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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."
They're busy folks, and Gen Con put a delay on things.
We'll post them as soon as we get 'em.
I don't think there is a problem with the number of instances...I think the vast majority of queueing problems are because there aren't enough players to fill out a particular instance. For instance (pun intended), AV needs about 25 people at least to queue on each side before an instance starts. If only 20 are queued, they are going to wait until 5 more people join. Then once that instance is full, if there aren't another 25 people to start a new instance, those people are forced to wait until people leave in the instance that is already up. So increasing the number of allowable instances (at least on a low or medium pop server) wouldn't do anything to help the queue lines.
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.
On my server, which is a low pop server, AV usually starts up around 6pm server time (9pm eastern, where most of the players are from) on weekdays, and a little earlier on the weekends. If you aren't there at about 5:30 server to join the queue on the alliance side, you're going to miss the start of the first instance, and likely won't get on until around 7 or 8 server time. Therefore, it isn't about people who play off hours, it's that people who can't be on at 5:30 server won't get to play very often.
Overall, I think people can understand that if they play during off hours, they don't have as good a shot of getting into BG. Those people should probably play on higher-pop servers where there is always enough people on to do BG. But people on low pop servers who can't get on at 5:30 (but still play during peak times) are unfairly missing out on the BG. But it's not the fault of Blizzard -- Blizzard can't force people to join the BG queues.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
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.