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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?"
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.
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That means 15 people in my guild are now expected to go out and get jobs and girlfriends instead of raiding?!? INSANITY!!
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.
WoW's requirements for nonstop grinding instances isn't fun.
MMO gamers want balanced skill-based pvp, functional economies not exploited by chinese-farmers, the freedom to create unique player-made content (like Shadowbane/EVE-Online), and to determine their own friends/enemies rather than being forced into pre-made "factions".
WoW fails in all those regards.
MMO gamers would move, provided a good improvement emerged.
What I want is for MMOs to make a lot more variety in the lowbie quests. Doing the same lame little quests in the begining just to same quests at level cap isn't fun. It kills replayablity. I'd like long term, story driven choices. Hell, I'd even support having a server where everybody started off maxxed out (rocket server, anyone?).
I'll agree with everything else but the farmer bit and WoW being a horrible game. I personally don't care about the farmers as long as they don't harass me, at which point they're just being individual pricks and should not represent the entire community. I've known enough gold farmers that mind their own business and grind, not bothering anybody. Many of the people who complain about farmers driving up prices the most are the first ones to snatch up the cheap, mass farmed goods and then resell at higher prices. If not, they're the ones ignorant of how prices would be if it was 100% player orientated. Supply and demand, plus the farmer's need to sell quickly, benefit many players, whether they admit it or not. This is especially true of commodity items like cloth, skins and even potions. Every time that the prices on those skyrocketed, it was due to "regular players", and was always brought back down by farmers that continued to sell at the lower, older price or cheaper. There are problems with quest mobs on occasion, but that happens with regular players who are farming the quest mob for the drops. The only difference between them and the regular farmer is the language barrier.
As far as WoW being a horrible game... Well, I liked it. I got bored eventually, but that's true of all games. I was heavily into CoH before that. Just because a game can still be improved on doesn't mean it 100% sucks right now.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
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.
Raiding is one of the absoulte worst inventions ever. While at first, it may look like an excellent idea, it suffers from one serious flaw. It effectivly limits every single character(class) to what they are absolutly best at. (And if they are an all-round character they can just go home)
What you end up with is heal bots, buff bots, tank bots and damage bots. Whereas in a five man group, players will need to use their secondary skills because there isn't anyone in the group that has that skill as a primary. Five man groups also can contain more interesting combinations, while a raiding group always is constructed after the same formula.
The absolute worst part about raiding is how it tears the community apart. Unless you whore (whoring is the correct term since you effectivly is selling your body and soul) yourself out to a raiding guild, you will have no access whatsoever to the high end content. A pickup group of 5 people is workable. 10 people is possible, but tough. 25-40 people is impossible.
World of Warcraft had two big selling points. Excellent level 1-60 solo/party fun. Secondly it is a Blizzard product which automatically created a big fanbase (Although Blizzard has lost most of its original developers by now). After the release they have added a lot of raiding, and simultanously destroyed PvP due to messed up items strengths. Level 80 items doesn't work when you have level 60 special abilities, where some of the abilities scale with item strength, and others don't.
It also suffers from the same flaw as other MMORPGs. Beginner areas quickly empty, and at the end you end up with all the people in high level zones (Or instances). This is however something that I have no idea how to fix.
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
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