Warcraft: the next generation.
So recently I really took notice that blizzard has slapped up some enticing rewards for recruiting a friend. As with most offers of it’s kind it is worded in a very general manner, almost slippery in a sense- like there’s fine print without there being any. Probably the most popular reward is bonus exp. You get triple experience points—- when you are in the party with your recruited friend. This means your getting about the same xp as before, just a little bit faster. However there IS one part of it that doesn’t have any catches, due to triple xp and the fact that when in a party you do not have to share quest experience you are provided straight up triple quest experience. Well as you can imagine, or can confirm from previous experience, this leads to some fast leveling. Just make sure that your friend can play according to your schedule or vice-versa. Don’t be fooled by the shiny levels though, this service has other pitfalls.
Don’t you just hate when you see a new level 70(cough* night elf hunters) or one that just has no idea how the hell to handle/play his or her class? It’s quite obvious really, just look for the most powerful, non-efficient moves in the game (sorry to all the lowbies/ noobies reading this). Well for those who agree with that last sentiment, I have news for you my friends, It’s about to become a lot worse. Fast leveling equates to learning to skills at a higher frequency, giving the player almost no time to learn and get used to their new skills. We end up back in gold shire looking at that stupid noob of a night-elf hunter, except he has even less of an idea of what to do than before!
So far this offer is mucking up our player base and community, let’s see what else it can do. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool.
And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least give them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic!
P.S. Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?Easy kills anybody? Meh maybe not, their recruit‘ll just jump you.
Warcraft: the next generation.
So recently I really took notice that blizzard has slapped up some enticing rewards for recruiting a friend. As with most offers of it’s kind it is worded in a very general manner, almost slippery in a sense- like there’s fine print without there being any. Probably the most popular reward is bonus exp. You get triple experience points—- when you are in the party with your recruited friend. This means your getting about the same xp as before, just a little bit faster. However there IS one part of it that doesn’t have any catches, due to triple xp and the fact that when in a party you do not have to share quest experience you are provided straight up triple quest experience. Well as you can imagine, or can confirm from previous experience, this leads to some fast leveling. Just make sure that your friend can play according to your schedule or vice-versa. Don’t be fooled by the shiny levels though, this service has other pitfalls.
Don’t you just hate when you see a new level 70(cough* night elf hunters) or one that just has no idea how the hell to handle/play his or her class? It’s quite obvious really, just look for the most powerful, non-efficient moves in the game (sorry to all the lowbies/ noobies reading this). Well for those who agree with that last sentiment, I have news for you my friends, It’s about to become a lot worse. Fast leveling equates to learning to skills at a higher frequency, giving the player almost no time to learn and get used to their new skills. We end up back in gold shire looking at that stupid noob of a night-elf hunter, except he has even less of an idea of what to do than before!
So far this offer is mucking up our player base and community, let’s see what else it can do. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool.
And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least give them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic!
P.S. Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?Easy kills anybody? Meh maybe not, their recruit‘ll just jump you.
How World of Warcraft Works
Imagine it’s the night before patch day. You’ve parked your level-70 character, decked out in epic gear, outside what will soon be the forest ruins of Zul’Aman. Right now, it’s just rocky pavilion with huge, wooden gates you can’t open. But tomorrow, it will become the entrance to a dungeon full of trolls. You and nine of your friends hope to be the first players on your server to go inside.
 ??2006 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. The Burning Crusade is a trademark, and World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. The gate to Zul’Aman, before the instance existed in World of Warcraft. |
It’s a risky proposition — and not just because Zul’Aman is full of enemies that are far more powerful than you are. Zul’Aman is an addition to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “World of Warcraft,” or WoW. As anyone who plays the game can tell you, making additions or changes to such an immense, dynamic world can cause some problems. On patch day, players often experience everything from server instability to problems with their user interface (UI) and addons. Players did get into Zul’Aman the day its patch went live, but only after the servers were down for hours of extended maintenance.
Patch-day technical difficulties and the joy of exploring a new dungeon both come from the same basic source — the enormous collision of people and data. The game worlds of Azeroth and Outland include 50 regions spread out across three continents. Each region has its own landscape and inhabitants — both friendly and unfriendly — and sometimes its own weather. Then there are representations of players’ characters and everything they wear, carry and use. You can boil all of this down to ones and zeros stored on computer hard drives.
Players interact with all this data using their computers and an Internet connection. The players’ computers store some of the data, and a remote server provides the rest. As one player interacts with the world, the world changes for other players — the movement of data back and forth between the computer and the server allows this to happen.
Multiply this information by the thousands of players who can log on to a particular server at the same time, and the amount of traveling data becomes staggering. All the people playing the game also have the potential to make unpredictable decisions, making the exact interactions between players and the game hard to predict. When you think about the game in terms of so much traveling data, it’s not surprising that patches and updates can have far-reaching effects.
