Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Launches Third WoW Expansion, Cataclysm
Last night marked the launch of Cataclysm, the third expansion for Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Cataclysm includes: two new races, both of which have their own starting zones; five new high-level zones that span the new 80-85 leveling content; seven new five-man dungeons (plus two heroic versions of classic dungeons); three end-game raids; a new profession; two new PvP battlegrounds; and one world PvP zone. In addition, Cataclysm features a revamp of Azeroth, the portion of the game world that went live when WoW originally launched in 2004, providing a much improved leveling experience for new players and alts. MMO-Champion posted a comprehensive collection of information about the new content. Of course, Cataclysm's launch has brought the video game addiction debate back to the fore.
Nevermind, my queue popped.
With all the player friendly changes finally incorporated into the old world the game is essentially new enough for people who have never touched WOW. It also is freshened enough for existing players to want to revisit the old world. Overall, its a much better expansion than BC and possibly better than Wrath. Is it perfect, no, but rarely will changes please everyone.
FWIW, someone made maximum level with the help of their guild within hours of the game starting up in Europe. Should be fun seeing all the people crush through the zones and race an un-winnable race
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Mom, bathroom!
they are all busy playing
therefore, if my understanding of the Slashdot demographic is correct, there will be a total of 22 comments in this thread all day, and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to the level 80 shaman that lives in my basement, Blizzard has basically slashdotted themselves - there are *so* many people trying to play that their servers are basically non-responsive. Players on the WOW forums are suggesting that people open 16 games simultaneously (in windowed mode), and then start to play whichever one responds first - which, of course, makes the entire scenario 16x worse.
I gave the game another shot, because I really wanted to give the 'fabulous new revamped overhauled Troll starter zone' a try. It took me 22 minutes to finish it, and I was level 9 when I did so. What a shame.
You'd be surpirsed.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.
Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.
WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.
I "played" Fable III until about midnight last night. I mean, I was constantly interrupted but it's a great story line. I'll put in my 40-60 hours playing through the storyline and just enjoy it. Same thing with WoW. I don't understand why people treat WoW any differently. Given the monthly fee, I would think it'd make more sense to beat the regular content in that first month and let the end-game go. It's a case of diminishing returns.
Oh, one more note, if I have extra time at the end of the month, I'll sometimes go back to old content and enjoy old end-game material that is now mid-game material that I never got to experience. With the new races, you can sometimes find a pickup group to go with you.
and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
WoW doesn't suck but it's not the last game I want to play. I am a WoW player but I'm at work right now. I am the elusive sensible responsible WoW player that you seem to claim doesn't exist. If you actually looked at the numbers though, a lot of us players are in this category. We're just not omnipresent in the game so you won't see my characters in game non-stop and now it's only when the new content comes out.
My work here is dung.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
I play maybe 5-10 hours a week, and that's plenty for me. At $14.95 per month, it's a good return for entertainment per hour.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I know, it's Christmas soon and everything, but this expansion is about the worst thing a gamer at university wants at the end of a semester.
Agreed,
Perhaps we are getting too old for games?
NAH!
But the grind no longer interestes me. I want goals and good social atmosphere with no drama and immature people.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
Anyone without kids, and/or a wife who is cool with it. You only need to play 5-10 hours a day if you suck. If you are half ass good at video games, you can play 5-10 hours a week, and still see all end game/end patch content. A good raiding guild raids twice a week for 4 hours a night 2 days a week, and clears and/or makes progress.
You don't ever really "win" anything in life. Lottery winners go bankrupt like 33% of the time, if you went to state/college championship you still didn't win the Super Bowl, so you're a loser! In no aspect of life is there ever a clear winner. Someone somewhere is better than you at whatever you claim to be the best at. If people have fun playing why tread on them? Is it because they are not like you? Are you better than them because you choose not to play? Is you're wife better than thier's because she would be appauled if you spent 5-10 hours a week doing something you enjoyed?
I want to be retired when I grow up.
Damn I hope you're not serious !
I think it has more to do with enjoying playing with those people than it does WoW itself. The people I know who still play WoW (including myself) play with good friends, either real world friends or those they met online.
Yeah, I know what you mean. After an EQ addiction and then a a bout of WoW addiction, I realized that as fun as MMOs are, they throw your life out of balance. It's one thing to have an escape every once in a while; but when you live your life in escape, those memories just aren't meaty enough to have been worth it. Memories of time spent with my family are more valuable. Learning something about science, technology, politics, economics, or history is more valuable than having my brain filled with the prices of virtual pieces of magical armor in a virtual world.
It's kind of like a guitar hero addiction. Sure, have fun with it for a few hours here and there. If you have enough time to spend hours on it a day, though, why not take up playing a REAL guitar?
That said, I think I started to drool a little when I looked at the new WoW expansion and thought about spending my Xmas holidays in Azeroth.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I know someone who took off the rest of this week from work to play. To each their own...
