End of World of Warcraft Beta 64
Today the Beta servers will be shut down, and by next week when the game ships all character information will be wiped from the system. After over six months, the World of Warcraft Beta Test is coming to an end. The test's final days are not without problems. Shiptar writes "Seems that some of the World of Warcraft Forum Moderator accounts were hijacked, and some posts were made deriding the latest patch. There's a discussion on WoW Vault Boards. It's not clear if the Moderator accounts were compromised, or a vulnerability in the forum software was used. The WoW boards have been down since last night."
Bandwidth (Score:1, Interesting)
had a great time (Score:3, Interesting)
This weekend will be one of withdrawal and suffering, before the solvent rush of renewed addiction.
Horde vs. Alliance war on the last day (Score:3, Interesting)
The alliance resorted to hit-and-run tactics, which whittled us down bit by bit untill we were at a size where their main force was finally assembled and steamrolled over us. Now that they had a sizeable army they figured it was a good time to attack our town (the crossroads) while we were down for the count.
Which in turn sparked another rally to regroup another force to counterattack (in additon to the two raid parties). It was bloodshed and meyhem, dead bodies everywhere!
I love this game, but first thing's first: need to upgrade my video card. All those players online really brought my old video card to it's knees..
Re:Merely Excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
You did the impossible Blizzard. You finally shut me up about Starcraft 2.
Re:Merely Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
It should be noted that this was lag within the game server itself, and not between the server and the clients. It's not that there were too many people hogging the internet bandwidth, but rather that the servers couldn't keep up. That's a fairly easy thing to fix if you've got your system designed right because you just throw my servers at it. Not be a fanboi, but clearly part of the stress/open beta phase was to get a feel for how many of each type of server need to be dedicated to alleviate as much of the lag as possigle.
In this case, the lag seemed to be with the item database. Anyone who didn't interact with their items, loot corpses, or use shops blazed along with no troubles. Of course, those are obviously fundamental components but it's not like they lagged all the time, there would just be, admittedly bad, bursts of item interaction lag. So that seemed to be a problem with their item database.
They rebooted the servers a few times and made some fixes and my experiences after that were zero item lag, but I didn't play enough to get a feel. I did notice the lag complaints dialed down a fair bit after that, and they were LOUD before that =)
The classes do not seem to be completely balanced but all of the classes are fun to play. I have played every single class and I enjoyed them all, For example a druid has a bunch of spells, but also has the ability to tank by changing into bear form which is great!
I agree on the class balance. I love the game, been in the closed beta for a few months (Troll Mage to level 60!) and the main thing I'm disappointed about is that the closed beta ended when it did. Not because I wanted to keep playing for free as a priviledged user (though that is a nice thing) but because they've repeatedly said there are a bunch of upper level abilities that they plan to add and I'd love to try and help balance that. I guess I'm a touch put out that they're releasing it this early, I thought for sure it'd be a January release. But I guess they're feeling the combined pressure of EQ2 & Christmas. =(
It's probably EQ2 more than Christmas I think though. People tend to commit to these things; I think they were afraid that even though WoW beats EQ2 hands down in almost every way (caveat: that's 2nd hand, I've never tried EQ2 myself so this may not be true) if people are waiting for WoW they might pick up EQ2, buy a 6 month subscription, and then never come back. I suspect if EQ was hitting shelves 3Q '05 we'd not be seeing WoW hit retail next week. =(
WoW OB impressions (Score:3, Interesting)
WoW is very clean for a release title - the only bugs were with lag and database writes when they were at the height of the stress test - just a few days before that it was flawless.
It's a more casual game. Although you can kill kobolds for a level its faster (and more fun) to do quests, some of which make you kill kobolds.
I played the warrior, paladin, rogue, warlock, and mage for a few days each. The thing I didnt like was Blizzard was starting to get into the nerf things mode yet locking you into decisions you had already made (like CoH before they added respec missions).
I think they are going to try to cater a little to the power crowd of EQ, but not to the extent that EQ1 has. There was just a massive amount of content in the first 20 levels...more than any other game that has come out. Massive - like I ran probably 200-300 unique quests - not the script generated crap of CoH and AO.
I had a few CTD problems but few actual in game problems. It humors me that fanbois think a magic version is in the box - its the same client as was in beta just a week behind because of when it went to press.
I think this game really caters to people who don't want to play 10 hours a day like FFXI or EQ1. I played every night and had fun, some people who are in the Gov;t cheese line were ahead of me in level - but I was progressing at a reasonable pace and having fun.
I think there is a big round of class balancing that will happen a month or so after retail goes live. I also think the battle.net crowd is going whine like crazy about PvP imbalances...but its a good game, good company...price is too much at 14.99 a month...but at least you can make lots of characters and play 2 sides, pve, pvp, etc.
I will see you in Azeroth on day one. All of my other game accounts are cancelled already. WoW is good stuff - everyone I talked to in the beta liked the game. I think its going to be a big hit and be a major player for a long time.
Twi