f13.net

Okay, so the stress test is my first chance to beta this game.  I've played for two hours, and my initial thoughts are:

Highly Unpolished.

Seriously, have they even played other MMOGs to understand some of the advances that have been made since 1998?

1. Character Creation - Easy and quick, but missing several key features.  No zoom key.  EXTREMELY LIMITED faces and hair styles and so on - about a half-dozen each.  And no clothing customization.

2. Interface - Strangely backward at times.  Mouse axis for up and down movement is inverted.  Autorun key is Num Lock.  NPC names not visible without selecting them.  Yes, you can change these things in the options... but who would suspect that "show UNIT names" referred to all NPCs?  Nevermind the fact that this should be the DEFAULT to begin with.

3. 60Hz, 60Hz, 60Hz.  My eyes bleed already.  No ability to set the refresh rate.

4. The backpack, inexplicably, does not show up in your character sheet like 99% of all other games, but instead is its own seperate button on the interface.

5. Right-clicking an equippable item from the backpack doesn't automatically equip it.  Instead, you have to drag and drop it to equip.  Thankfully you don't have to select the right slot, but still...

6. There doesn't seem to be any coding to accomodate lag at all.  Yes, I know it is a stress test, but I'm talking simple consistency checks.  For instance, I clicked in one room to sit down in a chair, ran to another room, and 30 seconds later I got teleported back to the previous room to sit down.  Talk about exploits waiting to happen!

7. Not enough of a directed experience.  I handled the initial quests easily enough, but then I had no other quests to do.  Plenty of guys hanging around with !s over their heads, but I guess I'm too low a level for them to give me a quest.  Of course, they won't SAY that... they just stand there, not saying anything, while I'm trying to distinguish between lag and a poor design.

8. So, sure, I could kill stuff to level up to get those quests.  Unfortunately, I'm level 2, and all the stuff around is level 5, or 6, or level 1s guarded by a level 5 or 6.  I tried killing a level 5 deer, and it healed faster than I could kill it.

9. Speaking of which, deer are level 5, but sheep are level 10?  Who came up with this?

10. I tried dragging a passive ability into my action bar, before I realized it was a passive ability.  Okay, fair enough.  But did it give me a pop-up message telling me I'm a dumbass?  No, it just did nothing, leaving me to try to figure out if I'm stupid, or if it's lag, or if I'm doing something wrong on the drag and drop.  

On a positve note, you get experience points for discovering new areas.  Kudos for that.

So, I'll play more later today, but so far I'm very unimpressed.

Bruce

I watched my buddy play this a little bit ago.

Lag didn't seem an issue. Dragging a passive action onto the hotkey bar DID come up with a message saying it was a passive action.

It was more polished than Horizons.

Perhaps then it's just some passive actions that don't work.  Or, perhaps you're mistaken.

It may be a more polished game than Horizons, but I will say Horizons interface is FAR more polished, if a bit overwhelming in its complexity.

Bruce

1. Their character customization is a bit lacking. Really however, all you will ever see of your character after level 10 is the face. The rest of your look will be defined by your gear.

The starting appearance is rather misleading too. The newbie characters look unimpressive. Once you get some gear on, you look better and cooler. Go check out the Tauren and Orc NPCs in Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff and see what I mean by this. The high end gear is definitely cool looking.

2. My mouse look wasnt inverted, and my NPC/monster names were on by default.

4. I like the backpacks like this, because sometimes I want to open my pack without opening my entire paperdoll.

6. The lag you mentioned, you didn't "teleport" to the chair. You actually never left the chair on the server, but were walking around on the map thanks to your client load. This happens in EQ and UO as well, even to this day. However it has been improved more in those games. No doubt the huge crush of stress testing is affecting this. I bet the server is also taking log files, which is going to give you huge lag gaps.

When I play on a regular beta server, this hardly ever happens. When it does, it is when the server is about to puke.

7. Not sure why you are having trouble with the direction of what to do. I found the quests very guiding. They take you from level 1 up eventually through the high levels. Some points in your levelling will have fewer quests, but generally you should have at least 1 quest.

You should get a quest telling you to go to a new area, when your quests in that area are about to all be finished. You get guided to new areas, in other words. It works rather well, so not sure why you have lost your way here. By sure you read the quests fully, and if you see a NPC with a yellow ! above their head then go get that quest.

You should be able to find stuff your level in the newbie area, and then eventually get a quest to do a cave or some such in the newbie area. Then you will get a quest that directs you out of the newbie area.

BTW my sister did the same thing with the passive abilities. They probably need more direction, but their isnt a manual yet so ok to that. She has submitted a few suggestions.

This game isnt for everyone. My sister isnt going to buy it. I am still undecided to be honest. I really want to check out EQ2.

It's not about polish, it's about a choice. Customization is surely reduced but to keep the game playable in large crowds and still mantain a style throughout the game.


Check the options in the text file (.WTF). I never play in full screen anyway. Windowed mode is way better.
Add this to the options of your launch icon: "D:\Games\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe" -windowed
Changing the path, obviously.


Really strange. It's really HARD to run out of quest at the beginning in the game. When you are high enough you should start to move out the newbie zone. In general the quests push you to do so.


I don't know if the server is bugged but I can reach level 5 in less than 30 miniutes. Going to level 3 is a matter of minutes and a pair of quests. Perhaps all the players flooding the world are messing the spawns but there should be PLENTY of low level non-aggro mobs.

Can you check how many are on the server? (while in the selection screen try to "change realm" it will show the number)


Sheeps are critters. No experience from them. You will meet mobs like boars from level 1 till the end. Just switching names and perhaps texture and dimensions.


Yeah, but is bugged and nerfed. You'll keep receiving useless exp. Getting 100 xp when you are level 15 and above is laughable.

I agree with Pineapple. The interface is wonderful in WoW and extremely polished. What you criticize are doubtful design choices that I find good.

Instead the completely messed and not in synch animation system, with all the bugs (stuck animations) is surely lack of polish.

What I mean is that the game IS unpolished. But exactly where you didn't comment.

And in fact that's the opposite problem. At higher level you'll hit repeatedly a wall. "Your quest log is full". Extremely annoying.

I had a feeling that the first time someone was critical about WoW that they'd get blasted.... even here.  I have to give SB credit for presenting his objective views knowing he'd get flamed for it.

Eh, I wouldn't consider any of the responses flames.  Some of Bruce's points seemed a bit petty or stuff I wouldn't even give a shit about.  And of course Hrose would counter, he's pretty infatuated with the game.  

This stress test is going to be a shitty medium for seeing what the game is like (except on launch day, heh heh).  The lag's going to be horrible throughout, the stupid will be high, and the population density will likely be unreal.  I doubt I'll leave with a good taste in my mouth, nothing as bad as AC2's, but still I don't expect to be blow away.

Well I wasnt replying as a flame. Just tossing in my .02 to his post. He does have some opinions that I think a few newbies will share, so that is important that Blizzard know this. First impressions are everything.

I personally think their new player areas are too small to handle their release crush. I also think they will not be able to avoid making their game resemble EQ very much in the high end game. This game wont be for everyone. I have my doubts too.

I'm just discussing. What SirBruce says about the interface is debatable. Other issues about the customization are well-known and again a choice.

He's right about the options. In fact I suggested him to look into the config file. A polished game avoids this.

But he seems to completely forget the rest. I consider the controls and the interface wonderful. For example the ability to control the movement pressing the right botton on the mouse and the camera with the left button.

My impression is that SirBruce is really trying hard to figure out something to criticize and he's actually finding nothing relevant. To the point that has to rant about default options.

I do not agree. It's good to keep things small so that the players can get comfy with the game. That's the purpose of a newbie zone. After two days the environment will be actually too big and it will become a problem.

Obviously this happens in every other game, but the issue is fixed after a few days, when the players will start to spread on the world. What I mean is that is more important to balance the world keeping your goal on the long distance. The important part is about the servers not crashing.

A good solution could be about instancing the newbie zones. So you solve both problems (overcrowd at release and desolation after few days).

It sounds like most of the complaints are "it isn't like other MMORPGs." Maybe that was part of the point. Inventory handling sounds a lot like other Blizzard games, for example.

When Fanbois Attack!

Yes and no. In Diablo the character window is different from the equipment window. But you can equip stuff just by using the equipment one.

In WoW Each bag can be opened separately (you start with one, then you can buy or loot different kinds of bags with different capacity) and you need to drag and drop to the character window to equip stuff.

So you need to cross the screen with the mouse and open both windows. Annoying.

During beta 2 you could just drag and drop an item on an empty bag slot to equip it. Feature that got discarded for absolutely no reason.

Whether the systems are good, and whether they are different, are two different issues.

If they are just bad, ok, they're bad. But the original post sounded more like different to me. How many times do you see your characters face up close?

Character creation screens often *feel* really cool, but make no real difference.

I would rather have a system where at each level there were a bunch of different things you could wear that looked different and were all effective. Anarchy Online seemed *really* good like that, every single person was decked out differently.

Most of character appearance is armor and weapons. If you can customize those, or have a a wide variety of useful options, that far outclasses things like eye color.

I have a new game. Hrose can't talk about WoW for the remainder of the stress test. I don't want to see a single solitary one of your arguments or opinions. Let people decide for themselves and shut your fucking fanboi mouth. You're on dangerous territory.

Edit: I'm dead serious about this. I want people to be able to form opinions without HRose stepping in -  so, HRose - you HAVE TO STOP.

Well, what about height?

They could have made a *little* effort at least to add the three types og heights that DAoC has...

Case in point: SWG. Despite the customization you can give your toon in creation, you're still going to look indistinguishable in the end. Last I checked, most of the players I saw were decked out in composite armor. The best you can do is dye your gear. Same with weapons: There's pretty much only one useful choice in each weapon line. Even Shadowbane, with it's god awful graphics engine, was better in this respect.

Thanks for the tip about the config file for the Hertz.  However, all those options should be in the GUI settings interface, and they aren't.  Furtheremore, there's no good reason to default to 60Hz when other games know my resolution can suport 85Hz.

I figured out part of my problem wih the "directed experience."  It might be specific to humans, as there's an early quest at the abbey than sends you down the road to a nearby village, which otherwise you shouldn't go to until you're level 5 or so.  So early on I missed all the early quests at the abbey, but then I went back and now I'm back on track with the quests.  Sounds like this is more of a specific quest problem than a general issue.

However, I have a far bigger issue with the game now.  It's World of WarCamp.  All the spawns are static, and the nebie areas are overloaded with people trying to camp mobs to do their quests.  Static spawns are a questionable design decision in today's generation of MMOGs, but if you're going to do it, you've got to have many many many times the spawn areas than they have currently.  They knew what kind of load the stress test and the launch would get... what did they expect?

Anyway, so far I'm not really getting into it.  And I'm not much for PvP, either, so I'm strongly suspecting I'll like EQ II better.  But, I'm going to give WoW the old college try for the next week until I make up my mind.

Bruce

I got about 1 hour to play an ork shaman.

Graphic very nice and smooth I did not notice any refresh rate issues and this is something that usually bothers me.

Character creation somewhat limited but acceptable because as with EQ2 and eq its the equipment that will really differentiate you from others. My ork after about 20 minutes of hunting looked very different than other people I saw just from items from quests and mob drops. At level 4 I already had 3 different pants 3 different shirts a few different weapon types.

Leveling so far is fast and furious got to level 5 in about an hour and most of that was running around looking for quest thingies.

I have to agree that I find it odd that the backpack is not connected to inventory but it took me all of 3 seconds to get used to it no big deal.

Lag so far for me was non existant. I saw no pauses/hiccups or server lag and was VERY shocked by that. Given the nut kicking they are taking it is purring like a kitten so far.

Not gotten far enough to really form much more opinions than that but so far so good I am pleasently surprised.


kaid

I am perfectly capable of forming opinions while other people express theirs. If it bothers you so much, just don't read what HRose writes. Everyone who wants to can just do that.
---

Anyway...I do agree height and general size would be a good thing to have. As far as basic character customization, the things that will last are width/height, racial characteristics (overall build, do you have a tail)...that kind of large feature. Maybe hairstyle and color if people don't wear helmets. But things like tatoos and eye color are really irrelevant in the end.

The mistake a lot of games make is at a given level their is one set of equipment that is clearly the best, so everyone ends up looking the same.

