Ask Questions of the World of Warcraft Team 1000
You may have already heard of Blizzard's most recent title. World of Warcraft was released in November of last year to high critical praise and a favourable player reaction. While technical issues were a problem for the first few months of retail service, prompt patching and additional world servers have left the game in excellent shape. World of Warcraft has since gone on to become not only the largest MMORPG in the United States, but also the world, with 3.5 million subscribers as of July 21st. Given all this, the likelihood that Slashdot readers would be interested in asking the development team some questions seemed pretty high. The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions. So, feel free to ask whatever question is burning in your heart. Please stick to World of Warcraft related topics, and only ask one question per comment. We'll take the best of the lot and pass them on to the Team. Their answers will be posted when we've gotten them back.
wow cheat (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wow cheat (Score:4, Insightful)
In game punnishment to cheaters (Score:3, Interesting)
Having some other-worldly demons force these guys to recover the items (if they sold them) and give them back would be a nice way to keep the game going -- and the fear of these demons may get people to refrain from cheating in the future.
Re:Good idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the whole problem is ridiculous, it would all be solved if they used transactions and made all swaps between inventories atomic. This has been solved in the financial world for decades, whens the last time citibank duped a few mill
Addiction (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Addiction (Score:3, Informative)
You may laugh, but it's a real problem. See Jeremy's latest video [purepwnage.com] for proof.
~Will
Economic Monitoring... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Economic Monitoring... (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtual worlds seem like an excelent arena for testing and experimenting with various economic models.
Have you guys considered using your world for economic model research that could be applicable helping understand real-world economics and potentially benefit to the rest of the world.
Or, if short of that; have you done any experiments with monatary supply; interest rates; etc with interesting results you can share.
Oh common (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Mr. Greenspan,
Based on the experiments we conducted in WoW universe, we are pleased to offer you the following advice regarding interest rate management
Sincerely,
A bunch of nerds from virtual reality.
--
It's OK to ask if they ran into any interesting problems with their economics model, but that stuff about 'benefit to the rest of the world' - this is really something
Re:Economic Monitoring... (Score:5, Interesting)
Level 60 players are allowed pass on their vast sums of gold to their level 10 alts. "Power-leveling" services online require 2.5 weeks to get to level 60, despite having all the gold in the world. If the economy takes a nosedive, players may still be able to have fun. So is economic monitoring a primary concern to you?
Re:Economic Monitoring... (Score:3, Interesting)
It may not seem like a big deal that the Darkmoon Faire takes 1000 thorium bars PER Darkmoon Amulet out of the economy (through thorium widgetx6->20 Faire Tix), but it's effectively driving up the demand/price of thorium to 3x what it has been since release. Essence of Undeath recipes have bumped up the going price of undeath 1000% (although it stands at 3g it needs to
Re:Economic Monitoring... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have any links or further information, I'm sure they'd be appreciated if you posted them.
My point is that economics don't really affect how fun the game is to play, in general. Yeah, people spend a lot of time at the AH. But a screwed-up economy doens't have that many negative effects on the
OK, I have a question. (Score:5, Funny)
Challenges (Score:2, Interesting)
Question of venue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Question of venue (Score:5, Insightful)
Not trying to sound flippant, but that's the reality of it.
Disclaimer: I don't play WoW or any online games, but this Q&A interests me nonetheless.
Expansion of base (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot is a site that they can use to connect to a large pool of gamers, where a decent percentage may not yet play the game.
This exercise in getting in touch with the Slashdot community could be seen by the cynical as just another marketing / advertising excercise.
Connect with a market of tech-saavy gamers who may not be playing your game, who have concerns about the administration and gameplay of the MMORPG. Send out a small contingent of developer
Re:Question of venue (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question of venue (Score:3, Insightful)
If a dev were to post to one of the WoW forums and say something like "I'm a dev", that forum would quickly become an unusable morass of whining, flaming, trolling, and general bitching. Yes, yes, they're already that way, but it would get even worse, as hard as that may be to believe. I've seen it.
Way back when, Brad McQuaid used to post to alt.games.everquest, and actually participate in the official Everquest forums. This was actually kind of cool, you could talk, and he'd answer.
