"Live Expansion" Announced for Warhammer Online

Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.

Comments

"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[SupremoMan]

Nice. I wish Blizzard did this. They sure as hell have the money for free expansions.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Impeesa]

Right, because Blizzard is gouging the hell out of us releasing a second paid expansion four years after release. They've added new quest hubs, battlegrounds, tradeskill stuff, whole zones, and of course many new dungeons and raids through free content patches.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Duradin]

Ya, it'd be nice if they added new instances without having to pay for a new expansion...

MC (shudder), BWL, Dire Maul, AQ and Original Nax were added to the retail release.
Burning Crusade had BT.
WotLK is coming up on the next CONTENT patch which will add a new raid instance.

Yup, no free expansions there.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

Keep in mind that in addition to paid expansions, Blizzard does add content for free too. (Think Ahn'Qiraj, for example.). Plus WAR has proven to have a lot of deficiencies that need to be corrected for it to be competitive... Although rather than add new classes (which always makes class balance harder) I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances - At least as of November, Destruction far outpopulated Order on nearly every server to a great deal because their classes simply had an edge... I made it to rank 15 or so before I got tired of Order getting constantly slaughtered in scenarios.

I'm sure WAR is going to see a paid expansion after a year or two, just like DAoC (Mythic's previous MMOG) saw quite a few, one of which managed to effectively destroy the game. (ooops)

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Phoenixhawk]

Played Eve Online for 5 years, Never once paid for any of the expansions, Nor did I have to pay to move my toon to a new server.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[SupremoMan]

What are you babbling on about? You didn't pay for Naxx? What's the first raid dungeon in WOTLK? Oh yeah... that one. And not everyone that played WoW raided. And those that did probably never made it to BWL. BT was supposed to be part of the Burning Crusade.

People who stopped playing might be a lot more likely to try the game again if they didn't have to pay $40 for the expansion. Hell it doesn't even come with a free month as far as I know.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bannerman]

Blizzard does release free new content quite frequently. Ahn Qiraj, Naxxramus, Sunwell, Zul Gurub, Zul Aman and the upcoming Uldaur are on the short list. I am a relatively casual player and I have spent thousands of hours in those zones over the years. For each expansion there have been at least two major free content patches.

Not that I am a fan boy, the crew Blizzard has maintaining Warcraft right now is just awful and I have canceled my account but this is one area in which Blizzard has treated their subscribers very well. They could have charged $10, $20, maybe $40 for each of those content patches and people would have paid it.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

I completely forgot, but Mythic has a bit of a history with "Live Expansions".

Typically their cycle in DAoC would be a free "Expansion" during the late spring/early summer timeframe, with a paid expansion in the late fall/early winter timeframe.

Examples of free "Summer" expansions would be Foundations (housing) and New Frontiers, and sometimes major game mechanics patches (such as spellcrafting the year before Foundations). There were fewer of these than paid expansions.

The paid expansions were typically yearly up until the past year (or was it two years ago they stopped?), when instead of another DAoC expansion, WAR was released. The paid expansions were Shrouded Isles, Trials of Atlantis (which led to DAoC's demise), Catacombs, , and Labyrinth of the Minotaur.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

grr somehow one of my entries got deleted, there was an expansion whose name I can't remember between Cats and LoTM.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[DreamsAreOkToo]

They're gouging the hell out of casual players. When was the last time they ever added anything for casuals, (read: those who don't have to "clock in" for a raid or arena)

I haven't been paying attention for the last 14 months, but in the 3 years I played, the only and last one was Dire Maul.

Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[idontgno]

BT was part of BC, true, but Blizz did roll out Quel'Danas (with its 25-man, Sunwell Plateau... though I don't know many raid guilds that ran that particular raid too much.) And that was "free" (or, from a more cynical perspective, it was part of Burning Crusade but delivered very very late).

But, yeah, Blizzard seems to be living well off the maxim "Charge what the market will bear".

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[zehaeva]

my friends and i have been complaining that the new instances and heroics are way to easy, way too casual. people are running around with purples like they were running around in blues at release.

also 700 dollars for 4+ years of entertainment, I've logged only around 200-250 hours(i'm low balling it) on my account so 700 dollars for that sort of time (i took most of 2008 off so you could cut 180 off that for me) is a good deal, to spend the same amount of time in a movie theater would have cost me a great deal more.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[zehaeva]

errr Naxx was first released before BC was released, see patch 1.11 http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/implemented/1p11.html

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[vux984]

I am a relatively casual player and I have spent thousands of hours in those zones over the years.

"Thousands of hours"?? That's more time than most people spend at a full time job in a YEAR. (40hrs/wk * 52 wks/yr = 1680hrs/yr) and you spent thousands of hours in just 5 Warcraft zones? How much time did you spend playing WoW not in those zones?

I think your definition of "relatively casual player" is seriously askew.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[irix]

In the TBC cycle, off the top of my head, the following was added for "casuals":
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters

They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.

On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.

If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[CrimsonAvenger]

Darkness Rising.

Which wasn't a paid expansion, as I recall. Though it's been so long my memory is fuzzy on which I paid for, and which just happened.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Saelorn]

Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

If you're a casual player, and you log in 10 hours per week, then you're getting 2000 hours( = 50 mo x 4 [wks/mo] x 10 [hr/wk]) of gameplay for those $700 dollars. Let's round that to 3 hours per dollar. The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it. Sure, you could go for 101% completion if you wanted to, and that might stretch the game out to 150 hours and make it a match for WoW, but if you were that hardcore then you would probably be logging 30 hours per week in Azeroth and keeping the ratio about the same. WoW is cheap.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[PotatoSan]

Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

Well, first of all, your own formula (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2) comes out to $850. In the interest of full disclosure, the original game was $50 and the two expansions were $40, so add in another $30, and you get a cost of $880 for playing WoW since release and paying by the month. If the average game is $60 and provides 10-20 hours of gameplay, that's $3-6 per hour. If you've been playing WoW for 50 months at a cost of $880, that's $17.60/month. If you play 5 hours and 52 minutes per month, your price per hour is $3, the low end of the price per hour of the average $60 game. So to answer your question, yeah, it's probably an unreasonable cost if you're playing much less than 6 hours a month, but how many people paying for the game since release actually play that little?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[_Sprocket_]

What are you babbling on about? You didn't pay for Naxx? What's the first raid dungeon in WOTLK? Oh yeah... that one. And not everyone that played WoW raided.

The Naxx you're talking about? That's not the same Naxx he's talking about. Unless you want to talk about lore - but we're talking content.

As for raiding - I suppose you're wanting to talk about the Battlegrounds then?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole game is for casuals now.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Amasuriel]

- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests

Hate to break it to you buddy, but having to gather 10 other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan is not casual.

If it can't be reliably done in an hour including the time to get a group together its not casual. Not saying its bad or good, but there it is.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[brkello]

Yes, you have no idea what you are talking about. WotK is mainly for casuals. Even the raid content has a lot of causals (one raid takes about 20 minutes). Heroics are casual friendly. You can wear tabards that give you reputation when you run heroics which makes reputation a lot more casual. All of the question content you can do alone is for casuals. I could go on and on.

MMORPGs are a different model than a typical video game. Does Crysis have admins on 24/7? Do they update content constantly? Do they have to run a huge server farm to host the game? Do they have people hired for balancing still working on the game? Do they have developers still working on the game? No. MMOs are not a video game. Your argument is so stupid it hurts. 10 million people think paying ~15 a month is reasonable for the amount of fun they get out of it. Taking my girl friend to a movie costs me $20 now and I only get 90 minutes out of it. It's fine if it isn't for you. Don't play it. But do us a favor and shut up about it. Your opinions aren't based on facts or reality.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Ephemeriis]

Nice. I wish Blizzard did this. They sure as hell have the money for free expansions.

They do. Routinely.

Molten Core was added after launch as a free patch.

The entire Silithus zone was redone in a free patch, and two new raid zones (Ahn'Qiraj) were added.

Zul'Gurub was added as a free patch.

Naxxramas was added as a free patch.

And that's just the stuff that was added after retail... Tons more stuff was added, free of charge, after Burning Crusade was rolled out.

Black Temple was added as a free patch.

The whole Sunwell Plateau thing was a free patch.

Zul'Aman was added as a free patch.

And that's just the large changes... Tons of quests and dungeons have been revamped and tweaked. Dustwallow Marsh is nothing like it used to be. New factions and quests were added for the Skyguard and Ogres...

Blizzard has rolled out a lot of stuff for free.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Amasuriel]

Considering there is only one server in EVE (if you don't count the beta server) its probably for the best that you didn't pay to move your character :)

I do agree about the expansions though; and not just content but vastly increased graphics etc.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Joeyspecial]

They're gouging the hell out of casual players. When was the last time they ever added anything for casuals, (read: those who don't have to "clock in" for a raid or arena)

I haven't been paying attention for the last 14 months, but in the 3 years I played, the only and last one was Dire Maul.

Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

You can do every quest, instance and raid in the new xpac with 10 or less people. I feel I've gotten more than $700 worth from the game and I have rarely played more than 10 hours per week since the release of BC. I have saved hundreds by not buying console games that I knew I would not play because of WoW. If you are still buying other games, it probably isn't worth that much money.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[DanielG42]

40 hours / week * 52 weeks / year = 2080 hours / year

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[_KiTA_]

If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.

