“Tankmages ruin games.” “If people can make a tankmage, that’s all they’ll make.” “Tankmages are too difficult to balance.” Why are developers so worried about people making characters they actually want to play?
Category: World of Warcraft
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.Cat Figurine: 1/46
I was telling a friend a couple weeks ago about the Spectral Tiger pet from the Warcraft CCG. Sexy blue sheen and transparency for the low, low price of only $500 on eBay. They do look pretty awesome, but $500. Holy shit! That’s when my friend told me about the tameable Ghost Sabers you can get. No sexy blue sheen, but you get the transparency for a fraction of the cost. And by “fraction of the cost” I mean “free.”
But surely, they wouldn’t happen to be the level I needed, right? I checked Petopia and was pleasantly surprised to see that the ghost sabers are levels 19 and 20. My main at the time was a level 19 (I just restarted) Blood Elf. Perfect!
Ghost towns
What’s up with MMO developers creating isolated cities in their games?
It’s odd. In WoW, we’ve get Darnassus and Silvermoon City both in the middle of nowhere. There’s all this beautiful content that you pretty much never experience unless you’re a newbie, or have to go there for an occasional quest. And on those occasions, it’s a lonely, isolating experience.
It doesn’t seem to be a mistake — after all, this had clearly already happened with Darnassus when Blizzard devided to build Silvermoon out in the boonies. I hear that when the expansion first came out, Silvermoon was teeming with noobs. Now it’s pretty desolate.
I saw the same thing in Asheron’s Call. After the initial release, all player activity coalesced into a few cities. The rest were ghost towns — a bunch of NPC’s hanging out, staring at each other from their storefronts day to day.
Does this happen in most MMO’s, or are these exceptions? Are there reasons I’m missing for not making these cities more centrally located?
Plagueworlds
According to the BBC, scientists are suggesting that the outbreak of a deadly virtual disease might give an insight into the outbreak of epidemics in the real world. In particular, they are invesitgating player reactions to the “Corrupted Blood” plague that took place a couple of years ago.
Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”
So, next time your partner/parent/child/employer asks how you can be spending so much time playing a stupid game, tell them you’re taking part in a medical experiment.
Let Us Play, Blizzard!
Yesterday I talked about how some friends and I on different servers who wanted to PvP together have had to level characters to 19 on a new server to do so. What’s more, we’re unlikely to ever level together far enough to play AV or Arena.
I suspect I’m not the first person to make the following suggestions. I suspect I’m probably more like the (hundred?) thousandth. But humor me… can someone explain to me why Blizzard erects such huge barriers to PvP participation?
If it were up to me, I’d tweak WoW PvP as follows:
If You Crush Your Enemy’s Skull and Nobody is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?
Some friends and I recently decided to do some battlegrounds together. Not being on the same servers, we had to create newbies and do the grind to 19. We’ll probably be stuck with WSG, and AV (much less Arena) is pretty much out of the question for us.
Anyway, this drove me to try out the Fury beta recently. Fury is getting a fair dose of hype as an upcoming fantasy MMO focusing exclusively on PvP. You’ve got standard PvP scenarios — free-for-all, team deathmatch, and CTF, with third-person WoW-style fantasy combat. There is not a persistent world, but there is persistent character advancement with skill trees you advance in to customize your character. Battleground-style PvP without the grind! Sounds great, right?
I was surprised that I got bored of it fairly quickly, and it wasn’t until I was writing this that I realized why: Fury isn’t an MMO at all.
Two Day Downtime…
Is there any circumstance that makes it even remotely acceptable for an MMO studio to bring its servers down for two full days?
Blizzard has announced a two day maintenance on select realms, with other servers to undergo similar downtimes in the future.
File this under, “WTF were they thinking?”
~Cyndre
Warcraft is the new EverQuest
In my last post I tentatively compared Blizzard’s announcement of The Wrath of the Lich King, their second expansion, to the post-Velious decline of EverQuest.  Some may smirk and point out that Verant and SOE would have killed for the success of the WoW machine, or that EverQuest running in its eighth year, is hardly dead and far from a failed development model, and those people would be correct and wrong in the same breath…
Wrath of Mediocrity
I have been in a state of disbelief all weekend…  The rumors of Blizzard’s newest expansion to World of Warcraft were indeed accurate, down to the last bullet point.  Northrend (but we all saw that coming a mile a way), levels 70-80 with new talents and spells, new zones, raised skill cap and…
Wait… ONE new hero-class? ONE profession addition, and no new races!?
Not a single new quest or content addition sub level 70!?!
And so the Djinni said: Three wishes…
Lots of great ideas on my Expansionary Thought thread, and it reflects a wide base of games we play from. With a nod to the authors, let’s take a look at them, where they are coming from, and why.