I'm being quite honest.  I'm casting a critical eye on things, I admit, but my honest impressions so far have frequently been more frustration than adoration.  The mechanics seem to be nothing new at all; it's all stuff we've seen before, but with none of the little flairs and touches and niceities we've come to see in 2nd generation MMOGs.  One can argue those do not often add much to the core gameplay experience, but the game still seems like a throwback to me.

Now that I'm back into questing I do like it; I enjoy consuming content via quests and the ability to choose your reward is great... although not so great when my two-hand wielding paladin had to take a shield as a reward with no other choice.  My larger complaint is there's not log of COMPLETED quests... so I can't look back and see what I did.  As a completeist, this is very important to me.  It may not matter to you, and that's fine, but it's a big thing for me.

Bruce

omfg i hate blizzard now they had to go and make a mmo chatroom and job instead of starcraft 2 gay ass broken genre i cant believe anyone likes to grind quests and kill monsters pointlessly for 12 hours

I dont see why so many games make everyone look so similar in the end.  Like Shadowbane for example.

to my knowledge 2 of the first big mmorpgs are the best ever at this, UO and AC.  You should be able to customise your appearance through dyes etc or at least there shouldnt be optimal or 'class' armour that everyone tries to get.

Yes, we have been spoiled by City of Heroes. I don't see this changing in WoW before release.



The interface is very easy to customize. I changed my autorun to R, and my /tell reply to Backspace, because I run a hell of a lot more than I reply to tells.

I actually really like that NPC and monster names don't appear above their head automatically. It's easier on the eyes, methinks.



Press B to open your backpack. Press Shift-B to open all your backpacks at once.



There were a lot of complaints from early testing that people were right-clicking to equip something while they had a vendor window open, and accidently sold what they were trying to equip.



This definitely sounds like a stress test problem. The normal beta servers do suffer from occasional lag ... not as bad as you describe here. Lag does seem to be getting worse, though, not better.



Looks like from your later posts that you figured this one out. If anything, I think WoW is TOO MUCH of a directed experience. Taking one character through the quests is exciting, but when you've been in beta since January and are on your fifth or sixth character, the thought of killing those same 12 boars again makes you sick to your stomach.



That was my first reaction as well, but then again I react that way to every MMORPG I play.

WoW is flawed and by no means revolutionary, but give it a bit of time and it gets under your skin.

Not as funny as the last gimmick, kthxbye.

Since MMORPGs are full of min/maxers, avoiding optimal armor is pretty difficult. You have to think about how to offer different sets of equipment that are all useful in their own way.

You might think "I'll offer one set of armor that raises attack power, and one set that raises defense power." But every attacker will choose A, and every Paladin type will choose B.

Part of that has to do with the fact that MMORPGs typically don't have a place for a jack of all trades. If you are the class that heals, all your equipment is plus healing. If you are the class that takes hits, all your armor is plus defense, etc.

I think if you start having mages have to defend themselves and bonk some people one in a while, and make paladins have to try to inflict damage every so often, you can make those choices a lot more varied.

If I were designing a MMORPG, I would try to make it so that every class would take hits, even if they didn't screw up. It just shouldn't be possible to totally avoid taking damage. (Obviously some would take hits more often than others.) And every class would have some use for long range attacks (or most, anyway) and the at least occasional need to jab something with a pointy stick.

As a mage, a choice between +magic armor and +defense armor gets a lot more interesting if you know those Kobold Archers you are going to be fighting will be gunning for you.

It's not just City of Heroes.  Compared to ever other recent-generation MMOG -- AC2, SW:G, CoH, etc. - it offers an extremely limited selection.  Fine, we can't specify our waist size and the length of our nose; how about having more than a half-dozen faces per race/gender?


I changed my interface as well -- not the point.  The point is if they'd learned anything from other games, their defaults would be more sane.  You have to realize that a lot of potential customers are stupid and if it's not immediately obvious to them they will not enjoy the experience.  Unlike most geeks, who enjoy trying to figure out what arcane steps they need to go through to bend something to their will.



Which just tells me right click to sell to the vendor was wrong.  Drag and drop, or some other interface paradigm, is preferred.  I will grant that one probably sells more often to vendors than one equips new items, but this sort of thing breaks established UI conventions.



I think some people missed my point here.  The point was not "OMG LAG" because that can be fixed.  The point was the program doesn't do a good job of HANDLING lag.  The solution to heavy warping is not only to eliminate lag so it doesn't happen, but also to do better coding so the amount of warping under heavy lag is minimized.

Bruce

I guess this isnt quite so releated to you but do /suggest and give them your feedback. They have stared countless times that they have people who read EVERY /suggest. Also, I know for a fact, several people, myself included, who have used this, and seen their ideas implemented in the next patch.

Is it perfict, no. But I am having a lot of fun.

I dont think any one here is gullable enough to not beable to form an opinion becuase HRose likes and enjoys WoW, and can refute a lot of Bruces points. Does it sound fanboi? a bit. But still, maybe a good mocking is in order, not threatening.

Numlock is the default autorun in EQ.  If you're targeting that market, it makes the most sense to use default keystrokes that are familiar to them.  In fact, I found most of it so familiar that I was frustated by things like the backpack not being on my toon interface, "I" not being inventory, and CTRL-<num> not swapping me through my hotkey panels.  (Though I'm getting used to and beginning to like the 'b' key thing. )  I agree that some things were changed from the 'conventions' just to be different.  That "I" thing really bugged me until I switched it.

Overall I'm finding the game just beautiful.  I took a whole hour off of questing just to wander around and explore. I much preferred Darkwood to the Night Elf starting city.  The tones are more earthen and 'feel' better to me. The newbie area/main city felt a little too 'toonish to me.

  My biggest complaint with the game is it feels hollow (At least at level 9). Like a big beautiful sugar shell. There's all these NPCs but you can't interact with them unless they're questers. For example, there was a night elf I found wandering between the largest city's (Darnassus?) druid/rogue training area and the lake.  He walked to the shore and sat down, but clicking on him produced nothing. I'd like some stories from NPCs like this, or even a "I can't talk, I'm on patrol" from the sentinels wandering around.

Overall I'm enjoying it, but after a 6 hour catassing session last night, I can't really see subbing to it long-term.  The criticisms I've seen that it's a single player game with other people seem to hold true.  I didn't have to group at all, for ANY quest and I was quite able to get my rewards/xp and get to level 9 PDQ alone.

Hrose--Where might you be taking your future posts about WOW?  PM me the links.  I want to keep up with what is going on in WOW.  Thank you.

That is pretty much my summation of WOW right there. It's Velius era EQ in gameplay design and technology.



That's the opposite of my experience. I felt like I was in a fully directed single player game. In fact, the intense directed experience frankly hurt my feelings of immersion a great deal. To me it had far too much direction.

Generally speaking, you don't get the quest to go somewhere else until it's time to move on. I never played human. I did orcs, night elves, undead, and, of course, gnomes. I remember one of them I got a quest that sent me to a far too hard area which turned out to be questionable directions that got me to the wrong place with the right, but higher level monsters.

I really didn't like the game. I had a full invite but I gave it back to the woman who gave it to me to pass on to another friend. I was bored after a single weekend.

I haven't played WoW, and I haven't seen it played.

That said, it galls me to see Bruce taking anyone to task about a shitty interface when he was one of the main WWII Online apologists out there.  If you want to point to shitty interfaces, lack of customization and bugs galore, look no further.

I understand that you had a financial dog in that fight, but really, your credibility is suspect after defending that abomination.

What happened to dynamic quest spawns? Is that only for a select few quests? If so, then as Bruce said, World of WarCamp.

I realize it is a stress test and there are a ton of people in the newbie areas, but the mobs needed for quests were woefully lacking and overcamped and when your main form of advancement is quests, then bottlenecks are that much worse. Not to mention combat has been less than engaging. SSDD.

I still enjoy the style and I do enjoy the quests. I kept rolling characters until I found a quiet newbie zone. This happened to be my Tauren. I was actually able to complete many quests and had quite an enjoyable time of it. So yes, I can see how this game can be fun, however, with no dynamic quest spawns and low mob population, I can see how other players could be a barrier to enjoyment. And in an MMOG, they are supposed to enhance the enjoyment. The problem is that, just like EQ, it's not worthwhile to group at low levels so consequently, nobody bothers and only gets in the way. I hope that Blizzard does a 3 day headstart for pre-orders as CoH did. It will save a lot of newbie irritation and overcrowding.

Overall, not bad, but not as "wow" as I expected. And those who boast the beauty and awe of the high level equipment... well, I'm not into phat lewt as a driving reason to play a game. Thank god there's some storyline in the quests. It still needs some more playtime, but it's pretty standard fare thus far.

DEER HUNTER ONLINE.

Oh, and goddamn fileplanet straight to heck.

I had a fairly enoyable time in WoW yesterday. I got in about 15 minutes after the account creation started and made my account, then logged in to a server with absolutely no lag at all. I greatly enjoyed the undead starting area, had some fun flavor text in the quest menus but it was mostly go here kill/get this and bring it back. I grouped for abit with a friend and that was kinda fun. Even though it was thoroughly over crowded I was able to finish all my quests in a reasonable amount of time also.

I think the undead area is just well polished. I started a troll hunter and a human paladin and found both their starting areas to be lacking. Quests not as easy to find and monsters not as easy to find to finish them. Overall I got my undead warlock up to about level 8 and had abit of fun.

IMO, compared to every major MMOG I have played WoW has a vastly superior default UI.  I found it very intuitive, and am happy it is customizable so it will have long term legs.

Sounds like things are too crowded when 10k people start on each server at once.  I presume that is one reason they are doing this stress test thingy in the first place.

I agree with Numtini that, if anything, the newbie experience is overly directed.  I really can't imagine anyone feeling lost at sea in WOW's "my first mmog" style noob game.

Customization is weak and always as been.

If you are upset that WoW has nothing revolutionary, you haven't ever read anything about the game ever.  WoW is not intended to be revolutionary, it is squarely aimed at being "EQ done right."  No HAM system here, sorry.

It's a single player game for everyone until 20, and if you want it can be a single player game to the level cap.   WoWs legs entirely depend on the PvP (not implemented) high level group instances (which have been A+ so far, but there probably won't be enough to keep your attention forever after hitting the cap) and raid content (not implemented) so that's all a toss up right now.

I think it was Schild's spheres of a MMORPG - combat, economy and social.  The latter two may be too early to comment on - what about the combat?  Do you find you have variety?  Or just keep fighting the same way?  Does mob AI offer any challenges?

It's overcrowded when only 1800 people start on a server at once and not all those players are level 1's either. They've got some work to do for that for release.

EQ "done right" sounds about right, but I'm not sure they did it right just yet.

No raid content yet? Only instances for high levels? Ouch. They better push back to November 2005. ;)

As for numbers, I heard that there were ~10k accounts per stress server, but that may be pulled from someone's ass.

On the raid content, they say that they only plan on releasing a couple raids for external beta so as not to spoil them.  Whether this means "we only plan on releasing a couple raids for external beta so as not to spoil them" or "we only plan on releasing a couple raids for external beta because we won't have any more done and hope to get them finished before you all start hitting level 60" is up to the reader to decide :)

No raid content is in the beta yet (though I guess you could "raid" higher level instances if you wanted).  The raid/supergroup/wheteveryoucallit group linking system that allows you to form raids is not in yet.

I have not played the game, only watched my buddy play it for about an hour. So I can't really tell you how it plays.

But I can tell you that I saw nothing in there that made me in the least excited about playing the game. That's generally not a good sign for me. I saw him play Diablo, and never had a desire to play that game at all. Watching gameplay should at least entice me to play, and this didn't.

EQ done right does appear to be a solid, fair assessment of what I've seen so far.

It's Everquest combat.  Or at least it is if you play a Taurren druid to level 8.

It could have been primetime West Coast numbers for all I know. I do know that last night at ~11:00 pm EST, the highest populated server was hovering between 2700 and 2800. The rest were between 1800 and 2000 per server.

They might benefit from removing some of the servers for the stress test, although a  server with 2000+ players on it was wicked lagged at around 7 pm EST. Actions tooks around 3 to 5 seconds to complete. It seemed to be this way regardless of the number of players in the immediate vicinity so the whole server was taking a good beating. I believe they may have done some optimizations on the fly though because the performance a couple hours later with 2700+ players was smooth as butter.

