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World of Warcraft Continues To Grow
Lots of tidbits for you about WoW today, to get you through the weekly downtime. Gamespot is reporting that there are now over 1 Million players in North America, and over 4 Million players worldwide. If you're one of those 4 Million players, perhaps that special someone is out there in Azeroth. Tom's Hardware has a guide on meeting women in World of Warcraft, for the lonely druid or warrior. For a view of what the game is like now, Mogg wrote to mention a 9 months later review at GamerGod. Finally, not everyone is happy. As we mentioned earlier this month, China is planning on forcing MMOG vendors to build in time restrictions for their games. GameDaily.biz reports that players have already begun to protest the separation from their game. From the GamerGod article: "The main dilemma preventing battlegrounds from being a break away hit is the queue required to join one. It is best compared to standing in line at a grocery store. The bigger and busier the store... the more lines and more cashiers there is. The smaller the store the fewer. On low population servers there is literally no battlegrounds open outside of prime time leaving off hour gamers unable to enjoy battlegrounds. High population servers often have five or more of each instance activated during peak hours and rarely struggle for players to battle."
Where's the response to the questions we asked the developers a week or two ago?
From level 15-55 I could do any of the dungeons in less than 2 hours but when I hit 60 some of the dungeons like molten core could take 4-5 hours and multiple corpse runs to complete. I just can't justify wasting 4-5 hours on something that does not benifit me educationally or financially.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The casual game that gets you to 60 - and the hardcore game to do anything at 60.
I like the first game, have other things to do (women) instead of the second.
Its a great game - worth the purchase - but unless you are willing to play ALL day you wont be uber.
Twylight
In my mind, instances are the most fun part of the game, but you have to allocate 4-5 hours to do an instance currently, because it takes so long for people to form a group, then get over to the instance. The fact that instances take more than an hour or two to do is fine, but the extra wasted time is such a drag, as it makes it much harder to spontaneously jump on and just have fun.
If Blizzard could encourage use of meeting stones on all servers, big and small, that'd be great.
To fix the Queue problem, all I would think they need to do is increase the maximum number of instances being run at a time. That may just be adding more hardware or changing code limitations.
As far as people who play off hours not able to join in the fun, should be considered a very minor problem. I would think the aim would be to please a majority of the player base with add ons.
It must be stopped!
As stated in the linked article a paying customer could have bought the game, a game card, or a subscription. This does not tell us the number of paid accounts on the North American servers. This only tells us how many there could be.
Consider that they have around 100 servers (104 or 105?). Now if only 1000 people are on each server at a time, I think the number can be double that during primetime, this puts them at 100k simulataneous users. That is phenomenal for a US MMORPG. The standard "rule" is that there are 5 times the number of accounts as there are people online at any one time. This would put them over or near 500,000 subscriptions. Impressive by itself. There is always http://www.mmorpgchart.com/ to look at as well. He has a good disclaimer but seems "mostly" accurate in his guesses.
As for the complaints. I find that most people in MMORPGs promise themselves more than the developers do. WOW does have its share of problems but Blizzard has shown they do act. They are very good when dealing with exploiters.
It is worth noting that this news is within 7 days of Turbine announcing they are closing down AC2. The integrity of the companies is very evident in how both fared. Blizzard has done their best to promote their game, police their game, and they did an incredible amount of work so that they released a very stable and nearly complete game. Constrast that to how Turbine handled AC2 both when it was also a MS product and when it was totally a Turbine product. They released a feature incomplete game ridden with bugs and exploits, the did nearly nothing to stop the known exploits early on forever damaging the game, and then there was little promotion of the game except by web banners and a few ads. To add insult to injury one of their lead people blamed the migration from MS's billing system to their own for a major population drop! Completely brushing over the fact that people don't pay for things they do not like.
Even with all the disgruntled people, whom are more evident because of the web, Blizzard and WOW will continue to propser simply because Blizzard is not standing still. The game improves monthly and there is much more to do in this game than can be experienced in just a few months. Battlefields is important, but it is not important to everyone. This is one thing most articles ignore. Battlefields is PvP, a lot of people playing WOW will never PvP so they do not care. These people who don't need PvP or Battlefields will find their own causes to rail about. Still you have to look at it this way, if your users are in such numbers as to get other sites to post about them your game is probably doing just fine.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Don't go to movies often do you? With all the advertisements and heck if you count travel time you can put in more then that.