I ALMOST agree with you...but I still loved just going solo every now and then.
Still, the connection and feeling of community certainly had at least something to do with it.
Living With a Nerd
Winning the game is so 80s, nowadays you lose the game!
It's kind of hard to play through a game like Assassin's Creed and then get excited about WoW. I'm constantly astounded that Blizzard can constantly demonstrate how much money one can make and still not have any viable competitors. Oh well, maybe cataclysm will allow us to rescue that sixth slave.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And my social life takes another hit. Not because I play, but because a good deal of my friends do. Curse you Blizzard! (shakes fist)
I seriously dont know of any other game except maybe Everquest which has been responsible for ruining so many of my friends lives lol. I dont mean to laugh but several have lost their jobs calling off fake sick and being caught on the servers by their supervisors who are ALSO playing WOW on their legitimate days off, not very smart lol. Several close friends of mine have also lost their girlfriends and one ended his marriage all over this damn Game. Ya cant blame the game or the game designers I am certain that they didnt develop the game with the intention of wrecking homes but that is indeed what it does. They need self help groups like AA for WOW players who obsess over their DPS lol. This new expansion is going to haul friends of mine who managed to pull themselves away from the game after months and months of grinding their social interaction percentage will now fall to 0 as they quest for ever highter dps lol.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
And, basically, who cares? Not all games are made to be won or lost. There is also no winning Elite, or Tetris, or Pac-Man.
What matters is whether you had fun playing it for X hours or not. Which fun can come from gear and achievements, but it also can come from doing quests, or exploration, or social interaction with other people, or just trying to be the biggest dick without getting banned, or really whatever floats your boat.
Essentially if the only point you can see is comparing dick size and complaining that the game doesn't give you an "OK, you won" popup, then I can see how maybe it's not the game for you. I'm sure there's a bunny-hopping and teabagging simulator... err... FPS out there more suited to your needs.
So, you know, don't? I keep hearing that complaint, and it never ceases to amaze me in it's pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head idiocy.
Guess what? There is no paragraph in the TOS that says "Blizzard can ban your account and kill your dog if you play less than 5-10 hours a day." You can play just half an hour a week on weekends or take a month off, if you wish. The game was designed to be playable in whatever portions you wish.
Heck, even if you're in a fairly obsessive "raiding guild", we're no longer in the pre-BC age of 40-man raids that take all night. You can do some reasonable raiding in two hours a day, which still falls short of the 5-10 hours a day bullshit. Or you can find yourself a social guild and never have any schedule at all.
Frankly, it seems to me that the only ones who come up with that stupid objection are those who think they're basically playing to prove penis size. It can't be a coincidence that it almost always comes together with the "but you can't win!!!111eleventeen" objection and with the whining that all there is to do is collect the best gear and all achievements. They end up caught in some race to have all the penis size symbols, and have them yesterday if possible, and not even seeing any other way to play than grind 10 hours a day towards that coveted King Of The Hill Position.
In reality, it's a race that exists only in your own mind, and a prize that exists only in your own mind. In reality, almost nobody actually gives a flying fuck about your being King Of The Hill or not, nor about how fast you got there. If you don't want to put 5-10 hours a day in a race that exists only in your own mind, then don't. It's really that simple.
Of course, you may have to find yourself
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You WILL conform to socially accepted norms!
The guild leveling system is fun. You can level your guild to level 25, each level gives a perk (%5 more xp, 10% faster mounted speed, etc) The guild levels by members completing quests, dungeons, and battlegrounds. Everyone contributes a little.
I'm mildly interested in it, but I have no desire to spend hour upon hour playing the same game again. That was my biggest gripe with WoW (and every other MMO I've played, from Gemstone III to Meridian 59 to Everquest to WoW, and everything in between.) When you're in the depths of an MMO, you miss out on everything else that gets released.*
Both of my downstairs neighbors are into WoW (they put in about 2 hours a day or so, unless its a Friday night.) Any interest I have ins eeing the changes could be done looking over their shoulder.
*ironically, I'm in my 74th hour of Dragon Quest IX :x
Living With a Nerd
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
You're doing it wrong.
The point isn't to win (though some people seem to think that). The point is to have fun.
It's a diversion. It's escapism. No different from reading a book or watching TV or going to the movies or whatever else people do with their spare time. Sure, some diversions like board games and most video games have a clear winner... But plenty of diversions like reading books and watching movies have no winner. It's just a way to kill some time.
My wife and I both play WoW. We play with a guild we've been members of for about 10 years now. They're people we know. They're fun to hang out with. Half the fun of the game isn't actually mashing buttons and killing critters - it's the social aspect.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
According to the level 80 shaman that lives in my basement ...
yeah mom i'm running out of food down here could you bring me some pizza please?