Anyone else notice that shamen, hunters and rogues have next to no skills/spells purchasable? Are these classes really that incomplete still? And they want to release in November? Warlock seems nicely rounded out though. Looking forward to snagging some of the nastier sounding spells.

Same with druids on the skills front. The amount of spells seems decent as you level up.  About one or two new per couple of levels. By 8 I have a decent retinue to rely on.

Um I am not sure what you are talking about with no spells/skills purchasble. I played my shaman to level 6 last night and bought 2 or 3 spells. Shaman do not have their talents in place yet however.

Rogues DO have their full range of skills for purchase as well as their talents implemented.

kaid

Name, job?

That's kinda what I was talking about. If you go to a shaman trainer, there are only about 8 spells listed total. If you play a warlock and look at their list, they have around 30+ spells in their list. I don't know if this is a bug and all the spells aren't supposed to be listed right from the start or if there are only just a few shaman spells all in all.

Except, no.

Play any of those classes into the high teens, and you will have plenty of abililties. As for skills, there are a number of very useful tradeskills to blow your skill points on (I am constantly watching my skill point total, waiting to reach the next plateau to get the next level of skinning/leather/alchemy/etc.)



The trainers in the n00b areas have a very limited selection, only about 8 levels worth. Once you venture out to the larger settlements, trainers have the whole enchilada of stuff you can do, all the way up to level 55 (you can't buy them yet, of course, but you can shop for the future).

Being a druid is extremely expensive right now, because you not only have to buy all your normal spells, but all the abilities for your shapeshifting forms as well. Druid = broke. However, Blizz has promised to change this soon, and we will gain abilities from questing.

Be patient, and soon you'll have more spells and skills than you'll need.

As for combat ... I think with any kind of combat against AI, you settle into a groove and stick with what works. **shrug** Again, nothing revolutionary here.

I've heard the term EverQuest 1.5 thrown around quite a bit, and I think that is a pretty accurate way to describe World of Warcraft.  Is that a bad thing?  IMO it's not.  I'm having a great time playing.  I'll write up something more detailed later.

eH?

That's from the Ultima games. You could interact with all the NPCs in those games by typing "name" and "job" to find out their name and job and if they were important NPCs that would start up conversation threads which you could traverse by typing in additional keywords. Your comment about wanting more interaction with NPCs reminded me of the NPCs in those games.

What does that gall you?  WWII Online had a shitty interface.  The second interface was only marginally less shitty.  A third interface is in development, but it won't be perfect, either.  Your point might be valid if I was arguing for "special pleading" but I'm not.



I think you're confusing two very different issues.

WoW is in beta.  My posts point to legitimate problems with the game that should be addressed before release.  This is part of my role as beta tester.  I don't mind people posting to explain this aspect or that, but "defense" posts -- basically, saying that the criticisms are invalid -- aren't particularly helpful.  For instance, pointing out that GUI problems can be fixed in a text config file is helpful, but that doesn't invalidate the point that the GUI needs to integrate those various things.

WW2OL, on the other hand, had been released, and my posts at the time were not a "defense" of the product at all, other than to say the game wasn't for everyone.  Most of my posts were along the "helpful" variety; i.e. telling people what 3 buttons to press to fire a rifle sighting down the barrel rather than from the hip.  I was never "defending" that it was too many keypresses; in fact, I thought it was 1 too many.  My defense, such as it was, came in telling people, "Hey, try it, if you don't like it, it's probably not a game meant for you."  I don't mind that sort of response for WoW either, although I doubt its sincereity unless their intention is to really is to specifically target those customers  who enjoyed playing early-EQ1.  And before anyone says that is their intention, well, they aren't here to say so, so you'll understand if I don't take your word for it.

Bruce

Yup.  All about Bruce.

So, let's see..What "negatives" have I learned so far?

1) It's not revolutionary. It's EQ 1.5.

2) Level 6 noobs only have about 3 skills

3) Camping isn't as viable as much as quests are. It feels like a single player game.

4) I can't gossip with every NPC

5) 6 faces per race

6) autorun is "TAB"

I'm not a fanboi or apologist, but c'mon guys. Everyone around here has dished out some good criticism on other games. Now it sounds like you were just expecting way too much.

Ah. Thanks for the explanation.  I didn't get the first 'puter until '93 and it was for school more than gaming.  I missed the whole Ultima era.
 
 


It's only been a few hours of one day.  Most criticizm of single player games comes after the first week, and MMOs after the first month.  I wouldn't expect anything ultra insightful or damning at this point.  I'm sure there's flaws that'll be bitched about just like every other MMO, you just won't hear about them quite yet.  That's why most of the more jaded among us wait 5-6 months post-release before buying.

So far WoW reminds me more of EQ than DAOC does. The environments are gorgeous but the game is boring as fuck. The mobs spawn in at the same place and same time. The loot is variable so if you need 4 batwings you probably have to kill 8 bats. Combat consists of casting the same spell over and over again.

Some things are really odd. Such as the inventory and paper doll being separate windows. My mage doesn't get any new spells until level 4 or 6 or whatever. I start with two spells and that's it, the next one I get lets me summon food and drink, though I haven't bothered to figure out what they do yet.

The quests I've had so far consist of "Kill 4 bats, then kill 4 rats". Perhaps it gets better later on but I'm failing to see the revolutionary, or even evolutionary gameplay and ideas.

Has anyone set a betting line on HRose's head exploding? Over/Under is midnight Sunday.

I played for about 30 minutes last night and they need to work on the newb experience when there are 100 people camping 30 mobs.

I see lots of posts about EQ1.5 or EQ done right. To me this is not so. MY EQ experiance is some what lacking I will admit, ad I only played for a month before the downtime made me insane. I would think it is MUCH more like DAoC done right.

A few things I would like to address.

1) grouping / single player online:
At early levels, solo is a bit more viable, because the mob killing exp of a quest give you a good chunck of your level. Once you hit lvl 12 or 14, and move out from your first "Real Town" to the second town. The quests get a bit harder, and it makes grouping much more fun. You CAN still solo most of the quests, but its more fun, and easer to group.

2) AI, and combat:
At higher levels the mobs DO get a lot more interesting. Yes, a lot still just "rush, attack, dead" but a lot more will act like their class. For example, caster mobs will do their best to keep distance from you, using roots and snares, then casting from range. Shaman type mobs will drop nasty totems, then root you, and run out of range. Some Mobs, when reaching half life, will yell for friends, or even run off to get their nearby friends. In these cases, you best has a snare ready. Is it the best AI around? no. But its a lot better that the early level mobs.

3) UI:
I have never had a problem with the UI. I LIKE how backpacks work. Also, of note, there is a program called cosmos, its sort of a UOAssist, and it is KILLER. The blizzard dev team has taken note of this, and has been slowly adding the features from cosmos to the UI eash patch. http://www.thottbott.com You will love it. More so at higher level for the added bars and stuff. As a warrior, typically the call with the fewest skills in a mmog, I have 4 FULL bars of skills and stuff I use in combat.

4) Social and ecconemy:
Again, this is addressing higher levels, and maybe needs work. Latesly I have seen a lot of people gathering at Orgrimmar (the orc city) because thats where the auctioneer is. It is a main social hub and trade hub. in the later levels, crafting stuff is really badass, but a lot needs rare drop materials to make, so there is a lot of material trading. Can the ecconomy support a full trader character? Probably not, but you could sure spend a LOT of time doing it.

He started the thread, munchkin.

And that changes things how?  The thread title still suggests a WoW discussion, not a SirB one.

I'm arguing semantics here, but comeon:

MY first 2 hour IMPRESSION of WoW. It's about Bruce and his IMPRESSIONS of a game. Don't make me pick sides like that. Please.

I'm confused. How does this not sound like Everquest? Can someone anywhere please give us hard proof that they have completely removed themselves from being an Everquest clone?

I'm starting to believe that the problem with MMOGs is that they are compared to EQ because it is so far reaching. There's no real way to not be an EQ clone. Hell, even Eve Online had some EQishness going on. And That's Just Sad. Perhaps EQ is the best we can hope for...I'm going to slit my wrists now, kthx.

edited to add that second bit.

I don't think that anyone is expecting "too much".  I think that given the HUGE reputation and cash flow assets that Blizzard has that they had an opportunity to do something more than produce "EQ_only_better".

I am sure that WoW will be an improvement over EQ in many ways... I just think most of us here want something more interesting.  That's why the disappointment.

I'm starting to believe that the problem with MMOGs is that they are aimed at people with no particular abilites but lots of time.

Every possible challenge (the need to "twitch," the need to group, the penalty of death, the need for close coordination between group members, etc.) is simply seen as a barrier to fun that needs to be removed.

I remember in CoH where I picked up a timed mission.  Right afterwards, something came up and I had to log off for the day.  I logged back on the next day, knowing that the mission was a bust.  I went back to the NPC; she told me that I hadn't really completed the mission but I still did a good job.  

???

Then she gave me some XP, and that was the last time I ever cared about a mission in CoH.   Welcome to the feelgood society, where everybody wins.

If I could ask, and this is serious though it's obviously also a slam, but where do you get the .5 from. I saw 1.0

The graphics are better.
It seems to be more quest driven.
It's not Everquest 1.

Oh, wait, I see what you're doing here, heh.

I would have to see what you were talking about in the game to explain what was going on. The shaman spell list I have seen had about 50 to 60 spells in it. Of course I could not buy most of them because I wasnt high enough level. But they were there.

Maybe that one trainer is just for newbie spells.

Considering the millions that the industry has spent on game after game that turned out to be "UO done worse" (SWG) or "EQ done worse" (every other major game), either one of those games "done better" would be a huge accomplishment.  Sad but true fact: if either UO or EQ were released today they would be the best games put out in 5 years.

The first instance you come across is about level 18? Something like that. Then you get more instances every few levels. Most instances have more then one quest to be done within them.

An instance is very neat.

Spoilers below this line! ****

What is really cool is when you do the non-standard "get this many of X" quests. Some quests are escort, some are defense, some are offense. Some quests present stories right in front of you. NPCs act out part of the story, or ghost images at least.

I did an escort quest a few weeks ago. As I caught up to a travelling dwarf that I was supposed to find, he was being ambushed by thieves. I saved him just in time, and he thanked me and we continued on our way as I protected him to his destination. This was all out in the open, and scripted but it sure didn't feel that way. It felt like I really came up on a tense situation and made a difference.

Star Wars did this on a quest from that island west of Tyrena to Tyrena. (I think the spelling for that is correct). Anyway, it's nothing new. It was however one of the neater quests and thank god Blizzard is at least taking some of the good ideas.

I don't see what's he doing. Clue me in.

Besides, others said it's EQ 1.5, not me. I'm just using it to be sarcastic. The fact that it isn't revolutionary isn't a good criticism IMO. If it isn't at least evolutionary, or worse, reverts to even poorer design concepts than what we have known, then there's a problem.

EQ has had escort quests for a long time too.  I don't think anyone was saying they were OMG REVOLUTIONARRY!!!11!!

EQ - Camping
WoW - Questing

EQ - Downtime
WoW - No downtime (or so little you dont even notice it, except the zepplins and boats, and flying. Longest travel time on any of the three, 6 minutes)

EQ - Job
WoW - Fun
(but I guess this is how you play a game)

EQ - Rip my eyes out rather than play
WoW - Cant wait to play

EQ - Devs dont listen
WoW - Devs make changes baised on feedback from players. Not forum whining. (maybe because its beta)


EQ - Forced grouping
WoW - solo is very viable as well as grouping.

EQ - NO real PvP (except pvp server)
WoW - Battlegrounds, and consentual PvP on regular server.

You stress testers may not believe me, but he is right about this. WoW is NOT World of Warcamp.

I've played WoW for 9 months, and have never once had to wait for another camp of people to kill a mob before I get "my turn".

I think you're just experiencing the thrill of playing the game with 10,000 of your closest friends all at the same time. Give the game a week, those n00b areas will clear out, and you'll have no problems finishing the quests you need.

Okay but we are considering the GRAPHIC. Just set different equipment with similar stats and we will be allowed to not look the same without loosing the min/max.


