World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Launches On September 25 247
New submitter JestersGrind writes "Blizzard has announced that Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion of the popular World of Warcraft MMO, will be launched on September 25, 2012 and can be pre-ordered now."
The game page has a good deal of information about the new expansion. The level cap is increased to 90, there is a new race (Pandaren) and a new class (Monk), and the talent system has been completely redesigned. They've added Challenge Modes for dungeons, which normalizes player gear and lets them compete to see who can clear it the fastest. The MMO-Champion website keeps track of all the minor details, if you're interested.
Said it here first... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, no. WoW isn't really a big deal anymore.
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Ps. Thundaaa Struk.... 3 years ago called and they want their idea of the state of online gaming back.
Re:Said it here first... (Score:5, Funny)
3 years ago called
Oh my God! Did you warn them? About Haiti and Japan?
No, and I can explain (Score:2)
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You've played since the first day and havent noticed each expansion progressively and consistently dumbing down the mechanics and encounters? Do you just hit level cap and unsub or something?
I've noticed people complaining about that. Of course the same applies to so much else. D&D. NASCAR. Football. Baseball. Politics. Rock and Roll.
I think the only thing actually true is that people consistently complain about the same things.
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There are a lot of casual MMO people. Those people do not drive the game so we are ignored.
I disagree. When it comes to WoW at least. Casuals are the primary driving force of that game now and have been since half way though Wrath of the Lich King. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly fine with that even when I considered myself a hardcore player up till about patch 4.2. Blizzard has been catering to the casual for a while now. That's where the money is seeing as most of their player base are casuals.
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There used to be a great sense of accomplishment in leading a 40-man raid to victory
Problem was, that was an unsustainable model. The 40-man raid leaders all burned out because the logistics of recruiting, organizing, and leading a 40-man really was like herding cats. It wasn't the game. It wasn't the encounters. It was the social bullshit that got in the way of actually playing well in the game. It just couldn't survive any longer, so Blizzard got rid of it. Tankspot has some excellent videos talking about the demise of the 40-man raids and how dumbing down content or catering to casuals
The grind never ends (Score:5, Funny)
It just goes on, and on, and on, and on....
MMO's, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war...they're the games you can NEVER WIN.
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It just goes on, and on, and on, and on....
MMO's, tic-tac-toe, and thermonuclear war...they're the games you can NEVER WIN.
I guess I won at WOW then. did everything one could without joining the weekly ballet practices with 20 people and then quit out of boredom(before expansions and none of them have brought me back there.. the problem is that the world is static. if you have to wait in line to turn in guests to some guy who is just giving the same fucking guest to some other guy it starts to feel like a circus ride, the bg's did provide some added entertainment but those too have no effect whatsoever on the game world).
quitti
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You realize the world isn't exactly static anymore, what with phased areas and actual progression through zones?
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I know you were being funny but MMOs are NOT games, they are toys. A lot gamers will go "Whaaat?"
A game by *definition* has a winning state (and conversely) a losing state. There is way to "win" at WOW. (Yeah some would joke that the only way to win is not play. :-/ )
Sure you can die but that is orthogonal to the definition. You can also die in Team Fortress 2 -- the effects are not long-lasting -- but TF2 has closure, unlike WOW.
Both games and toys along with this sandbox mode can be a lot of fun! But pl
Re:The grind never ends (Score:4, Informative)
Dictionary.com disagrees with your definition of game; the ability to win is not part of the definition.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/game?s=t [reference.com]
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Games do not by definition, have a winning state and conversely a losing state. Many do, to be sure. You might want to read up on the philosophy of games a bit. I can recommend Huizing's Homo Ludens as a good starting point. Even of the definitions listed on Wikipedia's entry for Game, many of the definitions do not mention a winning state.
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Why would a nerd call tech support? To troll them?
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This was true when Wrath came out, I know because I was one of the 40 or so guys out of 300 who showed up to work that day. That was a long-ass time ago and people actually fought over the Tuesday morning shift, because that's when WoW would be down for maintenance every goddamned week. Most people wanted to work during those hours, so they could get home early and play the new content before everyone else.
Today, though, the ratio is reversed. Probably just a handful of hardcore weenies will actually bot
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So what do they play these days?
