Next WoW Expansion Title Leaked? 121
Gamespot reports that the German software ratings board may have accidentally tipped Blizzard's hand on the title of the next World of Warcraft expansion. "Spotted by German community site Gamona, a listing for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King appeared on USK yesterday, accompanied by the tag 'GC-demo,' implying Blizzard will be showing Wrath of the Lich King at this year's Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. Responding to a request for comment, a Blizzard representative stated, 'We have not yet announced any details with regard to future expansions of World of Warcraft.'" No surprise that Northrend would be the setting for the newest expansion. A bit disappointing, really.
And interestingly enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Forbidden
Captain Kirk does not have permission to access this server.
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More appropriate title.... (Score:5, Funny)
I originally read that as Wrath of the Lion King (Score:1)
Re:I originally read that as Wrath of the Lion Kin (Score:2)
Orcs vs Mickey!!11
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Emerald Dream as well? (Score:3, Informative)
There's a ton of other good info at that site too.
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Wow (Score:3, Funny)
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My mate asks, "So an elf and a human, would that even work?"
I replied, "Dude, where do you think half elves come from?"
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Whorecraft [whorecraft.net] - Swords, Sorcery and Sex
Misheard (Score:5, Funny)
disappointing my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of folks were pissed off last year when it was revealed that the expansion would not be Northrend but instead Outland. I think this will make quite a few WoW addicts happy.
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But definitely Northrend would have seemed to be a better release to come before Outland. I mean after getting an alien world to explore, a frozen continent seems like a lacklustre follow up.
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Arthas is nearly a god in the Warcraft mythos at this point, considering he wields Frostmourne, which has all the power of the Lich King in it.
God, I'm a huge nerd.
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granted, that involved a lot of people. and when the Lich King merged with A
Re:disappointing my ass (Score:5, Funny)
Re:disappointing my ass (Score:4, Funny)
World of Grindcraft (Score:1, Troll)
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well, at least till the high end. Then it's all about farming. Loot seems to flow like water in BC though, so it's not much a concern.
Re:World of Grindcraft (Score:4, Insightful)
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And maybe I'm doing it wrong, but last time I played WoW (yesterday), I spent ~2 hours non-stop killing orange mobs, and I got roughly 35% of a level. W
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I'm now entering my third month of play, and I haven't felt like that at all. I'm now level 56 and have had no trouble finding zones in which I can get multiple quests with relatively close "turn-in spots," making a bucket of XP in the process. While I'm not going to level every couple hours (nor should you
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Grinding on oranges is a bad idea as you lose a significant chunk of dps when you go to "orange", so the loss in throughput is nowhere near offset by the increase in xp yield. Similarly, you want to be almost always qu
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It's counter-intuitive, but you actually level faster killing green mobs for several reasons.
1) They are lower level than you, which means:
-a) You are harder to hit and damage.
-b) They are easier to hit and damage.
-c) They do less damage as a rule.
-d) They have less health.
2) Orange mobs are higher level than you, which indicates the exact opposite of the above and also adds the additional possibility of sustaining Crushing Blows. Going after orange mobs is especially dif
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Sometimes, it's worse if they're hard to kill, forcing you into whatever fixed killing sequence happens to work for that particular beast. But after the four or five of 'em it takes to figure out th
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Asheron's Call was not a grind except in the loosest interpretation of the word. That's like saying russians are asians, when you know damn well what the person means by asian.
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I've done grinds in AC, but the combat was fantastic.. I never really got bored fighting, as it's a very exciting game to play, combat wise.
And the story was pretty bitchin', yo.
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AC? (Score:2)
Oooh. (Score:2)
Soon to follow... (Score:2, Funny)
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WoW is not going down anytime soon simply because it is so profitable. Even with "only" a million users, it's still 10 million $ in revenue per month! While I hope they are working on creating new intellectual property, I think we won't see anything come out while WoW still enjoys popularity.
And, I know Starcraft 2 has been announced, but it won't come out for a while and I don't believed it's aimed at quite the same crowd.