It's another choice to make the game always soloable. As you go up there will be plenty of quests that you cannot solo (elite) and the fact that you can manage the situation is a strength.

What I mean is that you aren't forced to sit down to find a group that may or not arrive. Instead you group based on the situation. For example I often find other players camping the same quest I'm doing, so we group.

WoW is different from other games where you sit down on a place of choice to then start a game session, more or less in the same group till you log out. Instead grouping is occasional. You join one for a quest or two and then disband to follow your own path.


The world is designed in this way. Mobs spawn in a specific point because that corner of the world is where they have the story, where their homes are built and so on. In WoW you don't have a general random terrain with mobs casually appearing. Instead every corner fits in a sense and a story.

There are wandering mobs and I've seen also an NPC that walks between four different zones. but it's still a game based on camping. There are both wandering mobs and standing still mobs.

I think dynamic quests are an exceptional case. I don't think I have ever encountered one.
--

This aside, all the issues have been obviously commented over and over and over during beta. Blizzard screwed a lot more than it solved. Quest experience was higher before, graphic was better and the general pace of the game was better balanced. But the game isn't really changed.

Many of the issues you report are shared by everyone. I'm collecting the various problems and I think I'll write a post on the beta forums with the list of the major issues and suggest possible solutions.

But the conclusion is that this test is a success. It isn't even a launch and peoples are ranting about the keymap. This is good, the servers seem holding and we are probably a few months away from the real launch. Most of the gameplay issues can be solved without going beyond the aim of the game.

The result of all this is that the reaction is "as expected". There are players that like the game and players that find it not interesting. But this is completely different from a broken game. WoW delivers what it choosed to be. Its ambition can be disappointing but it's a good game inside those limits. It isn't full of broken promises or flawed mechanics.

No, World of Warcraft doesn't make coffee but it's more polished, bug-free and stable than SWG at release and even right now, after more than a year.

And long ago I wrote (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/view/162) about those issues:

<cough>

Is it too late to take the under?

Doh! The pundits are going to take a beating on this one.

There is SOME camping in WoW such as when a boss mob that isn't in an instance needs to be killed. However, I've not run across any of the "this mob drops awesome loot" kind of camping.




totally agree.



Agreed however we haven't seen if they'll keep listening after beta. However, the fact they listen to beta testers is encouraging.



At low levels. At high levels all the good equipment is in instances and you cannot in any way solo instances unless you're high enough above them that what you get from them is mostly useless anyway. This would be my biggest complaint with WoW right now is how the high end game turns into the standard "I can't get jack shit done by myself" type of gameplay.



Not a positive for me to be honest. I don't enjoy PvP as it is time-invested based rather than skill-based.

WoW is very much an enjoyable, modern EQ. Some aspects of that I like. Some I don't. For instance, I am so sick of the taunt, dps, heal triad in the EQ mindset I could scream. However, for now I am stuck with it and for the moment WoW has the best implementation of this design I've seen.

As for the various interface bitches..meh. I find the interface just fine personally.

Why, oh why can you not just STOP. Do I need to make a forum just for you so you can stand on your soapbox and just vomit everywhere around yourself? Tell me what I can do, to keep you from talking about that fucking game.

Hey Morph,

EQ = 5-6 years old
WoW = Not out yet, and only improves upon what EQ already did.

What's your point with all  that crap?

Edit: Confused the dates of EQ and UO.

My point was just that despite the surface similarities, the games are much more different than WoW = EQ1.5

I think the point was obvious. Improving on something is good. It's better than doing something the same, and better still than doing something worse.

An improvement over something decent is...something better. It came out later, it's better...what more do you want?

Tons of great games are just better versions of older games...nothing wrong with that.

Even though the systems for kills and quests in WoW work fairly well, it still makes me think the same thing all mmos make me think. 'Man, this game would be sooo much better if there weren't any other people.'

So someone please bring on the single player mmo like games!

http://www.morrowind.com/

If you have a PS2, try looking for the .hack RPGs: Basically, you play a person playing a character in a fictional MMORPG, and need to find out about the unknown people running the game in the game.

I played both of them and don't like either of them. Here is what im trying to say to make a single player mmo. Take WoW for example.

Firstly leave the game mostly like it is now, except make everything soloable and remove the other people. All the instances and raids and such can be completed with one person. Possibly add other things to make them harder though.

Update it regularly like a normal mmo through patches, and charge subscription like normal. Hopefully because they don't have to run servers they can concentrate more on making content.

Thats pretty much all there is to it.

Things I'd change though is of course make more storyline elements but never give the game an 'ending'. I'd add a real storyline arc for Horde and Alliance as well a full storyline arc for each and every class. Class quests are more fun to me, and I would of rather they made more quests specific to class then just generic.. Its more work but it makes it more fun and personalized.

Something sorta like Fable, yes? After all, WoW would be neat as a single-player, but the world would need to feel more alive in terms of how NPCs act.

I'd agree with the latter, the world isn't deep enough for single player play, but my problem was I saw it as mostly a single player game anyway. If all grouping means is a random invite to zerg the boss on a quest, you might as well just make him killable by a single player and take the whole thing offline.

On camping vs. questing. After a weekend of doing the quests, I decided the difference was camping vs. travelling. I felt like I was spending far too much of the game running to a mob location to kill them. And less time than I did fighting in an old style EQ camp. Maybe it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other, but compared to a LDON/AO type mission, either questing or camping comes in behind missions as a game mechanic.

Since I've not played WoW and have given my beta key away, I can't really comment on this game with any sort of experience.  I actually just stopped in to say that HRose makes me hot and shivery at the same time.

Well, I'm bored of it already.   Though, given my recent stint with SWG, and how I'm going back to playing FFXI, I apparently have no taste.

I think what bothers me the most about WoW is that the gameplay isn't quite as involving as I would like at lower levels - not enough options yet.   I'm burning out at lower levels because I don't have the patience to slog my way to higher levels where the abilities I need now are.   About the most interesting classes are Warlock and Druid, in my opinion, but even they don't have quite enough toys to keep me interested enough to run over and do the next quest anymore.   In other words, they strung the carrots out too far - I need more carrots on the onset to keep me going long enough to get to the later carrots.

I'd like to get the Druid up to level 20, but right now I'm in a state of mind that can't get him logged in at level 11.   I've got bear form.  Between now and 20, I'll get cat form, a bunch of upgraded attacks, and maybe a couple more spells and attacks.   That's not enough.

Hm.. rogue is a pretty damn good progression. Not only that but it's incredibly fun.  I've never had much fun as a melee (which is my fav) in other MMOs, but they're really fun to play in WOW.  New abilities or upgrades every even-numbered level.  I've hit 14 and just got my first 'bleed' ability.   It seems the 'generic' classes of Other fantasy MMOs are really, really well defined. (Warrior, Priest, Rogue, Mage) while the hybreds and alternate characters need some serious love & expansion.

Hmm, if the progression tree is interesting, maybe I'll give the Rogue a second look.   I did like the looks of those combos...

Might as well make the best out of this 7 day free Tri^H^H^H^H^H^H^HBeta Stress Test.

I know what you mean, I'm trying to get a few chars to 10 just to see if it's worth playing them higher (for now).  I almost wish it had been spaced every level instead of every two levels, because it starts taking longer and longer to go through a pair of levels.

I'm now level 28 and the time to ding a new level is between 4-6 hours, depending on the pace. I'm surely not a minmaxer but I'm going quite fast, I suppose.

You can get infos with the /played command.

Yes, so about 12 hours for new skills.  I guess compared to other games thats not too bad, but I still feel that it should've been 2 skills a level instead of 4 every 2 levels.  That way when you go to town to sell/trade/quest you can be like, oh shit, that's right I leveled!

You're going to be saying this about the beta of another extremely high-profile game very, very soon. And WoW will come out smelling like roses in comparison.

You don't know the meaning of slow, option-free progression yet.

Ah, yes. Leave it to SOE to continue the tradition in EQ2. Can't hardly wait... no... really...

Having a hard time getting myself logged in anymore.

Some general sentiments I'm getting out of WoW:

• There needs to be more grouping.  There's little "social" hook here, depriving the game of purpose consideraby.  I'd enjoy this game a lot more if other people wanted to play with me.
• Abilities are spread out too much on the leveling ladder.  Even Everquest gave you more than just upgrades at a quicker rate than this.
• Leveling slows down waay too much at level 8-10.   The gameflow is all off at that point.  (This would lessen the last issue's impact considerably.)   Maybe it feels better at higher levels, but not where I'm at.
• Most Quests are not feeling epic enough.   Fetch does not an epic quest make.
[/list:u]
In the end, I'm feeling much the same way about WoW that I was about CoH: Great game, poor MMORPG.   Actually, CoH retained me considerably longer, perhaps because it had such a radically different approach.

I'll probably be in a few times before the 7 day stress ends to see if things improve if I can get myself to level up a few times.   I'll also probably give the game a shot during open beta to see if they improved it by then.

Before the last Patch Of Fanboi Death, the beta boards were full of complaints from people saying exactly the opposite, that levelling was way too fast.

So, armor was severely nerfed in this last patch, which has slowed down levelling do the degree that you can't take on as many mobs as you used to before having to rest.

Blizzard never came out and officially said it was a bug, so I think they purposefully went to an extreme to see how far they could push the numbers, and I am guessing they will ease back again on the next Big Patch, which will make levelling faster again.

Still, even with the way it is now, WoW levelling seems far faster than CoH, and you get abilities at a much, much faster pace. In WoW I'm constantly readjusting my hotbars because I'm trying to juggle all the abilities I use, even at low levels.

I am playing CoH and what I don't understand is why our "guild leader", who downloaded the client for the stress test and has tried WoW - is not still playing.

He found little difference between EQ and WoW although the latter is "prettier" (albiet, how much play time has he really had to arrive at this conclusion).  For him, he is continuing with CoH.

When you level in WoW - I gather you do not assign any attribute points?

What class are you playing? Remember Talants are only active for 4 classes right now. And starting at lvl 10 you get one talante point per level. These are equilivent to the diablo 2 skill points, just the skill trees are a bit smaller. This helps with not having many abilities.

As a Warrior, a class often considered to have the least few abilities in roleplaying games. I have all four of my hotbars filled with skills and abilities that I am constantly using in combat.

I do agree there is a sucky time around lvl 6-10. Those are the only levels I didnt have that much fun playing. I also think this depends on what starting area you choose via your race. The Night elf area for instance, I had no touble with these levels except for 8. Where as in Undead lands, 5-7 was a pain.

Can I get some salsa with that talante? Ho Ho Ho, I just couldn't help myself. ^_^

I suspect that there's a part of truth and a part of legend. It's something that exactly repeats with EACH patch.

From a side it's true that from March the experience is changed for the worst but not to the level of the rants. In particular with my warrior I really noticed little changes before and after this last patch. The bigger problem is about the elite mobs that are now doable only when they stop to give you experience. For the rest the nerf is nowhere near the complaints, at least in my case.


I'm having big problems in fact. The tools I need as a simple tank are more than I can fit on the bar.

That explains it.  I'm playing a Druid right now, and I know I've got zilch in the way of Talents, but three talent points kicking around doing nothing.

Looks like it's time for me to research which classes have talents (http://12.129.232.213/thread.aspx?fn=wow-stresstest&t=10379#Post10379) and play one of them instead.

Talents are a specialization mechanic. They *rarely* offer new gameplay.
For example on my warrior I've rised the damage/effects of styles, % to get a critical hit and only two level ago I got a spell that let me attack a target and double the damage to another one nearby.

But talents don't generally change the gameplay. I visit the trainer no more than once every three levels and most of the times I just get power ups of old styles. The rewards and hooks are mostly item-based and, luckily, I'm having a lot of fun in the game *despite* the hooks. I personally enjoy the game for what it is aside the treadmill. Yesterday I visited another instance with a group and it was a blast (before the server died).

And I even lost a /roll fron an awesome turtle armor... (dropped from a big turtle mob named Gameraah or something similar)

I would recomend Rogue, if you like that style of class, they are VERY powerful right now. And for 7 days, you could have a good time.

Warriors are fun, I absolutly LOVE playing my warrior. He is my favorite character form any level baised MMOG. So much versatility. They ARE pretty plain untill around lvl 20, when you get duel wield, and some more skill points under your belt to learn 2h sword, 2h axe, and 2h mace. Charge is the best skill EVER given to a warrior class.

