Blizzard Launches Third WoW Expansion, Cataclysm 218
Last night marked the launch of Cataclysm, the third expansion for Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Cataclysm includes: two new races, both of which have their own starting zones; five new high-level zones that span the new 80-85 leveling content; seven new five-man dungeons (plus two heroic versions of classic dungeons); three end-game raids; a new profession; two new PvP battlegrounds; and one world PvP zone. In addition, Cataclysm features a revamp of Azeroth, the portion of the game world that went live when WoW originally launched in 2004, providing a much improved leveling experience for new players and alts. MMO-Champion posted a comprehensive collection of information about the new content. Of course, Cataclysm's launch has brought the video game addiction debate back to the fore.
First P-- (Score:3, Funny)
Revamped Azeroth sells the game (Score:4, Interesting)
With all the player friendly changes finally incorporated into the old world the game is essentially new enough for people who have never touched WOW. It also is freshened enough for existing players to want to revisit the old world. Overall, its a much better expansion than BC and possibly better than Wrath. Is it perfect, no, but rarely will changes please everyone.
FWIW, someone made maximum level with the help of their guild within hours of the game starting up in Europe. Should be fun seeing all the people crush through the zones and race an un-winnable race
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Yeah, talked to a few long time players, almost makes me want to sign up... almost.
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With all the player friendly changes finally incorporated into the old world the game
The fact that this is working for Blizzard gives me hope that Square Enix will ape it to fix the horrible world that is Final Fantasy XIV. Even if they fixed everything else in that game, they're still stuck with the most bland, most boring, most oversized, most repetitive world map that's ever been in an MMO.
I don't really intend to play WoW, but it's nice to see that at least one MMO company is willing to take risks like completely redoing their original world map when they feel it needs to be redone. App
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If they were to do this, and get rid of the zone lines and make the world much more interconnected, I'd actually be interested. One of the things that drove me away from EQ2 in the first place was the tiny zones connected by tiny doorways that made WoW's Azeroth look huge. I got tired of taking bells everywhere instead of being able to actually walk or swim from zone to zone.
It's also the reason I final
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Meh, I actually like the art design in FFXIV more than WoW. The problem is that the world is like playing on a giant Carcassonne [wikipedia.org] board - the world is very clearly made up of a very limited number of tiles that are frequently reused. And since it's a 3D game, the fact that they've just rotated some of them really doesn't help when you're running along a road - it still looks identical, even if the road is running east/west instead of north/south.
Plus, while WoW has seamless zoning, FFXIV requires you to load
no one who plays WoW will comment here (Score:5, Insightful)
they are all busy playing
therefore, if my understanding of the Slashdot demographic is correct, there will be a total of 22 comments in this thread all day, and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
I Play WoW (Score:4, Interesting)
I "played" Fable III until about midnight last night. I mean, I was constantly interrupted but it's a great story line. I'll put in my 40-60 hours playing through the storyline and just enjoy it. Same thing with WoW. I don't understand why people treat WoW any differently. Given the monthly fee, I would think it'd make more sense to beat the regular content in that first month and let the end-game go. It's a case of diminishing returns.
Oh, one more note, if I have extra time at the end of the month, I'll sometimes go back to old content and enjoy old end-game material that is now mid-game material that I never got to experience. With the new races, you can sometimes find a pickup group to go with you.
and all of them will by non WoW players commenting how much WoW sucks
WoW doesn't suck but it's not the last game I want to play. I am a WoW player but I'm at work right now. I am the elusive sensible responsible WoW player that you seem to claim doesn't exist. If you actually looked at the numbers though, a lot of us players are in this category. We're just not omnipresent in the game so you won't see my characters in game non-stop and now it's only when the new content comes out.
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FYI, Blizzard has never given people a free month for buying an expansion. You might be given an e-mail begging you to come back and try it for 10 days if your account is inactive, but that's it.
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WoW sucks!
(Am I doing it right?)
I don't play WoW (or any MMORPG), but I'm having high hopes for Diablo III.
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Nope. I played for 10 minutes this morning to check out Stormwind from the air, then logged out for the day.
I'm going to an open mic night after work so I won't even be playing tonight.
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See, this is more like me. I logged for a while last night, did some dailys, went to bed. I'll probably play tonight, but I've got to file some bills as well, so it probably won't be until late. I'd probably play a lot this weekend, but I've got family coming, so probably not.
You can enjoy playing it without having to be a slave to it.
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You forgot us former WoW players, who are cautiously curious, but still keeping our distance.
