f13.net

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=22682.0


THIS...IS AWESOME.

 :vv:

Yeah, we pretty much killed the Crossroads in about five minutes. "We" being a Horde guild, of course.  :why_so_serious:

Heh, my reintroduction to WoW was to log into my lowest level toon (12 paladin) to poke about and relearn how to play. 2 minutes in I get deaded by a Zombie! Great fun.

Sadly I lagged out soon after.

I'm laying siege to darkshore as I type.  :drill:

This is going to TOTALLY SCREW UP my plan to go back through and do all the noob zone quests for faction/achievements!

DAMN YOU ZOMBIES! DAMN YOUUUUUU!

Yeah, and I was going to log into WAR today. Game, set, match if this is just phase 1 like they're hinting.

I only wish this event would never end.

I spent wayyy too much time as a zombie tonight.  It's fun with lowbies and people that want to play, since zombies are easy fodder for just about any 70. And the guards. Good lord, the guards.

Heh, when a bunch of us got infected, dueled and became zombies, then invaded SW it was great fun. Getting the auctioneers to assplode was  :awesome_for_real:

Holy crap! Is this live everywhere now?

Nnnnggggg so much cool stuff happening while I can't play!

Brains?

My only complaint, is the zombies are super weak. One 70 who hates fun? Gameover.  :uhrr:

Yeah, the zombies are really weak, but get them in numbers with some real people helping out...

(http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/ahoythematey/WoWScrnShot_102208_225410.jpg)

(http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/ahoythematey/WoWScrnShot_102208_233353.jpg)

(http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/ahoythematey/WoWScrnShot_102208_235451.jpg)

The biggest danger is, of course, asshole 70 mages with their bullshit arcane explosion.  That decimates zombie packs.

So can zombies communicate across faction lines?

You can talk and trade cross-faction as a zombie

Good to see another of the stupid game elements slowly being broken down!

[Zombie] is the international language of love

I can see were there are problems with this on a detail level, but Good Lord is it a cool and fun experience overall.  I ran into the first of this with no knowledge of the event at all in Hinterlands while picking flowers for my new Scribe.

A player zombie was slowly making his way up to the FP surrounded by two NPC zombies.  The player was 70 so I immediately stayed out of his way.  Hell, I couldn't figure out what was going on first of all.  I thought maybe it was a GM run event.  Nope, just a player that was infected.  Another 70 came along and ganked him no problem.

Then, the guild chat was flooded with people getting in on the fun.  This is a perfect event for people that were getting bored or in a rut just prior to the expansion.  I was having fun with all the new stuff from the patch and now this?

Why don't they just shove that needle a little deeper into my vein?  Oh yeah....they will with the expansion.

Damn it I take all last night off from WoW to play Fable 2 and this shit rolls in. Now I'm at work and I can't wait to get home. BRAAAINS!

I'm leveling a shaman and managed to nail a fellow leveler. It was tons of fun!

Please tell me I can spam-shackle Fordel.

I have never liked the look of the zombies in Wow, i have no idea what they are supposed to be. But this does look like a fun event. But not as fun as the EQ2 plague that was gibbing players and spreading like wildfire.

I gotta login tonight to see what this is all about. One thing I'd love to see in WoW is some sort of 'Footmen Frenzy' PvP game where you're the hero unit and you or your base spawns minions. I used to love going the undead tier in FF (Ultimate Footmen actually) and amping up the speed of the ghouls. There is nothing like hearing the screams of horror from your LAN buddies when you have several hundred of those things running pell-mell into their base and munching on everything in sight. "WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY SO FAST??!! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!!!!" Used to love flanking the other heroes when they couldn't run away fast enough. :) My one buddy used to say 'Oh god, he's got the munchies! We're boned!'

The first part of the problem is they were never "zombies" but "Ghouls."  Completely different undead-type, feasting on corpse meat and not live brains.   The second part is that the basics of the model were developed for WC3 as the Ghoul is the Scourge's basic foottrooper. The unit is supposed to look good and unique from an iso view as a small bit of a greater picture.  That doesn't always translate well to a first or third-person model view.  (Which is also why the various faction buildings also look way too damn goofy from a structural standpoint.)

WoW does have a zombie model, they just didn't use it for this:

(http://upload.wowhead.com/images/screenshots/40260.jpg)

They probably just used the ghoul model for this because it has more and better animations.



I'm hoping there is another phase to this, the Blue CM's are hinting at this.  :grin:

Zombies in phase two, disease crates in all cities, infected critters spreading it, 5min disease timer instead of 10 and higher resist rate on dispels

Awesome.  The QQ in the forums is already hilarious and this will only make it better.  Plus, it'll give me plenty of tears to polish my gear after I take out the inscription trainers in Orgrimmar, for the umpteenth time.