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Judging from my flatmate, I'd say it's Day Z. I'd count as a nerd in some people's books, but I never found WoW or Starcraft or any other Blizzard games particularly interesting... I guess maybe I'm a kind of hipster nerd.
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I guess maybe I'm a kind of hipster nerd.
I've never heard of this.
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Yeah, well that's because I'm doing it before it's cool.
Re:Said it here first... (Score:5, Funny)
Look! Hipster Candy! [jeffgreenspan.com] [SFW, promise!]
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Waaaaait. It's that a mousetrap to catch and kill hipsters, or a mousetrap set up by hipsters to catch the mainstream media people who say "Move over fad, new_fad is here!"?
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Now I have to execute a deep, soul-wrenching sigh of superiority and contempt.
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Guild wars 2?
Planetside 2?
both are coming out shortly. Both are free to play. PS2 is shaping up to be a great MMOFPS and GW2 has taken all that is bad with wow and thrown it out the window. No "5 skill tabs", no "you must follow this quest chain" stuff, rewards for doing jumping exploits to solve puzzles, etc. Also: genuinely challenging. You get 5 skills, and 5 that you can choose yourself. That's it.
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I things go right I plan to be busy with the enhanced Baldur's Gate series release.
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rewards for doing jumping exploits to solve puzzles
That's because in GW1, you couldn't jump! :p
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That's because in GW1, you couldn't jump! :p
That's what I thought: 'all you GW1 players who complained you can't jump... the joke's on you now, because you'll have to jump to reach a lot of the obscure locations in the game' :).
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I was getting pretty excited about GW2 until I have been reading their thoughts on it and now my hopes are fading away.
Despite its flaws, Guild Wars 2 is the best MMO I've ever played. If people expect it to be like WoW, I'd guess they'll be disappointed, but an MMO with no monthly fee and no grind to keep people paying that monthly fee is hard to beat.
And yes, the end game is largely about getting the coolest outfit. But that's the end game of every successful MMOG on the planet.
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Which is a good thing; play is based more on skill than completing timesinks, but the people who do complete the timesinks still get something to show for it.
In GW1, one of the main reasons I played through the expansions was to get new outfits for a couple of my characters, with exactly the same stats as the outfits they had.
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And yet it is still (sadly) the best mmo out there, both in actual playability and scaling.
sadly, all the wow "killers" i played (warhammer, swtor, rift) didn't get anywhere near the polish that wow had and has.
Rift is really the only (fantasy) mmo even close and sadly their engine still sucks donkey balls.
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Nerds don't play WoW. The game is eight years old and is long past its prime (and even looks it).
Wow graphics were dated on day one. That didn't stop millions of people playing it.
Long time WoW player here (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, the technology underpinning WoW is just too dated these days. Players expect more - Tera is a perfect example of that, a combat system where you actually have to hit your opponent (yes, some of it is simulated, but it feels real.
I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year, maybe two, and don't plan to go back to it, even for Pandas.
What little gaming time I have, I spend on games that are trying to innovate.
If Blizzard wants me back, they need to do something other than yet another expansion money grab. They need to do something new, innovative and wonderful. Sadly, I don't see much of this coming from them any more. I played Diablo 3 for about 3 hours before I got bored and switched back to Tera.
Hey Blizzard, how about this: World of Starcraft. And make it awesome, using latest technology - not an groaning engine that's 10 years old.
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Players want an easy grindfest.
If they wanted advanced fighting mechanics games like DD:O would be massive hits (You can actually dodge spells/shots, but you have to move your toon yourself)
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I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year, maybe two, and don't plan to go back to it, even for Pandas.
Even for Pandas? So you are saying that Pandas are basically cool but the game sucks otherwise? I seriously thought that adding Pandas was a bad case of jumping the shark. Well, maybe I just need to admit it to my self: I'm totally out of touch with gamers today. Now if you excuse me, I'll go and find rumors about Football Manager 2013 which I will eventually buy but won't find time to play.
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well they added kung fu too.
so.. a stick toting panda and monks. jumping sharks would be soo much cooler.
Re:Long time WoW player here (Score:5, Funny)
I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year, maybe two, and don't plan to go back to it, even for Pandas.
I seriously thought that adding Pandas was a bad case of jumping the shark
So after talking goats, walking cows, walrus men, British werewolves, zombies, vampires, zombie vampires, egyptian cat men, fungus people, bearish furbolgs, beings of energy wrapped in bandages and necromantic crow-men... you have a problem with pandas?
