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World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25
New submitter JestersGrind writes "Blizzard has announced that Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion of the popular World of Warcraft MMO, will be launched on September 25, 2012 and can be pre-ordered now."
The game page has a good deal of information about the new expansion. The level cap is increased to 90, there is a new race (Pandaren) and a new class (Monk), and the talent system has been completely redesigned. They've added Challenge Modes for dungeons, which normalizes player gear and lets them compete to see who can clear it the fastest. The MMO-Champion website keeps track of all the minor details, if you're interested.
If you call in for tech support on September 25th and the hold time is more than one hour, you can bet your arse many nerds have taken the day off to play this.
What did you think of the Pandaren in Warcraft III?
How many days will I have to take off of work to be the realm first level 90? I'll start stocking up on adult diapers tonight, no time for bio breaks.
Actually it would be kind of fun at 90 to go back to solo the old level 80 raids, I may have to start playing in October once all the server issues are fixed.
Wow lost my interest about a year ago. It used be a fun game, but the community is rotten and full antisocial d-bags.
I don't really care for the choices the game designers made either. Encounters are 100% technical execution and leave no room for creativity or fun at all. It gets old fast, and wow's imploding user base proves that most people agree.
It also takes far too much time. The reward for time invested is pretty damn low. Even if we just talk about game time, there are a LOT of other games worth playing today.
Know what I think is killing wow more than anything else? Steam summer sales. :)
WoW went from being a genuinely hard game
When was it ever a 'genuinely hard game'? I played since the first day it launched but I must have missed this mythical period. Even on the first day there were numerous people who were 75% or mote towards hitting the level cap . You could blow through half the game or more solo.
So now they are putting Kung Fu Panda into warcraft? Boy, they are getting desperate to retain customers.
Its sad really. I started WoW many years ago (prior to BC) and loved it because it was a vibrant world filled with wonderful things to go see. The players were, for the most part, having fun running around, seeing new content, exploring and just enjoying the toungue-in-check nature of the WoW world.
Then came BC, for quite a while, the game was still viable - lots of players in the level 1 areas, etc - but the expansion areas felt duller, flatter - not nearly as inspired or quirky as the original zones.
Then came WoLK and things started going downhill. Once WoLK was out, the starting areas quickly became ghost towns and the game was clearly regearing itself to make getting through the first 60 levels a simple grind so that one could get to WoLK. The game started dumbing itself down and showed it in terms of being far less engaging. It simply felt cookie cutter.
I played the last expansion, Cat, until I got to level 85 and then stopped. The game had simply lost everything that made it enjoyable to start with. It had degenerated into an unending set of grinds to get better armor tokens so that one could brag about how buff one was. The game had gone from being a wonderful, sight-filled content exploration into "how fast can I get to level 80 and grind out better armor so that I can beat up on other people in PvP and claim that I'm great".
I think if Blizzard wants their subscribers back, they need to sit down and put in the work to create a new MMO where there are 50 or so levels of content out the door. They simply have to re-create that original WoW experience which will require the same level of energy, passion and effort that went into the original WoW. Somewhere along the line someone started trying to minimize the amount of effort required to add content and consequently diluted the game of the very thing that made it enjoyable to start with.
Honestly, the technology underpinning WoW is just too dated these days. Players expect more - Tera is a perfect example of that, a combat system where you actually have to hit your opponent (yes, some of it is simulated, but it feels real.
I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year, maybe two, and don't plan to go back to it, even for Pandas.
What little gaming time I have, I spend on games that are trying to innovate.
If Blizzard wants me back, they need to do something other than yet another expansion money grab. They need to do something new, innovative and wonderful. Sadly, I don't see much of this coming from them any more. I played Diablo 3 for about 3 hours before I got bored and switched back to Tera.
Hey Blizzard, how about this: World of Starcraft. And make it awesome, using latest technology - not an groaning engine that's 10 years old.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
but MoP is completely of my radar. I used to be a WoW player, a raid who played over 30 hours/week. But the disappointment with the last expansion (Cataclysm) and later content patches pushed me off the game. Without mentioning I had Dragon Soul (the latest "raid") 10 hours after it was released, the overall quality of the game went downhill. Short content with little to no creativity, recycled mechanics and overall boring content.
morcego
When they completely removed all challenge and need for skill WoW became a very pretty Zynga game that was all about grinding out time and not about fun... Since we don't care what Zynga does (unless it's go bankrupt) is this even still new for nerds?
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
WoW
a genuinely hard game
Funny, cuz the EQ people told us WoW people we were kiddies compared to them (something about raids involving over a hundred people, limited boss spawns so guilds fought to get dibs on it, PvP where you actually lost your stuff/exp if you lose, etc)
I would say rants such as yours about "the good old days" is the embodiment of gaming industry (and of most things)
Man, nostalgia used to be great in the good old days, but not anymore. Bah hum bug!
The irony in this post is so thick I could eat it with a fork.
Wow's true downfall is catering to antisocial 'hardcore' morons like yourself. In doing so, they carefully squeezed out every bit of fun of every encounter and replaced it with bland, predictable, min-max pablum. Every encounter really is the same.
