Slashdot Mirror
Surprising Burning Crusade Details for WoW
Heartless Gamer writes "There is quite a few surprises waiting in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. The raiding scene in World of Warcraft is going to dramatically change once Burning Crusade is released. Here's the long and short of it: all of the new high-end raid content will be capped at 25 heads. Indeed, all the raid content that was mentioned in today's demo, with the exception of Kharazan (which is designed for 10 players) is being designed around a force of 25. Blizzard has completely done away with 40-man raiding; Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxrammas will still exist, of course. There just isn't going to be any new 40-man content. How's that for earth-shattering?"
I prefer the term "sanity."
How's that for earth-shattering?
/. , and there still isn't a comment crying about these forthcoming changes, I guess not too earthshattering.
Since this is
There won't be any at launch time, but that does not preclude Blizzard from adding 40 person raid content later. Remember, WoW had only a single 40 person raid when it was released: Molten Core. Over the past two years, we have seen the addition of three more 40 person raid instances, and two 20 person raids. It would not suprise me at all of Blizzard caves into the raiding minority and releases several 40 person raids in a row, each following the same pattern as before: give out the best items and best store lines to raids with 40 people.
Space for rent, inquire within
I think that this will not affect things too drastically, although it will take some getting used to. Maybe this will make people spend a little more time in that mystical "real world." Oh wait, no it won't.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
That means 15 people in my guild are now expected to go out and get jobs and girlfriends instead of raiding?!? INSANITY!!
WoW is a horrible game.
. php
The vast majority of endgame play revolves around endless rep farming, honor farming in BGs, and doing yet another instance run.
So many PVPers played WOW, only to find out how bad the PVP system really is. Risk free pvp. Nothing remotely comparable to UO during the tank mage era. Instead, overgeared dimwits burning cooldowns. != skill. This led to a huge PVPer exodus from WoW.
Soon, there will be a huge exodus of the sheep out of WoW, I'm not sure to which game yet though.
Promising candidates include:
http://www.darkfallonline.com/
http://www.vanguardsoh.com/
http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/home/index
So you still have to treat WoW as a second job to play in the end-game? Great. Hopefully Blizzard will introduce some good non-set items in 5 or 10-man instances. I don't have the time to invest in raiding for 10+ hours a week, nor do I even have that desire. I do, however, have a few real-life friends that I'd love to be able to play with through the end-game. I realize Blizzard can get away with the crappy end-game WoW currently has, but it would be great if it were possible for players like me and thousands of others to still be viable without having a second job.
I heard that CmdrTaco had to change his name.
I've read the story on Slashdot and I've RTFA and I still don't get why it's such a big deal that "raiding will be different"?
The owls are not what they seem
Why this is on Slashdot? I'm sure this is on a ton of WoW-centric messageboards, and rightly so, but this is a forum on science and technology, not about one particular game that just so happens that the site owners play.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
When I played WoW, I liked the idea of large raids. I would've liked to see larger than 40 man raids IF the server and clients could handle it. I was in a guild that frequently had to turn away players from 40-man raids.
I think it is conducive to the idea of a MASSIVELY Multiplayer Online RPG to have large scale raids. It gives an epic feel.
is anyone actually suprised by this? The idea behind the new levels was to make the 10 levels take as to get as the 60 before it.. the levels themseleves are going to create huge gaps in strength every time.. mc and the likes are going to be the equivalent of BRS before long
For all you three reading this wondering what this is all about: An instance in WoW is a dungeon cut off from the rest of the WoW-world, sort of like a mums basement for the ubergeek. You and your friends enter an instance, and you can be completely alone in there, killing NPC-monsters (and get nice equipment) and not having to deal with those outside the instance.
The most difficult instances require up to 40 players to complete. Molten Core is a Dungeons & Dragons-like dungeon full of fire-monsters. Blackwing Lair (more difficult than Molten Core) is a place full of dragons. Naxxrammas is full of undead, spiders etc, and is probably the hardest instance atm. Chances are that previous friend of yours you haven't seen for the past 16 months run around in Naxxrammas, killing bosses such "The Four Horsement".
Of course, requireing 40 mans to complete, these instances are usually reserved for the "hardcore". Since WoW's success is because it was casual friendly, it doesn't surprise me Blizzard concentrate on 25 man stuff, that is probably easier for the casual to join in at.
The real problem that MMO's face, like Warcraft and in my case in Guildwars is the dumbass probability.
IE the more people you have in a group the greater the chance that one of them is going to be a dumbass.
Which requires that you somehow vet all the players, otherwise you have to go through a very long process to get decent players.
Allot of complaints people have about MMO's is that sometimes its nice to log in, blast about then log off, not wait about for an hour to get a group and then only to find out that because its a random group you have X number of dumbasses that get you killed 5 minutes or less into it. Or god forbid just at the very end of it.