Really? Catering to 95% of their player base? What crazy rebels!

... seriously. Is it "catering" at that point or "producing the product their player base is expecting?"

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Chris Burke]

Hate to break it to you buddy, but having to gather 10 other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan is not casual.

If it can't be reliably done in an hour including the time to get a group together its not casual. Not saying its bad or good, but there it is.

Then you don't consider even 5-man non-heroic instances to be casual (at least, certainly not instances prior to Wrath, and even then a typical PuG takes more than an hour especially including time to get the group together).

I mean, I have an uncle who played WoW, and could only play for two hours a night due to work schedule, so instance running was largely impossible -- thus why he stopped playing. However that's pretty unusual circumstances. I'd wager most "casuals" will still put in more than two hours of game time on those occasions that they do play.

Personally, my definition of "casual" is: If you can PUG it, it's casual.

By that definition, when ZA was released it wasn't casual. Soon after the Sunwell Isle expansion, it was casual. People were plucking "[9] other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan" out of trade chat on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[PaladinAlpha]

Yeah, and you can pick up a copy of Dos 6.11 for fifty cents and spend TEN years writing batch files, and it comes out to like a billionth of a cent per hour!!!1! The problem with your reasoning is you are assuming that "Playing WoW" is equivalent to "Playing a wide variety of story-driven self-contained RPGs." It's like saying that since an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus is cheaper per-page than 20 sci-fi books it makes for better reading.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[vux984]

40 hours / week * 52 weeks / year = 2080 hours / year

Yep, mistyped as 40x42 when I did the calc. Still the point stands even if though I was out 400hrs. Of course, once you factor in vacation, and days off etc, the total drops below 2k again.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[irix]

Hate to break it to you buddy, but having to gather 10 other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan is not casual.

Is gathering 5 other people of specific classes for a contiguous timespan casual? You do realize we're discussing a multiplayer game, right?

ZA was getting cleared by trade-channel PuGs before too long. The instance was designed for casual players - the timed run for the warbear mount was thrown in as a bone for raiding guilds.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[MBGMorden]

Still though, you're comparing a SINGLE year of a full time job to "years" as he said of play time.

Lets assume for example, that this guy has played since launch. Lets assume 2000 hours as a minimum time spent here. The game has been out now for 4 years and 3 months. Roughly 220 weeks.

So if he'd been playing since launch, he could have broken 2000 hours putting in just 9 hours per week, which is pretty tame and casual for most MMORPG's, and isn't really anything I'd consider excessive. Hell I know people that watch that much TV in 3x that many hours of television per week.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[irix]

... seriously. Is it "catering" at that point or "producing the product their player base is expecting?"

I never said it was bad. The OPs point is that Blizzard only cares about and only releases "free" content for raiders, which is demonstrably not true.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[.Bruce Perens]

Taking my girl friend to a movie costs me $20 now and I only get 90 minutes out of it.

For $20 I get 15 minutes out of your girlfriend in the backseat of a car.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[tnk1]

Uh, speaking as someone who clocked in every day to run a non-casual guild, I can tell you that we were more than a little annoyed about just how much they did give the casuals.

Badges of Justice, nerfing content, removing attunements to content, daily quests, etc.

I'm not saying that WoW is awesome for casuals, but they certainly haven't been ignored.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[tnk1]

There *are* people who play that much WoW. Usually, however, they aren't all that good at playing or they are just there for the social aspect. The better you are at WoW, the less time you end up playing, I found.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[furby076]

They do actually do this. Let's see:
AQ20/AQ40 was a MASSIVE world event where opposing factions worked together and against each other to race to get AQ40 gates open.

NAXX40 was at no additional charge.

Blizzard continuously updates their game and modifies it to help improve it (or at least try). Where I think Warhammer is vastly superior to WoW is PvP. In Warhammer you can never attack a PVE mob and get levels and items. PVP generates experience, items, reputation etc. Or you can go to PVE and play that. If Blizzard tweaked their PVP to provie better and more frequent item drops as well as experience in PVP - to the point a person never had to grind out in the environment they would see a swell of people leave Warhammer for them.

Warhammer seems to be less resource intensive and I think the graphics are a bit better (at least are coded with better potential). I was getting 90 FPS on my video card (only display 60 due to the monitor). WoW I get about 51 FPS - and WoW is 5 years old...it should be doing better then Warhammer.

WoW has better tab-targetting then Warhammer. Warhammer has superior PvP which Blizzard should ninja into WoW

So WoW could be improved, but it is a matter if they want to improve those aspects.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

Ah, that's it.

Yeah, DR was that year's paid expansion. Not sure if there was an unpaid that year (the last one I remember was NF?) with the exception of a major midsummer content patch. (When were mounts added - was that Cats, DR or a midyear patch?)

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, personally I am sick and tired of wow.. I quit almost a year ago.. came back for WOLTK and quit again (Didn't even make 80).. but you can't look at the monthly fees the same way as buying the game (Its not the same thing and the fees aren't for the same thing)... its more that you are paying blizzard to be able to maintain the servers. You think that blizzard could afford to keep all those servers up and running, pay the internet bill, and keep fixing the game (On top of making new content too) off the initial purchase costs for the game??

Could they get away with charging less, probably.. but why would they when they know 9 to 11 million people are willing to pay $15 a month to maintain their habit?? Does a coke/heroin (Or any other drug) dealer is going to charge less than they have been for a product just to be nice??

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[D'Sphitz]

The last two expansions are almost entirely geared at casuals. Remember how much commitment it took back in the old vanilla days of 40 man raids to get any epic gear at all? Very very few people ever saw BWL much less AQ or Nax, nowadays even the most casual player can see at least some of the endgame content...

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[CrimsonAvenger]

Mounts came with Catacombs, as I recall.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Skuld-Chan]

To be fair - most of eve's expansions are new ships (or ship in the last one) and a bunch of low-sec systems for hard-core players to fight over.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bFusion]

More like 2 minutes amirite?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[SupremoMan]

Exactly, you paid for it in WOTLK, even though you supposedly got it for free before.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

QQ Moar

Seriously. You make up maybe 5% of the total population of World of Warcraft, but 95% of the whining(the other 5% are the shaman players).

There were lots of people in small guilds who couldn't put together the numbers for the 40 man or even the 25 man raids. Is it fair that they who make up the majority of the people paying for the game, never got to see some of the best content they were paying for?

Also, most players have things called 'jobs' and 'lives' and can only log in a few hours at a time. Blizzard simply catered to majority who pay for the game. To quote Star Trek "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few(or the one)"

Oh.. and before you start replying and looking even more like an idiot. I fall into the 'hardcore casual' catagory. I do some raiding, have a regular raid group, but the game doesn't consume all of my life or free time. And I have been around since launch. How about you? I have put my time in MC, BLW, ZG, AQ40 & 20 and Naxx Have you? I have downed Ragnaros, Onxyina, C'Thun, and Kel'Thuzad. Have you?

Then the expansion came. I beta-tested (did you?) I downed Archimonde, Lady Vash, Kael'thas Sunstrider (hope he stays dead this time) and was even prepared for Illidan. Were you?

So now Wrath is out. Yeah.. I beta tested that too. I am working through the raids here too, but with a more limited schedule and smaller guild, it takes a bit longer. But I guarantee you I will.

And you know what? I will enjoy it more because I know that I am having fun with my friends. You talk about 'clocking in' every day. That sounds like work.

So QQ Moar.. your tears taste like candy. I enjoy my easier to get epics. That just means I have more time to spend on other things. (You should, too.. maybe you should think about a shower once and a while.. oh.. and get out of your mom's basement for god's sake).

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Hythlodaeus]

Nice. I wish Blizzard did this.

They did. Dire Maul, Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj, Naxxramas, Sunwell.
Ulduar coming in the next patch.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[atlastiamborn]

OR you could download one of the many free (as in beer or otherwise) games available and get infinite hours per dollar.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

A.. a WoW n00b :)

Did you even play the game before Wrath came out? Naxx was one of the MANY dungeons that was rolled out to the game in a FREE content patch. BWL is Black Wing Lair, home of the famous Blackwing Whelps and some guy named Leeroy Jenkins... oh and Nefarian. Yes... BT was in Burning Crusade, but it was never meant to be relased with the launch of the expansion. You see, if you knew dick about WoW (which you don't seem too) you would know that Blizzard releases all the storyline content in stages to give people time to gear up before the next raid level. It is brilliant. If they gave you everything at once, there would be nothing to look forward to until the next expansion so you would have a severe drop of in revenue as people quit because they were bored. So they roll out bits in content patches.

You want the game all at once, go play on your PS3 and STFU.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Krater76]

You're right about everything except the Netherwing. It was stated on the box that you'd be able to fly, and specifically a dragon. This wasn't put in until about 9 months after BC release.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

Warhammer has superior PvP which Blizzard should ninja into WoW

Shh.. I am trying to get all the PVPers to leave WoW and so Blizzard will dump PVP all together.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[LandDolphin]

That is just comparing it to other games.

As a generic form of entertainment, $15 a month for ~10 to ~40 hours of entertainment a month is a damn good deal.