1. Find mechanic
2. Practice mechanic
3. Farm gear that enables the play of the next area/boss/whatever
Ultimately, all that's left is a bunch of annoying no-lifers that actually have the time to practice 1-3. Want proof? Shrinking party size. You can't FIND 40 people that have enough hours of matching schedule for this model. The old 40 mans were fun because you could drag along the awful, but fun and social people that hold groups of people together.
So, fuck you. Fuck your 'hardcore' game lifestyle, and fuck wow.
The "level cap" has never been any kind of challenge in most MMOs. It's just about time investment and in the past, having the right class or people to group with. In actual fact, reaching the level cap is when the real game starts.
Vanilla WoW did have some pretty hard content. Original Scholomance was crazy if you did it with the intended 5 people (most groups at the time were actually raids of 10). Original Naxxramus had *nobody* on most of the servers in the game manage to fully clear it before Burning Crusade rendered it obsolete. The Strathlome timed run was a good challenge until you overgeared it with raid gear.
It's gotten progressively easier over time, to the point that now you push a button in the raid finder, get tossed into an easymode raid with a PUG, and essentially go beat up a loot pinata boss. Pokemon Panda expansion is not going to reverse that trend.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
GW2 is coming out on August 28th, the next 5 years are taken.
Level cap is nothing I think he means things like the molten core/bwl/aq40/naxx progression. Only a small percentage of players ever got through molten core, let alone even stepped foot in the rest. Hell even stuff like the original scholomance and stratholme were reasonably hard.
I completed all of those ( and every raid in tbc) and stopped playing before woltk, but I renewed the other week as they had a $10 expansion sale and I was curious. 5 mans are now basically a matter of going through the motions. Healing is never a problem and even if you "stand in the bad" you probably won't die. Tanks never ever lose aggro and can aoe tank everything. In the past every single pull was a reasonably big deal if you got it wrong. Tanks couldn't hold aggro on the entire world so cc and burning stuff fast was a big deal. Now it seems like you can do whatever you like and you will get through it fine.
From what I've heard the end game content is much the same.
*rolls eyes*
Panderen, which started out as an easter egg joke in Warcraft 3 somehow got turned into a full blown expansions in WoW, because, honestly, blizzard has totally ran out of ideas at this point....
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Yeah, a tiny fraction of content was 'hard' but the overall game has been ridiculously easy since the beginning. It has always been more tedious than hard.
The level-cap was quite a challenge in Everquest. Which is also _the_ hardcore PvE MMO. Maybe start playing that one, it is free2play now. Vanilla WoW is child's play compared to EQ.
Besides I just remembered that there are vanilla WoW servers, so if you love it so much, why don't you play vanilla? But as GP said, vanilla WoW wasn't very hard. The endgame content basically only needed tons of grinding (and an immense pain-tolerance because of all the bugs). Scholo, strat etc. hard? Only if you have terrible equipment, but that.. again.. can be fixed by just grinding.
In the end all "challenges" in WoW can easily be beaten by investing more time, and it has been that way since launch.
It just goes on, and on, and on, and on....
MMO's, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war...they're the games you can NEVER WIN.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Yes, I was talking about end game content. Hence "genuinely hard game where huge a minority of players cleared end-game content". The current combat mechanics make every role easy, and lets just about every class fill any role.
If you honestly believe that WoW has become MORE hardcore with recent expansions, you are a moron.
Man, nostalgia used to be great in the good old days, but not anymore. Bah hum bug
I lol'd.
In all seriousness, though, are there any games out right now that could be compared to the difficulty of vanilla WoW (raiding, that is), let alone EQ?
WoW went from being a genuinely hard game
When was it ever a 'genuinely hard game'? I played since the first day it launched but I must have missed this mythical period. Even on the first day there were numerous people who were 75% or mote towards hitting the level cap . You could blow through half the game or more solo.
I played since it launched, and I have the 4 hour long waits in MC for a full 40 man so that we can down 2 or 3 bosses. I never saw Rag. Maybe I was on the wrong server. Or wrong people. It was just me, a friend or 2, and 35 other morons trying to do something no one ever did. End content was hard. *puts on Jedi robes* From a certain point of view...
WoW was never a "hard" game. It took over the market because it was the easy, casual-friendly alternative. That's always been Blizzard's mo - take a solid concept, polish out all the pain points and then take over a market. They make good products, but "genuinely hard" almost never applies.
Just because they've been in the game a while (as a joke, mind), doesn't mean that making an expansion pack based around them is a good idea, or even interesting.
As a solo player, yes it isn't hard. For raid content, there have been periods. C'thun in vanilla Wow was unbeatable until a patch. There is still a debate whether that boss was initially too hard or was the encounter bugged where you could never win. When BC was launched, the top guilds had to ask Blizzard to ease the attunement process as it would take an exceeding long time to get to end game. Some suggest this was on purpose as the end game bosses like Lady Vash were not ready. Back then everyone in the raid had to be attuned to open SSC and the Eye. The problem was that only one person per week per raid could get attuned if done right as it required drops from other raids. That meant 25 weeks if every single raid player never missed their chance.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The popular opinion is the opposite. But, as usual, popular opinion is wrong.
You are wrong.