If spending half your game time running the length of Elwynn Forest is your idea of "earning it", I can only say I disagree. Completely.
MMOs have a nasty tendency to pad game time with copious amounts of traveling. I hate that. Blizzard would seem to agree, and have made getting around quicker and easier for years now (with one exception, the removal of the hub city portals). You get mounts earlier, you get fast mounts earlier, you get flying earlier etc. It's the right thing to do.
Heh. You do realize, I hope, that the starter zone is just that. It's partially a tutorial (e.g., telling you how to use Immolate or Steady Shot or whatever on some dummies) and partially giving you some back-story for your race and helping get in-character, so to sleep.
It's basically the equivalent of, dunno, castle Cousland if you played Dragon Age as a human noble. Or that escaping-from-the-hospital-station level in Mass Effect 2, while being taught how to control the game. Or the tutorial town in Fallout New Vegas. Etc. You get the idea.
It's not like it's the end of the content or anything.
Honestly, I can't even imagine (A) why you'd actually want a tutorial longer than 22 minutes, and (B) seriously, why not go to another race's tutorial zone if you need to practice the start game some more?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
4.0 is a better game than 3.0 was.
3.0 was better than 2.0
2.0 was better than 1.0
I've been there for all of them (since open beta actually, when looting didn't even work half the time), and people who complain that the game is currently too easy are usually just annoyed that they had it harder "back in the old days" (lol 2004 was a long time ago).
If you want harder gameplay, start questing in zones that are above your level. judging the current state of the game on the northshire abbey experience is retarded.
Also, if getting a bag for free makes the game too easy for you, maybe you should throw it away?
Dragonlance had a Cataclysm that reshaped the world back in 1984.
(well 1987 if you want to be specific to the books where the characters were "there" for it).
Destroying students' final exam grades since 1991.
Seriously, I know they're releasing it now to get big Christmas money, but that alone makes me really glad I don't play that game any more.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
To be fair, the bulk of the revamp of Azeroth is to get rid of the mindless/endless grind. They've even tweaked experience gains from instances so that your best bet for levelling quickly is to immerse yourself in the storyline and do the quests.
The new races added with this expansion are especially good at that... I have only had a chance to play a Gilnean (worgen), as I only had an hour before I had to leave for work this morning, but I didn't run into a single FedEx quest. (well, ok, I did run into a couple, but they were well embedded into the story line and easy to do at the same time as others). What I found, instead, was a well developped story line that moved quickly and kept me wanting to do that next step in the quest chain. Levelling is also much faster at lower levels (I made level 9 on my little druid), and you get into the class skills that actually make you *feel* like your preferred spec as soon as you can choose that spec... there's real distinction between specializations right at level 10, whereas you used to have to be in the late 40's or 50's before you saw a meaningful difference. That does help to keep the levelling interesting, I find.
That said, endgame is still going to be a grind. Particularly once you reach max level and get into the raiding game... I currently have 2 characters I raided with in ICC, and the only thing that kept it interesting was having dual spec... when I got bored of healing on my priest, I could switch to shadow, and when I got bored of DPS on my shaman I could switch to heals again. (and yes, healing on a shaman is very different from healing on a discipline priest, so there was enough difference there to keep me interested, too :))
Can't do anything about the drama and immature people, though. My solution to that is to join an 18+ guild with a strict no-drama policy, and turn off trade chat. It helps that I'm on an RP server, as there's not quite as much stupidity in chat as you find on a regular server.
I play maybe 3-5 hours every 3 or 4 days. Its enough for me. That 14.99 saves me from buying 49.99 video games every other week, "winning" and shelving them. Think of it as a financial investment. I have most fun PvPing in low level brackets - not end game content. I could care less about being king of the hill - like you said, I have a real life to be king of the hill in.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
You don't play to win. You play to achieve.
Winning is just one of the many ways to achieve in a game. In pacman you couldn't really win, but you achieved higher levels every time you played. Or a higher score then someone else. In WoW, just like in many other games, you achieve things. You achieve a kill of the Lich King, or achieve some achievement. That's what keeps people playing, achieving things.
As a former WoW player, I say, I didn't get enough achieve for my time. I might play a bit again once Cataclysm goes in the discount.
Best "achieve" for my money this year: "Super Meat Boy" http://supermeatboy.com/
The game is hard, but not impossible, and you achieve more and more when you progress. Impossible things become possible, hard things become easy. You see yourself achieving progress. I don't think I'll ever "win" SuperMeatBoy, as the game features well over 300 levels. But it's damn fun trying (&dieing, died over 4000 times now)
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
I see this said a lot. I really don't get why people bring this up, open ended games have been around for a while. (Myst, being the first one I can think of). Oblivion is another one. Point is, there is no way to "Win" these games either. And those ones aren't even multiplayer. Yet I know people who have played Oblivion past the final story arc multiple times through, different characters and all that.
