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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."
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
WoW is a horrible game.
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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.
Have a look at the left sidebar. There's a Games category in there.
Because maybe this is CmdrTaco's personal blog that just happens to be visited by everyone and their techie mother?
:P
Seriously, if you don't like what's posted on Slashdot, don't complain about it, because the site isn't here to serve your personal desires. It's here to serve the personal desires of the editors.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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?
The Science and Technology is only one aspect of what the site is about.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.