I think that their needs to be a kind of rating system for players, so other players can rate them based on their experiences with them.. Sure it could be griefed... but I think overall it would be good.
Popularity does not mean satisfaction.
Primacy in the market does not mean superiority either.
It could be merely because a better alternative does not exist, or how horrible the other competing solutions are, or a game learning curve issue.
Considering how many MMOs have actually been a market success versus the recent number of failures, perhaps the average board poster should be more involved in game development or requirements solicitation?
More importantly, who gives a shit?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
News about WoW is news, and just because it doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it doesn't matter to other nerds.
So nya.
NASA doesn't matter to me, but in no way is WoW on a level of news, it's more information than news.
In Soviet Russia, Linux compiles you!
It doesn't appeal to me, therefore it shouldn't be on slashdot!
UBRS was once a 40-man instance. Then it got put down to 15. Now I believe it is 10. How exactly is WoW changing the amount of people that can enter an instance "news?"
Go remove Games from the categories you want to see.
No need to be an ass, but I guess that's par for the course with this article.
http://server1.plunder.com/994/OnyxiaWipe.swf
we know that WoW is a very important and integral part of everyday life, worth every second and every screamed WTF!
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
"it's more information than news"
One man's information is another man's news. It is news in the sense that they have released additional new information about the game. For WoW players or those interested in WoW, this is news.
See the definition:
2. New information of any kind
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Is they'll do what they feel makes their players the happiest, and thus keeps them playing the longest. My guess is that their experience with their current raid instances shows people like the 20-man concept more. If there's demand for 40-man raids though, they'll come back.
Translation : We got bitched at by the majority of players for making end-game too hardcore. We're gonna try going with a 25-man cap and see what happens seeing as the 10-man runs turned out to be a total waste of time due to sheer difficulty and poor rewards.
And for the record, yes I do subscribe and play WoW.
Less people means less room for error, and less chance of people getting away with stupid crap.
For those who are utterly tired of WoW and wish not to hear any more about it try reading this link instead. It's about the upcoming "Kali" expansion to CCP's EVE-Online. A game that actually gets better the more you play it. Who could have thought?
-Pinkoir
people constantly complaining about how this stuff "isn't news" or "doesn't belong on slashdot" just because you aren't interested in playing world of warcraft doesn't mean other people won't find this interesting. I don't care at all about, say...VOIP, but i don't start threads saying "HOW IS THIS NEWS?!?!?!" whenever a VOIP article comes up. i just don't bother reading or posting on those topics. please try to understand that while you don't care about this game, there are more than 6 million people out there who do.
...does this summary read like and endorsement?
So if MMO players like games like Eve and not WoW, why are they all playing WoW and not Eve? Perhaps you've miscalculated what most MMO players want, assuming your own preferences are universal.
People like WoW because it's easy. You don't need to think, there's no risk, nothing surprising, you can zone out, go afk, anything, and still progress.
Talk about pvp is irrelevant. I for one like pvp, but I'm in a minority, most people don't like it as it's unpredictable and you can lose even when you do everything right. People like fighting predictable mobs.
So you're at 60 and what do you do? Join a raiding guild. The trouble is, most of those guilds raid for 4-7 hours a night and require you to have a 40% raid attendance or be kicked from the guild.
That's on top of your usual requests from the guilds to get NR, Frost or Fire resists up. They need to somehow figure out a way to force guilds to trim the time down.
Let's also not forget that most guilds either run a DKP (Dragon Kill Point system) or Zero-Sum. Which adds to the madness because you're never going to get any loot unless you attend every single run.
4-7 hours a night is too much for one video game. Some of us have other things... 2 hours is cool. Blizzard would be really nice to implement some new scheme for loot, one that is a mixture of raids attended and luck.
Also, ever notice the "females" in guilds tend to get free loot even when they don't even have a microphone. I was halfway tempted to create a female character with no voice communication to get loot, then seduce all of the men in the guild with a fake picture I picked up from Google. But alas, I quit before attempting that.
WoW needs improvements in how it works. As it is, you get in a guild, and go around killing monsters to get items that let you kill more monsters. The monsters all come back to life, and so do you. How about a MMORPG where there is a significant story that you play a part in? e.g.:
You start out as a soldier/merchant/etc. for some faction (e.g. Alliance or Horde). If you do a good job, you get promoted/become more powerful and maybe get to have some choice in what you do. At the beginning, the people in high positions would have to be bots or admins, but eventually players could get those positions. As your faction, which starts out around equal to all the others, accomplishes its goals, it will become more powerful. Conversely, if it does poorly, it can be eliminated. Factions are not necessarily built in and are created dynamically. You can choose to be neutral.