In this article, we’ll look at what it takes for data to become an interactive, persistent game world. We’ll also explore the game’s architecture and the people it takes to keep the game running. We’ll begin with the human factor — the people who play “World of Warcraft” and why they play it.
WoW Kills Another WoW Killer
It seems that the walls of World of Warcraft are impenetrable as yet another hyped MMO is broken against them, I’m of course speaking of Age of Conan. Age of Conan was probably the most hyped MMO in the last few years and while the hype helped AoC to break sales records, it didn’t last long. Age of Conan became the fasted selling MMO of all time, shipping 1 million units by June and Funcom stated it had 700,000 accounts by June 30th.
While off to a good start in terms of sales, the game itself did not start off so well. Across any MMO gaming site you’ll read about player complaints and gamers leaving AoC due to the many issues. While Funcom has not released any figures since June 30th, it is rumored that about 1/2 of the player base has left the game. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime also recently mentioned that “40% of the World of Warcraft subscribers that left for Age of Conan have since returned“.
Although the walls of WOW still stand strong, like all great world powers they must eventually fall. In an article at GamePlayer.com.au, they write about the recent “Recruit-a-Friend” campaign as a sign that subscription numbers are falling and Blizzard is looking for ways to bolster them until the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I myself made a prediction back in May stating that WoW would reach its peak this summer and then start to decline.
It seems that with every new big MMO, WoW is slowly starting to feel the pinch. With Warhammer Online on the horizon and a few other MMOs (Huxley, The Chronicles of Spellborn) before the years end, can WoW continue it’s growth? I’m sticking with my earlier statment and say no, it can’t.
Also, this article is not to say that AoC is a failure, I’m merely stating that AoC did not live up to the hype and is little to no threat to the WoW empire.
World of Warcraft - a first experience
The reputation that World of Warcraft (WoW) has gained is somewhat of a mystery to the uninitiated, when purely considering the statistics. Though it is firmly at the top of the MMORPG range in terms of number of players, its user base is on par with Second Life, and compared to social networking sites (even some of the more minor ones) it actually comprises a relatively small population. Yet, despite this, WoW is recognised to be one of the most addictive gaming experiences available, and has rightfully earned the title “World of Warcrack”. The obvious representation of this is the retention rate – in Second Life it was revealed that only one in ten thousand users are still regularly in world three months later, whereas in WoW the figure is hugely higher, being close to half of all users. Even casual mentions of the fact that I planned to play the game provoked some strong responses – a number of people warned me that I shouldn’t, that it would consume my life, and that they knew a number of people who personalities dramatically and negatively altered after playing the game. Terrifying warnings when all is considered, but those who are fully immersed in the world were much more positive, to the point where a number of my friends literally danced for joy that I would be joining them. “I’m so proud” said one of my housemates.
First experiences of the game are, however, slightly incongruous to this kind of reaction. Firstly, the install files for the game are enormous, the core game taking up well over 4gb of hard drive space, and with the expansion (which I purchased along with the core game as part of the “Battle Chest”) it took almost an hour to fully install the software. Once this is done, however, you cannot merely jump in world and start playing, as you are facing with a laborious patching process. Blizzard (the makers of WoW) have decided to not provide the patches as a direct download, but instead use torrenting technology to distribute the files required to its user base and require you to run their patching software to prepare the game. This process took more than two hours, and three hours of set up is a very long time indeed – by the time I was ready to play I was already put off from the experience, but I reigned in my reservations, ignored the warnings of the naysayers, and at half past ten in the evening of Tuesday 20th April 2008, I loaded up World of Warcraft for my first taste.
The next thing to do, of course, is to set up an account, log in, and choose a server. For your first time its more or less a random choice – you have no idea what the different varieties really involve, and so I plumped for a Role Player server that didn’t have any Player versus Player activity. I created a character (a Night Elf Druid) and entered the game.
Visually the game is simplistic but stimulating – the “cartoony” graphics in fact add a lot to the experience, meaning that your PC isn’t overly taxed, and yet is appealing at the same time. The area in which I emerged was an enormous forest, and after a short introduction describing the history of the Night Elf people in a vague way, I was ready to move around. The towering trees all around me, capped with pink and purple leaves, were a truly impressive site, and the graphics and design really add to the experience. Trees sway in the wind, animals crawl across the landscape, cities and towns burst from the trunks of the forest trees, and swooping architecture really adds to the feel of an alien and yet beautiful environment. Some help tips immediately sprung to my attention and I was quickly instructed on how to move and interact with the world around me. Though you can use the arrow keys (or wasd) to move around, it is much more intuitive to hold both the right and left mouse buttons and push the view where you want to go. It’s a little clunky to begin with but in minutes it feels natural and easy – so unlike the awkward controls in Second Life. I moved a little away from my starting point and began to talk to my first Non Player Character (NPC), a Night Elf hunter who I knew had something to say as he had an enormous golden exclamation mark hovering above his head. He gave me a quest immediately – the forest animals were proliferating too quickly for the ecosystem to handle and though it was sad he required me to thin the populations. I set out and more short help tips instructed me on how to engage in combat, and soon enough I had slaughtered some of the local fauna and returned clutching a plethora of pork ribs, teeth, and for some reason copper pieces, looted of their corpses. I returned for my reward, and with an engaging swirl of light I gained my first level.
