New WoW Patch Brings Cross-Server Instances 342
ajs writes "World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion was staggered into 4 phases. The fourth and final phase, patch 3.3, was released on Tuesday. This patch is significant in that it will be the first introduction of one of the most anticipated new features in the game since PvP arenas: the cross-realm random dungeon, as well as the release of new end-game dungeons for 5, 10 and 25-player groups. The patch notes have been posted, and so has a trailer. The ultimate fight against the expansion's antagonist, the Lich King a.k.a. Arthas, will be gated as each of the four wings of the final dungeon are opened in turn — a process that may take several months. The next major patch after 3.3 (presumably 4.0) will be the release of Cataclysm, the next expansion."
They're making the game far too easy (Score:4, Insightful)
So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster... but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a point, but I think there's a little more to it than this. I suspect that they're speeding up the levelling process because they're going to add another five levels onto the top come the next expansion. My impression has always been that Blizzard have a definitive idea how long it should take a player to go from level 1 to the maximum level, and that they try to keep this constant through expansions. So, not long after the release of Burning Crusade, we had a nerf to the 1-60 levelling process (with 60-70 still being a substantial gap). Then 60-70 was nerfed shortly before Lich King hit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the 70-80 xp grind had a nerf shortly before or after 4.0.
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The end game gear grind, however, is not fun. Don't get me wrong -- I love to experience new content, I don't, however, like to keep re-experiencing it at the mercy of the RNG hoping I get the item(s) I need. Yes, badges mitigate this, slightly, but in the end you're still grinding the same one or two instances until a new one gets released.
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What do you mean slightly? You can purchase tier 9 items for every slot of your character with badges.
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They don't want to have a very long experience gap between new players and "regular" players. You get to grind your way up to 90, getting up to 80 gets easier. That's the way it's always been, so everybody can complain about how "easy" it's become but really they're just trying to keep people together. It's not "fair" but it's a game, if the endgame was a target that kept moving further and further away for new players it'd eventually become some place they'd never reach.
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Any changes to levels below 10 are inconsequential, that's about 3 hours of playtime. Removing the dazing effect and increasing regeneration just helps out new players, and i presume Blizzard is trying to recruit new players/subscriptions rather than just alts.
The meeting stone level requirement is effectively a nod toward boosting - given that low levels go past so quickly now, it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing. I gue
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But the title of this article solves that problem....
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it's like they're just making the game easier and easier.
If by easy, you mean faster to level, is there something wrong with that? Now, if only the instance server will stop crashing on the last boss of the Heroic dungeon. lol 3 times I failed to get the heroic daily bonus because of the server crash (I gave up trying) and once I got locked out of a decent Halls of Reflection heroic because the server crashed. lol, I only laugh at the irony of when it crashs. It seems to know when I will succeed and stay stable every other time. =P It's just growing pains,
Meeting stones (Score:2)
Level on meeting stones was stupid. Nothing like going to run a newbie through a lower level dungeon for some leveling gear, only to get there when you're 70 or 80 and get a "you can't use that stone, only for levels 40-50".
Lack of daze from 1-5 just makes sense, you're trying to stroke that skinner box.
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Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Making it too easy? It was too easy from day one and they haven't made any strides to really up the difficulty. To WoW developers, adding grind is upping the difficulty...you know, instead of doing something like add strategy to a game that's designed around a bunch of people in a group all hitting their attack button at the same time. That kinda worked with Diablo (and was part of what made it great to some extent), but this is a different beast entirely. In fact, I'd blame the watering down of the entire genre on WoW. The last time I decided to take SoE up on a free month of EverQuest to check up on my old characters, I was kinda disgusted at how much they've tried to dumb down the game to try and draw over people who've gotten bored with WoW.
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Could someone hand that guy an "insightful" mod? He hit the nail so directly that the head is now no longer visible anymore.
WoW basically "ruined" the MMO world for those of us who wanted an MMO where a success actually meant something. At least more than "you managed to sit down for 5 hours and hit the same buttons over and over, good job!". There is rarely a challinging moment in WoW. Put time in, get reward out. If you're not good at it, all that means is that more time is required and maybe a different approach (e.g. instead of doing the raid you can't get a group for, farm some tokens and buy the gear with them instead).
