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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?"
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.
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Which has proved to me that great gameplay, clever writing and an absolutely huge community can make up for graphics in a MMORPG.
Most MMO players want PVP. Although more Americans want PVE type of servers, americans as a percentage of total MMO players cannot shift the balance towards PVE thanks to our asian MMO brethren that prefer PVP. (There is a study on this, but I don't have a URL for it)
Casual gamers are not competitive in WoW. They may hit 60. They will never have the big raid content, or obtain highend PVP rewards. If they were obtaining those things, they wouldn't be casual gamers because of the massive time contributions required for those rewards.
Shadowbane failed because of it's poor engine and sb.exe (notorious client error). Wolfpack made a huge mistake trying to roll their own...... Mythic's DAOC had a far superior engine at that same time, yet SB stole a large amount of market share from DAOC until the client flaws killed it.
UO had a great PVP system during the tank mage era. This was for PVPers, against other PVPers, and so people without adequate skills became cannon fodder.
Your opinion about North American MMOs is accurate, but as a whole for the overall MMO market, PVP is preferred.
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.
Such a system will be abused. Suppose a really good player (player #1) makes a constructive remark to a less good player (player #2) on improving his skills. Player #2 is agitated, and puts a bad review on him with "steals items" as an explanation. Player #1 notices this and puts up a bad review with "needs to learn to play". You can see where I'm going here, right? Never doubt the immaturity of the audience of a game (or for that fact, people in real life). You can't fathom how upset people can get over virtual "property", until you've had some kid whine for an hour at you for having something he doesn't. Hell, I've even seen someone threaten to kill (yes, in real life) another person over virtual "property". Some people take videogames way too seriously, and a system like this would do more damage for good players than for bad ones.
A guild, corporation or clan easily weeds out bad players. In WoW, high ranking guild members tend to notice when people incessantly nag about items (even though there is a DKP system, or other thing, blah blah), don't pay attention in raids, etc... Most of the time, you'll find out what kind of player you're dealing with before they actually go on a raid.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
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.
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....
Now, I am one of the first people to complain about the continual focus on 40 man raid content, and the sometimes insane imbalance its gear creates in PvP, but to complain that all there is to do at 60 is raid is complete nonsense.
I have a level 60 Alliance warlock. I am not a casual. I am in a small guild with about 10 to 15 members (it fluctuates a bit because raiding guilds sometimes like to poach people) most of which I know in real life. We have about 10 level 60s. We can't do 40-man content simply because we don't want to whore ourselves out to a raiding guild, so we do other things. We aren't held together by the urge to get more and more crazy loot from end-game instances (anyone who claims that raiding guilds are held together by anything other than the desire for end-game loot is fooling themselves), we are friends.
I started a trend in the guild for doing PvP. Contrary to what you claim, it is quite possible to get very good gear from PvP in a pickup group. Not the epic set of course, but you can get the rank 10 rare quality set which is very good, and allows you to complete with raiders in tier X, even if it doesn't completely level the playing field (for example, their set bonuses are insane, particularly the bonuses to pet resistances on the warlock sets). I got this set playing exclusively in pickup groups for about 10 weeks, even though we spent a lot of time being dominated by the resident Horde premade. While you are doing battlegrounds you also get rep for the relevant factions which also gives you access to pretty nice gear, particularly if you are obsessed with your gear being epic(i). Amusingly, while the Horde premade on our server win about 80% of all AB/WSG games (vs. pickup groups it is fairly even, but probably stacked in our favour) we slaughter the Horde every single time in Alterac Valley, simply because we are all used to working in a pickup group and they can't cope without their highly organised, legendary-equipped premade. All that needs to be fixed in PvP is to remove "Join as Group" from the other two battlegrounds. With cross-realm battlegrounds in 1.12, hopefully we'll at least get the opportunity to be slaughtered by *different* Horde premades!
Now that I have most of the gear I wanted to get, I can (and do) *shock* PvP for fun. Do I get anything material out of winning Alterac Valley? I get no rep, I'm not grinding honour any more. I do get three honour tokens which makes it possible to hand in the three lots of three rather than the battleground specific quest while I try and get the rest of my rep for the other two, but that's not why I do it. I do it because it's fun, and I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Try playing the game for *fun* rather than taking it so seriously.
While I feel we've been ignored somewhat since release, I look forward to the new 10-man content in Burning Crusade, and I look forward to the changes to the honour system. It's all good. It's as if Blizzard are listening to the small guilds and what we want rather than the mindless, single-button-pushing 40-man raiders. It's no shock that 40-man instances aren't casual friendly - they aren't *anyone* friendly, they are just a miserable slog to divert the attention of people who are too obsessed with the colour purple to stop. I have been raiding once, outside the guild (a random invite to fill a place), and it was possibly the most boring thing in WoW except possibly for weapons levelling. I don't miss it.
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(i) I wish people would realise that being epic does not make it automatically better.