A movie will run you $8 and only get you about ~2 hours of evertainment.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[zehaeva]

not sure how this follows, i got it for free as a 40 man raid in wow, i played it, i got many hours of enjoyment out of it, no supposedly there at all. Now i've paid for it though its since been overhauled and retooled. Naxx in wow and Naxx in wrath while they share the same layout, some graphics and a lot of the same names is not the same exact instance. granted they are not hugely different but they are not exactly the same. so getting a 10 man version, a 25man version paid for and a 40 man version for free isnt so bad.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[boarder]

And there you go showing that a higher UID means a lower IQ.

Look, moron, while I completely agree that paying $700 for a game is a lot of money, you yourself spelled out the math pretty concisely (except you missed the $50 for the original purchase). In your own misguided rage, though, you missed the part about playing for FIVE FUCKING YEARS. There are very few games I can think of where people played them for that long and only paid $50. In fact, Counterstrike is the only one I can think of right now. Aside from that, you didn't factor in how much that cost you per hour of enjoyment. A movie costs $10-$15, depending on where you live, for less than 2 hours of enjoyment. If you define a casual player as someone who plays for about 2 hours per week (that's really low for a lot of people, but I'm making a point), that comes to 400 hours played in those 50 months you quoted. $700 for 400 hours of entertainment is pretty damn good... it works out to less than $2 per hour, or 5 times better than a movie. Even for a game like Oblivion where I paid $60 and played for 100 hours, it's not too much worse.

And those numbers I just used were for 2 hours per week. That's pretty low, and I'd say most casual WoW players put in more like 4 or 5 hours per week. That puts it right in line with an amazingly large game like Oblivion. Most people buy a game like Ninja Gaiden Black for $60 and put in 20-40 hours.

Hell, you even said yourself that you haven't paid attention in the last 14 months, but you feel the need to pipe in and insult something you no longer know much about. In BC they added four new instances; 2 were 25 man raids, 1 was a 10 man raid doable by a small casual guild, and 1 was a 5 man dungeon (doable by casuals and also open on heroic for casuals). But aside from the free content they added, all the original BC 5 man dungeons had heroic modes for casuals to get epics and reputation grinds to get epics as well. Now in WotLK, all the dungeons are 30 minute short runs with heroic modes. There are reputation rewards and daily quests to get rare crafting recipes, etc. The 25 man raids are now heroic versions of 10 man raids that are doable by small guilds.

If anything, they have catered too much to the casual. All the top end raid content was cleared by big guilds in the first week. Do you remember how long it took for people to clear AQ40 and Naxx? My friend just hit 80 this week and already had epics and full blues... and he only logs on an hour or so per day, if that.

All that said, I liked WAR so much better than WoW and was hoping it would succeed. There are a lot of things I don't like about WoW, but I don't like single player games... which WAR became when WotLK dropped. So I came back to WoW to play with my friends.

There is nothing wrong with not liking WoW, but you are attacking them for things that make no sense (especially the arena system, which was another easy way to get epics for casuals).

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean they fixed the whole silithus zone with a free patch. Did you ever go there pre their fix? The mobs had no loot tables and it was a big nothingness of nothing that served very little purpose what so ever. They didnt add free content they put in place what should have been in when you paid for your copy of the game.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Archimonde]

- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub

Those are daily quests (aka reputation/rep grinds) and are for bots and retards. Hardly casuals. Lets say that a casual wants to play 2h/day. What he gets with those dailies? 1h for dailies, other hour for other stuff. And you can get a reward in like 2 months(!) time with grinding like that.

- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests

Hard instance for casuals actually, few guilds did it on my server anyway (ragnaros eu, so not a small server). Of those guilds, none were casual.

- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance

Yeah, more daily grind. I do concede that there were 2 instances, one was somewhat okay, the other one just for hardcore.

- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters

Wow, I mean, just wow! They threw few houses, couple of npcs and a few quests and thats it. Nevermind that the rest of azeroth wasn't even touched so it looks, feels and plays like a ghost world (and 98% is the same since day 1). And did I mention that it still takes an eternity to level a char to 60, 70 or 80 anyway?

They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.

Yeah, they took more than a half of year to nerf ZG so the rest of 95% of guilds could pass first 4 bosses in less than 3 hours. And sorry, bwl, aq20/40 and naxx were never nerfed to the point a casual could see there more than first or second boss. Let alone final boss. And eventually when some of the instances got nerfed nobody cared anymore.

On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.

If you consider the "vast majority of content" to be zones for leveling, then it is not really for casuals only, as you seem to imply. Every wow gamer has to get over it to become max level and try the endgame, casuals or hardcore alike. I'll admit that there is plenty of 5 man instances for casuals but that is only short term anyway. Soon enough there will be more new content pretty much for hardcore only (as they did in wow 1.0 and tbc) so casuals will get bored with the same old content (which was made irrelevant with the new content anyway).

And please don't never, ever mention pvp "content". It is pathetic. With wow 1.0 we had what, 3 battlegrounds, with wotlk, they threw another one + 3 arenas, and in wotlk they threw a whole one more battleground and two arenas. (Mind you that arenas are very non casual). Lake wintergrasp is just bleh, too large and uses vehicles (like a bad copy of UT). And all that pvp currency, minimal arena ratings, and so on are nothing more but a bunch of obstacles pointed *against* casual gamers. Not for them.

And that is my point, even though there are some additions for casuals, those are only superficial, and for every casual addition there are at least two hardcore ones.

PS Just for those who haven't played WoW: casuals in wow are those who play less than 6h per day, those who log on 0-2h per day are probably can't use WoW for nothing more than an expensive chat program.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[vux984]

So if he'd been playing since launch, he could have broken 2000 hours putting in just 9 hours per week, which is pretty tame and casual for most MMORPG's, and isn't really anything I'd consider excessive. Hell I know people that watch that much TV in 3x that many hours of television per week.

Remember, that's nine hours a week for 4+ years, IN JUST FIVE ZONES. I suspect if spent that much time in just the 5 zones he listed, he's spent even more time, EVERYWHERE ELSE.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[festers]

Too bad you have to pay for a 2nd account if you want two different characters to be able to train skills at the same time. CCP is in it to make money just like everyone else.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

I've easily logged that many hours and that many dollars playing Warhammer 40k and Warhammer. At the end, I sell my army and buy another and start all over again...

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even play the game before Wrath came out?

Certainly it seems that you didn't either.

BWL is Black Wing Lair, home of the famous Blackwing Whelps and some guy named Leeroy Jenkins...

Except Leeroy Jenkins "event" was in UBRS.

You want the game all at once, go play on your PS3 and STFU.

You fail at wow. You fail at slashdot too. What are you doing here anyway? Except trolling?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bannerman]

I did say "relatively" casual. I have been playing since a few months after release and have approx 200 days /played time amongst my various toons. I am not a "hardcore raider" but I do have a raid invite any night that I wish to play. What do you do with your leisure time? Many people get home from work and sit down in front of the TV for the rest of the night. When I am not doing something with my band, I choose to spend my time socializing with my friends online.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bannerman]

Nice troll.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[brkello]

I play for two soccer teams, an orchestra, have a full time job, and a girl friend I spend time with on the week and almost all of the weekend who does not game. I had no problem making it to 80, have all the pre-raid purples (i.e. all rep and heroic epics), and am able to raid. I don't do naxx, but I can do the others. The game is extremely casual friendly. You either haven't played WotLK or just have some sort of strange bias. Leveling content is interesting and there is a lot more of it than you need to get to 80...thus I can understand why someone would say it is in there for casuals because the hardcore would just skip it as soon as they hit 80.

Arenas are as casual or non-casual as you want them to be. If you want to be the best there is, you are going to have to put time in to it....but that is true of any online game.

WotLK makes running Heroics much faster by giving you just a few trash pulls so you get to the bosses faster. Most are run under an hour. While you run them, you wear a tabard that gives you rep for whoever you want so you are also working towards that goal. They are balancing rewards with effort it takes to get things and I think they have done an incredible job so that I can be geared the way I am and still have a full life (hell, I bet my life is fuller than yours).

You don't like WoW. That is 100% fine. Just don't play. But don't spout off a bunch of crap that isn't true like your definition of a casual. WoW is the most polished, casual friendly MMORPG ever created.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[brkello]

I think you might be insane. The guy basically said as a hardcore player, his OPINION was that it was made too easy. And that makes sense, if you play a lot, you can get through all the content pretty fast and it isn't much of a challenge.

Your response on the other hand is full of insults and stupid WoW forum abbreviations. This is Slashdot. You come off as a pre-pubescent retard with your QQs. Then you try to compare your virtual dick size by saying how long you played. How is that even relevant to his comment? It doesn't matter at all how long he has played. Then you, someone who says you have played WoW for so long, start telling HIM to take a shower and are stereotyping him? You are just a complete moron. You insult him for playing and then brag about how much you play. You need to lay off the drugs or get some counseling.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Sethumme]

It's not $700 for a game. It's $700 for a fantasy life.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL "I haven't been paying attention for the last 14 months, but in the 3 years I played, the only and last one was Dire Maul."

So you haven't been playing for 2 expansions now, but feel your hold some valid information.

Way to be a fucking tool...

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Arivia]

Do they have people hired for balancing still working on the game?

After 3.0.8, I wouldn't assume Blizzard has that for WoW itself!

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Janu-waaagh-ry alone could have kept me videogaming for close to a year.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[SupremoMan]

Listen you flamebaiter. It's funny how you miss the point of my post. I know Naxx was released for free. So if it was free, why did you pay to play it in WOTLK? Wouldn't that mean it was not free after all? Or you enjoy paying for rehashed content?