But then s
Re:PLEASE DON'T MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:3, Insightful)
Other MMO's (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, unclear quest instructions like in FFXI or the staggered leveling system in City of Heroes, etc.
What would you have done differently? (Score:5, Interesting)
Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently, and when?
LEEROY JENKINS!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Subscribtion Fee (Score:2, Interesting)
(My personal thought is that you won't simply because a person could by both games and only pay for one. I know the reason I don't play WoW is because I would feel guilty by not playing because I know I dropped a good amount of money so I could play that month!)
Linux version? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Linux version? (Score:2)
Read the LGP interview (Score:3, Interesting)
Blizzard is definitely no friend to Linux or the open source community. Sure they make good games, but thats about it. There is a Linux version of the hugely popular World of Warcraft, and Blizzard canned it, without warming or explaination, even though it was functionally complete and ready to go, and after a discussion of a support agreement with LGP. It would have risked nothing for them to make the game available, and they chose not to.
Re:Read the LGP interview (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the more appropriate question to ask Blizzard on the Linux client issue is:
Why are you alienating a market which is most likely more dense in players than your other target platforms? Why did you can WoW Linux?
Dual boot / Emulate means no *new* customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that the Linux market is *not* anyone who will play a game under Linux. It is *only* the subset of that group that refuses to emulate or dual boot. Given the fact that the majority of Linux users dual boot or emulate the market is far far smaller than you suggest. Replacing a Windows sale with a Linux sale does not generate any new income and does not defray the ongoing costs.
In short, why bother, why add the QA and tech support issues when the community is *already* saying "It runs great under cedega (transgaming wine), even better in opengl mode."
Re:Read the LGP interview (Score:3, Informative)
Anyways, if the linux user is more likely to play WoW than other users, it's not because they run linux. It would be because they were tech users and early adopters. Most people I know that fit this description and play games also run windows or can do emulation.
My guess is they developed a cross platform version to
Re:Linux version? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever that means for sure, I do not know.
Plus, slouken is Sam Lantiga, the sdl guy who used to work for Loki. So Blizzard does have someone who is capable, however, they have him doing a lot of other things.
Server setup question (Score:5, Interesting)
World Economy (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, what about building/programming/etc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it does appear that you (Blizzard) have made a conscious decision to go for slick playability over user-designed content. Can you confirm this, or would you like to see more player cities and the like? This is something that does seem to be hugely lacking in MMORPGs compared to text MOOs [mud.org]. Given various speculations [slashdot.org] about the "wikification" of games, how long do you think the top-down content model can thrive?
Mutiple platforms (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mutiple platforms (Score:3, Interesting)
Should I ask a question? (Score:2, Funny)
Breaking Through the Great Wall (Score:2, Interesting)
I have had a few interviews, and some really bad experiences with video game companies out there who shall remain anonymous for the purpose of this question.
In once instance, I've been lied to by HR directors on the annual salary, told it was around $65k and it
Reduced priced restricted accounts (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to try out WoW, but I don't have a huge amount of time and paying the high up front and monthly cost seems excessive to me for the amount of time I would play it. However if there was some form of time restricted cheaper account I think I would try it out.
Re:Reduced priced restricted accounts (Score:3, Informative)
I should add that despite the trial period I very much share your concern about the high subscription fees. As it is I'm considering not even extending my trial since it just isn't worth it to either a) waste money on a service I don't use much, or b) ruin my life by playing enough to make it worth it.
...why do I feel like b) is my inevitable pat
item duping (Score:2)
final decision process? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which sort of leads to my question. How in the world did the decision for a Warcraft MMORPG get made? I mean, I know it seems like a great idea now but at the time that idea represented a huge amount of money to invest in a new area of gaming Blizzard had limited experience with via Battlenet. The new game also faced the once (and possibly still) formidable Everquest juggernaut. When I first heard about WOW, the general rumors going around were that it'd be an action adventure title about a single Orc in the style of say, God of War or Prince of Persia. I'm just curious who first said at the weekly staff meeting, "Uh...dudes? Like, let's totally go all MMORPG with this biatch and like stuff!" and what was the reaction of the staff and Blizzard overlords.
