World of Warcraft: Cataclysm To Launch Dec. 7th

Blizzard announced today that the third expansion to World of Warcraft, dubbed Cataclysm, is set for launch on December 7th. In addition to upping the level cap to 85 and including several new high level zones, the expansion will revamp the parts of Azeroth that have been around since WoW's initial launch, bringing the 1-60 leveling experience more in line with the improvements Blizzard has made in the expansions. Cataclysm will also give players two new races to play, Goblins and Worgen, who have joined the Horde and the Alliance, respectively.

Comments

Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Real ID lost me. I don't play online games so I can be stalked and harassed, and by failing to make privacy and security a priority from the start, you ruined any chance I'd trust you to handle it right,.

So I won't give you money.

I'm sure you miss me.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MBGMorden]

Huh? You realize that you don't have to add ANYONE to your RealID list right? Nobody has been added to my RealID list, and so nobody "stalks or harrasses" me.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[NiceGeek]

RealID is completely voluntary. They even backed of on the requirement of it's use on their forums.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[vux984]

I thought he covered it in his post:

by failing to make privacy and security a priority from the start, you ruined any chance I'd trust you to handle it right,.

Doesn't really matter if they 'backtracked' and 'fixed it up AFTER the community when batshit' to him.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[digitalnoise615]

Real ID lost me. I don't play online games so I can be stalked and harassed, and by failing to make privacy and security a priority from the start, you ruined any chance I'd trust you to handle it right,.

So I won't give you money.

I'm sure you miss me.

Don't pay much attention, do ya? Real ID isn't required, period, just a Battle.net login, which isn't the same thing. You don't have to share your Battle.Net login with anyone, thus they can't find you unless you willingly give it out - Blizzard is putting the responsibility for your safety and privacy in your hands, where it belongs.

Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Bill_the_Engineer]

WoW jumped the shark when Blizzard created achievements and players started to use them as a criteria to participate in a raid.

Gear-score came along and gave the finishing blow.

I have nothing against requiring some prerequisites like completed a lower level raid or have a reasonable gear score. Unfortunately most players who spam the trade channel for a raid pug require that you've already achieved that particular raid instance or a gear score so high that requires you to have farmed that raid repeatedly.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MBGMorden]

They announced a PLAN to make RealID required to post on the official forums (an activity that only a small percentage of players even participate in anyways). After community backlash they NEVER IMPLEMENTED that plan.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Kenja]

You can also just disable real id altogether. Sure its a despicable system, but so long as its not enforced I can overlook it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[B4light]

I don't want to play a game with FURRIES in it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Huh? You realize that you don't have to add ANYONE to your RealID list right? Nobody has been added to my RealID list, and so nobody "stalks or harrasses" me.

This is how we know that the Coward is being dishonest. Anyone even remotely familiar with it realizes that none of the 'DANGER DANGER' stuff came true. Anyone touting it as true today is either not a player or is deliberately being false - probably both are true, actually.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they backed off from it, but that's like an abusive spouse apologizing after hitting you.

Did you seriously just compare an company considering then declining to disable anonymous commenting on their forum to spousal abuse? Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[cgenman]

This is the dumbest argument I've ever heard of. They had an idea they thought would make the experience better. They put it to the public. The public hated the idea. They responded to the public and binned the idea.

And you're complaining that you can't trust them? You could just as easily say that they're trying new ideas to improve the experience, and they're clearly listening to their customers.

There is a pretty big difference between looking for ways of making people responsible for their actions online and hitting your wife.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[NiceGeek]

To use your abhorrent analogy, they never "hit" anyone. The policy was never implemented. They listened to their customers, how terrible of them.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[jo_ham]

From my experience too, on returning after a hiatus to find the gear score thing in place (and my character still being pretty well end-raid geared (ulduar 25/tournament 25), it seemed that the people demanding the really high gearscores and pre-completed raids didn't meet their own requirements - ie, they just wanted boosting.

I'll still never forget being turned away from a Karazan badge farming run on my 6/8 T6 mage with Sunwell off pieces for "too little spell power". Perhaps it was because I wasn't 8/8 - the sunwell pieces were better than the equivalent T6.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

WoW jumped the shark when Blizzard created achievements and players started to use them as a criteria to participate in a raid.

Gear-score came along and gave the finishing blow.

I have nothing against requiring some prerequisites like completed a lower level raid or have a reasonable gear score. Unfortunately most players who spam the trade channel for a raid pug require that you've already achieved that particular raid instance or a gear score so high that requires you to have farmed that raid repeatedly.

I read an opinion, which isn't necessarily mine by the way, that basically said that Cataclysm was the answer to all of these woes introduced by the new meta-game. The theory goes like this:

1) The talents and values on gear are simplified, making the basics of the game very easy to grasp without help.

2) The difficulty is ramped way, way up. The standing intention now is mana/resource conservation along with the return crowd control. Also, there will be a progression of 'Normals > Heroics > Raids' that cannot be skipped.

3) Two deeply-critical roles are seeing huge nerfs - tanks/healing - while damage is getting a sizeable buff, creating an inherent conflict of interests.

4) Guild are getting rewards, which translate into costs when one leaves said guild.

This is said to result in a climate where you're never, ever, ever going to want to play with people you don't like. Everyone will be dieing together, a lot. Victories will be by the skin of your teeth, and only when everyone is playing at their best. The days of 'one-wipe-and-bail' will be gone, and the players who seek to judge your ability by Gearscore+Achievement won't be worth playing with. You'll be intended to foster relationships with players and keep them around. You'll guild up for the rewards, and you'll focus on doing this stuff together to get more of them. As you do so, you'll work on getting more skill for those that need it, as pugging just won't be a workable idea.

Or so the theory goes, anyway.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[CFBMoo1]

You can now shut off RealID completely from the account settings page.

Account > Settings > Communication Preferences

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Have you even used the Real ID friends list? First of all, someone has to know the email you use for your WoW account (granted, this is probably easily guessed in a lot of cases). Second, they send a friend request which you must manually accept before they can see anything.

In other words, Real ID has been opt out from the start by design. If you never add anyone or confirm anyone, no one can see your real name or track you, and your WoW experience is no different than before they added this feature.

This isn't something they added 3 days ago with the web based controls, this is how it has worked since it was originally implemented. Also, from the very beginning, if you wanted to go through the hassle of setting up the parental control system you could have completely disabled Real ID if you were super paranoid about it for some reason.

Basically, the main addition they added a few days ago was the option to disable the display of friends of friends, and made the method of totally disabling Real ID less complex. While I think the ability to hide yourself on the friend of friend list should have been in from the start, the simple solution beforehand was to simply not add any Real ID friends. Any method of "totally disabling" Real ID is just paranoia by people who apparently lack the self control to not click "accept" every time some random stranger sends them a friend request in a video game (other than the pre-existing parental controls method, which was the specific case of a parent of a minor child exercising their right to control their child's online engagement level).

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

It's an opt in system already. You opt-in by adding Real ID friends to your friend list. If you have no Real ID friends you're already opted out. The hard disable on the website is just to make idiots feel better about their inability to avoid clicking "confirm" on every pop-up they ever see.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[NiceGeek]

How is that Blizzard's fault? Neither GS nor achievements are actually built-in requirements for raids.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Binary Boy]

Just to be clear, Real ID - is opt *in* as you have to explicitly use it. Blizzard doesn't automatically give everyone Real ID friend status and then require you to opt out. Or did I misunderstand your use of "opt out"?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[VGPowerlord]

They announced a PLAN to make RealID required to post on the official forums (an activity that only a small percentage of players even participate in anyways). After community backlash they NEVER IMPLEMENTED that plan.

If you check, I believe that they stated that they're choosing not to implement that plan YET and refused to comment on what they'll do in the future.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

It's not voluntary on Starcraft II. You can't create multiple characters, or even ever change your one character's name.

That and every time I start the game there's my real name in bold 24 point letters and this macro-lens close up of this real ugly guy. And links to Facebook. Most of the time the game shows videos you can't turn off of cigarette smoking. Gross. Made me really not want to play it.

I returned it for a refund.

My guess is that somebody at that company is trying to turn it into a social networking business and couldn't care less about making a product their customers want. The main point of games, for many of us, is to forget the real world for a bit.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Idiomatick]

Halving repair costs would do that as well. I'm sure bliz can come up with other money sinks. (Would be nice to hear this being true but i've not heard anything.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't say healing/tanking are being "nerfed" in the same sentence as damage is being "buffed". Damage gets "buffed" every patch by that logic. It's a non-statement. If you're talking about PvE, how does player damage going up have anything to do with player healing going up? If you're talking about PvP, player health pools are ballooning to huge levels vs. player damage. I'd call that a pretty huge damage nerf when the "time to kill" every player without healing goes up by a factor of 2. If anything that's a healing buff in PvP because it allows healers time to react or sit in crowd control without worrying that their teammate will die in a global cooldown.

The only logical sense is player damage vs. tank threat. But Blizzard has been buffing tank threat multipliers by huge amounts every test realm patch (which are coming out about every 2 days now) to try and fix the problem. That indicates that Blizzard considered tanks having low threat to be a bug, not part of their design.

Anyway, don't repeat stupid shit that you don't understand.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[pauls2272]

t2) The difficulty is ramped way, way up. The standing intention now is mana/resource conservation along with the return crowd control. Also, there will be a progression of 'Normals > Heroics > Raids' that cannot be skipped.

Interesting. It might be worth my checking out then. I dropped the game after Patch 3.0 or so when they ramped the damage up so high that Crowd Control became meaningless and every encounter was so easy - the hard part was looting the bodies.

Wow became just a tedious grind with no strategy or danger or excitement. Leveling became a real chore.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[vux984]

Have you even used the Real ID friends list?

Of course not. I personally think World of Warcraft sucks monkey balls as a game.
(I realize millions of people apparently think otherwise, and I'm happy for them.)

I enjoyed DiabloII and Starcraft enough, but didn't care to play either through battle.net or whatever its called now. And Starcraft II ... meh... I'll wait until the expansions are out and maybe buy the box set then.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Yeah, AoE-fests are supposed to be dead (tanks can't keep aggro, and heals can't keep up), and as DPS you now have to pace yourself. If you don't you'll go Oom and have to just sit and watch for the rest of the fight.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Spousal abuse is way funnier. This RealID shit is serious!

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[GameMaster]

I, like most people, think that idea was absurd. That said, I will worry about it when they announce their intention to revive it. I'm not going to whine about something that they've shelved, there are too many other scummy practices going on in the game industry that are, actually, being actively implemented.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MBGMorden]

I believe their wording was that they won't be implementing it "at this time". Which is corporate speak for "we changed our minds". Or do you really expect Blizzard's PR people to come out and say "Yo dawg - that RealID stuff we talked about? It was whack so we said the hell wit it!"?

That's just the way corporate drones work. You don't want to let on that your idea was stupid, so you just play it off as lightly as possible.

Either way, it makes very little sense to quit a game based on what you think a company might do in the future, unless you legitimately just don't like the game. Otherwise it would make more sense to actually quit when the change goes live . . .

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

I'm replying to you despite how hard you tried to get the opposite result...

The only logical sense is player damage vs. tank threat.

That's close. Yes PvP and yes in comparison to the other two roles. The damage output, particularly burst can quickly, easily out pace both threat and healing output. DPS are going to have to change from their 'go go go go' mentality or they're going to wipe the entire group. They'll have the ability to AoE, post huge Recount number, etc, but won't be able to do so because tanks and heals can't keep up.

Ergo, conflict of interests.

But you are correct, I'm not talking about PvP. No idea how that's going to go because I haven't done any testing on it whatsoever.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Sorry - Yes PvE*

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Halving repair costs would do that as well. I'm sure bliz can come up with other money sinks. (Would be nice to hear this being true but i've not heard anything.

Funny you should mention that, but for most players they actually increased those costs. Everyone will now pay the price for plate repairs...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Right. I meant to say it was "opt in" from the start. Thanks for the correction.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Also, when Blizzard made the leveling experience quicker, it created an influx of horrible players as well as decent ones. However, most of them have bad attitudes and greedy as hell. In my experiences, this wasn't the case on my server when I first started WoW just after BC launched. While there are much more level-capped players, it's mostly of idiots and that makes finding competent players with good attitudes hard to come by. WoW is infested with 4chan trolls. I'll probably play Cataclysm with some friends but this might be my last attempt at playing. I'm just disappointed with the quality of people I have to play with.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ben4jammin]

I agree and am amazed at the ones that go a step further and ask for DPS scores. Those scores are not static...do you want the scores from singles/small mobs/big mobs? Do you want the scores when I am with weaker/stronger/about the same DPS players? I have a DK, so you want blood/frost/unholy numbers?...or maybe you should just ask me if I am smart enough to not stand in DoT effects and follow orders and work within the team.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Thanks for confirming my point.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Your SC2 character name is not your Real ID. There's no way anyone can associate you with "Slayer#123" unless you explicitly add them as Real ID friends, the same way in WoW they can't associate you with "Legollaz" unless you explicitly add them.

I do think it's kind of funny that they put your real name in the menu interface, but if that concerns you, no one's making you post screenshots/videos on youtube, either.

As for worrying about the smoking... really? Quit trolling.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW tends to move between extremes. The game itself is polished but game mechanics are in horrible shape and have been for several years. The last expansion was the worst yet in terms of game mechanics. Blizzard has literally programmed all of their customers to want and desire only the easiest of content and that has pretty much destroyed the game for anyone over the age of 10 who might actually want something challenging. On the PvP side Blizzard's insane devotion to the Arena destroyed all other forms of PvP.

I think Blizzard actually noticed this time, because in LK they managed destroy the game mechanics for all three major aspects of play... PvE/environmental, Dungeon & Raiding, and PvP, all at the same time. Instead of moving between aspects which is what happened in BC (before the Arena completely destroyed PvP anyhow) people began to leave.

In Cataclysm Blizzard has promised up and down that they would make the game harder. They've made such promises before, and have never been able to keep them. I really don't hold out much hope.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, there will be pink pony mounts for all.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Blizzard has literally programmed all of their customers to want and desire only the easiest of content and that has pretty much destroyed the game for anyone over the age of 10 who might actually want something challenging.

I know a cool kid wouldn't say this, but I find Wrath challenging. Still haven't downed LK yet. I'm leading a guild where we don't kick for performance reasons, though, so it becomes quite a bit harder.

I find it unfortunate that only the 'turn and burn' people get to say what 'challenging' means. 'Hard mode' was supposed to fix it, but it doesn't it. Even the hardcore complain about that one.

Personally I worry a bit that Cata is attempting to cater to customers that won't be loyal anyway.

Though, you're absolutely correct about the extremes, and I believe we'll see BOTH in this same expansion. I think it will start hard, and gradually slide towards easy.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Rewind]

It's not voluntary on Starcraft II. You can't create multiple characters, or even ever change your one character's name.

That and every time I start the game there's my real name in bold 24 point letters and this macro-lens close up of this real ugly guy. And links to Facebook. Most of the time the game shows videos you can't turn off of cigarette smoking. Gross. Made me really not want to play it.

I returned it for a refund.

My guess is that somebody at that company is trying to turn it into a social networking business and couldn't care less about making a product their customers want. The main point of games, for many of us, is to forget the real world for a bit.

Seriously? You returned the game because it shows YOU your own name? Was it a surprise? Did you not know your own name previously? You do realize it shows no one else that information unless you tell it to. And you thought the default avatar was "ugly" and were offended by CG models of smoking? Also you lied about the Facebook bit. If you never turn it on (and I don't even know how you turn it on so it isn't in your face or anything) then you never see it.

I hate sounding like a jerk, but those reasons are really silly.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

Either way, it makes very little sense to quit a game based on what you think a company might do in the future

Its ok to penalize a company for bad behavior. Its the only influence we consumers/customers have.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MetalPhalanx]

I have nothing against requiring some prerequisites like completed a lower level raid or have a reasonable gear score. Unfortunately most players who spam the trade channel for a raid pug require that you've already achieved that particular raid instance or a gear score so high that requires you to have farmed that raid repeatedly.

These are not requirements set out by Blizzard. They are set out by other players. I know that as an experienced player and raid leader (for over two years), I tend to set the bar higher for pugs I don't know than I would realistically require from players I know. GS and achieves give me a convenient way of getting a general idea of experience level. Most of the pugs that are requiring you to have a high gs are probably doing that deliberately. They specifically DON'T want you if you're new to the content. They DON'T want to have to stop and explain fights to the newbie, especially in ICC where one clueless person flailing around will not only kill themselves, but will also wipe the raid. They DON'T want to wipe 2-3 times on a boss while the newbie "gets it". They are looking for other experienced players to roll through the content quickly and (hopefully) in a relatively painless manner.

Not trying to be argumentative, but you're looking at the pug requirements from the wrong angle.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

Sucks losing the features of it just because I want to protect my name though. Basically, if you own real estate, and you don't want someone to know your home address, phone number, and birth date, you can't use RealID.

If they had implemented it so that it let you use an alias name in-game/in-forums, it would have been a non-issue.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you completely missed the part where I pointed out that, for example, Defensive Stance's bonus threat has been buffed by over 100% several weeks ago (45% -> 100%), and an addition 25% on top of that just in the past week. All the passive threat modifiers for all the tanks have been changed this way. They'll keep going up until the "threat game" is the same as it is on live (at least for single target, or 1-3 targets). Not to mention Vengeance for raid threat scaling.

Tanks not holding aggro on beta/PTR is a bug. Not a design.

Read, then post.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

For what its worth, I used to be a guild master, and I had to kick someone from the guild because they were literally stalking female members of the guild, to the point that they had complained to me about it, as a last-step measure before they went to Blizzard about it. I shudder to think what he would have done if he could have gone to a deep-search web site and gotten their home addresses and phone numbers.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[JohnRoss1968]

If Cigarette smoking is that fucking offensive to you..
FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING ANTISMOKING NAZI FUCKER.
you dont hear us smokers whining that we cant make Mario light up, so stop whining that you cant make someone not light up.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[nschubach]

I find it interesting that the game that pulled most of it's concepts from EQ is reverting to a game of similar design.

Concentration in that game boiled down to having at least 2 classes, a tank and healer (albeit slow, it worked.) They did best with a tank/healer/dps/crowd control.

My supervisor plays a paladin on WoW currently and water cooler talk tells me that he can do so much AOE damage that he keeps tons of mobs on him and plays the role of lead tank for most of his guild events... I remember EQ being focused around letting the tank get aggro and keeping aggro off other players. (I played an enchanter and applied mem blur liberally before the tanks broke mez to clear heal aggro, etc.)

I guess the biggest thing that interests me is how are they going to concentrate more on CC? When I quit playing at level 45 about a month after release there were very few crowd control spells (Turn to chicken and some roots?)

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[LanMan04]

As you do so, you'll work on getting more skill for those that need it, as pugging just won't be a workable idea.

Well, looks like most people with kids and a job will stop playing. I jump on at 9:30pm on Friday and Saturday nights. Whoever is on, I play with. If I have to maintain build connections, I'm done for.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ironhandx]

So its going back to how it used to be pre-TBC is what you're saying? The only limiter on my DPS back in MC/BWL/AQ etc was tank threat(besides the odd fight that I wound up dead for some reason(usually my own stupidity). I had far outpaced the threat by that time. To the point where on long fights I would hide in a safe-ish corner to go to the bathroom and come back and catch up.

Though once on my hunter that had me sitting there as the only one still alive because the boss hadn't reacquired aggro on me after I FDed and I jumper cabled the priest. For some reason we were always short of warlocks back then. And priests, I wasn't exaggerating when I said "the priest"

If you're saying what I think you're saying, I may have just re-acquired a wow addiction. Up until I just read that I hadn't even paid any attention to Cataclysm, in fact I'd heard about it so long ago I figured it was probably already out by now until I saw this posted and didn't care too much.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Tanks not holding aggro on beta/PTR is a bug. Not a design.

Not exactly. They have stated they want to keep threat low. Ghostcrawler explained what you're seeing as their not having a firm grasp of what the other changes were going to do to threat. They had other nerfs on deck, but it turned out that the underlying equation changes had more of an impact than desired, so they weren't needed.

If you think they're going to bring it back up as high as it was, you're the one who needs to do some reading.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[AltairDusk]

As Blizzard said they designed the system mainly for people to use with their real life friends. I don't know about you but my real life friends already know where I live. Now I definitely agree that letting you hide your real name could spread the usefulness of the features in RealID to some in-game friends but seeing as that was not their stated design I'll consider that to be a suggestion for new features rather than a failure to implement what they said they would implement.

The real name required for posting on the forums was a stupid idea but it was also never implemented and posting on the official forums is not required to play the game (in fact I personally find other forums far more useful for WoW related discussion and info). Their actual implementation of it has been quite decent, it was opt-in by default and they were upfront about how it worked. A few people got burned with the friends-of-friends deal but again, this was known beforehand and it was a user's choice whether or not to opt in by using the feature.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Find a guild like mine, with people of that same type, and you'll be okay.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Making the game harder is going to be seen, in retrospect, as an error of "New Coke" proportions. Players may like to dissemble that they like challenge and difficulty, but their behavior in the game shows otherwise for the most part. Most players are not masochists, and don't want an entertainment product that causes frustration and anguish.

They need to make the game easier, not harder. Even WotLK wasn't easy enough. Surprisingly few players finished the PvE content on normal mode.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

I guess the biggest thing that interests me is how are they going to concentrate more on CC? When I quit playing at level 45 about a month after release there were very few crowd control spells (Turn to chicken and some roots?)

More classes have it now, and those that had it back then have seen CC significantly buffed from where you'd remember it being.

The general idea is: broken CC = wipe.

It will simply be too much for the tank and healer to handle. Either the tank will get burned over time or a mob will break off and start creaming people.

Bear in mind, though, that this is likely only going to be the case for trash. I'd be rather surprised if very many boss fights had this mechanic.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[AltairDusk]

The lack of a convenient way to opt out of Real ID was bad enough

I don't understand why people keep making this point. RealID was and still is an opt-in system. By default if you did nothing you were not using RealID, only by sending someone a RealID friend request or accepting one would you be opting in to RealID. The forum issue I can see more justification in, though for me that's not enough to write off Blizzard, they never implemented it and I don't use their forums anyway. It just means I'll be keeping an eye on what they do a little more closely.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Yes, this should be close to the same as you're describing, except:

A) Healers are supposed to play more like dps, in that there is an 'optimal' rotation and missing that mark means not doing as well.

and

B) There seems to be a LOT more movement, and a lot more dynamics in the fights. This is intended, I think, to aggravate A, above.

So no more hiding in corners, I don't think...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MBGMorden]

Its ok to penalize a company for bad behavior. Its the only influence we consumers/customers have.

I agree with your statement, but that's not what happened here. Actually, it's quite the opposite. Penalizing for bad behaviour promotes good behavior. Penalizing regardless of behavior (ie, cancelling your account even after the mentioned possibility has been canceled) sends the wrong message.

