Blizzard Announces New WoW Expansion: Mists of Pandaria 276
Blizzcon 2011 kicked off today, and the biggest announcement from the opening ceremonies was the development of a new expansion for World of Warcraft. Titled Mists of Pandaria, the expansion will focus on the battle between the Horde and the Alliance instead of a traditional Big Bad Enemy. There will be both a new race — Pandaren — and a new class — Monk. The level cap will be raised to 90, there will be "challenge mode" dungeons, and they're introducing a pet battle system. Blizzard also mentioned that people who buy a 12-month subscription to WoW will get a copy of Diablo 3 for free.
Still a grind (Score:5, Insightful)
PvP is gear based, which requires grinding, Dungeons are gear based which requires grinding, crafting requires grinding....
Same crap, different day.
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And grinding is damn annoying to casual players such as myself. I would like to go after the lich king, but my gear sucks. Even at the max level of 85, I get my ass handed to me. In the group I'm usually the first to die because of my gear (being a mage doesn't help, either). I do not want to run through the same dungeons a hundred times hoping for an epic drop that might give me a slight improvement in stats because that is boring. I will say, however, that WoW's reliance on gear is a whole lot better
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Hell, MC was fun even though I was geared out because of the 40 people I hung out with. Now its 5, 10, 15... little groups of friends. What is the point of big guilds now?
They screwed up big IMO...
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The beauty of 40-man raids was that you could have a half-dozen casuals and as long as they understood the mechanics of what was going on (i.e.: they didn't do stupid stuff) there's still a sizable group of folks to pick up the slack.
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NO you could not. One under geared person, and it would be TPK.
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In my case, I'm in a small "casual" guild. Casual in the sense that we have about 40 regular members, but we can only reliably pull together 10 people for a raid. We're an older crowd with jobs and families, and we have no patience for trolls or troublemakers, so our roster consists of a core group of people who've known each other IRL, and friends-of-friends. The few 25-man raids I've done were PUGs, or collaborations with another friendly guild. I just play a few hours a week, and some weeks I'm too b
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As a casual gamer, I can confidently state that MMORPG's are not for casual players but only for hardcore gamers willing to spend large quantities of time and money. I have yet to encounter and MMORPG that doesn't feel like endless grinding within the first hour of play.
As for the extensiion in the topic; Kung Fu Panda.
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My brother is a casual gamer and he enjoys Warcraft a lot. It all depends on what your goals are. If you are the kind of casual gamer who just wants to finish the game, have the top score and best gear of course you'll need to grind. But in the case of my brother he just enjoys doing quests, leveling whenever it may come and even just enjoying flying and trying crazy stuff to test out the virtual world.
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Thing is, all those quests usually are the same deal; slay a dozen of those creaters over there or collect a dozen of these objects.
Another thing that annoys the hell out of me in most (though not all) MMORPG's is the sheer amount of time it takes to move around. I enjoy the visual aspects of games; I enjoy wandering around, exploring sites and discovering things in them; I don't enjoy walking for 15 minutes in a monotonous forest just to kill some wolves. Seems like all quests involve killing something. Pe
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Blizzard actually aproach this with the newest expansion. A lot of the world changes as you do quests, storylines will cause entire areas to turn from devastated to green and flourishing. It's actually quite nice.
That being said, WoW was still a major grind so I dropped it for something else :-)
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If he's casual and likes visually appealing stuff, have him try the free trial of Rift. :)
From wallhacking (no flying in Rift, yet) I've discovered that so far they use very few invisible barriers, and in fact put cairns with loot at the tops of some mountains.
So far haven't found any crazy not-supposed-to-be-seen unfinished areas like pre-Cata Old World had, but it's fun to try.
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> If you are the kind of casual gamer who just wants to finish the game,
Uhm, you DO realize there is NO way to "finish" WoW -- there is no "game over" that good, traditional games have.
It has a "soft win", not a "hard win" -- it is shitty gameplay designed for one thing -- string out the customer to keep the paying as long as possible to play.
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I second that emotion. I've tried to get into MMO's, but every side mission is basically "go fetch me 10 wolf pelts" or some variation. I played MUD's back in the day, and they never seemed like this kind of grind. So I'm killing 10 wolves in WoW, mining some asteroid in EVE, or whatever, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. About the only MMO that I have liked so far was Guild Wars, not only because it was free and easy server-changing made it easy to play with friends, but because it was one of the few MMO's I've seen wi
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Best PvP? Really?
