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New WoW Patch Brings Cross-Server Instances
ajs writes "World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion was staggered into 4 phases. The fourth and final phase, patch 3.3, was released on Tuesday. This patch is significant in that it will be the first introduction of one of the most anticipated new features in the game since PvP arenas: the cross-realm random dungeon, as well as the release of new end-game dungeons for 5, 10 and 25-player groups. The patch notes have been posted, and so has a trailer. The ultimate fight against the expansion's antagonist, the Lich King a.k.a. Arthas, will be gated as each of the four wings of the final dungeon are opened in turn — a process that may take several months. The next major patch after 3.3 (presumably 4.0) will be the release of Cataclysm, the next expansion."
Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.
See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.
To implement that, they made it so that people teleport directly into the instance instead of having to travel in the open game world to the instance's entrance, because you can't see people from other servers in the open world.
Since there is also generally a very unhealthy focus on instanced content rather than open-world content, what it means in practice is that wow is not really a MMO anymore. People hang out in capital cities, which function as glorified lobbies like you find in non-MMO multiplayer games, they form a party and then teleport inside of a private dungeon.
You have almost no opportunity to meet random people on your adventures anymore because people of maximum levle have seldom any reason to bother ever going out in the open world. And leveling from 1 to 80 has also been made trivial and is therefore a minor part of the game.
It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring. This game has turned from a MMORPG into a glorified dungeon crawling game.
So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster... but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
No, but I don't need to pick my friends based on their preferred server.
No, I have friends on multiple servers, which means WoW doesn't allow me to interact with them all. Even with two friends this is a problem.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
I wouldn't count on that. In particular, I'd look into how they've managed (with some success) to support what they have.
Eve would've burned to the ground a long time ago if they couldn't scale.
I'm not laying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game. I loved playing Unreal and BF1942, but if they somehow made servers that could handle 100,000 people I wouldn't want to play on them. It's just too many people. Blizz and other companies try to find a balance between too many players in one place, and not enough. I think they have succeeded in that I can usually find a group to go wherever, and don't lag out when I zone into the capital cities.
As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins. If your server is 75% alliance, world PVP is going to be pretty meaningless/frustrating if you're horde. The only way to make it fun is to try and make sure the same number of people fight each other at the same time, which is what battlegrounds and arenas are for.
Finally your assertion that WoW is a glorified dungeon crawling game strikes me as baseless, given that I spend ~20% of my time going to dungeons and 80% having fun killing people in battgrounds/arenas. WoW to me is like TFT2, but with swords and magic instead of guns.
There are a lot of people who seem relatively uninformed, are basing their statements in some variety of hearsay, and/or their experiences on a patch day. I've been playing WoW on and off for 3 years. The experience can be a mixed one, it is certain (as all things in life). However, I can assuredly state that this is one of the most well designed games I've played. The changes being made (faster leveling, obtaining gear being made easier) are designed to increase the appeal to casual players (which I don't at all see as a bad thing), and allow them a sense of achievement with relatively little playtime. This in no way prevents one from "min/maxing" their characters with harder modes, etc... The challenge in this game is alive and well for those who chose to go after it (corpse run lol).
Whether or not any individual thinks WoW is a good game is subjective... however from my personal experience, and the continuing success of a game more than 5 years old, I'm inclined to say that WoW is a quality product (despite patch day bugs: black screen of death anyone?), with huge amounts of appealing content for a variety of different kinds of users.
That is all.
> That is simply not acceptable and thus WoW fails for me as a platform for interacting with my friends, which seems to be it's main purpose.
Fail. WoW's main purpose is to be an online RPG. If you want to interact with your friends, you use some crap like Facebook.
some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp)
Open world PVP is not interesting, and has never been interesting. I played WoW extensively in the early days on a PVP server. 99% of open world PVP consists of one of the two following scenarios:
1. Higher level person ganks lower level person. Lower level person stands no chance.
2. Group of people gank smaller group/single person. Smaller group/single person stands no chance.
I don't know what you consider "interesting," but I prefer scenarios in which the most skilled competitors win, and not the players who have simply spent more time in the game (to get a higher level) or brought more friends along.