~D
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here as well...
Not everybody playing WoW is dumb (Score:2)
Some of us that play WoW do not fit into the same demographics as the kind of people that will wait outside a store at midnight to get the expansion as soon as it comes out and then rush-through to level 85 without actually enjoying the content.
Me, I'd rather wait until the crowds are past the initial quests: if this is anything like other expansions there will be, almost literally, lines of people waiting at all important targets from the main quest-line to kill them, and probably the secondary ones (actua
Servers non-responsive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Servers non-responsive (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse still it made Starcraft 2 non-functional. I tried to have a quick game of SC2 last night, and as far as I could get was a frozen log-in screen and no way to either proceed or exit.
I ended up having to ssh into my machine and kill -9 the Stacraft 2 process to get back to the desktop.
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Re:Servers non-responsive (Score:4, Interesting)
It's because this is the first expansion you could buy digitally before it was released, to have it unlock at exactly midnight (plus or minus a few hours depending on region). Previously, people had to physically buy a copy at the store at midnight, so unless you had a buddy that worked at Gamestop, you were actually in line or driving home for the next hour or so after midnight, and on top of that, it was always based on midnight local time. So not only were logins spread out by time zone, they were spread out by physical travel time from the store to the home.
This time, you have people who bought it online, and people who bought their physical copies and installed them hours ago sitting at home waiting for exactly the designated time to simultaneously login at once. And if the other poster is correct, now their login servers have to share time with SC2 players, which is also not something they previous had to deal with.
They really were just setting themselves up for disaster, but apparently whatever system they used to enable the digital download versions had to be run at the same time for the entire region, and I guess they didn't want to discourage/encourage digital purchases by giving an advantage/disadvantage to those who purchased online vs. in the store.
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No, I remember really long queue times when Wrath launched, too. And for several weeks after launch, at that. I have a screenshot somewhere on my hard drive of me sitting there at 900th in queue to get on to the server, too.
This morning, when I booted up to check my e-mail, I decided to check and see if WoW was up. It was, I had an hour to kill before I had to go to work, so I logged in and created a Worgen. No waiting at all. There may have been a huge rush at the Midnight rollover, but this morning there
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We're not talking about queues. we're talking about the login servers being physically unavailable. As in, you can't even get into a queue. And it only really applied to the first hour or so the game was available in EU/NA.
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According to the level 80 shaman that lives in my basement, Blizzard has basically slashdotted themselves - there are *so* many people trying to play that their servers are basically non-responsive. Players on the WOW forums are suggesting that people open 16 games simultaneously (in windowed mode), and then start to play whichever one responds first - which, of course, makes the entire scenario 16x worse.
This launch may very well be worse than past ones... But I've seen something similar at the launch of each previous expansion.
You've got a ton of people who haven't been playing WoW who suddenly run out and re-subscribe just to see the new stuff. You've got a ton of people all trying to log in and download the most recent patch at the same time. All hitting the authentication servers at the same time. All hitting the web servers and the forums to complain when it doesn't work. You've got piles of peopl
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This always happens any time they release a new expansion, and often when they release a new major content patch. It's in inside joke in most raiding guilds that you learn never to schedule raids for the tuesday a major patch hits.
That said, I digitally pre-ordered the expansion a week or two ago, had it all pre-downloaded in the past few days, went to bed last night at a normal time, got up this morning at the normal time (7am est), logged right into my server (Stormrage, one of the most populated servers
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If you did a digital pre-purchase you'd have most (all?) of the new content preloaded. There might be a quick patch to unlock everything, but that's about it.
Folks who are installing from a retail CD are going to have more content to download. Even though they've got a disc, there've been tweaks on the server.
And if everyone is trying to download that content it's going to be a painfully slow process.
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It would be if everyone were downloading from a central server.
Bliz's reliance on peer-to-peer patching should mean that the more people who are trying to patch simultaneously, the faster it is.
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It would be if everyone were downloading from a central server.
Bliz's reliance on peer-to-peer patching should mean that the more people who are trying to patch simultaneously, the faster it is.
Assuming you've only got one client behind a given public IP address, and that you've got your firewall configured to forward the ports correctly, and your ISP doesn't mess up your traffic... Yes, the BT-based downloader actually does scale well.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case for a lot of people.
My wife and I both play WoW. We're both behind the same firewall and are NATing out to the rest of the world. This wreaks havoc with BT downloads. I can only forward the appropriate ports to one machine at a
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Nothing will ever be worse than the first day of the release of WoW classic. There weren't queues yet, so people would mob a server, crash it, then mob the next open server, crash it, etc.