Yes. I know because I was there for all of it. It can also be proven mathematically but i don't need to. The top level encounters today require rigid execution and and absolute min-max with zero deviation from the expected path. Previous encounters were MUCH more soft and flexible and fudge-able. Nearly all encounters could survive losing a few players or plenty of screwups. Today one player deviates slightly and the result is an instant raid-wide wipe.
The community has changed. There are simply a lot more players willing and able to "harcore" it today. The player pool for attempting high-end content is proportionally much higher. Incidentally, these people are annoying jerks and are killing the game's popularity and profitability.
Say what now? WOW stopped being hardcore back in BC... Its been nothing but carebear playing ever since.
...WoW is for teenage children and dumb-fatasses who don't know any better.
actually, vanilla wow wasn't hard obectively compared to current wow.
TBC was probally the hardest in pure by-the-numbers hard, and wrath had some of the best mechanics difficulty.
People got insanely better at group challanges in games since vanilla wow.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
People arguing about WoW and calling each other morons on the intertubes makes me lolz.
EVE. A thousand times EVE. Just learning how to play the game, in terms of mechanics, is more than most minds can endure (let alone crave!). Throw in non-optional non-consensual PvP and, IMHO, this game blows all others away in terms of difficulty at almost any level of in-game play time.
Well, I have played the betas, and I think GW2 is awesome. The graphics were, IMO, nicer than TOR graphics, and the game performed better as well. And I did a lot of PVP and didn't find it to be "klunky." There is a bit of a learning curve, since you can jump right into top-level pvp after you play through the intro quest, but once you have it figured out it is awesome.
It is true, you can pay real cash for a cute outfit. So what? Cash doesn't buy you better gear, no pay-to-win BS, just solid competition. They have to do something to make up for their lack of monthly fees, and cute outfits are it.
The only thing I don't like about GW is the dialogue for the PVE encounters. Their script writers really dropped the ball. It is like being in care bear wonder land, where everyone you meet wants to give you a hug! It is silly. So if that aspect of the game is important to you, consider other options (though I don't think wow's panda-people are any better).
You don't understand, this is srs business.
In a blizzard survey of subscribers, The pandaren were the #1 requested expansion pack subject. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the majority of the WoW players don't.
The only thing exciting is that the expansion shares the same initials with one of Metallica's top tier albums before they decided to change their audience base from rockers to PBR-quaffing coffee shop denizens.
FWIW, the beta pretty much showed all the expansions content until a content patch. We all know the plot of it, so it won't be worth fooling around with until the Siege of Orgrimmar hits.
Looks like we have the same old FoTM stuff too. Roll a panda monk, rock the PvP until a subsequent patch nerfs the class and race in line with everyone else. The DK stuff over again, except you faceroll with a different mechanic instead of rune Tetris. The FoTM concept in WoW (either play the FoTM, or become the FotM's HK) has gotten old, but it is how they keep the subs with everyone gearing what is in vogue at that time, be it a ret pally, DK, guardian spec druid, or even further back, demon lock.
I'm sure others will enjoy it. However, there are other MMOs which have some interesting concepts. EQ2 has something similar to challenge mode for dungeons, except you can also build your own basic dungeons and have them ranked. Rift is dropping an expansion where all you have to pay for is just the expansion, and you end up with that and all content previous. Heck, if you really want a challenge, play EQ 1.
Of course, I will end up buying the expansion. WoW is like Facebook, a central message place for most gamers. However, other MMOs have better challenges, and take both tactics (see red stuff, move away from it), as well as strategy (put this type of healer in the tank group, this type in the melee DPS group, the third type with the ranged DPS, so there is the best buff synergy.)
EQ was fun, but enormous time investment. Days just to get 1 AA, and then youneeded 1000s of them to be considered "useful" ? Plus the whif monster that even max levels had to suffer? These were annoyances that wow got rid of. but wow had its own probelms: pvp balance was non existant for quite a while, certain classes or specs being simply unwanted in any form, raid dps being just mages and rogues for quite a while....but these things were evened out over time. I mean it must have dome something right: after all teh failed EQ-killers (that we used to mock like we mock wow killers now), WoW is/was the EQ-killer.
also consider that wow came out at just the right time: as EQ's core base matured they had less time to invest in it, so "chracter progress return on investment" became more important, and wow offered a better return, plus the hugely popular warcraft universe.
Rift and Swtor put serious dents in it, the first "wow-killers" to do so, but they did it by being at simplest terms wow-clones with new worlds/mythologies/settings to explore. they changed some things, minor annoyances that wow has included themselves or is about to. rift is still gaining a steady audience having stabilized after the initial wow-hater influx ("wow sucks this, wow sucks that, this game rocks.....(3 months later) man this is just like wow, this sucks"). swtor used wow clone design combined with the huge builtin fanbase of star wars to become an instant hit, the closest to a wow killer of all. like rift did, its now going through its period of shedding people after the intial influx and stabilizing its subscriber base.
this is why these observations are amusing. wow revolutionized the mmorpg general style by fixing most of the complaints of the biggest mmo, EQ. in so doing it became the new big guy on the block, gaining at one point over 12million players (EQ topped out at what, 1 million?). so far most wow killers have failed, and the most successful ones have been the copycats.
will there eventually be a wow killer? yes.
but will it kill wow by being revolutionary, like wow vs eq, or just evolutionary with a more interesting world, like rift/swtor?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee and your ancient game
It wasn't difficult, just inconvenient.