You want the game all at once, go play on your PS3 and STFU.

Who said this? I mere stated that Blizzard has an incentive to release their expansions free of charge. And any free content they do release just backs up my point, not yours.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

also 700 dollars for 4+ years of entertainment, I've logged only around 200-250 hours(i'm low balling it) on my account so 700 dollars for that sort of time

If you already own a PS2 you could entertain yourself for hundreds of hours just from bargain bin stuff now that it's "last gen". Most of it will look better than WOW anyway. Or if you REALLY need the online interaction, Guildwars will give you over 200 hours for under a hundred dollars.

Sure. 200 hours of THEATER time would be more than 700, but I have a hard time naming ANY game other than Everquest that gouges as hard as WOW.

I bet you consider it a steal to pay for Starcraft 2 three times rather than buy, say Sins of a Solar Empire...

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[GaryPatterson]

Sadly, the WoW forums are full of this sort of thing. Gloating, demonising new players, insulting anyone with the temerity to ask a question and the whole "your tears are like candy" thing, which would net a punch in the face in real life.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Stormie]

I haven't been paying attention for the last 14 months, but in the 3 years I played, the only and last one was Dire Maul.

If you're going to post such hilarious lies on a website as popular as Slashdot, at least do it as Anonymous Coward so people don't know who they're laughing at.

Patch 2.4 - Isle of Quel'Danas (new zone), Magisters Terrace (dungeon), Sunwell (raid)

Patch 2.3 - Zul'Aman (raid)

Patch 2.2 - Built-in voice chat

Patch 2.1 - Black Temple (raid), Mount Hyjal (raid), Skettis, Ogri'la and Netherwing Ledge (outdoor quest hubs)

Patch 1.12 - Cross-server battlegrounds

Patch 1.11 - Naxxramas (raid)

Patch 1.10 - "Dungeon 2" armor sets (massive quest chain)

Patch 1.9 - Ahn'Qiraj (world event and two raids)

Patch 1.8 - Green Dragons (outdoor raid bosses), Silithus rework (virtually a whole new zone)

Patch 1.7 - Zul'Gurub (raid), Arathi Basin (battleground)

Patch 1.6 - Blackwing Lair (raid)

Patch 1.5 - Warsong Gulch (battleground), Alterac Valley (battleground)

Patch 1.4 - PvP honor system and rewards

Patch 1.3 - Dire Maul (dungeon), Azuregos and Kazzak (outdoor raid bosses)

Patch 1.2 - Maraudon (dungeon)

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

Which is why I used those insults in the first place. Maybe you misunderstood my position. I hate the whiners I spoke to them in their language. Yes I play more than the average casual. I am tired of them saying oh.. the game is too easy and they are giving out epics.. waa waa waa.

Was I a little strong, yes I was. I was trying to prove a point, which obviously was too subtle and taken wrong. If you had bothered to read what I was writing, I was defending the fact that the game is easier. You don't have to not have a life in order to get to the end content of the game anymore.

Calling me insane is over the line. What I said is tame compared to what goes on in the mind of these 'hardcore' players.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

You are right, the Whelps were in Upper Black Rock Spire. I misremembered that. It has been a couple of years since I was there. I stand corrected on that fact.

However, since I am not the one hiding behind the anonymous coward posting, who is the troll here?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Daswolfen]

First of all, yes, it is the same Naxx, right down to the Dodad labeled door(that the finally got rid of last patch). Maybe YOU need to go reread not only your post, but the post you were replying to. He pointed out that they did in fact release Naxx originally for free, which is the whole point of the thread. You basically called him a liar and implied that Naxx was first released in WOLK.

And then you bemoan the $40 dollars for an expansion, the 2nd expansion in 4 years, that not only contained a new profession but a new class, beyond the whole new continent. Just like BC added a new profession and 2 new races. Hence the comment about the PS3, because obviously you are not a PC gamer if you think that paying 40 dollars for a major expansion to a game is bad.

Was I a little mean spirited, sure. I will admit that.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[analog_line]

The Darkness Falls dungeon, as well as the "dragon zones" in the old world, and the underground pvp dungeons in the old frontiers were also free and added to the old world, though they didn't really call them expansions at the time.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't want to seem like a wow fanboy, but you really need to pay more attention. in the original wow, blizzard added maraudon, dire maul, pvp battlegrounds, blackwing lair, silithus, zul'gurub, ahn'qiraj 20 & 40, and naxxramas, all free of charge. in burning crusade, they added black temple, zul'aman, sunwell isle, magister's terrace, and sunwell plateau. and i might as well mention all the minor stuff like darkmoon faire, several iterations of the honor system, outdoor raid bosses, numerous holiday events, cross-server pvp battlegrounds, and daily quests.

don't feel ripped off because you have to pay for an expansion every other year.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

They're gouging the hell out of casual players. When was the last time they ever added anything for casuals, (read: those who don't have to "clock in" for a raid or arena)

if you have to "clock in" to play 10 arena matches over the course of a week, then maybe wow isn't the game for you. you should stay inside more often.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Nazlfrag]

I choose to spend my time socializing with my friends

So how the hell do you clock so many hours on warcraft then?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[drsquare]

The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it.

Who the hell measures their level of entertainment in 'hours'? And who the hell counts ten hours a week as casual? I could bang my head against the wall for an hour, it'd be free but not very entertaining.

Even if you are counting other hours, you could play a subscription-less game for the cost of the game alone, saving you hundreds of dollars.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[cyn1c77]

I mean, I have an uncle who played WoW, and could only play for two hours a night due to work schedule, so instance running was largely impossible -- thus why he stopped playing. However that's pretty unusual circumstances. I'd wager most "casuals" will still put in more than two hours of game time on those occasions that they do play.

Pretty unusual? I stopped playing for the same reason. Maybe you can collect some people for a PUG in 30-45 minutes if you're lucky... counting time for someone to forget stuff and get ganked 30 times. Then the instance takes a few hours. Then you have to grind for another few hours to get gold for supplies and repair.

Maybe I am not the best player, but that was my experience. I found that it took about 4 hours to do all that. And that's not counting the time to research the instance. Sure, it can go faster if you are in a good guild... but joining a guild was like a commitment to play 16 hours a week! Now I had that kind of time in college and in grad school, but I don't anymore. How do adults find the time to put in 4 hours a night (a few times a week) with full time jobs and kids? Do you just lock the kids in the closet with a jar of peanut butter and a pillow?

I really liked WoW, but the time commitment to do anything fun was just too much for me. And don't get me started on that whole PvP tournament BS.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Admiral Ag]

Why didn't someone tell me that I would have to scroll though 90% of the page to get to posts that were actually about Warhammer Online rather than complaining about World of Warcraft?

Can I humbly request that the title of any Slashdot post about an MMO includes in brackets after the title the following: "(i.e. bitching about World of Warcraft)"

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Canazza]

unless by Zones he means:
Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Outlands, Sunwell Isle and Northrend
but in that case he's a moron

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Archimonde]

Oh, it seems we are very quick to jump to ad hominems and meta level. Please spare me of that rubbish.

You had my responses to the parent, and you didn't acknowledge any of them. Of all the (few) points I made in the previous post you only replied to the point about 5-man instances which I described as casual friendly. Have you actually read the post you are replying to? And oh, arenas. Explain to me please, how do you manage to play 10 2v2 games in under an hour when the queue is never less then 10 minutes? Moreover, if you consider fun playing around 1500 (or under) rating, good luck getting any gear which would enable you to get better rating.

WoW is the most polished, casual friendly MMORPG ever created.

That says more about other games than WoW itself. Or do you mean that if the WoW is the most polished mmorpg, then any criticism is automatically invalid? Is that what you mean? Or do you think that I couldn't parrot that phrase as well? I also consider WoW the most polished mmorpg there is but that doesn't invalidate any of my points. Nor does make WoW any better just by saying it.

I could make much more points about WoW but it seems to me that all you want to discuss is your "fuller life". Well enjoy it then, don't waste it on WoW.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Anonymous Coward]

umm... if you're gonna actually write a formula somewhere, you should maybe use a calculator. 40 * 52 = 2080.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Cowmonaut]

Although rather than add new classes (which always makes class balance harder) I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances

Not in this case. Every Race is supposed to have a melee DPS, tank, ranged DPS, and support/healer. Currently Dwarves and Greenskins don't have their melee DPS. Was pretty bad for Empire and Dark Elves since they didn't have their tanks until a few months ago. The game is balanced around each side being able to have these kinds of roles, and for a new game its balanced pretty well.

A lot of players don't realize what is happening in combat so they cry out that a specific class is overpowered. They're wrong, but even when you show them statistics from combat logs going over a month they don't listen. There WERE some major balance issues/bugs in combat regarding specific abilities.

The Bright Wizard/Sorcerer classes were doing too much damage off of criticals from their dots, all the RDPS classes had a bug with their player based AOE root that caused it not to break properly were the two biggest ones. They fixed that in a patch and while the BW/Sorc does more damage in the long haul, their spiking was nerfed a bit so now 3 of them working in tandem can't waste a team of 12 people on their own.