Consider it like a parent disciplining a child. Your kid comes home and says "Dad! I'm going over to Tommy's to watch some random R rated movie!", and you respond "No you're not! If I catch you over there doing that you're going to be grounded for a month!".

His response: "Sorry dad. You're right, I'll stay home.". You then respond with "Good. You're still grounded for a month just for bringing it up!".

What do you think the kid is going to take away from the incident? It's certainly not going to impart any good life lessons except for "Next time just don't even say anything about it.". That's not the lesson I want kids, or companies, learning.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Gear score and achievements are often used by raid leaders to quickly assess a player's competence. There is less margin for error with the smaller raids, where one person's poor performance can cause repeated wipes. In the past, it wasn't uncommon to have several members of a 40-player raid to be AFK or disconnected even during a boss encounter. That is no longer the case. Raid leaders owe it to the other 8 (or 23) members of the raid to find someone who they can be reasonably sure is capable of performing.

Granted, a player could be carried through enough raids to earn a full set of gear and multiple achievements despite their poor play, but this is the exception rather than the norm.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[RobDude]

I don't mean any offense; but this a huge, huge, huge pet peeve of mine.

He's not saying that RealID is *like* spousal abuse. What he said is that the relationship between the RealID idea being presented and the retraction is similar to the relationship between a domestic abuser beating and then apologizing to their abusee.

At no point does he make light of domestic abuse or say (or even imply) that it's 'the same' or 'as bad' as domestic abuse.

He's just saying that doing something bad (like the original RealID proposal or beating your wife) isn't immediately fixed by a meaningless gesture (backing out at the last minute, apologizing after you beat your wife).

I'm not saying I agree with his argument or not; but I am saying - why the hell do people get their panties in a wad over this?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

How is that Blizzard's fault? Neither GS nor achievements are actually built-in requirements for raids.

To be fair, Gearscore is now going to be built in in Cata. You're going to have an 'average ilevel' right next to your paper doll.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

My GM is a bit of a security nut (he does work in security though so I suppose that's a good thing) so he changed the name on his account to Xor Malice - problem solved.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

Not trying to be argumentative, but you're looking at the pug requirements from the wrong angle.

The underlying problem I have here is an ethical one. And to be completely honest, it is the same thing that gives me pause about the 'hardcore' level of play.

In order to get that gear, those achievements, etc, time must be invested. Someone, somewhere has to lead that player through that content, show them the ropes, carry them somewhat, and so on. This means that someone gave them a chance and let them into the raid.

Fast-forward to the guy setting up a pug, or reviewing a guild application, who is looking at this material. He (or she) is planning to profit by this effort, by not needing to expend it themselves. Because of the way raid lockouts and guild membership works, they are necessarily doing this at the expense of those that DID invest the time on them.

Now, half of the time the person in question is a truly unpalatable type that didn't quit the guild but got ejected. Gearscore won't tell you that, and that is a tiny bit of shadenfreude in way of consolation. But the other half of the time players that set these requirements are profiting off of the players like myself, and they often take the time to insult me for my efforts.

Just sad, really.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[mitgib]

WoW jumped the shark when Blizzard created achievements and players started to use them as a criteria to participate in a raid.

Gear-score came along and gave the finishing blow.

I have nothing against requiring some prerequisites like completed a lower level raid or have a reasonable gear score. Unfortunately most players who spam the trade channel for a raid pug require that you've already achieved that particular raid instance or a gear score so high that requires you to have farmed that raid repeatedly.

I read an opinion, which isn't necessarily mine by the way, that basically said that Cataclysm was the answer to all of these woes introduced by the new meta-game. The theory goes like this:

1) The talents and values on gear are simplified, making the basics of the game very easy to grasp without help.

2) The difficulty is ramped way, way up. The standing intention now is mana/resource conservation along with the return crowd control. Also, there will be a progression of 'Normals > Heroics > Raids' that cannot be skipped.

3) Two deeply-critical roles are seeing huge nerfs - tanks/healing - while damage is getting a sizeable buff, creating an inherent conflict of interests.

4) Guild are getting rewards, which translate into costs when one leaves said guild.

This is said to result in a climate where you're never, ever, ever going to want to play with people you don't like. Everyone will be dieing together, a lot. Victories will be by the skin of your teeth, and only when everyone is playing at their best. The days of 'one-wipe-and-bail' will be gone, and the players who seek to judge your ability by Gearscore+Achievement won't be worth playing with. You'll be intended to foster relationships with players and keep them around. You'll guild up for the rewards, and you'll focus on doing this stuff together to get more of them. As you do so, you'll work on getting more skill for those that need it, as pugging just won't be a workable idea.

Or so the theory goes, anyway.

What this is saying to me is the game will be played by those who have time and wish to devote it to the game, everyone else will not see the value to continue to pay for it. I play more then most, but much less then those hard core raiders out there. Our guild has wiped on Litch King for weeks, it's just a hard fight for us to get the mechanics down. If every fight is going to make that look like a walk in the park, I'd suspect most will vote with their wallet and leave the game. I had been hearing how the game was going to be seriously dumbed down, which makes sense if you are trying to be entertaining to the widest audience. If you need to study all the mechanics of every encounter, I see WoW shrinking severely in the new year.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Jim_Maryland]

One feature of the RealID that is a little annoying is that you can see the names of friends of a friend you have. As an example, if I right click my son's RealID entry on the social interface, I can see who his friends are. I only see their name (not the email), but the name is what most of us worry about.

For the forum RealID, I think part of what Blizzard wanted to accomplish was eliminating the "trolling" character post. Blizzard could easily solve that by adding an option to "show characters" link for any posting character. This would only show the character names/realms, not the user login or name, making it easier to figure out who is trolling the forums.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[RobDude]

I think the most fair analogy would be a drunken husband who gets into an argument with his wife at a bar and *would* have beat the crap out of her; if not for the gang of friendly local bikers that said, 'You'd better not do that....'

Blizzard had every intention of tying your real name to the forums as part of it's RealID implementation. They announced that they were GOING to do it. They even had a go-live date. They never asked permission or for user input.

A mob of angry customers intervened and convinced them to change their mind. Begrudgingly.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

HIGH VOLTAGE

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Jim_Maryland]

I'm going to guess that most people are complaining about the RealID implementation for the forums rather than the in game RealID implementation.

Game RealID (Opt In) - After exchanging email addresses with a friend, you can request to add a friend and they'll need to confirm the request. If you don't make or accept request, you won't show up under RealID.

Forum RealID (Required - Not implemented based on negative reaction from the community) - Any forum post made (after the system would have been implemented) would reveal the users RealID.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Gear Score is a mod. It's used for people who are wanting to build smooth raids using other people who have already completed or near completed the raids. GS + Achievements anyway. It's uses almost exclusively by pugs so if you do not like being left out of 75% of the new raids being created (there are raids that have lower GS/achievement requirements...it's not all despite posts like yours almost always ignoring this) then go get into a guild and stop pugging.

GS + achievements only annoy people who are trying to sneak into raids they shouldn't be attending anyway in a pug setting.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[NiceGeek]

Still not a requirement for raiding tho. That requirement is totally player-driven.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[rcuhljr]

Man I wish I had mod points for you today. I approve of your analogy.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[RobDude]

It's basically just the old 'I want someone to power level me'

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[UnknowingFool]

The problem that Blizzard faces is how do you keep both casual and hardcore players both interested. It used to be that only the hardcore players got to see any real content. But that meant getting into a guild, grinding out enough gold, supplies, etc for the raids, attending enough guild events, etc. It was like a part-time job. More and more WoW is being simplified for the casual player so that Blizzard gets more revenue. So they have to introduce heroic modes into everything to keep the hardcore players. Even then it mattered which server you were on. Some servers had lots of guilds that could beat the tough bosses; some servers had few.

This is said to result in a climate where you're never, ever, ever going to want to play with people you don't like. Everyone will be dieing together, a lot. Victories will be by the skin of your teeth, and only when everyone is playing at their best. The days of 'one-wipe-and-bail' will be gone, and the players who seek to judge your ability by Gearscore+Achievement won't be worth playing with. You'll be intended to foster relationships with players and keep them around. You'll guild up for the rewards, and you'll focus on doing this stuff together to get more of them. As you do so, you'll work on getting more skill for those that need it, as pugging just won't be a workable idea.

Pretty much the "dieing alot" was being part of a guild. With more casual players, being part of a guild means less and weeding out the riff-raff is harder. When my guild finally downed Lady Vashj back in BC after trying for three months, it was big news on the server because even though it was a year after the world first kill; our guild was only the 4th on the server to actually do it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ironhandx]

I never minded that part. Healers had their work cut out for them back in the days when they had to stretch that mana pool as far as possible. The problem with healing was the mana regen never got nerfed much, it turned % based for a lot of stuff and mana pools went through the roof. At the same time they either invented new spells that were 5x the healing of the old ones with only 1.5x the mana cost or made the new ranks of the old spells that way.

Like, mana regen went so ridiculous that I had a paladin and a druid that could sit there and spam max rank heals indefinitely. The druid could do it with healing touch, and that spell is one of the worst mana wise.

Before that I had to perma carry about 20 mana pots around. Then they made mana pots so cheap and drop so much that not having 10 or so on my rogue was nearly unheard of.

Then they decided the pots were the problem and made a permanent cool down for pots for a fight duration, or so I heard.

Also A) was true before in the original. The optimal changed based on what gear you had and how much mana regen but there was always an optimal. In MC/BWL gear it was usually renew -> fh -> GH -> GH or downranked GH spam if there was enough HPS while you were conserving mana.

The odd thing is that attempting to heal as I used to in MC/BWL actually made me a worse healer in the xpac. They totally changed the dynamics around and it basically became "SPAM BIG HEALS GO!" instead of attempting to actually utilize more than like, 2 spells.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghostcrawler famously said (April 2009) that modern game designers consider a game a failure if anyone can't finish it on normal mode.

So what do they do? They tune ICC so most 25 man raiders don't finish it on normal mode. And then they ramp up the difficulty greatly in the PvE content in the next expansion.

I'm not going to send any more money to these lying bastards. The hardcores can play in their rapidly shrinking sandbox for all I care.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I shouldn't have to make that complaint heard.

It's like having to tell Toyota that I don't want my car to wildly accelerate.

It should go without saying.

Also, what's the difference in substance? Betrayal of trust is the key factor or is it not?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[SatanicPuppy]

The thing is, what did you do before those came along?

You joined a guild, paid your dues, and eventually were allowed to participate in the "toon" raid, where, if you were good enough, you were allowed to, eventually, move up to the main raid.

That's how it's always worked. You're acting like there was some magical world of pick-up raiding, where you could wander around in greens and get invited to high-level stuff.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mistakes were made"

"Did my opponent rape and murder a young girl in 1990? I'm just asking questions"

Your pedantry is both unwarranted and dangerous. The grandparent attempted to engage in emotional manipulation with an analogy specifically chosen to align Blizzard with a particular group of heinous abusers, and I rightly called him out. By allowing him to retreat behind his semantics, rather than the obvious subtextual intent, you contribute to one of the core problems of modern society.

Inform yourself.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[rcuhljr]

I'm in a friends and families guild that has no outside recruitment and the range of ADHD kids up to old married couples playing, we've knocked down Lich King on normal and all hard modes except sindy, PP, death whisper and LK. We do that in two sub 3 hour raid nights a week, although with extend-able raid id's that doesn't much matter. Our invite policy is reverse attendance priority, so we bring in the least experienced set of players that still has a viable make up. The content was perfectly within most players grasp. If a guild still doesn't have Lich King down now with 30% buffs in the zone you are either a couple of standard deviations down on average skill or more likely, your guild members just aren't interested in it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

Seriously? You returned the game because it shows YOU your own name?

No, that wasn't a major reason.

Was it a surprise?

I thought it was a bit odd. No other software I've ever used puts my full legal name (not my email, handle, etc) in big bold letters on the main screen.

Did you not know your own name previously?

No, I was previously aware of my own name.

You do realize it shows no one else that information unless you tell it to.

Yes, but I didn't feel like I had a good understanding of just how much of the game I would be sacrificing if I declined to participate. My experience is that choosing privacy (i.e., opting out of information sharing) tends to make one something of a second-class citizen when the product or service is heavily oriented to an online community. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but I got the sense that Blizzard was really pushing for me to give in to RealID friend sharing and I would end up missing out on a significant part of the game's experience.

And you thought the default avatar was "ugly" and were offended by CG models of smoking?

I don't really know if this counts as offended, but it just looks gross to me. When I was younger, people in my family would smoke cigarettes, and I developed chronic bronchitis. It gives me a dizzy shudder to smell it or sometimes even think about it. Some people will instantly relate to this, others won't at all.

Also you lied about the Facebook bit. If you never turn it on (and I don't even know how you turn it on so it isn't in your face or anything) then you never see it.

Sometimes I feel like the last guy on the planet without a Facebook account, but I'm pretty sure I would remember having signed up for it. Not sure how I could prove that negative (that I didn't turn on Facebook), nor am I really going to try.

What I'm saying is that, to me, the game startup screen felt like loading a web page with affiliate links. I see enough of that during the day to enjoy at more of it at night. I get tired visually of filtering out corporate logos. Here's a link to the startup screen in beta. To this they added my legal name, and the character name in big bold letters. As well as prominent/frequent invitations to associate my real identity on Facebook. Take a look at the WoW startup screen, it doesn't have any of that. If they ever added banner ads and affiliate links, I'd probably stop playing.

I hate sounding like a jerk, but those reasons are really silly.

No, absolutely, those on their own would be silly reasons to not play a game, and the actual gameplay didn't suck. As I said, the main reason I returned the game was because, after spending $60 on the thing, I was forbidden from ever changing my character name and I felt like that wasn't made clear to me at the time that I purchased it.

Hypothetically speaking, if you want me to be a customer and pay $60 for a game, and I say "No thanks, it turns out not to be enjoyable to me because I find your policies about identity to be heavy-handed and I'm not exactly in love with some of its other aesthetic qualities" then it's not really useful to anyone for you to argue back. I'm not under an obligation to be logical about what I like and don't like. The game (particularly the character name thing) wasn't what I thought it would be. Nothing personal.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MetalPhalanx]

...In order to get that gear, those achievements, etc, time must be invested. Someone, somewhere has to lead that player through that content, show them the ropes, carry them somewhat, and so on. This means that someone gave them a chance and let them into the raid.

Pugs generally are not the right place to gain that sort of experience. The place to gain that type of experience is in an appropriate guild. Which, of course, is NOT a 'hardcore' guild. Pugs don't want to carry members, as generally there is no return (in terms of raiding) on the time you invest into the members of a pug.

Fast-forward to the guy setting up a pug, or reviewing a guild application, who is looking at this material. He (or she) is planning to profit by this effort, by not needing to expend it themselves. Because of the way raid lockouts and guild membership works, they are necessarily doing this at the expense of those that DID invest the time on them.

I don't think you understand it exactly... there's no way for me to profit off the effort of others, in game terms. Either I'm in the raid doing my part, or I don't get even get a chance at loot.

Reviewing guild apps is completely different from pugging, but I'll say, there's no in game reward for leading pugs/raids/guilds... it's basically a bunch of extra work and hassle, and the only benefit you CAN get out of it is a good group of people to work with. Think of it more like you are interviewing potential co-workers, instead of as a boss with a more abstract stake.

Now, half of the time the person in question is a truly unpalatable type that didn't quit the guild but got ejected. Gearscore won't tell you that, and that is a tiny bit of shadenfreude in way of consolation. But the other half of the time players that set these requirements are profiting off of the players like myself, and they often take the time to insult me for my efforts.

Just sad, really.

Not really sure where you're coming from with this, it came a little out of left field. However, I never said gearscore should be used to determine entry into a guild (that would actually be a very bad criteria for guild apps).

What I DID say, is that gearscore is a useful tool for me to get a general idea of experience level for pugs. It will not tell me if they're a good player and it will not tell me if their gear is properly itemized/gemmed/chanted. It is not a perfect diviner of skill or knowledge... but again, from the perspective of a raid leader, it allows me to filter out SOME of the potential raiders. I know automatically that anyone with less than a 4k gearscore is basically going to get carried through ICC. Even an amazing player with that kind of gear score isn't going to be putting out worthwhile numbers, regardless of skill. Several of my ghetto 80 alts would never attempt to pug an ICC, for exactly that reason.

It's a screening tool. The same way that job recruiters will discard resumes with spelling or grammar errors just to lower the number remaining. Some pugs set their requirements high, just like some companies set their standards high. They aren't trying to make sure everyone has a spot, they are just trying to succeed.

As far as the insulting goes, it's unfortunate, but as I'm sure you've noticed, the internet tends to make assholes out of all but the nicest people. Gamers tend to be even worse.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW jumped the shark when the Horde got paladins, the embodiment of all that's wrong with the Alliance.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[conark]

Actually, I think they want to return to the roots of the game by over-simplifying the game. Part of that is evident in them thinning the talent tree and forcing people to choose one branch (which I think is stupid as an expansion). As far as not wanting to play with people you don't like, well, I think making the game harder and forcing people to group up is going to cause even more issues. In essence, people want to reap quick rewards so I can see tempers flaring in the game. Already happens when I'm with guildies. Now, it might mean the expectations are higher for people, so people who aren't as serious but want to experience end game content will get marginalized as a result (which I think is the vast majority of people). Dying a lot together doesn't really sound fun and I see more finger pointing than anything else.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[fishbowl]

A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return. They had all kinds of reasons, but they needed a catalyst.

One big reason, though, is that a lot of players are burned out. While I realize that not everybody reached that point, it's pretty common to have gotten to the point where there's not really anything to get that is meaningful to your character. I reached that point with the 10-man game a long time ago, and my motivation to go further in the 25-man game decreases with the amount of downright hostile and antisocial behavior that I run into every time I join or form a group.

I played the Cata beta and enjoyed the Worgen starting zone, but I don't see the things in Cata that would hook me.

What I really wanted (expected) to see was a great deal more character customization possibility, even world customization, something like I imagine if Second Life and World of Warcraft had a baby. Instead of your character's avatar being defined by its gear, it could be completely customized (or maybe customized with a range of provided textures and shapes, in order to maintain some consistency of the theme). Instead of a few dungeons, there could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of player-designed dungeons. Instead of a segmented world with a few thousand players in the same gameplay universe as you, there could be one really huge interconnected world so that your options weren't so limited.

It's a real problem when you need a 25 man team, on a server with maybe 1500 characters who can run the content, who already have 40 guilds competing for them. It actually becomes extremely (artificially!) difficult to put a group together.

Cataclysm brings nothing to the table to fix any of the problems in the game, and doesn't bring anything that can be characterized as new or innovative except maybe in marketing terms. Of course that wasn't its purpose. Blizzard needs to do something to drive a few quarters of growth in order to keep the interest of investors. Sure, Blizz has a ton of subscribers but that makes them a parking place for money, not really an attractive investment. Entertainment companies are really not a great place to park money, they are a place to risk money if you think you're betting on growth.

Cataclysm, SC2, and some of the Activision console offerings should provide a couple of quarters of growth for the company, but Cata isn't exactly breathing new life into WoW.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but the Friend of Friend feature can be disabled.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

in soviet russia your wife hits you!

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

To be fair, I'll turn down players that are sub-4000/4500 on a fairly regular basis. You can easily eclipse that mark via the heroics, and I do think that this is a fair place to begin expecting people to do some sort of preparation for a raid.

This isn't usually the case, though. This kind of raid leader, the 'whisper me Gearscore, Achievement, and roll' (yes roll, not role is what they say) type guy, is looking for 5k or even sometimes 6k scores. They're wanting hardmode achievements when they themselves don't yet have them. A lot of progression guilds won't put you on the roster unless you have already farmed the highest 10-man tier for gear. That's the sort of thing I take offense to.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[fortyonejb]

you do realize of course that blizzard is allowing a name change due to the frequency of the complaint you have. So, they solve the issue you have, and you still complain? I have a feeling that you'll find another reason seeing that your reason is most easily debunked. Clearly you just want to be negative, thats fine, but stop lying about a perfectly good game to get your warped view across.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

He's doing nothing of the sort.

An analogy is not invalidated by a difference in scale.

The analogy is bad, but it's because it maps poorly, not because it's about wife-beating.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the highest leaf node post on this page, so I'm just going to put this here:

"They revealed personal information!" False. It has been opt-in since day one.
"Well, they wanted to reveal personal information." No, they wanted to let people chat across games.
"Well, the feature could be used to steal personal information." That's why you can get a free two-token authenticator app for iPhone or Android. This allows it to be more secure than Slashdot or 99% of the other login systems on the internet.
"Well, inattentive people don't know that. That clearly puts it in Blizzard's hands!" No, that's the user's problem. It's no different from any other software.
"Well, it looks like it could be bad." No, it doesn't. You're gasping for air. Try again.
"Well, I just want to believe the big software company is doing bad things." That's better, let's keep this stuff on the level from now on, okay?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is you think you can talk about language like it's some finite state machine that's encompassed by rational, comprehensible rules. Because of that, you have the capacity to understand neither propaganda or poetry, and for that, I pity you.

As to the original analogy: It's fucking weasel words. It was intentional, duplicitous, and manipulative, and it can't be allowed to stand.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Lady Vag?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't pay much attention, do ya? Real ID isn't required, period, just a Battle.net login, which isn't the same thing. You don't have to share your Battle.Net login with anyone, thus they can't find you unless you willingly give it out - Blizzard is putting the responsibility for your safety and privacy in your hands, where it belongs.

Sorry dude, but they failed to put it in my hands from the start, otherwise people wouldn't have been able to use friends of friends for the same info, and they would have had "No, I don't want to opt into Real ID" as a basic part of the process from the start. Combine with their idea of using real names on the forums fiasco, and well, I'm not trusting them to keep it in my hands.

That's the whole point. They had a chance to do things right. To even show they wanted to do it right, and would fix it. They failed to convince me they would.

Pardon me for not wanting any of that. Apparently that's some great sin, but I'm going to stand by it. They lost me.

Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.

A) Fix your sarcasm detector

B) False correlation

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[obarthelemy]

I think RealID was an attempt at calming down the trolls: you troll less when you can be tracked back to your main, and can't hide behind a lvl 1 alt. I understand the issues that this created though.

I think Blizzard should implement a Karma system similar to shalshdot's, and openly rate player on 3 axis:
- social (the karma thing)
- skill (also peer-generated)
- gear (anything would be better than GearScore.

This is difficult to do right, especially since you want to watch out for gangs of friends karming up each other, but Blizzard hould have the intellectual, technical and financial means to put something nice in place. Once they realize that trolls and noobs are a main reason why people get sick of their game.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[DedTV]

At first, that's how it will be. Just like with WotLK. Heroics weren't an easy faceroll at the beginning of WotLK. But when people are easily able to obtain gear 2 or 3 tiers higher than the content was balanced for after a few content patches are released, they will eventually become as trivial as Heroics are in WotLK. And if Blizz does with Cata raids what they did with ICC by adding the creeping buff, it's likely by the end of each content patch people will also be raiding the top tier content in PuGs again.