Quests individually weren't difficult - just spread all to hell and gone over the world with no rational organization, so you spent a lot of time running hither and yon rather than doing anything useful.
Dungeons weren't difficult - just inconvenient as hell to get people to do with you and took forever and a day to get people to the dungeon.
Raids weren't (usually) difficult - the mechanics were pretty simple assuming you had an appropriate class composition and the people playing understood that they can't just willy-nilly spam debuffs on the target without overwriting things.
Raid strategies weren't as widely known because there weren't as many tools for publicizing them and so on.
Contrast that with today:
- Quests are much more intelligently laid out, and questing is more about telling stories than it is about "challenge". Getting to the level cap via questing is trivial, but that's good because the level cap keeps going up.
- Dungeons have 2 modes, one which is normal and one which is a more challenging (mechanically and numerically) heroic mode. Some of the Cataclysm dungeons had mechanics that made them extremely tricky for PUGs to handle, and even now some of the heroics are tricky due to other mechanics.
- Raids have multiple modes. LFR mode is trivial to do (except when the people in your PUG intentionally or unintentionally screw things up), Normal mode can be a bit of a challenge but nothing that a decent guild can't handle. Heroic is challenging as hell.
Raid strategies are trivial to find and learn because we have great out of game tools for them - videos of how to tank a fight, the different phases, etc.
They gave us something for everyone, difficulty wise, now. But anyone who thinks WoW was more difficult (as opposed to inconvenient) in the past is definitely not right.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
exp grinding levels is not indication of the ease of the game, I would assume they are referring to prenerfed dungeons and raid content that didn't baby players like the new stuff. back when the hunter epic was actually a challenge that forced you to learn your character etc. -James
..just because you can, doens't mean you should...
Blizzard would like to thank you for your patience. While we constantly strive to maintain a stable server environment, there was no way we could have predicted so many people, most of whom pre-ordered the expansion pack, were ACTUALLY going to attempt to play it the day it came out. We thank you for your patience while we work out minor server stability issues. We are confident that you will be able to log in and enjoy the world we worked so hard to create on October 10th, following our regularly scheduled maintenance.
No, and I can explain. It was a voice mail, and I didn't make a custom greeting for missed calls from the past because the past doesn't show up on caller ID.
For all the griping that WoW isn't cutting edge anymore, it's as if gamers are forgetting that everyone has a different reason to play. Of course WoW is dated and some of its systems have been surpassed by countless other games: work on WoW began *eleven* years ago! It's as if there was nothing to be said for the quality of the lore, the humour in the writing, the scale and depth of the game world, and the simple fact that for many us, having played the game for up to 8 years now, the friends we've made and experiences we've had in-game have nothing to do with the engine, game mechanics, or even the battle system. I'm looking forward to MoP, if only to make new friends, and have new experiences that I won't forget for a long time.
I canceled my wow subscription months ago, Ill reactivate it for MOP since it should be pretty cool what with the whole new pokemon style pet collecting and fighting, completely revamped skill tree system, new zones, pandas to play as, new class to play as and other stuff.
Then you have guild wars 2 which will be great also I hope. Plus lack of a subscription fee without having to pay to win is most excellent.
My only complaint about MMO's though is the challenge is gone. I miss everquest back in the day where everything was a challenge, even crossing a damned zone and it was so damn hard it weeded out most of the cry babies and fostered a strong server community. So Ill play WOW MOP for 3 or 4 months till it gets boring and all I have are the idiot kids to play with and Ill cancel my account and then go play guild wars 2 instead because by then they should have all the bugs ironed out and the game patched up very well.
A perfect example of when it's a bad idea to give the customer what they want -- Homer's car also comes to mind.
Also, last time I was playing WoW back in the WotLK days, the majority of subscribers seemed to be happy with sitting around in general chat making Chuck Norris or Anal [whatever] jokes. This isn't a population of erudite people.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Original 40 man naxxramas was hard, once you got to the 4hm. Not so much for the encounter, although a taunt resist could/would wipe a raid, but more for raid makeup and finding 8 or whatever tanks plus 32 other people that can do their jobs in the raid + count at the same time.
But that is the one time WoW was hard, it was also the only time a majority of players never saw the end raid content which got it dumbed down and recycled in one of the later expansions.
Wow's true downfall is catering to antisocial 'hardcore' morons like yourself.
You're confusing "hardcore" with "raiding". Raiding is simply one way to play the game. WoW is more favorable to casuals than ever, as casuals can find more things to do other than raiding
If you think raiding is the only worthwhile measure, I say that speaks more about YOU being a hardcore elitist who only thinks about the content that drops the highest level gear
Something about fighting some giant demon-thingy and looking at your teammates and seeing twirling teddy bears just doesn't do it for me.
Let me guess: You didn't like either of the first two Care Bears movies either.
...is that Blizzard still thinks their have enough of a quality advantage that they can still charge and monthly subscription fee AND the price of a new game for an expansion pack.
Watch out for those storks when you get turned into a frog.
Also, it's been fun playing both Pandarean Monk Female and Pandarean Hunter Male, and I like the new appearance mods.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Never heard of Day Z.
I think you may think you're a hipster, but you're just one of those zombie wannabes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea or isn't interesting, either.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
First, the starting area will drop - a lot. You may have physical problems getting the first quest.