Don't get me wrong I agree with you that MC BWL and such take way to long and way to many people to provide and benefit.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
I don't doubt that there are that many people who have bought WoW in total, but I would love to some verifiable numbers of:
1) The peak number of players across all servers daily
2) The number of accounts -currently- paying the montly charge that is not either included in the free first month or some other marketing incentive
Almost everyone I know who started playing WoW has quit - and many of those who did buy the game managed to get their fill of the game in under the first free month. It sounds like Blizzard is counting all of those people.
From level 15-55 I could do any of the dungeons in less than 2 hours but when I hit 60 some of the dungeons like molten core could take 4-5 hours and multiple corpse runs to complete. I just can't justify wasting 4-5 hours on something that does not benifit me educationally or financially.
So 2 hour quests are good, 4-5 hour quests are bad, why not just play half the number of quests per month that you used to? Wouldn't that be roughly the same number of hours on a monthly basis?
I live in a small town I can walk to the movies, the grocery store and my local bar all in less than 5 minutes.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Another issue which is exacerbated by these imbalances is that one side's PvP players are often highly practiced, coordinated, etc. whereas the other side has a much higher percentage of 'pickup' players. The higher-pop side with the 'pickup' players will typically get beat on - which is not a problem in and of itself, but it will tend to drive away the more 'casual' gamers from that side, which will eventually lower the BG demand even on the high-pop side.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Of course, it's quite probable that the BG, being simply a server-tied instance, *can't* handle player integration from different servers...but still, it would seem that this would be an easier place than anywhere else to set it up.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
My wife started moving her flirting in WoW to real life, she started talking to this guy in IM and calling him on the weekends. Very childish, and I had to file for divorce after she said she loved him and wouldnt goto marriage counseling. 14 years and 4 kids, she threw away.
We where in a married guild, most people in the guild where married or couples, we where the 3rd largest guild on our server. But after I quit playing due to my ex, the rest of the guild split off and/or moved accounts.
I guess its getting more common for women to have cyber affairs online that turn real, WoW has its fair share. But if you post about anything like this in the forums, Blizzard deletes the posts. Blizzard deletes lots of negative posts......
Over 500,000 concurrent in June.
c id=13437461
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wow, how is the 50's treating you??
Or to put it differently - that is un-natural and unfair. You must now die.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
It's like trying to stop people from developing an addiction to a drug by only allowing them to use the drug for 2 hours at a time. And yes, it's a fair comparison. I've seen many an Everquest player do things that usually only seriously drug addicted people do. (grossly distorting the amount of time playing the game, loss of jobs because of lack of sleep or refusal to stop playing, paranoia that people are trying to interfere with their 'precious', losing their children in custody battles because of the game, theft to make up for money spent on computer equipment/monthly fees, etc...)
Time limits won't do what they are intended to do. In fact, it will often have the opposite effect because the person is left wanting at the end of each session instead of naturally getting bored or making the conscious decision that it's time to do something productive like mowing the lawn.
The forbidden fruit of playing longer than X hours will tempt a lot of people especially children to work around it...even if they wouldn't have wanted to play that long anyway. It's rebellion against authority. They'll rent multiple accounts if all else fails.
It's up to family & friends to intervene when someone has this large of a problem. Time limits won't do anything at all except make people Feel Good[TM] about what they've (allegedly) done to stop gaming addiction.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
There's a difference in end-game content, yes, but it's a bonus, not a detriment. Epic Item sets could take a year of play to get. Even for items that you can craft yourself, there are items that could take quite a lot of time to gather materials for (bottomless bag, any of the purple stuff).
It's a bonus because if you want to play shorter/quicker stuff, you can create an alt character, and go through some of the lower instances more often, playing them from a different role.
It's true that the easiest way for Blizzard to add long-lasting gameplay is to simply make the end items insanely difficult to get. But eventually you're going to move on to another MMORPG sooner or later, and if the current situation annoys/bores you enough, maybe it should be sooner.
The readers of slashdot has been declining, because...
THERE ARE NO REAL NEWS!
I myself can get 2 hours free, but not normally 5 hours and not five hours at the same time for multiple consecutive days. Also things like Molten Core runs tend to have to be coordinated. You are basically commiting to being in game at a certain time of day and to stay online for a long time. Running through the whole dungeon typically takes about 6 long sessions.