World of Warcraft HAS story in it. You just ignore it. Most people ignore it. They are so wrapped up in trying to get the best gear that they don't read the quest log. There is an insane amount of writing in amongst all the quest data. On the Alliance side, you can actually play all the way through to level 60 as if it were one massive chain quest - it will direct you to the next zones when you are ready (usually via another quest) and then finally it'll send you back to Stormwind and you can start the annoying Behemoth that is the Onyxia tuning, and then downing her.
When the game was still young- that was considered the end. If you downed her, you won.
As for the time spent playing a game - my girlfriend is out of town, as a result, I have around 4 hours a day monday through friday and 15 hours on the weekend where I have essentially "Free" time, if I wanted to play WoW I could.
I just don't find it as entertaining as it used to, things have gotten too easy.
I've been there for all of them (since open beta actually, when looting didn't even work half the time), and people who complain that the game is currently too easy are usually just annoyed that they had it harder "back in the old days" (lol 2004 was a long time ago).
You're probably right. It did suck to have to wait until 40 to get your mount. :-)
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Sure, I admit that it annoyed me that I paid like 1000g for my shaman to have dual spec, my priest got it for like 50g, and my mage got it for 10g or 15g or something...
But you know what, I'm glad that I didn't have to pay 1000g 3 times.
There is no way to win the Slashdot. The only point is to get the best news and comments and then sit as 'King of the Slashdots' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
Seriously, who over the age of 5 has 5-10 hours a day to spend posting on Slashdot?
ad nauseum. If one gets enjoyment from something, what the fuck does it matter that it doesn't bring enjoyment to you? Are your desires the measuring stick the entire world needs to use to compare them self to?
I've played all but 3 classes to 80, and done the endgame thing, and you know what I felt after this last patch? Even with different NPCs telling me to kill 10 different types of mobs, its still the same fucking game. I want a new decent MMO, and since for some reason blizzard are the only ones who make competent MMOs, I'm kind of stuck waiting for WoW2 or WoS, or WoD, or whatever it is they do next. Even though I'm sure there are at least 2 more expansions coming before this thing is over (we all know that level 100 is an inevitability.), I really hope that sometime early next year they announce a totally new MMO.
To end ALL discussions of "game addiction" let me say this. Ones self-worth is not dictated by the gears/gold/achieves one has in game. If it is, there are other issues at hand that do not involve the game at all. If your self-worth is so low that you get divorced, then you probably should not have married her to begin with if she did not raise your self worth from "pond scum dirty dog", to King. If you your self worth is so low that you lose your job...chances are it was a crappy job, and you were not really important to the company anyhow. If you didn't feel important then you weren't. If others around you didn't make you feel important as a provider, then you weren't.
I want to be retired when I grow up.
I thought Myst was a puzzle/adventure game, and was meant to be won. Right? Or wrong?
Dark Reflection
It's certainly one thing to motivate some people, but not the only one by far. E.g., Bartle's famous paper dates from the days of MUDs and identifies 4 types of players:
1. Achievers (Diamonds): these are the kind you describe. They play to achieve something, be it a more epic sword, more money in the bank, a funky title, or a higher score.
2. Explorers (Spades): these are the kind of people who play to find out stuff. It can be some mountain pass that nobody else heard about, or how the game works, or try to find every single quest, etc. For example the kinds that put numbers in a spreadsheet to find out the exact numbers in COH's attack formulas were explorers. Essentially these guys play to reverse-engineer the game.
3. Socializers (Hearts): these guys basically treat the game as a chat room that incidentally has a video game attached. They're there to make friends, chat, organize some guild event, tutor newbies, etc. Even actually playing the game is only a tool towards interacting with people.
4. Killers (Clubs): these guys are not the PvP gang, but the people who live to harass, annoy, gank, and make life as miserable as possible for others. Their highest reward and achievement is getting someone to leave the game entirely, effectively perma-killing them in the game. Hence the "killers" name. The rest of us tend to call them "griefers" or simply "asshats".
Bearing in mind, though, that nobody is 100% in one category, but you can still classify people that way by their predominant interest and behaviour.
And that's actually just one of many classifications.
At any rate, the moral of the story is: please don't generalize. There's nothing wrong if you're an achiever, but do realize that other people play for very different reasons than you do.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Agreed. It's not that I couldn't, probably, still sit for hours playing an MMO. But I get this niggling feeling of responsibility to myself, my home, my dog, etc. Should I be raking the leaves? Walking the dog? Showering? Or even doing something else I enjoy like tennis, etc. One my friends out-leveled me and I realize the simple gameplay mechanic of EQ wasn't worth much without the joking around and other social aspects, I was never drawn back into the MMO scene.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that interconnected everything so what you did mattered: you hunt deer, to sell to the market for meat, and you can use the hide to make clothing. The meat you sell is actually available in the store for other players and even NPCs. If no one is hunting and selling meat, a city's NPCs could decline -- no more city guards, no more Molly the Baker selling cherry pies. And you would build relations with NPCs in order to get discounts or quests or access to certain areas or just an extra story line. If an orc raid occurs on your little town, and there aren't enough NPC guards, and you're not around to assist, Molly the Baker may end up captured or dead...and you lose the bonuses that relationship brought you.
