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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.
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.
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
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
Warcraft III - ripping off Kung Fu Panda for -6 years
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?
People arguing about WoW and calling each other morons on the intertubes makes me lolz.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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=-
Thats a minus 50 DKP for you.
Good-bye
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
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.
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.