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Role Playing (Games)

World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, Chinese Launch 77

Posted by Zonk from the they're-liquid-metal dept.
World of Warcraft continues its roll across the globe, with a successful Chinese launch of the MMORPG. More than 500,000 players participated in the beta test, and the launch statistics are expected to be impressive. Meanwhile, those of us who've been playing for a while have much to look forward to as the Battlegrounds of Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch move into production. From the press release: "World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds are PvP-enabled zones where players compete against each other to achieve victory, Honor points, and valuable in-game rewards. Each Battleground has different goals and gameplay styles, providing an addictively engaging experience for participants. The two initial Battlegrounds now available to the public are Alterac Valley, a high-end zone designed for large groups of experienced players, and Warsong Gulch, a more casual zone designed for all players level 21 and up."
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World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, Chinese Launch More

World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, Chinese Launch

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  • I wonder how long it will be until games like WOW are required by control-crazy governments like the PRC to alter content. Something that commands the attention of youth for multiple hours per day is likely to come under attack eventually, just like books, music and film have in the past. But in the case of a movie, the officially released version can simply have some edits. It will be harder to "edit" WOW content, I think.
    • I guess that's the advantage of WoW separating regional versions. If it comes to that, they can censor the Chinese version without changing it for American or European players.
    • This has already happened. Originally Ultima Online included the ability to dismember human corpses, get paid bounties for turning in criminals' heads to town guards, and if one were so inclined, to make human jerky. All that had to go for the game to be legal in Germany.

      You're less likely to see such things ever be an issue in current/future games. Whereas UO began as a crazy experiment no one expected to take off, MMOGs now are designed from the beginning to be mass-market behemoths with suits, market
      • Technically they probably took it out to not get an 'indexed' rating which doesn't mean that the game is illegal. Games that are 'indexed' just can't be adverised or displayed in stores (nor sold to minors, obviously). The consequence of course being that the game will sell like crap because they couldn't make the customers aware it even exits.
        • Interestingly, WoW features the ability to turn in heads (and other body parts) in exchange for bounties, and I understand it's quite popular in Germany.
          • The rating standards of the youth-protection agency are somewhat mysterious. WoW is rated for teenagers in germany for these reasons, I think:
            - you are nor actually doing (or seeing) the act of seperating a body part
            - total lack of gore
            - killing actual humans is not strictly the only way to play the game
    • well being a WoW player I can tell you that you might censor game content but you cant censor dialogue between players. I see lots of Chinese people going about their daily jobs farming gold in WoW and their is no way the government can censor that besides just banning chinese access to WoW servers located outside China.
  • The honor system is actually a system now. You lose honor for dishonorable kills, instead of only gaining for honorable kills. It didn't make sense to me that this wasn't part of the system to begin with, since the honor system was touted as a means to punish people who slaughter players 20 levels below them.
    • I could be wrong, but I believe that killing someone 20 levels below you isn't a dishonorable kill. Only killing civilians is dishonorable. If a mob of level 20s attacks a level 60, he has to defend himself, right? If you're level 20 and don't want to get your ass handed to you, don't go PvP unless you're sure there aren't higher levels about.
    • I'm pretty sure the "dishonor" part of the honor system now only applies to NPCs. If you're 60, and you kill a level 10 player, you still don't get dishonor.

  • 2 million subscribers (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirBruce ( 679714 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @01:43PM (#12749090) Homepage
    FYI, my next update on my web site will have WoW at 2 million subscribers according to inside sources.

    Bruce
    http://www.mmogchart.com/ [mmogchart.com]

  • In the Chinese version (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will all gold collected be evenly distributed among
    the players for the greater glory of Chinese WoW players?
  • ... maybe a lot of the Chinese gold farmers on the US Servers will go play on the Chinese servers. I don't intend to sound racist against Chinese people playing the game, but when they farm gold and sell it, it ruins the economy of the game.

    Here's to wishful thinking!

    • That's right! We only want American gold farmers selling to Americans!
    • It not only ruins the economy, but also ruins some players experiences.

      Par exampla, I was in a party on our way into Maraudon. One of our players simply couldn't or wouldn't communicate with the rest of us. He kept running ahead, and eventually lead to our team getting wiped out. He finally told us that he didn't know very much English (this was long after we entered the instance...) We had also previously agreed to a need-before-gree loot system, such that if you need it, you can roll on it. It's yours if
      • even in an instance, can't the group leader boot a player who is screwing the party? I think if you are not in a group, you get teleported to the surface. I think it is better to go with 4 tight adventurers, than 4 guys and a loose cannon getting everyone killed regularly.
        • You can boot them from your party, but you have to wait 60 seconds til they are evicted from the instance. Unfortunately that gives the soon-to-be-evicted enough time to make the rest of the instance impossible to complete if he works quick. That threat alone can be enough to keep them in the party after the rest have discovered their intentions.
        • LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEROY JENKINS!
      • Good tip to prevent "ninja looters" atleast for bosses who you know will drops blues, is to switch to master looter before you take the boss on, and then /random 1-100 for each item, and if someone rolls who clearly does not need it, can be ignored.
    • This will only happen if Blizzard forces people in China off the US servers. There's no money to be made farming gold to sell to other people in China, and the sweatshop bosses in North America are well aware of that.

      On the other hand, forcing the Chinese to play on the Chinese servers ruins the gold farming sweatshops, because the margins would be too low hiring North American gold farmers to do all the grunt work. The sweatshop bosses would just drop it and go back to spamming or identity phishing or w

  • BGs (Score:4, Informative)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@gma i l .com> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @04:20PM (#12751110) Homepage
    Having played on the test server for a bit, I can tell you that the battlegrounds are a BLAST.

    The 10v10 CTF are a blast (especially as a rogue) and the 40vs40 maps are seriously epic, with quests that can turn the tides of battle.

    They allow you to upgrade the levels of npc defenders, summon epic mobs (around MC trash difficulty) etc. Reminds me of the ToB, DoTA maps I loved on battle.net. Good stuff!
  • "World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds are PvP-enabled zones where players compete against each other to achieve victory"

    Good thing Blizzard specifically added that the goal of the competition is to achieve victory, cause for a moment I thought the goal was to lose.

  • Hey, what's with all the orc noobs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by borkus ( 179118 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:07PM (#12752843) Homepage
    Interestingly, most players up through now have been playing the Alliance side - Humans and Night Elves being the most popular with Dwarfs and Gnomes coming in later. On my server, the ratio is at least 3:1 Alliance versus Horde. This is going to be a problem on the WoW Battlegrounds. For every Horde player who wants to get on the battleground, there will be three Alliance players waiting to play. Since these areas are balanced (you only enter when both sides have equal numbers), Alliance players are going to find it harder to get into the battlegrounds - there just won't be enough horde players to fight against them.

    I expect that you're going to see many players re-rolling Horde alts so they can PvP.

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