It took them 6 months to deploy enough server capacity.
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Nothing will ever be worse than the first day of the release of WoW classic. There weren't queues yet, so people would mob a server, crash it, then mob the next open server, crash it, etc.
It took them 6 months to deploy enough server capacity.
Yup. I was there for the initial launch. Logged in right at 3:00 EST and rolled up my first character.
It was bad enough that they were actually crediting players free gametime, since the servers were down so much.
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Didn't have to fight for every spawn as my young Gilnean this morning... :) The Worgen start zone is phased into at least 4 different instances that I've seen so far, and as a result, there's plenty of spawns for everybody. (at least as far as I've seen.)
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Didn't have to fight for every spawn as my young Gilnean this morning... :) The Worgen start zone is phased into at least 4 different instances that I've seen so far, and as a result, there's plenty of spawns for everybody. (at least as far as I've seen.)
Nice.
I won't be able to play until this evening... And my server is fairly populous... So I'm concerned that the phasing won't matter much.
The deathknight starter area was phased, but it was still painfully crowded for several days after launch.
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Some of us, trying to level 80s, are running into shared-spawn quest areas with huge kill competition. For instance, the initial Vashj'ir [wowhead.com] quests. I hop on the boat leaving from Orgrimmar, travel over the sea, and promptly get shipwrecked by some hideous tentacle beast and find myself trapped with about 50 other Hordies in the shrinking trapped air bubble of our inverted ship. Did I mention I'm in a PvP server, and by some amazing stroke of luck the Alliance's ship arrived in our area at exactly the same tim
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That sounds absolutely awesome.
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Yup. That's the reason I'm only 40% of the way to lv81 after four hours of playing last night. It was a bloodbath:) Adding the 3rd dimension to PvP made it a totally new game. On my warlock, I made it a point to single out the Rogues. Call it karmic retribution.
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I dunno about non-responsive. I was up at midnight and the login servers did bork out, but everything was back to normal half an hour later. I don't think that's too bad, considering the insanely above normal load we're talking about here.
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I played WoW for about 2 hours before coming in to work today. That is 7AM to 9AM central time. I logged in as normal, played for 2 hours straight without glitches, getting kicked out of the game, etc.
I also had guildmates that had been on all night without a problem.
Apparently this expansion is much more stable than the last 2 were.
In preparation for the launch... (Score:4, Insightful)
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.
Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.
WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.
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And you have iron-clad proof that these same people wouldn't be failing school or divorcing over something else, were it not for WoW being there?
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Sheesh. Where have you been? Correlation is always causation.
It's the Modern Way to shift responsibility the addiction, rather than the addict. It's what gave us our War on Drugs. (I suppose the War on Druggies wouldn't make such a good election campaign platform, eh?)
So, at some point, some prominent socially-aware journalist will expose the scourge of addictive, violent video games and we'll have the War on Those too.
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And you have iron-clad proof that these same people wouldn't be failing school or divorcing over something else, were it not for WoW being there?
Yeah my wife is sleeping with me again :P
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And you have iron-clad proof that these same people wouldn't be failing school or divorcing over something else, were it not for WoW being there?
Yeah my wife is sleeping with me again :P
I never stopped playing WoW, but she's still sleeping with me.
Damnit, she told me I was the only one.
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WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends.
What kind of hobby really "ends"? Like say all sports, you're never going to win anything of significance at the hobby level - not significant to anyone but you anyway. Same goes for playing any form of instrument. I got one in the family that likes to paint, where does that end? He's not heading for the Louvre, I can tell you that much. How much real "useful" or "meaningful" things do you really learn outside your own little self-referential world view? If you play the guitar you learn to play the guitar,
You got pwned,didn't you? ;) (Score:2)
Aye. I've known people who did almost that before. Well, almost. The selling was done for them by whoever got them to download a keylogger, the gold went to some gold-seller site, and they didn't much unsubscribe as just had the password changed ;)
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I get where you are coming from and I think it comes down to your own personal experience with WoW.
In my case there were usually 5-10 people sitting on Vent chatting while playing. So it becomes a social outlet. Although I cannot find a link to it, there is a massive social aspect to WoW, that is underpinned by the concept of the guild.
I had some great times, but a lot of it was down to the people you played with on a nightly basis.
There was a secondary reason for me quitting, I was taking off three months
Ho Hum (Score:2)
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Considering the comic was about the Cataclysm beta... unlikely.