Which is a good system. The more hardcore players will get to see the content and show off the gear early but eventually, more casual players will be able to do it too and there won't be any issues like with Naxx40 or TBT where only a tiny portion of subscribers get to experience the top level content..

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

[Retyping this. I don't know why the other one didn't go through. Sorry if it turns into a double post.]

you do realize of course that blizzard is allowing a name change due to the frequency of the complaint you have. So, they solve the issue you have, and you still complain?

I'd seen rumors of it (such as yours), but found nothing official. When I emailed their support and asked about it their solution was to give me a refund rather than offer a name change.

This was just a few weeks ago. Do you have a link to anything official?

I have a feeling that you'll find another reason seeing that your reason is most easily debunked. Clearly you just want to be negative, thats fine, but stop lying about a perfectly good game to get your warped view across.

No, I'd consider trying it again if their identity policies became nicer.

Why can't they just make it work like WoW? That's closer to what I was expecting.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Chibi Merrow]

Yeah, except some of us don't even want to be in a guild... :)

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

Well, that's my point. I'm critizing their design of "real life friends only", vs. "players you play with" type philosophy.

They could have very well made it so that you maintain the same level of anonymity you have now with just character names, and not have to introduce the displaying of real names. Then the facilities of the service would be available to people like me who wanted it, but not at the expense of exposing our real name.

WoW is not Facebook. While I have no problem with people that I add in Facebook knowing my name, I definitely don't want the snot nosed raging WoW nerd I'm in the same PUG raid with calling me at home and telling me how badly I suck at tanking, etc.

Also, as a former guild master who had to kick/report a member for harrasing female members of the guild, I worry at the fact of what that person would have done if he could have gotten the female members real names, then their home addresses and phone numbers.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

For the forum RealID, I think part of what Blizzard wanted to accomplish was eliminating the "trolling" character post. Blizzard could easily solve that by adding an option to "show characters" link for any posting character. This would only show the character names/realms, not the user login or name, making it easier to figure out who is trolling the forums.

/agree

They could have created a unique id that was not your real name (or any real information) and that would have served the same purpose.

But it wouldn't have linked in with Facebook, which their agreement with Facebook probably states it has to.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

Your SC2 character name is not your Real ID. There's no way anyone can associate you with "Slayer#123" unless you explicitly add them as Real ID friends, the same way in WoW they can't associate you with "Legollaz" unless you explicitly add them.

Yes, but from a little reading on the SC2 forums I learned that they had eliminated the option of non-RealID friends. Anyone you were going to be friends with was going to be under your legal name from your account billing.

So SC2 forces you to choose: either give up your personal identity/privacy, or have no friends.

I chose the third option, which was to simply not play SC2.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

Your analogy doesn't really hold to the situation, but lets pretend for a moment that it does. Using your analogy, then what do you do if the kid tries the same thing, over and over again? Do you forgive him each and every time, or realize at some point that you're being played, that he's pushing the envelope as much as he can, in hopes in getting away with as much as he could.

Remember, Blizzard came out very arrogant at first, and only when everything went to hell did they finally back down. They didn't just hear the initial beta tester comments and say 'Sorry, our bad' and changed their minds, they heard the comments and said 'Tuff feces, we like it this way' (my paraphrasing), and pushed forward. People were telling Blizzard 'This is BAD!' and they were not caring one bit. They didn't back down because they realized they were doing bad, they backed down because they were pressured to do so by customers, both those who left over this (myself) and others who didn't but threaten to.

They need to be slapped down for trying to steamroll this over us in the first place. They need to realize you can't just make agreements with other companies (Facebook) then go back to your customer base afterwards and tell them they have to accept what is going on, without dealing with the outcome/ramifications.

If corporations are supposed to be citizens, like people are, then they are just as susceptible to be told by the community 'You are doing bad.'

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[flimflammer]

I don't know what you're talking about man. They didn't "backtrack" and "fix it up after the community went batshit". You could disable realid the moment it was introduced. All they've added recently were finer controls if you chose to use it.

Hearing all this bullshit is sure getting old.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Idiomatick]

Yeah but its hard to see what that will really mean. Money might be more expendable. I heard arrows are being removed from the game.... that costs hunters a lot. So the increased repair costs might mean nothing compared to the savings. And so on....

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, of course, if you think the world's most successful gaming company is not capable of more coherent thinking than an 11-year-old.

Well, admittedly, looking at Kotick, you might have a point...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Kidbro]

The addon vulnerability that let everyone access your real ID list wasn't really voluntary...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

This is not correct at all. That's why you have a character name and code after the hash. You can add friends either from within lobbies or by giving them your friend code hash. In my example, if you played a 2v2 with some random person and thought they were good you could send them a message and give them "Slayer#123" and could add you as a SC2 friend (NOT a Real ID friend). They would never know your real name unless you told them and not be able to see when you were playing WoW or any other Blizzard game. Only SC2 on that exact account. It's pretty much exactly the same as WoW except you only get one character name.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ziwcam]

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/374722023

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid I must disagree. When I quit, I made sure to be tell them my reasons in the forums, in an e-mail, in the comment field for unsubscribing.

I made every effort to be clear that I found their actions abhorrent, and why I was quitting, and that I believe no sane company should have even considered suggesting such a thing, let alone announcing that they planned to do it without actually asking for feedback. And no, I don't consider their retraction sufficiently convincing.

To borrow your analogy, not quitting, it's like catching you kid doing something wrong, getting a sullen apology, and instead of punishing them, taking them out for ice cream.

No thank you, I won't do it. That would be sending a mixed message.

If they get the wrong idea, well, tell me how I could make it more clear?

What's your alternative?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the way raid lockouts and guild membership works, they are necessarily doing this at the expense of those that DID invest the time on them.

Ehhhhhhh....

It's not that I don't get your point. For some players, yes, someone else (or several someones) expended time to help get someone new up to speed. That is not in doubt.

But I have an issue with trying to "quantify" that value, and use it to proclaim the one who spent that time is somehow cheated because the person they taught or aided has moved on. Reason being, I think it's unethical to give someone a helping hand, and then immediately turn around and ask "Now that I did that, what do I get back? Huh? Huh?" I think a decent person, having been helped and treated well, WILL give something back, but of their own accord. The moment you start expecting it, the moment you start "owning" that other person you helped, by saying that other people are profiting off of your hard work when that person goes off to another guild, or does a pug run, then I think *you're* in the wrong, at least by some shade of gray (although on a person level it bugs me pretty seriously). And this isn't to say that you should let someone mooch off of you--you shouldn't. Some people are just lazy, ungrateful asses, and once you figure that out, stop helping them and give them the boot. But you making the choice to do a favor for someone doesn't mean they are now your minion because you chose to do that.

A guild master or raid leader isn't necessarily being unethical by using tools that are available to them. If your argument is that someone took time to mentor and aid every raider out there with achievements, my argument is that a GM or raid leader has a responsibility to the rest of his or her guild or raid to NOT bring in players that will be a drag. I do think if someone uses achievements or gear score exclusively, they're dumb. I also think if they ignore those tools exclusively, they're dumb. And I also think that keeping people in a guild is hard. You have to have a good idea of what motivates skilled people to stay in one guild or another. Once you fall to the level of saying your members owe it to you to stay in your guild, because you can't keep them there any other way, that's a pretty good sign something else is wrong with the guild that probably should be attended to by the GMs or Officers, or at least that the guild's goals and the player's goals just don't align, and that's how it (and life) is.

I dunno. As I said, I don't doubt you've put time into people. So have I. But I just get very leery about trying to quantify what sort of "obligation" or "karmic debt" the person that aid is given to has acquired by that, and I do not believe that I, as a GM or Raid Leader, am being unethical by using this tool or that tool to source (hopefully) "quality" and possibly experienced raiders for their guild or pug because by definition "experienced" means someone else put time into their development sometime in the past.

So. I should probably call out two things... A) I grew up in an household where I was expected to take abuse because I had basic necessities such as food and shelter and I "owed" gratitude for that even when I was abused and neglected in other ways. So I'm always a huge skeptic of people being "kind" and then asking for favors back. And B) I was the guild master, and raid leader, of a small raiding guild myself, and I used both tools...mentoring of intelligent folks, and looking at "history" (ie, achivements and gear score) to get people who wouldn't be a total drag on my raid and guild.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[doctor_subtilis]

I, for one, disagree with this analogy. Kids shouldn't be punished for wanting the bad behavior but companies should. Companies are not children. Plus, they didn't just bring up the idea they created a plan with an obvious intent of implementing it. That means discussion and probably disagreements but an eventual agreement was made by all participants. Yeah, that's so similar to a child testing limits. I say punish 'em.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

why the hell do people get their panties in a wad over this?

Because it's an easy target, instead of addressing the concern, they can just attack the impertinence of person suggesting the connection.

Predictable, and probably going to lead a bunch of folks into being distracted as they fume mightily about how terrible and intolerable such an analogy was.

Oddly, it will just show the situation even better. To them, use of such an analogy is effectively the very same unforgivable offense being talked about, and no apology or explanation will make up for it.

Is that illustration ironic or what?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, punishing bad behaviour only supresses bad behaviour. If you want good behaviour, punishment alone is not sufficient.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[AlamedaStone]

Companies are not children.

Thanks to corporate personhood, they are, though - evil children. They're like that little kid in the original Twilight Zone episode that could just make things happen, and everyone was terrified of his capricious wrath. Don't mess with little Johnny, he has legislative clout.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[theArtificial]

I shudder to think what he would have done if he could have gone to a deep-search web site and gotten their home addresses and phone numbers.

Yeah, let's see what their boyfriends/husbands do to the stalker...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

Sorry you are an idiot. Since blizz uses your email address as your account name for signing in, you, using RealId , have already given half the log in info. Sorry, the whole idea concerning security, coming from Blizz, is retarded like your mom.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[rpillala]

I read something really interesting about this. The people who advertise in trade channel with "please be geared and know the fights" or "gear will be checked" are simply lazy. They want a raid of experienced people to carry them through an instance because they're too stupid or socially inept to explain fights to people. Or maybe they just lack patience. Regardless, excessive gearscore requirements or demands that you already know the fight means that those people are garbage and why bother?

No wonder people leave PUGs at the drop of a hat.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

Canceled my WotLK account, my TBC twink account and my Vanilla twink account because of this BS. Went to buying game cards. Fuck blizzard.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

Just give me player housing, the ability to set up a player ran store, and an appearance tab. Then I would probably spend the next ten years making gold and having fun.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Americano]

A lot of people quit during the "RealID" debacle and didn't return.

Any actual numbers on this? I saw a lot of people saying they would cancel their subscription in the feedback on the forums, but, judging from my own realm's forums and population, very few - if any - people actually cancelled their accounts once Blizz backed away from the change.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

So giving out half of your account login info is OK with you? Fucking idiot.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

Bitch should have gotten my sandwich quicker and should have FD on those adds. Fucking cunt deserved much more than a black eye I am telling you.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

My name, on all three of my accounts, is fred flintstone. Fuck blizzard, and fuck their RealID.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

Get you a FB account under a fake name. Only friend folks you fucking know in RL. Profit!!!!!

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Americano]

a) It was not retroactive to existing forum posts, it would have only been on the new forum system.

b) You don't HAVE to post on the forums, so the system is still opt-in. It may suck that you can't post on the forums while keeping your name private, and I think Blizz was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in going that far, but it absolutely is an opt-in system.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

With a crappy geared hunter I pulled aggro three times with a tank today in a non-heroic dungeon. Finally went to a steady shot, arcane shot rotation, with kill shot when available. My crappy hunter is my PvP farmbot which I make money and BG with, which means I am loaded with resilience and other nice PvP stuff. Fucking Cata is going to be a fucked up nerf fest for at least three months while the devs try to get the customer base happy.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[stonewallred]

I was being spammed healed for 14k or more in a dungeon today, just saying.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[QuantumLeaper]

So you don't give your Email address to your friends? I have one RealID friend in Wow and he already had my Email address from the Guild website. I have a Core Hound Pup to protect my account...

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[NiceGeek]

RealID is for people you TRUST you dipshit. Think one of your friends is likely to screw you over? Don't give the info to them.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Eskarel]

The metaphor is crap. For one thing, while I disagreed strongly with the RealId system, it wasn't obviously wrong from Blizzard's point of view the way that punching your spouse is, and second of all they never did it.

Metaphorically it's a bit more like telling your wife you're going to grab her breast, her saying I really don't want you to and you saying "Oh, well then I won't".

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Roman Coder]

What, they couldn't defend themselves?

The point is that I wouldn't wish sending a crazy person to anybody's house, for any reason.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

Thanks. I think I'd seen that link. Still no indication of when though. It looks like it's not happening until they can set up to charge fees for subsequent name changes.

Having heard Blizzard's reputation, I figured it could be a very long time. Their notice says "We'll announce more details on how the free name change and additional paid character name changes will be implemented in the near future." Yet it's been 7 weeks apparently without an update. I can imagine they're busy with Cataclysm related stuff.

I wasn't going to wait around since I figured my best chance at a refund would be if I hadn't had the game very long.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you compare peoples' personal feelings to women's undergarments!

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

I don't think I understood that. I never tried the online play since I went to pick a cool handle and found that it was ar forbidden. I felt a bit cheated since I didn't understand that the name was permanent the first time I chose it. Maybe it had been stated somewhere, but it wasn't very prominent and I assumed it worked like WoW.

Looking at the forums its hard to get an accurate picture (like reading /. I suppose). There was some controversy about transitive friend relationships revealing RealID info and a switch being added to disable it. There seemed to be a lot of SC1 players who were angry about missing LAN play, chat rooms, the name restrictions, or this or that. I wasn't an SC1 player, so I thought I had an open mind. Turns out I was assuming it'd be like WoW!

It still seems like quite an arbitrary restriction. I don't believe, like some posters, that Blizzard simply wants to squeeze more money out of the players in this case. My guess is that mainly they wanted players to feel less free to behave like jerks. A side effect is that I, who wouldn't behave like that in any case, felt less freedom to have fun making my character(s) on the game.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

My name, on all three of my accounts, is fred flintstone. Fuck blizzard, and fuck their RealID.

That's an idea. I could re-register with a "stage name" on my billing info and participate in RealID in some semi-private way (they'd still have the name on my CC and all that). Seems like a bit of a hassle, and it's probably a ToS violation.

But I have a lot of things competing for my limited time, so I'm just not going to go very far out of my way to get into some game that gave an un-inviting first impression.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Definition of EMPATHY

1: The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
2 :The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's for my real life friends why do they need to see my name? They already know my name.... It's shenanigans pure and simple. I'm scared to see what will come of this in the future.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

Having the achievement for a raid shows you've been in a successful group for it before so you probably at least have some idea of the tactics involved. Some people don't want to spend ten minutes before every single boss explaining how to kill it to the idiots who can't be bothered to do the reading beforehand and they shouldn't be expected to cater for lazy people like that.

Gearscore was useful for folks on the cutting edge of raid progression but even at best it's now a very rough at-a-glance guide to a player's overall gear quality. It's easy to abuse but can you think of anything better? The addon does actually have a very useful subfunction in that it can tell you exactly how many times a player has killed all the specific bosses in any raid. Firstly, why are you blaming Blizzard because some people are misusing a 3rd party addon, and secondly, why are you complaining about pug raids instead of finding a nice guild to play in? Are you honestly that clueless about MMOs after all this time? Didn't you notice that MMO raiders are generally fairly elitist?

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that's what they intend to happen. Blizz intended a lot of things that turned out to be sucky.

Here is my prediction: with tanks and healers having a harder time, and with damage getting a buff, tanks and healers are going to burn out or swap over to pure dps rather than deal with the flak that comes with playing a vital, thankless role. They will become scarce, pugging will turn into a long, drawn out wait for dps classes and a frustrating nightmare for others, and any class that can heal or tank will see increased pressure to heal or tank.

I played a druid when druids were the shittiest class around, good for healing and fuck all else, where you hadn't a hope of getting into a raid unless you were full resto. What do you think happened back then when dps was awesome but no one wanted to tank or heal because they were hard, shitty, jobs? Yeah, you guessed it - the high end raiding guilds had the players they needed, and if your class could tank or heal but you didn't want to, you got all kinds of shit from the dps and good luck getting into groups for ANYTHING.

Being able to swap roles through glyphs and dual specs and gear changes means nothing. My experience of that is that you'll still end up being forced into tanking or healing if you can because there'll be a shortage. And that means you'll get tanking or healing gear over dps gear, which means you'll be better at tanking or healing than dps, which means you'll be stuck tanking or healing... And don't get me started on elitism, ffs. There's no patch in the world that'll fix that. Before we had GS, they were asking for full Tier X or you couldn't come to [insert dungeon name here]. They'll figure out some other half-assed way to measure your raid-worth before long.

Yeah. I quit for good a few months ago. Cataclysm isn't going to convince me to return.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[JackieBrown]

Why don't you want your kid watching a "random R rated movie?" /joking - I was expecting to see that troll response so I figured I'd start it myself.

I actually think that this is one of the better analogies I have seen on slashdot and other online forums.

***even further of topic, has anyone else noticed how much better google's search spellchecker is compared to the one built into chromium? I mispelled analogies as anologies and the spellchecker was way off base on its suggestions but plugging in the word to the search engine gave the correct spelling under "Did you mean..."

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[mr_mischief]

I doubt everyone in the company came to unanimous agreement. Most of the people who understood what kind of terrible idea it was just wanted to keep eating and paying mortgages, I'm sure.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Think about it though: why would you need "characters" in SC2? The only purposes multiple characters would really serve is trolling people in-game or attempting to exploit the ladder rankings. You can have multiple single player progressions by simply having multiple save game files, if that's the issue.

Really, the only thing your "character" in SC2 does is obfuscate your login from random people in game (which is a good thing).

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Luckyo]

They have recently introduced a way to completely turn Real ID off on your account without having to enable parental controls just to do that.

Not exactly a shining example of doing it right, but at least they're listening.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[BobMcD]

So, so long as it benefits you, everything is golden. That's not an uncommon point of view, and is very human.

The slavery angle is in bad taste, and is way off the mark. This would be more like a recording artist who jumps from the label that gave them their start at the first opportunity. And, conversely, a label that never seeks out new talent, and only poaches from the indie labels.

You're looking to ascribe some kind of ill will towards those players looking for a leg up, and that's not the case. I'm disappointed by the ethics of those leaders who exclusively seek to poach players who are already developed. Taking all kinds is one thing, but actively seeking and attracting only those players that are developed beyond what pugging can provide is clearly one step too far.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Bill_the_Engineer]

You joined a guild, paid your dues, and eventually were allowed to participate in the "toon" raid, where, if you were good enough, you were allowed to, eventually, move up to the main raid.

You are correct.

I've been sending Blizzard my money since season 1, and been a guild member most of that time. Lately, I had less time to play and most of the guild members moved on. So now I noticed the trade channel.

But even during the good old days, a pug wasn't as bad as it is now.

You're acting like there was some magical world of pick-up raiding, where you could wander around in greens and get invited to high-level stuff.

No. I'm talking about when you are running around in gear with an average item level of 245 (all purple) and still can't get in a raid pug.

I sit back and laugh when I hear all the bitching on the trade chat about how bad the raid was... karma is a bitch.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ironhandx]

Hunter pulled aggro? Should never happen. Thats your own fault and you've gotten lazy because of how easy it has been. You have a 30 second aggro wipe/drop(whatever state its currently in, worst case that I saw that was fixed after was a 20% drop, which is still significant enough to provide a good gap for tank aggro)

Warlocks I used to feel bad for but they have an aggro sink now too so it shouldn't be as bad.

Now obviously if they have nerfed it too much(so that its worse than in original) they'll have to rebalance a bit, but overall I would be happy with that situation. Happy enough that apparently on Dec 6th I'm reactivating my WoW account.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Ironhandx]

Spam healing in a dungeon was often the way, but on longer/harder fights it wasn't possible because you'd go OOM in a couple of minutes rather than in 15 minutes or so.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[MBGMorden]

If it's for my real life friends why do they need to see my name? They already know my name....

They know your real name - they dont' necessarily know every one of umpteen character names you create in WoW. I know people who have upwards of 20 characters that they play. Take that and multiply it across a dozen people or more and it gets hard to keep track of. It's easier to just see their name regardless of which toon (or which game, with SC2 connected now) they're playing.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[N0Man74]

It's a real problem when you need a 25 man team, on a server with maybe 1500 characters who can run the content, who already have 40 guilds competing for them. It actually becomes extremely (artificially!) difficult to put a group together.

Cataclysm brings nothing to the table to fix any of the problems in the game...

You do realize that they are getting rid of these 25 man teams (for the new content), right? All raids are going to be run by 10 man groups instead.

I agree with your assessment of 25 man groups, and I welcome the change. It seems that a very very small number of anti-social or otherwise unpleasant players can really ruin an online gameplay experience, and the more people that are required to experience content, the greater your chance of your group (or team) of having one or two players that end up souring the group. 10 is a good number.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[dosilegecko]

t-t-t-t-t-trollcombo

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[godefroi]

You do realize that they are getting rid of these 25 man teams (for the new content), right? All raids are going to be run by 10 man groups instead.

Uh, no. 25-mans are still there, just like 10-mans are. The only change they made is that you can't do BOTH 10-man and 25-man runs in a single lockout period, and the loot from 10-mans is no longer inferior to that from 25-mans. Whether or not this will effectively eliminate 25-man teams is up for debate.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[godefroi]

First of all, someone has to know the email you use for your WoW account (granted, this is probably easily guessed in a lot of cases).

If you used your email account name for one of your characters, you're a retard and deserve what you get. That's been a security worst practice ever since the very first MMO came out.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[IndustrialComplex]

His response: "Sorry dad. You're right, I'll stay home.". You then respond with "Good. You're still grounded for a month just for bringing it up!".

I disagree. It wasn't that they brought it up that was the problem, it was that it was such a horrible idea that we literally wondered if this company was actively trying to 'be evil.'

To continue your analogy, it wouldn't be like going over to watch an R-rated film and then being grounded for bringing it up, it would be like going over to watch Faces of Death and scat films.

The response should be your suggested "If you do that you're going to be grounded", AND I think on Thursdays we are going to be meeting with a psychologist because something is SERIOUSLY wrong and needs to be addressed.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Mysteray]

I figured I'd make a throwaway char to learn on offline, then switch to a persistent one for playing offline. Also, I imagined that I might want to use a different char when playing each one of the three races in the game because my skill level of each was likely to be different. Maybe that's considered cheating or something, but if the SC2 crowd is that uptight, I'd probably prefer not to participate.

Slashdot could attempt to restrict everyone to one ID too and prevent anonymous posting. This would arguably reduce trolling. In reality, it would be so obnoxious to enforce, and likely not even successful, that people simply would go somewhere else.