Priests are very good if you like healing, and you can spec your talants in a more offinsive line (shadow) with the high talents giving you abilities, like Shadow Form, where you turn in to a shadow, take 20% less damage, do 20% more damage with shadow spell, but cannot be healed. Priests are ALWAYS needed in groups. In PVP they can be very nasty with several feer spells, good damage spells. Holy Word Shield, and heals. Also a stamaina buff.

Mages are cool becasue they can make food and water, and never have to pay for it. Luss you never have downtime. Mages can also make portals to the main faction cities later on. They have big damage. There is a bug with the spirit  mana regeneration, so I culd think a low level mage with out a big mana pool could be very frustrating to play. Also, they suffered a HUGE nerf last patch. They are still very viable, but that tells you how overpowered they where last patch.

Let me know if you need any mre info.

this push I am a lvl 45 Undead Warrior. I just got my mount, and DAMN. It is so killer.

This might help put in perspective how much fun I have in this game, at all levels.

I am actually looking forward to the next character wipe, just so I have a chance to try out a new class. I could start a new charatcre, but I want to concentrate on one at a time. I do think at retail I will play a Undead Warrior though.

Gamera? Is Godzilla in the game as well? Fucking Blizzard.

There's a ton of similar references out there. So many they spawned a 15-page thread I'd link to, but the bliz boards seem to be fuxored at the moment.

Can I have his stress test key, then, or anyone who doesn't like WOW for that matter?

Did you just register to ask someone for a cd key for a stress test? What are you thinking?

If you don't want your stress test key, I really want to play, so email me at paulmccartney2008@yahoo.com

Lay off those scooby snacks, there buddy.  I know the colors are pretty but you're about to be spanked very, very hard with that newspaper.

You don't understand. I need World of Warcraft to live.

See, if 2/3 of the world wants to play WOW then I have to, too.

http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=setandget&tp=118831&poll_id=0&category_id=20&warned=y

Die.

Hey no fair. The stress testers get NAMED servers. Boo.

...

Heh, that's a good one. Looks like there's a bug in the server count decrement code and it overflowed (wrapped around) an unsigned long int (2 ^ 32 = 4294967296).

Sheesh, I would think a former member of the Beatles would be able to pull enough strings to get his own Beta invite.

"And in the end,
The l33t you take
Is equal to the l33t you make..."

I haven't read anything in this thread yet, but I just got in about 3-4 hours of play in before the servers went down.

My impressions so far:

-The engine seems to be relatively solid performance wise. I cranked the res up to 1280x960 and maxed all the details (minus the water, which can't be turned up for some reason) and get a rock solid 50-60FPS regardless of how many people are on screen.

-Character creation kinda sucks. You get sex, race, facial type, facial hair, skin color...and that's about it I think. So every warrior is the same hulking muscle head.

-I'm level 7 now, and so far every single quest has been either FedEx-ing stuff or "Bop X monster". Blizzard also made sure to make the monsters that drop quest items rare as possible so everyone ends up camping their spawns.

-Players can kill NPCs from enemy factions. This proved annoying since there were a group of level 15+ orc players that kept running around in the newbie areas (level 6-10 area to be specific) slaughtering NPCs and anyone with PVP on.

Eventually a massive group of newbies would chase them down and overwhelm them, but they'd just respawn and come right back.

That's something that bugs me.  They have "Kill X things" quests, where X is the number of stuff you need to kill.  Okay, good.

But they also have "Collect Y drops" quests, where Y drops of a specific mob or group of mobs.  But the actual drop rate is som rate Z.  So you have to kill Y*Z mobs, but it's RANDOM, so sometimes you have to kill more and sometimes you have to kill less.  And that's highly annoying.  I had to kill like 50 dragon whelps to get 6 underbelly scales; whereas other people only have to kill 15 or so.  Why not just make the quest "kill 30 dragon whelps" and if you want to make the character bring back scales for the sake of story, just make it drop every time?

Seems like you are needlessly frustrating the player.

Bruce

This is a big problem, not only for what you write but also because it's a mechanic that stongly discourage grouping.

I hope they'll fix at least the group part and allow the item to be shared between the players in a group. It will improve the situation a lot.

Often the quest items will reproduce for groups.  I don't know if this works for something like Spiderweb Silk, being a quest unique drop that randomly drops and you need to collect multiples of.   However, I do know that this works for singular items such as a journal that's needed to be recovered that drops 100% of the time off a dead named mob.   That journal will preproduce for each member of the group that searches it.

However, I have noticed that kill tasks are not shared across a group very well.    First thing I did when going into WoW was team up with a friend of mine.  We took a quest hat involved killing two kinds of newbie mobs, attacked those newbie mobs with a passion, but *the counter wouldn't go up*.   Soloing, however, it worked fine.   Either we were targetting similar named, but different mobs than the quest required, or it simply doesn't share kills across the group for kill counter quests.

This is the aspect of WoW that's probably going to ruin the game for me. Griefing bothers me to no end. And I intensely dislike PvP that's all about gear/levels, numbers, and some sort of arbitary rock/scissor/paper class matchup so saying "well you can just fight back" just doesn't cut it for me.

Blizzard has said (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=217670#Post217670) that this sort of conflict is going to be part of the "PvE" servers which to me is stupid. While they have in many ways improved upon what EQ has done, in this area they've taken a huge step backwards. It's clear that there are people who enjoy griefing and will do so given any opportunity. This crap about "greatly punish"ing killing important NPCs like quest givers and transportation merchants isn't going to do squat to deter the hard-core griefers.

As an example of how Blizzard hasn't learned from EQ, think back to when SoL was released (for those of you who played back then). The shard "giver-outers" that allowed you to teleport to Luclin were, when originally released, killable NPCs. As you can imagine, they were being ganked on a regular basis making it difficult to get to Luclin and SOE quickly had to patch the game to make them invulnerable. Now in WoW they are going to allow people to kill the gryphon and bat rider trainers which means they are rarely going to be up in the border cities once griefers have leveled high enough to be able to kill them on a regular basis. And don't even get me started on allowing people to kill quest NPCs. Argh!

They should really patch it up so that the deeper you go into hostile territory, the tougher NPC opposition you're going to run across.  In fact, I bet that this eventually will happen.   However, in the meanwhile, I've noticed that the guards hanging around the newbie area seem to vary widely in level.   The guards in the Dwarven starting area are level 75.  The guards in the Night Elf starting area are level 15-20.   Which is probably why orcs are running rampant there.

Lack reward for taking down lower level players should stem grief play a bit.   However, it's still annoying.

Yet, these kind of shinanigans are probably the lead thing that would make WoW's otherwise humdrum quest repetition and poor group support interesting in the long run.

I was with a raid last night from the Barrens on Tichondrius into the southern NE territory. The guards' levels were listed as ?? and there were a lot of them.  They managed to decimate a group of @30 horde raiders in no time.  Bypassing the towns isn't much better because the mobs are all agro in the southern NE territories.

For the moment it seems like (at least as far as large scale invasions go) the difficulty in invading other factions' homelands is reasonably high.  I don't know if that will hold when the mean level of raiders is 50 instead of 15 though.  But for now, having the lion's share of the defensive capabilities on the borders of an area seems a pretty effective deterrent to large scale griefing while still allowing individuals and small parties of PvP'ers to have some fun.

Lets say a casino has two slot machines.

Machine A is the standard slot machine we all know and love.  Over time, it has a 96% payout.  Sometimes you lose a lot quickly, and other times you win a lot quickly.  But, over time and many thousands of users, it pays back 96 cents for every dollar put in.

Machine B is a machine where every single time you put a dollar in, it spits back out 96 cents.

Funny how there are a lot of A's and no B's in actual casinos.  Almost enough to make you think that people prefer the first.

I have to admit, there is something perversely satisfying in FINALLY getting that last Foozle Toenail after slaughtering 37 foozles in a row, hoping after each one that maybe THIS will be the Foozle that will drop that magical toenail that will finally let me get that better [insert quest reward here].

I have a disease.

Luckily it's not contagious.

Ah, but this is different, so your analogy doesn't hold. The loot-dropping mob "slot machine" averages 10 cents (1/10 drop rate to be nice) for every "dollar" (mob defeat). And it either pays you one dollar or zilch every time you play. And you probably aren't playing the slot machines in order to win 20 bucks for some other dude.

Plus, the real currency going in (time, stamina, ammo, charges, whatever) is different from the currency going out (quest loot). So it's a steady stream of dollars you get from somewhere, but what you might get from the slot machine is an Euro. Or whatever.

Next analogy?

Generally this holds pretty true already. Main cities have lvl 90 guards, and newbie zones have lvl 75 guards, and the farther away you get from your homeland the guards in the outposts get low and lower level. The guards in the outposts for my level (lvl 45) are usually around lvl 30 now.

The thing is, the guards spawn as soon at the move from their spawn point. So you can invade an outpost, but HOLDING one, takes some real work.

Actually, the analogy isn't all that far off.

The payoff is the quest reward and not actually the foozle tail though there is a direct link between the two.  Ultimately, it's about time.  Blizzard wants to consume your time while you attempt to obtain said foozle tail such that they can continue to extort cash from you.  If you obtain quest items too easily, this will a) devalue the quest reward and b) allow you to complete the quest too quickly.  Remember, this is a ultimately a business we're talking about where the bottom line is a razor thin line between keeping them too long at a task vs. making the tasks too easy.

Risk versus Reward is probably what he was trying to establish there.  In WoW's case, however, all that is at risk is your time.   You're ultimately in for a reward, but the time invested towards that reward varies wildly.

I don't consider this as big of an issue as WoW's neigh utter lack of social interaction intercentive, however.    WoW would be a lot more interesting of a game if I actually had some longstanding parties.    Unfortunatel, the way that the quest progression works, people tend to party up only for as long as it takes to complete a quest (usually a matter of a half hour or less, especially with a party's firepower to back them up).

Within three months after release, I can see WoW as having an extremely underpopulated lower level environment, with a highly dissatisfied player base lingering at the upper levels wondering why they're wasting their time, due to the utter lack of social hook involved in this game.   Actually, that sounds pretty familiar (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1273094&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1#1273094).  

At least WoW has a PvP end game which may keep people entertained an additional month or two.

As sad as it is, I've acutally made 3 friends that I party whenever I'm on for this stress test.  My orc rogue (L13) has been partying w/ the same 3 people since about L7.  I get on, check my friends list, see what they're up to, invite, then we meet somewhere, share what quests we can, do the shared ones, then complete them, and so on.

But I have had plenty of 'single-serving groups' to shamelessly plug Fight Club.  Personally, I like this style more, but I can understand the pain when I drag 3 of my RL friends into this and we all have different quests to do.  I don't mind helping out friends on quests, because the exp is always good and it gives me a chance to mine/pluck while I'm out and about.  But I guess it comes down to personal preference, like all else.

What I have a hard time with is outside of 2-3 RL friends, I can't see the point of a Grandeous Guild consisting of more than a dozen people.  However, I never played EQ so I may not understand the sheer stupidity of 300 person raids.

Edit: Talking about CoH, I just figured out how the rest system works.  It's basically the inverse of CoH's death penalty.  Remember how if you died, you would get a period of leveling where your exp would come in slower?  There was that little bar that would show you how much you had to go till you get max exp again?  Well in WoW, that bar is back.  But as you log out and go to inns, this bar 'ticks' up.  Now when you log back in, that bar is moved forward and your exp bar turns light blue.  When you kill stuff, you get bonus exp up to that bar.  Actually feels like a bonus too.

The point was just that people like a little bit of unpredictability.  People don't want every quest to be a precise "punch the clock" exercise.  Slot machines are powerful reinforcers because of the random nature of the reward for the same regular and repetitive task.  The core mechanic of these kinds of quests is exactly the same as the core mechanic of slot machines.  Bruce wants all regular and repetitive tasks to have regular and repetitive rewards.  That is not a good behavior reinforcer.

Geldon is 100% right re: the biggest threat to WoW is turning into another CoH.  The raid content and PvP content is the answer Blizzard has been giving to this, but we have yet to see if they can deliver.

Diablo 2?

D2 loot farming is a great example of that.  As is the good, old-fashioned "rare spawn/rare drop" in EQ.