And since it's the most successful of all MMOs (at least counting subscriber numbers), it's the role model for MMOs now. Everyone creates basically a copycat version of WoW. Invariably you have easy leveling with a very limited amount of player decision influencing it (try comparing it to the skill decision and implant/outfit system of Anarchy Online to see what I mean), solo playing 'til the end and no penalties for fucking up. And while this surely makes playing a lot more accessable and easier, it makes me wonder... why should I play if I know I already won?
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This is one of the many, many posts from people who can't separate difficulty from tedium. Nothing in this post has anything to do with difficulty. Or leveling, for that matter. It's all about taking out the boring elements like sitting around waiting on mana before you're high enough in level to have abilities to manage it. Plus, it's only for levels 10 and below. That's only the first day or two of play.
And marking targets? Seriously? You're complaining about that as a means of leveling players faster? Th
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to agree sadly. Functional things that make organizing things easier - like cross-realm dungeons for example, are always welcomed changes. However, it seems like Blizzard is constantly dumbing things down over time. Heck IIRC in Cataclysm they're not even going to have any stats aside from your basic STR/SPI/INT/STA on items, which is meant to "Reduce confusion".
Between the dumbing down of the instances, dumbing down of itemization, CONSTANT gear resets via moving badges so that everyone running dirt easy heroic content can always have gear on equal footing as everyone else, it's just gotten insane.
And mind you, I'm not being a complete elitist on the "easy badge gear" issue. Yes, I do think that people running harder content should have better gear, but it also works in reverse. I really haven't touched the game much in the last 3-4 months (mostly for the reasons cited above), so all my gear is typically stuff from Naxx25/Maly25/Sarth25 with a smattering of some Ulduar25 gear. Good stuff, but not the current top notch. Result of all this easy badge gear though is that any group expects EVERYONE to be sporting Tier9 equivalent gear for just about anything. You have people literally wanting 2800+ "gearscores" to run into a Naxx10 run.
Overall, the whole thing has just gotten to the point where I don't care to play anymore. Raiding has gotten boring - I want to raid for a challenge not a weekly "grab my epics and leave" session. Running heroics truly has turned into a treadmill - rather than running instances for strategic upgrades we're stuck running the same stuff over and over as they nudge the badge rewards up just a lil higher again.
IMHO things like achievements and such were a good idea - something to give everyone things to work towards. I log into WoW now though and it feels more like I'm in a themepark called WoWLand than the game I used to play. It's like an amusement park meant to be just an imitation of Azeroth - let people hang out, get fake toys, and experience "attractions" in the form of instances rather than an actual challenge.
Oh well. At least Dragon Age was fun to play through (and actually challenging). Here's hoping Bioware will continue to deliver and not fall into the same pit as Blizzard.
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That analogy is completely on the mark.
They're trying to cater more and more towards the ADHD kids, who will immediately jump ship to the next shiny game that comes along, rather then take care of thei
Re:They're making the game far too easy (Score:5, Insightful)
They're trying to cater more and more towards the ADHD kids
Or perhaps adults who have day jobs and can't invest entire days playing the game.
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the knockback change is primarily because knockbacks are ridiculously powerful already. This has nothing to do with "making the game easier", it's about balance
The knockback change is about griefing. Mages were using it (via Fire Blast) to knock people off their mounts while flying causing them to die by falling. That incurs the equipment damage penalty which is why they nerfed it.
It would have been nicer if they could just not do the equipment damage penalty if you die as a result of falling during PvP but I imagine that fix would be harder to make, and they almost always do the easy fix.
Trade with other players? (Score:3, Interesting)
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You can only trade items that you picked up INSIDE the cross-realm instances. Other items cannot be traded.
