New WoW Alliance Race Revealed

Now.Imperfect writes "The New York Times is reporting that Blizzard has slated the Draenei to be the new Alliance race in the up-and-coming Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. The article also states that E3 visitors will also be able to test the new flying mount."

Comments

Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[Captain Kirk]

One of the bigh imbalances in WoW is that far more people roll "cute" Alliance characters and the Horde is played by people who think about issues like Stun resistance, enhanced melee speed and so on. This makes a HUGE difference in battlegrounds where Horde usually win because they have more thinking players and Alliance have interminable queues becasue there are often 3 to 1 alliance to Horde population imbalances.

I'm an Orc Shaman and we win in battlegrounds 90% of the time. My hope is that this will lift the level of Alliance players a little while encouracing more peope to try Horde characeters.

Re:For What It's Worth

[SnowDog_2112]

There's an interview on the NYTimes site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/09/technology/10war craftqa.web.html

It has info on the race, profession choices, and much more. Very interesting read.

Just like any other game, then?

[Moraelin]

"I haven't played but working in IT everyone I work with plays it incessantly and all admit that it's reached apoint where they can't stop and yet they don't see any point in continuing. I don't need to use cocaine to know it's addictive and has no real finite purpose."

Some people get addicted to it, yes. But then people get addicted to anything else. Including:

- counterstrike
- BSD/Linux/Amiga/obscure-programming-language debates
- Everquest2 (and unlike EQ1, I can't even really see what a couple of co-workers even see in EQ2, since it's mostly just a mediocre idea and badly executed)
- sex
- porn (see people who end up unable to stop browsing for it even at work, and then sue the employer for firing them)
- karma-whoring on Slashdot

Etc, etc, etc.

The problem isn't as much the game, as the people. Some people are the kind that just has to find refuge in something and, unsurprisingly, a good game will collect more of them than a bad one. So, yes, you're more likely to find them in WoW than in crap games like Anarchy Online or SWG.

And some people basically have an Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, so they can't leave anything they haven't 100% finished. They _must_ have opened every single chest, killed every single boss and collected every single armour piece, before they can consider a game finished and move on. I can see how some MMOs would trap them, because they're games designed so you can't really finish them. The end-game grind in WoW is there precisely so you'd need at _least_ a year of doing the same thing over and over again before you're finally "finished".

Again, I'd "blame" the people not the game. (Well, not as much "blame" as have some compassion.) The same personality types do the exact same in other games too. E.g., I had a friend who simply _had_ to find every single chest, secret door and quest in such games as "Betrayal At Krondor". I remember that game particularly because he's explicitly fumed about not being sure if he covered 100% of an area, and there could be some chest he's missed. Or in games like Panzer General he'd save before moving each and every single unit, and reload if the dice-driven result was anything less than _perfect_. (Meaning his unit had to take exactly zero damage, and the enemy had to take exactly the maximum attack value of his unit.) Not because he couldn't have finished it otherwise, but because it _had_ to be perfect, if he could help it.

At any rate, I'd venture a guess that it's not really the game which turned them into that.

Is it just addiction and carrot-on-a-stick for everyone? I'd say I'm proof enough that it isn't, seein' as I'm not even playing it any more. Can't recall any withdrawal syndrome either. If you _don't_ approach it with some silly idea that it's like a marriage for life, or that you _must_ finish everything before you give up, giving it up is actually pretty darn easy. It's just a game. You've seen as much content as was enjoyable, and when it starts being consistently unenjoyable, it's goodbye and good riddance.

As for my comments about "trolling" or "noise drowning the signal", they're not about your having an opinion. It's about your passing a harsh judgment on something you just don't have the data to judge. Knowing one IT guy who's a WoW addict doesn't make you an expert in WoW, and, no, doesn't give you enough data to extrapolate about why everyone else is playing it. It's like knowing that some terrorist was from South America and did drugs, and deciding that surely all people in South America are terrorists and junkies. It's that uninformed a judgment. That's all.