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And my social life takes another hit (Score:2)
And my social life takes another hit. Not because I play, but because a good deal of my friends do. Curse you Blizzard! (shakes fist)
Guild leveling (Score:3)
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Level to do what? Everything is about leveling and then when you're done what happens? You can't even stand around while newbs check out your "hard earned" gear anymore since they are giving it away fo free! The entire game is a pointless waste of time... and I'm not hating, I played it for 3 years and I forgot today was the expac.
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The entire game is a pointless waste of time...
All videogames are a pointless waste of time. That's why they're entertainment.
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Very untrue.
The fact that something is entertainment does not make it a pointless waste of time. For example, snowboarding is entertainment to me. As part of that, I bond with friends, enjoy the outdoors (and get to see some new sights), get some exercise, and feel accomplished when I do some new trick I'm working on (assuming I don't end up in the hospital in the meantime...helmets have saved me more than once).
Now, when specifically talking about video games, those aren't necessarily a waste of time eithe
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Blizzard Entertainment (Score:2)
Destroying students' final exam grades since 1991.
Seriously, I know they're releasing it now to get big Christmas money, but that alone makes me really glad I don't play that game any more.
I'm still not coming back (Score:2)
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For every bored player 3 new join the Internet. WoW will last longer then Hell.
Your statement presumes that those are two different things...
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World of Diablo. Heh.
They can't make that right off, though. Diablo is too MMO-ish. They first need to make Diablocraft, the RTS. Then they can make the MMO based on the RTS, World of Diablocraft.
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Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
I play maybe 5-10 hours a week, and that's plenty for me. At $14.95 per month, it's a good return for entertainment per hour.
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Winning the game is so 80s, nowadays you lose the game!
And... who cares? (Score:3)
And, basically, who cares? Not all games are made to be won or lost. There is also no winning Elite, or Tetris, or Pac-Man.
What matters is whether you had fun playing it for X hours or not. Which fun can come from gear and achievements, but it also can come from doing quests, or exploration, or social interact
Re:You can't win WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
You're doing it wrong.
The point isn't to win (though some people seem to think that). The point is to have fun.
It's a diversion. It's escapism. No different from reading a book or watching TV or going to the movies or whatever else people do with their spare time. Sure, some diversions like board games and most video games have a clear winner... But plenty of diversions like reading books and watching movies have no winner. It's just a way to kill some time.
My wife and I both play WoW. We play with a guild we've been members of for about 10 years now. They're people we know. They're fun to hang out with. Half the fun of the game isn't actually mashing buttons and killing critters - it's the social aspect.
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You don't play to win. You play to achieve.
Winning is just one of the many ways to achieve in a game. In pacman you couldn't really win, but you achieved higher levels every time you played. Or a higher score then someone else. In WoW, just like in many other games, you achieve things. You achieve a kill of the Lich King, or achieve some achievement. That's what keeps people playing, achieving things.
As a former WoW player, I say, I didn't get enough achieve for my time. I might play a bit again once Catacl
Not all people, though (Score:4, Interesting)
It's certainly one thing to motivate some people, but not the only one by far. E.g., Bartle's famous paper dates from the days of MUDs and identifies 4 types of players:
1. Achievers (Diamonds): these are the kind you describe. They play to achieve something, be it a more epic sword, more money in the bank, a funky title, or a higher score.
2. Explorers (Spades): these are the kind of people who play to find out stuff. It can be some mountain pass that nobody else heard about, or how the game works, or try to find every single quest, etc. For example the kinds that put numbers in a spreadsheet to find out the exact numbers in COH's attack formulas were explorers. Essentially these guys play to reverse-engineer the game.
3. Socializers (Hearts): these guys basically treat the game as a chat room that incidentally has a video game attached. They're there to make friends, chat, organize some guild event, tutor newbies, etc. Even actually playing the game is only a tool towards interacting with people.
4. Killers (Clubs): these guys are not the PvP gang, but the people who live to harass, annoy, gank, and make life as miserable as possible for others. Their highest reward and achievement is getting someone to leave the game entirely, effectively perma-killing them in the game. Hence the "killers" name. The rest of us tend to call them "griefers" or simply "asshats".
Bearing in mind, though, that nobody is 100% in one category, but you can still classify people that way by their predominant interest and behaviour.
And that's actually just one of many classifications.
At any rate, the moral of the story is: please don't generalize. There's nothing wrong if you're an achiever, but do realize that other people play for very different reasons than you do.