Honestly though, the PVE is fun and fair, the Open RVR is getting performance improvements and extra rewards, and RvR in general is balanced between the two sides (there is a mirror of every class and while they don't work identical, they are pretty close in what their skills actually do) and every class has a counter-class. The key is organization and on 4/5 servers I've been on Order is more organized and more willing to help their fellow players while Destruction is full of self serving wankers. At least it keeps the RvR games interesting.

I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances

They are. They keep moving server populations on a monthly/weekly basis. The populations in total are pretty damn close, especially on the larger servers like Badlands or Dark Crag. This varies depending on the time of day, but not by much. Really its kind of sad. Mythic has this great game here that seems very well made but people aren't behaving how they assumed. They thought people would want to play the game, but so many people are looking for instant reward situations like in Guild Wars.

At least as of November, Destruction far outpopulated Order on nearly every server to a great deal because their classes simply had an edge... I made it to rank 15 or so before I got tired of Order getting constantly slaughtered in scenarios.

Um, no. Destruction is typically a higher population than Order because far more players want to be "evil" or an Orc. Having been in the closed beta, played both Destruction and Order, and played on Core and Open RvR servers I can tell you the Destruction has the numbers, but Order has the players. The maturity level is vastly different, with far more of the bitchy self-serving 13 year olds rolling a Chaos Chosen or a Dark Elf Sorceress/Wytch. Also, the Order players work together and are far more organized than the Destruction players. Again it goes back to the maturity level, most Destruction players want to be the hero rather than just accomplish a goal.

Made me rather sad actually. I've never liked the Order armies in tabletop Warhammer. I like my Greenskins a bit too much. But you can't work with people who think Guilds have to be huge (they don't in WAR) and that they don't need to use tactics/strategy to win. They spend most of their time bitching or trying to "get kills" rather than take out the enemy team. There's a great game there for organized PvP/RvR but its being wasted currently.

I imagine that Mythic will have paid expansions out as they add other races. They get the whole Warhammer universe to play with. There have been 18 different armies in th

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bannerman]

We play World of Warcraft together, of course. We can't afford to fly out every weekend for Slashdot-approved tabletop gaming.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Chris Burke]

Pretty unusual? I stopped playing for the same reason. Maybe you can collect some people for a PUG in 30-45 minutes if you're lucky...

Get on a high population server, don't run something really obscure (e.g. anything not in the latest expansion), and 45 minutes is when you're very un-lucky. If you can tank or heal, unlucky would be having to wait 20 minutes (almost certainly for the other character type). If you can tank or heal, and you want to run the daily instance, you can get a group in just a few minutes.

Maybe I am not the best player, but that was my experience. I found that it took about 4 hours to do all that. And that's not counting the time to research the instance.

Hm, lemme guess, you stopped playing before the first expansion? Yeah, a lot of the instances there were gigantic. Sunken Temple, Stratholme, those were ridiculous crawls. Certainly a lot of the more casual players didn't even get to see them.

In TBC, even with a bad group an instance run would take 2.5 hours tops. With a decent group (by pug standards) you could clear most places in a little over an hour. In Wrath they've went even further, and now 45 minutes is a reasonable time frame to complete most instances with a decent group.

How do adults find the time to put in 4 hours a night (a few times a week) with full time jobs and kids? Do you just lock the kids in the closet with a jar of peanut butter and a pillow?

It's called the weekend. After you mow the lawn and clean the eaves troughs you send the kids to the neighbor's to play and sit down for some gaming. On weekends its even easier to find a group; already you see people PUGing the 10-man raids.

I mean it's the same question as to how adults find time to watch as much TV as they apparently do. I know a lot of people who have kids in roughly the 4-10 range who go to be hours after their kid does, and if they're older than that they can generally handle not having direct supervision. People manage, is my point.

I really liked WoW, but the time commitment to do anything fun was just too much for me.

I understand what you're saying. I guess that's really my point -- you can't do much of anything in just an hour or two, so if 5-mans aren't "casual", then really, what is?

Obviously for you the answer was "nothing, I'm outta here" :)

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[bonch]

WotLK is short, easy, and lacking in content. They even changed the dungeons so that no crowd control is required, and all tanks can hold threat on multiple targets easily. This makes for repetitive dungeon runs where everybody spams their AoE spells. Most of the new quest hubs are more of the same "collect 10 bear asses and return to me" quests, and the new battleground sucks. Wintergrasp slows down all of Northrend. Trade skills aren't finished, and some recipes couldn't even be made on release.

Mythic is offering two more new classes for free on top of the previous two they offered in an update. You might say they're reintroducing content they cut, but Blizzard promised hero classes like the Death Knight four years ago and just now got to it. Blizzard still hasn't even done Uldum, modern-day Hyjal, or the other incomplete old world content that's sitting there with non-functioning portals and gates. Aren't you tired of seeing that Emerald Dream portal in Ashenvale that doesn't go anywhere?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Morlark]

Moreover, if you consider fun playing around 1500 (or under) rating, good luck getting any gear which would enable you to get better rating.

Given that all the gear available that requires no rating at all is easily sufficient to get you to well above 1500 rating... (And no, I'm not talking about raid gear, or any other "hardcore" content. Not that raids are actually hardcore, nor have they been for years.)

And that is my point, even though there are some additions for casuals, those are only superficial, and for every casual addition there are at least two hardcore ones.

Any truth to this comment is largely invalidated by the fact that the game (and both of its expansions) at release contained vastly more casual content than "hardcore". And that's even going by your definition of hardcore, which I strongly disagree with.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Morlark]

Wow, talk about a false sense of entitlement. No, they did not put in place something that should have been there before, they very definitely added new content. The content that was added in that patch, was not content that was accessible at release, nor was it intended to be. Just because you know something is going to be there, doesn't mean you have the right to access it before it's created.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Morlark]

you really need to pay more attention

No, based on his other posts in this thread, it seems he's well aware of the developments in WoW post-release. He knows damned well that Blizzard has released a great many free expansions. I can only assume that he was trolling, hoping to get up-modded by people with less knowledge of WoW. Thankfully he's picked up a few overrateds as well.

Actually, the only the only reason he can get away with preying on that confusion is because Blizzard doesn't try to trumpet it up as giving away for free some amazing expansion, a word which you'd naturally associate with having to pay for. They, quite sensibly, call them patches, just like they are.

Of course its free

[Daswolfen]

Its just content that was originally planned for release that got cut just so they could beat Blizzards Wrath Expansion out of the gate.

So all the Orcs will yell...

[Myrkridian42]

GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!

Re:So all the Orcs will yell...

[Krinsath]

Funny you should mention that...since that was what Mythic referenced in their pre-announcement materials. :)

http://www.walloftext.info/2009/01/mythic-was-right-no-official-forums.html An interesting way to do an announcement at least...

Fix the graphics!

[Tryle]

Instead of expanding they need to address the major graphics requirement issue. You need a serious PC to run this game at even minimal settings. If they expect to gain more subscriptions, then they need to widen their gamer pool by allowing lower end PCs to run this game. Putting out expansions is nice to maintain subscriptions, but they should focus more at making the game more PC friendly for aging computers to continue to grow their customer base.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[Andy Dodd]

Good point. In addition to the realm balance issues, the graphics requirements are one of the main reasons I stopped playing.

While my system was more than fast enough, a friends' system and his wife's couldn't play it acceptably even though their machines are great for WoW. My girlfriend's system is even more of an issue - She can just barely play WoW on it, there's no way she could play WAR without buying a new system in (at the very least) the $500-600+ price range.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[RogL]

She can just barely play WoW on it, there's no way she could play WAR without buying a new system in (at the very least) the $500-600+ price range.

Why do you think a $600 box is needed to play WAR?

I've been playing WAR for several months on a 4-yr-old box (old office Dell P4 3GHz, with a $90 512MB ATI 2600 video card). Runs fine, night after night.

I did bump system memory from 1GB to 3 GB - that made a noticeable difference.

  If her system meets the minimum processor spec, just add some RAM & try popping in a recent video-card with 256-512MB. You may be surprised; my $120 of upgrades made a world of difference.

Here's the supposed system requirements:
        * 2.5 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
        * 1 Gigabyte RAM
        * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
        * At least 15 GB of hard drive space

Re:Fix the graphics!

[CaptCovert]

A 'recent video-card with 256-512MB' means PCI-E. For a LOT of people, this means a new motherboard (and, consequently, RAM+CPU) to go from AGP to PCI-E... in essence, a full upgrade, which'll easily cost you $600.

My old AGP machine ran WoW quite well, and choked on WAR like a... well, I'll not bother with an analogy here. A full system upgrade was necessary to move at all in Inevitable City... and this was on a dead server (Tor Elyr).

Re:Fix the graphics!

[bigstrat2003]

You need a serious PC to run this game at even minimal settings.

Which is ridiculous, because even at max settings, the game looks rather bad. It has the graphics quality of WoW without the pretty art style to distract from it. I played the trial, and couldn't stop noticing how badly textured stuff was.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[Tryle]

Exactly. The graphics requirements should be read as "FPS requirements" since visually the game doesn't get better as your machine specs improve. It just makes it more playable, which is a really bad way to be viewed. Trust me, I was one of the hopefuls that this was going to be the WoW killer. Fortunately they still have the capital to keep developing and hopefully they will wake up and take note of the graphics complaints and rewrite some code. Here's to hoping.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

Different strokes, I suppose. I think the art is far superior to WoW. Yes, it's not the same cartoony art style, but there's a lot going on in the game.