You wouldn't be restricted to "he is a monster, attack or run?". If you disobey orders or steal, and you get caught, others players/bots/admins will then try to drag you to jail or kill you. You can pick a fight whenever you want to, with whomever you want to, and the consequences will differ. You can work as a spy.
If you go on some sort of mission, and it changes the situations of the different groups, it affects everyone in the game.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
me roommate and I were discussing the other night the need for more REAL pvp in WoW, like back in the good 'ol text mud days. If you guy, your corpse can get looted, and you have to get your stuff all over again, things like that...
our idea was this:
new WoW server type: hardcore pvp
if you die, then the other guy can raid you corpse. Now, honestly, letting them have all your stuff would be crazy, because it takes too freaking long to get it all, so...let them take a percentage of cash, (or not) and importantly, they can pick any one item from your iventory (epics and higher included) and take that as well, or maybe two items.
something along those lines, where it really DOES cost you to die, would appeal a different crown than the current carefree model.
The OTHER 85% of the content in WoW is for people like you --- people with jobs, lives, and no desire to spend 40 hours a week grinding the same instances time and time again in WoW.
Endgame content is for hardcore players, period. It HAS to be, because those players max out their characters the fastest and complain the loudest, that the game is boring because there is nothing for them to do. If you make it any easier or any less time-consuming, it will be too easy for the hardcore players and it won't consume the massive amounts of time they are willing to throw at the game.
Honestly -- up to about level 55, WoW was one of the more interesting MMORPGs I've played (it was certainly better than EQ, DAoC, CoH or SWG). You can actually solo all the way to 60 in WoW, and also do interesting instance encounters that should keep a casual group of players occupied for MONTHS.
If you played through to 60 in the first month and are now complaining about raid content, don't expect much sympathy from me. I spent almost a year in WoW getting my first character to 55, and I enjoyed it nearly all of that time. (Then I quit.)
Besides the client bugs, the other reason Shadowbane failed to have mass appeal is that it's a game that lets people kick each other's asses more profoundly than in games like WOW.
It's possible to lose Shadowbane, in a major way. Not so in WOW. Most gamers can't handle this, and so WOW derives much of its mass appeal by limiting the amount of grief players can inflict on each other, in order to create a "cozier" environment.
Unfortunately this also creates dumbed-down gameplay.
So if MMO players like games like Eve and not WoW, why are they all playing WoW and not Eve?
E.g. because Eve has no Mac client.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you did that, the Soulbound system would interfere. If you could not loot someone's Soulbound items, your system is meaningless: you'd get a Major Mana Potion at best. Players would put things they care about in the bank.
If you could loot someone's Soulbound items, then you could go to Gurubashi Arena to move Soulbound items between characters, so they wouldn't really be Soulbound anymore.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Know your roots...await the day Blizzard makes a new Starcraft...they have one lone hacker in a dark back room working on it, you'll see...
A new type of MMO with a different core of gameplay then the current PvE grinds and PvP un-balanced balancing act would indeed be nice if for no other reason then the novelty value.
But it requires more then just a vague rant.
The problem with a promotion system is that there can only be one person at the top of an army, yet in this army all the soldiers are paying to be in it. So how are you going to sell peeling potatoes to a person paying 14.99 a month? This is the problem with any ranking system.
But okay, let other players create the missions you take. EVE does this in a way I believe with its bounty system but can you base a game on this? Would you really pay to follow my insane orders?
And how many order givers can there be versus order takers? If you ever been part of a guild you would know that there are plenty of generals but very few soldiers. Nobody wants to be the grunt send to charge that goblin tank and give it hell while the general goes for the loot chest.
Dynamic sounds nice but it is hell in real life. Unless you reset the world every so often how do you give new players starting on the loosing side a fair chance? Would you really want to spawn as say a japanese soldier in your hometown of hiroshima, report for your first mission on august 6, 1945 in World of War 2.0?
You say it yourself, every faction starts out equall, yet this would not last long in a dynamic world. Unless offcourse every player is a faction but then this is closer to one of those empire building games. They exist and have to deal with the problem of how to protect newbie players from the longer super powerfull players.
A lot of this has already been done in FPS games. Why do you think these maps reset after side X controls Y points or has made X kills? To maintain balance. Good now you got all the bases, start all over again.
In MMO land this is even harder. Already the simplest problem is how to deal with population inbalances. SWG, EQ1/2 and WoW all have larger "good" populations then "evil".
Just write your idea down on paper and then try to make it work in simple game logic.
You will quickly see why all the MMO games are so much alike. WoW and EQ2 could be twins, just one became popular and the other didn't.
It is not because nobody wants to do something different but because nobody yet has found a good way of doing it.
(Oh and please do not mention EVE. I played the free trial and fell asleep during the tutorial. God that game is boring)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That is called Forumle 1 racing and it is getting boring as hell with the organisation trying everything possible to level the playing field again before they loose their audience.
