Kill Ten Rats

I am going to talk about some of my favorite features of World of Warcraft over the next few weeks or so, just because I can.

Up first: Sharing Quests

“You can share your quests with your entire party. In order to utilize this option, you need to open your quest log, select a quest, and press the “Share Quest” button. All members of your party will now be presented with the quest like you were the quest giver NPC.

Some restrictions:

1. You can only share with party members

2. Party members must be nearby when you share

3. Party members must meet the pre-requisites of the quest itself. For example, if you are on step 2 of a quest and your friend is still on step 1, you could not give him a “short-cut” to step 2.

4. Quests generated from items cannot be shared.”

OK, here is how this works: You get a quest to go get some gold dust that is dropped by creatures in a mine. You head out there. When you arrive at the mine, you spot 2 people getting ready to enter the mine. You ask them if they are doing the “gold dust” quest. They say they are doing a quest that requires they kill 10 miners, but they have not heard of the “gold dust” quest. They add you to the party. They can now share their “kill” quest with you and you accept it. You can share the “gold dust” quest with them and they accept it. Now instead of each of you having to kill 10 miners, you only need to kill 10 amongst your group. While looting them, you will all be able to retrieve gold dust as well. If there was a quest to kill an elite mob, you would all be able to loot the quest objective when you kill it as a group. You do not need to kill it once for each person.

No more waiting for one person to go “acquire” the quest. You can give it to them directly.

1) A death process similar to the one UO had (i.e. becoming a ghost), only… Weaker

I don’t know what UO had, but death in WoW means nothing. It’s harmless. In fact, I used the ghost form to travel through a dangerous area tonight.

2) A death penalty that allows –negative– XP….

Hmm. There is no XP penalty for dying in WoW so I’m not sure what you mean here.

3) Having to go find your corpse…

Yeah, you are a ghost that runs really fast, your corpse is on the map and you only need to get close to it to resurrect. Hell, you can run over water even. When you appear as a ghost, you are at the nearest cemetary as well. Hardly a pain.

4) Item decay

No affect on anything other than a little money drain now and then. I click one extra button when I sell stuff to a merchant once every so often. Big deal. Your items are always repairable, they do not ever disappear.

5) Level-based game (any game that is not skill-based is inferior IMHO)

Yeah, it is sort of a combo. As you use skills, they go up as well.

6) Patch Method. Peer-to-Peer for patching. Stupid. Blindingly stupid.

Not so sure this is the case now that we are in retail, but I’ll wait to see. During beta is was no big deal to me.

7) Segregated game play. Race/Faction… Something that I dislike in AO even.

Well yes, the Horde and the Alliance cannot play together, but I have yet to find this an issue. You can still go to all their areas and hunt all of their mobs. It is World of WARcraft after all. The whole point of the game is to fight the bad guys eventually. Even on PvE servers you will have the option, and it is quite elegant how they handle it.

Had some free time tonight to play a little WoW. I log in and up comes the “Retrieving Characters” box and then … nothing. 15 minutes later, nothing. Hit the forums (something I loathe to do in any MMOG) and find out they are having some problems with some of the servers, they are not sure what is going on, so they are rebooting some of them. They project that they will be back online in 45 minutes or so. An hour later, still down.

Fine, I figure I’ll log into some of the pacific servers which always have low population. Change region and pick a different server and click ok. “Connecting…” and then nothing. Try another server. Nothing. Great.

I had been relatively unaffected by the occasional server issues they have been having, but it seems like it has been getting worse, not better. I just hope it doesn’t get too much worse before it starts getting better. At least they are extending the “free” month for the problems we are having.

I spent more time playing World of Warcraft in the past 3 days then I have ever played an MMOG in 3 days. I have been having a blast. Other than 2 times getting into a queue (maximum wait 10 minutes) I have been able to log straight in and this is on one of the most popular servers according to the sign in page.

I am playing an Undead Mage now, putting my Rogue on the back burner. I decided that after all the time playing a Rogue in beta (both in Alliance and Horde), I needed a little change of pace. So I created an Undead Mage and I have never played a Mage before in any MMOG. As soon as I reached level 6 (about 2 hours) I made the run to the Orc/Troll lands to do those quests. I had not done any Orc/Troll area quests so this is like playing the game for the first time and I am having a blast. Got to level 9 last night, almost 10.

That is one of the best things about this game, there are 4 different newbie areas to experience and they are all different. You could play 4 different characters in this game and never do the same quest, well at least the first 20 levels or so. After that it narrows down into Alliance and Horde so you will see some quests eventually. But still, 2 characters without EVER seeing the same quest twice. Lots of replay value.

Needless to say, Blizzard is blowing them all away. EQ is dead, long live the new champion: World of Warcraft!

One more thing. World of Warcraft is up to 88 servers now. Yeah, 88. Unreal.

With the release of World of Warcraft in North America, Australia, and New Zealand yesterday, we have already seen an incredible level of demand for the game. We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players.

In just one day, World of Warcraft sold through an estimated 250,000 copies to players. Over 200,000 accounts have already been created, and peak concurrency across all active game servers has been above 100,000.

The account-creation and concurrent-user populations are both record numbers for a MMORPG on its first day of launch, making World of Warcraft the fastest-growing online game in history.

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I did not have as much time to play as I was expecting as my wife came down with a sinus infection. I did get to level 8 with my rogue so it’s a start anyway.

I took this upcoming Tuesday off from work so I could play World of Warcraft alongside my brother (he has the day off too). We plan to play all day and all night, providing we can log on at all. I’m debating taking Wednesday off too.

Pathetic.

In preparation for the upcoming retail launch of World of Warcraft, we will be taking the North American open beta servers offline on Thursday, November 18. While this will mark the end of the open beta test, there will still be some work left for us to do. To provide the best experience possible at launch, we will be making numerous final optimizations to our hardware based on the data we’ve acquired during the open beta test.

During our closed and open beta test phases, thousands of improvements were made to World of Warcraft. Those changes were made through game-client patches and updates to the game’s server and database infrastructure.

As we moved closer to retail, we continued to make changes and optimize all of the code that makes up World of Warcraft until we reached the point where we felt we could create a gold master — the version of the game that’s currently being pressed onto the discs which will be available for purchase at retail.

Likewise, these processes must also take place on the server side to ensure that no out-of-date code, which could corrupt the retail version of the game, still exists. Before the retail version of the code can be installed, the current hardware must be wiped clean. This also includes the information on current accounts and characters that are being played on our test servers. So that all World of Warcraft players will be able to make a fresh start on our community site at launch, the same procedure will be taking place for the North American beta forums when the open beta test ends.

We realize that you’ve grown attached to your characters, and we’re sorry that the end of the open beta test will require you to part ways with them. However, with the retail launch of World of Warcraft on November 23 comes the opportunity to begin a new adventure in Azeroth on fresh, untouched servers. Along with that, you’ll have the knowledge that you played an instrumental role in the creation of a game of epic proportions that players will enjoy for many years to come.

We greatly appreciate all the time you’ve spent with us testing World of Warcraft, and we look forward to seeing you in-game!

Finally, a beta test that ends with me feeling like the game is ready for prime time.