One of the things that makes the game engaging right from the off is that they waste no time at all getting you used to the surroundings, or teaching you about the history of the world, or anything else, but throw you straight into quests, combat, rewards, and the satisfaction of achievement – gaining you first level after only a couple of minutes hooks you into the mechanism of reward, and the ability to choose (in a limited way) what your reward will be for some quests allows you to immediately start pushing your character in the direction you want it to go. Not, of course, that I really knew what direction I wanted my character to go in at this point. My next quest was to go and speak to someone else, and they told me to go speak to someone else, and soon I was happily bumbling from place to place, wiping out the indigenous life, gaining experience and money, and generally having a happy time of it. I learnt a few more skills and abilities, which made things a bit easier, and purchased a few choice items of new equipment from local retailers. Soon however, my rate of achievement was slowing dramatically – it was taking much longer to level up, and I was finding that to get to my next quest I was having to hike quite a long way to get there, and had little to do on route. The scenery which had, until now, been interesting and unusual, now became somewhat dull in its similarity – without variation that you would normally see in a landscape, burdened as this place was with perpetual forest, I was no longer distracted by my surroundings and thus travelling became a burden rather than an adventure. Once you’ve seen one thousand foot high tree, it turns out you’ve more or less seen them all.
At this point my housemate, ever helpful, arrived to give me some pointers. Not only had I chosen, it turned out, the slowest class to progress with (apparently Druids are notoriously dull until level twenty), but I’d also chosen a server on which he had no characters so could nip over and give me a hand. He suggested I create a new Draenai character on one of the servers he played – Ravenholdt. Ravenholdt was also a role play server, but also allowed player versus player combat. I logged off with my Night Elf, and created a new character on a new server. Wanting a quicker and more frantic experience, I asked for his opinion on what class I should play, and we eventually decided on a Warrior, a relatively simple “I hit things” class. I signed on and prepared to slog through my first five levels again, growing progressively more irritated with the game. What I encountered, however, was something much more exciting.
The Draenai were a race added into the game with the expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, and their starting area is relatively new because of it. It was also designed by a company that now knew what players wanted from the game, and because of it the area is much more stimulating and engaging that the Night Elf forests. After spending some time with this character talking to people and getting an idea about the history of my new race (apparently we crash landed on the planet from space!), I set about killing some mutated wildlife, and collecting blood from enormous moths for reasons that remained somewhat unclear. However, the questing this time around was much more varied – one involved locating a missing scout, and then assisting him against a Blood Elf expeditionary force that had set up camp nearby. Another involved inoculating some of the natives against the radiation caused by the crash. All in all, it was much more stimulating, and soon I’d reach my sixth level, and was told I was ready to move to the area next to my current zone, the second of the two introductory areas. I forded a river, talked to a woman about fishing, killed some nasty little water demon things, delivered a package of supplies to a village, and then arrived at my new base of operations. One of the great things about this area was the way that my quests overlapped to a certain extent – I could travel to the next village to pledge my allegiance to their defence, and at the same time take them medical supplies, catch some mackerel, and a whole host of other quests, and then be rewarded for all of them. Levelling seemed all round a lot easier and more rewarding, and the game was also giving me better items for completing these quests. My housemate turned up in the guise of a rather scary looking rogue, presented me with a couple of gold pieces and some rather lovely hand-stitched bags to carry all my spiders legs and so on in, and left me to my own devices. I got so caught up in the excitement of the experience that the next time I looked at the clock it was 2am, and so I sensibly logged off to get some sleep.
I returned to the world the next day and continued play with my Draenai Warrior, but soon ran into a couple of hitches. Firstly, I couldn’t find a new shop to buy new equipment in, and I was struggling to complete the quests I was being given – without top notch equipment I was dying pretty quickly, and I wasn’t relishing the experience quite as much as I had been the night before. Frustrated, I decided to leave my character for a while and try something else, so I created yet another avatar, this one a Human Paladin. Not really knowing what to expect, I jumped straight in to the world and began to play.