A slashdot example would be say MS vs oh say ah Novell. Because MS is the biggest, it gets the most money so it can spend the most to help it be the biggest. Novell on the other hand can't spend enough, therefore doesn't get as much and therefore can't spend anymore.
In the real world that is just life but this is a game and both players pay an equal fee.
Do you want to pay to be the looser? To get your one rare piece looted by a decked out player?
Perhaps you do, but blizzard caters to the crowd and I think most people do not want this model. Enough for one server? Perhaps but is it worth the extra development and support?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Blizzard always said that wow is a casual friendly game. I have 130+ days played on my warlock (main) and rogue (alt), and I can without shadow of a doubt say that this game is hardcore gamer only. There are 2 things you can do in the game:
1. level character(s) to 60
2. raid at lvl 60
Leveling is to be honest boring an repetitive. 98% the quests can be summed up in this scheme:
a. Kill X number of mobs Y on location Z.
b. Kill mobs Y until they drop N number of items I.
c. Take item J and take it to place P.
And once you leveled your char to 60, leveling another one will lead you doing the same quests all over again. True, if you reroll on another faction (horde/alliance), you get different quests, but only superficialy, not fundamentaly.
Then when you hit lvl 60 there is only one way to progress: getting better gear.
Better gear can be obtained through raiding 5, 10, 20, 40 man instances. You get best gear in 40 man instances. Comparing gear from 5 man instances, and 40 man instances is like comparing tiger to a cat. Considering equal skill, player with 40 man "raid eq set" will eat another player geared in 5-20 man instances.
Well, there is another way to get good gear and that is by doing pvp. To get comparable gear from pvp to 40 man (purple=epic) gear, you will have to get a pvp team and farm pvp battlegrounds whole days. Problem is you are competing against whole server, and to get first part of the epic/purple set you need at least 2 months of weekly full-time pvp-ing. And that is far from easy and casual.
Well, one would ask: "Why don't you farm 40 man instances then?". This is easier to say than do. Consider:
1. You have to be in end game instance farming guild
2. Be active (4-8 at least hours/day)
3. Have good gear
4. Raid every day, only with toilette breaks, from i.e. 6:45PM, to 1:00AM
5. Compete with other players from your guild that have the same class for points which you get from attendance, because points get you the loot/gear you want.
6. Farm money/materials(herbs, ore etc), so you can raid in the evenings.
And belive me this isn't casual, nor pleasant.
To be honest, in the game I always liked pvp most. But the problem was: Battlegrounds imbalance. Problem is simple:
1. Premade groups>>pickup groups (game is over in 10 minutes or less, if you are in a pickup group, you get nothing, premade gets all: honor, reputation etc. and 3x more faster than you)
2. Premade vs premade (they exit battlegrounds if they meet each other because fights are "too long" and premades need pickups so they can utterly destroy them)
3. Pug vs pug: I was the unlucky one which rolled alliance warlock. On our server horde pug beats alliance pug 9/10 of times.
4. It is not easy to have a good premade group.
One thing to note is this: few patches ago (2 or so), when you were in a pug and faced a premade group (who will eat you in 10 min and you will get next to nothing), you could "go afk", or in other words exit battleground and rejoin some other battle. This was bad for premade farmers so they complained and blizz introduced Deserter debuff. So if you exit battleground you get that debuff and you can't rejoin another one for 15 min. So when faced against a premade as a pug, the most dominant tactic was to do nothing and be killed as many times possible in 5 min. You get nothing, but at least you didn't get debuff. Premades were very happy because they could farm pugs more easily that way. And premades got smarter: when the battleground was open for their group, they would send one player which would scout if another group is premade too. If it is, nobody would join and that scout would exit, and the group would just rejoin another battle. That way, premades didn't fight each other, and the farmed non-deserting pugs. And this is very very unfriendls and uncasual. Blizzard as to this day did *nothing* to help casual pvper against premade groups. More so, they did exactly the opposite.
So I joined good p
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Yeah, tried it. went back for a month, I always expected Spyro the Dragon to come sauntering around a corner at any moment.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
...space invaders (also a video game) will be DRAMATICALLY altered to feature only 10 aliens invading the base, but if they get to your base, the take 2 LIFES! OMG!?!?!
now THATS EARTH-SHATTERING!
and i obviously have a love-hate-relationship with slashdot.
And we all know the massive hordes of MMO players all play on Mac. ;-}
Whoa there dude! Check your keyboard, somebody might have slipped you a Dvorak.