If that happens, Quit the game, forcing a save of your newly created panda character.
This will help the next load.
Second, no, it's not that hard. Until you get to the frog ponds and the cranes eat you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think most of the difficulty in vanilla WoW raids came from the forty man requirement. Leading and maintaining a group of that size is a far greater challenge than mastering the mechanics of any given fight.
...Oddly enough, that's what I miss most about vanilla WoW.
+1 Disagree
The level-cap was quite a challenge in Everquest. Which is also _the_ hardcore PvE MMO
Not any more; Everquest has been WoW-ised to death in a vain attempt to bring in new players. The closest you'll get to hardcore is the progression server using an approximation to the original rule set.
Who gives a flying f*ck about this game anymore? Only people who were too weak to quit during Cata, I guess... Blizzard sucks nowadays, and whereas in the past I would buy any game the made without hesitation - I now couldn't care less about this abortion of a game...
They're making a mistake not trying to beat ArenaNet to market, IMO.
Two different markets, really. Hardcore grinders won't like GW2, and GW2 players who hate grinding and don't want to pay to play every month won't like WoW.
I guess you never played Ragnarok Online? Good luck capping there. Maybe if you started years ago...
Raiding in most MMOs comes down to finding about fifty people to follow you, of whom not one is a complete dipstick. If you can do that, the rest is easy.
Wasn't this released last Christmas?
Therein lies the challenge of vanilla raids - in a society composed of 50% dipsticks, the odds of a random sampling of fifty people being complete non-dipsticks is what... (1/2)^50? I get 8.88e-16...
+1 Disagree
Thats a minus 50 DKP for you.
Good-bye
Exactly; that's why the most successful MMO guilds are usually careful about recruiting and quick to kick out the dipsticks who get through. It's the only way to reliably beat the odds.
I've been reading all the posts here and I will agree that this game has catered hardcore to the casuals since about halfway through the WOTLK expansion. In vanilla and BC a guild had to work much harder to keep guild members, get them attuned to raids and gear them up and pray like hell no people left so you didn't have to re-gear someone new. Now if someone leaves a guild it's basically "Meh, whatever, lets find someone new who doesn't stand in fire and can watch vids on tankspot for fights".
Even today you still see random level 85 pug raids trying to do oh lets say Icecrown Citadel as an example. They have LFR gear and breeze right through all the bosses basically ignoring mechanics that were important when ICC was progression raiding. Only to get up to the Lich King (and this is usually in a PUG raid) to find that, yes, mechanics do matter even at level 85 and DS gear, and yes, you are a bloody moron for spreading defile on the platform and wiping the whole raid, and also a moron as a ranged character for not helping to kill the valks as they carry members of you're raid off the platform and drop them off the edge all the while the valks are thinking "HEHEHE F-ING NEWBS" ;-). I was in a guild that killed Lich King on my server back in 2010 and if you didn`t work well in a raid group you were considered a casual newbie and not worth raiding so to speak and didn`t know what the hell you were doing, especially if you didn`t have all the proper gems and enchants, could not listen on vent, and later on, reforged gear too.
Also from the days gone by was the hours, and somedays days long, battleground fights in Alterac Valley while each team tried to summon creatures to help turn the tide of battle. Now, battlegrounds are more often then not bots just standing at starting area casting random spells to avoid AFK status and the occasional blatant speed bots running around in BG's.
I don't have high hopes for MoP as it just seems like Pokemon (letting your companions fight in arenas), farming (Can we say farmville anyone?) and raids and dungeons that from what i`ve seen on beta videos on youtube look really easy. But, since I have five 85`s (DK, Warlock, Rogue, Shaman, and Warrior) from playing the last five years I may renew my sub in September and buy the standard edition to check it out.. but then I think back to how screwed up D3 launch was in USA compared to Korea where it launched on time and a lot of koreans had D3 on farm the next day and on streaming videos.
Try imagining all the servers same day MoP is released and how flooded the panda starting zone will be, how many idiotic kids will be there spamming anal jokes and acting, well, like kids do, and how many server restarts and crashes and emergency patches will be issued. Might be better off to wait a few weeks to resub and get the standard edition. :)
If worse comes to worse there`s always SIlkroad Online-R to play where all you have to deal with is Korea style mass grinding to get anywhere, lots of newbies using player bots because they can`t handle korea style grinding let along WoW style grinding, and more non english speaking players then english. *Rolls eyes*.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
My wife and I both play, and have for years. My tendency is to play too much, get all the gear, and achievements, get frustrated by something stupid and quit for a while -- only to come back a few months later. My wife plays casually, *loves* the graphics, and all the little frills (pets, mounts, etc.), and actually *reads* quest text and follows the story. I tend to think she's doing it right, and I'm (usually) doing it wrong. We'll be getting MoP and likely enjoying it enough to pay the fees.
Ah, apparently I have been saving this for YOU. SEE YA! lol
World of Warcraft: Mass Pandering
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everyone is going to be playing Guild Wars 2 though :/ They should have put in in mid october at the earliest hoping that people would be burned out by then...
EQ2? really? That's a broken game. I suspect you use the mechanic and graphic flaws to kill people, not any actual skill.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just because millions of idiots want something, doesn't mean it should be done.