"Game Exploits" and Economic Farming (Score:2, Interesting)
or
What is your take on Chinese farming? It would appear that a lot of people are making thier livelihood dealing in virtual goods in your wo
What are you doing to curb farming and ebaying? (Score:5, Interesting)
Marukah
24 night elf Druid
Silverhand
Balance (Score:5, Interesting)
Please... (Score:5, Funny)
Long vs short term players (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonus question: What do you think/compare/dislike about StarWars Galaxies? I'd also be interested to know whether you think the combat upgrade for SWG was worthwhile or whether they should have rewritten the game from scratch i.e. SWGII. Any interesting lessons for WoW to learn from this?
Here's one! (Score:5, Interesting)
So, how does today's WoW server infrastructure look like? Did everyone take precautions? Do you use a load balancing system to equal the loads? Did you create more optimized patches? What kind of server hardware do you use?
Thanks,
Paulius
Game Designer's Favorite Games (Score:2)
What other (non-Blizzard) games do your designers like?
Computer games? Console games? Table-top RPGs? Chess, Go, Bridge?
What are your favorite german board games?
Why don't the developers speak for themselves? (Score:5, Interesting)
But not in WoW. Apparently the community needs to be "handled" by go-betweens. I don't blame the go-betweens as much for this, as this is their job, but why not be as open as others? Feedback could actually come on ideas BEFORE they are implemented on a test server (of which I have yet to see anything NOT implemented on there, INCLUDING bugs), and result in a more streamlined process overall.
"Community Managers" just seem like a way to keep the community away from making the game better, which seems like a mistake. The cries of the majority are RIGHTLY not always heeded, but never knowing the direction of the development at all is far more frustrating from a player's perspective. Why can't the development team speak for themselves, and forget about keeping secrets? We all want to know the future of our game.
Still competitive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Worse, the Battlegrounds/PVP changes have made crafting virtually useless - even at higher levels - because player-crafted items are inferior to drops in instances, which are ALSO inferior to hardcode PVP-earned items.
So with the exception of long-term players, who play hardcore PvP virtually every day, there is little new to enjoy.
What then do you say to a nine-month subscriber who is looking at alternatives (SWG, CoH) that are doing those things better?
Why innovate, if you're just going to stop later? (Score:5, Interesting)
But then I got to level 60, and all that ended. Now, instead of being able to do most things alone or with a small group of friends, game accomplishments take a full raid of 40 people? You need someone to plan it all out in advance, you need everyone to agree to common rules and to get along with each other; and you need everyone to be coordinated in order to defeat ridiculous enemies. With this, the challenge of the game ceases to be learning techniques and honing skills, and becomes social. The difficulty is not in playing, but in making sure everyone else is playing.
Endgame is a different game, and I don't care for it. It's not the game I bought. Rather, it's the games I declined to buy in the past. Friends of mine who played Everquest and Final Fantasy XI are right at home, but I'm decidedly out of place, and don't really want to invest hours, days of my time on goals with exponentially increasing difficulty and exponentially diminishing rewards.
The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:3, Informative)
Because at low levels you could solo, and in a 1 - 2 hour playing session you would always come out with a new item, or a new level and with it some new abilities (well new abilities every other level).
At the endgame you need to find raids of 5-40 people to be successful. You group up with them, and raid a dungeon for 2-6 hours. You will sometimes come out with nothing to show for it.
WoW was so
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:3, Funny)
You need the Golden PSP. And a soul.
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the entire reason I cancelled my account and moved to Guild Wars. While I don't know if Guild Wars will be any better toward the end, at least I get the early on experience again. I absolutely despised the end of the game where anything worth attaining on my character was so hopelessly out of reach of someone like me who casually plays. Blizzard consistently said "We realize our main audience is casual players", and then implemented these massive, sluggish requirements
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why innovate, if you're just going to stop late (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you can have your fun agonizing over organizing 40 player groups that will get along and all be on at once. You can fight your 2 million HP bosses where individual player skill and actions mean nothing. I can have my meaningful end-game where only having 5 players mean the skills of individual players make a huge differencce.