I agree wholly with the folks that casual gamers are turned off by the MMORGS. While I never into WoW, I had my fill with DAOC, which I felt was a actually a better system. Drops had finite lifespans, so you limited the farming aspect of the game. PvP was initially weak and limited, but got better over time. The server lag on the raids was horrible, IMHO, and my involvement was limited to walking into the raid and reading "You have died". But driving force that went against the casual player is that once you are beyond level 10, the progression slows to a crawl. You'd spend 3 hours getting one bubble of experience, and then you'd slip up and lose half in a second. As the game matured, they allowed anyone with a level 50 (the max) character create a level 25 from scratch. Once that happened, the number of low level characters simply evaporated, and often times you'd wander for hours in lower level spots without seeing anybody.
There's a fantastic game that will do exactly what you want to do, however. It's called Baulder's Gate.
Don't be fooled into thinking that 25 man raids means that your chance to drop top-end gear will be improved. If you read the rest of today's announcement, the intention is to shift top-end rewards from raiding to PvP, honor and reputation grinding.
IN other words, grinding will still be the way you get the best gear, it just won't be raid grinding.
hopefully Blizz begins concentrating development on actually making the war between teh Horde and the Alliance a war. More outdoor world PvP with geo-political and economic consequences should be incorporated into the game so that players can actually begin generating their own content and conflicts rather than running on one of three or four kinds of treadmills. Todays announcement about including a capturable city was a good start, but I wonder if this approach can be retro-fitted onto the existing zones and cities? Could you imagine how amazing it would be to see full-scale Horde attacks on Stormwind, or to log-in one day to find that the Alliance have blockaded Onyxias lair? I reckon we'd actually have a game that was perpetually amusing on our hands.
Homepage
Obiter Ludens Game Blog
40 was always too few - bumping out people.
WoW should make some 80 and 100 party massive battle adventures, think of lord of the rings, the fog of battle etc -
it can be done, and exciting if it is done right!
Even prenerfs with normal blue-green gear around that lvl you could clear with 10-15 people. Even MC (which is by far the most ridiculously easy 40 man raid instance) you'd need at least 30-35 people in blue-green gear to start out. New guilds killing ragnaros with less then 38-40 people in blue-epic would take quite some skill.
You could also take 40 people to BRD or Scarlet Monastary pre-caps. Does that make then 40 man instances too?
The difference is, 40 man new instances actually require 40 people to finish. I'd like to see you take 25 people to naxx or aq today and see how far they get.
Hmmm... Pie...
I was looking for a Mac MMORPG and just started playing Shadowbane. Doesn't hurt that it's entirely free!
If raiding 3-5 hours a day for a few days a week was sufficient to be a decent team player, I'd be all up for it. After my last guild broke up (after attendance waned and our server broke 3x per day or lagged us to hell while raiding) I was reluctant to join another raiding guild because it made you fucking tired. I wasn't a big fan of farming bosses we've killed ages ago but I loved going into new instances and figuring out how to beat the next boss even if it took many deaths.
What I got tired of was collecting god damn new resist equipment for every new dungeon with still limited bagspace along with new potions. I already need two sets of gear just to be productive as a damaging warrior and a tank. So just for MC i used three sets of gear near the end, then i had to get nature gear, then some shadow, and now frost. This after blizzard said they'd stop going the resist route over a year ago. Which of course turned out to be false (yeah lets see you do all of aq with no nature resist gear).
Ridiculous amounts of required farming for mats, + ridiculous amount of equipment sets required, + ridiculous server uptime and performance (monstrous amounts of lag during prime raid time) just made me want to quit.
Hmmm... Pie...
There isn't much out there that avoids WoW's problems without having even more glaring issues of its own. I'm finding the Saga of Ryzom to be pretty good, though.
Hopefully all us clever /. readers will be able to come up with ways to prevent this game from destroying the Earth, killing all forms of life and generally ruining everybodies day.
It kinda puts Global Warming and the War on Terror into perspective doesn't it? They arn't going to destroy the planet! I'm personally sitting here shitting myself, comtemplating the implications of having the Earth shattered.
Oh, well.
But what does Leroy Jenkins think, that's the question!
Chicks Have All The Fun
news is information information is news you fail it
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The problem of A and B fighting together is very real. It was a big problem in SWG where towns/guilds could have military bases as part of PvP. These bases were only vulnerable at certain times (wich could be found out) so that the defender didn't have to maintain a 24/7 defence but even maintaining a defence for those times was hard.
Not to mention boring.
Even ad-hoc defence missions can be a pain. They always start JUST when you have arrived almost at your destination on a long journey and now you have to go all the way back again the help out. A war like game would be very hard to do. They are being tried in the guise of persistent WW2 games focusing mostly on aircraft. There the missions are generated based on each sides achievements and you can have a leader form an attack group to take on a mission.
Never heard of them? Well that is because they are not exactly WoW like in their success. Some are still running and so there is an audience and enough money to pay the bills but the games just lack common market appeal.