Beer cans with tits on them ?
Shotguns with bluetooth ?
Lawnmowers with a TV ?
Me, I want an expansion that undoes all the dumbing-down that's befallen WoW over the years. I would gladly pay $60 if it made the game fun again.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
No, the real reason is $14.95 * 25 * 6 = $2242.50.
But why?
I would say that MMO's starting out tend to be tougher because they have generally put all of the work into leveling, and not as much into endgame content. They don't want a lot of people sitting around at endgame, getting bored.
Expansion packs for MMO's will add some leveling up content, and dump a ton of content into the endgame experience.
IMHO, EQ1 has had some of the more annoying stuff removed (mobs actually leash now, so trains are not as large as in the past, and the addition of a combat state allows for faster regeneration of mana/HP when resting.)
I still keep a sub to it. You are not handed levels on a silver platter, you still have to work for them. However there is a lot of content to go to for exploration and grinding, and with a merc, it isn't too bad to go and do stuff.
I'd say for MMOs, EQ1 has improved the most. It still is "old school", but if someone used to WoW or other MMOs sat and got used to the old graphics engine, they could "get" it and eventually get raiding without issue.
Some of the most successful raid guilds I've been on (and this is in WoW, EQ1, and EQ2) were groups of friends who excelled at two abilities -- focusing and communication. After those two things, strats is a third, gear is a fourth, and class selection after that.
I've had guilds do dipstick stress tests before, where they toss a recruit into a dungeon or raid that the app would be horrifically undergeared for and see if the person ragequits or bellyaches beyond the norm. If the new person does complain past a certain threshold, they find another recruit.
Some people play games because they want to do hard things. Other people play games because they want to have fun. There is nothing "wrong" with games that are designed to be fun rather than hard, they are just a different kind of game.
Nor is there anything "wrong" with wanting to reach a wide audience. From an economic perspective, this is as right as rain...wider audience = more money = right!
So the abundance of easy games is not something wrong with gaming today. You are simply in a smaller target audience.
The only thing wrong here is your expectation that game-makers should sacrifice profit potential to cater to an audience of people who don't want to have fun. There are a small number of games designed to cater to your market segment, but that number will always be small because there aren't very many of you, and that is exactly how things should be.
If these panda-people drive players away from WoW, then I will agree with you. If, on the other hand, it draws in new players (of *any* demographic) or retains existing players, then this will be a good example of exactly why listening to your customers is good.
The purpose of WoW is to make money for Blizzard. Everything else is just details.
So it's "sloppy thinking" when someone else says people who play a game he doesn't play are 'weak'.
But when someone plays a game you don't play, they're unskilled cheaters?
I bet you think "hypocrisy" means "that guy doctors take an oath on".
If you wanted a non-dumbed down WoW you would be playing Everquest. WoW has ALWAYS been dumbed down. It was Everquest-light and it sold like hot-cakes to the twelve year olds that couldn't handle WoW or were spit out by the community.
Hence you got Barren-chat, a type of chat that would have had the ban-hammers flying in any hardcore game but is the staple for WoW.
Complaining that WoW got dumbed down is like complaining teletubbies lost their hard satirical edge. That Full House lost its black humor. That reality TV became boring.
It might very well be true on an absolute scale but when you are the bottom, digging down doesn't really make a difference anymore. When you are last in a race, stopping won't make you drop any more places.
Go play a real game. Here is a hint, if you encounter barren-chat, that ain't a real game. Real games have a population of 200k, 300k at most. WoW has 10 million.
And people wonder why democracy sucks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Wow and Aion? SWTOR which had the worst combat of any current MMO, hands down? Remind me how great of a game that is, with all the wonderful reviews of SWTOR that exist so far. (sarcasm) Polished turd references, etc. People aren't exactly happy with the game.
GW2 is indeed giving you the choice to pay for cosmetic shit. What does that have to do with some kind of purported similarity to Aion combat where you have 4-5 skill bars and consumables in addition? GW2 has nothing of the sort. You have a bar of 10 skills, 5 are static and 5 are change-able. GW2 - forgot the "better or worse" aspects of the opinion, but simply does not have a combat style that matches any other game. They intentionally made it different, and it is.
You might want to check someone other than your "friends" and/or I don't know, you could have maybe tried a beta and decided for yourself? Did you even watch a youtube video of some Spvp or WvWvW?
They told Wow's endgame concept to piss off, and made sure that being overleveled doesn't mean anything - areas retain their challenge. Instead of wow's "spend 10 minutes watching a gryphon fly around, go get a coffee" they have a "you can teleport anywhere at any time". cross server guilds. Being able to play with friends in instances even if they're across other servers. Instead of any game that exists with stupid revival mechanics, they added a "you're not dead yet just because you hit 0hp". Die after that and you can simply teleport back to the nearest waypoint. The only thing that's somewhat similar is the Warhammer concept of "public quests" which GW2 did their own spin on. Oh, and did I mention? you don't have quests, either. You simply have "areas to do things" and you go do whichever ones you want. there is no "order" which is required.
I don't mean this as "wow GW2 is awesome!" as somehow being better than other games but as to highlight that really, truly there aren't other games that are similar to GW2. 0123456 is correct. Also endgame in GW2 as noted is cosmetic.
