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Role Playing (Games)

Slashback: MMORPG Trends 52

Some additional details on stories we've previously discussed. The Garriott brothers gave a talk at the DICE conference earlier this month, and while Next Generation offered the gist of the Garriot keynote, Gamespy has a detailed look at their predictions. We also talked earlier about World of Warcraft as the new golf. C|Net has a deeper look at the trend of networking in Azeroth. From that article: "With more than 5.5 million people now playing WoW and joining guilds for everything from police officers to soldiers returning from Iraq, it was bound to happen: The rich guys have carved a virtual space to call their own. In fairness, the six-month-old guild isn't just for rich folks. There are plenty of bartenders and regular workaday types in the group as well. But what sets 'We Know' apart is its concentration of movers and shakers in the technology world."
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Slashback: MMORPG Trends

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  • by dan dan the dna man ( 461768 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:09PM (#14733497) Homepage Journal
    do CEO's of companies have time to sit around playing WoW?

    I barely have enough time to post to slashdot these days!
    • You're kidding, right? CEO's don't do a damn thing but find out novel ways of pumping up their corporation's stock price so they can dump it just before the shit hits the fan.
    • Easy! It's an age-old setup:

      You: do all the work.

      The Boss: doesn't.

      (and, btw, he just told me to tell you that you're spending too much time on slashdot...)
    • These are geek fantasies. In reality WoW is an incredible timesink, has a real learning curve for non-gamers, and players who dont get into helpful guilds don't usually advance. In real life, you can't do a MC run during your 9-5 job and if WoW is the new golf, please tell me who these golfers are so I can avoid their company. Obviously they're over-hiring.

      Not to be a jerk, in fact I played WoW when I did support, but I could only play for a little bit at time. So we're talking very basic killing and quick
  • by Psmylie ( 169236 ) * on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:12PM (#14733535) Homepage
    We have to let you go. Having a ninja-looter like yourself on our team undercuts morale.
  • Why is it... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by garrett714 ( 841216 )
    ... that even with the amount of new subscribers (more $$$) in WoW and the new servers they keep adding, I still see heavy lag and wait times to get into servers. Why when I'm paying $15 a month should I have to suffer like this?
    • Re:Why is it... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Fizzog ( 600837 )
      I've been noticing this as well.

      Even when I have a ping of 50ms the game can still be laggy. I have a pretty decent system (A64-3700, 1Gig of Cas 2, 6800GT, 74GB Raptor) so with a ping of 50ms the issues are at their end.

      My guess is that either:

      a) they are running out of backbone bandwidth (unlikely), or

      b) they have downgraded the spec of the servers they are now buying to the bare minimum they can get away with, just to save a few bucks

      • Have you changed servers? The old servers haven't lightened up much at all. If you're staying on your year-old server, especially if it's one of the locked servers, you won't see any improvement at all.

        On the new servers, it depends on which one your on. There are, in the US, 12 PVP servers that are on very low user levels, and lag is negligible on those. For Normal servers, switch to one that's at Medium traffic - they've been there for a long time, and are well established, but actually have less traffic
        • For Normal servers, switch to one that's at Medium traffic - they've been there for a long time, and are well established, but actually have less traffic than most of the New-tagged servers, which got a small influx from every High and Full tagged server on launch day.

          Until, of course, they decide to offer transfers to people from a high-population to your medium-population server. Then you get to experience an influx of rude people, lag, and wait queues during most of the time you're interested in playing
    • Re:Why is it... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't know why you got modded as a troll, because you're only speaking the truth.

      Do like me.

      Quit.
    • Re:Why is it... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by phlinn ( 819946 )
      Probably because most new players join the already existing servers that their friends who got them into the game are playing on. The bigger the server, the more this happens. Closing off new chars on existing servers is just a way to get older players to start over so they can play with their friends.
    • You still have to suffer like that because your only paying $15 a month as you said. What can you buy for $15 that lets you have an awesome online experience with countless others, make new friends there, battle giant monsters solo or with a team of up to 39 others and generally being able to kick the ass of others. $15 for a month of play? Seems like you can put up with a bit of waiting and slight lag for that price. Anyway, if you think you have bad lag, try play it from anywhere thats not in .us or .eur
      • "You still have to suffer like that because your only paying $15 a month as you said.

        Only $15 a month? With over 5 million subscibers, Blizzard has a steady revenue stream of $75 million a month. For comparison, it cost Bungie around $40 million to develop Halo 2 over the course of three years, and H2 was considered a very high-budget game. Blizzard is making nearly twice that in a month. They have more than enough financial resources to keep the game running perfectly for every single paying customer.

    • WoW was poorly implemented by people who didn't understand what they were getting into and the technical needs of the project were overshadowed by the artistic nature of Blizzard. Don't get me wrong, WoW is a great game ... until the servers start to break around you.
    • The WoW servers can only support about 3000 players logged in at one time...if a server is popular (20,000+ accounts with characters on it) you can see why this would be a problem. I'd hardly call 3k concurrent players "massively multiplayer", WoW was poorly designed to handle the load.
  • World of Warcraft as the new golf.

    That is the dumbest thing I heard all day. And I just watched an interview with Cindy Sheehan.
  • MMORPG (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:20PM (#14733621)
    Other MMORPG trends:

    Awkwardness, sexlessness.
  • Tell: OMFG CN U pl my job PLZ!!!111!!!

    (Original version rejected by Slashdot lameness filter...sigh...)
  • cos im crap at golf, but can certainly hold my own in WSG. Finally all of us un-coordinated geeks get a chance to network
  • by Zorikin ( 49410 ) <zorikinNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday February 16, 2006 @04:02PM (#14736025)
    I posted in the other story that my workplace was crawling with WoWers. We got firewalled. Now they watch FRAPS movies and look things up on thottbot.
  • I think that blizzard could balance hardcore with casual by making competative cross server BGs. Esports is taking off in the FPS world, the MMORPG/RPG world should follow. PvPing takes a well coordinated team, with everyone knowing what they're doing. Tons of practice and experience. If Blizzard fixes WoW pvp, or makes it right in Diablo3, maybe we can see 3 blizzard games at the CPL next year.

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