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Friends (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there a way to friend someone on another server, so you can do an instance with these specific people, or is it always random people to fill out your group?
squeezing the players for subscription cash (Score:5, Insightful)
Patch 3.3 is Blizzard's big squeeze for subscription cash before the next expansion. Each wing past the first wing of the raid dungeon is locked out on a real-time timer such that the dungeon incrementally opens. What's worse, is the final boss of each wing has an attempt count which also increases linearly as more wings open. All this is to forcefully stop well-coordinated teams of players from beating the dungeon quickly, and I don't just mean in one week. There are guilds out there who are capable of beating this thing in a couple months in about the 50th percentile of raiding guilds, but with the harsh attempt count on the bosses of each wing it will most likely lock these guilds out for more than that, keeping the subscription cash flowing longer than it needs to. To top it all off, hard modes won't be accessible until the whole dungeon is cleared, and when that happens, they're granting all players a buff to their statistics to make it easier to beat the dungeon. That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.
Blizzard has gotten so addicted to the high revenues that they're willing to implement game mechanics based around keeping people subscribing with minimal content updates. As a result, I've cancelled my subscription and I can safely say I won't be returning to Azeroth again -- ever.
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UIpdate from mmo-champion.com: "The next unlock will happen on January 5th, if each wing is unlocked after a month it means that we won't see Arthas before April but if I had to give my opinion I would say that it will probably be faster than that. The 4 weeks are probably here to let people test the rest of the content without focusing too much on raid instances."
So there you have it folks, they're giving themselves plenty of time to harvest those delicious greenbacks without updating the content at all. I
Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason blizzard is adding this timer is because it looks bad when they release a new boss, zone, etc and the 1337 guilds beat it that same night (they were probably practicing on the test server). It's like the players who went from level 60 to 70 in 24 hours. And then did it from 70 to 80. There are always going to be these players. These are the players who hang out on the test servers, have no lives, and figure out what needs to be done then. Once the release comes out BAM they are the first. Nothing wrong with this... but when some server beats the last boss of a new expansion in 24 hours it makes Blizzard look bad. Nobody cares that it's the super guild that gets sponsership, they just see that WoW = ezsauce
Every time I get out... (Score:2)
... they pull me back in.
There were 2 things about WoW that made it pale for me over time: Finding dungeon groups as a casual player and the massive quality/functionality disparity between vanilla (Azeroth) and expansion (Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King) areas.
This patch makes it likely that my extremely casual self will be able to find a group - I dislike joining guilds because it feels like there's always going to be drama over the whole casual vs. raider mentality. Not only that, but even in
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15 minute lockouts and no solution (Score:2)
On my server currently, if a person uses the new looking for group tool to get a random instance, there is an error where you get "too many instances are running try again". Well this locks you out of using the random LFG tool for 15 minutes and you don't get into the instance.
Once you leave group, you get a 15 minute debuff preventing you from getting into another group.
I hope you all can see where this is going.
It has made the game unplayable. I'm buying an FPS and just playing that for a week or two, t
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I found a work-around to this - you can all just run into the instance manually (instead of being teleported there) and it seems still work - even with the debuff.
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Yeah, it is an issue, but it's a short-term issue.
It's because Blizzard builds their capacity based on normal usage, not on patch-day usage. I think this is just as much an issue with their tendency to bundle up lots of changes into one large content patch rather than stagger them on a more gradual basis.
Back in My Day... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not quite working ... Yet... (Score:4, Funny)
(Mostly because you're unable to logout)
Re:Old (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.
See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.
To implement that, they made it so that people teleport directly into the instance instead of having to travel in the open game world to the instance's entrance, because you can't see people from other servers in the open world.
Since there is also generally a very unhealthy focus on instanced content rather than open-world content, what it means in practice is that wow is not really a MMO anymore. People hang out in capital cities, which function as glorified lobbies like you find in non-MMO multiplayer games, they form a party and then teleport inside of a private dungeon.
You have almost no opportunity to meet random people on your adventures anymore because people of maximum levle have seldom any reason to bother ever going out in the open world. And leveling from 1 to 80 has also been made trivial and is therefore a minor part of the game.
It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring. This game has turned from a MMORPG into a glorified dungeon crawling game.
Re:Old (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins. If your server is 75% alliance, world PVP is going to be pretty meaningless/frustrating if you're horde. The only way to make it fun is to try and make sure the same number of people fight each other at the same time, which is what battlegrounds and arenas are for.