I came from EQ1, and even though there were times WoW was slightly grindy (you couldn't just easily hop from quest to quest in some level ranges, but you could always see about nailing an instance), but truly difficult, I'd probably beg to differ.
EQ1 then was truly hard, especially raids where if you wiped, you had the risk of losing every single piece of gear you owned. In fact, you kept multiple stashes just so you were not naked after a botched Fear raid. Just getting the raid in the zone was extremely difficult. Of course, if you died too many times, you couldn't even enter the zone where the corpses were. Even getting to endgame levels, you ended up on a waiting list so you could get into a Guk or Highkeep goblin group.
What WoW brought was the ability to be absolutely antisocial in every way whatsoever, but still have a path to getting gear. In EQ1, someone who was a real putz would get a bad reputation real fast, and even getting to level cap would be rendered impossible, much less getting endgame gear or seeing anything past Lower Guk.
Get a group of fresh 85s in the new cata heroics. If you don't use CC you die. That is unless they nerf it and that wouldn't surprise me. It remind me of old wow in a way and I like it better than Wrath.
The current combat mechanics... lets just about every class fill any role.
That is a good thing, IMO. It was awful that some classes simply "weren't allowed" in certain dungeons. Now, all classes are allowed. Some are obviously better than others, but the game SUCKS for one of the classes that couldn't play.
Ah, I remember playing a Druid in vanilla - the worst class by far.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
This isn't a population of erudite people.
No, that's EverQuest...
The Wandering Isle is a blatant rip-off of "Avatar; The Last Airbender"'s Lion-Turtle.
I disagree with your last paragraph, while easier in WoW because frankly instanced dungeons made raiding much more accessible, there were still plenty of antisocial a-holes in top eq guilds people that even the guildmates hated but they were tolerated because they were exceptionally good at playing whatever class they played.
If someone is antisocial, but is housebroken enough to be able to perform a specific duty on a raid, all isn't lost. If someone is well geared, they have to at least do something right... or they were an eBay, and at the time, a purchased/transferred character was a highly negative thing. There are rotten apples in every bunch, but generally someone who was a true flaming rectum would eventually get tossed on their ear, no matter what the consequences.
WoW allowed people who were not able to interact in any positive manner to get geared. I'm meaning the people who kick out the healer because he isn't DPS-ing enough, or randomly fear off mobs because they think it is funny to watch everyone wipe over and over again until people would leave.
A good example of this was an event ages ago where there was a level 1 attackable horse in Stormwind that would respond instantly. People would make characters whose sole purpose was just to keep killing this horse in order to cause people to crash due to the sheer amount of corpses. This went on 24/7 until Blizzard finally removed the mob. That is the type of play which seems to be encouraged in WoW.
+1
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
GW2 is for kids who think X-box 360 graphics are cutting edge.
At 30 years of age I'm hardly a kid, plus I have never owned an Xbox of any kind nor do I consider it worth ever owning, either. I just don't understand what that has to do with GW2.
You don't pick up quests anymore by going to spot X, you go to spot X and wait a few minutes for the event to start. Woot!
You've quite clearly misunderstood more-or-less everything, it is nothing like what you describe. With a comment like that you've just shot down all your credibility with one sentence. Well done.
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I completed all of those ( and every raid in tbc) and stopped playing before woltk, but I renewed the other week as they had a $10 expansion sale and I was curious. 5 mans are now basically a matter of going through the motions. Healing is never a problem and even if you "stand in the bad" you probably won't die. Tanks never ever lose aggro and can aoe tank everything. In the past every single pull was a reasonably big deal if you got it wrong. Tanks couldn't hold aggro on the entire world so cc and burning stuff fast was a big deal. Now it seems like you can do whatever you like and you will get through it fine.
From what I've heard the end game content is much the same.
End game content has varying degrees of difficulty. The "raid finder" raids are roughly the same as the 5-mans in difficulty. You only need to know the bare minimum on the encounters, and even then there's leeway. Regular-strength raids are a step up, pre-nerf I would say raids like Firelands and Dragon Soul were on par with Karazhan. Heroic-version raids are, IMO, comparable to Burning Crusade or Vanilla raids (where everything was heroic-strength).
One thing done now that wasn't done before in vanilla and BC -- progressive nerfs to raid instances. They're released at full strength and remain so for several months, and then every month all bosses get a reduction of 5% to their health and damage done, until those nerfs reach 30%. That way the hardcore guys get to strive for their world firsts, but even casuals can beat the instance... after some time and the nerfs bring the instance down to their level.
So why do current raids seem easier? A few factors:
First, the raids are smaller, and the 10-man versions are just as difficult and give the same quality gear as the 25-man versions. However, it's easier to put together a kickass 10-man group than it is a kick-ass 25-man group, and far easier to put either of those together than a kick-ass 40-man. In ye olden days, very few groups could ensure that everyone in the raid was a quality member. Instead you usually had a core group that excelled, surrounded by a number of decent raiders, then some so-so people you had to have because you needed to get 40 people and the raiding pool had dried up. Now, that core group can form a 10-man and rip through an instance better than the 40-man could.
