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.

Comments

I'm impressed

[spun]

More impressions below if you Read More.
I'm impressed with the lack of impressions below.

Re:I'm impressed

[prichardson]

Check the Related Stories tab underneath the summary.

Re:I'm impressed

[Minwee]

The impressions were taken down for scheduled maintenance early this morning, but that ran a little bit long and they weren't back up until ten AM. After people started reading the impressions they became unstable and needed to be taken down again for emergency maintenance which will probably last until next Tuesday.

See? It's all the fun of actually playing the game without having to pay a monthly fee.

Initial thoughts.

[ThePuceGuardian]

The new race will also possess new innate abilities, including a heal-over-time skill called Blessing of the Naaru, though it won't be overwhelmingly powerful ("it's on par with a renew or regrowth [spell]," explained the producer) but will scale up with your Draenei character's level and be useful enough for reducing downtime (the time required to sit and recover from wounds after battle). 1. There's downtime in World of Warcraft? Since when? 2. What person who'd give a tinker's damn for an upcoming MMO expansion - that will be out a year from now, at that - would need this term defined for them? Who's this article written for, exactly?

Blizzard developer interview

[joejor]

This New York Times interview is very informative. You get the impression that

1. the interviewer knows enough about the topic to ask intelligent questions, and
2. the interviewee enjoys the topic and has intelligent answers

25% have killed Ragnaros?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.

I can sort of buy the first statistic... sort of. Ragnaros is regularly downed by pickup groups now, so I can see a fair amount of people getting a shot at him.

But Nefarion? 15%? To propogate a meme, ORLY?

For those with actual social lives, Nefarion is the last boss of Blackwing Lair, currently the second-hardest dungeon in the game. You have to kill seven bosses before you get to Nef, and each of them can take weeks for a new guild to learn to defeat for the first time. And since the dungeon resets every Tuesday, you have to clear your way through all of them EVERY WEEK to even get a shot at learning how to kill Nef - a process that takes months for some guilds.

In other words, Kaplan is estimating, from his "gut feeling," that 15% of the people who've gotten to level 60 will ALSO have spent 15+ hours a week for several months in BWL. Either the WoW playerbase (of 5-6 million) is even more fanatical than I would have guessed, or this is a big overestimate, and possibly an attempt to justify the fact that for about a year now the WoW development team has focused almost exclusively on new content for the high-end raiders who make up a small proportion of the fan base. (I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since I'm a raider myself, but hey.)

Re:25% have killed Ragnaros?

[Soybean47]

I'm not saying that 15% is necessarily accurate, but you're making faulty assumptions in the other direction. Not everyone who's killed Nefarion has been on all the learning runs. Once a big guild gets good at BWL, some of the regulars start slacking off, and they start taking new 60s in the guild, or friends of the guild, or whatnot. I've never been in a BWL-capable guild, but there were people in my old guild who would sometimes run it with a bigger guild when they needed a fill-in.

Basically, what I'm saying is, there are probably a lot of people who have killed Nefarion who haven't spent months in BWL.

Re:25% have killed Ragnaros?

[snuf23]

"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?

About stats

[beldraen]

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.

Heh. What ELSE did you expect?

[Moraelin]

Believe it or not, Blizzard doesn't have infinite funds, nor infinite manpower. They can't _possibly_ provide an endless stream of new content, so your level 60 character can go through a dozen new quests per hour like you did at level 1 in Northshire Abbey. Even if they had 10 times the total content in WoW, you'd still run out of it in a couple of months at that rate. Then what?

So they developped as much content they could afford, and messed with how much they give you at each level. If you plotted a graph with the time along X and the percent of content you've seen as Y, let's just say it would look like very much an asymptote. It starts by going up pretty quickly, but then it slows down, and it takes more and more time to get closer to that covetted 100% spot. By the end of it, huge amounts of time are required to make even the tiniest of progress.

I fondly call it the "boiling a frog alive model". They say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will just jump out. But if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, it will stay in and get boiled alive. Now I don't know if that's true with frogs, but it's certainly true with about half the WoW players. Because that's what Blizzard does.

In the beginning you're not up against any major challenge, farming or grinding is entirely unnecessary, travel times are 1-2 minutes, and you get to do new quests and see new content all the time. And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of cool water. (Some people may whine that it's cooking pot shaped, but you're sure it's only whiners/fanboys/whatever.)

It's a _great_ game at that level. And it had to be like that, because that's what gets people addicted.

But unfortunately they can't afford to keep it like that for ever. They just don't have the funds, the manpower or the infrastructure for the insane quantities of content that would be required.