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Really? Why and compared to what? As 'to be cool' has to be related to something. What's the 'cool' benchmark for MMO's?
Really? Why? I stopped playing some months ago and I have little reason to start playing again, but I would be the first to pre-order the next expansion and play it. I enjoy WoW, but only when I can progress my character. Unfortunately, 'WoW end-game' doesn't fit
you're all wrong (Score:2)
Actual Title Leaked (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Actual Title Leaked (Score:4, Funny)
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"leaked"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or does anything think Blizzard minds the free publicity and getting WoW-fans all over the world into a "wannahave" frenzy?
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"What? The ultrahypermegaubersword I got after 3 months of grinding is worthless with the first green drop in the new instance?"
And they were cured.
ANY more levels or item grinding, and ill quit (Score:3, Interesting)
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is this the end of the world... (Score:2)
Hmm... (Score:2)
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Instance running is a problem these days. A lot of people have quit, a lot of people don't want to run the instances anymore, and all your hear all day in Shattrath is "LF1M tank".
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I work a standard 40 hour work week, and also enjoy such things as eating and sleeping. Assuming I get a decent 8 hours of sleep a night, spend 1.5 hours on food and hygene and 1 hour commuting; 5 out of 7 days of the week I have a total of 5.5 hours of free time.
Assuming 15 days
Conversely, the typical console game completion time is 40 hours, or 80 hours if it's an unlockfest. In the time it takes to level (not gear) an alt, one could potentially complete 4-7 console games.
The problem will only become worse as the level cap increases. There are a large number of group quests in Outland that will be difficult to complete for alts due to the lack of contemporaries, most having moved on to newer pastures save for the occaisional raid. If Blizzard intends on further increasing the level cap it will become prohibitive for new players or alts to successfully catch up to other players.
I'm not asking for the option to instantly spawn characters at high levels. Leveling is an excellent way to allow players to understand and master a class. However, the amount of time required to do so is too much.
I personally recommend increasing the exp received from quests by a substancial amount. This can be lessened in earlier areas where the quests are already enough to carry a player from zone to zone, but should begin to take significant effect by level 25. Multi-zoning shouldn't be a necessary measure in order to level.
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mod parent up. i honestly think the time to level to 70 should be negligible, to encourage people to develop more alts. more characters allow for more flexibility. as it stands now, i'm considering quitting because of the huge time investments WoW is requiring now.
compare /played times with whoever says that it doesn't require a huge time investment. every time i do, it ends up dwarfing me by 2-3 times, and i used to be a "hardcore raider" in the Naxx days.
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Of course, there are plenty of free permanent
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Note that I'm talking purely about getting alts to 70, as I have a 70 warlock main. I think the solution would be allowing you to buy alts with gold from your main, or some kind of 70 questline to get you a free
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I don't think so. Any game that contains character "levels" is broken unless it is a console single player genre where it doesn't really matter. Levels are a weak excuse to give a player a goal: the highest level can be level 60 or 70, therefore you feel as though it is necessary to attain tha
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Funny, you just described how Eve Online [eve-online.com] works.
See you in low sec!
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It'll be interesting when we finally see a fantasy MMORPG that doesn't use some derivative of the d20 system.
You're complaining that there is too much content? (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming 15 days
Conversely, the typical console game completion time is 40 hours, or 80 hours
Re:You're complaining that there is too much conte (Score:2)
It depends on what one counts as value, and how money constrained one is. As I'm working a salaried job that more than pays my bills by a fair amount (including paying more than the minimum on loans and leases), I can well afford the difference if I believe it provides more value t
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That's pretty much how I felt not long after hitting 70, which was an 'on-par' leveling schedule when the expansion was released. That's also how I felt when I hit level 60 and tried to get set pieced from places like Strat. or Scholo.
As it was, even in a good large guild (50 or so people) very little guild members wanted to do
Wrath of the Lich King, starring... (Score:2)
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(And kudos for reading GitP. It's awesome
Its so cool to hate on WoW now (Score:1)
Sorry folks but, their subscriber base is still increasing. While it may have burned you or your friends out, it's still an extremely well made, polished, and entertaining piece of software. The only ones who think WoW isn't cool anymore are those who think it's cool to be doing "the hot new thing" versus "the old popular thing".