Second, the biggest reason why so very few people saw Sunwell and Naxx 40 when they were new wasn't because they were hard. That contributed to it, but the other important factor was that at the endgame, raiding was the only way to get decent-quality raid gear (except for a short period when pvp weapons were good). But you would drag down your progression group if you weren't already geared up, so you had to start in earlier raids. You had to go through the MC -> BWL -> AQ40 treadmill if you wanted to be prepared for Naxx. Sure, a Naxx group could afford a couple undergeared people, or maybe they couldn't. Well-geared people might tire of the game or burn out on the group, leaving. The undergeared people would also start with no DKP, leaving them undergeared longer under most loot systems. But now? When a new raid instance comes out, it comes with 5-mans that drop gear equivalent to the previous raid instance. So there's still a curve towards the top, but easy ways to jump up close to the top quickly. That means when you recruit people they might be able to step right in to your harder encounters rather than farm the earlier instance. And that speeds things up for everybody.
So many things that made progression "slow" in the old world didn't have to do with the encounters so much as the coordination issues of putting together a high-quality raid.
Ugh. The old days:
All druids were resto. Feral and balance were a joke and had no place in raids.
All priests were holy (or at least healers). Shadow was a joke and had no place in raids.
(Almost) all warriors were prot. If you had generous raid leaders you could be a hybrid dps/prot warrior, like the old reliable 31/5/15 arms spec I had for a few years. Old raids needed a lot of tanks, and they were all warriors.
(Almost) all hunters were total flakes.
All paladins were Alliance and the Horde were totally jealous, as paladin buffs were far better than the shaman buffs, and the holy paladins were the best healers in the game. This led to a tremendous skewing of PvE favoring the alliance, so most people who really liked PvE rolled alliance. On my server (and later battlegroup) PvP initially favored the horde (the shamans did have the edge there) until the gear gap from high-end PvE gear tipped the scales towards the Alliance. Oh yes, all Paladins were Holy except for the occasional retardin.
The older combat mechanics required not only certain classes but certain group setups. Remember that shaman totems only affected the 5-man group that they were in, even in a 40-man raid. Same for battle shout, trueshot aura, and all the other combat-time buffs. I used to be an arms warrior, put in a group with two rogues, a hunter, and an enhancement shaman.
Yes, things are better. :-)
They need to all be completely fresh 85s, but that often doesn't happen anymore. I definitely liked the Cata 5-mans much better than the Wrath 5-mans.
No, the real reason is $14.95 * 25 * 6 = $2242.50.
It kept people actually playing the game instead of getting bored because there's no longer anything to do. When anything is in easy reach (or requires a coordinated raid group) it becomes boring, then you're done.
A good example of this was an event ages ago where there was a level 1 attackable horse in Stormwind that would respond instantly. People would make characters whose sole purpose was just to keep killing this horse in order to cause people to crash due to the sheer amount of corpses. This went on 24/7 until Blizzard finally removed the mob. That is the type of play which seems to be encouraged in WoW.
That's also the type of activity that Blizzard bans or suspends accounts for.
Who play MMO - who haven't a life.
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You're abrasive as fuck and so are your comments on everything I've seen in your history. What the hell is wrong with you? Nobody started off by insulting you before you went into a lazy trollpost.
Yes. I know because I was there for all of it. It can also be proven mathematically but i don't need to. The top level encounters today require rigid execution and and absolute min-max with zero deviation from the expected path.
Like Patchwerk? Or Vaelastrasz? Really, the only dungeon that really let you do encounters at your own pace was Molten Core, but it was shabbily designed and rushed out. In BWL, Nefarian (maybe Chromaggus) is the only fight that you should take your time on, which is probably why my guild's first kill took 29 minutes. Naxx had enrage timers. Almost every boss in BWL had mechanics that wipe you if you're not doing the fight fast enough. I think AQ40 was a bit of a mix, some encounters were strict, others you could take all day on.
And I fight the top encounters of the day currently and I see about the same, if even a bit less of the "require rigid execution and and absolute min-max with zero deviation from the expected path." The biggest way in which raids are less hardcore? The progressive nerfs after release leading up to the release of the next raid tier. Dragon Soul and Firelands are under the aura of -30% boss health and damage, and they did the same for Icecrown as well, since they have publicly stated that everyone should get a chance to do the expansion-ending bosses. Did they do that with AQ40? Did they do that with Naxx40? How many saw the end of Naxx40? How many have seen the end of Dragon Soul?
Previous encounters were MUCH more soft and flexible and fudge-able. Nearly all encounters could survive losing a few players or plenty of screwups. Today one player deviates slightly and the result is an instant raid-wide wipe.
There are a few encounters like that, but "nearly all" is a big exaggeration. Other instant-raid-wipes I can think of:
Molten Core/BWL/AQ40: Main tank dies, bosses are immune to taunt.
Vael: Anyone with Burning Adrenaline fails to move out of the way in time.
Three Drakes: If almost any tank dies or simply doesn't properly taunt in time. Any of the healers die due to raid damage that you couldn't heal through back then.
Chromaggus: So many things can go wrong here.
And that's just one raid dungeon! Let's not forget Onyxia and the rigid standards she imposed.
The players are not more "hardcore." There are more people doing endgame content because Blizzard has added a number of shortcuts (5-man epics, easier dungeon modes) that kept people out of the endgame before.
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