90% of the time you were getting completely curb stomped by groups of 50-200 people in the frontier areas. Whoever got the area mez (basically it stopped everyone in a given area from acting for a good thirty seconds, until damaged, or they used a (purchasable through PvP points) skill to break out of it) off first. Also, hacking was rampant. As soon as you stepped into a frontier a group of people would come running at approximately the speed of sound with their weapons out.
The only fu
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To deal with the huge range of ability (or patience for grinding) of different WoW players, one feature idea I had was what I would call Difficulty Scaling.
Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.
So you'd be slower to level, but wouldn't die all the time, allowing you to participate in activities you normally wouldn't be geared for.
On the flip side, experience players
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Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.
Should say:
Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get lower than usual benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.
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Somehow I suspect this has a lot of unpredictable side effects, like one person supertanking by turning it way down so everyone else can score XP. Unless it affects party drop rates, but then everyone would hate you. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be a lot more complicated than adding a slider...
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You could probably deal with the supertanking in a mixed raid by also linking "threat" level to the difficulty level as well. The tank would be able to absorb a million points of damage, but it wouldn't matter because they couldn't keep the boss or adds on them.
You could turn down the difficulty of the dungeon itself and then scale the rewards based on difficulty level as well. That means that you would still all do the same roles, but the fight would be more forgiving. You would get to see the content,
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If you are the first to die, especially at level 85 doing Litch King content, the issue isn't your gear.
The issue is almost NEVER gear, atleast for PvE.
The issue is almost always player knowledge/skill with their class, situational awareness for avoiding extraneous damage, and lack of knowledge of raid mechanics.
An excess of gear will allow players to overcome MOST mechanics. If your tank has 250k health and you're dealing with bosses that are only hitting for 20-30k, your healers can be half asleep and kee
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Heroic Litch King has a number of issues that are completely non-gear determinent.
If you can't move out of the blast wave, you'll get knocked off the platform and die. Doesn't matter how much health you have, if you can't move, you die.
If your raid doesn't burn the angel chicks, the member they are carrying dies, again, doesn't matter what gear that person has, if folks don't switch targets, the person dies.
If people are standing in the black puddle, it will grow and encompass the entire platform. With a hu
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The issue is almost NEVER gear, atleast for PvE.
Er? It's been a while since I played WoW but gear is important. To overcome the hard fights you need skill and gear but there were quite a few of the early raid fights that were essentially gear checks. For example, Patchwerk [wowwiki.com] was a tank and spank gear check.
For the most part, if you are the first to die, you did something wrong and while more gear might have mitigated it, it was your mistake to be in the position to die.
There is always a bit of chance in every fight and sometimes it isn't on your side. There were a few fights where the tank died because he got 3 critical strikes in a row followed by a special boss move on a boss we routinely beat. Now the rules of
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Gear is not (always) a substitute for skill and teamwork.
I'm not a super-hardcore player, in that I only have one main character, and I raid one night a week. I have a normal life, as normal as I.T. consulting can be I suppose, and I have very little trouble keeping up with the no-lifers. When the last expansion came out, I beat the leveling content in 2 days, as I only had a few small contracts going at the time. Then I quit for about 6 months, came back after a new patch and content update, and caught
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Any crappy green level 85 gear you have today is still much better then the epic level 80 gear from the litch king era. If you are dieing trying to kill the litch king at level 85 with level 85 gear.... I hate to say it but gear is not the probelm.
I didn't replace any of my 80 raid gear until actual better pieces dropped, and that didn't happen til heroics and rep gear, nothing green or blue is better then well geared 80 raiding gear. but the grind got to me and moved on to other things and let WoW lapse like millions of others did.
Re:Still a grind (Score:5, Interesting)
> I didn't replace any of my 80 raid gear until actual better pieces dropped, and that didn't happen til heroics and rep gear,
Please don't tell me you used "maxdps.com" and no greens were suggested as upgrades. I'm pretty sure that every AEP calculator on the planet agrees that you're doing it wrong.
I ended LK with a full set of top tier, as did most in my guild. And almost all of mine was gone within two levels. If you actually believe that your hit, expertise, or any other caps were being maintained as you leveled up...
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I ended LK with a full set of top tier, as did most in my guild. And almost all of mine was gone within two levels. If you actually believe that your hit, expertise, or any other caps were being maintained as you leveled up...
