Second World of Warcraft Expansion Launched, Conquered 386
The much-anticipated second expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, launched on Thursday, introducing a new continent, raising the level cap to 80, and bringing a wealth of new items, spells, dungeons, and monsters to the popular MMO. Crowds gathered and lines formed outside stores around the world leading up to the release. Massively has put together a series of articles for players wishing to familiarize themselves with the expansion, and CVG has a piece discussing the basics as well. It didn't take long for the first person to reach level 80; a French player called "Nymh" reached the level cap on his Warlock only 27 hours after the expansion went live. Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch. Fortunately for them, the next three content patches are each expected to contain new, more difficult raids.
65 hours... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch
They should make them twice as strong as they're "supposed to" be, and drop them say 5% each day. I'd make that competition last so much longer and frustrate these raidoholics, lol.
Re:Athene (Score:4, Interesting)
Athene got to 80 in 13 hours..
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
Getting your account suspended for doing something which does not involve hacking, require any 3rd party software, or cause grief for other players is frankly ridiculous.
It's even worse given that he'd been good enough to ask a GM for permission to play the game that way, and got an affirmitive.
Re:65 hours... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually an idea I've been campaigning for. These raiding guilds like to show off how great they are, yet they're just incredibly dedicated. Your average guild can't even get people to log in for scheduled events on time.
So up the ante, make the raids insanely hard even for pro's. Make them unfair (like Naxx), require a distorted balance of classes, designed to engender social infighting. Give them some really hard problems to overcome inside and outside the game. Plant a few CSR "reps" in these guilds, have them create chaos, fan the flames of egos. Basically get them to play the game like normal people so the dev's can focus on the 99%, not the 1%.
Then gradually ease up as your main player base starts to reach the top. "Patch" content that was "harder than anticipated", etc.
Re:I really enjoyed WoW when it launched... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Blizzard, however makes approx $15 a month from each of its 10 Million players.".
Hmmm
There are approx 11 million WoW subscribers (all active according to Blizzard), the $15 is only the average amount paid per month by Western gamers. The majority of those 11 million subscribers are in China / SE Asia, and they do not pay flat monthly fee, instead they are charged on a per hour basis.
Re:Athene (Score:3, Interesting)
But not 13 consecutive hours, since Athene was banned at level 79 for - as far as I can tell - playing the game too well.
What happened?
I have to agree. (Score:1, Interesting)
I enjoyed WoW very much. But their 3.0x patches really screwed up the lower-levels. Blizzard claims "balanced at L80". Well, I'm a casual player. I'm there for the lower level content. And I'm fucking screwed!
I don't appreciate nerfing CoR/Fear on Warlocks. Or taking improved wanding away from priests. (That won't affect the L80's in groups with free water, but us lower-level solo players are left out in the cold.)
Or the constant UI changes. Quote "Improvements" UnQuote. Well, their improvements broke my AddOns, and took away a lot of my functionality. Blizzard can claim I need to go to third-party coders all they want. Or code it myself.
Fact is, they broke it. And why the hell do I need to rely on third parties for functionality Blizzard should have coded up in the first place. What, 1.8 billion a year in fees ($15/month * 10 million subscribers) isn't enough for them? Christ, you can't even change the view angle from the keyboard without an addon. Even EverQuest had that!
Treat me like crap! Well I'm moving on. LOTRO has similar gameplay, much better graphics & storyline, and a lifetime subscription.
Re:Athene (Score:4, Interesting)
And he got all of it.
Anyone who doesn't call it cheating has a pretty conservative definition of the term.
Re:Athene (Score:5, Interesting)
To be precise, it was Darus, another Paladin, that they were power leveling. Athene and the other people in the group didn't get any XP at all during the experiment.
Athene did a full half hour video report on it on his website [worldofathene.com], including the part where his whole party were disconnected by Blizzard GMs and got their accounts suspended temporarily.
It seems to me that Blizzard were monitoring the attempt throughout, and in the end decided that the game wasn't meant to be played this way after all and decided to break up the party. Maybe they were afraid of the publicity that would come out if Athenes group claimed the record. Perhaps they thought it would look bad, that the game that they had spent years to produce was demonstrated to be beatable in less than a day.
Re:Everyone who cares.... (Score:5, Interesting)
really, how is this stuff that matters?
If the game play doesn't interest you any more, then consider an IT client-server delivery system that manages 11 million customers on a daily basis, each of whom have up to 9 entities per x servers (I don't know how many there are now, but their are 3 major groupings of them) each entity with up to a hundred objects or so each with their own attributes, with those objects involved with a number of transfers, creations and disposals per hours-long encounters, and a similar number of entities living on the server (as PvE mobs).
Think of 11 million customers and the absolutely monsterous OLTP system that allows for all that database management with a surprisingly small amount of lag overall.
If the computer system that supports all that isn't "stuff that matters" then I suspect you may find spending your time on a different forum more profitable.
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:4, Interesting)
I predict Northrend will have individual monsters slowly roaming back and forth over small areas of ground. Occasionally there will be a few monsters standing together. Virtually every quest will involve killing X of them. To step things up, you can kill difficult elite monsters while in a group. The combat will be so simple that an 8-line perl script can do it.