The main reason is that they are just to hard to get into. For one thing they are about real skill and don't really give a fuck about balance. Yes the stuka divebomber class is breakfast for the spitfire class. No we are not going to nerf the spitfire.
Could you imagine the WoW/EQ crowd playing this? The people who whine that class X does 1 DPS more and this is ruining the game?
Freedom too is a problem. SWG tried that. It really gave you the freedom to form your own class, none of this grinding to level XX and then playing the end-game till hell freezes over (or SOE fixes outstanding bugs, wichever comes first). So what did people do? Grind uber templates and then play the end game until hell frooze over (NGE).
But it sounds like you should give EVE a try, while I tried the free trial (14 days, no credit card asked for) and was utterly bored it does have a lot of what you suggest. That game is far more under the control of players. Find a guild, join up and you will find plenty of demand for you to do certain missions. Provide security, ferry goods, go mining etc etc.
Just be prepared to sit through the most boring tutorial ever put into a game.
But for now WoW is the game to rule the market. It ain't perfect but for all its simplicity and copy-cat gameplay it does simply work in a nice stylish way. If you want something different you are going to have to really work at it to come up with a system that will appeal as much and also be accesible enough to be commercially viable.
Why take risks when copying what everyone else has done works so well? Just look at WoW, they cloned Everquest, made it more simple, and proceeded to laugh all the way to the bank.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Don't be fooled into thinking that 25 man raids means that your chance to drop top-end gear will be improved. If you read the rest of today's announcement, the intention is to shift top-end rewards from raiding to PvP, honor and reputation grinding.
IN other words, grinding will still be the way you get the best gear, it just won't be raid grinding.
hopefully Blizz begins concentrating development on actually making the war between teh Horde and the Alliance a war. More outdoor world PvP with geo-political and economic consequences should be incorporated into the game so that players can actually begin generating their own content and conflicts rather than running on one of three or four kinds of treadmills. Todays announcement about including a capturable city was a good start, but I wonder if this approach can be retro-fitted onto the existing zones and cities? Could you imagine how amazing it would be to see full-scale Horde attacks on Stormwind, or to log-in one day to find that the Alliance have blockaded Onyxias lair? I reckon we'd actually have a game that was perpetually amusing on our hands.
If you cannot get into a top end 40 man raiding guild, the new top end 25 man raid instance won't be any improvement either. The casual's odd of getting into a guild that will be doing the new instance actually got dramatically reduced as the top end guild wil now have to recruit even more carefully. If you don't have the gear and the experience of doing raid, you still won't be getting the top end gears.
Yea, because games arent supposed to be about fun. They're about being packed into huge groups, lagging about, and sucking the guild leader's Ego for special favors and DPs.
Secondly, the DPK system is a bunch of crock. Leave it in EQ.
You don't NEED epic gear. heh heh, ok even I'm laughing after I wrote that.
Eve takes even more time investment than WoW, I suspect that contributes to its lack of popularity. It's also immensely more complicated.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I am at a point where all I do is raid. Login, go raid 3-4 hours, log off and go play something I enjoy (Like cov4: Warlords). I despise this game with every fiber of my being, and just like anyone who remembers a better MMORPG (Like UO circa 2000) I hope for a better game to come along. A game with skill based PvP and a very dynamic social scene where player actions have concequences. Do I expect this game to ever come out? Let's just say I also hope for world peace....
Or maybe...
GET A LIFE?
I wouldn't mind rep grinds for good gear - a person can spend an hour or less at a time farming, rather than having to spend 4-5 hours at a shot (or more) raiding.
I'm lucky - in my guild, we don't have any "forced attendance" or bullshit like that, and it's cool that I make a raid maybe every other weekend - but I like this idea too. There should be multiple paths for players to take, ones that accomodate everyone's play-style.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Well said. I too have taken over a year to take my main to where he is now (55). I never grouped much, as I am not as social a person as most gamers, and being a hunter class I didn't have to. I missed out on some good gear and good storylines though. When I hit 52, I started a guild designed to help newbies and lowbie alts get started in the game and have a place to not feel so overwhelmed. Alliance gamers on my server tend to be total assholes and I wanted to do something about that. Now I rarely play my main other than for guild management. I've recently started a new hunter, determined to do with him what I missed out on with my main. So far it's been very rewarding; I deliberately chose Night Elf this time around instead of Dwarf so I'd have some new story content, and I've been more socially active too.
My girlfriend, who actually was the one who got me into the game, has two 60's and several PvP bots. She is a hardcore endgamer with her 60s, and to her it's not work. I look at endgame as a second job, and with a full-time job and a part time consulting gig here in the real world, I don't have time for it. To me, the game is all about the 1-60 and not about 60+. With the expansion, I may take my main to 60, 65 or even 70, but if MC, BWL, AQ and Naxx are required for that progression, I'll probably retire him and concentrate fully on my new hunter.
