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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."
It's WoW; you come for the good ideas, and stay for the bugs.
(Mostly because you're unable to logout)
You don't get it. EVE doesn't have "instances". It's one giant instance. Every player is able to communicate and meet up with every other player at any time.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
Fun
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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 can handle over one thousand players in a single system/"zone". Places like Jita (THE trade hub of EVE) regularily pass 1300 concurrent active users at one time. In one star system. Admittedly though the vast majority of Jita players are "passing through" or conducting trade and not shooting each other in the face. Star systems out in the areas of space where players create their own empires can have fleet battles that push past 400 people per side, though admittedly there are occurences of heavy lag. In the past (IE one year ago or more) this would be instead extreme lag to the point of killing the node. In the last year however they have implemented heavy server and database optimizations that are pushing the boundary of stable large group combat higher and higher. I wish I could have better references, but I know several battles have been fought that were past 300v300 and were done with a minimum of lag (the reason I remember this is because of the comments wondering WHERE the lag was). CCP devs have also stated that they've just begun major DB optimization and they expect greater improvements to come. Of course, that's them selling their product, but they do recognize it is a major issue, and they ARE working towards correcting it. To turn the question on its head, how many people can a single WOW server handle, in one instance, in one specific zone? All PVPing against each other or providing remote support in one manner or another? Personally I'd be suprised if that number was any higher than what EVE is currently capable of.
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!
Eat shit! A few thousand billion flies can't be wrong!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Is it possible to trade with players from other realms via this cross-realm instances? Possibly players could even schedule a meeting in the lesser frequented instances.
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.
Is there a way to friend someone on another server, so you can do an instance with these specific people, or is it always random people to fill out your group?
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.
Months, huh? I call bullshit. Some guild with no life will beat Arthas into paste before the end of the year.
The only possible things that could put it off until the new year is (1) Blizzard hard coded it so each wing is opened on a set schedule, regardless of how fast the bosses in that wing are beaten and (2) Christmas break.
Which is exactly what Blizzard did.
The first wing opened now, the next wing will open 28 days from now. There are a total of 4 wings, and you need to complete ICC on normal mode before you can do hard modes.
If you're seeing smaller numbers, then you have something wrong with your computer.
like.. using a higher resolution than you are?
(2560*1600 here)
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).
WoW doesn't allow you to interact with them all, yet, but it will. Battle.net 2.0 will allow this when it (hopefully) comes out next year with Starcraft 2.
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.
No, it has not been set aside. They have simply made it easy for those people who are already instance grinding to do so easily. Instance grinding has always been "soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring".
Personally I'm on the last stages of equipping a character for raiding and the ability to go from instance to instance worked great for me yesterday, as it did for everybody I grouped with. I did not hear a single negative comment from anyone yesterday. (And we all know how much players bitch when they don't like a new patch.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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.
Different people focus on different aspects of the game as large as WoW. I believe your experiences are valid - within the set of playing activities you experience yourself. Please don't over-generalize it to everybody, though. PvE and RP servers (or players) won't be affected as much, because world PvP has never been a big part of their gaming. Guilds raiding progression content will still raid together, because it takes consistent grouping - and their realm-specific social networks will stay within realms because of it. Arena teams, as well, are realm-based. Wintergrasp is a rather popular, successful way to make outdoors PvP meaningful and concentrated in time and space, and it won't get any worse.
The only minus I see for my style of playing is the inability to form Friends list cross-realm and to chat with friends from other realms. I usually add to my Friends list from groups I pick up. I hope Blizzard implements these options soon. They already made a step toward it with cross-realm Ignore list.
WOW servers cap at 30,000 people... they lag like shit at 25,000. Here is the big thing though, >600 players moving in one map will crash the server in wow. In eve there have been BATTLES involving >600 people at once that occur with minimal to no lag over 4~5hour periods.
In any case 54,000 players at once is already an achievement.
I found a work-around to this - you can all just run into the instance manually (instead of being teleported there) and it seems still work - even with the debuff.
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
Errr... from a server POV having characters that move their arms and make noise has NO effect.
EVE doesn't have terrain but wow doesn't have objects in any real sense. In eve bullets/lasers/missiles are actual objects that move and require impact detection. In wow, spells, arrows, w/e are all targeted to a person and they hit or miss, completely run client side. Terrain/obstacles in wow only effect spells half the time... generally you can shoot through most obstacles (this has been improving) but not through terrain. And I imagine you can fly near/through bigger ships. that requires impact detection going on.
Disclaimer: I haven't played eve nearly as much as wow.
When I first started playing WoW there wasn't any of this fancy "meeting stones" or "looking for group". If you wanted to get people together to play you shouted into random channels in Ironforge. No cross realm ques for battlegrounds and there were no PVP rewards, and we liked it! If you wanted a horse, you saved your money from level one and didn't even THINK of buying anything until you had it, and if you wanted something other than a horse TOO BAD. Everything was better then. Loot meant something and everyone in your group looked out for you and made sure the right people got the right gear. Back in my day Paladins were ineffective but unkillable, shamans were GODS and if you wanted to leave Tarren Mill you WALKED because the flightmaster was DEAD. You think it's hard now? Imagine running MC and hoofing it back to your body in Blackrock, uphill both ways!
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
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