So from there it goes slowly downhill, and more and more time-sinks are worked in. Gradually you need more time spent travelling, more time farming for your next weapon or recipe, more time waiting for a good group for that instance, etc. But still, you work your way slowly towards that 100% point.

Until eventually there are only 2-3 instances left total, and that's it. That's all that separates you from finishing the game, getting bored, and cancelling your account. You've consumed everything else already. So all they can do to keep you busy (and paying the monthly fee) is to make you do those over and over again for months.

That's, in a nutshell, why it becomes repetitive.

Why does it require large groups too? Well, for various reasons. Among others, because:

- it's viral marketting. It's a way to make people beg their friends to keep playing. In other games it was just the thought of "oh man, but all my online 'friends' are in this game" that kept you playing. But in this one said friends _need_ you. They start sending you tells or even emails that you're _needed_ for that 1000'th MC raid. You may even feel like you've failed your friends if you can't log on for that raid. It can make it very hard for some people to cancel their account, even long after they stopped having any fun in WoW.

- to further dillute the rewards. Even if you hit that 1% jackpot and the boss drops that item you were after, too bad, you're one of maybe 8-12 people rolling for it. (Or even more fun, you may know from the start that you're not going to get it, because your guild implemented some "contribution points" system. So you can know from the start that although you've played for 8 hours a day, someone else who's played 16 hours a day is ahead of you, and you'll only get that item if they don't want it.) Time to do it again next week.

Or maybe that boss doesn't even drop anything you need, but you're helping someone else get it. So hopefully they'll reciprocate and help you get yours. Well, that's even better. That's some hours for each of you which didn't get you any closer to your own goal. You're still as far from th

Re:Heh. What ELSE did you expect?

[snuf23]

"So from there it goes slowly downhill, and more and more time-sinks are worked in. Gradually you need more time spent travelling, more time farming for your next weapon or recipe, more time waiting for a good group for that instance, etc. But still, you work your way slowly towards that 100% point."

I wouldn't say it goes slowly downhill. While yes it takes a lot longer to get from level 49-50 than it does to get from 19-20 the game still moves along at a pretty quick pace. Once you get into the mid 50s you get a taste of what the rest of your time in WoW is going to be spent doing. Running the same dungeons over and over again to get item X. The level of timesink skyrockets at that point. It's practically like a brick wall. The other options such as PVP and high end crafting require a huge time commitment as well.
I would have enjoyed a longer middle game. 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. WoW even has a lot of areas that are completely lacking in quests, or quest chains that appear to have been dropped. Things like the Druid quests ending at lvl 14 (why is there a ghost Cat in Moonglade if there is no cat form quest?) or the Rogue quest line where they made that cool dojo up in the mountains and yet there is nothing there. Or zones like Azshara with almost no content.
It sure doesn't seem like Blizzard has any interest in fleshing out the rest of the game now that almost everyone is 60 (some with multiple alts at 60). What are the new races going to bring? One or two low level zones you complete in a few hours?
You're right, the game should just say "Game Over Casual Player" when you hit 60. Of course the definition between casual and hardcore somehow seems to solely relate to the ability to endure endless repetition.

Re:Heh. What ELSE did you expect?

[Moraelin]

"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?

PLEASE

[GmAz]

Oh please tell me you can poop on peoples heads as you fly by on my flying mount??? That would be the ultimate PWN towards the opposing race.

Well, even if 25% is correct...

[llevity]

Most folks debate whether the 25% number is inflated or not. They say "No way 25%, it's probably more like 15%!"

That shouldn't even be the point of the argument. If ONLY 25% of level 60s have downed the boss of the easist raid dungeon in the game, why the hell do they keep making more raid dungeons?

Misleading summary

[Anonymous Cumshot]

The flying mounts will ONLY be usable within Outland, one of the new zones to be added in the expansion.

More about stats

[AHumbleOpinion]

Look away from the textbooks and consider the real world for a moment. Consider the GP's "According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.". Data analysis from Excel or SPSS is not needed. 99%(*) of your statistics textbook is not needed. The key thing that I believe you are missing is that sampling is not required. Given that this is an on-line only game that only plays from company servers means that they can simply observe the *entire* population. Record who killed Nefarion, count uniques accounts, divide by total accounts.

The world is usually more complex that we think, but sometimes, on rare occasions, it is much simpler than we think.

(*) Yeah, a made up number but we are talking statistics so that is appropriate.

sucks

[allforcarrie]

I have been playing ying for a year, i have 3 60's and have never cleared MC,ZG,BWl.