With 40 players, each player is a cog. A priest for example is strictly a healer, usually assigned to a couple of players to concentrate on...oooh what fun, cast heal over and over for 30 minutes. A warrior simply spams high threat spells and holds the mob in place where the group wants it.
With 5 players each player is doing a lot more. Maybe the total group DPS is too low, so the preist will have to deal damage as well as healing. Or the warrior can go into damage dealing mode to raise group DPS but they'll take more damage too making things harder on the priest. You have all sorts of options and can play the way you want to see what works for you. Compared to 40-player where everything is a a precisely-scripted minor role, 5-man is far more fun and takes far more skill.
Compare it to an office, in a small office with 5 people, one of the office workers will also have to run the company's website, and support the computer network as well as doing normal office work. It's more interesting because they do a diverse set of things at work. In a 40 person office you probably have a dedicated web admin and net admin, and the work is much less diverse because they're each doing the same thing over and over.
At work, this is a good thing because it allows them to specialize and it's work, not play. WoW is supposed to be a game, you play for fun, so more diverse and interesting things to do in a dungeon is better.
Dealing with the Negativity (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, how are decisions made with regards to these "suggestions" from players? How do you decide the difference between "You can't please everybody" and a suggestion with merit?
Mac and Windows Co-Existing Challenges (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is:
What challenges did you/do you face in bringing together clients from different software and processor architectures on an ongoing basis? I'm working off the asumption that the graphics content is similar if not identical and really it's the data translator that sends/receives information from your servers that does most of the client interaction.
Thanks, looking forward to more things to come.
More role-playing? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is good in a sense--it makes the game simple and somewhat predictable, which is one truth that has made Blizzard games so appealing to the mainstream in the past.
On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if the game would benefit from more depth in some ways.
For example, it would be interesting to have a Morrowind-style enchantment system, where certain (possibly rare) "base items" can hold varying degrees of enchantment, and enchanters can assign a wide variety of abilities to those items. If a player chooses to have an item hold two different types of enchantments, each will be far weaker than just having the one.
In order to prevent extreme specialization, it may then be necessary to implement some sort of penalty for having multiple items with the same enchantment. For example, it would be a BadThing® if every single item on a warrior were enchanted with +1% chance of critical hits.
Another important item, at least important to me, which I believe to be missing from WoW is the role-playing. WoW is classified as a role-playing game, but there really aren't any moral choices of any kind as most RPGs would include (and make an important part of the gameplay).
For example, many of the quests are "good deed" quests, but there exists no option to do the quest "out of the goodness of your heart" or to have to choose between "evil" and "good" quests.
I suspect that perhaps a good way to implement this would be to have an attribute like "virtue", similar to faction "meters."
The benefits of this attribute would be up to Blizzard of course, but a few possible suggestions might include: 1) Requiring that warlocks maintain a fairly low virtue and and that paladins maintain a high virtue (or have penalties).
2) High virtue may lead to a discount at stores
3) Virtue effects faction
I am sure the creative minds at Blizzard could come up with good uses for this idea without ruining the simplicity and streamlining of the game. I hope they do!
Programming model? (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming it isn't a trade secret, how do your lead engineers "think" about the problem? A first-that-comes-to-mind object model would probably be fantastically hard to scale up and/or verify, due to the huge amount of state associated with even the smallest little things in the game.
On the other hand, you probably didn't write your auction house code in Haskell.
How "cool" is your model of the world?
Class Changes before Launch. (Score:5, Interesting)
OS and Database choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:OS and Database choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Esp. The Oracle part.
Possible addition: which DB systems even made it into serious consideration?
Why is there no native Linux version? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am glad to help out the Cedega folks, but it would be nicer to not have to use a band-aid.
Raid instance lag on high population servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Because of the number of people required to do these instances (40), it is hard if not impossible for us to schedule these except during prime playing time.
I understand that you have offered transfers off of some of the higher population servers, but this doesn't really address the problem. In the coming months are there any plans to beef up the raid instance servers on the higher population servers to accommodate their increases usage?
recent performance issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it that theirs too much data in the game now? your team is stressed with supporting the EU and Asian servers? IS it because people are crashing the instances (on purpose) to dupe from them?
