I just sensed a great disturbance in the Internet. It was like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced.
Interesting. FFXI scheduled their maintenance today at 11am - 3pm. I wonder if MMORPGs plan them together, or maybe Tuesday afternoons are just the best time.
They are down every Tuesday from 5am - 11am pst for scheduled maintenance. Sometimes back up sooner, sometimes down longer. Why is this a surprise? And Bailey, that would be 6 million. I don't really care, since I'm working during those hours, anyway.
7 million. On some of the boxes, they say 7 million now. For me, I could never really get into WoW. I did buy it and got up to lvl 25-30ish. I found that there was not as much to do within the game as FFXI. The crafting in FF was much deeper, and the way the party dynamics and interactions work made you feel more like your group accomplished something as a "team". Still, WoW is much less annoying to play overall and I really liked the way you could solo till the really high levels, and them letting you cooperate when you wanted to, instead of forcing you to find solutions as a group IF and when your goals coincided.
Ahhh.. 7 million, lol.. so many WoW servers. There is plenty to do within WoW. I played FFX too and REALLY disliked it, even though I like the art style. Such a frustrating game. They beefed up WoW's crafting with the expansion. Added new professions, new recipes, made a lot of the crafted items actually worth while for those who do not like to raid. Lots more patterns and recipes drop in the outlands. Lots of cool new enchants, as well. They added discovery to the alchemy profession, so while you're making potions or trasmuting primals, essences, etc.. you can actually 'discover' a new recipe you didn't know before. Some crafted gear can also be upgraded as well. It certainly could be deeper than it is, for sure.. but it works pretty well, IMO. hehe, I just won a new riding mount the other night that no one on my server has yet. If I have time, I'll take a screenshot tonight and post it here. It's really neat looking. I've been grinding reputation for my Nether Ray epic flying mount. Especially since the birds are so damn ugly.. after that one, I'll work on getting a nether drake (dragon). The new Arena PvP is fun as hell. 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 teams. Lots of cool gear you can spend arena points on. New battlegrounds and lots of new world pvp have been incorporated as well. Which is cool, imo, because I play on a PvE server. If I'd always had played on a PvP server, then that wouldn't be a big deal. Bombing runs are fun as heck tho, especially now that I saved up enough gold for an epic flying mout.. the non-epic version flies at 60% speed, where the epic flies at 280% speed. 5200g though, for the skill and bird mount. So much to do in WoW, which only gets better when you hit level 70.
Yeah but those 7 million include all banned accounts too. And a considerable part of the accounts are bots used for farming. Still can't deny that a lot of people play it.
Almost all of the spamming accounts are 10-day trials which do not count towards the total. The banned accounts are really a fraction of actual players. There are gold farmers in WoW, like in any other MMO, but the ratio between farmer and actual player is miniscule. Oh yeah, I just read yesterday that Blizzard is suing Peons4hire or whoever they are, the biggest gold seller. I hope they win big.
The problem with MMORPGs is there will always be some people who play it for only 2 hours a day, some who play it for 8, and others who are on it 24/7, like the gold farmers and gilsellers. You can't exactly ban people from playing it too much. So it stands to reason that prices on items will be too high for people who play the game only a little, and about right for the average players.
Well, they've made it terribly easy to make money now. Quests when you hit 70, will give easily 12-25g for finishing it. That is also why they made so many easily craftable items, for those who only play 2 hours a day. They made dungeons have 2 different difficulty settings, one normal mode and one for heroic mode. All dungeons in the outlands have this option. So while you might go through Hellfire Ramparts at 58-62, you can go back in at 70 on heroic and it'll be a lot harder with new loot tables. Also on heroic, badges drop off of each boss, which you can turn in for epic quality items. Even if you only play 2 hours a day, you can easily make 100-300g in that amount of time. Eliminating the need to have to 'buy' gold. The prices of items on the AH has also gone down, at least on my server, because you don't have to be hardcore to build up a nice 'nest egg'.
I'll try to take some screens of my new mount, my epic warlock mount and the mount I'll have in the near future.. probably by this weekend. Oh, I'll take pic of my current epic flying mount.. you'll see why I want to get rid of it. The one I got over the weekend, was a rare .5% drop in a certain dungeon, from a boss that can only be summoned by a druid for their epic flight form quest. Druids have built in flying mounts, because they can shape shift into a bird. But for them to get the 280% speed version, they have to do a quest line, which ends up taking them to fight a boss which I believe is called "Raven Lord". I was just lucky enough to have the mount drop when we downed the boss, then even luckier to win the roll out of the 5 of us. Mount sure draws a lot of attention.. it's the tallest one I've seen in the game and since my toon is a gnome, it makes it even bigger. For some reason gnomes have the biggest mounts, except maybe Taurens... must be compensating, lol.
If that is the case, won't the rare items just cost 10x more because of inflation? In WoW, are there chinese players that camp a certain monster 24/7 just to keep getting the rare drops to sell them on the auction house for profit? I didn't play WoW long enough to really run into any problems with gold sellers. In FFXI, they made a lot of previously rare items either exclusive, meaning you can only have one in your possession at a time, or unsellable, or both exclusive and unsellable. The gilsellers have gotten smarter though, so now they play like normal players, and if a real player wants an item, they will leave the area rather than risk getting their account banned.
Well most rare and epic items are Unique, so you can only have one. But what they did with a lot of drops was make them BoP or Bind on Pickup. Meaning you can't sell it, except to a vendor. Now, this is only the case with items that drop off a certain mob (monster). For instance, +30 intellect to weapon, +40 spell damage to weapon, Arcanoweave boots, Arcanoweave Robe, Whitemend pants, etc. are all BoP for the recipe. So I went out and farmed them myself. This isn't the case with all recipes, there are BoE (on equip) recipes which are world drops. Meaning they can drop anywhere in the world or in a dungeon (depending on level), not just off a certain type of mob. A lot of crafted epics also take a primal nether to make. Primal nethers are BoP and drop from the last boss in a heroic instance or a rare chance they will drop off the last boss in a level 70 instance, non-heroic. You can also trade in 10 badges of justice (which you get 1 from each boss in a heroic instance) for a primal nether. They made a lot of tweaks to cut down on that kind of farming and ripping people off on the AH. You still make good money crafting items, because of the primal nether and rarity of patterns. There aren't that many world drop weapons. Well there is, there are quite a few rares, but not many epics. Epic pattern drops are more common than they once were, which is how I made the 5200g for my mount (lucked upon 3 of them), but still sell for a good price. They're starting to achieve a good balance between casual and hardcore, which is actually very hard to do in any MMO. But, no matter what you do, you'll always be upsetting someone. I just enjoy the game and have since I first got it, more than any other MMO. I'm not quite a hardcore player, but I play more than the casual player would. The one issue they need to fix a bit for the casual players is the Looking for Group interface. It's a bit clunky and sometimes hard to find a group if you're short on time. Though, the best solution is to find a good guild.
I've thought about signing up for either WoW, Ultima Online or the subscription-free Guild Wars. Alas, I have neither the time nor the money to spend on games.
Better late then never! Pics of my 3 favorite mounts are attached. The one that is flying is a Nether Ray, which I just got yesterday. The Bird is the Raven Lord's mount and the fiery horse is my warlock Dreadsteed mount. Nether Ray comes from being exalted with a faction called the Sha'tari Skyguard, the Reigns of the Raven Lord has a 1% drop rate from a boss in a dungeon called Sethek Halls (on heroic difficulty) and the Dreadsteed comes from a warlock quest line when you hit level 60, which was my first epic (100% speed) mount. I have a few others like a mechanical chicken, a ram, a griffon (one with armor and one without) and a panther-like cat mount. The griffon with armor is 280% flying speed, the one without is 60% flying speed. Which is a big jump in speeds, but one costs 1000g to learn to ride, the other costs 5000g.