Finally your assertion that WoW is a glorified dungeon crawling game strikes me as baseless, given that I spend ~20% of my time going to dungeons and 80% having fun killing people in battgrounds/arenas. WoW to me is like TFT2, but with swords and magic instead of guns.
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"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game."
Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?
"As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins."
No, it doesn't always devolve into ze
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That, and also playing hide and seek with the groups of vigilantes trying to take revenge on you for ganking people doing their daily quests on quel'danas, etc.
There's lot of fun to be had with free form pvp.
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I've personally organized a few 300+ person raids. The 1st time was terrible, the server went down and you couldn't log back in for 20minutes, when you did you were likely dead due to the 5x1 ratio at the time. It was meaningless to set proper teams/raids because it would never stay up that long.
2nd time I tried hitting every alliance city at once. This worked in the minor cities, mostly... since less defenders came
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This really is a pity. During the early days of WoW there were plenty of open world PvP battles between the factions (Crossroads?): they were fun, simple to get involved with, frantic and you end up meeting dozens of new people in the midst of battle. Much more fun than the high-end raiding, IMHO
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some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp)
Open world PVP is not interesting, and has never been interesting. I played WoW extensively in the early days on a PVP server. 99% of open world PVP consists of one of the two following scenarios:
1. Higher level person ganks lower level person. Lower level person stands no chance.
2. Group of people gank smaller group/single person. Smaller group/single person stands no chance.
I don't know what you consider
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World PVP, imo, is the best, as it's spontaneous and more interesting. It's more "immersive" when you are questing in a zone and you run up on a horde and both of you make that decision of whether or not to attack. Oh, and you left out another scenario: higher level ganks lower level who stood no chance, who then logs out, grabs his higher level toon and perhaps a few of his buddies to come back and wreck shop and seek revenge.
Keep in mind that, just because something isn't fun to YOU, doesn't mean the v
Re:Old (Score:5, Interesting)
It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring.
No, it has not been set aside. They have simply made it easy for those people who are already instance grinding to do so easily. Instance grinding has always been "soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring".
Personally I'm on the last stages of equipping a character for raiding and the ability to go from instance to instance worked great for me yesterday, as it did for everybody I grouped with. I did not hear a single negative comment from anyone yesterday. (And we all know how much players bitch when they don't like a new patch.
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I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity.
You have clearly never played WoW. People with no clue about software design are CONSTANTLY bitching about Blizzard. The point was despite the disparaging remarks above the normally intolerant players were actually enjoying the new system. Believe me, when it breaks people complain.
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Different people focus on different aspects of the game as large as WoW. I believe your experiences are valid - within the set of playing activities you experience yourself. Please don't over-generalize it to everybody, though. PvE and RP servers (or players) won't be affected as much, because world PvP has never been a big part of their gaming. Guilds raiding progression content will still raid together, because it takes consistent grouping - and their realm-specific social networks will stay within realms
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I don't buy this assessment at *all*. You can still fly around the world, help random people completing quests, find people hanging out ready to go into dungeons, and kill the opposing faction (pvp server). The coolness of dungeons would NOT be possible to implement as "open world content", because in that case you have a big guild, and they kill all the content. If you are in the same faction as them, you can suck up to them, but if they are the opposite faction they'll just roll right over you and aoe
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"The coolness of dungeons would NOT be possible to implement as "open world content", because in that case you have a big guild, and they kill all the content. If you are in the same faction as them, you can suck up to them, but if they are the opposite faction they'll just roll right over you and aoe you down like so many trash packs."
That would make it a challenge, which would actually make the entire thing much cooler. Dungeons in wow are not challenging, clearing them is merely a ritual you need to acco
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I can create an MMO which would host millions of players simultaneously on a single server.
It'd be pure text mode though, and the interaction would be limited to a "hit player X" button every few minutes or so.
Have fun!
So... what stuff does EVE lack that WOW has?
Re:Old (Score:4, Funny)
Fun
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So... what stuff does EVE lack that WOW has?
What you said, although not quite as extreme.
All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes, but I have yet to see anyone do that successfully. All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying.
Of course, if
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All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes...
So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.
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So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.