And don't overhunt the deer, or the dire wolves will be looking for something else to eat.
What about the guy who follows every football game is doing nothing but hitting refresh on ESPN? The same guy who is in multiple fantasy football leagues? What about if they start doing it for money?? The same guy who goes to work thinks about how soon he can get out of work to go home and play Madden or setup more simulations for the season to better his predictions in the fantasy league. And while at work yammers at the water cooler about football constantly to the point no one cares.
I hate how games are being made out to be the "bad influence" when I look out at the office and see people just as obsessive with "harmless activities". Being obsessed with anything can throw your life out of balance where just saying "They should do something productive" or "Why not do the real thing?" while ignoring the guy trying to tweak their spreadsheets for the nth time planning out their fantasy football drafts for hours on end.
The problem is obsession not the game or activity. If your kids are begging for your attention and ignore them it doesn't seem to matter if the excuse is because they are watching a football game or running around a virtual world.
10 years? Wow just had its 6th anniversary.
One of the things that I've found in redoing the low-level quests is because I'm not concentrating on learning the game or on leveling, I can actually get involved in the story that they're telling. It's been a while since I did these quests the first time, but it seems like they're telling a more complete set of stories rather than "this is what you need to do to get through this area and on to the next one".
Myst is a puzzle/adventure game - but the fact is the game never stops you from playing once you achieve what can be considered the end goal. The story will not progress anymore, at all, but they let you wander around around and revisit places you've already visitted.
Some of us that play WoW do not fit into the same demographics as the kind of people that will wait outside a store at midnight to get the expansion as soon as it comes out and then rush-through to level 85 without actually enjoying the content.
Me, I'd rather wait until the crowds are past the initial quests: if this is anything like other expansions there will be, almost literally, lines of people waiting at all important targets from the main quest-line to kill them, and probably the secondary ones (actually, this being WoW, people won't actually form an ordered line and there will be plenty of bitching & moaning about kill-stealing) - everybody is starting from the same point at about the same time so lots of people will be going after the same things at once.
My recommendation is:
- Wait a bit before starting on the expansion and take the time to look around and explore the new content and enjoy the story.
After all, what's the point of paying for an expansion just to get the everyday rush-hour experience but in WoW (only worse, 'cause many people are arseholes when under the cover of anonymity) and only see 10% of of the new content?
But the grind no longer interestes me. I want goals and good social atmosphere with no drama and immature people.
Shop around. You can get some of that in the better guilds. Our guild has a "nobody under age 25" rule and we're pretty strict on the maturity / language. Guilds like that tend to be the smaller ones, not the big mega guilds that will invite anyone. You're still stuck dealing with the rest of the kids on the server, but that also varies by server/faction and turning off "General" and "Trade" chat makes a big difference.
After 9 years playing MMOs, the grind is what you make of it. At least in WoW, you can get things done in an hour or so of gameplay per session and there's not much grind left. I look at gear or whatever and decide whether or not the grind is worth it. If I'm not having fun, I stop chasing a particular goal and go do something else.
And sometimes, the best way to stop grinding is to slow down, read the quest text, talk to random NPCs, look at the scenery, and stop trying to finish quests in record time.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
What prevents me from getting into playing WoW are the payment options available to European (and US) players. It's either a monthly subscription or a 60-day timecard. With either option I'd feel obliged to play nearly every day to ensure I was getting my money's worth. I don't always have the time to do so every evening. In China, they buy game hours, which is a model that would suit me better.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that interconnected everything so what you did mattered
Go live in null-sec (or 0.0) space in EVE Online.
It's not as dynamic as it could be, but all those null-sec systems generally started out as nothing more then planets, moons, and asteroid belts with only stargates. Nearly everything in null-sec is player driven.
(That being said, I found EVE to be too invasive to my schedule. If you weren't grinding 20-30 hours per week, you'd never really get anywhere or be able to afford flying battleships regularly. Or you had to be ready to login at a moment's notice and help defend your system / structures from attack. I played for 6-8 months again earlier this year, made 10B ISK and got back out.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Aye. I've known people who did almost that before. Well, almost. The selling was done for them by whoever got them to download a keylogger, the gold went to some gold-seller site, and they didn't much unsubscribe as just had the password changed ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And Homeworld: Cataclysm came out a decade ago.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I quit playing WoW for quite a while, thinking the same thing as many above posters - my time is better spent on other things. After some time and careful experimentation I have found that I just don't have it in me to be productive after a day of work. I just end up wasting my time on other stupid junk (tv, movies, console gaming). Of the array of time wasting things which I have to do it turns out that WoW is actually quite a bit better than most of them. Mainly because it's a social game. Hell, I'll take it over what I did the past 6 months on my time off.