The play experience for a human was simply a joy – my first few levels came very easily and the starting area was small enough that I could navigate easily and varied enough that I was entertained by the landscape. I served my abbey well and soon I was strong enough to move out into a larger area, to be thrown into a world of kobolds and farmers, necklaces and pork pies. It was here that I really had my first interaction with other players, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. I was camped outside a mine which had been overrun by kobolds, and my mission was to scout the mine and then report back to the local marshal. I could see from where I was that there were a lot of kobolds, and on the whole they were quite tough. It seemed unlikely that I could simply blast my way through them and scout the mine on my own – it was swiftly going to turn into a boring run of drawing them off one by one and occasionally dying meaning I’d have to make the long slog back here to resurrect. Just as I was preparing to do this, I spotted a mage roughly the same level as I also standing staring at the mine. I approached her and began to discuss (acting in character) our respective missions and abilities. It turned out she was currently engaged in scouting as well and we teamed up to enter the mine, taking along a warlock we found as well, and ignoring a rather irritating gnome rogue who had the elegant name “KILLEROGUE”. He wasn’t terribly popular with our small band of heroes, and without him we ventured inside.
Adventuring with a group is, without doubt, a very different experience to adventuring solo, and we had soon completed our quest and returned home, disbanding the party once we were done. Our experience rewards were slight, as we shared the kill experience between us, but we all received the same reward, and it seemed an excellent way to progress. Sadly, my team had other things to do and I was left once more on my own. Exploring became the order of the day – there is a great sense of achievement when you discover a lake for the first time and receive some experience just for having been adventurous enough to find it. Walking around the world stops being merely moving from place to place and becomes a goal in of itself – exploration can be exciting all on its own. Determined to not let the game take over my life I again logged out and spent the rest of the day catching up on some paper work and spending time with some friends. I would return the next morning.
I had been told where to find a seller of weapons and armour by my housemate that evening for my Draenai character, and I logged back in first thing in the morning, reequipping myself, and moving on to more dangerous quests. Once again I found that the adventuring was exciting and fulfilling, and I gained my ninth level before logging off after about an hour of play. All in all, I felt rewarded by my experience but I felt happy enough to leave it, having completed a number of my most pressing quests already.
One thing that occurred to me about my play experience was the way in which it pulls you back into the world – whilst you have an outstanding quest that you feel like you can complete (i.e. not one where you die every minute or so) you feel drawn back in, you want to complete it. However, once you have completed a number of quests, it’s relatively easy to leave and do other things out of game. The short term goal orientated nature of the game works both for and against its addictiveness – whilst it keeps you trapped when you do have quests, as soon as you’ve finished one round you don’t feel compelled to continue. This is lucky, in some ways, as otherwise the horror stories that people tell might well be truer than I would like. At the end of my play time I have three characters – a level five Night Elf Druid, a level eight Human Paladin, and a level nine Draenai Warrior. At level ten you can begin to truly customise your abilities, selecting off talent trees for the first time and pushing your character in a more specialised direction. I am excited to see what will happen.
Total game time: roughly ten hours
Total levels gained: 22
Highest level character: 9
Drive to return to game: 6/10 – I want to go back, but I wouldn’t be that bothered if I couldn’t
WoW Kills Another WoW Killer
It seems that the walls of World of Warcraft are impenetrable as yet another hyped MMO is broken against them, I’m of course speaking of Age of Conan. Age of Conan was probably the most hyped MMO in the last few years and while the hype helped AoC to break sales records, it didn’t last long. Age of Conan became the fasted selling MMO of all time, shipping 1 million units by June and Funcom stated it had 700,000 accounts by June 30th.
While off to a good start in terms of sales, the game itself did not start off so well. Across any MMO gaming site you’ll read about player complaints and gamers leaving AoC due to the many issues. While Funcom has not released any figures since June 30th, it is rumored that about 1/2 of the player base has left the game. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime also recently mentioned that “40% of the World of Warcraft subscribers that left for Age of Conan have since returned“.
Although the walls of WOW still stand strong, like all great world powers they must eventually fall. In an article at GamePlayer.com.au, they write about the recent “Recruit-a-Friend” campaign as a sign that subscription numbers are falling and Blizzard is looking for ways to bolster them until the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I myself made a prediction back in May stating that WoW would reach its peak this summer and then start to decline.
It seems that with every new big MMO, WoW is slowly starting to feel the pinch. With Warhammer Online on the horizon and a few other MMOs (Huxley, The Chronicles of Spellborn) before the years end, can WoW continue it’s growth? I’m sticking with my earlier statment and say no, it can’t.
Also, this article is not to say that AoC is a failure, I’m merely stating that AoC did not live up to the hype and is little to no threat to the WoW empire.