I only had about 6 hours or so on WoW using a friend's account.  There was a problem that I saw, but I want to know if it is really a problem for those who know the game abit better.

Each race/class has it's own set of quests it seems.  As a tauren hunter I was being led by the nose from one quest to the other.  I figured if I had a friend playing an orc shaman they would have an equal amount of quests eating up their time and unique to their town/class.  If we tried to group up as friends from outside the game, wouldn't it be a massive fucking pain in the ass?

He would have quests in his part of the world, I would have quests in mine.  Mine would keep leading me back to my part of the world for the next step, his would keep dragging him back to his place.  Sure he might be able to take some of the quests in my town and vice versa, but I am sure some of them, if not many of them, are class/race specific.

Travel time in this game already sucks more ass than DAOC (worst game to date IMO, but this is more annoying to me).  Traveling across the world constantly to do a tiny short few quests and then running across the world again for a few of the other players quests, splittling up and visiting our towns for the next step and then getting together again seems like a fucking nightmare.  Even if 'across the world' isn't very far for the newbie areas, the run speed in WoW is pathetically slow.

It looks to me that the only practical way to group is with others of your race until at least level 10-15 or so.  And that just sucks ass IMO.  Is there another easy way I am missing?

OH NOES! I despise slow run speeds.

You can do any quest on your faction.  Very few quests are race specific, they are almost always just faction specific. There are some class specific ones, but they are fairly rare, probably available in all the capitol cities anyway, and mostly occur at regular and predictable intervals (e.g. shamans and warriors get new quests when they get a new totem type or stance, which hgappens every 10 levels).  There is no real need to be in your own race's area.  That means that your dwarf friend can hop on over to your human lands and do all your quests with you.

This is easier for some than others.  Obviously, races that start in the same place (orcs/trolls and gnomes/dwarves) can do this easily.  It is also very easy for gnomes/dwarves/humans to do this, since they start out with a flight route from Ironforge to Stormwind, so you can fly there as soon as you get your first 50 copper (or whatever) and for orcs/trolls/undead, since you can use the zepplin (which is free, not sure if it will always be?) to go from Undercity to Ogrimmar.

The trickier ones are taurens and night elves.  Taurens have the Barrens between them and the other 3 races, and that would be hard for a newbie to cross (though you could just run along the road, you'd die a few times though).  I heard some talk of an automatic flight route between Ogrimmar and Thunder Bluff, which would solve that problem.

I am not sure about Night Elves, having never played one seriously.  I think that they can boat/fly from their capitol to Stormwind or Ironforge, but I think it takes a few silver to do, which will take a couple levels to scrounge up.

Actually if you can get to the same area as your friends started at which can be a bit tough till you are level 5 or so it works fine. The newbie area quests are either generic or class specific. I have not found any that were race specific so if your friend joined you in a newbie area you would all be doing the same quests.

I infact see many night elves doing just this because the night elf area still seems to not be fully fleshed out. Also probably people go to where they know so if they leveled somebody in the dwarf area before they may go back there just to be where it is familiar.

Some classes though have issues when traveling abroad. If you take a druid on walk about from night elf lands it can be very difficult to find trainers other than the one at stormwind.

The walking around is a bit tedious but using a combination of the recall stones and the griffin routes its not super horrible but there is an AWFUL lot of hiking in the game.

kaid

Thanks for the info.  Good to know.  The tauren area just FELT racially specific.  I didn't know anyone could do those quests, since they would refer to 'your kindred' and stuff like that in the quest it always seemed racially targeted.

I can see how trainers would be a problem, but from other games I am pretty used to traveling to trainers to 'level up' or buy spells.

I think that there are class trainers for every class in the capitol cities, even where the race of that city cannot be that class.  I know that there are priest/mage/warlock trainers in Thunderbluff, for example (in the undead area).  So you don't have to go home every other level to train even (I think).

You guys are still missing the point.

Let's say you have a quest to collct 5 foozles.  Foozles have a 1 in 10 chance of dropping off the Foozle Monster.  So this quest is "really", on average, kill 50 foozle monsters.  The thing is, some people will only have to kill 25, and others will have to kill 100.

Why not simply make the quest "kill 50 foozle monsters"? Or if you want to have items so players have to carry something back, then back it "collect 50 foozles" and make the foozle monster drop it EVERY TIME.

The time invested and the reward gained is, on average, the same in either case.  The difference is the first one has a random chance element to it, which is generally more frustrating than it is rewarding.

Bruce

I heartily agree. After spending two hours trying to get 3, yes just 3, Nightsaber Fangs. This was also after the initial huge wave of players going through the level 1-10 quests. Yes, there we still a fair amount of people doing the same quest, but no more than I would expect at release and the weeks that follow. Luckily, that was the only frustrating quest I encountered of the Night Elves... so far...

If you do that, Bruce -then why not just make the quest: "click YES to accept the reward" ?

You're very correct in your analogy, but the reason it's done this way is almost Pavlovian.  If you told someone to kill 50 foozles, they'd likely say "screw that" or trudge through it with some angst.  Instead, you say "just get me 10 foozle tails".  For some reason, the psyche seems to handle that better for many.  Now, you have as an added bonus the "drop lottery".  When you actually GET a tail, you get a little mini-rush (Yay, I got a foozle tail!  This is like a prize in Cracker Jack!).  Couple the two together and you get the sugar-coated EQ camp treadmill effect.

I agree that any rational person would prefer to have the system done in a more up-front manner but I see why they have implemented as they have.  This game is about keeping people subscribed... any way that they can add an element of anticipation (uncommon/rare drops) seems to have some effect.  Hell, I can't explain why people would camp a spawn for 20h straight in EQ, but they do.

Actually the reason for these quests is to target the Soloer, thats you bruce. In a group, you can rip through a kill 50 quest in a matter of minutes, but solo it would take much more time. With a loot 10, you have basically the same amount of time spent, weather solo or in a group. Infact it is a but more productive to do it solo. That was the official dev reply to the kill 50 or loot 10 question on the forum.

So there you go. You got a quest made specially FOR soloers....


I agree, they do really kind of suck. I think its pretty universal in the beta, most people dont like the collection quests. There are some that are just attrocious. There is a quest to get 1 spider ichor, in Hillsbrad. Took me over an hour of just killing spiers to get it. What did I do? I promptly did a /suggest that it took to long, was boring, and the drop should be sped up. But did it suck? yes. Thats one of the bad parts I was talking about.

I had a similar problem with the fangs. The drop rate is just really bad on them.  I /suggested they take a look at it and /bugged that i thought they were dropping too slow.  If you'd do the same we'd have a better shot at someone seeing it, I imagine.  This was also a complaint some of the other testers had about the murloc collection quests in closed beta, and a Bliz rep recommended doing what I just said.

R->C->P.  Psychology simply disagrees with your assertion.  People by and large prefer occasional reinforcement to the steady, predictable punch-the-clock grind you prefer.  No matter how many times you cover your ears and scream "LA LA LA RATS WOULD RATHER GET THE PELLET EVERY TIME THEY PUSH THE BUTTON" it's just false.  That's why slot machines, Everquest and Diablo II make heaps of money.  If you hate them, don't do collects.  If skipping the collects leaves you with an insufficient number of quests to advance the entire game (which it might if you play Horde) /suggest it.

Of course, there clearly are some quests where you don't get your pellet quickly enough and the frustration takes over (FUCKING SPIDER ICHOR HOW I DESPISE THEE), but that's what beta is for.

Wow, so I just made a dwarf.

Thier quests involve SO much running it's ludicruos.

Edit: So I started a dwarf hunter last night, and it was going really well till I hit 9.  Now I have 1 quest, and it's too hard to do myself.  So I've been L9 for about 4 hours this morning.

That's something I wondered. How many different quests do you have at once?

How many ways can you get experience to level?

From the sounds of a lot of people, everyone has certain quests that progress the game and provide exp and you get to pick your reward. Instead of having tons and tons of quests in an attempt to overwhelm you with content. I.E. WoW seems like a single player RPG with thousands of other players playing the same game.

Here is a list of all the quests available for alliance players that are suggested levels 8-12:

http://www.thottbot.com/?f=q&title=&obj=&desc=&minl=8&maxl=12&minol=&maxol=&empire=A

(you can alter the search to get lower quests if you need them)

You may need to move to a different area, 9-ish is where things in the newbie zone start to dry up I think (its been a while).  Usually, there are a couple delivery type quests given to direct you to new areas that will be good for you.  I would /suggest your problem with finding the content and then go to one of the zones listed on that link where there are a lot of quests your level.

My attempt is here:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=281468&p=1#post281468

Quick Update:

Problem solved, I remembered that my human warlock had a ton of quests around this level.  So I moved to Stormwind and did a few, got my and then some in about a half hour.

Now I get to charm an animal!


Edit:  BAH! I wanted to charm a cow.  How sad.

WoW is going to be like every other Blizzard game: easy to learn, polished, and addicting.

Unfortunately, it's also going to be like every other Blizzard game: rife with Battle.Net kiddies and Koreans, maphacks/radar and other cheats, and a flourishing eBay market that will eventually lead to insane duping.

It'll be be a fun first 3-4 months though.

That sounds just about like every other MMO that's on the market, so I don't see what your point is.

I must agree with Carl from Aqua Teen...randomized dropping is generally the best way to create addicts out of people. The reason is, you never know! Maybe when you pull that lever you'll get something, even though you got something the last time too! Every time there is a chance!

It also will create long periods of frustration, periods of incridble luck, etc. It's more memorable.

It may not be true of everyone, but for the majority of humans, non-humans, even animate milkshakes, random interval training is the best.

B.Net takes the cake for skull-pounding mindnumbing.  It has something to do with unfiltered names, rampant chat bots, and not being able to communicate with half the players(Koreans).  It's kind of like the streets of NYC or some other congested city.  In other MMO's like DAoC and EQ, they just like to look down upon you or pretend you don't exist.  It's like the Hamptons or some other gated, rich, white enclave.  I guess as I'm getting older, I prefer to be within the vincinity of the Hamptons.

As I play more and more of the stress test, I'm starting to get the feeling WoW will be the closest MMO yet to capturing that mythical UO feeling the vets remember so dearly.  It may have something to do with unchecked names.  Another reason is that WoW seems to shed the sexed-up fantasy/medieval environment of EQ/DAoC/SWG with the cartoony graphics to remind you, the addicted MMO gamer, that it is just a freakin game and that you can have some pointless fun here and there.

There's surely been psychological studies to determine the optimal "drop rate" for the rat hitting to bar to get the pellet of food.  I suspect many of the WoW quests are below that optimal rate.

Bruce

What, for all rats?  I would think different rats would have different preferences for drop rate, based on varying genetics and upbringing.   (Though that was probably outside of the scope of such an experiment.  I would assume they just took standard generic stock rats which had all been raised in the same environment to do the tests.)

On other words, I'm rebutting the possibility that there really is an optimal drop rate for all people.   Although I could agree that, with careful study, you might be able to get the majority satisfied with the right drop rate.

Actually, for something completely different, I don't think the drop rate is the problem in WoW.   I think it's the total lack of social hook and the quests don't feel quite "epic" enough.   However, it's possible this may be a result of observations of an unfinished product.

I believe lab rats come in many varients these days..  List here (http://www.informatics.jax.org/external/festing/rat/STRAINS.shtml) has lots of different 'inbred' strains of rat.  An 'inbred' strain is one that has been brother-sister mated for 20 consecutive generations, and can be traced to a single ancestral pair.

The quantity of detail on some of the strains is... disturbing.

--
Alkiera

I suspect they are too low for a lot of people, and just right for a lot of other people. IMO ideally the drop rate for quest items would be such that it roughly corresponds with XP rate...you don't want to be stuck doing a low level quest because the right items haven't dropped, or burn through them and have nothing to do...

Items that don't drop often enough is about the same as XP curves that are too high - content substitutes.

Blizzard announced a couple of weeks ago that they are going to implement a restrictive name policy. Your name has to at least make an attempt at fitting into the fantasy environment, so ~~~MaStaH~sLayAh~~~ is out of luck.

No, it's an observation from someone that still hasn't seen the game.

I'm at level 32. And I cannot even brag to have seen half the game because the treadmill obviously slows down.

