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Second World of Warcraft Expansion Launched, Conquered
The much-anticipated second expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, launched on Thursday, introducing a new continent, raising the level cap to 80, and bringing a wealth of new items, spells, dungeons, and monsters to the popular MMO. Crowds gathered and lines formed outside stores around the world leading up to the release. Massively has put together a series of articles for players wishing to familiarize themselves with the expansion, and CVG has a piece discussing the basics as well. It didn't take long for the first person to reach level 80; a French player called "Nymh" reached the level cap on his Warlock only 27 hours after the expansion went live. Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch. Fortunately for them, the next three content patches are each expected to contain new, more difficult raids.
That's actually an idea I've been campaigning for. These raiding guilds like to show off how great they are, yet they're just incredibly dedicated. Your average guild can't even get people to log in for scheduled events on time.
So up the ante, make the raids insanely hard even for pro's. Make them unfair (like Naxx), require a distorted balance of classes, designed to engender social infighting. Give them some really hard problems to overcome inside and outside the game. Plant a few CSR "reps" in these guilds, have them create chaos, fan the flames of egos. Basically get them to play the game like normal people so the dev's can focus on the 99%, not the 1%.
Then gradually ease up as your main player base starts to reach the top. "Patch" content that was "harder than anticipated", etc.
To be precise, it was Darus, another Paladin, that they were power leveling. Athene and the other people in the group didn't get any XP at all during the experiment.
Athene did a full half hour video report on it on his website, including the part where his whole party were disconnected by Blizzard GMs and got their accounts suspended temporarily.
It seems to me that Blizzard were monitoring the attempt throughout, and in the end decided that the game wasn't meant to be played this way after all and decided to break up the party. Maybe they were afraid of the publicity that would come out if Athenes group claimed the record. Perhaps they thought it would look bad, that the game that they had spent years to produce was demonstrated to be beatable in less than a day.
really, how is this stuff that matters?
If the game play doesn't interest you any more, then consider an IT client-server delivery system that manages 11 million customers on a daily basis, each of whom have up to 9 entities per x servers (I don't know how many there are now, but their are 3 major groupings of them) each entity with up to a hundred objects or so each with their own attributes, with those objects involved with a number of transfers, creations and disposals per hours-long encounters, and a similar number of entities living on the server (as PvE mobs).
Think of 11 million customers and the absolutely monsterous OLTP system that allows for all that database management with a surprisingly small amount of lag overall.
If the computer system that supports all that isn't "stuff that matters" then I suspect you may find spending your time on a different forum more profitable.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The day someone throws up an article on this, I will be more than just interested, it will be a fantastic read I'm sure! That wasn't today though was it?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!