Sure, you could take the socially-acceptible, healthy, and self-enriching route and live a well-rounded life helping yourself and others. Or, you could trade the fruits of 3 hours of labor for a month of fun! You do the math ^_^
DATABASE WOW WOW
..and yet you still play for 3-4 hours a shot.
Seems to me like Blizzard is still doing everything right.
As a former EQer (and a former WoWer... for 2 months, hit 60 and quit...) I honestly don't want any WoWers playing Vanguard when it comes out. I'm glad a game like WoW came out to keep them busy, so that the rest of the good games (EQ/EQ2/Vanguard, hopefully) have a few less noobs...
. I have 130+ days played on my warlock (main) and rogue (alt)
...
Noob. Years (multiple) played on Everquest characters, and I still find stuff to do
WoW is for the simple minds. You hit 60 and either PVP or farm/raid for gear. That's it. You take it as far as RL lets you. Its a very simple game. Contrast that to a game where you can lose gear (EVE) or a game where you can lose XP (EQ) or funnel XP into abilities (EQ) on top of farming factions/gear/high-end quests/a ton of raid content, and WoW just looks like a toy. Sorry. Not trying to rant, but everytime someone gets up on there high horse and says how "hardcore" WoW is I just have to laugh inside. And yea I played it. Hit 60 in 2 months and sold my char. Just wasn't fun.
You might actually want to reread the article. It says that the best PvP gear will be *comparable* to the best PvE gear. Not *be* the best gear.
The PvP system coming out will be an effort to mirror PvP to match the PvE environment, not the other way around. The best PvP gear will come from Arena, which pits teams against teams. The difference from normal BG's is these teams are persistent, like guilds. And like a raiding guild, rewards come to those teams that work well together and can accomplish goals.
Raiding will still be the better avenue for getting top end gear, it just won't be the *only* avenue.
Hardcore players stole our game. WoW started as a nice, easy to play, fun and casual game. It had a wonderful world and a lot of fun quests, and a unique style.
Then the hardcore players started complaining. "We reached 60, and there's nothing left to do", they said. They were right. Blizzard game them more. But soon the hardcore players grew tired of the new content, and Blizzard decided to give them even more. And more.
18 months later, WoW is still the same game for 60 players. Yes, there are battlegrounds, and a lot of nice new features, but for the casual player, WoW has never really changed.
See, the problem is that level 60 players represent about 5-10% of the total userbase. Hardcore players who enjoy the high-level content are a fraction of those players. Why should 2% of a userbase get all of the new content?
What do you do when you get to 60 in WoW if you're not a hardcore player? You quit. PvP is no fun when you are playing against opponents who are so much better equipped.
Casual players don't spam the forums with compliants. We don't play the game for hours a day, so we aren't going to invest time in complaining. But we do exist. We are most of the community. But Blizzard has ignored us.
Is WoW a good game for new players? Yes. But there isn't any major new content for casual players than there was when the game was released. WoW, like many games, has low replay value for casual players. And, like all games of its type, it eventually gets old.
I've never played WoW , never will. Throughout the article and throughout this forum there is no mention of what a "raid" even is. Nor why this is even significant.
... does not fit .. so , um, what is this even about ?
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
Shadowbane and Eve both suck. Eve is one of the most stupid games around. Eve to me is a game that fails to deliver. You wait months to train up skills for what. The huge time gap between acquiring new skills after newbie content is what drove me to cancel my Eve account. Eve loves to brag about its automatic skill training system (works on a timer) and how the game has no grind, which is untrue. Cost of skill books (required to train a skill) goes up astrometrically as you progress which forces you to grind for money in game on hours to no end. It could take you about 40-50 hours of grinding just to buy a mid level skill book. The best ones can take hundreds of hours.
After you grind for money to buy skill books you have to grind to buy equipments which can be destroyed in an instant by some 13 year old kids who apparently has more time on their hands to camp for money than you do. Grinding itself is doing the most stupid things you can think of in an online game. That to me is work not fun. PVP you say it is broken in the core. There is no hard player cap in number of people you can bring to fight but the game is lagged and broken beyond recognition by even the mildest size battles. The core flux of PVP is pretty stupid tbh. There isnt much variety in what you can do besides ganging up on each other DAoC style. I really dont see a point to play Eve other than having a space sim GUI to look at.
Talk about gold farmers, Eve has a bunch of macro running bots running on free accounts purchased with in game money. Parent company makes absolutely no effort to ban macro gold farmers unlike Blizzard. Another reason I quit the game.
Thanks to Eve, I really learned to appreciate WoW's 40 man raids after I tried Eve.