The thing that kills me about the whining is that I know in my heart these are the same people who wish Blizzard would do more events like this. ><

Halloween fun with lead in to the expansion and people are complaining?  Geez.  Bravo to Blizzard.

Well, it does kinda suck to have useful NPCs dropping dead. But eh.

The amount of people complaining about this awesome event is depressing. I mean, you've had over FOUR FUCKING YEARS to do all these lowbie quests many times over multiple characters and now that there is some disruption in the old routine for a couple weeks - an event that will most certainly only happen ONCE in the entire history of WoW - you are going to cry and complain? That your precious static quest-dispensing treadmill has a random element suddenly? Fucking pathetic.

WoW is still at heart a single player game, and events like this screw with people's playtime. Not everyone has played for four years, not everyone gives a shit about events like this. What else do you expect?

For gamers to be open to a temporary random element in an otherwise almost completely static game? To remember that leveling isn't a job and diversions just for the fun of it are acceptable? To enjoy being a part of a once-in-the-game's-lifetime crazy event? I guess it's too much to ask for some people. And no I don't believe the game is "at heart a single player game" at all, that's complete rubbish.

For every person that is upset about this I promise there are one thousand that think it's awesome. Complaints are always louder than praise.

The only problem I have with this event is that they fucked up the implementation in Shattrath City.  We have zombies wandering around Shattrath, but the Sanctuary zone prevents us from killing them, and the NPC's in Shattrath are mostly not scripted for combat/assisting/guards, cause the Sanctuary zone made it unnecessary.

So people are wandering around Shattrath able to attack one NPC at a time - they can't attack players, so they just kill NPC's and annoy the piss out of everyone else.  If we could fight back in Shattrath it'd be fine.

This is a Universal Truth.

So, appearently the "Scourge" are their own full faction.

Any Zombie can communicate with ALL other zombies, regardless of if they were horde or alliance before death.

You can also Trade with zombies.

Hit up an alliance friend, and finish up your pet / recepie collecting by trading vanity pets and rare recepies between eachother directly!

O M G i'm going to go pet shopping!

It amuses me that the scourge bring free markets to Azeroth.

it's a subtle commentary on the nature of the consumer?


Layers upon layers....

I didn't actually realize until last night, as a group of us mowed down a newbie for the third time and caused him to yell in zone about 'paying fifteen dollars a month for this bullshit', or summat, how subtle this is. Presuming the doesn't quit  :grin:  that guy's REALLY going to hate the fucking scourge.

They have harnessed the power of griefing to power the story...If we could use this technology on a pool of SA forum goons, we could be energy-independent by the end of the year.

This just in! I like the zombies.  EVEN THOUGH I HAD TO WAIT FOR AN NPC TO RESPAWN ONCE.

Doesn't make nearly as good copy as "ZOMG BLIZZRAD HAS BROKEN TEH GAME, /RAGEQUIT"

Sup?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lmEdh1qOoP0&fmt=18

Actually, I was thinking more like

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/122163/138436.jpg)

Excellent.

Question - as a zombie, your health keeps going down. Do you have to eat or something to keep it up?

Yes.

That's very, very cool.

Just to supplement:

Apparently, the grave of Arthas' horse has recently been dug up near the Scarlet Monastery.

Also, possible new boss in Karazhan that's linked the event (possibly a little like the pre-Naxx event I guess).

No eat, so much as beat up on something.

you gain health by damaging the living (beasts, humanoid NPC's, PC's) or by standing in the green clouds that zombies puke out.  The clouds regen effect stacks, so having a bunch of friends around to drop a nice concentrated cluster of the stuff can help keep you alive for long trecks.

lol, did I pick the wrong time to try out the free trial. Thursday afternoon, trying out the game doing some quests and a little tailoring, leveled up my warlock to 10 then wham! 5% health left, dead, zombified.  A couple level 70 zombie players wander away. I check the forums to see what's going on, find out they turned the servers into pre-Trammel UO for an event and realize I'm never going to get a thing done. So I logoff and start my second playthrough of the Witcher. Heh, spent more time dowloading the trial, and the 5 patches that come after it, than I have playing it.

Hey, I tried it last week - the servers were down for 2 days, and completely unplayable for the next 4.

Which group of people is more annoying:

1) Players who QQ about being ganked by zombies
2) Zombies who QQ when someone who 'hates fun' kills them

Players who send real life death threats to zombies via whisper.