Plus, for me, it's far more fun. I had 4 level 70s in WoW, so hardly a newbie, but the game stopped being "fun" and started being "a job". Get this faction, get that faction. Log in every day and do the daily quests again. Run the same instance again.

Warhammer eliminates all of that. No grind. You get points for RvR. You get BETTER rewards for RvR than you get for questing! You can advance the story, or RvR or do dungeons or just do Public Quests (which are genius), and you get good loot and advancement.

Oh, and you don't have to go find flight points, you learn them when you reach the appropriate level for them. And there's no 11 minute griffin rides.

The game is simply more fun, less tedious.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but no.

I'm currently running WAR on a PC I had built 5 years ago. I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs and the video card (which is AGP) to a 512mb model over Christmas. My CPU is an AMD Athlon 2600+.

Can I run WAR with all the bells and whistles? Hell no. As a matter of fact, I run it on the fastest framerate settings.

But honestly, if you can't get past those specs, you're either lying, running stuff in the background, or something else is wrong.

Re:Fix the graphics!

[L0stm4n]

Athlon XP 3000+, Radeon X800 XT, 2 GB RAM

Game plays like shit. I loved the game, but it choked the hell out of my machine. Lowest settings It would let me do and it was just a step above a slide show. CPU was constantly maxed at 100%. It was reasonably ok in solo PVE but any PVP scenario was dreadful. I had to give the game up and went back to WOW with some friends. I miss my little Ironbreaker. Little bastard was almost indestructible.

WOW plays fine on the box, except Dalaran turn into a lagfest.

Seems to be a trend

[LogarithmicSpiral]

It seems like more and more games are doing this now. Recently Team Fortress 2 added achievements to get new weapons. They are also creating new maps. Are these game devs trying to give gamers more incentive to play? ...or just upping the user experience?

Re:Of course it's free

[Anonymous Coward]

Which doesn't mean it has to be free. Maybe it should be free, and it's a good thing that they're offering it for free, but it doesn't mean that it has to be free.

I think it was Sony's Final Fantasy Online that recently decided to do something similar, where they're rolling out an expansion in small chunks. Small chunks that you have to pay $10 each for.

So it may be content that was cut to meet a deadline, but if we've learned anything from Sony and their attempts to monetize literally everything (you should listen to them talk about $2 shoes in PlayStation Home), it's worth praising publishers when they give away content for free - because if we don't, they may decide to charge us $5 next time.

Please!

[whisper_jeff]

"...and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please.

Ok, smartass comment out of the way, I feel bad for the Mythic crew. They had the best chance to take a substantial bite out of WoW's rather massive pie. But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW. Yes, Warhammer may do some (or even many) things better than WoW but WoW also does many things better than Warhammer. More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

In my opinion, it will take a long time before another fantasy MMO comes out that has a similar real chance to take a substantial chunk of the market from WoW. If Warhammer couldn't do it, with all it's legacy behind it, it will require something truly spectacular to do it. Blizzard will need to screw things up at the same time that another company does a lot of things REALLY well with a hot IP (kinda like what WoW did to Everquest...). Warhammer had it's chance but missed the target. It'll be a while before another game has a shot. In my opinion.

Re:Please!

[Jack Sombra]

"Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please." Probably true, but also very clever, they know many many pvpers are VERY UNHAPPY with WoW since WoLK and Bliz don't seem that interested in fixing those issues any time soon, so now is a good time for Warhammer to be doing this "More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important." Honestly after you reach much more than the half million mark it is pretty unimportant in terms of MMO gaming experience how many more players you have because in majority of games (wow included) those players are divided by servers/shards/realms That all said, still will not be playing WAR for one simple reason, EA

Re:Please!

[zergl]

More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

And how many of those players play on one same shard? The massive part matters only if I can actually interact with those other players and the biggest US realms have about 35k characters of levels 10+ rolled on it. That's characters only, mind you.
I don't have any numbers on it, but if you could count only actual accounts/players (and/or players logged in at the same time), those numbers would be way less than that, too.

Anyway, if you're gonna go with this argument, EvE Online beats the whole bunch in that department without breaking a sweat. It's where the massively multiplayer aspect is truly massive with a peak of around 45k accounts (probably a bit less if you discard alt accounts) logged in at the same time in one persistent game universe.

Re:Please!

[Thaelon]

A few points at random...

But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW.

I played wow early on got the collector's edition, and everything. Eventually got very bored and quit. I mostly like PvP, but if you do pure pvp in wow, you don't level. I got tired of the grind and quit. In Warhammer you can level all the way to 40 without killing a single NPC monster. You even get great gear from it.

That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

This is very misleading. Sure 11.5 million players is an incredible amount, but they play on how many different servers? 400? This means there are probably at most 30k players a server. It equates roughly to at most 4,800 or so players on at any given time. Compare this to the only truly massive MOG I'm familiar with, EVE online. It has usually has 25-35k players active on one server at the same time. Sure WoW is bigger in terms of player base, but the actual number of players participating in any given thing is minuscule by comparison. EVE routinely has 300 to a thousand players in a single battle. There's only one server too. This means you and all your friends can't help but play on the same server. This perk is unique in the MMO world as far as I can tell. It's also a completely different genre (Space/Scifi) with heinous death penalties. But those penalties result in the creation of a phenomenon I've never heard of outside of EVE called the "pvp shakes". It often get so intense people's body shake. You'll hear them talk about it in vent, or in local chat, or on forums and evemails. The battles are often fewer and sometimes shorter, but they are orders of magnitude more intense and stimulating as a result.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Blizzard, I'm just not into WoW. I prefer other MMOs, notably EVE and Warhammer.

Re:Please!

[brkello]

I just had to see what you quoted to know this was going to be an Eve online post. Yeah, it is nice to know that if your friend plays Eve, he is on the same server. Even just isn't fun for the majority of people because the PvE is lacking and the PvP requires you to be a bit more hard core. That and the single shard means that the whole game is spoiled from dev cheating in the past.

What he is saying though...is that you probably know someone who plays WoW...thus making it more likely you would want to join so you can play with them.

Re:Please!

[yoshi_mon]

In my opinion, it will take a long time before another fantasy MMO comes out that has a similar real chance to take a substantial chunk of the market from WoW. If Warhammer couldn't do it, with all it's legacy behind it, it will require something truly spectacular to do it. Blizzard will need to screw things up at the same time that another company does a lot of things REALLY well with a hot IP (kinda like what WoW did to Everquest...). Warhammer had it's chance but missed the target. It'll be a while before another game has a shot.

I played WoW, TBC, and then just did a 10 day trial of LK. I'm of the same opinion. WoW will have to die of it's own natural cycle and then in it's place will need to be a new option for people who enjoy MMOs.

Re:Please!

[furby076]

It's also apathy. Players of WoW don't want to leave their established characters to start from scratch.

One thing Mythic did screw up on, they created WAY too many servers to start. They helped fix it by giving free transfers - but I can't help but think how many people they lost to that.

I went and played it (had quit wow in 2007) since friends asked me to. Then they quit so I did and went back to WoW. If blizz were smart they would adopt the PvP aspect of War. They did it right.

Re:Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like the Everquest era. No one game was responsible for EQ's decline -- it was a natural expiration of its life cycle after a *number* of decent MMO releases diluted its value in comparison.

It's not even a Mythic problem -- WAR is but one game, with one primary target audience. It wasn't until Anarchy Online, Camelot, AC2 and others all came out that EQ finally saw a natural decline.

We're several years' worth of notable MMO releases away from WoW's subscriber base being that totally diluted into the MMO mainstream.

But it will not be *a* game. It will be many, and they'll probably need to be the sort of PvE-heavy raider system that WAR intentionally avoided.

Re:Please!

[tnk1]

Honestly after you reach much more than the half million mark it is pretty unimportant in terms of MMO gaming experience how many more players you have because in majority of games (wow included) those players are divided by servers/shards/realms That all said, still will not be playing WAR for one simple reason, EA

That depends. You're right about the separate servers, but even WoW has to face situations in PvP where they do cross-server battegrounds because there are issues with faction populations being different and causing queuing problems.

Also, the bigger the game is, the more chance that someone you know has played it. They get the in-jokes, etc. I've played Eve Online, for instance, and a fair number of people here know about it on ./ but I've never seen a Jeopardy question referencing Eve.

That means more people will likely buy it to play with their friends, and the more people who buy it, the more money there is for building new content.

So, the bigger the better. And considering the time it takes to set up an MMO and provide content, its generally not enough for it to simply be profitable.

Re:Please!

[tnk1]

I think there is room for another big MMO, but I think it needs to be substantially different than WoW, rather than trying to be a WoW killer or even just a competitor. WAR was not unique enough to fill that niche.

Re:Please!

[Hythlodaeus]

I'll tell you the only thing that will kill WoW for me:
a similarly high-quality MMO with pvp where you [b]pick sides as a result of story development, not at character creation[/b]
Eve and Shadowbane have this, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is less fun than stabbing your eye. The game that adds politics and territory control like Shadowbane and Eve onto a basic solo/small group experience like WoW will be a winner.

Re:Please!

[yoshi_mon]

Well you very well could be correct but my gut says that is not the case. I base this on a few things:

-- WoW has attracted a lot more people to the MMORPG genre than before it's existence. As such many of those people have developed an expectation of what should be present. Many people have found a comfort zone with what WoW provides and will want that from any successor.