But back when Blizzard made that deal with Facebook, well. They've been really pushing the real names in game thing, and it's not something I like. They're also using real names on the new forums after all -- sure, they don't officially show them to other people, but they broadcast your real name in plain text with every page view, and they don't use encryption for it.
Which would be a really stupid thing to do if there were anyone interested in trying to phish WoW players.
Back before the ActiVision merger, Blizzard paid a fair bit of attention to security, and it was clearly the fault of idiot players when they got hacked. But back then, the people playing the game were the customers. Now, the people playing the game are the product, and Facebook are the customers.
So even though pretty much all the game mechanics changes to the game sound great, and are stuff I was really enthused about, I'm still out. Went to a game where global friending people doesn't use real names, and I'm happy.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
First off, I agree with you that MMO's are grindfests, and that grinding just isn't very much fun no matter how they couch it. EVE has perhaps the best idea, in that your character gains XP just by being there. You don't have to do anything, and can just get on with the game. The downside to that is that anyone can be a high level as long as they don't quit before they automatically get the level, which means that the morons who want everything handed to them can be right there with the serious gameplay people.
But what you wrote can be applied to just about any video game, from Pac-Man on up. Even an intensely story-driven game like KOTOR still had leveling, and there were parts of the game that were difficult to get through unless you decided to grind by killing the same guys over and over again to advance your level, or your money, or whatever you needed at the time.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
I grabbed a 10-day trial just for the hell of it. Hadn't played since the first year. Mounts at Level 20? That's freaking awesome. Half the annoyance I had with the game was walking all over hell and creation. There's a lot of stuff that the old players that have stuck with it bitch about, saying it's noobifying the game. As someone who played back then but quit, I'd say they just took a lot of the plodding dredge out of it.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I play WoW eight to ten hours a day, every day. I have for six years with few breaks, and even those breaks were to play other MMOs. Between the characters I have made over the years I have recently passed the 700 days of played time marker. I have been accused countless times of being addicted, and that "it's ruining my life" and that "I should get out more" or that "I should get help".
I don't get it. While endgame raiding I have moved out on my own, finished a 'difficult' bachelor's degree program at a high end university, and am now holding a 9 to 5 secure, meaningful job in the field I studied in. It's not like there's anything constructive to do at latitude 65. To be honest, I don't even like the game, but it's all that's here. Everyone I grew up with is either dead or incarcerated.
I can understand having hostile feelings towards someone who neglects their spouse or children to play a video game, or towards those who play as much as I do but don't have a job and/or live at home with their parents. Just don't assume that everyone who plays for several hours every day fits into those categories. People that are worthless garbage while playing a video game are most likely also worthless garbage without the video game.
I've read all of Proust, all of Dickens and everything Alistair McClean ever wrote.
HA HA HA
I WIN
I am best reader
yus.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Yes, there is. The only winning move is not to play.
I played WoW for over five years, including throughout my entire undergraduate education.
I have played the game for over 3500 hours, which is enough to get an air transport pilot license if I were flying a jet instead (to be fair, WoW is considerably cheaper).
I was on a 2450-rated 3v3 Arena team, which in our class/spec comp was #1 in the US and #2 in the world (although we played a weird comp).
I don't hate WoW. I would never begrudge someone for playing. But I do despise Greg Street "Ghostcrawler" ("GC") for what he did to the community and to the game. I despise the fact that 2v2s - which I loved playing - were effectively deprecated because GC said they couldn't be balanced. I despise the fact that damage was amped way up in WoLK, so much that people were dying in three hits at launch. It took almost a year for PvP to get back to a place where it was based on skill rather than getting lucky with crits. I despise the fact that mana was effectively removed from the game as a factor for healers, that threat was effectively removed as a factor for DPS, and that the release raid content was a too-easy warmed-over version of an instance from vanilla. And, most of all, I despise that GC has to constantly screw with things, as if a title that has stood as the #1 paid MMO for the past 5 years needs it.
Eventually I just got tired of it. I got tired of reading patch notes and checking the PTR to stay ahead of the curve. I got tired of adapting to each new flavor-of-the-month combo. Maybe if you never played PvP it was better, but in my world it was a constant cycle of getting screwed by some comp for 2 months, finally seeing it get fixed with a patch, and then having to deal with the next flavor comp.
So I'm not playing along anymore. I've found other games to play, like StarCraft II. There is a world of options out there and I eventually decided that I can live without WoW.