The reason you need to commit to the time is because the dungeon requires a group of 40 players total to run it versus 5 or 10 for the earlier dungeons.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That article had absolutely nothing to do with how to meet women... All it was was an anecdote from some dude about how he knew this guys whose friend's fiance sent some half naked pictures in return for access to the beta for WoW.
"I just can't justify wasting 4-5 hours on something that does not benifit me educationally or financially."
You must be very, very tired.
Meet the new sig, same as the old sig
This original article doesn't really detail the two major reasons why battlegrounds have queues.
Reason #1: Faction Imbalance
You require basically the same number of alliance and horde players to play in a battlegrounds. On many servers the ratio of alliance to horde is 2:1 or 3:1. This means the horde can get into battlegrounds easily, while the alliance need to wait a long time (can be hours). Furthermore this disparity leads to unethical behavior, like horde exiting a battleground to find an easier team to fight.
Reason #2: Localized Battlegrounds
When you go into a battlegrounds you always play with people from your server. The positive of this is that you can form better relationships with those people. The negative is that you have a much smaller pool of players to pick from.
Lets say for example you have a 100 servers on which there are 5 characters level 21-30 who are queued for battlegrounds on the alliance side. How many games do you get? Zero! Five is not enough to start a battlegrounds.
Solutions:
Make battlegrounds cross server, including allowing pvp and non pvp characters to interract (since the BGs are purely pvp anyway). This would require a few modifications:
- transfer of characters to bg servers, and back from bg servers
- disable trade window while in a battlegrounds (to prevent transfer of items)
- allow a localized name space, do not allow collisions (simplest solution) so there is only one "bob" in any battlegrounds, but there could be 10 bobs in different battlegrounds
The cross faction issue should be lessened by the above, but if it's a big issue long term it may be worthwhile to look at other solutions, like potentially allowing alliance vs alliance in the battlegrounds. This opens other issues -- like the need to prevent cross-team communication.
Battlegrounds are great, queues are terrible! Blizzard really needs to implement ways of getting people into games faster so they can enjoy Warcraft.
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I support spreading santorum
hahahahaha, thanks for the laugh. if i had mod points you would get one.
Disclaimer: I have not played WoW.
What's with the long queues? In Guild Wars, you pick the type of PvP arena you'd like to enter, click Enter Mission, and you're playing in 30 seconds or less. What makes the battlegrounds on WoW so much slower?
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Does Blizzard really think they can to get away with this kind of bulls***? Thats like saying 'if customers have test driven a Toyota car within the past month, they're a Toyota owner.'
The server populations are quite misleading. It can say high one day, low the next, medium the third time you look. So the range they use to decide these categories is quite small. I don't understand why they need to keep the actual numbers a secret unless the intent is to mislead people and exaggerate their subscription numbers. Then again, they also hide many other numbers, maybe they have some designers that helped with the windows xp interface; hiding anything "complicated" from the average joe.
And yes, the up to 5 hour queue times are quite ridiculous. Furthermore, when you finally get in, you have 60 seconds to click to accept entry, which means that it is possible to wait 2 hours, run to the loo, and come back to see that you are no longer in the queue. (yes it happened to me)
Sure, you can do other things in game in the meantime(although I usually have to cancel if I have entered an instance so I don't abandon people), but that necessity to stay in your seat is simply evil. Now that I think about it, forcing you into groups where you can't leave or it would let other people down is quite evil, as well. I swear that they must have had some psychologists with doctorates specializing in addiction and group behaviour help them with the feature design.
As for the faction imbalance, our server magtheridon is quite odd, I think; the Horde seem to win the overwhelming majority(~90%) of warsong gulch(CTF) matches and the Alliance seem to win the substantial majority(~75%) of alterac valley matches.
So you're saying that things will tend to balance themselves in the end, but somehow still make it sound like a complaint. I'm confused.
But hey, I play da bad guys, no queues for me.
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As with any other type of game practice makes perfect. I'm not "uber", but 9/12 of my gear are 53+ blues. You just need to refine your technique.
we get 5 people through DMW & Strath nicely in 1.5 hours.
on our server (mannoroth) there is a guild who can do MC from entrance to Rag in 3 hours.