Slashback: MMORPG Trends

Some additional details on stories we've previously discussed. The Garriott brothers gave a talk at the DICE conference earlier this month, and while Next Generation offered the gist of the Garriot keynote, Gamespy has a detailed look at their predictions. We also talked earlier about World of Warcraft as the new golf. C|Net has a deeper look at the trend of networking in Azeroth. From that article: "With more than 5.5 million people now playing WoW and joining guilds for everything from police officers to soldiers returning from Iraq, it was bound to happen: The rich guys have carved a virtual space to call their own. In fairness, the six-month-old guild isn't just for rich folks. There are plenty of bartenders and regular workaday types in the group as well. But what sets 'We Know' apart is its concentration of movers and shakers in the technology world."

Comments

Re:Why is it...

[Fizzog]

I've been noticing this as well.

Even when I have a ping of 50ms the game can still be laggy. I have a pretty decent system (A64-3700, 1Gig of Cas 2, 6800GT, 74GB Raptor) so with a ping of 50ms the issues are at their end.

My guess is that either:

a) they are running out of backbone bandwidth (unlikely), or

b) they have downgraded the spec of the servers they are now buying to the bare minimum they can get away with, just to save a few bucks

karmic retribution at lvl 60

[Zorikin]

I posted in the other story that my workplace was crawling with WoWers. We got firewalled. Now they watch FRAPS movies and look things up on thottbot.

Re:Why is it...

[phlinn]

Probably because most new players join the already existing servers that their friends who got them into the game are playing on. The bigger the server, the more this happens. Closing off new chars on existing servers is just a way to get older players to start over so they can play with their friends.