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tera? this tera? http://community.tera-europe.com/uploads/pics/2.jpg [tera-europe.com]
simulated?? what the fuck man???????????
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I played a bit in the Tera beta... it was shallow, but the combat was fun...
I refused to give them money just because the game was pedobear approved. Why the hell would I play any game capitalizing on sexy 8 year old girls? I'm guessing its trying for a very different demographic than me (people who like the whole creepy cute "uguu" japanese thing), but there still is something very distasteful about it. Same with the female wardrobes, they took a very annoying trend, and made it more so. Its about a st
Re:Long time WoW player here (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, the technology underpinning WoW is just too dated these days
Hey Blizzard, how about this: World of Starcraft. And make it awesome, using latest technology - not an groaning engine that's 10 years old.
Personally I think the WoW servers are on the leading edge of MMO tech. The new cross server phasing zones would be awesome for the lower pop servers and those people with friends spread out over several servers. To bad it's being added now and not 3-4 years ago.
As for the game engine, yes it's dated. That said I would still rather have the WoW graphics then a game with the latest and greatest graphics that require a $500 video card to play at max settings only to still get frame rate dropping in large fights with several people. The game graphics are at the bottom of importance. The game play and content are #1.
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I have 5 level 80+ chars on WoW, but haven't played the game in at least a year
So you've been paying a monthly subscription for a game you haven't played in a year?
If Blizzard wants me back
Blizzard must love gamers like you. No, they don't want you back, just keep paying them for nothing.
Re:Long time WoW player here (Score:4, Informative)
Your WoW characters don't disappear when you unsubscribe. It's entirely feasible to have multiple high level characters and not be subscribed to the game for long periods of time.
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Er... I've got 3 level 80s, and I haven't given Blizzard any money in a long time. They don't delete your characters for not paying them. If I decided to start giving them money again, all my old characters are magically available to me again.
Way to jump to conclusions!
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I think that was sort of the goal behind Titan, to innovate while they still had customers locked into the Blizz-does-it-right mindset.
I'm not sure what happened to Titan, because it sure has hell has completely fallen off the radar. Now whatever new property Blizz comes up with not only DOESN'T have the blizz-fanboi carryover, it'll have an extra hurdle in terms of "what, does this have pandas too?" sort of silliness.
Considering that ...
a) Titan has been in dev for what, 5 years now (allegedly) since 2007
Forgive me if I'm not excited (Score:3)
but MoP is completely of my radar. I used to be a WoW player, a raid who played over 30 hours/week. But the disappointment with the last expansion (Cataclysm) and later content patches pushed me off the game. Without mentioning I had Dragon Soul (the latest "raid") 10 hours after it was released, the overall quality of the game went downhill. Short content with little to no creativity, recycled mechanics and overall boring content.
sigh (Score:2, Informative)
*rolls eyes*
Panderen, which started out as an easter egg joke in Warcraft 3 somehow got turned into a full blown expansions in WoW, because, honestly, blizzard has totally ran out of ideas at this point....
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It's because players where beating down the servers with request for an actual class.
Blizzard listen to it's user base. But because it's blizzard that's bad?
Niiiicholaaaaaasssss... (Score:2)
Something about fighting some giant demon-thingy and looking at your teammates and seeing twirling teddy bears just doesn't do it for me.
Let me guess: You didn't like either of the first two Care Bears movies either.
Blizzard would like to thank you . . . . (Score:3)
Blizzard would like to thank you for your patience. While we constantly strive to maintain a stable server environment, there was no way we could have predicted so many people, most of whom pre-ordered the expansion pack, were ACTUALLY going to attempt to play it the day it came out. We thank you for your patience while we work out minor server stability issues. We are confident that you will be able to log in and enjoy the world we worked so hard to create on October 10th, following our regularly scheduled maintenance.
What Gets Me... (Score:2)
...is that Blizzard still thinks their have enough of a quality advantage that they can still charge and monthly subscription fee AND the price of a new game for an expansion pack.
my name is mw13068 and I like WoW... (Score:2)
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Stereotype much?