Group 1, they totally miss the point of Zombie Panic Invasion!

Hah, I got some of those today checking this stuff out.  They stopped when I started correcting his grammar.  :drill:

Group 1, for sure. They're too addicted to raw progress to feel the true benefits of a 24/7 living/breathing world. Sorta sad actually, but expected. As easy as it is to get 1,000 people to agree vocally on something, it's much easier to get 10x that annoyed.

As well, as a Zombie you can use the other faction's portals in shattrath.

My complaints have nothing to do with the event itself.

My complaint is the same is has been for every large event since the AQ opening, the servers can't fucking handle it and it makes everything laggy or the server gets crash happy or both. Not to mention you have to have the fastest machine on earth to walk through a zone with zombies and turd clouds everywhere.

From what I have doen so far, being a zombie is cool, but the horrendous lag makes me meh on the whole thing.

Can zombies form groups? And cross-faction?

Good point too Chimpy. I fancy a zombie zerg this evening, might turn my graphics settings down a notch or 3 first :p

How much is it server lag vs graphics? I haven't had a problem at all on either end. I've got the type of computer WoW barely recognized as a possibility when it launched and am playing on 10mb broadband, so I'm curious to hear what's the worst offender with this type of event. And I wonder if people had the same complaints back in the days of UO when they had those invasion events in that February of whateveryearitwas.

Zombies can group up and across faction, I think.  I know they CAN take opposite faction portals, since I just did it and went rampaging through Undercity for about 30 seconds.  (Guards suck)

I wonder how grouping cross-faction works, if it's true that it's possible.  I know zombies can zone into instances (including raids).  I wonder if you can zombie then group then enter the same instance cross-faction, and at that point, what happens to the group when the zombies die and respawn as players?

....especially if it's a heroic or oldschool raid instance, where zombies might have a chance at killing something that gives them a raid ID and a lockout timer.  Get 20 zombies together, some horde, some alliance, hit ZG, clear to the nearest boss and kill it and see what happens......wish I had enough friends on both sides to do this.

Zoning as a zombie does bad things apparently. 50/50 on that character being missing until the daily reboot.

I disconnected when trying to infect a Kara group a couple of days ago, zoning as a zombie is bad.

Same thing happened when I tried to zone in to a BG as a zombie, or maybe I was just infected and about to pop.

Meh.

Stealthing past the argent healers is fun though.  FYI, the faction leaders can not be infected.

Yeah, these zombies are starting to get fucking tiresome.

Tonight was the first time I've been turned into a zombie against my will, I got jumped by two npc zombies as I came out of the hall of legends in Orgrimmar.

 It seems the infection timer is down to 1 minute now, and every hit from a zombie lowers that by 10 seconds.  If you get into melee range of more than one of them it's pretty much all over.

I was jumped by two PC zombies on the isle earlier today while fighting a mob. I spotted them in time and kited 'em until I got dazed by the mob [grrr], but at that point they were so low from my totem + shock damage that only one of them got a few hits on me.

After he died, I had 10 sec left on the timer, so I frantically spammed my disease cleansing totem... it removed the disease at 2 seconds left: Was a pretty intense moment... then 15 seconds later they corpse-rezzed [two undead rogues, obviously] and ganked me as I was pulling the next mob with 50% hp.  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

I logged in to a character today and was surrounded by 10 zombies.  Oh well, my characters needed rest xp anyway ;-)

Personally I'm loving it. I got infected on the way into Shattrath and legged it for the UC portal in the hope of finding a healer before the timer was up. Then I noticed the timer was only a minute - and subsequently found they've lowered the number of healers - so made it to the inner tier of the magic quarter before turning.

So I took out the tailor trainers instead, then converted a couple of Deathguards and then me and my undead crew jumped a lvl 70 druid and he joined in and we basically scoured half of the inner circle, a couple of auction NPCs (and PCs auctioning) the Frostwolf advisors, an elite NPC and then headed for the bank area where I got we took down a troll priest trying to disinfect and a couple of others.  People complain about the lack of meaningful world pvp in WoW and finally there is - it's just that you can't elect out of it.

My only complaint about being a zombie is the durability damage - that should be removed as it's so easy to die.

Should I also mention that I'm currently also trying to level up to 70 before the xpac hits too.  I haven't found that this has hindered my play at all unless I choose to get involved. Of course, I don't spend a lot of time in the capitals so I can avoid a lot of it.

The zombie invasion is over now.

Best world event ever, imo.  Of course, part of my enjoyment came from listening to the whining on the trade channel.