I think the "Gomeragon" instance is a major milegate. Right now I pass nearly all my time playing in full groups and the gameplay in that instance is the most awesome experience I had in a mmorpg to date.

In the last three days I just keep going there because I'm simply addicted. Not to the game, just to that precise instanced dungeon.

I love the mini-games, the hyper fast gameplay between tons of monsters and those little armored guys looking like Astro Boy.

Really, someone here has seen the instance?

The only instance I got to see were the Westvale mines, with the couple of missions that involve things down there.  I was cool, but not THAT cool.  And it required a group, which meant soloing was right out, which totally sucks.

I had no idea WoW had mini-games; I've never seen one.  If I had to wait until level 25 or 35 to get to them, I think I'd rather just go play something else more fun.

Bruce

Havent we already decided you would be better off with Fable and Baulders Gate already?

I'm sure this will upset a number of the beta testers I've seen... they will have to come up with a new name once the game goes live.  Oh, I also want to thank the testers for showing me every imaginable way to spell the names of all of the LoTR characters.  

I've met some great people while testing this game but MAN did I have to wade through a sea of idiots to find them.  What is it about these titles that bring out the gaming dregs?  If I decide to give this thing a go at release it's with the hope that a monthly sub fee will act as an idiot filter.

In a reasonably crowded zone, ask over general chat what everyone thinks the monthly fee will be.  You'll get a few exploding heads from some interesting names that way.  Or at least the conversation I watched on Ysera did.

Yes, some folks still think it's a standalone or 'free' game, and a very large number expect it to be released in November.  How sad for them.

I can't help but feel it will be released soon.

By soon I don't mean Nov. cuz that seems TOO soon, but earlier than we typically think.

VU really wants this game out I think.

I've tested this game since Alpha, and I STILL haven't found a guild to join, mostly because I'm forced to solo to avoid teh stupid.

If you find a group of decent, mature folks Nebu, who play on the Beta server, please let me know and I'll hitch on to that wagon.

I have a REALLY great group of guys. Most have been playing since alpha also. I got in Beta in phase 2 and met up with them, and have since brought structure to their guild. I think come release we will have a great group of mature players who want to have fun, but also be major players. Bummer your not on the PVP server.

This invite is also to any other people who would like to join a fun guild, very friendly, no shitheads. We put it in the charter that no vulgur or aLtCaPs names where allowed. We do have one guy whos name is ShaDoFist, and I give him grief about it all the time, but he will change it for release.

We ARE on the PVP server. We also do a small bit of RP. I go by Morvant, and the guild is Dread Guard. Also www.dreadguard.com is just about finished. You can look me, or any of the guild up in game by doing a /who Dread Guard.

This goes out to any of you guys who would be interested. I will also invite every one here again right before retail.

Well it's either November or December.  They've said that they're releasing this year and I don't have any reason to doubt that they will.  As far as I know, Sony is planning on releasing EQ2 for christmas and I'm sure that they want to beat them to the punch.  I don't think the game is in very bad shape - if the crash bugs were gone I think it is plenty read to be released to the public.

Well I borrowed my friend's stress test key and played WoW this past weekend.

I guess seeing comments here of "EQ1.5" regarding WoW influenced me.   When I logged on for half an hour - I was so disappointed I logged and went back to CoH.  My first reaction was - what was new?  Do I want to restart EQ all over again with fewer polygons?

Upon taking a second look with more time I am now a convert.   The landscape is amazing (e.g. Dwarven, Undead) giving great atmosphere.  The tweaks really do help game play - including "quest sharing" a nice little innovation.  My reaction was that the quests were not just camps with movement - I felt engaged.  Moving encouraged exploration - and distraction - a nice change.

Exploring the taverns and little cottages, oddly, despite its low polygon count gave me FAR more intimacy with my environment than SB, EQ or CoH.

I focused on the Warlock, Warrior, Priest and Druid (leveled 5-8).

It drives me crazy attributes are auto assigned as you level - very little choice involved.  They are making some major changes to tradeskills too I hear.

Where is the crowd control in this game?  While some classes can deal with one add (Rogue, Warlock) - there does not appear to be "crowd" control.  No feign death either for a pull to break a camp... Am I missing something?

All in all a great experience and I will try it on retail.

There's plenty of CC. Even as a warrior I have various skills to manage the aggro. AOE attacks, confuse spells, root... The fun is that confuse spells actually work in PvP. Basically you are hit and start to flee around randomly. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw that :D

In the last few days I had that wonderful experience in Gnomeragon, today the game won me again and I topped my fun in a mmorpg. Finally I'm in a real contested zone (I've reached level 33 with near-zero impact with PvP) and the Horde plays here as well. The start of it was a simple kill quest that on the normal server would require no more than five minutes.

Well, it took a whole hour but after I was done I kept playing there for another hour just for the sake of it. Basically it was about killing mobs around a farm but the farm itself transformed into an Unreal Turnament session since there was another Horde group doing the same quest. The zones and the spots are tailored for a specific level ranges so the groups were balanced enough and it seems that the last patch did wonders to make the PvP viable. I had no problem hitting level 38 enemies (and the "charge" skill is awesome to fight casters).

Really, really fun. We sorta died at turns. In two minutes we were back, getting organized and rushing them. Then there were two minutes for us to go on with the quest and wait their turn to get organized and gank us.

Even if there's zero reward for killing enemy players we kept going to the farm just because it was a lot of fun. And so did the Horde group.

Morphiend... I may take you up on this assuming the pvp is better implemented than it was in EQ.  If I play WoW at all, I'll likely start on a pvp server.  My only concern is that this is the place "teh stupid" will congregate when they beg mom for enough cash to sub up the first couple of months.  

At least with a good gang of mature players they won't be more than entertainment.

Straight from the Blizzard's mouth.

The game is very polished. I think they can make a smooth, successful release by the end of the year.

EDITED: I despise agreeing with schild, but in this case he's right. It's late, I have to go back to my depressing job tomorrow, and I wasn't thinking. Nuke the quote. People will find out I'm right eventually, but it's too soon to say what I said.

You are either:
1. Breaking NDA.
2. Being a fucktard.

Stop doing both.

As for WoW, of course it will be polished. That's what Blizzard does. They polish and simplify. Didn't you get the memo?

I played a good amount of the stress test when a friend got in a second time in the second batch (before I got in once, betas hate me).

On the friends account I got a Tauren hunter up to 9 and a gnome wizard up to 6.  When he gave me his second account I got a Human Warlock to 18, and a Night elf Rogue to 10.

It is a fun game, but just too simple for me.  Simple in many ways.  Even too graphically simple for me.  The cartoon-ness of the world removed any feeling of awe that I might have had.  It was like I was watching a badly drawn saturday morning cartoon, and nothing in those ever amazes me.  Even things of large scale didn't impress me for some reason due to the style.

The game itself seems abit simple as well.  The quests lead you by the freaking nose to the next quest, and while that keeps you busy, I feel like I am playing the worlds first Linear MMOG.  Linear is okay for me in a game I expect to be disposable, but not in an mmog.  My human got into westfall before he could finish some of those quests (mostly they were WAY too camped and he could not muscle in far enough and still be safe).  So I went and did all the dwarven quests as well.  Some of the ones below my level in their capitol city zone and then all the ones I could do in the zone to the east.  This finally brought me up to the level I think the game expected me to be at for that point.

So I guess I did some different things than others my level might have done, but I sure saw a lot of other humans doing the dwarf quests, especially since it is hinted that you should do that by making you go to that zone on a delivery quest.  It just felt like everyone had the same shared experiences, exactly the same.

I don't know why that bothers me, but it does for some odd reason.  If the quests were more optional some would do them, some would not.  But as they give the bulk of the exp in the game they are the optimal way to level so EVERYONE does every quest and gets the same rewards for the same class.

With EQ2 having only 2 starting towns it will probably be the same problem there I guess.  I will probably have to get over it.

Another thing is that the attempted epic feel of some of the WoW quests just rub the static world in your face.  Pretty much the same for all quests in all of these games.  Pretty much the same as crushbone respawning every few minutes...

This next bit is really a game design thing, but something I had been toying with in my mind...

With all this instancing going on, why not use it for more than just crowd control?  If you do a quest that rids zone abc of gnolls, why not put you in an instance where the gnolls are gone?  With other people who have also gotten rid of the gnolls.  It would make staying with friends pretty hellishly stupid, but would be a neat idea other than that big problem.  Each zone could maybe have 3 different instances or so for a few epic style quests in each one.  You could label them as epic plainly to at least advertise that you are about to do something big and force an instance change.

Ah well.

The game is good, but it just does not 'hook' me.

It was for me. I liked the stylized graphics. I liked the quests providing direction in game play. I DID NOT enjoy the fact that so many of the quests has me camping a static spawn with Eleventy-bajillion other players.

I made it to level 9.

At the end of the day, it felt like Everquest with some blizzard polish.

No thanks.

Full disclosure: I'm still playing City of Heroes, and having fun. *shrug*

There are deffinatly certain "quest tracks" in wow that lead you in a fairly linear path. The downside of this is that is is somewhat linear but the advantage would be that it does insure at least to some extant that all of the content in the game will be visited and used. Unlike eqlive where you had a lot of zones that after some expansions never had anybody visit them this isn't really possible in WoW.

There is a bit more diversity for questing though than is apparent at first because if you are a human and go to kalimdor you now have another huge chunk of zones to level in similar ranges with very different quest paths.

I think eq2 will probably be similar in how this works to WoW with only two city I am uncertain of how many truly different quest tracks there will be. The only way to really avoid it is to add such a metric fuckton of quests that there just is no way to due all the quests when you are in the level range to do them.

I would have to say that at least certain linear quest tracks are NOT a bad thing. leading people around your world so you can tell them a story about  what is going on with the people and seeing all the content is not a bad thing.


kaid

Now that the stress test has ended and only faint echos of me screaming RTFQ in General chat can be heard, I've come to a few personal conclusions:

-They really copped out on class balance. Rather than balance differing, dynamic elements from each unique realm, they homogenized the class system across the entire game. While this definitely addresses balancing concerns, it really takes away from feeling as if your character is a unique and useful addition to your side.

-Quests that require you to get a certain number of kills are easily addressed by grouping, but that same group is going to be there on a linear order longer if they are all gathering dropped items for a quest. This leads to common, useful quest areas being dominated in short burts by groups, usually keeping a spawn location wiped clean for 10-40 minutes at a time, depending on the quest/group. This makes doing a drop quest pretty difficult for solo people, and especially frustrating when the spawns are camped each time you check. Some unique drops have addressed this with multiple simultaneous recipients. (Fitzsprocket's Clipboard comes to mind)

-Newbs should not be getting all of the PvP mesages, especially not for other races newbie zones. It would be more convenient to have the reported area increase with your level or via a setting. Especially during the last day, at level 9, my chat was a torrent of <insert zone name here> is under attack!

-Player crafted guns and ammo, in their current form, will dominate this game at release. The cool factor alone will draw people to it, with the appalling damage output bringing the naysayers onboard. It seems they balanced the difficulty and cost of fabrication with power, but cost and difficulty are not factors a month after release.

-I have to agree that the epic feel just isn't there. Like every MMOG I've played they failed to capture the real essence of adventure: enacting change. Any quests that result in a change are quickly reversed or reset to allow another player to complete them. There's never a sense of doing something that made a noticeable, important change. "Thank you! You've released me from my eternal prison! Now shoo so this next guy can, too."

-It's frustrating to have quests that you know you can complete, only to see the rewards are something you can't use. (nor trade, as I assume Soulbound means) Granted, the xp is always a bonus, but it's not as rewarding to choose whatever item you think will sell for more. Each general quest (elite and unique item quests aside) should have a reward for any class that may do it, even if it's likely you'll have better.

-They *really* need to fix the idle weapon animations. More often than not I found my weapon model to be missing after a battle, recoverable only through a sheathe/unsheathe. This was probably the most surprising bug I found, since it's so conspicuous and major.

With all that said, I'll most likely be playing at release.. unless, of course, I get into beta and burn out. My desire to play something new and decent outweighs my yearning for innovation.

I actually had my first PvP match in WoW on the last day.

As a big level 2 mage I found myself being kill stealed by a big level 4 mage (clash of the Titans).  While annoying, this guy challenged me a to a duel.