From Day 1 players could see how unbalanced and unfun the PvP was in WoW. However, I patiently waited until Blizzard released the Battlegrounds before deciding if WoW was worth my time or not. How severly dissapointed I was.
I left for Guild Wars. Not exactly an MMO, but it is currently the finest example of what an RPG based PvP system should be like. Winning is not based on ubergear and hours spent raiding, but on player skill, build, strategy and teamwork. It is very well balanced, and is extremely deep while being easy to jump into. Guild Wars also has a proper ladder where skilled teams are the ones at the top, not the ones that have grinded honor the longest.
PvPers aren't going to go to Vanguard. Vanguard has promised that they will be about huge raids. In fact, they keep saying that is the whole point of their game. I haven't seen Darkfall, but my bet is that PvP junkies will either check out WoW again after the expansion, with its promised changes to PvP, or will go to WarHammer until it is decided that WarHammer is a bust too.
There is just too much exploit going on in Planet Side, Eve, Shadowbane, et al. to have a true geniune PVP game. Its a major turn off espeically when you have your game hours on stake as opposed to your usual FPS where you can just join a different room if you dont want to play with cheaters.
Am I the only self professed "majority opinion" that fail to see the point in PVP under the MMOG genre? The fact that data is persistent is nice and all but most MMOG tries to focus PVP on your gears and character skills trained rather than true playing skill. In a lot of those it is too much of a numbers game. Whoever can amass the most number of high end toons wins. There is no limit on the number of people you can bring to a fight besides the obvious lag monster which ironically serves as a soft limit. There is also too much exploiting going on trying to take advantage of lag and ping time in most of these games as rampant in a lot of FPS. Planet Side is a good example of exploiters taking advantage of and breaking a good conceptual MMOFPS.
Eve is an example of MMORPG games being heavily exploited thru player induced lag in PVP. For example, in Eve people will copy bookmarks or coordinate log ins to lag out the other warring parties so they can get pretty much free kills. PVP isnt also much about playing skill but the number of people you can bring and the type of uber faction gear they can afford to lose.
There just isnt enough pie to go around in MMORPGs that PVP. Guild Wars is largely successful because they broke away from that genre and focus on tactical group play where your playing skill (dont confuse with character skills trained) actually does matter. Most others fail and fall into the classic WoW top gear and numbers wins it genre.
Fair enough, but don't forget that the Arena will be on a three-month timer. To me that means "must play Arena solidly for three months to achieve good gear from it." Thats pretty intense, and not much different from grinding reputation for the top stuff in the battlegrounds as the system currently works.
Homepage
Obiter Ludens Game Blog
Fair enough, but don't forget that the Arena will be on a three-month timer. To me that means "must play Arena solidly for three months to achieve good gear from it." Thats pretty intense, and not much different from grinding reputation for the top stuff in the battlegrounds as the system currently works. I agree. There just isnt a grindless MMOG. Truth is most MMOGers love to grind thats why they play this genre. True PVPers enjoy games like FPS where playing skill is all that matters, not gear character level/skill trained. Guild Wars is a game that most closely resemble grindless but it totally took itself out of the MMOG genre.
But it isn't about making the game more casual friendly, fundamentally speaking I don't think they can make WoW both what a casual gamer wants and what a hardcore gamer wants (beyond what they already have). But reducing the size of the instances will help relieve gamers headaches a bit, they are still going to have to make something with ridiculous requirements and the best rewards to sate the hardcore gamer, and that is going to leave the casuals in the cold or (the blues rather than the purples). Personally I always had the most fun in the 5 man instances vs the 40s (they were ok for a while). I would like to see them introduce some epic natured 5 or 10 man dungeons... Although since I retired from the game I don't think it would sway me anyway, I have a backlog of games to play as it is.
Why would blizzard waste their $$ and man power no things none of their customers get to experience when released. Its like buying a game and having to wait for 40 people to join the game before you can play it??. 25 is to increase the number of customer who can get into that content. Even if they fail at it at least they have a greater chance of 25 other players who are willing to join. For the people who complain they are usually the ones that like the fact that they have access to content others wish they could play its nothing more than e-peen shrinkage.
"I am at a point where all I do is raid. Login, go raid 3-4 hours, log off and go play something I enjoy (Like cov4: Warlords). I despise this game with every fiber of my being..."
What the hell is wrong with you?
Maybe I missed, it, but I can't read it at work as almost all gaming sites are blocked, but are current weapons going to have gem slots?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Last I checked (now), slashdot was news for nerds. WoW news does appeal to a large number of nerds.
I don't know if the parent above should be modded as funny. Blizzard is one of the very few companies that does put out Mac clients for their current games.
I know several people who use Macs that play WoW. While I don't know the total number of Mac users playing WoW, I believe that Blizzard thought the mac gaming community was significant enough to make a Mac client.