Patch 3.3 is Blizzard's big squeeze for subscription cash before the next expansion. Each wing past the first wing of the raid dungeon is locked out on a real-time timer such that the dungeon incrementally opens. What's worse, is the final boss of each wing has an attempt count which also increases linearly as more wings open. All this is to forcefully stop well-coordinated teams of players from beating the dungeon quickly, and I don't just mean in one week. There are guilds out there who are capable of beating this thing in a couple months in about the 50th percentile of raiding guilds, but with the harsh attempt count on the bosses of each wing it will most likely lock these guilds out for more than that, keeping the subscription cash flowing longer than it needs to. To top it all off, hard modes won't be accessible until the whole dungeon is cleared, and when that happens, they're granting all players a buff to their statistics to make it easier to beat the dungeon. That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.
Blizzard has gotten so addicted to the high revenues that they're willing to implement game mechanics based around keeping people subscribing with minimal content updates. As a result, I've cancelled my subscription and I can safely say I won't be returning to Azeroth again -- ever.
World PVP, imo, is the best, as it's spontaneous and more interesting. It's more "immersive" when you are questing in a zone and you run up on a horde and both of you make that decision of whether or not to attack. Oh, and you left out another scenario: higher level ganks lower level who stood no chance, who then logs out, grabs his higher level toon and perhaps a few of his buddies to come back and wreck shop and seek revenge.
Keep in mind that, just because something isn't fun to YOU, doesn't mean the very same thing isn't way fun to someone else. That's one of the reasons WoW succeeds even when its not always perfect. There's something for everybody in there to enjoy provided you're not focusing on the finger and missing all the heavenly glory (my apologies to Bruce Lee).
Yeah, and with how many of those millions of users can you actually interact while "playing" WoW? Only a fraction of the amount of people online in EVE right now. WoW having a lot of users is of no consequence whatsoever, because you only interact with the folks in your realm, which is never more than a few thousand. In WoW, you are not aware of the millions of other players at all.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Probably not, but with all the work the community has done, Hackintosh's on solid hardware are typically pretty problem free machines (and no, that's not being sarcastic). Generally if a program runs bad on a Hacktinosh that is otherwise behaving then it's because the program itself is buggy, not the machine.
As someone who actually owns a real Macbook and a G4 Mac but has a hacktinosh to play games because the specs on the other two systems just aren't geared for it, I can honestly say that aside from the Hackintosh showing an AMI BIOS screen at boot followed by a brief Chameleon loader splash you'd literally never know the difference between it and a "real" Mac.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It's a video game... It is supposed to dispense pellets as rapidly as possible. Have you looked at any game developed in the last, what 10 years? When is the last time you actually had to struggle to beat a game and see the content? I had hordes of nintendo games where I never even saw the last few bosses. If it didn't have a cheat code that was pretty much the end. Even something like mike tyson's punch out, I couldn't even get to macho man, let alone tyson, thank god for the cheat code.
Game design has been refined. Now, you get to play the game and enjoy it. Then, if you want to break your balls trying something hard, they give you the option to do it, either through achievements, alternate game modes opening, or whatever.
Wow continues this design by having easy and hard modes, and surprise, the hard modes...are HARD. Perfect design IMHO.
Looking at this list of changes, sounds to me like they are taking steps to remove long waits to play the game. Are you so hung up on EQ that you thought those late night 4am 'get my corpse before it rots or quit the game' runs were fun? Hey, you really should WORK for those jboots, have fun camping the most boring fucking zone in the world for 18 hours for the quest drop.
Does anybody want that in a game? Why is that even there? We want to get in to a dungeon with people and play the GD game. If you want to play those old instances that most of the player base has been doing over and over for the past 5 years (hence boring, who wants to do that?), congrats, look at the patch notes. Now you can probably queue up for that instance and from a huge pool of players you can find the rare 4 others that want to run the old instance at the proper level. Why is this a bad thing again?
Yeah, it is an issue, but it's a short-term issue.
It's because Blizzard builds their capacity based on normal usage, not on patch-day usage. I think this is just as much an issue with their tendency to bundle up lots of changes into one large content patch rather than stagger them on a more gradual basis.
I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity.
You have clearly never played WoW. People with no clue about software design are CONSTANTLY bitching about Blizzard. The point was despite the disparaging remarks above the normally intolerant players were actually enjoying the new system. Believe me, when it breaks people complain.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction