Good Morning, MMOG Fans! Haha Haha!

[Signe]

  1. Good morning players! | 1/18/2005 10:12:02 AM PST          
 
 
Welcome to the forums. I know there is a lot of various discussions and questions going around today so I am hoping to consolidate them somewhat.

Class questions/suggestions
Regarding class balance issues, we have asked the dev team to look further into the following. Please be aware that any proposed changes take time to occur, which is why the discussions have been so many, and the feedback not as many.

Hit/miss ratio concerns - Some players say they miss all the time. Some players say they miss in succession some of the time. We are trying to determine what exactly the problem is. Please remember, unless your weapon skill is maxed out for your current level, misses will be an issue. We are investigating why players who are maxed out on weapon skill are still missing.

Warriors - We are aware of many players who say the warrior is lacking utility. We picked out the most well-developed thoughts on this matter from the player base and have presented them to the dev team for their analysis.

Warlocks - As with the Warrior class, the most well-developed concerns regarding the Warlock class have been made aware of the dev team.

If you have questions outside of these 4 points (this is the extent of info we have right now, but that might change through the course of the day), please feel free to ask them here.

[Language mod]
We have brought up this issue, but it must first be investigated.

[Realm/Login]
All levels of the organization are working to address this. I would like to stress that real progress is being made on the issue behind the scenes, and again, we are all fans of the game and want as much to rid of these problems as much as our players. I know the perception is contrary to that, but there aren't enough words to express how much dedication, from the president on down, is going into resolving these issues.

[Mage]
Water - I will ask for some feedback, not sure why there wouldn't be higher end water.
Arcane Missle - I believe QA is still looking into this matter.

[Character migration]
We plan to offer a 1 time migration from high population realms to low peopulation realms to ease the overcrowding. It is currently undergoing implementation/testing. More details to follow.

Link

[naum]

And a new battlegrounds part 2 preview:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/battlegrounds-part2.html

Sounds good as I peruse, but the devil is always in the details...

[Shockeye]

Very interesting. I especially found this tidbit enlightening:

We're sorry but there has been an error with your request. Please try again later.

    * Go back to the previous page
    * Return to main

[Sky]

Warriors - We are aware of many players who say the warrior is lacking utility. We picked out the most well-developed thoughts on this matter from the player base and have presented them to the dev team for their analysis.

Warlocks - As with the Warrior class, the most well-developed concerns regarding the Warlock class have been made aware of the dev team.

Heh, the two classes I went for before settling on Hunter.

[Jayce]

I'm a warrior, and my most common gaming partner is a warlock.

So, goody goody *rub hands*.

[Righ]

Welcome to the forums.

Congratulations on getting them to work for you.

Regarding class balance issues, we have asked the dev team to look further into the following.

Nerfs all round! Cheers!

We plan to offer a 1 time migration from high population realms to low peopulation realms to ease the overcrowding.

We notice some servers are not yet broken. This should remedy that situation.

[Ardent]

A character migration would be nice. I currently have a lvl 27 shaman on a ganking server that I gave up on, and I would love to move her to a carebear server.

[Zane0]

I'm not concerned about class balance being a significant problem- there are only 7 or 8 classes.  Though people aren't as varied, balance has to be much easier to maintain than the standard 10 or 12+.

[Morfiend]

I dont think even Blizzard will be silly enough to allow PVE to PVP server transfers, but if they do, you can bet we will see the general forums explode like no forums hath exploded before.

Hell, I will likely chime in too if they do that. But maybe by that time I will be 60, and it will provide a ton of unexperianced  fodder for my rogue.

Battleground look fun, but the fact they are for lvl51+ is a bit disapointing, all through beta they said they would do instanced level baised battlegrounds. Yeah, I know, what should I expect right? Anyway, I just had hoped they would go that way. They did say lower level battlegrounds are in the works, but I think its going to be a major bummer for a lot of folks.

[Samprimary]

Generally I see a view of the game here that is way way more negative than that which I would be inclined to give it from my own individual perspective. But now I understand why this is:

1. My server has always been up at the times I wanted to play,
2. This makes me a terribly rare case on a terribly rare, functioning server,
3. Overall, this is not the experience for most people and for most servers, and
4. It does suck prodigal ass to have to deal with these issues, so for most people the game is sucking though many prodigal-ass level issues.

[Disco Stu]

I dont think even Blizzard will be silly enough to allow PVE to PVP server transfers, but if they do, you can bet we will see the general forums explode like no forums hath exploded before.

It really isn't a big deal in this game. I'm on a pvp and I couldn't care less. It is not hard to level on a PvP server. I'm about 3 bubbles from 50 and I can't think of more than 4 times when being on a pvp server slowed my lvling down. Constant ganking just does not happen very often. Corpse camping is hard and there are an abundance of leveling spots.

[Signe]

I should hurry and level a character to 60 just in case they let us move from PvE to PvP.  Then I will become a grief gril.  I'd love it.

Oh yes.

[Ardent]

Constant ganking just does not happen very often.

You're luckier than I was. On Blackrock, levelling was an exercise in frustration with ?? level Alliance slaying me and my companions constantly. I quit at 27, and from what I heard, in the 30s levels it got 1000x worse.

I'm not trying to whine, just explaining why I switched. I'd really like to pull that shaman over to a normal server.

[schild]

I should hurry and level a character to 60 just in case they let us move from PvE to PvP.  Then I will become a grief gril.  I'd love it.

Oh yes.

If you're going to become a grief gril, will you invite us to barbeques?

[Fabricated]

Finally, I can move my primary character to a server with people I sort of know! And hopefully he won't suck anymore!

Oh wait, almost all of you pigfuckers play Horde. Bah.

Edit: If serious changes are made to warrior talents, I had better get a free respec.

[Jayce]

Since it's a lot more fun to post complaints than happy times, I'll chime in that I have had hardly any issues with login, no queues, and lag is at or below the reasonable threshold in these types of games.

I'm just not sure whether we see more bad experiences because who posts  when it's all going good?  And there are a LOT of people playing this game.  I have friends who wouldn't know UO from Whamadoodles Online who are now playing.  It's weird.

[Jamiko]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=902431&p=1&tmp=1#post902431

The overwhelming success of World of Warcraft has brought hundreds of thousands of people together to adventure in Azeroth, and concurrency numbers are well beyond what we expected or even hoped for. Unfortunately, this high concurrency, especially when concentrated on a small number of realms, initially caused issues with our hardware infrastructure. We were able to streamline our code to increase performance in the weeks following launch. However, the holiday season nearly doubled our player base, and it quickly became apparent that in order to handle not only the current player base, but all future players as well, we needed to make some upgrades to our infrastructure.

Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.

In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.

The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our players this weekend. This process coincides with our constant efforts to improve the current performance of World of Warcraft, and sometimes issues can arise when implementing these improvements. We will do our best to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, and we once again thank you for your patience and understanding.

[Sable Blaze]

Whisperwind must have been a "charmed" server. To date I still have yet to experience much of what people complain about.

More confirmation that Blizzard is looking at warriors. Good. Although, I don't share the opinion that the class is completely useless (at least, not once you hit the mid-30s), it does have a variety of issues. Blizzard was more than a bit too clever making this class, and there are some things (like rage generation) that need a serious looking at (preferably complete scrapping, but that'll never happen).

Melee classes altogether need a serious look at their tohit rates. This is particularily troublesome with warriors because of the rage generation mechanics.

Lastly, stances need more intrinisic bonuses. The ONLY reason I switch stances is to access abilities confined to a particular stance. There should be a bit more reason to choose, say, zerk stance over battle than to use pummel or berzerker rage.

[WayAbvPar]

Took them a while to cough up the information, but at least it sounds credible. They were probably waiting to explain what was going on until they had a fix in place.