In my opinion, it looks like Blizzard implemented these policies in part to prevent kids from sharing the game with their little brother. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[ildon]

Slashdot isn't charging $60 per ID like Blizzard does. The game splits up your win/loss ratio by race when displaying your statistics so people can easily see that if, for example, you're 10-3 as Terran but 1-11 as Zerg, that maybe you're just not very good at Zerg. It's not a "cheating" issue in that case. The "cheating" issue comes when someone creates multiple dummy accounts to purposefully lose to their buddy to artificially inflate their buddies ranking, or some other more clever system that I can't think of (since that would be pretty difficult with random matchmaking etc.)

As for coming up with a dumb name for offline before going online, a lot of people thought the same thing. A day or so after the game went on sale, Blizzard put in the "breaking news" window in the login screen a message to warn players that their name was "permanent". Later, they announced that all players will be allowed a one time free name change to make up for the confusion, and after that players will be able to change their name at any time for a small fee similar to WoW characters. Your stats, rank, and friends list etc. are retained, you just change your handle.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Dashiva Dan]

Please never let second life corrupt WoW.
And they're redoing how raid lockouts work for Cata, and applying those changes to ICC and RS with the 4.01 patch, these changes will make it easier for raid groups, allowing a player to go with a different raid group for every boss over a single week, potentially. It will make picking up pugs to fill raids, or breaking a 25 man raid whort a few people into 2 10 mans for an evening then back to 25 later, and so on. So, yeah, they are playing attention, and improving things, accross the board.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Dashiva Dan]

Simply coming up with an implementable plan doesn't justify that. In the business world you don't come out to the public with just an idea, but with a complete solution. The fact they opened it up for discussion on the forums before they implemented it is as good as can be expected, and better than either not opening it up for discussion, or simply coming out with the concept (if they had have done that the drama would still be going on).
Besides, the implementation, while flawed, still had a lot of good points to be credited to it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Dashiva Dan]

Someone mod this guy up 'funny'
I'm sure the 'giving blizzard money for their cards, a much bigger moneysink, instead of their software' was intentional.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[fishbowl]

>Please never let second life corrupt WoW.

I don't mean to literally merge the two.

There are a lot of really cool things that SL brings to the table. I really love being able to do 3D object building and texturing and animation and scripting. Take that stuff to another level and add some really compelling gameplay, and I think you will have something extremely compelling.

Personally I think the whole lockout thing is stupid to begin with. There's not really a good reason you shouldn't be able to run an instance or reset, as often as you want, within reason (server load balance, etc.) The reason they do it is to artificially limit resources to make things rare. The effect it has though is to encourage a culture of total douchebags.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[N0Man74]

Maybe my information was old or misunderstood. Admittedly, I have not been following it that closely since some of the early designs were presented.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[cgenman]

It was an idea with a side effect they didn't think about. I'm guessing most of the people involved in making World of Warcraft have never been stalked. Or at least, they don't get stalked if they don't mention what they work on.

The point was to try to make their forums more civilized. It's not like their idea was to kick puppies. They didn't want to charge microtransactions every time you logged on, or show commercials while you craft, or scan your computer for illegal movies. If people had a permanent, immutable identity that they were stuck with, they might protect their reputation a little more and be less jerks towards each other.

If you choose to see that as the same thing as wild car acceleration followed by death, and fundamental betrayal of trust, that's your choice. To me, it just sounds like a committee of dudes in Irvine who haven't had to deal with certain things.

They announced it, people complained, they listened and decided not to do it.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[Dashiva Dan]

The lockout is there purely to stop the elites from getting the top gear, then farming the raids out and charging others for a run through (and the loot) meaning that a) you have to earn your own loot, and b) the top end hardcore raiders don't get to gear up quite so fast.
Basically it narrows the gap, which makes the game more fun for all.
Same as how only one random a day gives you 2 frosties, etc.
In the end it discourages the culture of douchebags.
As much as I'd like to be able to create my own stuff in WoW, I don't want to look at every other person's created stuff, or waste bandwidth on downloading their meshes and textures when I could be using it for blizzard's professionally created ones.
Sure second life has a lot of good digital artists, but it has a lot more bad ones, and one of the things that makes blizzard's games so damn good is how polished they are. Letting anyone create stuff would totally destroy that.

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[djdanlib]

But.. but.. you get to KILL THEM

Re:Sorry Blizzard, no longer a customer

[djdanlib]

I somewhat agree with you and generally avoid PUGs where there are requirements for that kind of BS.

Here's what you can do to avoid PUGging with the GS/acheevs addicts while avoiding joining a hardcore raiding guild...

Find out what guilds raid the instances you want to run on your server. Go to their websites, see if they have a "friends of..." group/channel ingame. Register on their forum, introduce yourself. Say you're interested in running certain instances with them once in a while. Be friendly with them, show some respect, and they will eventually start tossing invites your way. Throw out a few lines like that, and if you're not a complete tool ingame, you'll probably get invited back after the first one.

Yes, you have to WORK for it. It's worth it to avoid all the immaturity that comes with the GS/acheevs epeen comparisons.

Really?

[Pojut]

I started with MUDs, moved on to Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, etc...I absolutely LOVED my time spent with MMOs, especially WoW (closed and open betas, continued until about 1.5 years after launch), but the genre got boring for me. Not even The Old Republic can get me excited about an MMO.

I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW. Anyone on here still playing since launch? What's kept you with it all this time? Gameplay, community, what?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I started with MUDs, moved on to Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, etc...I absolutely LOVED my time spent with MMOs, especially WoW (closed and open betas, continued until about 1.5 years after launch), but the genre got boring for me. Not even The Old Republic can get me excited about an MMO.

I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW. Anyone on here still playing since launch? What's kept you with it all this time? Gameplay, community, what?

Been playing since early 2005. Blizz has managed to keep it interesting, despite some missteps. About time for the old world revamp though. Bring on the Cataclysm!

Re:Really?

[bmin]

I started out with the MUDs, did some DAoC, CoH, WAR, etc, but I've stuck with WoW. I started WoW about 4-5 months after launch. I've taken a 6 month break from it, but I keep coming back to it. I enjoy both the PvP and PvE aspects of the game and find the new content they keep releasing refreshing. Also the game has been updated again and again. With the launch of Cataclysm the talent trees are being made smaller. You'll be able to fly in the old world, etc. For me it's more of a social thing than a game. It's my Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. It's where I spend my time talking with friends and doing an activity. Also the cost per hour is minimial. Even if you pay 15/mo in the US, it still works out to a few cents per hour (I play alot in a month). Even if you play for 2 hours a month it's cheaper than going to a movie.

Re:Really?

[MBGMorden]

I've been playing since just a few months after launch, but "playing" is used loosely for the last 6 months or so(I've been logging at most an hour per week during that time).

The community aspect - guildies to log on and talk to for a bit, is a big part of staying, but aside from that sometimes I just wanna kill some time. WoW feels like a decent way to spend that time. Repetitive? A bit, sure, but life itself is repetitive. Nobody asks the sports fans why they watch the same sport every Sunday, or why the fisherman goes out catching the same kinds of fish every Saturday, or why people go down to the same bars with the same group of people each weekend. People do the things they like because they enjoy doing them, and just because you can reduce it to "doing the same thing over and over" doesn't necessarily mean that it loses all appeal.

Re:Really?

[Fizzl]

Same history here. I actually got hooked on a MUD once again. BatMUD rocks. Chip off the old rock...

Re:Really?

[assemblyronin]

It's my alcohol without the hang-over the next morning.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reinforcement.

WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans. Some people are more vulnerable to this than others.

Cataclysm is not evolutionary. It is just more of the same. I won't be re-opening my old WoW account.

Re:Really?

[digitalnoise615]

I started with MUDs, moved on to Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest, etc...I absolutely LOVED my time spent with MMOs, especially WoW (closed and open betas, continued until about 1.5 years after launch), but the genre got boring for me. Not even The Old Republic can get me excited about an MMO.

I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW. Anyone on here still playing since launch? What's kept you with it all this time? Gameplay, community, what?

Been playing since early 2005. Blizz has managed to keep it interesting, despite some missteps. About time for the old world revamp though. Bring on the Cataclysm!

As a Beta Tester, I gotta tell you - the water effects ALONE are worth the 4.0 patch. So much has changed, yet alot is still the same, or just slightly different - but it feels like a new game, truly.

Re:Really?

[VGPowerlord]

Even if you pay 15/mo in the US, it still works out to a few cents per hour (I play alot in a month). Even if you play for 2 hours a month it's cheaper than going to a movie.

Or I could just play Team Fortress 2, which I got as part of a 5-game pack for $50 that has no monthly fee*.

Since my community runs it own servers, we turn AllTalk on, although that does make it harder to coordinate things as a team.

* However, since I've clocked over 800 hours (prolly over 900 by now, over 1800/1900 if you count idle time for items back when that worked), I did spend the $50 on the item pack Valve recently added. I can afford to give then some money to continue adding new things to the game.

Now, if Valve would only give me a Mann Co. Supply Crate, I'd give them even more money! (They cost $2.49 for the key to open one.)

Re:Really?

[BitHive]

Geeks love WoW because it's the closest thing they'll ever experience to working at Foxconn.

Re:Really?

[BobMcD]

I'm an on-and-off player since Beta. I play in within my social circle, mostly, so I'd have to say that we'd simply rather be on WoW than on Facebook. We can work together towards a common goal, 'hang out', and simply share a hobby. My vendor's rep is into WoW, too, so we can swap stories from time to time.

WoW is a lot like the new golf. Nearly everyone has either played it, or has heard of it, and can at least carry on a conversation.

So, the gameplay is part of it. It changes a lot from xpac to xpac, and keeps things from getting too stale. This keeps the community that you'd naturally attract otherwise.

Re:Really?

[TheKidWho]

Have you ever thought that someone who might like an Action-Adventure-RPG such as WoW wouldn't like a twitch First Person Shooter like TF2?

Re:Really?

[twoallbeefpatties]

Have you ever thought that someone who might like an Action-Adventure-RPG such as WoW wouldn't like a twitch First Person Shooter like TF2?

Maybe you should go back in time and tell this to the people funding APB. :D

Re:Really?

[bhcompy]

Actually, FFO, original EQ(pre-WoWing of the experience system), and some other games are more like Foxconn than WoW. WoW is like working at Hot Dog on a Stick

Re:Really?

[darkwing_bmf]

TF2 has 9 classes to choose from! And quests ("push the cart!", "go get the flag!", "defend the point!"). You gain new loot by playing. You can get achievements. You group with other players and kill enemies. It's basically the best online RPG ever.

Re:Really?

[Anachragnome]

"I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW."

Some of us went full circle. I'm back playing Ultima Online (privately owned-public server...and free, UOSecondAge) and it is like I never left. WoW is what made me realize that, by FAR, the most fun I had playing MMO-style games was the very first years I did so.

Go back to your roots. I honestly believe that the trailblazers in MMO history rode us right to the clearing at the end of the trail--everything else is simply derivative. Until someone takes some huge risks, it will remain so.

Re:Really?

[VGPowerlord]

Have you ever thought that someone who might like an Action-Adventure-RPG such as WoW wouldn't like a twitch First Person Shooter like TF2?

Maybe I should have clarified that.

I could renew my WoW WotLK account and pay $15/month to play WoW or I could pay nothing and play TF2. I clearly can't make your decisions for you, but for me it was easy.

P.S. The two groups do overlap. The group of friends I used to play WoW with are the same group of friends that I played FPS and RTS games with in the past.

And Valve really seems bent on eventually turning TF2 into an RPG. Hell, the game just added item sets of all things, and equipping all 3-4 items in a set gives you bonuses.

I have my Tier 1 Spy set equipped right now!

P.P.S. I'll likely renew my WoW account for a month once the old world changes hit just to see what changed.

Re:Really?

[Cinder6]

Played since launch, but not continuously. After it came out, I played for 6 months or so, then quit. A while after WotLK came out, I started up again for another four months. That was a year ago. I started again last month, because I wanted to be around when Cataclysm came out. After I get to 85, I'll probably do some raiding, remember that I got totally burned out in Blackwing Lair in classic, and quit again.

Basically, it's worth it to come back and see what's changed, but once you've done everything, it's kind of pointless. Sure, you can start a new class, but that's always felt like a chore to me. I wish they were adding a new hero class, as it's really nice to skip the 1-55 grind with the Death Knight.

Re:Really?

[Rinikusu]

Frequent breaks. I played the hell out of it for about 4 or 5, maybe 6 months, took a year off, played for a few months, took off until BC, took off another couple years and just resubbed a little over a year ago. My sub lapses next week, but that's because I'm on a PPC mac and support is being dropped for it, but that's okay. I'll wait until Cata is good and broken in and I'll be ready for a new computer then. :)

Re:Really?

[Blakey Rat]

I come back every 6-8 months or so. I don't consistently play it. Even then I've managed 2 level 80s, a 78, a 70 and misc. chars in the 40s.

Re:Really?

[mikael_j]

I could renew my WoW WotLK account and pay $15/month to play WoW or I could pay nothing and play TF2. I clearly can't make your decisions for you, but for me it was easy.

Well, assuming you have no interest in TF2 (which you obviously do) then would it really make sense to choose "save money" over "have fun" when what you want is "have fun" and you (presumably) have disposable income?

Re:Really?

[BobMcD]

WoW to me was the ultimate decline of the online RPG genre. It's always been sort of the Super Mario Bros. of the RPG world. Dumbed down to the lowest common denominator to maximize corporate profits. People will flame me for saying this, but I'd rather play DDO or LOTRO with the free-to-play model Turbine seems to be doing OK with...

You're mixing the two arguments, without really doing anything about meshing them together. Your points are:

A) Games charge too much per month to play
and
B) Games are being dumbed down

But you're advocating DDO and LOTRO. Why?

A) - Check. Free to play, at least somewhat. You can elect to pay as little as you'd like, so long as you're fine with restricted access.
and
B) - Not-check. They're both as dumb as WoW, on the whole. Some ways more so, some ways less, but the net is about the same.

On the one hand you're advocating storyline as a good thing, and on the other you're happy to wreck that for others while you grief them PvP-style.

Very disorganized rant, IMO.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! The coveted "modtroll" Troll mod! I don't see anything terribly trollsome in that post and I'm an old school pen/paper D&D to WoW convert!

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any other Meridian 59 players out there? I used to play the hell out of that game!

Re:Really?

[Canazza]

Pretty much this for me too. I've made loads of friends in WoW that I'd begrudge just upping and leaving. I have stopped playing a number of times, ie, stopped paying (not just "log on once a week or so") for various reasons throughout the years, always hanging around the guild forums, but eventually, it keeps bringing me back.

Re:Really?

[node 3]

WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans.

What isn't?

Re:Really?

[node 3]

Actually, FFO, original EQ(pre-WoWing of the experience system), and some other games are more like Foxconn than WoW. WoW is like working at Hot Dog on a Stick

I thought it was TF2 that had the funny hats.

Re:Really?

[IndustrialComplex]

Or I could just play Team Fortress 2, which I got as part of a 5-game pack for $50 that has no monthly fee*.

I'm not allowed to play both?

Re:Really?

[ildon]

I played TF in various incarnations for 7 years. I tried to get into TF2 but I guess I just got as tired of the genre as the originator of this thread got tired of MMO's. Not being able to put the time in to get good enough to play in a competitive clan, and the general lack of a strong clan scene to begin with, probably didn't help. Valve chose to balance the game around public servers rather than clan matches, to the detriment of clan matches. Granted, it makes good business and gameplay sense, since no matter what pubbies were going to account for 90%+ of their users.

Re:Really?

[stonewallred]

Making gold, killing things, low level BGs as a hunter. Never raided and never will. Just enjoy making gold and killing things. Setting up a lowbie with max gear and feeding them a fish feast before they BG pops is probably as good as it gets, especially when at 10th level you can faceroll the wanna be BOA 19th level twinks.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody asks the sports fans why they watch the same sport every Sunday, or why the fisherman goes out catching the same kinds of fish every Saturday

I do.

I get punched a lot. :(

Re:Really?

[Moridineas]

WoW is a lot like the new golf. Nearly everyone has either played it, or has heard of it, and can at least carry on a conversation.

I think that is VERY much dependent on where you work / who is in your circle of acquaintances.

Re:Really?

[stonewallred]

No toon customization, no player housing, no player ran stores, no way to differentiate yourself from any other toon of the same race/class/level except for your name and haircut. Blizz would do good to pull out some of the good ideas from all the other MMORPGs and throw them into the mix.

Re:Really?

[Monkeedude1212]

I played at launch and quit towards the end of Burning Crusade, I had just had enough. Like you, my last 5 to 6 months were not much more than 2 hours a week, just to kill time before actually heading out and doing something. I had originally started WoW with 3 other friends, one of which became addicted and we forced him to quit cold turkey before Burning Crusade came out.* The other friend quit on his own when he found he was running out of time. He wanted to get into Engineering so the work-load for a class like that is pretty big. Not enough time to play. He's since started playing again but only since WotLK, and even now I don't think he plays it too often. That left me and my other friend playing Burning Crusade for a while, and Having done all the raiding I could care for, the only appeal for the game was the introduction of Arenas. We started a 2v2 team to see how we could do. We weren't one of those omg gamestopping combos that win nearly everytime, but we won more than we lost (I think 1700 rating pretty consistantly). Once we found that all the gear was attainable by simply playing a few games every week - and maintaining a decent rating - it kind of lost its appeal.

Eventually it just got to a point where it was like "What do you want to do?" - the Arenas were not enough to keep us playing. If I went on and he wasn't on, I'd log. And Vice Versa. We didn't really care enough to schedule times - its just a game afterall meant to kill some time when either of us have spare time. Eventually my partner and I tried Eve Online, and that did us for a spell because it was fresh and new. We've quit that though - the game doesn't seem to have any real end in sight and a lot of the progression is just spending real life time to get your skills up, or saving up for the next ship. I never really could get a hang of really getting into the game and what its mostly really about (Backstabbing and trickery and deception for money).

So I just don't really play MMO's anymore. If there was still a good social aspect to it, I might play, but it has to be with people I know. Guildies are people I just can't get a real connection to because I may never meet them, so anything I say to offend them will only ever have consequences inside the game and how much I care about the game can change as much as I want it to. Whereas my brother won't go away, so I need to be his friend, you know?

Like you said, the only real draw after a really long time is the community aspect. "Doing the same thing over and over" does lose its appeal but its different everytime when you do it with friends. Just like watching Sports, there will be differences in plays, going to movies feature different films, they are all slightly different each time you do them, but its the people you share it with that make each activity unique and fun. So I guess the only real difference between you and I is that you were capable of establishing really good friendships with the people you met online, or the people you know still play.

*I know it might sound a bit hypocritical, WoW players getting a friend to quit WoW while still playing themselves, but he would skip school, ditch parties, it wasn't good for him. He found a girlfriend who doesn't play, that helps. She likes Starcraft though, so thats a plus.

Re:Really?

[Moridineas]

Agree.

I played classic for a number of months and then quit. Played BC for a number of months then quit. Played Wrath, etc. I only played Wrath for like 3 months...really did not enjoy it. I think in a lot of ways classic WoW was a better game than WoW now. Things like sparkly resource annoy me, though they do make it a lot easier.

I still think my favorite moments of WoW were exploring zones when I was just starting. Flying over high level areas into Ironforge? Awesome! Haven't felt that same thrill of exploration anywhere else. Definitely not in Wrath, I really thought it was uninspired. Seems like half the people now play with QuestHelper and all these other addons just making it a race to 80. I always liked leveling with friends, and never liked raiding nearly so much.

I also wish there was a server for like...people 21+ who don't have a ton of time to play. I guess that's a sign I'm getting old :p

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans.

What isn't?

Going to the dentist.

Re:Really?

[BobMcD]

WoW is a lot like the new golf. Nearly everyone has either played it, or has heard of it, and can at least carry on a conversation.

I think that is VERY much dependent on where you work / who is in your circle of acquaintances.

Indeed. I almost put 'everyone cool' or something along those lines, but I didn't want to generate a new debate on the desirability of conversation partners. Better put, possibly, would be that if they've never even heard of WoW, the chances of our being friends is relatively low.

Re:Really?

[dbet]

Been playing since early 2005. I leave the game for months at a time every summer. And I've never been a 24/7 kind of player. I also don't get into the gear race and nitpicking about every little talent level of play. The content is extremely fun but gets old when you've done it a few times. But every expansion or sometimes just the release of a new dungeon makes it fun again for a little while.

I get the feeling a lot of players will be playing SOME kind of game every night no matter what, so they're on WoW a lot but that's just their night's entertainment. I don't really game at all unless I'm playing WoW so I realize I'm not typical of other people who've been playing since (near) release.

I also have several real life friends that play who keep me coming back more than the new content.

Re:Really?

[VGPowerlord]

TF2 has 9 classes to choose from! And quests ("push the cart!", "go get the flag!", "defend the point!"). You gain new loot by playing. You can get achievements. You group with other players and kill enemies. It's basically the best online RPG ever.

You forgot to mention the awesome PvP play in TF2! And you can trade the items you pick up, but some are soulbound/non-tradeable. You can craft new items.

As for classes, they both have:
Tanking classes (WoW Warrior - TF2 Heavy)
Close range DPS (WoW Rogue - TF2 Spy, Scout)
Ranged DPS (WoW Mage - TF2 Soldier)
Ranged Specialist (WoW Hunter - TF2 Sniper)
Healers (WoW Priest - TF2 Medic)
Hybrid DPS/Healer (WoW Shaman, Paladin, Druid - TF2 Engineer)
DoT Specialists (WoW Warlock - TF2 Pyro)
Cheesy, overpowered classes* (WoW Death Knight - TF2 Demoman)

*except ones already on the list, like Rogue.

Re:Really?

[Moridineas]

Fair enough!

When I was in grad school (in a non-techie field) virtually none of my friends had heard of WoW, and all but one had no interest in WoW (or even more generally in video games).

OTOH, that one and I got married, so it worked out pretty well ;)

Likewise, working in non-techie fields, the number of people that I've run into that have played WoW is pretty small!

Re:Really?

[VGPowerlord]

Or I could just play Team Fortress 2, which I got as part of a 5-game pack for $50 that has no monthly fee*.

I'm not allowed to play both?

You could, but it really depends on how much free time you have.

Valve has the disturbing tendency to reward people who play more often, although they did put a cap on how many items drop for a person in a week.

WoW also tends to have large time commitments.

My decision was easier, as my friends started dropping out of WoW following a series of "lets start over, but on a (Normal, PvP, or RP) server as (Alliance or Horde)!" bits.

Re:Really?

[Skuld-Chan]

I managed to get a girlfriend and found she is far more fun to play with than any game - the downside is just how much time I seem to have lost playing WoW since its inception.

Re:Really?

[VGPowerlord]

I played TF in various incarnations for 7 years. I tried to get into TF2 but I guess I just got as tired of the genre as the originator of this thread got tired of MMO's. Not being able to put the time in to get good enough to play in a competitive clan, and the general lack of a strong clan scene to begin with, probably didn't help. Valve chose to balance the game around public servers rather than clan matches, to the detriment of clan matches. Granted, it makes good business and gameplay sense, since no matter what pubbies were going to account for 90%+ of their users.