Yeah, being hit, expertise and all the other caps really make a difference lvling, NOT!
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Almost any basic level 82 green will beat 80 epics, except possibly where set bonuses come into play, and even then you'd only have to wait for a level 83 green.
I ran a LK raid for fun while leveling a toon not too long ago (was either 83 or 84 at the time), wearing almost all greens with an occasional quest blue, and was pulling dps that I only dreamed about when actually wearing full icc gear.
The changes in stats on even level 78+ cata greens compared to pre-cata everything else is like day and night.
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PvP has always been gear based. It seems like you weren't there when twinks roamed battlegrounds. If anything it is better than before.
Dungeons and the gear they might require is nothing to the crap you needed to do back in WoW classic where you needed to have a couple of resistance gear and the grinding was absolutely horrible. Again, in this regard they kind of dumbed down the game so I don't get you.
And with crafting, recall when you had to do the different specializations for each profession, like armor
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Zzzz..... WoW bores me to no end these days. A new expansion will not help.
PvP is gear based, which requires grinding, Dungeons are gear based which requires grinding, crafting requires grinding....
Same crap, different day.
I was saying the same thing about MUDs back in the 1990's. Life suck. Only MUDs were free.
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A lot of the world must bore you since "Diablo 3" is going to have grinding. "Dark Souls" has grinding. "Battlefield 3" and "Modern Warfare 3" are going to have grinding. So on and so on.
I am not defending "grinding" where I do find it an undesirable side effect of multiple game systems but I suspect "grinding" isn't the real reason The Parent Post don't like "World of Warcraft" any more. "WoW" has the most streamlined leveling system of any modern MMO and has the most dynamic raid content where no two
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Zzzz..... WoW bores me to no end these days. A new expansion will not help.
WoW doesn't bore me at all these days. Because I stopped playing when Cataclysm dropped. Not because of any changes in Cataclysm or anything... just because I was very bored with all non-raiding parts of the game, and the part that was still fun, raiding, was too much like a job with bi-weekly appointments that interfered with the rest of my life. So the new expansion's arrival seemed like the right time. I made my last few attempts to get Kingslayer (nope, didn't do it) and then made a clean break.
If
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I have not even made it through Cataclysm yet. I made it as far as collecting some stupid tree marks. Blizzard set it up so that you can only get about 14 marks per day, and you need 200 of the damn things. I understand that they wanted to slow down the people who rush through to the end of the game, but seriously? I have better things to do with my time. If I have time to play a game, I want to be able to play the game. Being told "Come back tomorrow, do the same thing again, but even then you still
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I imagine you're talking about marks of the world tree. After you turn in the IIRC 150, you get to do it twice more, albeit with a few more marks per day in additional quests. At least, that's as far as I got before I quit that grind.
There's a lot more to the game than those Firelands dailies, though.
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There's a lot more to the game than those Firelands dailies, though.
The game lost all continuity for me when dungeon finder came out. Any relationship between the instance and the zone it is in vanished. I had no idea where to find quest chains, or what quest chains led to which dungeon. I could be wrong, but it seems like Blizzard might have phased out that dynamic by putting the quest givers right in the beginning of the dungeon. That just increases the disconnect and makes it matter even less what zo
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"Dungeons are gear based which requires grinding"
As opposed to cinematic story narrative driven crap? Games are about doing things. RPG's took the doing stuff out of the game and that's why it's boring. If WoW played like darksiders I'd be all over that. But WoW is a casual game so all they have for you is tedious autocombat.
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Eve is skill training, mission running, ratting grind based.
Even if you bring outside money into Eve you have to grind skills out.
only if your definition of grind includes 'not doing a damn thing while you gain skills'.
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Aren't skills in eve just on timers? So the "grind" is just wait however long it will take - either doing other things or just logged out not actually playing at all.
or did that change (I played Eve long ago and not for very long then)?
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Sure, if you include "doing anything else" as grinding. You don't even have to be in game. I can be skilling up while I'm at work, or eating dinner, etc.
Pet Battle system? (Score:5, Funny)
When did Michael Vick join Blizzard?
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Gotta catch 'em all (Score:2)
WOW gamers (Score:2)
I wonder what priceless videos we can gain out of this expansion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc [youtube.com]
I'll keep looking for an mmorpg I can get into, till then SC2 and it's 100% free somewhat crappy servers ftw!