Right - the major difference, of course, being whether you prefer being awesome (as a priest) or lame (as a shaman)? Yes, I went there. :) My priest was my first 60, 70, and 80, and still the best. I *detest* totems, though I find I generally love healing roles.
I haven't gotten online yet today, hoping to get online for a bit tonight and check out the new stuff, but in general, I thought the Wrath questing was light years ahead of Vanilla & TBC questing, I'm hoping they continued that trend.
Your advice on avoiding drama is good, and spot-on - find an adult guild populated with some people you enjoy bantering with, or start your own. The new expansion makes raiding for the very best gear very accessible to 10 players, so there's no reason you couldn't start a small but quite successful raiding group. Trade chat has its moments, but a robust ignore list helps. I've never played on an RP server, though I found that PvE servers seem to be a little more laid back (and thus less douchey, on account of everybody being PvE Care Bears) than the average PvP server (which, as we all know, is where the srs bsns happens).
One other thing (for the guild officers out there) that's actually helped us a lot is asking people to get on a first-name basis... we've all got lots of alts, so it's easier for us to keep track of who's who if we know the person's name and can associate the alts with them. Plus it's a little easier to relate when you're not on vent calling out shit like "HolyCow, DI LegooooLASS and wipe it. HumanMage the Druid just got smoked by the blood beasts, and AngelLOLOL is our only healer left standing."
This is exactly the point of the game. As a solo-play experience, WoW would be pretty fucking boring. Its adding the social element that makes it enjoyable, and I find that most of what I look forward to when I get online is getting a chance to unwind with some friends - some of whom don't live near enough for me to "see" short of a weekend trip & a plane ticket.
Yeah? Well I did that, plus the collector's editions from JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.
READING IS SRS BSNS BRAH, not for CAREBEARS. YUMAD?
Personally, I value my time too much, so I don't rat or mine or anything of that type for money. Selling GTCs keeps me in money so I can fly in fleets or solo and have fun.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
you can often pick up most quests while they are still red.
you can manually queue up for dungeons that are orange at the very least.
yes things resist you, thus challenge.
plus you can never underestimate the added challenge of grouping with people who are horrible and/or stupid.
The gathered that previous poster was looking for a harder game, I was trying to provide him with one.
What it turns out he was really commenting on is that wow is not as much of a time sink as it once was (unless you want to make it so), and things came cheaper and quicker than they once did.
Wow is certainly more convenient than it used to be, but it's not -easier-. Not really.
time taken to do a task does not necessarily indicate the difficulty of a task. Some things take less time and effort now. That's all. Other things still take a ton of effort.
I had the pleasure of raiding both c'thun before AQ40 opened up (the classic definition of hard raid encounter) AND heroic Halion (fairly comparable encounters really) and you know what? The game is still hard. I didn't do heroic 25man LK, I hear that's even worse than heroic Halion.
The problem is obsession not the game or activity.
Right on. And on the other end of the spectrum there are parents who get so over-involved in their kids' lives that their kids start playing WoW to try and get away from it. It would seem that some people have a greater propensity for addiction to certain things, but for now I'm still thinking obsessive behavior is still the culprit.
Okay... So this looks to be a very cool expansion pretty much all around (not that I'll play), but... "Deathwing?" That's seriously the best name they could come up with for their paragon of evil type Dragon?
...that Blizzard's WoW is done on purpose not to have a defined end.
Indeed doesn't end at all, and it's always a vicious cycle.
While with games as StarCraft II you can decide to play multiple games but you always know that when a match is over is over, with WoW there's no such thing.
This is why BBC's Panorama isn't that bad talking about WoW.
Cheers
Ps. I've played WoW for 4.5 years. Stopped when I realized the game wouldn't have anything to offer more.
There is also the idea that folks play the same game different ways. I love the low-level BGs. I have several XP-off toons that I do nothing on but PvP and run instances to gear them to the max. I have another toon I farm and fish on. I have several toons on different servers who only are lvl 5 or 6 and "live" simply to fill the gbanks with goods and then sell the stuff to make more gold to fill the gbank's money tab. don't raid, rarely quest (at lvl 10 I either BG for XP or I do the traditional grind of killing things)and I thoroughly enjoy playing WoW. I ain't buying Cata because Blizz broke my hunters, but I will eventually.
10 years? Wow just had its 6th anniversary.
Yes, and many people jumped from an earlier MMO to WoW. It was SWG for me, our guild there was up for about 2 years and we hopped to WoW and have been thre since launch. 2+6=8.
Trolling is a art and for that i give me 3,00 internets.
The original Star Wars: Galaxies (pre-CU) had this kind of economy. It was *amazing* - and pretty much the ONLY thing the devs managed to get right, primarily because they didn't have anything to do with it.