Valve does do some things with competitions in mind... the Scout's Sandman weapon lost its ability to stun ubered players based on complaints from the competitive side.

Having said that, pubbies (me included) are where there money is, both with new game sales and now the in-game item store.

I must admit the Mann Co. Supply Crates were an interesting addition to the game. Since they came at the same time as crafting, and you must buy a key for $2.49 to open it (and can only add $5 or more to your Steam wallet), if you don't want to spend the money to buy a key, you can just trade the crate to someone else for something you need.

Of course, since the only apparent way to get the new non-set hats is these crates, you take your chances on missing what is currently a rare hat.

Re:Really?

[KriticKill]

WoW has changed enormously since launch. Its barely even the same game anymore. New races, classes, professions, zones, instances, raids, gear, battlegrounds, as well as new innovations like achievements and flying mounts have kept things interesting. Much has been streamlined, including making hybrid classes a viable option, talent tree's constantly (and positively) being revamped, new designs in raid content (no raid requires 40 people anymore, and the preparations and time spent just getting ready for a raid are gone as well). Heirloom gear, RAF, and enchanting scrolls make levelling an alt far easier, and random dungeons help you gear new max level toons with ease. WoW has been tuned into an experience that is easy to play, but hard to master, with some fresh challenge always ready to be attempted.

Re:Really?

[scatter_gather]

Good grief man, you are a /. reader and haven't upgraded your comp since your PPC? I sense some missing geek cred here.

Re:Really?

[Chris Mattern]

You obviously haven't seen some of WoW's headgear. And I didn't even look that hard for these; I'm sure there's sillier.

Re:Really?

[ieatcookies]

Exactly, this is entertainment and sometimes entertainment needs to be simple and brainless and sometimes it needs to be critical and though provoking. I've had an account since launch and I go through periods where I play a lot and periods where I play little to none. I'll buy cat and continue this.

Re:Really?

[MattW]

I played thousands of hours of Quake 3: Arena. I really like WoW, in particular the peculiar competitive-end-game-raiding aspect. Different strokes to different folks. My "dislike" is RTS games, which I've never enjoyed.

Re:Really?

[Skadet]

just because you can reduce it to "doing the same thing over and over" doesn't necessarily mean that it loses all appeal.

Tell that to my wife.

Re:Really?

[node 3]

And which of those hats were you wearing that muffled the "whoosh" sound coming from overhead :)

Re:Really?

[node 3]

Going to the dentist.

Fair enough. At least, not for the patient. For the dentist, however...

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, still playing, since 3 months after launch. I have taken breaks from the game occasionally but recently started grinding it out again.

Re:Really?

[ZenDragon]

Ive been playing WoW uninterrupted since the origional open beta, with an occasional couple months break here and there. I also played Ultima Online since launch before that. Heck the only reason I gave up on UO was to play WoW, and if something else better comes along I will gladly move on. MMOs for me are an essential part of my personal gaming experience, but I dont really harbor any loyalties to one specific company. I still play wow because to date, not one other company has made anything that even compares. And yes I have tried several others, including Warhammer and Conan both of which looked incredibly promising but, to answer your question, just didnt have the gameplay dynamics that WoW has.

Although I will admit, I have started to tire of it over the last year or so. The only reason I still play is because my son plays as well and I enjoy playing with him. I think as I have gotten older I have taken to more casual gaming anyhow, aside from the occasional Fallout 3 or Assasins Creed II marathons.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

just because you can reduce it to "doing the same thing over and over" doesn't necessarily mean that it loses all appeal.

Tell that to my wife.

I will, the next time I'm sticking it in her pooper. She seems to like that.

Re:Really?

[StikyPad]

I would, but I see you already told her. Twice.

Re:Really?

[StikyPad]

Pretty much anything else. Most games don't attempt to influence the behavior of the player outside of the game, because they don't provide consequences for *not* playing. There's no consequence for not playing, say, Tetris for a month, while doing the same in WoW (or other MMORPGs) will lead to the disintegration of the social network, be it through apathy or necessity on the part of one's "friends", required for all but the most trivial of tasks, relegating one to the oft-maligned (and justly so) "pickup group". Additionally, the state of Tetris fails to advance in your absence, so you're not missing anything by not playing. The same is actually true of WoW over a sufficient timespan, but it's cleverly disguised though reduced requirements to "catch up" to everyone else, which are meted out in annual or semi-annual doses -- long enough to discourage waiting, but sufficient for anyone who's starting fresh or returning after a hiatus. For many people, the innate desire for instant gratification precludes waiting 6 months to resume playing after a 1 week break (family vacation, business travel, whatever), so they jump back in, work twice as hard, and try their damndest not to miss another week.

Re:Really?

[Thrashing Rage]

Have you ever thought that someone who might like an Action-Adventure-RPG such as WoW wouldn't like a twitch First Person Shooter like TF2?

Actually I do like both, thanks for asking. A Raid group fighting a boss or PVP group in battleground can be just as exciting and "twitchy" as a FPS.

Try getting ganked sometime :D

Re:Really?

[fishbowl]

>My decision was easier, as my friends started dropping out of WoW following a series of "lets start over, but on a (Normal, PvP, or RP) server as (Alliance or Horde)!" bits.

On every realm where I've played, I found significant amounts of chat indicating that the grass is greener on some other realm. Either someplace else doesn't have as many total douchebags as here (yeah right). Or some realm is more "progressed" (which just means a lot of players are finished with the game and those that are left don't need *you*).

Sometimes the assertions are legitimate (e.g., Wintergrasp balance). But usually you can find the same argument ("want to transfer off this fail server and go to _REALMX_") where they say the exact same thing about"REALMX"...

The only times I've had better experiences on some realms than others, has been when I have actual real-life friends who play, and where there was a guild that just happened to schedule its raids at times that worked for me in my time zone. But other than that, I have found the same flavors of ridiculous attitudes pretty consistently, everywhere I've played. The fact that I must be willing to make teams from among this pool of players in order to progress, just turns me off the whole game. I realize there are mature people playing the game who I'd love to group with, but I don't find them very often and they don't find me, and certainly not in the kind of numbers you need to run 25-man content (e.g., you need a high level of interest, and you really need enough to overbook 2x or 3x, so that you have at least two or three separate groups running ICC each week. Most guilds stop short of overbooking, lucky enough to have 25 players at-level and capable of running ICC at all.)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well instead of the ol' in and out... try doing the ol' side to side.

Re:Really?

[QuantumBeep]

WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans.

What isn't?

Going to the dentist.

NOT going to the dentist is.

Re:Really?

[TheKidWho]

I was 2350 rated in 3v3s and 2100 rated in 2v2s :) I ganked the crap outta people, that's what I liked to do in WoW.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

But WoW has a lot more variety when it comes to quests! You have "kill 10 of A", "collect 10 of B", kill 20 of C", "collect 20 of D", and of course, "kill 10 of E and collect 10 of F".

I mean, seriously, a flag? Why the fuck do we have to steal the enemy's flag? If we make it all the way to the enemy base, we may as well fortify that position and deny the enemy further entry to the combat zone. Then, we can capture as many flags as we want without having to fight for every feet. It's not like the enemy can go around the conveniently placed invisible walls and mountains. Luckily there is no such foolishness in WoW. It's ridiculous to even.... OMG FKING RESTO DRUID EFC GOING TUN

Re:Really?

[seebs]

If it hadn't been for Real ID, I'd still be playing. I had a lot of fun in that game, and the gameplay was still fun to me.

And no, the "optional" thing doesn't address my concerns. My biggest concern is their complete inability to acknowledge the substance of any complaints -- they've been told time and again why the real name thing is a deal breaker for many people, and they're fine with that. Well, okay. They can be fine with that without my money, 'cuz I have friends for whom the real name thing is a deal breaker. And I'm sorta one of them; I find the idea of real names in my fantasy RPG unpleasant, among other things, and yet, I really WANT the cross-game/cross-server chat functionality. You know, like the functionality that EVERY OTHER GAMING ENVIRONMENT has offered for years now, whether it's Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, or whatever. Heck, City of Heroes has working global handles (which aren't real names) and has for ages, and somehow not using real names didn't make the feature useless. ... And that's why I'm playing CoH, not WoW, these days.

Re:Really?

[Dashiva Dan]

I started in beta, and played well into Burning Crusades, but at that point I had a family, full time job, and was pushing the envelope in hardcore raiding leading 40man raids (for the non-mmo people, that means trying to organise and manage 40 other people from all over the world via voice chat to achieve what most considered the toughest of tasks)
I was getting burned out, my wife was barely playing anymore, so I just up and quit, I'd play web games like kdice and some civilizarion over the lan with the wife, but that was about it.
Last christmas my brother-in-law remembered we 'played WoW' and bought us teh WotLK exapnsion... Well, had to at least give it a look, so now we're still playing again, however not 'hard-core' and it's still fun. Prolly be buying the next cataclysm patch (unless the brother-in-law gets it for us this christmas lol)
Then again, my step daughter played (and still would, but college taking up much of her time) but - as I just mentioned - she's at college and living on campus, so that's more free time, and it's really just a matter of managing priorities.
And even further, if you have better things to do, you're best to go do them. I just find $15 (times 2) a month is cheaper than going to the movies every weekend, and many other more expensive activities - going out to dinner, etc, and managable entertainment, economically.

Re:Really?

[Dashiva Dan]

Hehe, I wrote/recoded a mud about 10-12 years ago, quit it a couple of years later, and last I checked (a year or so ago) it was still up and running.
Good muds never die!

Re:Really?

[Dashiva Dan]

I started with MUDs, moved on to lan parties, played UO, a little EQ, a half a dozen others I won't bother naming, WoW is the only one I've gotten more than a year of enjoyment out of, and it continues to deliver.
Not saying you're wrong, I'm sure for some there's nostalgia and other factors that make going back to the roots more enjoyable, but it's not the case for me.
Then again, I can now get nostalgic about vanilla WoW, most current WoW players don't remember 40 man raids, let alone Molten Core raiding, or BRS raiding, and the game was very different back then.
"I miss the good old days where there was no battlegrounds/cross-server stuff, and we'd have a grand old time at Tarren Mill/Crossroads" type stuff.

Re:Really?

[Dashiva Dan]

I play Wow, but I started on twitch based FPS and loved them all. Doom, Hexen, ROTT, Quake, UT.
But when it started getting into crap (imo) like team fortress I realised that for team play with specific roles, etc, WoW does it so much better.
Unfortunatly I moved to the other side of the planet, but if I was still near my friends (or even in the same timezone) We'd probably still be running LAN parties with the classic FPSs

Re:Really?

[Dashiva Dan]

That is a bad point, I believe. Tetris is a solo game. WoW is a social one.
If you drop out of any social environment for 6 months, relationships will disintergrate. Be it Wow, Facebook, and particularly Real Life
It's not a clever or devious or manipulative attempt of WoW, it's one of the core tennants of any social game, which means all MMOs, Social Networking sites, and real life itself.
To use a real life example of this: Many people go to family gatherings only once or twice a year - christmas/thanksgiving/etc, and spend this time to "catch up" with everyone else... The "hard-core" Ralatives (usually your parents) will try to get you to spend more time "with the family" and be more involved, and offer incentives and rewards (or at least a lack of guilt) if you do so. Those who decide to be "more involved" usually work twice as hard till they catch up, spending time with their neices and nephews, etc, untill they're up to par with their other relatives in ... you see where this is going, I'll stop now.

Re:Really?

[conark]

i play on a PVP server (mainly because my friend was on there). the whole race to 80 for me was mostly because i kept getting ganked and just got sick of it. i still get ganked as an 80 but at least i have somewhat of a chance. i can't imagine for someone completely new to the game how they'd react if they inadvertently chose a PVP server and knew no one that could help them out. the one thing i wish the game addressed is making PVP more fair with regards to this. make it so that people can PVP only at the zone level unless they had their PVP flag turned on. well, then again i'm thinking of starting from scratch on a PVE server. maybe i can actually enjoy leveling...

Re:Really?

[Omestes]

I kind of don't blame him. The switch to Intel is part of why I stopped using Macs, the PPC ones just seemed better. At least spec wise, a 1.xxghz PPC seemed much more "zippy" than the 1.xxGhz Intel variety. That and the transition wasn't as painless as advertised. Rosetta made 90% of older apps suck.

That and he has a Six String Samurai sig, meaning he gains a couple of geek points.

Back on topic, and having nothing to do with your reply: I played WoW since right after the release (about 2 months), and quit. Then started with BC, and quit. Then started again with Wrath, and quit. Each time the break grew longer, when I quit the first time it was only for 3 months or so, and mostly because school wasn't being forgiving. The second time it was around 6 months, and mostly because I go bored. The third and last time has been around a year, and mostly because I got REALLY bored, and now I have pretty much no motivation of going back. Some times I miss it because of social concerns, I have couple friends from high school who play, who I never talk to outside of WoW (and now b.net chat). But I look at the end game with a sense of dread. I'm one of the few players who liked leveling more than raiding/arena, both of which seemed rather Sisyphus like, an annoying never ending grind for the prize of having the largest epeen on the server (which really doesn't hold my interest).

And now they are further "dumbing down" the game, so I care even less. Not to be one of those "hardcore" types, but I miss 40-man raids, they were interesting, and held interest past the whole "I got my purples!" thing. I find it hard to be motivated when I just have to get to the Icecrown Pavillian and MiniMall, just to get the epic shoulders of Bob the Whalesmacker so I can go to the Icecrown Dirty Dungeon of Vice and kill Belluga the Retconned Stripper, so I can get the Hat Of Vengence +9000, so I can then wait until the next expansion/content patch hits so I can do it all over again.

WoW is a bit too much like living in some strange existential novel for my tastes, I suppose. In a strange way it mimics real life a bit too much.

The social aspect is also a bit nasty. I made several friends on WoW, but they pretty much only exist within WoW. The second one of us leaves the game for a while, the friendship is completely destroyed. Yes, there are exceptions, but pretty much everyone you know in WoW is only existent in WoW. I'm kind of sick of the ephemeral friend trend (Wow, I'm in a guild with 500 people, and have 4,000 FaceSpace friends! I must be cool!).

I did enjoy the story and mythology though. It probably is the only game when I actually am interested in the story, and sought out information outside of the game.

Cataclysm might make me come back, since it is nice that the developers decided to actually put some time and throw us people who love leveling a bone, for the first time since launch.

Re:Really?

[jeffasselin]

I still play, although I've taken leaves of absence from the game from 1 month to one that was 4 months long. I've gone through different phases and styles from hardcore to uber-casual to "seriously casual". I recently took time off for a trip to Italy.

I like the lore, the environment, the quests more than anything else. I enjoy developing my character and playing with nice people.

Re:Really?

[Trubadidudei]

WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans.

What isn't?

Going to the dentist.

NOT going to the dentist is.

I think you all misunderstand what a skinner box is, or at least, you are not using the expression in the right way.
A skinner box is designed to promote one kind of behaviour by offering a reward for "doing the right thing" (or removing a reward / adding negative stimulus for doing the "wrong thing"). A pigeon for example, can be learned to do a little spin by offering it a reward every time it turns around, and thus learning it that turning around = food and thus = good.
Now, what do kids get after getting their mouth examined by a stranger with icky gloves? Well, a reward of course! aaand I guess you can see where im going with this from now on.

The point is that a skinner box is just a demonstration of a basic mechanism on how we learn behaviour. You could say that every form of activity that involves a reward has some skinnerian elements to it, and as thus you could even make the point that society is in reality a giant skinner box. Making the argument that something is a skinner box is a moot point because all it really implies is that that something involves learning through some arbitrary reward mechanisms. You might say that WoW as a skinner box is "bad" because it promotes certain kinds of behaviour that might interfere with the already learned "good" behaviour (which you got from the society around you). However using the term "skinner box" as a descriptive term of an activity such as playing WoW, is in essence completely meaningless.
You could also say that the term skinner box is used to describe something which reduces the reward-behaviour relation to its simplest form, and is thus for some arbitrary reason "bad". However, very simple mechanisms are involved in alot of the learning we do (like previously mentioned reward from dentist), although it is not easily visible as we tend not to regard our own existence, in a particular society, as a closed environment the same way many do with WoW, and thus do not see the same relation with the clean, sterile and calculated skinner box.

Also, i would like to comment on the argument made earlier, where it was said that WoW was in fact a skinner box because it discouraged not playing. Personally I think this comment is completely invalid on the subject of WoW because it concerns social interaction as a whole, and not WoW in particular. Yes, WoW "uses" social elements to keep you playing, but that is due to the social interactions occuring within the game, and not the game itself. Ironically, once you reach a certain part in WoW (i.e the max level) you could basically wait for an entire expansion, and then be on equal footing with everyone else as gear is effectively wiped and everyone starts from scratch (this point is lessened somewhat by the permanence of achievements, collected mounts, pets and such vanity items, but interest in these is socially driven and not what one would call a "core" feature of the game). One could thus say that to some degree the game rewards not playing at max level.

Re:Really?

[Moridineas]

I always wanted to play on a PVP server, but all of my friends were on PVE. In retrospect I'm glad I ended up on PVE.

Re:Really?

[conark]

i find my server to be pretty obnoxious on average. too many rude players. also, endless ganks which make questing impossible. and of course, Blizzard really doesn't care in the end.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, good news for you, they just fixed that.

Eh,

[moeluv]

I'm more interested in finding out about the new next gen mmo Bizzard ir rumored to be working on. Supposedly it's a new IP with no story connection to their other works. Would be nice to see something thats not a sequel. Regardless of what one thinks of WoW, Blizzard has created som iconic game IP lines.

Re:Eh,

[Pojut]

Much like Valve, Blizzard is one of the few companies that could continue only releasing games connected to their core IP and not hear a single complaint about it from me. While I'm excited about a potential new Blizzard IP, their current IP is so iconic and so engrained in my gaming experience that I don't think I'd ever get enough of them.

Re:Eh,

[MBGMorden]

I pretty much agree. I mean, Blizzard really has their "typically game genre" bases covered. They've got the more aloof less serious fantasy setting with Warcraft, the darker more serious fantasy setting with Diablo, and the futuristic sci-fi setting with Starcraft.

I don't think there are a lot of good options for creating a modern day IP separate from reality. The only significant option that seems to be unexplored for them (aside from just doing different fantasy/scifi world) would be a more Victorian/Steampunk type IP (or, God help us, a vampire/werewolf type setting), which I can't say that I'd personally be extremely interested in.

Re:Eh,

[TheKidWho]

Steampunk = goblins
Vampire/werewolf = Worgen

Re:Eh,

[MBGMorden]

Vampire/Werewolf = Worgen gets a "kinda" from me. It's still embedded into the WoW "swords and sorcery universe", rather than letting the vampires/werewolves be center stage. There's also the issue of the vampires missing from that aspect of it. I'll let that slide though as there are some vampires that show up in WoTLK, even though they're decidly not of the "pop culture" variety of vampire.

Steampunk = goblins though is a "no way". Steampunk is an established genre that doesn't typically feature different species. It's typically human, and has heavy influence from the American West and Victorian England. The devices might be there in WoW, but the atmosphere and feel of the genre most certainly isn't. At best they could be argued to be a strange parody of steampunk.

Re:Eh,

[cgenman]

While I'd generally agree, I'm very happy Valve took chances on Portal and Left 4 Dead. Blizzard seems content to evolve their IP's, with WoW being very different than Warcraft, and the failed Ghost being very different than Starcraft. But there is something special about when Valve releases a whole new world to explore. TF2, while it didn't have much of a "world" world, did feel like a 1950's take on a very 1990's genre.

And they have enough, and release infrequently enough, to keep the interest up. But here's hoping Blizzard starts taking more creative risks like Valve.

Re:Eh,

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more interested in finding out about the new next gen mmo Blizzard ir rumored to be working on. Supposedly it's a new franchise with no story connection to their other works. Would be nice to see something thats not a sequel. Regardless of what one thinks of WoW, Blizzard has created som iconic game franchise lines.

FTFY!

Re:Eh,

[idontgno]

Steampunk = goblins though is a "no way". Steampunk is an established genre that doesn't typically feature different species.

For very small values of "Steampunk".

Major counterexample from an established RPG house: Spelljammer.

Major counterexample from an established console gaming franchise: Final Fantasy VI

Major counterexample from a prominent graphic novel line: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Not all steampunk is Gibson/Sterling.

Re:Eh,

[scatter_gather]

For very small values of "Steampunk".

Ok, that really did make me laugh.

Re:Eh,

[darkwing_bmf]

I can think of a few genres you're missing: Dinosaurs, Ancient Civilization, Vikings, Wild West, Post-Apocalyptic, Eastern Fantasy, Arabian Fantasy, Undersea Adventure, Elemental, etc...

Re:Eh,

[Anonymous Coward]

The only significant option that seems to be unexplored for them (aside from just doing different fantasy/scifi world) would be a more Victorian/Steampunk type IP (or, God help us, a vampire/werewolf type setting), which I can't say that I'd personally be extremely interested in.

So you won't join my multi-species guild, the Gay Poly-amorous Vampire Werewolves of Azeroth?

*angrily stalks off to sulk in a dark corner of the tram station*

Re:Eh,

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW already has dinosaurs (an entire zone in a crater full of stereotypical movie dinosaur types, plus giant insects)

WoW already has ancient civilisation both ways. You've got the "ancients knew more" stuff where it turns out there are complicated machines hidden inside the mountains (big machines, gears the size of a house) AND you've got fallen empires, cursed lands, temples sunk beneath the water, etc.

WoW already has vikings, up to and including boat loads of them landing and attacking a fishing village

Blizzard have been steadily raiding every possible source for new material. Remember, the game has spaceships AND wizards in it. They are not limiting themselves by some arbitrary genre boundary. Only the "feel" is restricted to swords and sorcery. A gun works roughly the same as a lightning spell, rather than vice versa.

It's about time

[VGPowerlord]

It's about time. We knew the release date had to be soon, as Blizzard's WoW Updater has already pushed out 4.8GB of updates to each user for the upcoming version (4.0.0).

Re:It's about time

[BobMcD]

My best guess as to the timeline:

10/12/10 - Soft-Confirmed date of the 4.0.1 patch. This will be client and class/mechanics changes only.

10/26/10 - End of Beta

11/23/10 - 4.0.3 'Sundering' patch containing world changes, but not perks like Goblins/Worgen, etc. This coincides with WoW's sixth anniversary.

12/07/10 - Cataclysm proper, as announced today...

12/14/10 - Rumored start of Arena Season Nine

The thing that's odd to me is, why start an arena season when nobody is geared to take part in it yet??

Re:It's about time

[Graff]

The thing that's odd to me is, why start an arena season when nobody is geared to take part in it yet??

You get gear during the season. People have been gearing up for season nine during the whole of season eight. PVE doesn't really factor into it.