Its weird because i really love wow, and the downtimes are usually around the order of 10 minutes or less. However, when you've spent 2 hours already in an instance and they it crashes, you cant help but get pissed off.
More dynamic universe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you planning to introduce "events" into the gaming world that would actually shape it permanently, like in Asheron's call?
For example, a demon/naga expedition force attacking a frontier fortress - and depending on how well the battle goes over the next week the threatened faction either hold the town or lose it. Depending on what happened, the next "event" would be either attempts to retake the town or perform a retaliatory strike. NPCs would do most of the "grunt" work, of course, but players ultimately would contribute to the fate of the world. The happenings could be tied to the actual World of Warcraft timeline. Depending on the server type (PvE or PvP) some of the events could also be between factions (players on both sides of conflict).
Battlegrounds are a good start, but in the end they are just refined team deathmatch maps..
Strong Start, Weak Finish (Score:5, Interesting)
I've played a lot of MMOs in the past and usually lose interest quickly because there's nothing obvious to do at the start. WoW breaks that pattern by having a very well crafted early game experience where I'm led around to a ton of great and varied locales, given a variety of quests to do and am told a rich and involved story. That takes me up to about level 30. Then, as an alliance member, I enter Stranglethorn Vale and the game goes rapidly downhill from there.
It feels as if the game had a lot of care and attention given to those first 30 or so levels, packing the areas with great content and wonderful gameplay, then suddenly I'm playing a different game completely. One that involves killing tons of mobs to grind out levels between quests, and then we're suddenly dumped into a game that requires 5-man groups for a large portion of the content.
Was this intentional? Was the first half of the game designed to be a solo, story-driven experience whereas the second half was meant to take what you learned at the start and now apply it to help other players? Why does the game change so drastically at this mid point?
Honor vs Dishonor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Honor vs Dishonor (Score:3, Insightful)
World of Starcraft/Diablo/etc? (Score:3, Interesting)
Server/Database Structure (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't instances scale with variable numbers of (Score:3, Insightful)
This seems all the more strange to me in light of the fact that Blizzard has already used this mechanism, with great success, in Diablo II. This seems to confirm that not only is it not a generally difficult thing to implement, it is specifically not beyond the reach of Blizzard in particular.
The current approach of using manually-tuned dungeons seems like the worst possible deal for everyone: players have a limited set of content that suits the play style they prefer, and Blizzard needs to do much more work to separately create content for soloers, small-group players, and huge-raid players. Causing all instances to scale smoothly would seem to allow players the most flexibility, and Blizzard the greatest return on their efforts.
This issue is of personal interest to me because I prefer to play with one to three real-world friends or alone, rather than with thirty-nine strangers. I've essentially ceased playing the game because there's simply no more content that suits the solo/small-group playstyle that I enjoy.
I certainly accept that other people prefer the feel of a huge raid, and I don't wish to deny them any content tuned to their preferences. Indeed, I'd like them to be able to 80-man any instance in the game if they so choose, while I 3-man the same instances with rewards scaled down to match.
Inventory lag, broken servers. (Score:4, Interesting)
The next vein gave me the same problem. In fact, I had gotten stuck, and had to re-log on 4 of the first 5 veins that I mined with this toon. If I had been a new subscriber, I would have returned the game later that same day, and demanded a refund.
This problem is obviously not just with mining. Sometimes, it can take 7-15 minutes to get an item out of a mail sent to me from another player. Sometimes, it can take 45 minutes to list all one-handed maces on the auction house, even though there's only 23 to list.
What data structuring technique did you use to hash items in the game? (I need to know, so that I stay away from it.) Also, is it too late to fix such a fundamental problem as this?
Lastly, what makes you think that the servers are in "Excellent shape"? Have you forgotten about posts such as this one? [worldofwarcraft.com] I count 397 people who disagree with the developers response (that's 100% of the players who have replied to the initial blue post). Why can you just respond with "ok, we're looking into it" ??