The game is weak now. Weak in the sense that there is no merit to getting any better than you were (or actually possibility of getting any better). I was pretty much a "hardcore" raider pre-expansion pack and my guild cleared pretty much everything (except 2nd half of naxx) before it seemed more like work than play to me then I quit my guild leader position (and the game) for 6 months. I renewed for the expansion and it was really fun to go to 70 and to do arena (had a very well ranked 2v2 team and sweet arena gearz). However, raid content is pretty lame. I generally wasn't spending the time to raid. However, I came now and then and even without much raid gear and ZERO experience in the new encounters, I was able to still heal it just fine and we downed new bosses easily. Basically the problem is you don't have to get any BETTER to beat the new stuff anymore... just need a few practice runs to figure out what the bosses DO. My problem was I still did basically the EXACT SAME stuff I did when I raided at 60 and I was still playing pretty much optimally... only new gear would improve me. And arena at the ultra high end (rating >2000), starts to be rock/paper/scissors. Certain class combos will just beat certain class combos unless someone makes a big fuckup (which teams rated over 2k rarely do). I admit my combo was pretty rigged (holy priest (me) + rogue), but it wasn't the best 2v2 combo. But still, certain team combos were just ideal counters vs our class makeup. Also good arena gear was basically a direct nerf to damage, (Except of course damage over time which doesnt rely on crits... which is why warlock+shadowpriest = op). As I said, at lower ratings, if you were good, you could beat any combo... at high ratings, everyones skill is about the same (pretty much playing ideally... the game doesn't allow a ton of room for "technique"), and certain class combos will just always beat other combos. Makes it pretty stale. Anyway it is a great game but I quit because it wasn't holding my interest anymore. All the raids are pretty much rehashes of the same battles with different visuals, and at the high end the arena games are too much rock/paper/scissors. The game was WAY better at 60 when new raids were actually DIFFERENT. You'd go into a new place and the bosses would be totally original... not just original artwork with the same old strategies. Really the only totally new type fight was prince and that was just an obnoxious, totally random thing.
Wow, if that isn't the most wrong statement I've ever heard. I'm sorry, but players must be BETTER now than they ever were. No more fillers for 40-man raids. The 25-man content IS pretty damn hard. It takes more coordination and more skill. People who use to run 40-mans, can't run the new instances, because they don't have the skill required. But, obviously, you're basing TBC off of Karazhan, which some of those bosses, yes you have a point. However, go to Mag, Leotheras the Blind, Hydross the Unstable, A'Lar and you'll see quite a difference. I, as a warlock, tank Leotheras... Our two main tanks need a full set of nature and frost resist for Hydross. The Lurker Below, even though an easy fight, takes a lot of coordination. In TBC, players have had to learn to think on their feet. It's not just simple button mashing. The most overpowed in arena is Pally + MS Warrior. Not warlock + shadow priest, who are tough, yes, but when you can't fear warriors and you have pallies who bubble... not much two clothies are going to do, when you're bleeding all over the place from MS. But okay, everyone has an opinion. BWL and MC were the most boring raids I've ever been in.. not until AQ40 and Naxx did it get interesting. Karazhan isn't a great indicator of the expansion, either. I still have no clue why they put in a 10-man, then jumped to 25-man, though a new 10-man raid is coming out soon. Prince is kinda gay, because it all depends on where infernals drop. I'm just glad there are no more 40-man raids, where 10 or more people could coast through doing jack shit, while the others worked their asses off.
I'd be one of those 10 people, and if they asked what I was doing, I would reply "Sprechen sie, bang bang?"
Not really they are easy. The gear + new skills make the game a lot easier. Having less players does mean that you can afford less people messing up than the EASY raids pre-BC. However AQ40 (huhu and beyond) and Naxx fights pretty much always required everyone to be paying attention. Less players makes it easier to communicate and easier to build a good raid. Four horsemen is still THE hardest fight in the game by far... Why do you think the top raid guilds clear the new content in about 1/8th of the time it took them to clear the old stuff? My point is I came in without practice for like 6-7 months and used all my pre-BC knowledge and I did everything very easily... nothing new required. Don't have to prefect any new techniques or learn any new tricks. Any fight that is difficult can be solved by just spamming consumables. Twin emps warlock tank, princess huhuran, sapphirron. You just didn't play the raid content before BC... all those bosses are rehashes and yes I have played everything in BC before Black Temple so I'm not just talking about kara. A few of the fights mix together concepts other boss fights from pre-BC but frankly I haven't seen anything new outside of the lame prince concept. It is true that Ihaven't seen BT though. Wow pvp has never been button mashing... and I can tell you I didn't get a rating of 2031 with "button mashing", I did it because I was pretty good and frankly the rogue I had with me was INSANELY good and he carried me a bit. Pally and MS warrior is one of the more rigged combos but shadowpriest warlock will beat them always if they are good. Mass dispel, silence, and felhunter means the paladin dies in under 30 seconds. If the warrior is causing problems, all it takes is death coil to waste his time. Warrior can NOT kill an arena geared shadow priest with all the bonus armor, resilience, and shadowform phys reduction... add death coil to buy some time and its pretty much game over. My team combo of holy priest + rogue is better vs SP warlock IMO. Of course we have a hard time vs paladin/warrior cuz they are both plate. Altho the worst vs us is MS warrior + Resto shaman since resto shaman is almost ideal vs rogue. MC and BWL were boring by the time you got up there. When it was new it hadn't been nerfed and everyone didn't have better gear to carry new raiders with. And it was also the "best gear" and "hardest stuff" at the time. Actually when BWL was brand new I think that was probably the most fun time in WoW ever. Of course if you started that when AQ or Naxx was already out it was an easymode gear grind. Basically comes down to average gear of the player base. When we first did MC, +heal and +damage didnt even EXIST outside of MC, neither did +defense. So with really shitty gear you needed a really coordinated raid... but later down the line when half the people had epics already (or the new DM stuff that was released), it was easymode and people could sleep through it. You just weren't around at the very beginning. At the very beginning of the raid game, raids were fuckin HARD. Now, they are beatable by everyone. When I got into the raid game, my server had TWO raid guilds that could even do the first molten giant pull in MC (cuz no good gear was out from patches yet and people were unexperienced). Now, my server has about 50 guilds on each side that do kara, about 20 on each side that do gruul, and about 10 on a side that do SSC, Eye, BT. Basically, the gear out there (thanks to ez gearing from arena + kara) basically makes it so you don't have to be that good to clear new content. You can't be a total goon you need SOME level of skill, but it really isn't too difficult with the nice padding you get from gear. Basically BC provides really easy gear which is awesome for the casual player (Which, for BC, was me) but because of really easy gear, you get really easy content. I'm not entirely sure it was a bad decision to open the end game up to more players... from a business standpoint. But for me, I didn't like it. I liked the idea of doing something VERY hard that most people couldn't do, then getting rewarded for it. Now, all you get is gear that is not as good as arena gear for pvp, and, while it is an upgrade for pve, its not required to beat new content (and not even required to keep it from being hard). Like I said before, I went to the eye with just a few kara peices, and crafted gear, and I was able to function just fine... and I barely raided in TBC, just enough to see the new content.
Well, Pow, the new raids were MUCH harder until they took the nerf bat to them as well. They ALWAYS do that. I admit, I don't have much experience with late AQ40 or Naxx, but my girlfriend does, she's been playing since the game released. She also thinks it doesn't compare. She says people have to do a lot more work now, than they use to. 40-man raids were a lot more casual, though NOT for casual players. So many people I know who use to be top players, quit because they couldn't keep up. Many good tanks, haven't learned to adapt to the new content, where instead of tanking one mob at a time, they're tanking multiple mobs. There are a lot of guilds on my server which are still stuck on the first couple bosses in Kara. If you were in a guild which had T3 armor and cleared a lot of old content, of course you moved along a lot farther right away, than most players. Sure you can get nice raiding blues and some purples from the new 5-mans, but all of that previous gear still helps quite a lot. Magtheridon is one of the more unique bosses I've done as well, but there might be more of an equivalent to him later on in the old raids. Will disagree until I am blue in the face that a warlock + sp is that wonderful for arena. It is good, no doubt about it and my original 2v2 team warlock + sp got to around 1990-2010, but warrior/pally combos were the worst. Rogues with Pallies were pretty bad too, but at least you can fear a rogue. BM Hunters eat me alive. I also prefer 5v5 and to a lesser extent 3v3 over 2v2 though. It is so much more fun to coordinate a bigger group and steamroll. It's also a hell of a lot more points. Arena gear is nice, but it is SHIT for raiding, at least for dps casters. Sure a piece or two is okay, but it has pretty much no hit rating. BC is a hell of a lot more fun than old WoW, IMO. It's much harder for people to be cliquey, uber, hardcore super nerd, know-it-alls. Those types of players annoy the crap out of me and I kick them from my guild quite often. Guilds are easier to maintain and you don't need an excess of players just so you can fill raids. But who knows, they already announced the next expansion "Wrath of the Lich King" which raises the level cap to 80 and introduces a hero class. Oh yeah, one more thing I like about BC better is the rep grind. It's not nearly as gay as it once was. It is way improved. Also the introduction of daily quests, is a great way to make gold. Epic flying mounts are also sweet as hell. So much fun to not have to use an FP anymore (at least in outland). But as I said in my last post, YMMV and it's all an opinion. I think WoW of today is a hell of a lot more fun than it once was. Also seems to be a lot less elitist pricks out there.
Rep grind is easier in BC but they added way more reps so it comes out to be just as lame if you ask me. FYI they STARTED with the encounters easier in BC. Go back and check it out. Blackwing Lair took two months for anyone to beat, and that was even after MONTHS of time where guilds stocked up on full MC gear. Black Temple was cleared in about a week and a half... with a MUCH shorter delay between the release of the previous raid (thus giving less gearing-up time). You can go ahead and say that subjectively, you got into the raid game later and yes, I'm sure going on runs with guilds that already farmed the content was super easy. Objectively, you can't deny that the old raids took MUCH longer before anyone on earth beat it... let alone before the average guilds started to beat it. It's just easier content, combined with the fact that you don't need to really do anything different than you did in all those old raids. You don't need to do more work now imo... you can slack off just as much as before... I know for a fact when you were posting here about leveling up all those pre-BC raids were all farm status by raid guilds already... that's why people could just coast. When the content was new, you couldn't do that because you didn't have a gear buffer and you didn't have multiple nerfs to help the crappy players (and more casual players) catch up. If they didn't do this, then too many people would be forever behind and they would quit. Just look at world-first completion times of old raid instances vs the new ones... way way way faster now. Really arena is the only improvement of BC. Arena was really awesome at first and I was pretty much only playing wow for arena for a while... however it didn't take long to get bored of it. Outland travel time is an improvement (less time just travelling). Of course that really doesn't matter at top level anyway since you don't go around that much anyway. And, like I said before, theres not much reward to raiding. You used to raid so you could get the badass pvp gear. Now it isn't as good as the Arena gear so there isn't a lot of point to it. Basically, they've taken the time window of raids being "hard" (and by hard, I mean very few people clearing it), and made it MUCH smaller. They did this of course to "even the playing field" for more casual players. And of course to lower the bandwidth costs... The real reason they made 25 man raids was because new content on 40 man raids often had lag issues consistently during popular play times. Same reason they came up with arena... they basically only make people spend 30-60 minutes of playing per week to get points. Neat change but if you play more you still only get points once a week... so they still make you wait a long time for gear (to keep the subscription rolling), but you aren't logged in as much. To be quite honest, I liked spending a lot of time and planning to beat hard encounters EARLY ON so that I could have gear to get a little edge in pvp. That was the reward for spending all the time raiding. Now you just get slightly better gear that helps you raid easier, and is worse than the Arena gear for pvp.