Actually, I did try to imply procedural content and other similar methods with with "you can duplicate the same content with slight changes". Now in hindsight, "slight changes" may have been somewhat badly worde, but my conclusion still stands. All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying. That isn't to say that procedural content can't be used to speed up content generation. But without a great amount of work by actual artists/designers, you simply don't get something worthwhi
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life jackets, bumpers, and seatbelts?
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Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
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As well... how long have various players of EVE been around?
The game has staying power. I can only handle WoW for a month or two at a time.
Amusement Park vs Sandbox
Guess which one gets old fast?
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Fail. WoW's main purpose is to be an online RPG. If you want to interact with your friends, you use some crap like Facebook.
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And if you lose in something like FarCry, you reload a previous save and continue again. How, exactly, is that different from being resurrected in game? A rez is just a way of handling that "ok, I died, time to reload" in a persistent environment where resetting to a previous state isn't possible.
If you want to have an argument against WoW being a game, then you should look more at the fact that there's not really an end goal in the game. Once you've completed all the quests, done all the dungeons, etc., yo
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WoW not having a lose condition is not the only reason why it isn't a proper game. You are right about the lack of a win condition either. This is exactly why Far Cry is a game and why WoW is not: altough the resurrection is some what similiar to loading a saved game, you can actually win a game of Far Cry by making it through the story. Same goes with games like Zelda.
I realise there is no single definition of what a game is, but most of the attributes commonly associated with a game are not present in WoW
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It's not about losing everything. Being able to die is not required to be qualified as a game in my book. But some form of failure is.
In WoW, you can never fail at anything. You can always try again, without being set back at all. In EVE at least people can steal your stuff when your ship is destroyed. This makes you want to prevent being destroyed. In WoW nobody cares if their character dies, because it has no consequence.
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I agree largely with Chris Crawford's definition of a game.
By this definition, roleplaying activities are indeed not games. Neither are racing games, Tetris, SimCity or Super Mario Bros.
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And this is something that SoE at least did right. While EQ and EQ2 all have multiple servers per game, same as WoW has, you can easily communicate across servers by appending the server name to the character name when you send a /tell. As well, you can create player-channels cross-server in similar fashion.
In fact, you can even communicate cross-game between EQ and EQ2 by appending the game name in front of the server name. While it's not as easy as EVE, since EVE is one server total, it's still better
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At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player.
Must make choosing names a chore if everyone is on the same "server". It's already hard enough to come up with a name without goofy special characters or random sequences of letters in WoW.
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Re:Old (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's the social aspect of MMORPG's that is the main appeal. Gamewise neither EVE nor WoW are very good imho.
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Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
I wouldn't count on that. In particular, I'd look into how they've managed (with some success) to support what they have.
Eve would've burned to the ground a long time ago if they couldn't scale.
I'm not laying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.
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Blizzard's done a lot to come up with new ideas.
The problem is that most innovations from Blizzard are geared towards getting more players to subscribe and keeping them subscribed in order to generate money, instead of greating an actual good and fun game.
Not that money is a bad motivation for creating a game. But I think Blizzard is putting the improvement of their business model above the improvement of the game itself.
Are there other games out there that benefit from the innovations created by Blizzard?
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Eat shit! A few thousand billion flies can't be wrong!
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What? You're saying EVE would burn to the ground if 5000 players tried to use it? (half the number on a wow server)
Sorry to tell you this but it's already broken 54k online users, which is ten times what a WoW realm handles.
The EvE vs WoW Debate (Score:2)
The "sandbox" aspect of EvE where everyone is in everyone else's universe is not actually one giant "realm" as it were. It is actually thousands of individual servers which control and manage distinct areas of the game world. As you move through the universe you actually move from server to server. There are, of course, central servers which need to underst
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World of Warcraft has over 12,000,000 active subscriptions and hundreds of thousands of active trial accounts.
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In any case 54,000 players at once is already an achievement.