World of Warcraft (Score:2)
World of Warcraft: Mass Pandering
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Uhh, why would you need more than one diaper? If you're going to take the time to change it after its first use, you might just as well have used the toilet.
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Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:4, Informative)
WoW went from being a genuinely hard game
When was it ever a 'genuinely hard game'? I played since the first day it launched but I must have missed this mythical period. Even on the first day there were numerous people who were 75% or mote towards hitting the level cap . You could blow through half the game or more solo.
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The "level cap" has never been any kind of challenge in most MMOs. It's just about time investment and in the past, having the right class or people to group with. In actual fact, reaching the level cap is when the real game starts.
Vanilla WoW did have some pretty hard content. Original Scholomance was crazy if you did it with the intended 5 people (most groups at the time were actually raids of 10). Original Naxxramus had *nobody* on most of the servers in the game manage to fully clear it before Burning C
Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:4, Informative)
Besides I just remembered that there are vanilla WoW servers, so if you love it so much, why don't you play vanilla? But as GP said, vanilla WoW wasn't very hard. The endgame content basically only needed tons of grinding (and an immense pain-tolerance because of all the bugs). Scholo, strat etc. hard? Only if you have terrible equipment, but that.. again.. can be fixed by just grinding.
In the end all "challenges" in WoW can easily be beaten by investing more time, and it has been that way since launch.
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The level-cap was quite a challenge in Everquest. Which is also _the_ hardcore PvE MMO
Not any more; Everquest has been WoW-ised to death in a vain attempt to bring in new players. The closest you'll get to hardcore is the progression server using an approximation to the original rule set.
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IMHO, EQ1 has had some of the more annoying stuff removed (mobs actually leash now, so trains are not as large as in the past, and the addition of a combat state allows for faster regeneration of mana/HP when resting.)
I still keep a sub to it. You are not handed levels on a silver platter, you still have to work for them. However there is a lot of content to go to for exploration and grinding, and with a merc, it isn't too bad to go and do stuff.
I'd say for MMOs, EQ1 has improved the most. It still is "o
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actually, vanilla wow wasn't hard obectively compared to current wow.
TBC was probally the hardest in pure by-the-numbers hard, and wrath had some of the best mechanics difficulty.
People got insanely better at group challanges in games since vanilla wow.
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Raiding in most MMOs comes down to finding about fifty people to follow you, of whom not one is a complete dipstick. If you can do that, the rest is easy.
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Exactly; that's why the most successful MMO guilds are usually careful about recruiting and quick to kick out the dipsticks who get through. It's the only way to reliably beat the odds.
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Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't difficult, just inconvenient.
Quests individually weren't difficult - just spread all to hell and gone over the world with no rational organization, so you spent a lot of time running hither and yon rather than doing anything useful.
Dungeons weren't difficult - just inconvenient as hell to get people to do with you and took forever and a day to get people to the dungeon.
Raids weren't (usually) difficult - the mechanics were pretty simple assuming you had an appropriate class composition and the people playing understood that they can't just willy-nilly spam debuffs on the target without overwriting things.
Raid strategies weren't as widely known because there weren't as many tools for publicizing them and so on.
Contrast that with today:
- Quests are much more intelligently laid out, and questing is more about telling stories than it is about "challenge". Getting to the level cap via questing is trivial, but that's good because the level cap keeps going up.
- Dungeons have 2 modes, one which is normal and one which is a more challenging (mechanically and numerically) heroic mode. Some of the Cataclysm dungeons had mechanics that made them extremely tricky for PUGs to handle, and even now some of the heroics are tricky due to other mechanics.
- Raids have multiple modes. LFR mode is trivial to do (except when the people in your PUG intentionally or unintentionally screw things up), Normal mode can be a bit of a challenge but nothing that a decent guild can't handle. Heroic is challenging as hell.
Raid strategies are trivial to find and learn because we have great out of game tools for them - videos of how to tank a fight, the different phases, etc.
They gave us something for everyone, difficulty wise, now. But anyone who thinks WoW was more difficult (as opposed to inconvenient) in the past is definitely not right.
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Yeah, a tiny fraction of content was 'hard' but the overall game has been ridiculously easy since the beginning. It has always been more tedious than hard.
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Re:The unfortunate state of gaming (Score:4, Funny)
People arguing about WoW and calling each other morons on the intertubes makes me lolz.