Re:It's about time

[BobMcD]

Sort of, but you can't equip any of it until you're 85. How does one get time to level to max AND grind up a bunch of points in only seven days?

I'm not expecting there would be anyone to queue against for such a person...

Re:It's about time

[Chris Mattern]

That's, "Hell, it's about time."

Re:It's about time

[Athanasius]

This way people can play Arena if they want to (put up with the queues). There'd be more whining if they plain couldn't for X weeks.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

They were in kind of an awkward spot, with Blizzcon coming up soon. They seem to take about 2 months to plaster the internet with ads for a new game/expansion once it's been announced. Announcing it at Blizzcon would have put a release uncomfortably close to Christmas.

Maybe this means they'll give us more Diablo 3 information instead...

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymous because I feel sad about this now... but my experience with WotLK:
Game released Thursday morning at midnight. By the time the server reset Tuesday morning I had not only hit 80; but cleared every heroic dungeon, 0-drake Sarth (10), and 2 wings of 10 man Naxx.
One week is lots of time to hit max level and achieve some amount of progress.

Re:It's about time

[BobMcD]

Sure, it is possible, but would there have been enough of your peers to make queuing for arenas anything but anguish? I'm thinking it would take something on the hundreds of players to make that work.

Maybe I'm underestimating how many would be willing to do it.

Also, were you 'hardcore' going into Wrath? Did you carry TBC gear with you into Naxx? Because I'm not seeing a parallel here with this particular gear reset.

Re:It's about time

[MattW]

Raids are still not being tested on Beta. Even if they rolled today, it might be tight to test/tune those in 3 weeks. I'd give the beta thing another week or 3.

Regarding the Arena Season - even if the ratings at first don't mean much, Arena Pts = get gear, so I'm sure some people want to get some matches in and start getting points for playing.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Never underestimate the sheer lack of sleep some people will participate in to get to level 85 and then do Arena or Raids.

Re:It's about time

[WuphonsReach]

Sort of, but you can't equip any of it until you're 85. How does one get time to level to max AND grind up a bunch of points in only seven days?

Well, if WotLK is any guideline... people will find where the infinitely respawning mobs that give XP are, then convince other players with healers to sit there and power level them. Which got people from 70 to 80 in WotLK in under 2 days. (There was also a bit of account sharing going on.)

In Wrath, my benchmark for leveling was that 8 hours of /played per level was fast with my less DPS-oriented characters (like my holy priest) taking more like 12-14 hours per level. So if we assume that leveling speed is the same, that's only 40 hours of /played to get to 85 in Cata, probably with an upper end of 60 hours. That's nothing to a dedicated, no-life, player who has a lot of free time.

The PvP points will probably come from battlegrounds, although I don't recall whether rated BGs will launch on Dec 7th or not until Dec 14th.

(I'm fuzzy on the BG/PvP stuff... because the whole "you must have X+ rating" to buy the top tier gear was insulting. It meant that unless you were ahead of the curve, you would be forced to fight against better geared players in the 2nd half of the season. Which would trash your rating, preventing you from buying the better gear. Which was a vicious circle-jerk. So I haven't bothered to Arena it up or even go play Battlegrounds because the gear disparity basically makes you nothing more then roadkill.)

Re:It's about time

[BobMcD]

(I'm fuzzy on the BG/PvP stuff... because the whole "you must have X+ rating" to buy the top tier gear was insulting. It meant that unless you were ahead of the curve, you would be forced to fight against better geared players in the 2nd half of the season. Which would trash your rating, preventing you from buying the better gear. Which was a vicious circle-jerk. So I haven't bothered to Arena it up or even go play Battlegrounds because the gear disparity basically makes you nothing more then roadkill.)

You might be pleased to note that the requirements are mostly going away. Except, I think, on weapons only. Look into it, though, if you think it could be your type of thing because they did recede a bit.

Re:It's about time

[Dashiva Dan]

With cross realm battlegrounds, there'll be at least hundreds of people going in, especially with new skills and new gear to test out.
Also, battlegrounds give EXP now, but even with that aside, I'm sure our top arena killers will be L85 within 2 days of cata coming out, if not sooner.

Pearl Harbor Day?

[mike.mondy]

WOW is just a game ... But this choice of a release date is sure to generate controversy....

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[digitalnoise615]

WOW is just a game ... But this choice of a release date is sure to generate controversy....

So? My daughter was born almost 59 years to the minute of the D-Day Invasion...

And, actually, it could be viewed as somewhat appropriate - Cataclysm is an upheaval for Azeroth in so many ways; much like the attack on Pearl Harbor was an upheaval both for America as a nation as well as the rest of the world.

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[Ben4jammin]

I challenge anyone to go to www.datesinhistory.com and find a date that WON'T generate controversy somewhere. I totally understand what you are saying, but all dates have meaning to someone.

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[TBone]

As was I (though 32 years, not 59...).

Happy birthday to me, time to kick some Deathwing butt.

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[mike.mondy]

Of course. And I'm sure the real rush is to make the Christmas shopping season. But, I still predict some complaints....

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[Ben4jammin]

Oh I am sure there will be...maybe not to the level of what EA got, but still. What surprises me is that I thought they would have it out before Thanksgiving weekend so everyone could begin a mad dash to lvl 85 over a long weekend.

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So? My daughter was born almost 59 years to the minute of the D-Day Invasion.."

D_Day is a day, not a minute or hour. (Paratroopers were landing at midnight and the first landing craft didn't reach shore until after 6am or so, And of course this is local (Normandy) times...

BTW Bill Millin, the piper that landed at sword beach with Lord Loat's brigade, passed away only a couple of months ago aged 87.

Re:Pearl Harbor Day?

[Rakarra]

But, I still predict some complaints....

Damn! Really sticking your neck out there, aren't you?

OCD? :P

[Moraelin]

OCD? ;)

Well, now seriously, I don't know anyone who actually played non-interrupted since start. The longest I know someone playing in a row is like 3 years, which admittedly is still a lot, but still not quite since start.

What most of us do is really play one game, play and eventually get bored, move to another game, played and eventually get bored, and so on. Not even all MMOs. There'll be lots of falling back to single player games in between MMOs.

I mean, technically I've started WoW relatively soon after it got launched in Europe myself, but, good grief, not continuously. In fact, the vast majority of these years I was _not_ on WoW at all. Ditto for other games. Actually my all time favourite MMO is City Of Heros, not WoW, but, you guessed, it's been actually a lot of not being on COH either.

At any rate, I'll probably have a look on WoW when cataclysm launches. Or maybe not. But it's not like, you know, a marriage or a job or swearing allegiance to a new king. It's a game. You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.

Re:OCD? :P

[AigariusDebian]

I would say WoW is an exception to this, because the expansions basically reinvent the game every two years, especially this one that fully refactors the initial leveling experience as well as adding the new content at the top.

Re:OCD? :P

[BobMcD]

You play it until you've seen all the quests that are easy to get to, maybe try again with a different character or three, but eventually that's it.

The Heirlooms that they introduced with Wrath, and are continuing with Cata, have put an interesting spin on this, actually. Your main character's efforts can now directly result in alts leveling faster through the content you've already seen. There's XP in the battlegrounds now, too, and PvP heirlooms make that a lot easier to get into.

Everyone I know has several alts. Many of whom reached max level during this last xpac. This did used to happen in the past, true, but not to the degree we see it today.

Also, the optional RealID system means you can play on another server and/or faction without anyone wondering if you've quit the game...

Re:OCD? :P

[WuphonsReach]

The Heirlooms that they introduced with Wrath, and are continuing with Cata, have put an interesting spin on this, actually. Your main character's efforts can now directly result in alts leveling faster through the content you've already seen. There's XP in the battlegrounds now, too, and PvP heirlooms make that a lot easier to get into.

I still think AoC did it better, or at least different at getting you to the level cap. Life in AoC really doesn't start until you hit 80 because probably 95% of the players are level 80, with multiple alts at 80. (It's also a very small population.)

I played AoC over the summer. When I signed up, I was able to pay an extra $5 or $6 for a "Tortage Starter Pack" which came with (10) 2 or 4 hour double-XP potions. Nice little perk and got me to level 80 in about 3-4 weeks before I had time to get bored. I still had 2 potions left by the time I hit 80.

In addition, they also have a feature called "offline levels". Every 3 or 4 days, as long as your account is paid up, you earn 1 free level. You can save them up, or use them as you go, or whatever. They can be applied to any character over level 30 on that account. So a lot of players grind a character up to about level 60 or 65 or 70, then use free levels to get instantly to 80.

You can also, once you have a character past a certain level (50? 80?) start a 2nd character at level 50 instead of level 1.

(In WoW, I have both the heirloom shoulders and chest for all the characters that I expect to be playing in Cata. As well as the heirloom weapons and a few of the 2% mana/health trinkets.)

So Familiar....

[EXTomar]

Why does a very destructive sneak attack from the ocean on major coastal cities around December sound so familiar?

To be serious for a moment, I still play since launch. The thing that kept my attention is their drive is partially beating the content and continuing drive to change the content. Seeing a new boss, dissecting its behavior, and attacking in a cooperative team manner is always fun. There is just enough complexity that it triggers my analytical side so when they revamp or change out mechanics I'm always interested.

Granted "WoW" isn't a perfect game and it does hinge on personal experiences (if you have no friends to play with, "WoW" is easily the dumbest thing to try to play) but I'm always stumped when people say "WoW" is a horrible experience.

Re:So Familiar....

[Ben4jammin]

Agreed. I think your enjoyment will be inline with how many friends you have that play, or how many friends you can make in the game. Since I found out that some people I work with play, and since I found a guild my enjoyment increased greatly. What I never got was the people that would do nothing but solo quest and then complain that the game was crap...of course you think it is crap if you miss the whole point of social interaction.

Re:So Familiar....

[Idiomatick]

Wow is great.... mostly. Wow has relatively complex fights certain epic battles and great pvp opportunities. Tons of fighting.

The bad really does hurt it though. PVE, is entirely pointless... well not entirely but it is easy to the point of being trivial. The whole PVE experience is hilariously pathetic. I realize I'm speaking more from a good at games POV... since I am a LOT better than the majority of wow players. But I think they pander too much to the terrible players.... And since PVE solo content is pointless you need pve group content at which point you have difficulty finding competent people.

The problem with PVP is balance as always. This is unfortunately really hard to solve. But as it is, the gear treadmill has made PVP sorta silly (rogue in 1v1 = free win). And I think it would be best to give pvpers an 'arena selection' which replaces all gear slots when you go into battle. Which would help balance things a lot. From there, tiered BGs would even out the rest. This would end out-geared people one shotting others, and it would end retards holding back pros.

Also, WG was a cluster fuck. I've no idea why they thought it could be balanced the way they tried, and never fixing it is pathetic. And their algorithm for determining when you get into a group is terrible. And the fact that you cant queue for everything at once is stupid.

Re:So Familiar....

[stonewallred]

Lol at rogue 1 v 1 being a win for rogue. My hunters from lvl 10 to 80 would like to speak to you. They might get a cheap shot and kidney, then I trinket, disengage, drop trap, mark and light them on fire until they die. But usually they get webbed by my pet and never get to do anything but die, QQing all the way to the GY. And why yes, I am a person who leveled three hunters and a DK to 80 on Cho'Gall Alliance side.

Re:So Familiar....

[Rakarra]

But as it is, the gear treadmill has made PVP sorta silly (rogue in 1v1 = free win).

The only thing that 1v1 encounters show is that PvP is not balanced around 1v1 combat. Some classes -will- be inherently better than others in dueling scenarios.

Re:So Familiar....

[Idiomatick]

Top end rogue vs top end anything without a bubble/plate goes like this.

Rogue gets first hit and can keep the target CCed until death. When his target trinkets they will CC again. The target may have the chance to use ONE GCD. That is ALL. For hunters that would likely be disengage. But you will still be slowed by poisons and have a decent chance that you will be stunned in mid air.

A really good rogue will NEVER lose to a hunter in a 1v1. In many/most cases they will not get hit. Their target won't even blow CDs.

Re:So Familiar....

[Idiomatick]

True. And blizz has stated the same for 2v2/3v3, that they are shooting for 5v5 balance. But that doesn't change the fact that it sucks. I DID say that it isn't an easy issue to fix, if at all possible w/ wow's lvl of complexity.

Re:So Familiar....

[Warhawke]

Why does a very destructive sneak attack from the ocean on major coastal cities around December sound so familiar?

Oh weird, I think I'm beginning to see a pattern.

Re:So Familiar....

[Dexter Herbivore]

Aliiance scum...(just kidding) LOK'TAR OGAR!

Re:So Familiar....

[Dexter Herbivore]

You seem to be forgetting frost mages.

Re:So Familiar....

[Idiomatick]

? Frost mages lose to everything... cept like prot pallies and shit.

Re:So Familiar....

[Trubadidudei]

Btw, cataclysm nerfs burst damage, has much higher health pools, and nerfs rogue CC.

Problem solved!

No mention of flying?

[chemicaldave]

The author failed to mention a primary feature of the expansion: flying allowed in Azeroth. The world was previously not setup to allow players to see the ugly transition between zones, and this is seen as a major update.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flying: an ability to avoid what little chance there was for spontaneus world PvP. Hoorayy.. :(

Re:No mention of flying?

[jdizzle636]

Flying: an ability to avoid what little chance there was for spontaneus world PvP. Hoorayy.. :(

Oh, you mean ganking.

Re:No mention of flying?

[cynyr]

balance druids, shadow priests and mages all can kill you while you are flying, so don't worry.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Incoherent07]

Yeah, Blizzard doesn't really do innovation. They take other games' features and add polish. It actually ends up working, because most of the "more creative games" have large gaps somewhere, and if you mash all of them together into one less creative game, you end up with more people playing it than the total of its component parts.

Specifically, the flying thing took so long because they didn't originally design the zones for flying (which CoH did). In the current world there are large stretches of flat textures, perspective tricks (the cathedral in Stormwind), false walls, and so forth. It took them until an expansion that rebuilt most of the old world for them to be able to correct that.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This. Never liked WoW, to be honest. I tried it, and hated it, multiple times. I even got in the Cataclysm Beta (God knows why) and tried it again, and hated it again.

CoH was a lot of fun. I only just cancelled my account, and only because of school. Going Rogue (the new expansion) just added a crapton of content to the game, as well as overhauling the graphics, which were already better than WoW's outdated graphics. And The Old Republic looks awesome too.

WoW just kinda pales in comparison to the much more awesome games that are out now.

Re:No mention of flying?

[mikael_j]

Or possibly make it even easier to gank "noobs" in lvl30-40 zones, death from above...

Re:No mention of flying?

[BobMcD]

Well, you're looking at this a bit one-sided, I think.

Yes, CoH allowed you to fly early on, and their character-leveling game was the absolute best I'd ever seen when it launched. But that's all they had. Fast-forward to today and, as far as I know, that is STILL all they have.

It would be very easy for a game like WoW to see those good ideas and incorporate some of them, without losing the other stuff they had built up along the way.

As far as I can tell people play WoW because of either Blizzard's good reputation or because so many other people are already playing it.

Yes, certainly. The latter part is clearly more of a factor than the former, as I see it.

By measure of the actual gameplay, it's one of the worst MMOGs you can find.

That's going to need a definition of 'gameplay'. It is at least as good, if not better than most of the stuff out there in terms of pressing buttons and getting a satisfactory experience. They have mediocre content to play - whether PvE, PvP, AH, whatever - but it all plays reasonably well. So I'll agree with you only in that 'good is the enemy of great', and that WoW as a whole could be a lot better. And it likely would, if it had any serious competition whatsoever. But as it stands 'worst' can't quite be accurate, unless it also means 'equally bad'.

Re:No mention of flying?

[VGPowerlord]

Flying: an ability to avoid what little chance there was for spontaneus world PvP. Hoorayy.. :(

Unless they lowered flying mounts from level 60 while I've been gone, you would have already been guided to Outlands by the time you gain them.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Rakarra]

Flying: an ability to avoid what little chance there was for spontaneus world PvP. Hoorayy.. :(

Oh, you mean ganking.

We call it, "free HKs from AFK people."

Re:No mention of flying?

[snuf23]

Yes flying is available at level 60 now.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Anonymous Coward]

The author also failed to explain that the game is so broken at present that PvP may as well not be a component of the game.

Re:No mention of flying?

[Dashiva Dan]

That's a harsh take.
Blizzard innovated ways to get more out of the engine for the same experience.
Not allowing free flying gained a number of benefits:

• The paths people took from point A to point B were more realistic to the average person
• The flow of movement could be factored into quests and items of interest
• It lent a mor enatural feel of immersion to the game, where you followed roads, paths, etc
• Characters weren't so all-powerful they could fly anywhere
• They could creativly remove a lot of the terrain that a player would never see from the places they could get to - backs of buildings, tops of trees, etc, etc, which allowed them to put more detail into what players could see without requiring top end expensive machines

I could probably go on.
When Burning Crusades came out they figured that a) players were 'more powerful' at level 70, so flying wasn't so unrealistic, b) computers were more powerful, so they could do full terrain, c) They'd explored most of what could be done with the ground limits, and could now focus on other gameplay aspects with flight, etc, and so they bought in flying.
Apparently it worked out, and computers are getting even more powerful on average, so they're bringing in flying (still only at high levels) to cataclysm. It just keeps on expanding the experience, without losing the good parts of the experience (no flight and it's mechanics and effect on levelling 1-60)
They continue to build and expand on what they've done, keeping the good, and fixing the bad.
I played CoH, flying was cool, but that was all it really had, the terrain was 90% boxes and so boring, the textures and graphics lackluster, the quests, storyline, boring. The mechanics of playing were poor. And they've done how much to improve on this? Their big new thing was to add villians, which was almost zero affect on any of the problems it had.
But yeah, WoW almost certainly looked at all the other games out there (and not just other MMOs) and took the best of them to build with. And thank god they did, it's resulted in the best MMO out there (as an entire experience). They'd be stupid not to start with the best of what exists.
I hope some other company does the same, and comes in and takes the best of WoW and other games, and builds an even better MMO, I'll go play it instead.
Meanwhile, however, Blizzard has been continuing to take the best, improve on it, and relase it as expansions, and that's why I still play WoW.

I'm shocked they're skipping the 23rd

[BobMcD]

Honestly I would have thought the guys in Marketing would have pulled this for the 23rd - their sixth anniversary. My only guess at this point is that they plan their 4.0.3 'sundering' patch on 11/23 instead. But genuinely, I would have imagined that they would pull towards that date, even if there were major bugs left to be fixed.

Re:I'm shocked they're skipping the 23rd

[Eskarel]

Blizzard doesn't do that, never have, it's what makes them a successful company.

That's not to say they've never released code with bugs in it, they like all other developers most certainly have, especially with WoW where you're dealing with huge numbers and infinite different configurations. What they've never done is release a product before it was ready, and if they managed not to do that when they weren't generating a billion or so dollars in revenue every year I doubt they're going to start caving in to marketing now.

Re:I'm shocked they're skipping the 23rd

[BobMcD]

I guess you haven't heard - they're Activision now. The Blizzard that used to have all these principles is slowly eroding in the face of the corporate machine. The 'wait until it is ready' ethic is largely a myth now, or otherwise we likely wouldn't see Cata until mid-2011.

hmmm good timing or planning?

[Deadstar_lll]

Wow just in time for the Christmas rush. Smart move on blizz or did it take too long?

Re:hmmm good timing or planning?

[BobMcD]

Wow just in time for the Christmas rush. Smart move on blizz or did it take too long?

I don't think Christmas is a factor for them. Nobody but nobody is going to buy this on the 7th, wrap it, and put it under the tree until the 25th. It might hurt sales of other titles, but somehow I doubt it. It is, after all, only $40 this time around. That's downright cheap for a PC title today.

Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[twoallbeefpatties]

Man, I remember that we were talking about Cataclysm more than a year ago. It had already been in development for quite some time, it had already gone through a lot of changes. When I talked to other people making guesses about when Cataclysm would come out, we figured it would hit around February/March 2010, so as to not interfere with Starcraft 2's release.

Well, it's not interfering with SC2, that's for sure. December 2010 - sheesh! It amazes me more that I keep falling for it, thinking Blizzard products are coming along okay, then always having the release pushed back by a year and a half. I know the quality of their products usually makes up for it, but you'd think they'd reach a point where they'd just stop hinting at release dates for years in advance. Not to mention that it's strange that they're going to put this out in December - I wonder how Activision feels about having a new WoW release to compete with the rest of its Christmas schedule?

By the way, Diablo 3? Not until summer 2012. Calling it now.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[space_jake]

They've been reliably* putting out a new pay expansion every two years.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[Idiomatick]

Your guess was simply terrible. Not really their fault.

And I don't understand this mentality. Those guys are jerks! Letting us know that a product will be coming out sometime and then we have to WAIT. Why couldn't they have kept it secret from us. Have some control man.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have a release pushed back for a year than something that just is unplayable. The fact that Blizzard developers have the ability to tell the marketdroids to shove off is what makes Blizzard offerings heads and shoulders above what other companies produce.

Take a look at other software companies. They push out a DRM system with a beta-quality release of a game attached, patch it perhaps once, and that is that, unless they are adding DLC. And they wonder why people end up not bothering purchasing their releases.

Same with MMOs. We have had a lot of MMOs come around and almost all fell flat on their face (going F2P or just going into a decaying orbit into GU Comic's Zapper.) Take WAR for example, Imagine if in World of Warcraft, about a month before its release, only Orgrimmar and Ironforge were released as capital cities, and playable classes were cut only leaving rogues, priests, warriors, and mages? Would the game have had as much impact if so much content was cut out before initial release? Yes, WoW does have supposed release dates go past, but it means for a far better game when it does come out.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[Machtyn]

The few friends I talked with (and their friends they talked with) had guessed at the earliest the release would be in time for Christmas 2010. Some thoughts were that it might be pushed back to Q1 2011. I'm glad we finally got a date.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[Rakarra]

Man, I remember that we were talking about Cataclysm more than a year ago

I remember going to Blizzcon in.. I think it was late July or August 2009, and attendees could play the starting zones for the goblins and wargen.

And few playable scenarios for Diablo 3, but I think they abandoned much of that D3 work.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[Rakarra]

Not to mention that it's strange that they're going to put this out in December - I wonder how Activision feels about having a new WoW release to compete with the rest of its Christmas schedule?

Sorry for posting twice..

I don't think that Activision is crying too much about having a guaranteed huge seller right before the holiday season every two years.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[fishbowl]

The entirety of Blizzard is barely significant to Activision. They consider WoW to be a distant third, in some quarters tied with the Tony Hawk and Shrek franchises for third after Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. There wasn't a Guitar Hero release in the last quarter so the current quarterly report makes more of a mention of WoW, but a lot of WoW players assume or delude themselves into thinking that ATVI thinks far more of it than they do.

