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Burning Crusade Impressions Roundup
With the Draenei out of the bag, the news sites have taken some time to reacquaint themselves with the new corners of Azeroth. From the Gamespot hands-on report: "To navigate these vast new areas, the expansion will add flying mounts, such as winged dragonlike characters that can run along the ground even more quickly than the fastest epic mounts in the game and also take to the air at any time and fly anywhere. Though you'll need to have a character at level 70 to get your own flying mount, you'll enjoy increased freedom of movement--and apparently, Blizzard's content team is also designing out-of-the-way pockets of content and monster camps to be discovered by adventurous players who don't mind exploring the new areas." More impressions below if you Read More.
Einstein once commented that the tools necessary to discover a problem are not the same tools necessary to solve it. Humans are notoriously horrible at recognition of statistical patterns; however, when we are good at solving problems, we often over-estimate our ability when his or her skills cannot be used for a purpose, like statistics. In this case, Keplan obviously knows very little about statistics. The first rule of statistics is humans are very poor at recognizing statistical patterns. Human brains are meant to find patterns and we will see what we naturally wish to see even when it is not there.
In a similar vein, Holocron of SWG once came out with some statistic about how the player base was performing. So I popped him a personal message and asked him for the f-stat and autocorrelation of the statistics. I was asking for the fitness and what-external-influence values for the stats he generated. Both are fundamental values easily generated in Excel. His response: "Well, we really just looked over the numbers."
Long story short, anyone who says "I think," "I feel" or "it ought to be about" usually should be immediately dismissed. He or she is using the wrong tools for the wrong purpose. Unfortunately, until a person takes statistics, he or she usually doesn't realize this.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
"It seems to me that the only people who can complete the 45-minute Baron runs to get Tier 0.5 gear are people with Tier 1-2 gear -- which is the same deranged logic that drives instances such as ZG and AQ20. The only people who can clear those zone don't need to."
Truer words were never spoken. I quite back in February mostly due to boredom and technical problems such as server stability and the login queue. I had 6/8 tier 0 items after more than 50 instance runs. Let's just say Strath had long since stopped being fun.
I did some ZG runs and got turned off by the reward system. The guild I was in was not big enough to do MC so we though ZG would be perfect. Boy was that wrong.
When I read about the patch changing the instances the first thought I had was "how the hell is a restoration druid going to get a strath run now".
My friends who still play were telling me about 3 man Strath runs with epic equipped characters. Which just makes me wonder - how the hell is Blizzard going to balance the Burning Crusade between epic equipped 60s and toons like mine?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"Sure it's easy to say "Blizzard can't make infinite content" but other MMOs have a lot more quests and things to do than WoW."
Having actually played other MMOs too, I'd actually challenge that.
E.g., COH/COV? COH launched with a _much_ smaller world than WoW, and it's still smaller. And it _still_ doesn't really have that many different quests. Sure, it has a lot of them, but they're all variation of the same dozen or so mission templates, and all inside maps are made of the same large building blocks arranged differently. (Yay for another instance of the exact same room I've seen since level 1, only placed in another position in the maze.) Plus, it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. It survived for more than a year on the Hamidon raid as the _only_ endgame mission. You can do it again and again if you want to, but that's about it.
E.g., EQ2? It launched again with an even smaller world (but to make up for it, it was divided into tiny zones and you had massive zoning times... several times even to get from Qeynos South to Greystone Yard, the equivalent of getting from the Stormwind gates to the dwarven quarter), fewer quests, massive balance issues, and problems like whole level ranges where there was not much to do or nothing soloable. Sony did in the meantime hire a huge team to churn out quests in wholesale quantities to catch up, but ended up with a lot of copy-and-paste ones or outright illogical ones.
(E.g., to find a manuscript, I have to first kill deer to see if the deer have the manuscript. Then wolves. Then bears. Then finally my character comes at the idea of killing forest wardens to see if they found the manuscript. A direct equivalent would be a WoW Alliance character killing the woodcutters in Eastvale to see if they found a manuscript. Not stole or anyhthing punishable by death, but to see if they found a lost manuscript. That stupid. WTH happened to asking? And that's just one in a hundred or more quests that defy any logic or suspension of disbelief.)
E.g., AO? Heh. Now that one was launched with _only_ randomly generated quests, and at that only reruns of the same "go there, kill all NPCs in the building" quest. No, seriously. Even if the quest text said you must "infiltrate", "spy", or use stealth, you wouldn't get the token unless you hunted down every single NPC on the map.
E.g., SWG? Whole classes, e.g., Entertainers, _still_ don't actually have any content for their class. (And can't do the combat quests either.) Or Smugglers can't actually smuggle, Bounty Hunters are at best some weird assassins, etc. The few quests it actually has that aren't automatically generated crap are little more than exercising in merchandising the SW characters. And again it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. Once you've hit level 80 (which until NGE everyone did by macroing anyway), it doesn't actually have either raids or anything else for you to do. You can just go PvP with that character, just for the sake of PvP, or retire it, or that's about it.
Just about the only thing it does have is a larger world size, but even that's mostly empty space for the players to build houses on. And it was even sadder than that at launch, where whole areas weren't even populated with either quests or NPCs. They'd be either literally empty computer-generated terrain, or someone had placed some houses there to make it look like a ghost town. Keywords: ghost town. There were no actual NPCs, quests, or anything there. It was in fact very little more than a placeholder.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that those games suck or anything. (Well, maybe except for SWG.) I'm playing COH again myself, if nothing else, because it's still better than waiting 3 hours for a raid group in WoW. But let's not pretend that they're a cornucopia of unique quests and massive amounts of content, because they aren't. Sadly enough WoW does have more quests, and (sad as it may seem, knowing the WoW quests) more varied ones.
The only one which might give WoW a run for its money is EQ1 with all the expansion packs. But then it took how many years to get all that content?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have been playing ying for a year, i have 3 60's and have never cleared MC,ZG,BWl.