-- WoW did what Blizzard has always done in making a very polished game. Trust me I know well that WoW had it's share of issues with a multitude of things. But still that level of polish is the standard these days. Anything that will want to compete with WoW will have to be close to that. Which is of course never easy with the scope of a real MMO.

-- Finally I just overall think that there is nothing inherently wrong with the MMORPG model that WoW is. To say that something would have to be different to succeed I think is a bit of a 'slap in the face', to use a WoWism heh, to what is clearly a pretty decent model. Again not saying that something different can't be popular or good just that I don't think different is a requirement.

Re:Please!

[drsquare]

Strange how every article about MMOs is quickly filled with EVE fans telling everyone how great and unique it is, even though no-one cares because EVE is boring as hell.

Re:Please!

[montyzooooma]

"...and it will be rolled out free of charge. " Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please.

Probably going to work for me. I got WHO, played for a couple of weeks, told everyone how much I was enjoying it and then when the included month ran out I just let it lapse. I don't know about WOTLK especially but there were a lot of really good SP games released around that time, or upcoming and those sucked me in.
Before I look at WHO again, and I will, I have to shake an X3-Terran Conflict addiction, master (ha! won't happen) Left4Dead and work through the STACK of other games that came out over the Xmas period.
I actually feel really sorry for Mythic. They did so much that was right, compared to Funcom's Age of Conan, and had a massive encouraging start and now they're shutting servers and are faced with tracts of lands that are empty because noone is doing the public quests.
Of course what they really need to do is introduce the WH40K Tyranids as a playable race. Heh, it works for DOW2.

Re:Please!

[StarTux]

All that aside, the game isn't doing that bad as long as you're on a server that is active. Actually, I'm enjoying it way more than I ever did WoW or EQ.

Does an MMO have to be as successful as WoW to be successful? Also, how long does it take for an MMO to even reach the proportions which WoW attained?

Re:Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean how an article on WAR gets filled with posts proclaiming how great WoW is, all of which get modded up even though they're off-topic?

Slashdot: News for Apple, Nintendo, and Blizzard fanboys.

Re:Please!

[Morlark]

Was that really a screw up though? I think it's more a trade off between having stable servers that you later have to migrate away from, or having massively overpopulated servers for the first month and an empty ghost town thereafter, thereby necessitating migrations and server merges. As far as first impressions of a game go, I think I'd prefer server stability, tbh.

Re:Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

EVE boring as hell? Then it must be exactly like World of Warcraft!

Loving this game...

[SpuriousLogic]

I have to say, I am really enjoying this game. I'm not getting the grind feel form other games, and playing it way more casually, but still having a blast because of the RVR. Having a free expansion is nothing but gravy. Sweet wonderful gravy....

Re:Loving this game...

[Craptastic Weasel]

Be wary of those Gravy Bombs though.

Signed. The Pie Assassin

Re:Loving this game...

[tbcpp]

I have to agree with the parent. I got this game about two weeks ago. So far, my wife and I have hit lvl16 (out of 40 lvls) and we've only been playing for a hour a day. Very casual oriented. I have a level 64 pally in WoW, and the leveling rate is so insanely slow we just gave up. You can't do PvP or even run raids in WoW until you hit 80 these days since getting 25 people in the lvl 64 range is next to impossible. In War, the RvR battles are everywhere, and you can actually help out as a lvl 16. I will be playing war for a long time....

They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Petersko]

I bought Warhammer Online, signed up, played for most of the first month, cancelled, and haven't been back since.

That game brought my machine to it's knees, and I have an Intel Q6600-based quad-core machine with 4GB memory with an nVidia 8800GTS video card. It wasn't bad in most of the world, but when I was in the chaos city it became completely unusable.

When I first logged in, there were some people in the beginning areas. Then I didn't log in for a couple days, and those areas were completely deserted. I couldn't find anybody to do the group quests in. I was also getting tired of being one-shotted from a ridiculous distance if I happened to stray to close to an order town.

In the end I was completely underwhelmed with the gameplay, disgusted by the performance, perplexed at the unbelievable linearity of the game, and simply unwilling to waste any more time on it.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[MaineCoon]

Interesting; I have a very similiar system (Q9300, 4 GB, nVidia 8800 512 GT), and it ran pretty well on max settings, 1680x1050 in a Window (on 1920x1200 desktop).

Did you update your drivers? If I recall there was a known issue with older nVidia drivers.

The server migration did wonders - they overestimated expansion based on early demand and expanded too quickly, but by allowing people to migrate from lower pop servers to some mid pop servers, things really picked up.

That said, I did get bored and quit after a month, but I get bored of every game after a month or so (even WoW).

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Faw]

I have almost your same configuration and I'm running it without a problem:

MB: EVGA nforce 780i
CPU: Q6700 (not much difference)
MEM: 4GB OCZ
VIDEO: 8800 Ultra

I even tried it in a friend's Toshiba laptop and it worked perfectly. I don't know why it didn't ran well on your machine.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[furby076]

Something is wrong with your comp. I have a dual core system and my video card is a bit weaker then yours and I had no problems with the graphics. Prior to that i had P4 - 3.02 ghtz with Gigbyte motherboard 2gigs ram and a radea 9700. It crawled but at min settings I could play it. Given your system is WAY better then my old system I think you should check your computer.

What did annoy me is that ranged had SUCH a far range that if an archer was on top of a hill he could blast you and you could not get away from you or out of his LOS so you were literally toast. But that is just gameplay.

With regards to LFG - the game is based on PVP you should have gone for the scenarios not the world events.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a much much worse PC than the one you describe and I can play with medium to high settings without any problems. I'm running a dual core 2.2ghz AMD, an old AGP Nvidia GeForce, and 3GB RAM.

Update your drivers and update the game, there were a lot of graphics related bugs in the beginning

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[ivan256]

Q6600 = 2x 4MB L2 cache
Q9300 = unified 6MB L2 cache

I can easily see that being a huge performance problem. If the game is threaded, and the scheduling doesn't take the separate caches into account, a lack of affinity could cause terrible performance.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Anonymous Coward]

its actually not computer specs thats the problem. its mythics netcode.

instead of comparing PC specs lets compare geographical location.

WAR servers are kept in VA. all of the NA ones atleast. that creates lag in the game if you're connecting from somewhere else (HAWAII FOR ME) or have a crappy traceroute to the servers.

WAR ran fine on my PC but once more ppl got into the screen it dropped from 90+ fps to 13 and never recovered. their netcode prediction sucks balls too. i constantly see people teleport yards back, or during keep sieges i see defenders walking up to the ledge - falling off and walking few more yards until they suddenly teleport back ontop of the ledge (on their screen i bet they didnt even fall or reach the ground)

great classes but the netcode fails
war is everywhere... during peak hours on your server and if one side isnt completely demoralized by the time you log on.

and the game isnt PVP based its RvR bases. you should be out trying to win over zones and capture fortresses instead of being in scenarios (at tier 4 that is).

oh and dont get me started on grind PQs to advance RvR zone control... *ZzZzZzZz

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Faw]

Well I'm in Puerto Rico so I'm kind of far too (not as far as Hawaii though), anyway I guess there's a price to pay for living in Hawaii. :)

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I have a Dual Core 6600, 4 GB Memory and a nVidia 8800GTS, and Inevitable City runs fine on my computer... though in massive PvP battles of 40 vs 40 it lags down a bit, not unplayable, but still a bit too bad.

Anyways, Warhammer is in no way as polished as WOW, but in my opinion the PvP is more accessible, as in I can find PvP where the teams work together and the healers heal, while I so far haven't been ganked (in a fight where I stood no chance) more than once or twice.

It's a different game, and I like it.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[furby076]

I guess there's a price to pay for living in Hawaii. :)

Lot's of SPAM imo.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Taulin]

I agree. I have a 7800GTX and an AMD64, and the game runs incredibly well on medium-high settings. The only frame rate problems I come into, and it isn't that bad, is when I have like 60 people on the screen at once during a RvR battle, which are fun as hell. Drivers, drivers, drivers!

-Phil
Urban Legions - Awesome Online Text-based Super Hero RPG!
www.UrbanLegions.net

Notes?

[RobXiii]

I'm disappointed they havent listed any patch notes, or game balance changes. WAR is a good game, but there's definite issues with it. Whoever coded the mail system likely did the buff/debuff updates. I have a great gaming PC (new quad core + 4870x2) and I can get 30-50FPS during a keep raid, UNTIL I target something with lots of buffs/debuffs on it, such as a keep door. Even with buffs disabled, nothing showing on my screen I instantly drop to 1 frame every 3 seconds. Theres some serious issues there. I'm also an Archmage, and really sick of invisible Witch Elves dropping me before I can even cast one instant ability, thanks to stun + silence and obscene DPS. Other than those issues, I have a great time in open combat with my guild, there's routinely 100+ people online each night in our guild, fun times!

Re:Notes?

[Craptastic Weasel]

Try out buffthrottle if you haven't already.

But aye. A keep door buff/debuff list gets long as hell when 40 players are beating on it.

I dunno about all the people saying too bad Warhammer didn't beat WOW or something similar, as if WOW is just gonna fall over dead after Warhammer was released. Our server (Vortex) is active as hell and we have a great community on the forums. I'll take a small group of good players over a massive influx of whiny brats any day of the week.

