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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.
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?
Living With a Nerd
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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'.
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.
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
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