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Hmm, I can see your problem, but I don't think making some meta-gaming categories into in-game classes would solve it much.
I mean, imagine playing a D&D game where the available classes are Rules Lawyer, Munchkin, Real Man, Thespian, Drama Queen and Loonie. Now guess which of them can tank for you. I mean, sure, you know the Munchkin will want the best loot, the Real Man will go slap the Turbonium Dragon, the Thespian will try to talk to every skeleton in the dungeon, the Rules Lawyer will derail it int
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There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
I see this said a lot. I really don't get why people bring this up, open ended games have been around for a while. (Myst, being the first one I can think of). Oblivion is another one. Point is, there is no way to "Win" these games either. And those ones aren't even multiplayer. Yet I know people who have played Oblivion past the final story arc multiple times through, different characters and all that.
World of Warcraft HAS story in it. You just ignore it. Most people ignore it. They are so wrapped up in try
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Myst is a puzzle/adventure game - but the fact is the game never stops you from playing once you achieve what can be considered the end goal. The story will not progress anymore, at all, but they let you wander around around and revisit places you've already visitted.
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Perhaps we are getting too old for games?
NAH!
But the grind no longer interestes me. I want goals and good social atmosphere with no drama and immature people.
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To be fair, the bulk of the revamp of Azeroth is to get rid of the mindless/endless grind. They've even tweaked experience gains from instances so that your best bet for levelling quickly is to immerse yourself in the storyline and do the quests.
The new races added with this expansion are especially good at that... I have only had a chance to play a Gilnean (worgen), as I only had an hour before I had to leave for work this morning, but I didn't run into a single FedEx quest. (well, ok, I did run into a cou
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Shop around. You can get some of that in the better guilds. Our guild has a "nobody under age 25" rule and we're pretty strict on the maturity / language. Guilds like that tend to be the smaller ones, not the big mega guilds that will invite anyone. You're still stuck dealing with the rest of the kids on the server, but that also varies by server/faction and turning off "General" and "Trad
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I think it has more to do with enjoying playing with those people than it does WoW itself. The people I know who still play WoW (including myself) play with good friends, either real world friends or those they met online.
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I ALMOST agree with you...but I still loved just going solo every now and then.
Still, the connection and feeling of community certainly had at least something to do with it.
Re:Le sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I know what you mean. After an EQ addiction and then a a bout of WoW addiction, I realized that as fun as MMOs are, they throw your life out of balance. It's one thing to have an escape every once in a while; but when you live your life in escape, those memories just aren't meaty enough to have been worth it. Memories of time spent with my family are more valuable. Learning something about science, technology, politics, economics, or history is more valuable than having my brain filled with the prices of virtual pieces of magical armor in a virtual world.
It's kind of like a guitar hero addiction. Sure, have fun with it for a few hours here and there. If you have enough time to spend hours on it a day, though, why not take up playing a REAL guitar?
That said, I think I started to drool a little when I looked at the new WoW expansion and thought about spending my Xmas holidays in Azeroth.
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I'm mildly interested in it, but I have no desire to spend hour upon hour playing the same game again. That was my biggest gripe with WoW (and every other MMO I've played, from Gemstone III to Meridian 59 to Everquest to WoW, and everything in between.) When you're in the depths of an MMO, you miss out on everything else that gets released.*
Both of my downstairs neighbors are into WoW (they put in about 2 hours a day or so, unless its a Friday night.) Any interest I have ins eeing the changes could be do
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Agreed. It's not that I couldn't, probably, still sit for hours playing an MMO. But I get this niggling feeling of responsibility to myself, my home, my dog, etc. Should I be raking the leaves? Walking the dog? Showering? Or even doing something else I enjoy like tennis, etc. One my friends out-leveled me and I realize the simple gameplay mechanic of EQ wasn't worth much without the joking around and other social aspects, I was never drawn back into the MMO scene.
I had this pipe dream of an MMO that
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Go live in null-sec (or 0.0) space in EVE Online.
It's not as dynamic as it could be, but all those null-sec systems generally started out as nothing more then planets, moons, and asteroid belts with only stargates. Nearly everything in null-sec is player driven.
(That being said, I found EVE to be too invasive to my schedule. If you weren't grinding 20-30 hours per week, you'd never really get anywhere or be able
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The original Star Wars: Galaxies (pre-CU) had this kind of economy. It was *amazing* - and pretty much the ONLY thing the devs managed to get right, primarily because they didn't have anything to do with it.
