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

[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.

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.)

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

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.