Re:Notes?

[Faw]

Nice to see another Vortex member. Of course if you're an *evil* Vortex member then I hate you.

Re:Notes?

[Kelz]

Vortex huh? Taurath here on the forums and ingame :) I believe theres another post coming soon about patch notes and balance changes/etc today. The next patch I believe is next week and should be big.

Re:Notes?

[Craptastic Weasel]

heh whats up Taurath and Faw, Caliber here. Order Engineer.

Vortex rocks!

Re:Notes?

[Craptastic Weasel]

p.s. Damn Faw, a 5 digit Slashdot ID. /salute

Re:Notes?

[Kelz]

Oh I know you quite well :P

Re:Notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

and really sick of invisible Witch Elves dropping me before I can even cast one instant ability, thanks to stun + silence and obscene DPS.

A) You're an AM. WEs are supposed to take you down. That's what we do.
B) Find some better tanks, or
C) Re-roll WP like the other 99% of Order healers.

xoxox,
a witch elf.

Re:Notes?

[Zelgadiss]

I'm also an Archmage, and really sick of invisible Witch Elves dropping me before I can even cast one instant ability, thanks to stun + silence and obscene DPS.

Sounds like rogues from WoW. Of all things to emulate...

Support sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Mythic's technical support sucks balls.

Re:Of course it's free

[brkello]

No, it has to be "free". The game just barely came out. They said they had to delay some content because it wasn't ready. The game still lacked a lot of polish when it came out. If they charged from this it would be too soon. If they waited until it wouldn't be too soon a lot of people would be irate that the stuff should have been in the game wasn't there.

Score +1, Funny.

[Saelorn]

My argument never claimed that WoW was fun, or that console RPGs were more or less fun. I was just comparing the value per hours played. Obviously, if you don't like the game then you're not going to play it and you get something like $50/per hour before you don't renew for that next month.

Writing batch files isn't fun by any stretch of the imagination, though, so that's a bad example; a better one would be a basketball which might give someone 100 hours of enjoyment per $1 spent, if you're the type of person who would rather do that sort of thing.

City of Heroes...

[Anonymous Coward]

.... has been doing this from pretty much day 1. It's true that there has been one paid 'expansion' (City of Villains), but every other content change, which has touched on every aspect of the game, has been free.

To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Satanboy]

I am going to post this because I have seen so many people complain about system requirement issues in warhammer.

There is a CUSTOM button in your preferences for graphics.

If you click this button, you can do the following:
You can set spell abilities to off, yourself, your party, or everyone.
You can adjust the buffer to use more of your cards RAM (this is set to 0 by default but moving the slider 3/4 of the way speeds the game up immensely for me).
You can change the resolution.
You can change the way shadows are displayed.
You can adjust the detail level of the textures in the game.

I run a 2.4 ghz dual core intel with 2 gb of ram and a 3870 vid card and the game runs fine. I've taken keeps with 4 warbands (thats 96 people folks) and have had some slowdown, but it was not a slideshow.

The game handles massive amounts of people very well, and adjusting your in game resolution settings should be a no brainer for anyone playing video games on their PC.

With all that said, i am VERY pleased to hear of the updates that are coming.
A suicidal dwarf and a berzerking orc will be fun to get to play around with.
Getting new lands? I'm still exploring the ones we have!

But yeah, this game is rocking along very well and I have to say, the devs have been really responsive on whats being done.

I have no complaints, and have absolutely no reason to get into another MMO with how fun this game has turned out to be.

Re:To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Skuld-Chan]

Shame it doesn't have good defaults - I've read at least 3-4 players they lost over that alone.

New mmo's don't seem to understand that you need to appease new players within the trial period or they may never come back. Sometimes they have even less time if they are already happy with an exist MMO (like WoW). This whole release now, and patch later thing really doesn't cut it anymore - even though WoW had a lot of launch issues as well.

Re:To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

WAR won't let me adjust the buffer setting in custom. What the heck? Anybody know why? Can't find anything through Google.

Re:To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Satanboy]

I would suggest posting on warhammeralliance.com at the forums, and getting some help there so as not to derail this thread any further.

Re:To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Craptastic Weasel]

May want to move this to the warhammer forums, but it depends on your video card. If you have lower than 512 it won't let you use the video ram as a buffer since the video card probably needs that ram to handle graphical processing.

They used to let you, but it would cause other issues like low texture qualities and anomalies.

Well their big problem

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that their game really lacks polish, and the leveling SUCKS. It is just boring getting started. Maybe the game gets really good in the high end... But most people aren't going to stick it out for that. We play games to have fun, they need to be fun right away.

There is plenty of room to compete with WoW, even in the fantasy genre. There are a number of things WoW doesn't really focus on, and thus could be improved. Mythic picked a good one in that they decided to concentrate on World PvP which WoW is quite weak in. A PvP focused game could get the players who like WoW, but want better PvP, less PvE. However I don't know if it is actually done well, since there is a large boring level grind to get to it. Their leveling is just really poorly done.

Re:Of course it's free

[Psmylie]

FFXI is SquareEnix, not Sony.

The mini-expansions are three separate quest lines. From what I've heard, there will be no new areas or gameplay added. Pretty much just quests and missions. Therefore, nobody who only wants to play just for the loot has to worry about paying for the expansions.

I like the stories in FFXI enough to buy the mini-expansions, though. They sound like fun.

warhammer, shmorehammer

[yodleboy]

does it have hogger? didn't think so.

Newish Player

[Anonymous Coward]

I played the first month it came out. It ran horribly on my computer after a 30-60 minutes, like it had a memory leak. But no one else complained about it, so I assumed it was just my machine. I put up with that until T3, usually in PVE it wasn't such a big deal but in Scenarios it was bad..and Open RVR it was a slideshow. Back then there were no options to turn things off, and it was so unplayable I got bored of grinding boring ass PVE quests and playing who can knock you into the lava first in Ton Anroc.

Since resubbing last week, I started over on a higher population server but I see a lot of the same issues plus more problems. The game still has the little memory leak quirky behavior although it takes longer to manifest itself..maybe 1.5 or 2 hours if I don't zone a lot. But if I fly around to multiple locations, it creeps in quite suddenly. Then in scenarios, and mind you this is pretty much JUST T1. There are tons of people re-rolling to replay T1 and T2. There are literally unkillable twinks in these scenarios. There was a warrior priest and Knight of Blazing Sun duo who our ENTIRE team could not kill. And these guys were putting out white damage of 170+ each hit non-critical. So after putting up with a night of that, I decided to just leave any scenario that had twinks in them.

Then I began noticing people who seemingly never got any new abilities or learned any new tactics or way of doing things.....even though they played constantly. Then I realized we had bots playing WAR scenarios. Now bots pissed me the hell off in WOW because it seemed like during non-peak hours half of each team would quite literally be bots running their little fixed paths. Now to see them in WAR, where the game is pretty much ONLY fun in PVP is really bad. I petitioned probably 12 of these guys in a two day period, and they are still around botting their little heads off.

Im about to the point where I'm gonna try contacting their billing department to complain about poor game play and get my sub fee back, and if that doesn't work just do a charge back. Because these guys don't seem to be doing anything to improve the experience of the game at any tier if all those T4 people keep rerolling...and T1 has a bot infestation that continues on after being petitioned days ago.

And apparently the name I used in beta, at retail, hadn't played in two months has suddenly become a naming violation....mysteriously after I started petitioning about these bots a lot. And the email they say to send questions to, bounces back with configuration errors. Way to go Mythic, it's almost like you haven't had previous MMO experience!

He's one of the NPC's you insensitive clod!

[freaker_TuC]

Can't you see ? He's one of the NPC's?

Truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual expansion was cancelled due to low subs after launch. Box sales were amazing but the turnover is really bad. So bad that they let more than half of go from our dept because we the game didnt meet goals.

This content was already planned out as a big new dungeon. Blizzard already does this and calls it a patch. Mythic doesnt have the balls to be honest thats all or this is how marketing spins things.

Old WHFB player

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it supr ironic that the Slayer is being added to a game where he cannot die.

Re:Old WHFB player

[Anonymous Coward]

"supremely", not "supr"...

They learned

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's basically what the expansions solve.
TBC had about 12 5 mans at max level.
WoTLK has around the same, and also has raids that you don't need to "clock in" for, as the requirements aren't as harsh.

and $700? you're telling me you wouldn't spend that on let's say uh, golf? or swimming over a few years? movies? pretty much any activity?

Focus..

[Solus_Emsu]

Who'd have thought this would turn into one giant WoW vs. WAR debate instead of discussing the actual content being released.. I'm shocked.

allright

[shnull]

i seriously regretted starting warhammer without the content they left out, maybe this might crank it up just enough to be like a little different from wow before i realise that it's all the same ... for a few weeks ...

Re:Of course it's free

[Morlark]

Eh, I think he meant more that they could hypothetically decide to charge for it, if they were dumb. Oh, sorry, I meant "monetize" it. That's what they call it these days when a company gouges their customers, right? That Sony stuff strikes me as more than a little silly though. I'd heard about that before, and it just baffles me why anybody would pay to get ripped off in that way. Certainly I wouldn't pay for an expansion the size of this WAR content patch, unless it really was dirt cheap.