today as many emulators exist which can be used to produce screenshots which are game engine generated and not photoshopped.
Still there are some game companies that ignore the problems, or worse acknowledge them and do nothing. The best example is Turbine games who allowed and still allow cheating/macroing/etc in their first game Asheron's Call. They allow things that make other MMORPG developers flinch. What this does for the industry is cause all such cheating/macroing/duping to be considered a norm. On the really bad side it gives some players reason to believe that if you can cheat in one game everyone should cheat, or if someone is really far ahead that they are just cheating.
Blizzard really has done a good job on being proactive. I think people need to realize that they cannot just swing the sword of banning without doing the research needed to ensure they get the right people. Collateral damage does not go over well in these games.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What really bugs me is this obsession that MMO designers have with creating content that can only be appropriately experienced by legions of obsessed players. This makes particularly little sense for me in the case of World of Warcraft where there's a rather abrupt transition from being able to make decent advancement with very casual play, to a game where in order to continue perceptible advancement you have to become rather hardcore, just to enjoy a relatively small amount of game content that allows you to continue to progress.
And what I really don't know, and often wonder is, does an MMO really need to be designed in such a way that once you reach a certain point, "raid" participation becomes virtually mandatory for any kind of appreciable character progression?
People often play "fantasy" games so they can be one of a handful of heroes (or villains) along with their other friends. Not to be just another cog in an (admittedly impressive) machine with 39 other people (or 71+ other people in the case of some games/raid encounters).
I mean, that might appeal to a small percentage of people who actually enjoy the challenge of dealing with the logistics of getting that many high level players (often paired with high level egos and low levels of maturity) together and getting them to do their jobs properly and sorting out who gets to attend what raid and will be rewarded what loot according to various "DKPoint" schemes and whatnot, but for the rest of us who would prefer to just muster up a group of around 4 to 14 friends, big time raid encounters, while perhaps being a somewhat enticing challenge, seems more like work that we should be getting paid for, not something fun that we should be paying to do.
I've played a few MMOs, and I know that as soon as I reach that point where it seems like my only option to improve my character involves retreading the same content over and over and over in hopes of one of a handful of rare items, or raiding, then my excitement about the game cools down, I stop playing very much for a couple months, then I just end up quitting, like I did in World of Warcraft months ago.
I've just recently thought about playing again, to have something entertaining to do with my girlfriend when we're not together (we live about 40 minutes from one another so it's not always worth it to go see each other, depending on the amount of free time we have and what we need to get accomplished at home) but I'm pretty sure that if her and I did start playing, we'd just play to level 60, maybe a bit beyond, and then move on to something else ... because at that point, while perhaps we haven't yet "won" World of Warcraft, we'd have done all the stuff that seems fun and worthwhile.
Oh, and also, Blizzard, like every other other company that tries this MMO thing, doesn't seem to have a clue about customer relationships. They've done the "stealth nerf" thing several times, they are slow to respond to what are often very legitimate/important player concerns, and it takes a pretty long time for inexplicable changes to be reversed (if they ever are). The dupe story, I suppose, is a good example of this. At least they're not as bad as Square-Enix though. I still can't fathom the mentality of an MMO company that thinks it's a good idea to design a game to crash if you try to alt+tab, and deletes characters if a customer decides to suspend their account for three months or more.
So I'm still waiting for someone to get it right. While World of Warcraft is a fun
Yeah, me too. I mean, why would anyone pay for a NIC card and then pay monthly for Internet access. And why would you buy a TV and then pay for Cable. Who in their right mind would buy a DVD player and then expect to pay for DVD's. I tell you, its ludicrous that people buy a client and then willingly fork over money to access the content the client provides. I mean sheesh! What is up with these crazies?!?!!
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Actually Everquest didn't peak near those numbers because the market as it existed in 1999 couldn't support those numbers. The fact that people, yourself included, are still using Everquest as the standard by which later generation mmo's are judged just goes to prove that it WAS a fun game.
**insert favorite profound quotation here**
I dont see why it has to be either or. Why does it have to be "all games are going online" or "MMO games are gonna crash and burn."
One thing i notice on the internet is that there is only one answer and everything else is 100% wrong. Intel vs. AMD, Nvidia vs ATI, Xbox vs PS, MS vs Apple, Windows vs Linux, etc etc etc.
You have to pick one and everything else sucks. Why cant people just realize that you can have your cake and eat it too. I have an Xbox and a PS2 and i love them both. I play WoW all weekend and i love it but during the week while i have work i like to sit down and play GTA or Halo. My last card was an ATI and now I have an Nvidia and they both work great.
My point is that technology, just like the rest of the world, is not black and white. There are shades of grey and different opinions. Not all games are going to go online and games that are online are gonna stick around and consumers will love them both for their own reasons.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
Can you be anymore dramatic? I certainly disagree that WoW was designed by racists, for racists. You definitely need to take this as what it is - a GAME. You could make similar parallels with Lord Of The Rings. Was Peter Jackson (who you would paint as a racist) making a movie purely for racists? Is it white power?
You sir, are moron.
Wow the mods today have really gone bonkers. How can you mod the GP as flamebait yet continually mod this reactionist up? Do you honestly think that an orc hating an elf is going to translate into real world racism? What is your definition of racism anyway?