I call BS on Northrend and the the title though. My money
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FIFY
Surprise Game at BlizzCon? (Score:2)
Had to be Said (Score:2)
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So what damn pointy eared Night Elf are we going to have to search for in the third expansion?
"The needs of the many have better rep than the needs of the few." - Blizzard
Blizzard's usual pattern.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition to Northrend, there are still several locked areas -
*The various entrances to the Emerald dream.
*Grim Batol
*Uldum
*Gilneas
*Timbermaw Hold (the big gates in Azshara)
*Something that looks like two PvP entrances in Azhara.
I just hope they bring back Captain Placeholder.
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* Hyjal
* Kul Tiras (island nation to the west of Menethil somewhere)
* Undermine
* The various buried old gods.
Not to mention all the unfinished terrain that prevents us from using flying mounts in Azeroth.
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wah.
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Blizzard have probably thought of this though and as a brand new storyline would need to be invented to open it up (giving a reason for the King to open the gates) they're probably saving this for when they really run out of ideas. My guess is we'll see the other side of those gates in the same expansion that we see the bubble removed from Dalaran (not far to the Eas
An Ignorant Question (Score:1)
Actually... (Score:2)
If you go to mapwow.com [mapwow.com], you'll notice that there's a new zone north of Eastern Plaguelands, and an island has popped up west of Darkshore.
Perhaps the real title is World of Warcraft: Our Continents have Cancerous Growths.
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But then, you knew that, and all I'm doing is replying to a troll.
DOH!
Where the hell are they going to go after this? (Score:2)
Expansion issues (Score:3, Insightful)
The first is the idea that Penny-Arcade identified as "green is the new purple". When Burning Crusade hit, almost all of the level 60 epics, which in many cases people had been grinding for over months (or even years) were suddenly obsolete compared to random "green" items that dropped from normal mobs in the new areas. I'd never been part of the pre-expansion end-game, but by the time I was level 62, I was actually better geared than many people who had. It seems almost inevitable that the new expansion will raise the level cap again. At the moment, I'm dipping my toe in the Burning Crusade end-game... once the date for the new expansion is confirmed, any motivation I have for doing so will evaporate, if it seems at all likely that any gear I obtain will be made irrelevant after 10 minutes in Northrend. If Blizzard intend to keep up a stream of expansions, as most MMO developers seem to, then unless they find a solution to this, most of their hardcore players will just leave, as any sense of purpose to the end-game evaporates.
Next... new races or classes. Burning Crusade added two new races, but no new classes. Frankly, new races don't really give you very much, apart from a new way to level from 1-20. The addition of new classes (WoW has always been rather short on these) would be quite helpful in terms of adding a bit of variety and dispelling the slightly stagnant feel that now hovers over the game. However, this in turn brings a few issues with it. Have Blizzard now made the combined PvP and PvE balancing issues so complicated that adding new classes would be all but impossible? Part of me suspects that they have. Moreover, the lack of a flexible job system, such as FFXI's, makes it even more irritating to level up a new class from scratch.
Burning Crusade seems to have created a whole range of rather nasty economic issues as well. As soon as it appeared, people more or less stopped running the old level 60 instances. This means that crafting recipies and ingredients that dropped only in this dungeons have become increasingly rare (just look how long you have to wait and how much you have to pay to get Enchant Weapon - Crusader on a "new" server). This is particularly problematic for people trying to level up crafts through the levels where these ingredients are key. If, following the new expansion, the availability of... for instance... the primals were to plummet, the chances for new crafters to make it to the top of their professions would be slashed dramatically. Some form of incentive for people to continue running the old instances would be very helpful.
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As for the rep & level grind, at first I was rather disappointed, being decked out in BWL Tier 2 gear (God knows how the Naxx folk felt), but found a few things as I leveled:
- T1 gear from Molten Core was easily repla