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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.
...is in Northrend.
whenever anyone else makes it to level 80, I really don't want to miss any of their important in game breakthroughs.
Stuff that matters, indeed.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
It's always comforting to be reminded that there are people out there with even less of a life than you.
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
They should make them twice as strong as they're "supposed to" be, and drop them say 5% each day. I'd make that competition last so much longer and frustrate these raidoholics, lol.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've never understood people who feel the need to rush to complete game content. After paying for a game, I like to take my time and enjoy it. I guess maybe people see it as another way of competing with each other? Or is it just obsession?
Maybe I have a slightly different perspective than most. I'm a game developer, so I guess I'm slightly more aware than most of how much work goes into every single game. It's slightly depressing sometimes, because you've put a year or more of work into a product, and you've still only produced enough content to last a long weekend.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
...and I really enjoyed BC when it launched, but not as much as I first enjoyed the launch. I thought about getting The Frozen Throne, but this kind of behavior on my server, which I'm expected to emulate in order to enjoy 80% of Blizzard's 'Content', has made me realize this generation of MMOs is not for me.
MMO developers cite limited budgets as their reason for not being able to make "better MMOs." Blizzard, however makes approx $15 a month from each of its 10 Million players. Effectively, their revenues are higher than most MMO's entire budget, every month. The truth is, MMO publishers *cough vivendi cough* have come to realize that MMOs make the most money when they emulate casinos. A pleasant, polished atmosphere with lots of slot machines where someone is "winning" every second, and there's constant reminders of that. Who'd ever want to leave?
So please, if you ever meet me, and I say that I don't think WoW is a "good game," please keep in mind that Jackpot machines are also "good games."
hate to break your heart sweetie, but that one has been down for a while.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
Athene got to 80 in 13 hours..
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
Getting your account suspended for doing something which does not involve hacking, require any 3rd party software, or cause grief for other players is frankly ridiculous.
It's even worse given that he'd been good enough to ask a GM for permission to play the game that way, and got an affirmitive.
He went into instances with friends, left group, tagged all the mobs, then let them do all the damage. since those mobs were designed to be taken down by a group, they gave lots of experience.
And he got all of it.
Anyone who doesn't call it cheating has a pretty conservative definition of the term.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
He went into instances with friends, left group, tagged all the mobs, then let them do all the damage. since those mobs were designed to be taken down by a group, they gave lots of experience. And he got all of it. Anyone who doesn't call it cheating has a pretty conservative definition of the term.
I know what he did, and what he did not do. He did not hack the game. He DID ask permission to play in that way, and was granted it.
That's why it's not cheating. Call it something else - gaming the system, powerlevelling, exploiting even. But since it's not against the rules of the game, as set out in software, and it's not against the rules of the game as set out by the GMs - remember, he asked! - it's frankly not cheating by any definition, other than possibly a stupid and jealous definition.
If you look at the speedrun subculture, people can "complete" most classic, deeply loved, games in ridiculously short amounts of time.
Does it devalue Doom to tens of millions of players, many of whom logged hundreds or thousands of hours in it, knowing that someone's managed a speedrun in an hour or two?
Besides, modern MMOs are about a huge number of things interacting:
Have they looted enough of the highest level drops that their players are now fully kitted out in the best gear available? Or did they just scrape by with enough to claim they could do it, only to get slapped down in PvP, next week, by a guild that didn't claim "completion" and is now better equipped?
Have they collected everything they need for their crafters to make the highest end items they also had opened up to them?
Have they gained the new mounts?
How about PvP specific loot? Have they gained the full sets of that stuff that were put there for the huge number of players that don't consider level 80 and a few raids to be the pinacle of the game?
And that's all before you get in to the broader culture of a game like that... mapping things out, raising interesting alts, side quests, etc.
A junior high bully gets to claim he's the most awesomest by having no one who can beat him in a fight. Yet the kids who're on dates, getting in to bands, on the sports teams, even nerdier stuff like winning science olympiads or actually understanding their classes so they'll get great grades in highschool, a great college place and be much better off in life... they're probably not all that impressed that, yes, he got to the top on a single axis. Did he really "complete" junior high as he likes to tell himself?
the sun will go nova and the earth will cease to be and all human endeavor will vanish forever. Nothing lasts. Nothing is worth doing except enjoying the small bit of time we get on this planet. If you get your joy playing WoW for 27 hours, being first to level 80, good for you.
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.
...I just gotta say they missed most of the fun of the game.
Granted, I have one character, a level 36 Warlock, that's taken me something like 3 months to get up to. But you know what? I'm probably having a bit more fun and getting more for my money than the people who have to powerlevel to 80 as fast as possible.
It makes PvP harder for me (as I can't compete with people who twink their guys out with the best gear), and I generally don't go into the instances/raids (I solo most of the time, and my guild is more social than goal-driven), but I get to actually enjoy the art, the people, the economy, and the experience.
Getting to 80 as fast as possible is like trying to ride every single ride at Cedar Point as fast and as efficiently as possible, as opposed to a group of friends who go on what they want when they want.
Which group has more "fun"?
hookers and grits.
This story is not news.
TwentyFifthNovember is a guild made up of Nihilum and SK-Gaming (aka Curse). Both guilds had members that experienced Naxxramas at level 60 (when it was originally released), and most of the bosses in Naxxramas (retuned and re-released for level 80) are largely unchanged since that time. Both of these guilds had very significant presences in the Closed Beta, where this raid content was available for anyone who could gather enough players. Many of them killed these bosses for weeks and months, before the game went live. The slight differences between these bosses at level 60 versus these bosses at level 80 is minor enough that even those who DIDN'T see the retuned content would still know how to get past it.
Raiding in World of Warcraft is more about skill than gear (although there are a few hard gear checks, such as needing 8.5k HP to survive Naj'entus area-effect nuke). These guys certainly are skillful, but there was never any doubt that they would steamroll all of this content as soon as they hit 80. The slightly bigger concern is that they managed to get 25 members to level 80 in ~65 hours of gameplay. Still, with the first 80 after 27 hours, it wasn't unexpected. People were hitting level 70 in Burning Crusade in about the same amount of time, and once the strategy for doing so was optimized, anyone (with a lot of time, and/or friends) could grind out the levels.
One thing to note is that these guys don't yet have the ultra-rare achievement awards, for example:
http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2138
Heroic Glory of the Raider involves a series of moderate to very hard challenges in Naxx, with the reward being an exclusive Proto-Drake mount. Until they get that, it's not news.. and even if they do get that, they've STILL got the qualifiers mentioned earlier.
present day... present time... hahahaha...
According to some players Nymh is banned cause due to some bad tricks. With others people from his guild he manage to hit mobs (monsters) the first and let his friends finish it. First to touch, first to get the XP... Good cheat but bad idea, Blizzard catch Nymh and now it's finnish for him. :)