I am another of the charmed few. I have had less connectivity/lag/log in problems with WoW than I have with any other MMOG game I have even played (it is probably about tied with CoH, which is impressive).

 UO, EQ, DAOC, AO, SB, CoH, WoW...good Christ I have wasted a lot of time on these damned things. Not to mention all the betas I have played...and I am a casual player for the most part.

[Dren]

I'm on Whisperwind too and agree I do not have any issues with the service so far.  However, I do recognize the lag getting worse each week, which leads me to believe even more people are joining the server. *Boggle* I don't like what that foretells.

WoW seems to be drowning in customers...Yay?

[Sky]

3. Overall, this is not the experience for most people and for most servers, and

Actually, it's what? 20 servers? 20 out of what? 88?

The people from those servers are being very loud right now (and understandably so), but that doesn't make them 'the majority'. No more than folks whining for class balance are.

The majority is silent and happy.

[MrHat]

3. Overall, this is not the experience for most people and for most servers, and

Actually, it's what? 20 servers? 20 out of what? 88?

The people from those servers are being very loud right now (and understandably so), but that doesn't make them 'the majority'. No more than folks whining for class balance are.

The majority is silent and happy.

Actually, I would assume that those 20 are the first 20 that went up.  They have the greatest population and probably comprimise half the population.

[Morfiend]

I dont think even Blizzard will be silly enough to allow PVE to PVP server transfers, but if they do, you can bet we will see the general forums explode like no forums hath exploded before.

It really isn't a big deal in this game. I'm on a pvp and I couldn't care less. It is not hard to level on a PvP server. I'm about 3 bubbles from 50 and I can't think of more than 4 times when being on a pvp server slowed my lvling down. Constant ganking just does not happen very often. Corpse camping is hard and there are an abundance of leveling spots.

I get the feeling you play Alliance. True?

[Signe]

I started an alliance warrior and it's much better.   They absolutely paid much more attention to alliance cities and the areas in general.

[Disco Stu]

I get the feeling you play Alliance. True?

Yes. I played horde in beta.. same experance. The problem with the horde side is its easier to fall into an area that is allaince heavy and the population imbalances do nothing to help that. But if you pick your zones right you can level almost as quickly as horde as you can alliance. The alliance does have an edge in some areas but so does the horde.

[Morfiend]

Once you get to lvl 35, the alliance presence is VERY strong in the majority of leveling zones.

On my server most of the horde have written off STV, due to SOOOOO many alliance there, which sucks becuase its a great zone. Also, Arathi Highlands, has strong alliance presence, and their town is right next to the graveyard, and the elite base with about 8 quests has a bunch of mobs that are alliance friendly. Hinterlands is very much alliance favored. Tanaris is neutral, but again there are so many alliance swarming all over, its a rare day when you can fly in to gadgetzan and not get attacked with in 45 seconds.

I would say badlands is a toss-up between horde and alliance, but I have not seen any zones with clear horde advantage post 30.

Also, Horde hits heavly contested zones at around lvl 20, where as alliance doesnt get heavly contested untill around lvl 30, and those 10 levels can mean quite a bit.

I play horde in retail, but during beta I played both, and I can say alliance has a very clear advantage in leveling due to pvp.

[Disco Stu]

I would say badlands is a toss-up between horde and alliance, but I have not seen any zones with clear horde advantage post 30.

Desolace, Feralas, 1K Needles, Azshara. I could name more. The horde doesn't have to hit heavily contested areas when they hit 20. They choose to.
The horde is just as present in every post 40 zone as the alliance is. There are a number of zones with the graveyard right next to the horde town. You should also take into account the location of SM (the best 36-41 leveling/loot spot in the game) and rachet as well which both give the horde an advanatge. The only major advanatge the alliance has in leveling has nothing to do with PvP. A pally is a.. not better but definatly more usful PvE class than a shamman and since their are so many pallys running around it is much easier to get a really good group together on the alliance side.