Open Source for Content Creation (Score:5, Interesting)
LetterRip
Make BGs shared across servers. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know you're probably worried about people trading items in WSG across servers due to the high abuse potential but if you disable trading in battlegrounds unless players are from the same server (which should be easy code-wise) cross-server BGs should enable us to actually get in in a reasonable amount of time. Right now my choices as a level 60 are:
= farm for gold while waiting for AV/WSG to open (boooooring)
= find a pickup group for some instance while waiting (which means waiting in IF for an hour for people wanting to do DM west/north or 5-man strath, which NOBODY ever wants to do) only to have the 'you are eligible to enter AV' pop up 30 min inside the instance run (argh)
= level up my alt(s) (gets boring after a while to do the same quests over and over and over and over and over again because there is no new content to be had at 60 really)
And btw, fix the code for the 'estimated waiting time' please, there have been way too many times where I've had the 'ETA 10 minutes, time elapsed in queue 3 hours 15 minutes'.
Auction House Locations? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm lucky, a friend of mine cannot even step foot in Ironforge. Her computer is unable to withstand the heavy lag and number of players. We went once, it took 45 minutes to get back out. Now I just buy her equipment, and bring it to her.
What is the reason for your decision to limit the auction house to a couple geographical locations within the game? This not only excludes a vast number of players from improving their characters at the early stages because of proximity, but also requires extra travel time, and completely excludes people with lower end systems from being able to easily sell their stuff. Is the reason a technical bottleneck of some sort, or a design decision?
Itemization (Score:5, Interesting)
Plans for the unfinished content? (Score:5, Interesting)
External API? (Score:4, Interesting)
Designing the Encounter Vs. Designing the Player (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that i'm curious about is how you see the alliance/horde population imbalance. If you could go back to day one and redo faction, would it still be the same way?
Finally i'm interested in what priority #1 is when you design an encounter. Whether you're designing a battleground or a high end rading zone such as Blackwing Lair, it seems that there are essentially two possible routes. 1. Focusing on the role each individual class will have in the encounter 2. Focusing on the overall scheme of the encounter. The obvious trade off being that focusing on the overall scheme can make players feel as if their individual contribution doesn't matter very much, whereas focusing on class can ocassionally make some classes feel as if they aren't needed at all for a specific encounter. Or does a different thing come to mind when you first begin thinking about how to build an encounter?
More solo endgame content? (Score:3, Interesting)
Moving the story along? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, at the end of Warcraft III: FT, Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall team up against Jaina's father to take him down and reigned in a new era of peace. I played WoW based on the excellent epic story of Warcraft and I thought it would be a no-brainer that both factions could learn the other faction's language and even earn reputation. For those on RP servers, I thought for sure that we would be able to rewrite the story thus fall and try to reestablish that era of peace.
Well, I was wrong.
Since the launch of WoW, the story is dead. What do you plan on doing to push it closer to Warcraft 4 / WoW 2?
Developer blogging as done in Linux, MS groups (Score:3, Interesting)
My question is, would your company encourage, allocate time for and generally nudge willing developers to blog?
It seems Blizzard has a bad name among some who used to like Blizzard. This is due to bugs, some bad moves by Blizzard legal, and a "black box" process for customer feedback (many comments here bemoan the 'handlers' on the Blizzard forums).
If anyone's worried about bad postings and replies to the blog, a good example to look at is the Microsoft IE7 bloggers. A public blog seems to have influenced Microsoft into fixing IE7 to a degree more than initally planned, which is a Good Thing for many.
A theory is their developers wanted to do the right thing, and the blog helped support that.
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Interesting)
Either the game is about the journey, or it's about the destination. I've been enjoying the journey for several months with just a few hours a week (10). As of now, I'm just shy of lvl 50.
One of the great things about WoW is how well the game difficulty scales as you go along.
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
I regularly play with 5 other friends who are similar ages and have similar real life demands as my own, and we manage to do quite well. We don't power level, and we're not participating in 40 person
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Playable for normal people? (Score:3, Insightful)
THIS is the kind of comment that wastes the game.
No, it doesn't start at 60. The game starts when you hit level 1. Bear with me - I'm not being trite.
When you get to level 60, you start being tough enough to participate in the endgame levels. But there's still a heck of a lot of interesting stuff in levels 1-59; it's just finding a team that it's enjoyable with that's the problem.