Yes, yes. And every computer game can be reduced to punching a few buttons and / or clicking on the mouse in a repetitive fashion. Yet despite this simplification, they have always been fun.
More on this later.
And that's selling the graphics really short. Sure the graphics are a big part of WoW. Blizzard does a really nice job with it. Some people don't care. My group runs around sight-seeing.
I'm not saying that something more wouldn't be great. I miss a lot of UO and various MUDs I've played in the past. Indeed - WoW is much simpler than these environments. And much more restricted. But again - it doesn't mean it's not fun.
So why is it fun? Well - to begin with there's nothing wrong with traditional escort, FedEx, or even kill quests. If they're done right. WoW's quests usually have some reasoning behind it. They work to expand the storyline if that's what you want to get in to (I do). They put you in to the content and give you a reason to interact with your environment. Nothing wrong with it.
But yeah - kill quests alone have limits. This expansion pack is introducing new elements such as vehicles that you get to toy with fairly soon in to the content. There ARE different aspects being rolled in to the quests. My group is still pretty early in to the content and we've gotten to experience some of it already. And we're having fun.
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:4, Interesting)
When you try to imagine the game without the graphics, you realize how little gameplay there actually is. It might be feasible to make a nethack-style game that captures every element of WoW gameplay, but that would be a very dull game indeed.
The one thing that Nethack lacks, that would make it an instant WoW-Killer, is multiplayer.
Seriously. Multiplayer-Nethack? That's 10 times the gameplay, depth and challenge of WoW right there.
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:2, Interesting)
When your DM allows it.
I saw a recent session where a third level wizard used Burning Hands to set some cots on fire in an enclosed room. The party closed the door and left... only to run into an ambush. The rogue character lured some enemies back to the room and used the smoke for superior cover, allowing several sneak attacks.
This was not a planned fire; the wizard is a pyro.
Re:Everyone who cares.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The day someone throws up an article on this, I will be more than just interested, it will be a fantastic read I'm sure! That wasn't today though was it?
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:4, Interesting)
When you try to imagine the game without the graphics, you realize how little gameplay there actually is.
As opposed to say first-person shooters, you remove the graphics from that game, and your left with what?
You are in a room with 3 first-aid kits, a player Zero is camping the Quad power up and has spotted you entering the room
Quake> Kill Zero
Zero was killed by Bazar, your score is now 5
Quake> Camp Quad
Ultimately most people play games to have fun. Not everyone appreciates a game where to kill a target you have to have done computations in calculus to plot the best path of attack, or in the case of nethack, play such a perfect game as a tiny screwup can result in death.
Some people want to just be able to run up to something and press the kill button.
For those seeking a greater challenge, they can do PvP or raids.
PvP is where your fighting another player, its as complex as it can get as its a game of attacks and counters. Success is usually a mixture of gear and skill.
Or you could raid with other players, the encounters are more challenging and require things like good timing. You could also pick up a leadership, helping coordinate members of the team. Someone needs to lead the raid, the tanks, the healers, and the dps.
Ultimately what I'm trying to say is there is there IS a rich tapestry of gameplay. But if your just out killing stuff by yourself, you not likely to see much of it.
Do some raiding, or enter some battlegrounds for pvp.
Most of all MMORPG games are a social game, make/get some friends and/or join a guild, and you'll be having far more fun.
Nymh banned... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:2, Interesting)
At 60+, you will notice that not only do the ten classes have significantly different playstyles and things going for them, but that they also have three different talent trees. For most of the ten classes, a switch from one tree to another will again completely change your game.
To address the comic joke: it's spot on... often. However, having completed an expansion zone over the weekend, I can tell you that while there are many of the "same" quests, there are also some crazy new styles. Perhaps most significantly are the additions of "vehicles" to the game, which are worked into a lot of the quests. One example is riding a mammoth and using its special abilities to destroy another mammoth-mounted npc. Another is using a siege engine to shelter your team mates from incoming cannon fire (vehicles that are also manned by players). I've been playing the game for years and the creativity of the quests in Wrath are a complete breath of fresh air. The poking in the comics is, imo, unfair.
Assuming you can get past the first 50 levels.
Re:Everyone who cares.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is where the monthly fee comes in I guess.
Re:Everyone who cares.... (Score:5, Interesting)
So would I. Large IT structures interest me. Huge computer installations fascinate me. Seeing how information structures interrelate and the ebb and flow of cache management gives me a silvery tingle in my eyeballs* (*that's poetry, I'm too old for drugs) and an itch to connect wires to see what they do.
Whenever my character on WoW gets hung in loot-lag I wonder -- did they run out of journal space (they must use journals, I've seen compelling game-play evidence) or did one of their load balancers chuck a reggie?** (**Australian cultural isomorphism, no apologies). That little moment of invisibility when I log in to Orgrimmar, but can still play -- how much parallelism is going on? How do they link those little conversation bubbles with the chat so quickly - is that my client or the server coordinating that?
Really, it's like another internal game, second-guessing how they move so many chess pieces around. But geez I would SO love to see a network layout.
Re:Everyone who cares.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Please keep me informed (Score:5, Interesting)
You sure? One of the great things about NetHack is that you have all the time you want before doing anything. Fall down a hole and get surrounded by 'H's, take a break, read up on what you can do, decide the best way to continue. None of this "I must act as soon as possible" stuff.