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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
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
RealID is completely voluntary. They even backed of on the requirement of it's use on their forums.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I don't want to play a game with FURRIES in it.
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.
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.
The ______ Agenda
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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).
How is that Blizzard's fault? Neither GS nor achievements are actually built-in requirements for raids.
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.
Signatures are the new names.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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! --
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.
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.
No, that wasn't a major reason.
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.
No, I was previously aware of my own name.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
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.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
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.
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.
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.
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".