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Holy cow, that video was hilarious. Thanks for posting. Still laughing my ass off
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I'm leaning toward skepticism of skepticism on this one. Is there any confirmation that it's fake?
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Straight to the top in an hour (Score:2)
Funnily, this made front page within an hour of being announced.
Like it or not, WoW is still popular.
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Oblig. (Score:2)
Skadoosh!
woot woot (Score:2)
I got my taking cap on, can't wait to brush off the keyboard cobwebs and get cracking on next n tier set.
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I got my taking cap on,
"Taking" cap? TAKING?
You're a ninja huntard, aren't you?
(I keed, I keeed. A little.)
I guess you meant "tanking", and for that I (the non-ninja huntard) thank you. A good tank makes being a hunter good. A bad tank makes a hunter bleed, and if the hunter is bleeding, something has gone horribly wrong.
Awesome (Score:2)
This is a welcome addition. I think a game based in monks and Asian culture is going to be far more interesting than the current Cataclysm expansion. Cata was good but not to the level of Wrath of the Lich King which truly felt epic. I also like that they are having Alliance and Horde finally clashing since to me it all seemed like a bunch of crap to have these two warring factions almost taking a stroll and having tea together. This is a game of WARcraft in the end.
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Agreed; I am actually interested in this, and may reactivate since I already plan on buying Diablo 3. I thought Cataclysm wasn't terribly exciting after hitting 85, whereas WotLK was great until the end. I always wanted a monk class in the game, too. But really, Blizzard, what we need is playable murlocs, not pandas.
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Correction: Monk has a tank spec in addition to the healing and dps specs.
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...a game based in monks
It's a jungle out there / Disorder and confusion everywhere / No one seems to care / Well I do / Hey, who's in charge here? / It's a jungle out there / Poison in the very air we breathe / Do you know what's in the water that you drink? / Well I do, and it's amazing / People think I'm crazy, 'cause I worry all the time / If you paid attention, you'd be worried too / You better pay attention / Or this world we love so much might just kill you / I could be wrong now, but I don't think so / It's a jungle out th
Wow meets Kung Fu Panda?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Or it could have been the other way around. In Warcraft lore, the Pandaren predate that movie by at least 5 years. They showed up in warcraft 3.
Also, a bare-fisted melee character was part WoW in the early alpha. It was the priest discipline spec, though that got removed very early, probably for balance reasons. Pre-cata, you could still see remnants of that in some of the discipline talents.
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Actually, pandas as a playable race in RPGs predate the whole MMORPG experience by quite a few decades.
Most instances were, in fact, monks.
I'm surprised you don't remember your gaming history.
And that's just the US/Euro gaming market - you can see them in Asian gaming even further back than that.
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What's really going on here? (Score:2)
A new expac announcement inside a year of the last being brought out.
A race and class that's been begged for since the beginning. And was once a April-fools joke.
An additional game, gratis, for long term subscribers.
Is it just me or does this have the reek of desperation? They reported a drop in numbers earlier this year, and it makes me wonder if that drop has been steady all year long. Why else bait the hook with so much junk? It doesn't feel like Blizz has the same confidence in the game they had before.
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The game is pretty old at this point you know. I think part of the reason is because Cataclysm wasn't as good as the other expansions. They are just fixing that by releasing a new one.
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Got tired of the drama... (Score:2)
Even with the smaller guilds syndrome, I still got tired of all the drama 30 and 40-man guilds could create. Seeing as I was the guild leader, that made it even worse. So many fucking massive egos to try and placate or squash that I finally said "Screw you guys, I'm going home." I changed the officers of the guild around to who I thought was best to run it, left myself as leader (intending to go back and turn it over), and then logged out. I haven't been back in almost two years now.
And I really do not miss
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Now I play some DDO and an old-school MUD and am looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic. With a very small, friends and family only guild. Fuck being the largest or first to do X crap. I want to have fun with friends and socialize while killing those scum in the Republic.
I too am looking forward to killing Republic scum. Who wants to be the boring good guys?
Only if Jack Black does the voice work (Score:2)
Whole lot of meh (Score:5, Interesting)
WoW already jumped the shark in Cataclysm. This is just confirmation really. Nothing they've announced is all that interesting as a player from vanilla to 4.1 when I finally got bored.
