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.

Revamped Azeroth sells the game

[Shivetya]

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

Servers non-responsive

[sunderland56]

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.

Re:Servers non-responsive

[Alioth]

Worse still it made Starcraft 2 non-functional. I tried to have a quick game of SC2 last night, and as far as I could get was a frozen log-in screen and no way to either proceed or exit.

I ended up having to ssh into my machine and kill -9 the Stacraft 2 process to get back to the desktop.

I Play WoW

[eldavojohn]

I just play WoW responsibly. I will probably wait until middle of January to buy this expansion (got a lot of holiday time coming up). I played the original off and on for about two years and then got sick of it. Now, I just look forward to an expansion and I have a couple level 80 characters that I will play up to level 85. Or if the lower levels have new content, perhaps I'll start a new race. All I want to do is get most of the easy quests out of the way and enjoy the game for one month (the month that comes with the expansion).

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.

Re:Servers non-responsive

[ildon]

It's because this is the first expansion you could buy digitally before it was released, to have it unlock at exactly midnight (plus or minus a few hours depending on region). Previously, people had to physically buy a copy at the store at midnight, so unless you had a buddy that worked at Gamestop, you were actually in line or driving home for the next hour or so after midnight, and on top of that, it was always based on midnight local time. So not only were logins spread out by time zone, they were spread out by physical travel time from the store to the home.

This time, you have people who bought it online, and people who bought their physical copies and installed them hours ago sitting at home waiting for exactly the designated time to simultaneously login at once. And if the other poster is correct, now their login servers have to share time with SC2 players, which is also not something they previous had to deal with.

They really were just setting themselves up for disaster, but apparently whatever system they used to enable the digital download versions had to be run at the same time for the entire region, and I guess they didn't want to discourage/encourage digital purchases by giving an advantage/disadvantage to those who purchased online vs. in the store.

Not all people, though

[Moraelin]

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.