Category: World of Warcraft

Just a quick thought/poll to our readers, on the same theme as my last post –

The next expansion has been announced. Tigole calls you up on the phone and says that you’ve been targeted as a Typical Player, and they will add a feature you want. It has to be codable and realistic (‘I want rats to drop Naxx epics” will probably not pass). It cannot turn balance on its ear, and if it is faction based, must be flexible enough to be used by either side.

What do you tell him you want?

The latest rumblings, coming here on the eve of BlizzCon, is that a new expansion will be announced. It’s silly to think that Blizzard is not planning one, and they have started on it. And, marketing people will agree, the best time to get feedback on your future plans is surrounded by a few thousand of your rabid fans.

Leading the popular charge is Northrend. Specifically “Wrath of the Lich King”. Reasons to this go from the music choices Blizzard has given for their party, which are all dealing with the frosty north, to the new 403 (forbidden) error code the curious have found on a subpage called Wrath on Blizzard’s site and servers.

If so, it will be interesting to see what awaits us. I’m heading off to hang with Mickey in Florida for a few weeks so I’ll miss the party/announcement/spoilers. Someone pick me up a spare Murloc Suit?

Here’s a question for those that raid out there: You’re about to hit a new and likely unfamiliar target, but one that is announced ahead of time. Are you more likely to:

a) Pull up a spoiler site and read up on the event to prepare yourself
b) Ask questions on the guild site about the fight
c) Log in a bit ahead and see if people know what generally will happen
d) Log in and wait for the raid leader(s) to tell you exactly what to do, including when you can go to the bathroom.

Me, I tend to over prepare, including watching videos. That’s the way I’m wired. I like to win. I don’t mind failing dramatically either, or going down in flames with a valiant attempt. Standing around for an hour while prepping is annoying, however. That’s why I left EQ raiding. And while I realize when you pull in people there will be some confusion, having to explain to 18 out of 25 people, individually, what their jobs will be really bites. Also, waiting an hour for anything in a game is really really dull. Not even /gems can save that.

In a weird way, I’ve recently found that EQ taught me how to be a better MMORPG player. Because of The vision. No really. Stop laughing, the soda’s coming out of your nose again. Ok look, let me explain. Remember how long you camped Mitty for that gold ring? Or you class BP from Trak? Tormax’s head? Or any of a thousand separate tradeskill items in PoP? Ya, that sucked, right? But you learned to wait.

WoW isn’t like that. And that causes some grief on us old school gamers.

Continue reading EverZen

The web is full of posts about how addictive video games are, especially MMORPGs, and especially World of WarCraft.  Over the last few weeks, I’ve had ample time to play WoW as much as I’ve wanted, and I did.  Continue reading Yet Another Post About Addiction

Our dear friend Tobold has an interesting post about WoW’s subscriber numbers surrounding the expansion. WoW repeats the same pattern of other games, just on a grander scale:

So the decline doesn’t matter? Far from that. We will never know the exact numbers, but the WarcraftRealms graph suggests a 10% decline from the peak in February. That still leaves more players than WoW had in December last year. But if you happen to work in a company, imagine you having to tell your bosses that you just lost 10% of your customers, starting the first decline after 27 months of growth. Big as WoW is, losing 10% means losing more people than Everquest ever had, and it also means losing over 100 million dollars.

ATSRTWT
: Zubon