They've been out of ideas for a while and focusing on how to better monetize their existing players. Now they're trying to get people to keep paying by throwing in Diablo 3 (and its auctions for cash shop). Pandarens as a race don't fit the world, they were originally put in as a joke...
Then again, at this point the lore has been so completely butchered that it really doesn't matter if it fits or not.
It was fun while it was in its prime, but that time has passed. Hopefully Activision hasn't screwed up Diablo 3 too much, because I still love Blizzard.
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WoW lore never mattered. It was always a hack job that stole shamelessly from everywhere, was more parody than story, and never met a cliche it didn't like.
But it was (and probably still is) a fun game if you didn't mind that and didn't take it too seriously.
blizzard ? (Score:3)
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Hopefully Activision hasn't screwed up Diablo 3 too much, because I still love Blizzard.
Real money auction house and required to be online to play. I can't speak for you, but those two things entirely killed my interest in DIII (the former maiming it, and the latter being the merciful bullet to the head).
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Agreed. They've completely lost me. Prior to WoW, I bought every single game Blizzard released, and I loved it. Since then...I haven't bought (or even played on a friends computer) a thing, and I don't really forsee that changing any time soon. Blizzard hasn't been the same in years.
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Pandarens as a race don't fit the world
But space goats in transdimensional ships fit in perfectly.
Pandas ..... eh .... (Score:2)
My poor lvl 70 lock ... (Score:2)
I played for nearly three years in WoW's earlier days. I started about the time of the Hakkar Blood Plague.
I enjoyed the story and the leveling, but after BC was released, there was a rush to push up to the new level cap. The expansion didn't add to the story – it just added more grinds. I finally quit when I realized I was paying to go to another job every day.
My kids play occasionally now on the free trial accounts, and they want me to pay for a sub so they can level a Worgen. I've told them
Apex of wow was Wrath of the lich king (Score:2)
wrath was norse lore, epic dragonS (not one), a mega global war, norse myths and folklore, titans, and many more.
and cata was what ? a rehash of old world, which was sorely lacking in story and grand scale by itself in the first place.
i dont want to even comment on this panda business.
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Sounds so cool, and I'm SO glad I quit WoW (Score:2)
Bread Store? Bakery? Wha? (Score:2)
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It will be interesting to see what they come up with, but anything grinding endlessly without a point will not do well.
DAoC did well until Mythic screwed it up, because the end game was a constant challenge
Same with Planetside and soon, Planetside 2.
Now I will admit, it is fun to gain new armor, and weapons, and such... but when it is the same thing over and over again like Blizzard made WoW, then it gets old.
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Except you can do racial changes.
And if Death Knights, Goblins and Worgen were any indication, the starter zones are worth the time of trying out a new character.
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Except you can do racial changes.
And if Death Knights, Goblins and Worgen were any indication, the starter zones are worth the time of trying out a new character.
They really need to move on from this dungeon crawl stuff.
Maybe something like World of Banking - take your group down a dangerous trail of betting on derivatives and making high risk loans ...
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Dammit Wyatt, tell her to post more greys below vendor price, please. :)
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Millions of people pay $15 a month to do that. It's a business model.
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More of the same? Hardly.
It looks like more of all the worst parts of wow, with a candy coated cartoon plot added on top. Ugh. This is embarrassingly bad.
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Except Pandarens predate Kung Fu Panda.
Pandarens were in WC3 Frozen Throne expansion in 2003
http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Brewmaster [wowwiki.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_III:_The_Frozen_Throne [wikipedia.org]
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And you'd be laughed out of court. The Pandaren were an April Fools joke from 2003-ish. Kung Fu Panda came out in 2008.
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Lol that is so true. Playing WoW saves tons of money even if it is at the cost of you becoming a hermit. In any case I've known people that met and dated thru the game and eventually got married, so it is just changing the way we interact I guess. Surrogates ftw :)
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http://www.planetside2.com/faq.html [planetside2.com]
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It's not April.... not even in the Southern Hemisphere. So it's completely out of season.
So, no, it doesn't appear to be an intentional joke.
Yeah yeah, (Score:2)
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ROFL yeah man. It's so blatantly obvious. I mean back in 2002 when Pandarens were originally created, Sam Didier hopped in his time traveling DeLorean, got up to 88 miles per hour, went to 2008 and totally jacked the Kung Fu Panda idea.