Re:Blizzard's Amazing Release Schedules

[snuf23]

Pushed back by a year and a half? The only date information given was that it was on track for 2010. Based on the release times of Burning Crusade and Lich King the best guess was that Cataclysm would be released around two years after LK. The December 7th date is less than a month off of two years since LK came out - 11/13/08.

Sure, I guess it *is* news for nerds, but...

[DdJ]

I'm sure both of the people who care about this topic and who saw it on Slashdot before seeing it on a WoW-related news site or forum are delighted to see this story here.

Re:Sure, I guess it *is* news for nerds, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are almost as many WoW players (11,500,000 2008 est) in the world than there are Mormons (13,508,509 2008 est), and they get far more media exposure than us WoW nerds do :(

Re:Sure, I guess it *is* news for nerds, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people would rather discuss it here than elsewhere. If not for the community, slashdot would have disappeared a long long time ago.

Anyone know the policy on updates?

[StuartHankins]

I haven't played WoW in a long time, not since Burning Crusade. So I missed WotLK.

If I restart my subscription now, and buy WotLK (so I have the most recent content available) do I have to pay again to get Cataclysm? If that's true it probably makes sense to do some catching up using Burning Crusade then wait for Cataclysm... assuming that option is still open.

Apologize in advance if this is obvious to anyone. Thanks.

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't played WoW in a long time, not since Burning Crusade. So I missed WotLK.

If I restart my subscription now, and buy WotLK (so I have the most recent content available) do I have to pay again to get Cataclysm? If that's true it probably makes sense to do some catching up using Burning Crusade then wait for Cataclysm... assuming that option is still open.

Apologize in advance if this is obvious to anyone. Thanks.

The changes to the old world (Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms)/old zones will not require any expansion. You could play the original WoW only and be stuck at 60, but you could still go to the changed zones.

However, the two new races (Goblins and Worgen), the new zones, the levels 81-85 require the Cataclysm expansion. Archaeology may require it too (new secondary profession).

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[Idiomatick]

You can play w/ just the original if you want. And yeah, when cata is released wotlk will probably drop in price. But you would need all the expansions.

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[Athanasius]

Yes, you need to purchase each expansion up to and including the one you want to play. Buy WotLK now and get up to 80 so you're at least vaguely in place to start on Cataclysm when it's released. You even have time to get some semi-decent gear before the launch.

Yes, you can also still play all the vanilla content and all the TBC content. Some things may have been retuned a bit, and of course you may have no luck finding a raid for TBC content, but it's all still there (yes, this will change somewhat with respect to vanilla once Cataclysm launches, given how all the old world is changing... but you'll still be able to play the new versions of it with only a vanilla account).

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[AltairDusk]

Regardless of waiting for cataclysm you will still need to buy WOTLK to level from 70-80.

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[snuf23]

Patch 4.01 is going to hit soon (estimated within two weeks). This patch overhauls the game mechanics in preparation for the Cataclysm release. If I were in your shoes I would at least wait until 4.01 so you don't have to bother with learning LK mechanics only to find your spells have changed two weeks later.

After Cataclysm hits the LK expansion is likely to drop in price. If you haven't hit level 70 yet just play the Burning Crusade content for now and upgrade later, IMO.

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[StuartHankins]

Drat. I'm cheap. Many thanks.

Re:Anyone know the policy on updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you'll have to buy both. My understanding is that if you buy Cataclysm, but don't buy Wotlk, you'll have trouble leveling from 70 to 80. And, to be honest, wotlk is worth it. They did a good job with the quests and leveling from 70-80 laying out a story, and the zones are absolutely gorgeous, even with wow's poor graphics engine. I really have to give it to wow's artists. Despite the very dated engine, they can really make things look amazing. Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills are beautifully done. And thankfully, they completely dumped burning crusade's candy-color mess for wotlk.

Your stock price?

[twoallbeefpatties]

Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.

Actually, what's funny about that is that last year I bought some Activision Blizzard stock (ATVI on NASDAQ). I had a little leftover money, and I figured that with such a strong release schedule for 2010, there must have been room for growth in the stock. And guess what's happened - the stock is currently down from where I bought it, from about $11.70 at this point last year to about $11.00 today.

This despite the fact that ATVI has been profitable, has lots of cash on hand with no debt, has good releases in the pipe. They've even recently implemented a dividend to try and help with that staggering stock price (which will pay out around 1.5% of the stock price early next year, and I'm quite happy for it since it's at least a small ROI). On the one hand, the stock is largely following the market, so its price won't go up much until the larger market goes up, but the stock has also had a few tumbles apart from the market average that it never recovered from. What's crazy is that the price tumbled just after SC2 came out in part because of a company announcement stating that their quarter 2 earnings weren't going to beat expectations. Huge worldwide release of a long-awaited game apparently meant nothing against a lackluster earnings statement for a quarter with no major releases.

I'm sure your stock price thing was just sort of a flippant comment, but I wanted to mention this since it's been weird following the stock for a year. It's actually taught me a valuable lesson about buying individual stocks - you're told to trade in stocks where you know something about the company, something about the industry, so that you can predict how the price will move, but knowledge about the company doesn't always translate into knowledge about the market.

Re:Your stock price?

[slyrat]

Actually, what's funny about that is that last year I bought some Activision Blizzard stock (ATVI on NASDAQ). I had a little leftover money, and I figured that with such a strong release schedule for 2010, there must have been room for growth in the stock. And guess what's happened - the stock is currently down from where I bought it, from about $11.70 at this point last year to about $11.00 today.

The problem is not Blizzard. The problem is Activision. Their side of this is sinking games like no ones business. Think about how they dealt with modern warfare debacle and how guitar hero is now more like guitar zero. Their goal in the game business is to extract as much money from franchises as possible. This means the games will just not be as good as before. Blizzard is the only good thing coming out of that stock so be glad it is as high as it is.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm suspecting Cataclysm is going to be a commercially disappointing expansion for WoW. I've been a WoW player since the original, and I'm not getting Cata. In fact, my subscription expires in a couple of days and I have no plans to renew.

Cataclysm has some major issues that are going to interfere with its commercial success. Healing specs are being nerfed very hard, to the point that playing a healer in PvE is not going to be fun for many players, and playing a healer in PvP will be even worse. Expect many players with healing mains to bail out. The PvE content is being made more difficult. While that may make the hardcore fringe happy, for the typical WoW player it only adds frustration. And remember, most of these player never finished the normal mode PvE content in WotLK; even that was too hard for them. The popular random LFD feature is going to be a wasteland.

Tremendous changes, larger than in any previous expansion, are being made to all classes and specs. It is unlikely these will be balanced adequately until well into the expansion, if then.

It doesn't take many defections from your circle of close in-game friends before you begin to question why you're still playing the game. When the stuff really hits the fan in after the next several months, SW:tOR will be coming along to snatch up the disgruntled.

If Cataclysm lives up to its name, I expect ATVI stock to take a considerable hit.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stock market is highly correlated nowadays. With everyone using computers for analysis and such almost all the stocks move in unison. There is almost no point in buying individual stocks any more. If it weren't for dividends then it probably wouldn't be worth buying anything other than an index stock (like SPY or whatever).

Kind of sad actually (I say this as a day trader). Not sure how to "fix" it though. The market has turned almost completely into a short-term game.

Re:Your stock price?

[twoallbeefpatties]

Their side of this is sinking games like no ones business. Think about how they dealt with modern warfare debacle and how guitar hero is now more like guitar zero. Their goal in the game business is to extract as much money from franchises as possible.

Last holiday season, the Activision side had the latest Call of Duty game, which is a fantastic, record-breaking hit. They also had DJ Hero and Tony Hawk's Ride, which were dismal failures. They also had Guitar Hero 5, which was decent. All-in-all, it was an okay Christmas season, and so I wasn't surprised that the stock price was stable through most of the season. But then they had Starcraft 2, a huge worldwide hit, in the middle of the summer where no one else was really releasing big games. And the stock dropped. And this was after they had instituted a stockholder dividend to make the stock more attractive.

How do you know how the stock is performing the way that it is? That's an honest question. Before I bought a couple of stocks and watched them over a long period of time, I thought I understood the directions that the market took. It turns out that it's a lot more dense than that, or maybe just more random. IANAE (where the 'e' is for 'economist'), but I get the sense that the market just isn't... I think the right word would be "smart." It looks at profit statements more than product releases. It reacts to success more than it predicts it. And it frequently does irrational things.

I recommend against saying that you know exactly why Activision stock is the way it is. And from this experience, I recommend that other people buy an individual stock on their own - or to be less risky, pick a couple stocks and just track them. Watch how the company performs, watch what products they put out, and see just how much your predictions match what actually occurs.

Re:Your stock price?

[LordLucless]

Yeah, but you need to remember that other people know the industry too, or at least, hire people whose job it is to know how to evaluate shares for investments. The $11.70 price you bought at probably incorporated people's expectations for Starcraft 2, and Cataclysm. You're probably right in saying that it's just following the market, but it could also be that your buying price was inflated due to unrealistic expectations of SC2 and Cataclysm's success. To really benefit from knowledge of an industry, you need knowledge that other people don't have. That's why insider trading is so powerful (and illegal).

Re:Your stock price?

[digitalnoise615]

I'm suspecting Cataclysm is going to be a commercially disappointing expansion for WoW. I've been a WoW player since the original, and I'm not getting Cata. In fact, my subscription expires in a couple of days and I have no plans to renew.

Cataclysm has some major issues that are going to interfere with its commercial success. Healing specs are being nerfed very hard, to the point that playing a healer in PvE is not going to be fun for many players, and playing a healer in PvP will be even worse. Expect many players with healing mains to bail out. The PvE content is being made more difficult. While that may make the hardcore fringe happy, for the typical WoW player it only adds frustration. And remember, most of these player never finished the normal mode PvE content in WotLK; even that was too hard for them. The popular random LFD feature is going to be a wasteland.

Tremendous changes, larger than in any previous expansion, are being made to all classes and specs. It is unlikely these will be balanced adequately until well into the expansion, if then.

It doesn't take many defections from your circle of close in-game friends before you begin to question why you're still playing the game. When the stuff really hits the fan in after the next several months, SW:tOR will be coming along to snatch up the disgruntled.

If Cataclysm lives up to its name, I expect ATVI stock to take a considerable hit.

So, since I've been leveling toons from 1 to 65 and 70 at this point during my Beta Testing, I feel entitled to say this: Bullsh!t

I keep hearing these whining comments from people who are fundamentally incapable of adapting - get over yourselves. It's not your game - it's Blizzard's, and they have every right to do what they want.

That said, I've enjoyed Cataclysm immensely - the changes are pretty damn cool to the game world, and it's very interesting to see new takes on old quests and events. The Class changes are going to take some getting used to - I hated playing my toons I copied over or the pre-mades.

However, once I started a new toon from scratch and played through the leveling process and re-learned from the ground up, I was able to go back to those copies and pre-mades and kick ass. It's something I'm going to be recommending to everyone I know who plays - I think it'll help. Don't have to level one from scratch all the way - just 10 levels or so, which only takes about 1.5-2hrs.

Re:Your stock price?

[wdavies]

Plenty of experiments have shown that market knowledge doesnt help much. The only place it really helps is if you are an insider, and in which case you are likely to go to prison :)

Re:Your stock price?

[Antisyzygy]

You also have to pay attention to Macro-economics. For example, investors have been systematically selling off stocks and moving to government bonds because there is a lot of uncertainty as well as fear. The entire global market is being affected by this. Most of the fear sell-offs are based on fear-mongering headlines, and manipulations by rating agencies or others with vested interest. Rating's agencies like Moody's, ect. seem to strategically be downgrading credit rankings of banks and nations when things look like they might start gaining ground in the currency and certain commodity markets. The tinfoil hat nutjob in me thinks that someone is shorting markets big time and trying to keep the prices of stocks and currencies down to gain some big profits.This being so they are making some "arrangements" with rating's agencies. I have no idea if this is true, but there were some major coincidences recently that made me suspicious. If you follow global economy or market news at all you will hear everyone talking about how there may be a "double dip recession" which is furthering increasing peoples fear. Overall, its not that Activision stock is a bad buy in relation to the Micro side of it, its just that no one is a buyer right now because everyone is trying to safeguard their assets in things like bonds and gold.

Re:Your stock price?

[AK Marc]

I think the thought on that was that healers were OP (but boring) for solo. Like tanks. You could chain as many mobs as you liked with no mana/rage issues, even if it took you longer to kill them. And most healers and tanks would be able to handle 5+ mobs at the same time without an issue at all, making group pulls almost to the level of frost mages (frost mages able to pull a near infinite number of mobs, but there's a practical limit based on mob density).

So if the idea was that you spec solo if you want to solo and heals if you want to heal. They should just give away dual-spec at lvl 10 or 20 for free, since they changed the mechanics to almost require it. But it isn't that much, so it's not that big of a deal. They had purposefully OP'd heals (and tanks) in PvE so that people didn't have to blow gold respecing all the time. With dual-spec, they are fixing that imbalance. You might not like it, or you might disagree with their level of adjustment, but the reasoning and logic behind it is clear an makes sense.

Re:Your stock price?

[rcuhljr]

Odd, I've got a healer main and every other healer I know is desperately looking forward to the expansion so healing won't be face smashingly easy anymore.

Re:Your stock price?

[twoallbeefpatties]

I did note that ATVI seems to be mostly following the market. If you pull up their stock price at any given time and check its percentage averages against the NASDAQ for any given couple of weeks, there's a strong correlation between the two. The difference is that ATVI has had a couple of bad weeks where they dropped hard compared to the average but never bounced back. The stuff that you mentioned here is something that I've learned by watching a few stocks for a while, and I'm strongly considering selling out and going to bonds or index funds once the first dividend payment rolls around.

Re:Your stock price?

[ahabswhale]

Their price earnings ration sucks. 42 and half is pretty high these days (especially compared to other game companies). In short, their stock is going nowhere anytime soon and their meager dividend won't change that. If I want big dividends, I'll go with an energy company that pays much much better.

Anyway, either their profits need to shoot up significantly to fix the P/E (unlikely), or there needs to be another stock exchange bubble (also unlikely for the forseable future), or somebody has to try and buy them out. On the plus side, they aren't like to drop much from where they are now.

Re:Your stock price?

[gutnor]

Major events like releasing a new product, quarter results, ... are all factored in the stock price before the event itself occurs.

The days after the event, there is an adjustment positive or negative if the event was better/not as good as expected. There are other examples: Apple stock falling after their most profitable quarter in history. Bank stock increasing after announcing worse losses on record.

Without starting a technical discussion, there are thousands of people thinking the same as you do before buying a share. Everything you can think of about a company, thousands of people think about the same stuff. Some will think like you, some will think the opposite. But everybody knows what you know. There are unfortunately stuff that you do not know - but everybody else does. All of that is summarized in one single number: the market price.

Buying short or buying long is the result of guessing what will be the unknown (insider type unknown). There are loads of theories how to guess the unknown but for Joe investor that invest a bit in his free time, the best is faith in the company and luck.

Re:Your stock price?

[twoallbeefpatties]

Fair words, really. I don't chalk this experiment up so much as a loss than as a learning experience. (And I actually managed to spark a halfway-intelligent conversation about something on Slashdot. How about that.)

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lesson to take away from this is that stock prices don't go up or down based on whether a company's doing well or badly - they depend on whether a company is doing better or worse than expected. Everybody knew that Blizzard was going to release Starcraft 2, and that it would make a load of money, so they had already bought Blizzard stock and driven up the price to reflect that expectation. So the actual moves in the stock were based on smaller things, like a lower-than-expected quarterly profit.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

The release and plummet of MW:2 hurt their stocks a lot though. They fired some of the top execs and I don't about you but not many people are willing to trade when there's internal conflicts going on at a company.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

finally someone that at least understands some of the basics of stock. Blizz/acti have only one way to go from their current stock price and that is down unless their are some massive increases in profit or with a buyout, Their profit growth is way to low to justify their stock price/PE ratio.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your knowledge of Blizzard and the pending release of SC2 was common knowledge. Everyone vaguely familiar with the gaming industry knew that unless Blizzard really screwed up, SC2 was going to be a big financial success. As such, this was already baked into the stock price.

Re:Your stock price?

[Apple Acolyte]

Off-topic reply:

That is utterly terrible advice. High quality stocks will always outperform the returns posted by the indexes. You have to know if you're investing for growth or income and how to diversify a portfolio, but you can do much better than the market average if you know what you're doing. If you don't, you're right buy a spider fund and hope for decent returns.

Btw, I used to day trade stocks, and it's a losing proposition unless you've got the resources to do it properly so that you can weather the inevitable volatility and manipulation of individual stocks.

Re:Your stock price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you want more than two specs. A healer, for example, might have a PvE and a PvP healing spec. There's no room for a solo spec.

BTW, this is another issue: with the healing nerfs, the soloability of healing specs is going to be very bad. Holy paladins could solo quite nicely in WotLK. In Cata beta, it's much harder. So healers are going to be forced to take a dps spec and sacrifice one of their healing specs (most likely the PvP one, since healing in PvP looks nightmarish now.)

Re:Your stock price?

[AK Marc]

I hadn't seen the actual changes for 4.0 yet, but a raid heals and PvP heals before (before the OP heals) would have the raid heals suck for solo and PvP heals work but be annoying for solo. You'd not do any damage, but you could take on 10 mobs at a time (unless you had mana problems). You'd have quick heals, low knockback, and such. It might take you an hour per mob, but unless you fell asleep of boredom, you'd never die. The OP cut the time it took you to kill things. There'd have to be a heck of a nerf to make them less PvEable than they were back at their worst. It wasn't pleasant, but it was easy. I know, I leveled a shammy and priest to 80 in heal spec (my pally was taken to 80 as tank, and the druid as feral, so I didn't try all the heal classes for leveling) and that was harder because of the lower survival and increased knockback.

Not ready for release.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the Beta and I can tell you, it's gonna be a buggy ass release. The damn thing plays like an alpha right now. There is NO WAY it will be ready for December 7 with the previous quality of expansion releases. Either the date will slip, OR it will come out sub par.

Re:Not ready for release.

[Incoherent07]

You've never been in a WoW beta or PTR before, have you?

Wish I could play

[PowersOfTen]

This will be the first expansion that I do not purchase. I was in college when the previous two were released and I can't see myself playing now that I have a career. I don't enjoy merely leveling alts, so there wouldn't be anything for me to do since I can't spend hours a day in the game, let alone schedule my life around it. I will forever miss pvp and raids, but one cannot play on a competitive level while trying to make something of themselves.

Re:Wish I could play

[Ben4jammin]

So did you finish college??? Don't keep us in suspense :) I am not, nor probably never will be "hard core". I have done only 1 10-man. I don't see myself ever going beyond that. That said, it comes down to priorities and time management. I play WOW a couple of hours each day, but I only watch 30 minutes of TV (PTI on ESPN), so I figure it all balances out.

Re:Wish I could play

[BobMcD]

Bear in mind that this iteration will introduce daily caps across every level (PvE, PvP, guild XP). I'm not sure how much it will take to achieve the cap, but Google should be able to tell you a few weeks/months after release. Check back. You may well find that an hour or two is adequate now, at least on non-raid nights. Depends on how high they set the cap...

Also with the flexible raid lock system, you might find that being on standby for a guild that's progressing faster than you individually is a lot less painful.

Re:Wish I could play

[stonewallred]

I have no plans to buy the expansion for at least a year or two. I figure with rated BGs, I will get together with some of the old school BGers and we will form a guild and slowly level via BGs and run just premades.

Re:Wish I could play

[snuf23]

I guess that depends. I've been raiding two nights a week for three hours a raid this expansion and killed everything except the heroic version of the Lich King encounter. It's certainly a hobby but six hours a week doesn't seem like a huge investment.

And no I don't spend hours farming for materials. A good guild where everyone contributes means no one individual has to spend hours and hours getting mats for raid consumables.

Re:Wish I could play

[Krojack]

Just everyone in the guild farms mats for you. =)

Noooooo

[Anonymous Coward]

I almost got laid this year....damn....

So now...

[Chas]

I would have to kill seventy trillion boars instead of forty trillion?

Not really sure why the level cap keeps getting bumped. It's just more grind.

  Yeah! I just spent twelve months grinding this guy to level *insert here* and getting him all the best stuff! Nothing can kill him now!

*Expansion*

  *Die!*

  *THUD!*

Yeah. Real fun.

Call me when the game isn't a boring single-path grindfest.

Re:So now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who grinds at this game? If you do, you are playing wrong. Most people level up through PvP or through 5-man dungeons...

Re:So now...

[space_jake]

WoW has never been about the path to the level cap it has always been about the content at the level cap.

Re:So now...

[VGPowerlord]

I would have to kill seventy trillion boars instead of forty trillion?

I'm sorry Cartman, but that's just how long it's going to take.

On a more serious note, the game doesn't actually work like that... you should use a more credible source than South Park if you really want to know how the game works.

Re:So now...

[elrous0]

Yeah, but if you gather enough boar-skins, you'll be able to contribute to the effort to open the Great Door of The Dark Lord Whogiveashitz.

Re:So now...

[fishbowl]

>I would have to kill seventy trillion boars instead of forty trillion?

They stop giving experience *at all* once you pass the threshold. You can't really gain levels by killing any number of low level monsters, but you knew that.

>Call me when the game isn't a boring single-path grindfest.

I have a role-play guild that is 100% focused on the Cooking profession, with the objective being to give players the "Chef" title, and of course providing buff food for raids. There's a certain amount of fishing that goes on, since that's needed to level the cooking profession.

Needless to say, there are very, very few players who are genuinely interested in it. Most people *want* that grind through the 12 bosses of ICC, and want that week after week grind of running the same raid for the small chance of getting another Best-in-Slot item so that they can be exactly like all the other toons with Best-in-Slot items.

There's a lot you can do other than the "single path grindfest" but very little of it is very interesting to very many players. Of *course* they are going to choose the path that leads to their character being the statistically optimal badass, whatever that may be at any point in the expansion. And there is always going to be a pack that reaches that point, a diminishing herd that reaches that point later, and a whole lot of people who won't reach that point because they started too late and so many other players already burned out. (It's not typical to get to the end game and then make a sincere effort to seek out and assist new players... worse, if you *do* want to do that, it's very hard to actually *find* those new players, because they are few and far between in reality).

Re:So now...

[Codename Dutchess]

What? The game is exactly like that. Sure, the boars might change models, and name, but they're still boars. You still have to kill a fuckton of them, you just change your clothes and kill stronger boars, ad infinitum.

Re:So now...

[fishbowl]

>Who grinds at this game? If you do, you are playing wrong. Most people level up through PvP or through 5-man dungeons...

5-man dungeon leveling is pretty good for Protection (tank) specs and maybe healers, but the real experience path is through individual quests. There are many, many paths to take but there is some optimization that can be done in terms of selecting which quests to do, which quests to not do, and when to drop one zone for another, and where to go next.