NPCs didn't sell anything, I think. Players would start off and pick a general profession, like "Crafter" which would let them make very basic weapons or devices like mineral harvesters. The crafter would start off by prospecting until they found a good source of whatever material they needed and then they would scrabble in the dirt to get a few. Eventually they'd get enough resources to make a few guns or whatever, which would give them crafting xp, and let them build more complex stuff. You'd eventually be able to build small harvesters that you could place atop a source of resources and you could have up to 10 of those. At some point you could specialize, and if you became an architect, for example, you could build factories and huge structures etc.
Crafters would often hire other players to get them materials - in my case, I had maybe 20 people on my "galaxy" (server) who would go out and hunt animals and bring me their bones, meat and leather. They'd also rent me their "lots" so I could have more than 10 buildings. I also wound up doing server trades with people, where I would make a character on their galaxy and let them have my lots, and in exchange they'd do the same for me. At one point, I wound up having over 300 different people directly in my supply-chain - resource gatherers, lot renters, people who would make sub-components for me to make big items or hunt up rare components to be used in special requests. And some of those people had people working for them - I'd place an order for 1,000,000 units of a specific type of copper and they'd find a way to get it to me. There were even entire player built cities that would spring up with different abilities - some were better for crafters, some for people wanting to hunt monsters, some for PVP. You'd even have different players buying and re-selling wares. I wound up supplying some of the best armor on my galaxy directly, while I would sell my mass produced (and somewhat worse) armor in bulk to merchants who would sell it near big areas where fighting happened.
Everyone in the game was participating in this economy at some level or another, and it was really, really glorious. Of course, SOE being SOE, they completely wrecked it, but it was incredible while it lasted.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Cataclysm is by far the best World of Warcraft yet in terms of how you interact with the game, the game systems and the quests and story-telling and probably in every other way as well. It's very obvious that a lot of care by a lot of competent people have gone into this. The only problem is that the skeleton of what WoW is is being stretched in the direction of even higher quality, but the identity of WoW was set when it came out and they can't just make Cataclysm a new game. It still has to be WoW, and the formula inherent to WoW has e.g. storytelling issues. WoW is not voiced and it is not cinematic - you don't get to see facial expressions of anguish as Mankrik implores you to find out what happened to his wife. You get to read a short blurb about how he is imploring you. They can't change that because then it wouldn't be WoW, yet those non-classic-WoW elements are a main part of what lends Wrath of the Lich King and especially Cataclysm their superior story telling. So what they have to do is try to make these things work in an engine that isn't made for it without having players feel that they changed the nature of the game too much. They are doing an extraordinarily good job at that, it's just that it's a lousy task to be set and the outcome is not quite cohesive.
Most of WoW is not voiced or cinematic - indeed most of the story in wow is throw-away and transparent excuses for having you go kill mobs - sprinkled with lots of puns, pop references and crazy goblin engineering. So when a tiny bit of WoW becomes voiced, kind-of cinematic and has a deeper and cohesive story, it makes the rest of WoW look shabby in comparison. That's probably why they rebuilt the whole of the original game for Cataclysm, but they have to stay true to what WoW is and so they can only go so far. E.g. the attempt is frustrated by the fact that the player character in WoW has no significant identity of his own in the game. That let's you imagine whatever you want, which is probably the point of that, but it also means that the character you are playing is always the all-important cog in the machine that makes things work out all right. Yet he has no identity or place in the story of WoW. He is an important but faceless technician that fixes the world and is never talked about except in generic and interchangeable ways, and even often in plural form like "the great heroes of Azeroth fought off the scourge." You can still do great story telling with that, as Blizzard is showing us all without a doubt - perhaps in the same way that the special olympics participants can probably all run much faster than you or I because they are so good at using what they've got. Yet the special olympics are not the real olympics.
When you look at the successive expansions to WoW, it's clear that Blizzard is putting more and more of their resources into providing their game with an ever-better-told story. It's the only reason they put phasing into their game where the world changes progressively as the player goes through the story laid out in the various quest lines. Yet the kind of game they built 6 years ago will only support them in taking that story-telling ambition so far now.
Compare this to the story telling style of BioWare's Mass Effect 1 and especially 2. I don't think Bioware has better writers than Blizzard does, it's just that WoW has not been constructed from the beginning to support excellent stories and they can only do so much to change that now - which is a lot but still there is a limit. With the resources Blizzard is increasingly with each expansion pouring into specifically story and narration, I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard themselves see this as something they must take as far as they can within their game's limitations. Bioware is coming out with The Old Republic in 2011, which is an MMO built from the beginning to support excellent and varied stories. If Bioware can approach the quality Blizzard has put into the rest of World of Warcraft outside of the story, then they will eventually supplant World
At the moment? Those three things have been the norm for pretty much all of human history.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
It would be interesting if other aspects of our lives had a /played option to look at - sleep, work, vacation, sports, TV, boinking, camping, sitting in traffic, etc. WoW might not look so bad in comparison.
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me