My EQ experience made me aware of two things about WoW:

1.  There is no collision
2.  Line of sight issues for casting are critical (viewing arc etc.)

So to sit there and trade nukes with a caster two levels higher than I is not a strategy.  So... hehe... I ran at him - RIGHT THROUGH him - and turned around and attacked him from behind with my... staff.

He kept turning so he could "see me" to nuke my butt.  But each time he turned I ran through him, pivoted and hit him again.

Owned.  About the only PvP fight I have ever won (I don't document my losses).

hehe.

I am not much of a PVP person but I have to admit the stress test server style pvp that I was seeing was pretty darn amusing.

Sunday morning looking the end of beta in the eye I said ah hell lets see how this PVP thing works. I had a level 20 rogue so I figured I would do a lil damage before getting wacked. I see the world defense channel reporting that the city right near where I was camped was under attack.

I see a level 25 hunter playing kick the dwarfie and the lil guys who were there level 10 or so were not hurting him at all. I figured oh heck this guy will kill me but who cares charge!

Okay so I didn't charge hey I am a rogue I hit stealth and crept up on him and low and behold taurens broad back makes one hell of an easy target. I opened with ambush and just cut him small burgers before he realized I was there.

Okay now the hunter knows I am around so he starts hunting for me. Me being a gnome and stealthed am having fun watching his every move from shrubs. He walks by me and I pounce and kill him again.

He then came back saw me at a distance and shot me. So I used my burst run to charge him, hit him with my stun side stepped and blasted him again.


I also managed to have some pretty abrupt combats vs the various casters that were called in by the tauren.

By the end of my pvp time it was gnomie 6 horde zip.

The pvp system seems to work pretty well if you are on your home turf and you do not want to pvp you do not have to. Just ignore the pvp stuff and go about your business.  If you however want to pvp you can hop over to one of the zones your world defense channel is saying is under attack type /pvp and you are now pvp+ for the next 5 minutes or until 5 minutes pass after you are out of combat.

If you are adventuring in hostile lands if you don't want to pvp just avoid the opposing alliances NPC's such as guards and vendors. If you choose to attack these or are agroed by these or just type /pvp you are open for combat. Generally you flip your pvp bit you will get action pretty fast.


Frankly with as quick and easy as it is to fire up pvp fights on a normal WoW server I am kinda curious why they are bothering with pvp servers at all.


Kaid

How did this happen?  I was under the impression that PvP was level-restricted DAoC-battlegrounds style, to prevent exactly this.

Well.. I got into the stress test Friday.  Nice little bit of time, but then I like the warcraft universe so I was good to go with the graphics.  The world is huge, but damn, COH has ruined my perception of what is exceptable movement wise...

Anyway, was fun and the questing had layers and the world hand interest that COH lacks.  I will be playing both, damn them.

As to the PVP question above.. Say your an ORC.  You can go into the Alliance homeland and turn PVP on.. but you can not attack anyone that does not attack you.

However, if your that same orc and a dwarf turns on PVP in your realm, you can attack them.

Basically the switch is currently a chest pounding "HEY I WANNA FIGHT" sign.

Of course, I played for all of two days, so what the pancake do I know.

Nope, no level restriction at all, but if the dwarves were being attacked it is because they attacked first or typed /pvp.  They were willing participants.

Granted if unwilling, an enemy could still keep some vital quest character they need from staying alive long enough to do a quest.  So you could still grief newbies.  You will probably rather quickly be attacked and killed, but since death means NOTHING in WoW, the griefer will be right back.  I don't know how long the defender will bother killing the griefer again and again and again and again.

I dont know that any body really got high enough, but come about lvl 22 or so you start going to "Contested Zones" where is basically every one is PVP flagged. This gets quite a bit more interesting. At first it was a constant war, and no one could really level, cause every one was always dead, or killing.

After a while of this there have developed several "Truce" towns. Booty Bay in Stranglethorne vale, and Gadgetzen in Tanaris it is very common to see players from oposing factions talk, or leaving each other alone. It is by no means safe though, as you could be blasted at any time.

Also, several of the higher level zones, it is common to run past other faction members, and do /wave, this is sort of the universal sign of, "Your questing, Im questing, dont fuck with me, I wont fuck with you." Its pretty cool. When im feeling charitable, I even have saved a low level alliance member or two from a nasty pull.

But when its raid time, no one is safe.

*Edit* the level based battlegrounds are coming in the next two patches. These will be instanced zones, seperated by level, that simulates a large war, mixing PCs and NPCs to give it a real battlefield type feel. I like that idea, but i will still play on the PVP server. Its not that bad, and the fun factor is defenetly there.

Is the above on a PVP or regular server?

How can anyone play an MMOG with a zone named BOOTY BAY and still have a straight face when they talk about it?

It's Blizzard, if your not chuckling while you play, then something is missing from your genetic material.

Ya the lil level 10s were willing pvpers. It was the last day of beta and they wanted to see if 4 lil level 10s had a chance in pvp. By themelves the answer is not much of one against a level 25 but they were handy for spotting and harassing the foe while the higher level folks took them down.

All in all it was pretty good spirited combat. Most of us involved were using it as the first test of the system just to see how the combat worked in pvp and it does work pretty well. The level gap is an issue but while a level 10 dosn't do much to a level 25 a level 20 can destroy a level 25 if you use your skills well.

The PvP system seems a pretty decent implementation and due to how it works I dont see that many staying on PVP only servers but the most froathing gankers.

edit for clarity

this is for a non pvp server. The pvp servers are 24/7 no level restriction pvp.

kaid

The above is the PVP server. Its more like DAoC regular server than say the DAoC PVP server. Except 60% of the quests are in the frontiere, not 2%.

That doesnt sound good put like that, but there are not HUGE zergs of people roaming around, so its not bad at all.  In a 3 hour playng session, with all that time questing in a Contested Zone, I get attacked maybe 2 or 3 times. IF that.

The normal server has PVP, but only battlegrounds, or if you attack another factions NPC you get flagged PVP. You can also flag yourself by typing /pvp.

Now, playing on a non-PVP server, I could see how people would liken it to EQ a bit more than the PVP server. Honestly, I dont know if I would play if not for the pvp server. It really is fun, and not as bad as the board trolls make it seem. Its even safer now that they have changed the town guard spawns.

I was under the impression that even on the PvP+ server faction members could not wantonly attack another faction member(Horde attacking Horde/Alliance attacking Alliance).  Not yet, anyhow.

You are correct. You can Duel members of your faction, but that is it.

That's an old DAoC trick thanks to lack of collision detection there. Also, I did find in WoW, that certain huge fricking trees in Elwynn Forest are... ummm... how you say... not solid. Or at least not in terms of Line of Sight. It'll be interesting to see if they address these PvP issues or if they just let the smart players exploit them. ;)

My bud and I like to talk about these stuff and one issue we are wrestling with is travel.

Who is the best travel class in this game?

Mage?  They can teleport to cities - but can they teleport elsewhere?
Druid?  Not sure how fast their ariel form really is for land travel.

And then we ran out of gas.  

I remember the early days of EQ - travel was important - as an innate ability or one you could grant others.  Remember paying for a SOW?

If anyone could shed light  which class is best suited for travel powers I would appreciate it.

PS - one reason to play a Dwarf or Gnome - is the small size of the avatar gives you the false impression you are moving swiftly (vs. the Tauren).

The answer is probably shaman, since they get the best, earliest speed buff.

The following classes have innate speed buffs:
shaman (lvl 20)
druid (lvl 30)
warlock (lvl 40)
hunter (lvl 20, but is only half the speed of the others)
paladins (lvl ??? - I don't know, paladins bore the shit out of me)

All classes can purchase a mount at level 40, except Tauren, who get plainsrunning for free.

Could someone enlighten me, what is this "Charge" ability all warriors seem to be so  crazy about ?

It does what its name implies -- it allows a Warrior to close quickly on a target (like a "sprint" ability). It also builds up Rage and has a chance of stunning a target at higher ability levels. It used to only be usable outside of combat but now it can be used during. That in combination with other Warrior abilities like Hamstring (damage plus chance of snaring the target) makes the Warrior very powerful in PvP combat.

mental note: "Try melee classes once WoW goes live ..."

Can you fight from atop the mount?

Rogues also get the sprint ability.  The cooldown can be tweaked w/ talents.

No.

Ummm .... I don't think so. I think they're just for travel.

My problem (and this could be a function of the game itself) is that I don't have any characters high enough to buy a mount. I've played every class in the game, some of them I've got into the late-20s (shaman, druid, rogue), some of them to the mid-teens (warrior, priest, warlock, hunter) and some I abondoned out of boredom fairly early (mage, paladin). If I just stuck with one character, I'd be at the level cap by now.

I don't know if this is just my beta behavior, trying to test things out and find what I want to stick with at release, or if I just hit a wall around level 20 when I lose interest and have to start something new. Probably a combination of both.

The rogue sprint ability is not very long lasting but it is REALLY quick. As long as it is up any death you take in outdoor areas is likely because you were to agressive and did not want to flee.

Not really a travel power though.


Melee classes in WoW seem very decent. The warriors get alot of tricks in their bags and while I originally thought they would have huge problems in the mosh pits of stress test they easily held their own. Infact it is amazingly hard to kill steal from a warrior who is using dash. Dash fires off much faster than most attack spells and has nearly the range. So if you see a mob up you can dash and pounce on it to claim the mob.

Oh also you don't need to be high level to stun with dash. Heck at level 4 I was consistantly getting a 1 to 2 second stun off on mobs when I landed it. Makes for a killer opener.

Rogues well rogues are a bit more shifty but they have a ton of tricks in their bag and are a very solid class to play. They even solo pretty well because you can still backstab easy enough using gouge which is a 4 second or so stun and then side step for a backstab.



Graphic wise you will either like WoW graphics or you will not. I do not think there will be much middle ground. Myself I do like them in a storybook picture way with bright colors and simple styling.



kaid

No kidding, for cripes sake they have a 'Six Demon Bag' drop item in game.  They have a hell of a sense of humor there.

I was told they have an actual "carrot on a stick" for an item as well.

They do, it makes your mount run faster.


One item I like are the Goblin Jumper Cables, these are an item you can use to resurect a friend, but as with all Goblin items, there is a 5% chance it will backfire, and in this case, kill the person who is trying to use them.

See that? That is how you sell me a game. I will play, just for the opportunity to use that item. After that, it's all downhill, unless of course something else funny and interesting exposes itself.

Vivendi Universal had their first half 2004 earnings presentation (http://finance.vivendiuniversal.com/finance/company_news/events_140904.htm) today. They continue to say they are aiming for a November release in the US for WoW (from their slides):


A small bit of WoW news that can be gleaned from the above statement is that where before they were saying there was going to be a simultaneous release in the US and Korea (http://www.blizzard.com/wow/faq/), the Korean release has been delayed a month after the US. One possible explanation is that they will be creating new content all the way up until the game goes live which means there'll be a translation/localization delay for the Korea version.

VU Games continues to be the only VU division to lose money and they definitely stressed the importance of WoW in particular and Blizzard in general during the conference call for achieving profitability. One thing I did find interesting is that there was no mention at all of Half-Life 2 in the slides or from what I heard of the conference call.

Trippy - thanks for that post.  Either by way of analyst Q&A or the presentation - any idea of the forecasted revenue compared to the current revenue of the division?

e.g. how significant could this game be for the earnings of the Vivendi?

No, they don't have anything like that in their presentation.

Bruce

They offered no guidance for VU Games for 2005 other than to say they expected that division to "rebound" in large part due to the release of WoW.

Looking at the numbers, VU Games had revenues of 148 million Euros and an operating income loss of 156 million Euros for the first half of 2004 of which about 90 million Euros were one time charges (project write-offs, restructuring costs, etc.). So assuming the second half does about the same as the first half that would be about an operating income loss of 132 million Euros for the year if you leave out the one time charges. If you estimate a super conservative 1,200,000 subscription months for WoW next year, that would translate into roughly 12.5 million Euros in revenues (assuming a $12.95 US monthly subscription fee).

Edit: DURR, misplaced a decimal point on revenue calculation.

Trippy - Interesting.  I have no idea what the profit margins are like in gaming software - MMORPGS in particular.  Any idea?