1-80 is maybe 40 hours of game play for a completely unspoiled newbie who isn't really trying all that hard, and is about 20 hours for an experienced veteran who has heirloom gear and gold from another toon. (Don't bother commenting that you did 1-80 in 7 hours, I know it probably can be done, but I don't care.)

Re:So now...

[drsquare]

This isn't true, it's always been about levelling up through quests and storylines. Most people don't do end game content, it's only really viable for hardcore players, most players will level up an alt or desubscribe once hitting 80.

Re:So now...

[Dashiva Dan]

Yeah, it's almost like game designers have skipped the research and added in levelling just to screw with the players.
You need to find some old school game (pre D&D, at least, not sure how much further back you'd have to go) and find yourself a game without all this boring levelling crap.

Re:So now...

[Terrasque]

5-man dungeon leveling is pretty good for Protection (tank) specs

Mmmmkay, you might want to read this rather amusing forum thread first, and ask yourself : Can my sanity handle this?

  -- A former WoW tank

Re:So now...

[bckrispi]

Citation, please..

Re:So now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, as soon as you provide a citation that more than a fraction of the playerbase go through the tedious end-game grind.

Well, I probably wasn't too clear

[Moraelin]

Well, I probably wasn't too clear about it. I do come back now and again, so the point is kinda: I too could technically make a claim like "oh, I've been playing WoW since launch" and even go into what got changed in which EP. But it's more like since start playing a month or two, then taking a half a year break, then playing another month, then taking a break until the next EP, then taking yet another break, then figured I'd try playing a horde char to see what's different, then take another break, and so on.

And for that matter I could make a similar claim that I played COH since launch (except most of the time not actually playing it) or EQ2 since launch (ditto.)

Most people I know who count as "playing WoW since 2005" are really something like that. _Very_ few have actually played it for so many years in a row. But when people hear about "playing WoW since launch" they assume the former, not the latter, for some reason. Which IMHO for most people is actually the very wrong assumption.

Re:Well, I probably wasn't too clear

[nschubach]

Sounds like my experience with Everquest... and I "only" made it to level 52. On again, off again. Of course, I can also tell most people I've been with literally hundreds of MMOs since launch (and a good chunk that were beta tests) but I haven't payed for any in so long. I really haven't played any either.

"The Guild" makes it all worthwhile...

[jayveekay]

While the game itself varies from occasional memorable moments to a great deal of mundane (and frequently mind-numbing) activity, the meta-game and content that surrounds the game can be very entertaining. The game is fuel for interactions with fellow players, discussions with game developers, and music videos such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrN3Rh55uM .

A date the will live in Infamy

[medv4380]

It must be deliberate

Apprehensive

[CFBMoo1]

Other changes like how the talent trees are getting chopped down big time really have me wondering. Also gear power feels like it's shot through the roof this expansion. Next expansion I heard mages in level 85 blues will be running around with around 70k health. PvP may be really interesting next expansion.

Expect a Worgen Crush during December

[WillAffleckUW]

There will be a lot of n00bz running around doing Worgens so spec for taking them down.

I'd concentrate on leveling Archeology with your existing chars instead, or if on Mok'Nathal, joining Fang and Claw, a pre-Worgen guild.

You'll have to respec everyone anyway, so lag will be highest in UC (close to the Worgen) and Ironforge (same) - this is a great time to do a Stormwind/Darnassus quest - or if Horde you should be lag-free except in Ogrimmar (starting quests).

I'd expect LW mats will be at a premium, given racial characteristics and new classes, so stockpile those for the AH - many starting chars so stockpile basic mats before 12/7.

Re:Expect a Worgen Crush during December

[BobMcD]

1) Goblins, too. They're probably going to be more popular than Worgen, and if lag is impacted by such things, expect to see that in Kalimdor as well.

2) LW mats will be absolutely worthless, so stockpiling them now is folly. Bear in mind that the Worgen racial bonus is to SKINNING. You're going to see a flooded market, I guarantee.

Re:Expect a Worgen Crush during December

[WillAffleckUW]

No, certain classes use LW for armor. I predict an uptick in that, and an increase in BASE skinning low-level mats, but NOT in the supplementary mats for LW - so look at the crafting requirements for LW and if it isn't a result of skinning, stockpile it (those will be in high demand).

Markets are not uniform. It's the friction points that have the greatest profit, so expect skinning/LW demand for non-skinning mats for LW crafting to increase.

Twenty years later...

[Myji Humoz]

Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.

Re:Twenty years later...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.

Didn't you mean to say ...abnormally cataclysmic?

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[WillAffleckUW]

No, they thought it would be a great marketing tool, allowing them to market more things to customers, and not being women, didn't realize how pervy it was.

A lot of players in Seattle are women, and expectations of privacy are there.

Re:OCD? or Heirlooms for alts

[WillAffleckUW]

Have to agree, while I hate the RealID (very pervy), the Heirlooms are a nice thing - use them to level up my lower chars and since they're BOA you can send them around between chars without the usual one-hour wait for mail.

I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[Moraelin]

Actually, I hope that's an oversimplification and that Blizzard is smarter than that. They have been so far, at least, so there is no reason to assume they've just got a lobotomy.

The formula that you'll wipe lots and presumably only dare play with people you personally know has been tried in other games before, and it was a major failure. In fact, it's one reason most new players went to WoW and not to the other games.

The days of "one wipe and everyone bails" will never be gone just because people don't like to waste their time and fail. Even on COH where death penalties have been reduced to a joke, or STO when it never had them, there is only so often that a group can faceplant before players _will_ leave. Add some form of cost (financial, XP or otherwise) and it just means they'll leave even earlier so as not to rake up a huge debt.

Most people will never get to know the people well enough to form those long lasting groups.

And those who do will be shafted when one of that group just have to leave for other reasons. (Like because they're in China and just can't afford another month, or their new GF doesn't let them play any more, or mom made them learn for the exam, or they're in hospital, or just some other game got launched.) And a lot of downtime when those you know aren't online.

Heck, the more important you make it to be only with the right clique, the harder it becomes to break into one when you start from the rank of some nobody who might or might not get them wiped. The more penalty there is in case that unknown turns out to be a smacktard, the less people are inclined to give him/her a chance. Yep, that's more downtime.

Plus, it's the perfect recipe to create even more drama than raiding guilds already have. The more the group gets kicked in the nuts if you can't show up for a given raid and has to fill it with some potential liability or skip it entirely, the more it becomes like a job where you absolutely have to be there or else. Trust me, there are a lot of us who never liked that aspect to start with. Making it worse isn't going to spell "greatest game ever".

Sure, to a greedy fucktard like Bobby Kotic it may sound like he'll keep more players around with a premise boiling down to "stick around or your friends will suffer", but that's not a setup most people enjoy. For a start because it means a lot of time of not just being the guy whose friends are kept hostage, but being the hostage for a change. The bigger the penalty you make it for when one of your clique leaves, the more people will see a non-fun time as a result. It's not a recipe for keeping people around long.

But basically as I was saying, I doubt that Blizzard is going to turn out that retarded this time. Then again, they did have ideas like the RealID and such. I guess I'll just wait and see.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[BobMcD]

The spec-swapping will be quite a bit easier this time around, for most classes anyway. Druids, for example, can Tree or Boomkin in the exact same gear - talents will convert spirit into hit automagically. Likewise, glyphs can be changed on the fly as they're going to be a part of your spellbook now. Same for many others as well. So maybe Blizzard assumes that people will just shift their roles around more often.

There was a conversation about the carnage this would wreak on the Dungeon Finder system, and IIRC the Blue response was basically 'Meh'.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[snuf23]

"The formula that you'll wipe lots and presumably only dare play with people you personally know has been tried in other games before, and it was a major failure."

This is exactly what progression raiding in WoW is like. You need good players both in terms of their skills and in terms of their ability to work through learning the fights. Learning new fights when you don't have a gear advantage (or the ICC raid wide nerf), takes time and wipes.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[Moraelin]

To some extent, yes. But the devil is in the details. (Though my D&D GM would say he's in one of the monster compendiums;))

For a start even the WoW endgame raids are a lot more forgiving than what other games used to put you through right off the bat. The tranditional school of MMO design has been, well, like the old testament: lots of rules, lots of possibilities to fail, disproportionately harsh penalties for the smallest failure, and no mercy. Light on the carrot, very heavy on the stick. By contrast, WoW actually makes it quite bearable to wipe once or twice.

More importantly, though, the message I was answering to wasn't just talking about that, but about turning the knobs up to the point where one wouldn't even consider going in with a stranger, much less a whole PUG. That's quite the quantitative and qualitative difference there. And all I'm saying is that I've seen _that_ point, and it wasn't fun or a success.

Basically it's not an all or nothing proposition. There are nuances for how much wiggle room is allowed and how harsh the penalties are for exceeding it. WoW managed to find a decent spot (but not perfect, obviously.) That's why I'm wondering why would they want to take it to a worse spot for most players.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[conark]

actually, i think they did become retarded. essentially, they are going back to pre-BC times. my guess is that it's a way to shutdown the current WoW franchise because certain people inside probably are sick of dealing with it (which imo is why they call it "Cataclysm"). What you're saying is true about creating more drama. I'm in a guild and people are cool right up to the point where we start wiping multiple times. Then people become extremely belligerent. From a game mechanics point of view, I think the vast majority currently playing are probably going to end up getting pissed and leaving permanently. From what I understand, this happens on every expansion. Unfortunately, the way these games work is that they force you to play the expansion, even if you don't have the expansion. It sucks for people who don't have money, especially on PVP realms because there's a lot of jackasses who gank all the time. Also, I really don't consider this an "expansion". This is almost a re-write of the game. IMO, an expansion would've been like WOTLK, where you have a deeper talent tree (or more available talent points) and more exposed areas that people without the expansion could not access. I don't see a lot to be excited with in the extra 5 levels and the elimination of abilities on loot makes the game seem even less strategic in some ways. Allowing races more classes seems more like a bling thing since the base race abilities aren't all that fantastic to begin with. At any rate, I think the changes are more superficial than anything. I'd feel sorry for the newbie coming in with his level 20 getting ganked left and right on PVP realms by guys who obtain level 85 in less than a week from the air. That's what the game truly feels like at this point without having participated in the Beta.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[BobMcD]

Basically it's not an all or nothing proposition. There are nuances for how much wiggle room is allowed and how harsh the penalties are for exceeding it. WoW managed to find a decent spot (but not perfect, obviously.) That's why I'm wondering why would they want to take it to a worse spot for most players.

Because, just like the 30% buff in ICC, they can adjust it on the fly, as needed, later on down the road.

Re:I hope Blizzard is smarter than that

[snuf23]

I understand your point. It does seem that with guild leveling Blizzard wants to reinforce the importance of a guild over pugging. This comes sort of contrary to the dungeon finder and ICC nerf policy.

Personally I don't do random PUGs. I'm in a top 10 guild for my server and generally either raid with them or with invites to other top tier guilds.

I don't think Blizzard will go back to the earlier strategy where the last 20% of content was only ever seen by 1% of their subscribers (i.e. Sunwell in BC). Odd are they will nerf the raids like they have done to make them more PUG/casual friendly. Keeps the hardcore happy pushing their first kills and eventually allows less skilled or dedicated players to experience the content.

No longer supports PPC Mac

[Shivetya]

One of the big changes, no more support PowerPC Macs. Needless to say it caused quite a bit of forum posting. While I understand the issue what I do not understand is those claiming that it is financially impossible for them to upgrade to a new machine yet they have time to play a MMORPG.

Re:No longer supports PPC Mac

[imamac]

Well, since they spend all their time playing games instead of working, I can completely understand.

Re:No longer supports PPC Mac

[AltairDusk]

Apple isn't even supporting PPC with their latest releases (Snow Leopard cannot be installed on a PPC Mac). I don't think it's fair to expect Blizzard to continue support after even the manufacturer has dropped it.

Re:No longer supports PPC Mac

[damnbunni]

Perhaps because the 'proper' replacement for something like a G5 Tower is a Mac Pro, and those are a hellalotta monies.

(If you had a full-tower machine, you're probably not going to want a Mac mini or an iMac.)

Re:No longer supports PPC Mac

[Apple Acolyte]

Blizzard was kind in supporting Power Macs as long as it did after Apple's Intel defection.

Re:No longer supports PPC Mac

[Builder]

(If you had a full-tower machine, you're probably not going to want a Mac mini or an iMac.)

I'm not so sure about that - I went from an old G5 tower to an iMac and it's orders of magnitude faster than the G5 was in the end. Sure, it's not as fast as a new Mac Pro, but it's faster than what I had, and comes with a gorgeous screen.

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[cc_pirate]

What the heck does Seattle have to do with it?

Lots of players from Florida are women.

Lots of players from Arizona are women.

Ad infinitum....

Then why not Guild Wars?

[Brain-Fu]

Guild Wars gives all those benefits, with no monthly fees.

And Guild Wars 2 is just around the corner, and promises to be superior to WoW in basically every respect.

Check it out.

Re:Then why not Guild Wars?

[MBGMorden]

Guild Wars doesn't offer connections with my online friends. You're loosing the point in this. It's not just connecting to people in general - it's connecting to SPECIFIC people. People that aren't on Guild Wars. The monthly fee is a non-issue. $15 per month is next to nothing.

Re:Then why not Guild Wars?

[0xdeadbeef]

Guild Wars was crap, and making Guild Wars 2 to be more like WoW isn't going to make it less crap than WoW.

Re:Then why not Guild Wars?

[kiddygrinder]

heh, i bet it's promising like hell it'll be better than wow, whether it can actually do it when so many others have failed is another matter.

Re:Then why not Guild Wars?

[Anonymous Coward]

NCSoft games? No thanks.

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[AltairDusk]

Actually the forum idea was something they thought of to reduce the flaming and idiocy that runs rampant on the WoW forums. If you've spent any amount of time there as I once did you would know why anything to reduce this would seem very attractive to them.

It was under our noses the whole time

[shermo]

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p9/gnomeregan2.xml

Re:It was under our noses the whole time

[yenne]

Mod parent up. Very clever, Blizzard!

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[WillAffleckUW]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Do you mean Trade Chat and Barrens Chat?

Not Excited

[Deorus]

After 3 months in the beta trying to explain what's wrong with the stupid design that they came up for Protection Paladins and being literally ignored by the developers who are now posting to the live forums as if nobody had warned them about the class' issues I couldn't be any more annoyed. Worse than that is the fact that as an EU player I can't post to the US forums, and Ghostcrawler not giving a crap about the beta forums really makes me wonder what their purpose really is.

Re:Not Excited

[spamdog]

You sound like the kind of person they ban from the forums every day.

Re:Not Excited

[Dashiva Dan]

If all the EU posters are like you I can see why GC doesn't post much on those forums.
4.01 will be out before too long, rest assured that if Prot Pallies are broken, they'll be fixed, but I suspect you'll realise you're just wrong :)

played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[MattW]

I played at launch, but started getting bored around 20 and by 40, unable to afford a mount, quit playing.

A friend convinced me to return just before WotLK. Using Refer-a-Friend, we leveled up. I found it a lot more pleasant with the faster XP and with his borrowed gold buying my mount. :)

Once I was into outland, questing was tolerable, and in WotLK/Northrend, it was downright fun.

Once I discovered raiding in Naxxramas at 80, I was hooked. Now that's why I play. As I got into the game I've changed guilds a couple times and now raid with a very high end guild. (We had a top 25 US Heroic Lich King kill, for those who know what that means.)

The high end raiding content is genuinely hard. It's a mix of optimizing gameplay mechanics, good awareness of all the things going on, twitch reactions, strategy and personal strategic planning (what "we" do in a given situation and what "I" do if X happens), etc. For my guild, also a lot of fun camaraderie, although some top guilds are notorious for being not-so-friendly places. It's a bit time consuming, as it will eat 5 nights a week potentially during "progression", where we're learning and downing fights, but when you factor in how little time it takes up in the "off season", it only eats ~9-10 hours/week on average.

Anyhow, end game raiding = a blast. That's why I play.

Re:played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[StikyPad]

End game raiding is just grinding on a larger scale. To make matters worse, you can't just log in and play whenever you feel like it; you have to coordinate times, make yourself available, and rely on others to do the same. You may have a forgiving guild (though probably not, since you describe them as "high level") which allows you to participate at will rather than requiring attendance, but even so, non-attendance will necessarily result in one or more of the following:

1) Reduced opportunity for reward through a point system (to say nothing of sheer odds).
2) Reduced opportunity for *attendance* (regulars get priority)
3) Social ostracism (nobody likes someone who isn't "there for the team")
4) Extreme resentment (possibly leading to fracturing of the guild), especially if the first two don't happen for whatever reason (usually because you're a founding member, an officer, or sleeping with one of them, or they harbor fantasies of sleeping with you).

I get that there's a sense of accomplishment in being the first to do something, but that's maybe 5% of the time, even for the best of guilds. It's far too much drama, politics, responsibility, interdependence, and luck for my taste. I get enough of that shit at work.

Re:played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[VAY]

"I get enough of that shit at work."

This quote made me smile. I run a raiding guid, not super hardcore but we're on heroic 25-man content.

And what I like about it is it is just like work SHOULD be. I get to organize stuff for 50 people, motivate them, keep them happy while maintaining discipline, work with the team to achieve things... all the stuff that should create job satisfaction in your job. Except I don't have some dick who can't tell his arse from his elbow coming along and setting impossible deadlines, slashing the budget, micro-managing me and my team, and generally fucking things up to the point where the only sense of achievement is a day where you made things less bad.

I work with one other person, and we have chosen to work together. The people are there because they want to be. I get to recruit who I want. And I've been able to prove to myself that my ideas about managing people - happy people are productive, people do their best when encouraged and given opportunities, teams are stonger than the individual, and all that other happy-happy crap, are all true. Sure, some days are shit, people give you grief and don't appreciate you, but hey, that happens everywhere in life.

But yeah, WoW is escapism - it's an escape from a broken world where money is everything, into another world where all that stuff you were taught as a kid about how being a decent human being leads to happiness actually applies.

Re:played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[Dashiva Dan]

Nah, you raid with a guild that matches the time you want to play. If you don't you're retarded (and I was retarded, which is why I ended up quitting for a large chunk of time, not making the same mistake this time round)
Raiding is nothing like grinding. Grinding is something that basically anyone can do. it takes no skill, no coordination, and gives no sense of achievment.
Raiding (assuming you do it right) is a combination of skill, practice, effort and working as part of a team, and can feel very satisfying as you suceed.
Sure it's still not for everyone, some can't work as a team, or don't have the skill, or just don't want to learn/try, or just don't like videogames, and that's fine, but games like this weren't designed for people like that, so go find something that is, be it tetris, animal crossing, scrabble, bunji jumping, white water rafting, chess, painting... the list goes on...

Re:played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[MattW]

To me, grinding implies you do something repeatedly that you don't enjoy, for the sake of acquiring something. I look forward to raiding each week because it's fun time for me.

I can't say my guild is typical, but it's generally very drama free. We're pretty damn picky about who we recruit and we've passed on extremely good players in the past because they didn't fit the guild persona.

I completely understand the sort of drama you're describing, but it's almost entirely absent from our guild, probably because our officers make an earnest effort to treat everyone equally and it's noticeable. The guild itself has been around a long time, and in that entire time, I've only ever seen one person leave for another raiding guild. Basically once people play with us, the only reason they leave is because they are quitting raiding to pursue other interests or because of life changes like a job/etc.

Re:played at launch; quit, came back for WotLK

[Anonymous Coward]

I've changed guilds a couple times and now raid with a very high end guild. (We had a top 25 US Heroic Lich King kill, for those who know what that means.)

I love it when people brag about their WoW achievments...

It's best when people tell you, their guildmate (not even themselves, hell they probably aren't even friends with the guildmate) did something so amazing like top 25 on a server (of many servers) out of a few thousand people. Meaning 25 of 10,000 people of 20 servers, and it's an accomplishment, because everyone else pursued many of the other "25 of 10,000" accomplishments.

I remember this happening in other MMOs, how guilds bragged about their member accomplishments, as if it matters to you in any way, or will benefit you for joining.

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[AltairDusk]

Since I was talking about the forums and Trade chat/Barrens chat are in game, no.

Meh

[Barny]

Will give it a spin when it goes free to play, till then enjoy beta testing it for me :)

Re:Meh

[Trubadidudei]

Enjoy your spin...which you will be getting aproximately 10 years from now.

Re:Meh

[Barny]

Yup, because global-cool-down based MMOG are not worth paying for imho.

"we couldn't be bothered making the combat interesting enough so we made it drag out by forcing you to wait 1.5 sec after everything you do"

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Games with no GCDs are so much better -- I love having my game performance be dictated even more strongly by network latency.

Don't forget the Activision half of that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Between then and now, Activision fucked up one of their other cash cows, Infinity Ward. After their billion-dollar Call of Duty franchise spat out Modern Warfare 2, Activision's retarded upper management fired the leaders of the Infinity Ward studio and tried to screw them out of royalties and bonuses. A mass defection followed, with many of IW's best employees following the fired heads to their new studio. That combined with Bobby Kotick's charming personality, has currently made Activision the most-hated of the big 3 publishers.

With the Guitar Hero franchise continuing to shrink, Blizzard is basically the only thing still making ATVI look good.

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[stonewallred]

As the ashamed owner of three accounts, all perma banned from the forums, I must agree.

Re:Blizzard and the sorry state of privacy

[Americano]

Go to your realm's forums. Read.

Go to your class forums. Read.

Go to the role forums. Read.

You'll see very quickly that forum trolling on the official Blizz forums is a huge annoyance there. Blizzard is basically spending a lot of extra money maintaining forums which actively scare people away because if you post anything, there's probably a 50+% chance you will be flamed or insulted by a douche posting from a level-1 alt who also happens to be from another realm.

The plan Blizz put forth WOULD have eliminated a lot of this, but it would have also killed the usefulness of the forums, because a lot of the people who post useful information would have stopped posting as well. If they has modified their plan to make it so you can only post on some designated main, or so that you could see all the characters on the account of anybody posting, or made everybody choose a non-changeable forum nickname, it would eliminate the "anonymous trolling" issue to a large degree without violating privacy and security.

There 10 or so women in my guild, and most of us are on a first-name basis on Vent... that doesn't mean they want to be on a first-name basis with the entire WoW community. I've heard too many horror stories from them about the skeevy things people say to blame them, too.

cha-ching!

[velen]

The next best thing to happen since sliced bread? :p Speaking from Blizzard's perspective; of course.

I clxl'd for a totally different reason

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I cxl'd because too many guilds I put a lot of time & money into disolved.

I dedicated a lot of resources to each guild I was in over 4 years. Donations of gold & pots > 500K GP. Rarely even got a thank you. Raiders looked down on casual players. PvP was fun, but the maps never changed (adding 1 or two pvp areas just didn't do it for me)It just got boring.

sometimes I miss it, but I don't want to pay first to be able to go back when I want. I discovered a ton of games since then, Batman AA, Mass Effect I & II, TF2 (again), StarCraft II, AOE beta, Ghostbusters, etc..