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Man, nostalgia used to be great in the good old days, but not anymore. Bah hum bug
I lol'd.
In all seriousness, though, are there any games out right now that could be compared to the difficulty of vanilla WoW (raiding, that is), let alone EQ?
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EQ was fun, but enormous time investment. Days just to get 1 AA, and then youneeded 1000s of them to be considered "useful" ? Plus the whif monster that even max levels had to suffer? These were annoyances that wow got rid of. but wow had its own probelms: pvp balance was non existant for quite a while, certain classes or specs being simply unwanted in any form, raid dps being just mages and rogues for quite a while....but these things were evened out over time. I mean it must have dome something right: aft
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It used be a fun game, but the community is rotten and full antisocial d-bags.
Doesn't seem to be a problem for facebook
I'm thinking they have other problems:
1) The "all that matters is its new and technologically cutting edge" crowd has moved on. The same kind of people that watch formulaic action movies. Adding Monks isn't going to help with this crowd. They need smell-o-vision or 5.1 surround sound or some other new tech. Put it in google glasses so you can walk around while playing. Anything that would appeal to the "shiny and new" crowd.
2) Social / casual gaming is taking aw
Aha! (Score:2)
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Since when did WoW require skill?
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Heh, it required a little back in the days of 40 man raids but it was never that hard.
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Yeah, it required the 'skill' of being able to read the guide someone wrote on how to get through them.
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Re:yawn (Score:4, Informative)
In a blizzard survey of subscribers, The pandaren were the #1 requested expansion pack subject. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the majority of the WoW players don't.
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A perfect example of when it's a bad idea to give the customer what they want -- Homer's car also comes to mind.
Also, last time I was playing WoW back in the WotLK days, the majority of subscribers seemed to be happy with sitting around in general chat making Chuck Norris or Anal [whatever] jokes. This isn't a population of erudite people.
--Jeremy
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Just because millions of idiots want something, doesn't mean it should be done.
Beer cans with tits on them ?
Shotguns with bluetooth ?
Lawnmowers with a TV ?
Me, I want an expansion that undoes all the dumbing-down that's befallen WoW over the years. I would gladly pay $60 if it made the game fun again.
Liar (Score:5, Insightful)
If you wanted a non-dumbed down WoW you would be playing Everquest. WoW has ALWAYS been dumbed down. It was Everquest-light and it sold like hot-cakes to the twelve year olds that couldn't handle WoW or were spit out by the community.
Hence you got Barren-chat, a type of chat that would have had the ban-hammers flying in any hardcore game but is the staple for WoW.
Complaining that WoW got dumbed down is like complaining teletubbies lost their hard satirical edge. That Full House lost its black humor. That reality TV became boring.
It might very well be true on an absolute scale but when you are the bottom, digging down doesn't really make a difference anymore. When you are last in a race, stopping won't make you drop any more places.
Go play a real game. Here is a hint, if you encounter barren-chat, that ain't a real game. Real games have a population of 200k, 300k at most. WoW has 10 million.
And people wonder why democracy sucks.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea or isn't interesting, either.
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And from the people I know playing the beta, they are saying it's a huge letdown. I was excited but have since lost that excitement.
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I played the beta, I'm still excited.
My name in Omestes, I'm an Ares. Now we know each other, so your statement is false.
Sorry. Need more coffee (or less).
It isn't the second coming, it isn't a WoW killer, but it is a very fun game. It's 60 dollars, with no subscription. The GW2 fanboys did make some pretty silly and unrealistic expectations for it though. It is more of an evolution of the genre, than the revolution the fanboys were hyping. That, obviously, is superficially disappointing (every new th
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I played the beta for about forty hours at the weekend and I'm likely to take the first headstart day off work so I can start early on the real game.
It was over-hyped by some fanboys, but it's damn good fun with very little grinding, no monthly fee, and no 'uber' gear to make some players vastly superior to others.
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They're making a mistake not trying to beat ArenaNet to market, IMO.
Two different markets, really. Hardcore grinders won't like GW2, and GW2 players who hate grinding and don't want to pay to play every month won't like WoW.
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People who enjoy different thing the you are 'weak'?
You are an ass... worse, you are a sloppy thinker.
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EQ2? really? That's a broken game. I suspect you use the mechanic and graphic flaws to kill people, not any actual skill.