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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
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.
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.
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.
Raiding, rep farming, and honor grinding = sums up all of WoW endgame.
Have a look at the left sidebar. There's a Games category in there.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.