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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.
Never mind duping ITEMS, I think Blizzard must be duping Chinese players! No WONDER there are so many server crashes, bloody Blizzard's customer duper team (the duperheros)
I just read "World" "War" and "China" and thought Here we go again!
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.
Are actually farmers?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
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."
You miss-spelled "Teh". -Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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
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.
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.
you act as if 15$ is a fortune. It isn't. It's going to the cinema twice. You complain about people doing *that*, too? I mean, you go enjoy your acting-less special-effect show. Meanwhile I'll pretent to be a hero in a fantasy world. If that makes me stupid, I don't know what it makes you.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
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.
1. Bandwidth, large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support, ongoing content development, etc, all cost money too. What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
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
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.