You're supposed to be able t
Re:Caydiem (Score:2)
They are made to be healers which they excel at. They get the best buff in the game and are superb healers, with heals-over-time, aoe heals, and combat rez which is very nice if you Paladin/Priest dies. They also get leather which makes them more likely to survive than priests. I've never, ever heard druids called
Re:Warlocks (Score:2)
Re:Warlocks (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a level 60 warlock with, well, entirely too many days
For the uninitiated, there are a bunch of warlocks on the forums that think all warlocks should be buffed to the point of uberness. We are currently very balanced, and deadly in the right hands. We can be killed by rogues. We can kill just about anyone else with varying degrees of difficulty. Rogues can be killed by, well, just about anyone they don't get the drop on, including warlocks. Rogues can kill anyone except shaman (nobody kills shaman, they're a trifle imbalanced) and plate wearing classes. Player skill is more important in PvP than player class. Your refusal to acknowledge that you may need to learn to play your class a bit more is just tiring, and really makes us all look like whiners.
Soul Shards: Please go read the class description. You should have known what you were getting into when you signed up. Your lack of ability to RTFM is not my (or Blizzard's) problem.
Escape Spell: You have more hit points than any given mage or priest COMBINED, unless you have really exceptionally bad gear. I routinely have almost 5K, unbuffed, with my PvE gear on. My PvP gear has more stamina on it. Here's your escape spell to keep from getting ganked by rogues: Team up with a rogue. Be bait. You're supposed to be rogue bait, just as priests and mages are rogue bait. Teamwork. Remember, this is a MULTIPLAYER game, not a big, long, solo event. Keep a succubus out, or sacrifice your precious voidwalker, and then deal with the rogue. Then, at some point, explain to me how ice block saves a mage from a rogue. Or an 8 second easily dispellable polymorph that fully heals it's target helps a mage with a rogue. 8 seconds won't open ANY distance for the mage, rogues have that Dash ability to close the distance back up again, and that's about all polymorph lasts in PvP. Or tell why a priest should go ANYWHERE alone. This is a MULTIPLAYER game. Make some friends.
End game pets: Yeah, they suck. Sorry, no arguments here.
Enslave Demon: About right for the abilities gained. There are ways to mitigate the danger and prevent the diminishing returns. If you haven't found them yet, maybe you should roll a mage? I mean, you get to take a world demon and make it your pet for usually about 5 minutes. Compare to priest mind control, which only works for 30 seconds and can be used in the same circumstances. Enslave is a great spell, and the only thing that keeps it from being too powerful is that there aren't that many world demons, and that many world demons are immune to enslave.
Voidwalker: If you're counting on him for DPS, you're doing it wrong. You have more than one pet. Many warlocks forget that. Evil looking chick with a tail, that ring any bells for you? That's your balanced DPS/survivability pet. Maybe you've not done that quest?
Invisibility: Eh, let 'em have it. I can see 'em anyway. If it'll give them a false sense of security and make me more wanted (because my Detect Greater Invisibility spell will actually do something), I'm all in favor of it. Mages are pretty easy meat.
If you're going to complain about something, complain about end-game caster itemization (caster items don't increase DPS nearly as much as melee items), or that the Warlock PvP trinket doesn't do anything we can't already do with a felhunter, or that the Warlock PvP set is the same as the Priest set.
Quit dragging out these pointless "Warlocks Suck" arguments, come up with some new ones. These are old, tired, disproven, and just highlight your stupidity.
Re:If I wanted to work as part of your team... (Score:3, Funny)
While I am no hiring coordinator for Blizzard, I'd say that you should at least posess the ability to use the Internet (at least try to click on the linked content in this story) and/or read.
Re:If I wanted to work as part of your team... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why do I need to buy a copy? (Score:4, Insightful)
I cannot justify spending money to buy the box for a game that CANNOT be played in an offline mode without a subscription. Why do MMORPG developers and publishers think this is an acceptable practice?
How can you possibly expect a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game to have an offline mode?
Re:WHY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area.
Re:Secret Ironforge Area (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda surprised you didn't ask about the airport, "under Stormwind," Zul Gurub, Hijal, Caverns of Time... there's a bunch of them.