Actually, your view turns out to be too pessimistic, the rating system for WoW called Playrate works very well with almost no abuse http://www.playrate.net/. As long as there are many more good sports than bad sports the rating system will work, since the unfair and irrational ratings average out. Just look at eBay, the rating system there works fine too, for the same reason.
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Early Ultima Online had this. Magic items were excruciatingly rare AND all items eventually suffered loss of durabilty and were destroyed. The result was that most people didn't become too attached to items and ran around with average loot. If you died and were looted, you ressed, ran back to your bank and re-equipped yourself with more of your own player crafted loot. I enjoyed that, since it placed more emphasis on having good PvP skills rather than on having "epix". Anyways, the point is, hardcore PvP'ers would not bother to collect "epix" and would instead just be happy with blue/greens or hell, even greys, for daily PvP.
I purchased WoW last month because I wanted to see what all of the excitement is about. A few friends of mine are really into it and I thought that it would be fun to play with them. I bought a three month subscription with the intention of re-evaluating my desire to play at the end of that period.
From what I've learned so far, I don't plan on continuing after the three month point. I'm a casual gamer at this point in my life. Between work, my girlfriend and martial arts my time is spoken for. I like the questing aspect of WoW that I'm involved in right now. I can logon, quest for an hour or two and then go do something else. The whole concept of raiding is a huge turn-off. I talk to my friends about it and it isn't uncommon for them to spend 3+ hours in a single instance. That's ridiculous.
The thing that really turned me off to the whole game is when my buddy explained DKP to me. The concept of "earning points" by doing the same thing over and over and over again so that you can have the "privledge" of getting a certain piece of gear just sucks. I understand the system, and I understand the benefits. If you're willing to WHORE yourself to a group and by doing so help others succeed, then eventually you'll get some reward from it as well. I just don't have the time and patience to grind through the same thing again and again and again and again and again and agai..........
Even from an outside perspective, elementary arithmetics says 25 instead of 40 is 62.5%. So, yes, it's a lot less.
From the perspective of getting that 40 player group together, it was just nuts for all but the largest guilds. Unless you were in one of the guilds with 300 level 60's, you could look forward to up to 3 hours just getting the last 2-3 people. By the time you got the last people who said they'd come, but were late, the first ones would (understandably) get bored or get their mom screaming at them to go to bed already, and start leaving.
Think of getting 40 people at the office to come with you at a movie. In fact, imagine that you can't even see the movie without exactly 40 people. You could probably easily get 5 people (a "group") to come with you, but getting 40 to do anything meaningful together starts involving meetings just to plan it, coaxing, and then waiting for the guy who comes 2 hours too late because something else got in the way. (And again, you can't go without him.) And then someone calls in sick that day and you get to harrass people on the street to join your movie raid. That's a pretty literal RL analogy of how that went on WoW.
It's boring, it's work, and it has nothing to do with playing the game.
From a human interactions perspective, 40 player raids are just nuts. The chances that someone will have to go afk, or have their mom send them to sleep in the middle of it, or do something stupid (ranging from aggroing the wrong NPC, to mis-click "need" instead of "greed" on a loot roll, to god knows what else), rise to insane values. It's just a source of frictions and people getting pissed off at each other.
It doesn't help that a lot of the others are already irritated by it all, and a lot less willing to forgive and forget. When you're already at the point of having waited for 3 hours for a group, past your bed time, postponing a badly needed snack just so you don't make 39 people wait for you, and only there in the first place because your guild-mates harrassed you into doing the same instance again the 100'th time... you won't be in a great mood to start with. You'll get a lot more irritated when they do stupid things and thus prolong your agony. Heck, chances are even the invariable guy playing a flirty female elf, and doing a non-stop impression of what a male mouth-breather geek thinks female flirting means (usually just one step short of "mmm, please fuck me now, big guy"), will seem a hell of a lot less funny under the circumstances.
From a gameplay and tactics perspective, it's even more nuts. Those people aren't trained soldiers, so even the most elementary group tactics _will_ go wrong when you depend on 40 casual players doing the right thing at the right time. Plus, 40 players on one enemy means a lot of the time you don't even really see what's happening there. The only way anything like that was manageable even on Team Speak was that it had been dumbed down to not needing any tactics or thinking. Everyone just spams the same small number of spells/attacks/whatever, and the keywords there are: small number. Very small number. As a priest for example you'll spam one icon again and again most of the time.
From a rewards/achievements perspective it gets even worse, as out of 40 people, maybe 10 actually need whatever loot that boss dropped. _If_ he even dropped what you were after. If it wasn't enough that that armour piece or whatever is dropped 1% of the time, divide it by 10 people who want it, and now you have a 0.1% chance. So even if you go by a "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme, chances are you _won't_ get your reward for that raid. And at level 60 you don't get XP out of it either, so it was just a big waste of time.
But even the "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme went out of fashion sometime last year, as guilds started implementing a "contribution points" scheme. So basica
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