NPCs didn't sell anything, I think. Players would start off and pick a general profession, like "Crafter" which would let them make very basic weapons or devices like mineral harvesters. The crafter would start off by prospecting until they found a good source of whatever material they needed and then th
Obsession Is The Problem Not The Game (Re:Le sigh) (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the guy who follows every football game is doing nothing but hitting refresh on ESPN? The same guy who is in multiple fantasy football leagues? What about if they start doing it for money?? The same guy who goes to work thinks about how soon he can get out of work to go home and play Madden or setup more simulations for the season to better his predictions in the fantasy league. And while at work yammers at the water cooler about football constantly to the point no one cares.
I hate how games are being made out to be the "bad influence" when I look out at the office and see people just as obsessive with "harmless activities". Being obsessed with anything can throw your life out of balance where just saying "They should do something productive" or "Why not do the real thing?" while ignoring the guy trying to tweak their spreadsheets for the nth time planning out their fantasy football drafts for hours on end.
The problem is obsession not the game or activity. If your kids are begging for your attention and ignore them it doesn't seem to matter if the excuse is because they are watching a football game or running around a virtual world.
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Pfft, I wish! That would have made it crazy awesome, not having to get up lol :)
But seriously though, our ages at the time ranged from 20-27, all of us either full-time employed or full-time students with part-time jobs. How else do you think we were able to afford properly setting up a 10-person LAN? (not to mention sustain it for months with the required snacks, booze, and soda.)
Luckily, my buddy already had some exercise equipment in his basement, so we took shifts putting in some physical activity. A
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Seriously, what the fuck did you expect?
Heh. What did you expect from a starter zone? (Score:2)
Heh. You do realize, I hope, that the starter zone is just that. It's partially a tutorial (e.g., telling you how to use Immolate or Steady Shot or whatever on some dummies) and partially giving you some back-story for your race and helping get in-character, so to sleep.
It's basically the equivalent of, dunno, castle Cousland if you played Dragon Age as a human noble. Or that escaping-from-the-hospital-station level in Mass Effect 2, while being taught how to control the game. Or the tutorial town in Fallou
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At the moment? Those three things have been the norm for pretty much all of human history.
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If spending half your game time running the length of Elwynn Forest is your idea of "earning it", I can only say I disagree. Completely.
MMOs have a nasty tendency to pad game time with copious amounts of traveling. I hate that. Blizzard would seem to agree, and have made getting around quicker and easier for years now (with one exception, the removal of the hub city portals). You get mounts earlier, you get fast mounts earlier, you get flying earlier etc. It's the right thing to do.
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4.0 is a better game than 3.0 was.
3.0 was better than 2.0
2.0 was better than 1.0
I've been there for all of them (since open beta actually, when looting didn't even work half the time), and people who complain that the game is currently too easy are usually just annoyed that they had it harder "back in the old days" (lol 2004 was a long time ago).
If you want harder gameplay, start questing in zones that are above your level. judging the current state of the game on the northshire abbey experience is retarded
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I've been there for all of them (since open beta actually, when looting didn't even work half the time), and people who complain that the game is currently too easy are usually just annoyed that they had it harder "back in the old days" (lol 2004 was a long time ago).
You're probably right. It did suck to have to wait until 40 to get your mount. :-)
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Sure, I admit that it annoyed me that I paid like 1000g for my shaman to have dual spec, my priest got it for like 50g, and my mage got it for 10g or 15g or something...
But you know what, I'm glad that I didn't have to pay 1000g 3 times.
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you can often pick up most quests while they are still red.
you can manually queue up for dungeons that are orange at the very least.
yes things resist you, thus challenge.
plus you can never underestimate the added challenge of grouping with people who are horrible and/or stupid.
The gathered that previous poster was looking for a harder game, I was trying to provide him with one.
What it turns out he was really commenting on is that wow is not as much of a time sink as it once was (unless you want to make it s
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Dragonlance had a Cataclysm that reshaped the world back in 1984.
(well 1987 if you want to be specific to the books where the characters were "there" for it).
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Or people just need to be responsible... When I realized that EQ was jeopardizing my university career, I quit cold turkey. Cancelled my account, and was done with it. I didn't pick up another MMO until after I'd graduated and had a job.
I play WoW now, but I play in my spare time, and have not missed any work time for what amounts to a silly game. I'm in a strong and healthy relationship with somebody, too... we've been going out for a year now, and are talking about marriage in the spring. It isn't that ha
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I'm sorry, if your boss knows your in-game avatars... you deserve what you get.