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EVE doesn't have terrain but wow doesn't have objects in any real sense. In eve bullets/lasers/missiles are actual objects that move and require impact detection. In wow, spells, arrows, w/e are all targeted to a person and they hit or miss, completely run client side. Terrain/obstacles in wow only effect spells half the time... generally you can shoot through most obstacles (this has been improving) but not thro
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How many can Eve handle in a single zone? Not a heck of a lot, a big fleet battle locks out the entire sector. Eve manages it because it has a huge universe filled with 99.9% empty space that nobody wants to spend time in. You can't go shardless and have the kind of detailed world with a backstory that WOW has. The closest you can have to that is multiple versions and the ability to change between what version you're in ala guild wars.
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To be fair though blizz is improving this number. They had to with wintergrasp (allows 120v120 fights). Not that they are improving huge battles but they are making 120v120 not horribly laggy so I assume they'll learn from the experience.
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However, I have been always annoyed at the seemingly extremely low number of simultaneous players that can play on a WoW realm. Even when the servers are full most of the zones are empty.
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Not to mention, the way Eve's warping system works, is that not every character is on the same set of servers as they move between zones. They achieve this with the warping stuff they have in the game.
The equivalent you can get to in WoW is that WoW has 4 continents. Each continent is set on its own server. You also have the "instance" servers, which handle battleground
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Eve *does* have instances--there are missions that DO instance you off from the rest of the player base.
Only a few tutorial missions and only for the purpose of protecting the player from being destroyed while still learning the game.
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I'm talking when a lot of people are in the same place of course.
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If you want to play at 60FPS, run it on any hardware released in the last 5 years.
I ran it on a *laptop* from 2002, and it was still playable. Running it on an nVidia 6800 (launched early 2004), it pegged a solid 60FPS in all but the craziest raids.
Thinking you need a 4Ghz CPU to run WoW is ridiculous. Hell, you can probably buy a graphics card that runs it for less than the game itself.
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I want 60FPS or I don't play the game.
I get 30FPS while my CPU is at 60% load.
My video card is fine and never goes above 20%.
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You do realise that TV and movies are only shot at 30fps, right?
Don't judge something based on a number, use a qualitative judgement: does the picture look smooth, or is it jerky. If it's jerky, you have something to complain about. But you might want to look closer to home when you're trying to figure out what's wrong: I get 60fps even in Dalaran on my 2-year old laptop, which is powered by a T5450 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 256MB GeForce 8600M GT, with gaming being done under Windows 7 x64. During end-g
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If you're seeing smaller numbers, then you have something wrong with your computer.
like.. using a higher resolution than you are?
(2560*1600 here)
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I'm at 1680x1050... yes, it's a lower resolution, but not as much lower as you might think.
However, I still think you're completely missing my point: complaining a game is unplayable because you're getting 40fps instead of 60fps is utterly ridiculous: you don't refuse to watch TV or movies because they're unwatchable, and they're at 30fps.
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If the process is single thread all it will do is bouncing it around on all the cores, but it will never use more then 1 core at any given time.
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Well, remember how long it took to get the AQ gates open? Is this of similar difficulty?
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Months, huh? I call bullshit. Some guild with no life will beat Arthas into paste before the end of the year.
The only possible things that could put it off until the new year is (1) Blizzard hard coded it so each wing is opened on a set schedule, regardless of how fast the bosses in that wing are beaten and (2) Christmas break.
Which is exactly what Blizzard did.
The first wing opened now, the next wing will open 28 days from now. There are a total of 4 wings, and you need to complete ICC on normal mode before you can do hard modes.
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Probably not, but with all the work the community has done, Hackintosh's on solid hardware are typically pretty problem free machines (and no, that's not being sarcastic). Generally if a program runs bad on a Hacktinosh that is otherwise behaving then it's because the program itself is buggy, not the machine.
As someone who actually owns a real Macbook and a G4 Mac but has a hacktinosh to play games because the specs on the other two systems just aren't geared for it, I can honestly say that aside from the
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It's a video game... It is supposed to dispense pellets as rapidly as possible. Have you looked at any game developed in the last, what 10 years? When is the last time you actually had to struggle to beat a game and see the content? I had hordes of nintendo games where I never even saw the last few bosses. If it didn't have a cheat code that was pretty much the end. Even something like mike tyson's punch out, I couldn't even get to macho man, let alone tyson, thank god for the cheat code.
Game design has bee