World of Warcraft continues to "WoW"
Newest Free Content Update Delights Millions
Developer: Blizzard
Genre: Role Playing
ESRB: Teens (13 +)
Platform: PC Games
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While most players were expecting the first retail expansion to be released in late November (The date has since been pushed to January), Blizzard answered the requests of its players and released much of the content due to release alongside the expansion on Tuesday, December 5th. While the deployment of this update to the servers was a bit bumpy, the wait has been worth it. Here are some of the most popular additions to the game:
New Player vs. Player reward system
WoW's previous system of player versus player combat involved a ladder-type system where players could only advance at the expense of other players. This created a brutal competition which demanded unreasonable amounts of playing to reach the top tiers of advancement. Most players would never be able to achieve these goals, simply because of the massive time investment.
The new system rewards you daily for your performance by giving you "honor points" which act as currency. Instead of rating yourself against your fellow players, points may be accumulated and spent on the rewards you choose. This allows players on all schedules and time budgets to earn rewards at their own pace, and gives everyone a chance to enjoy some of the finer pieces of equipment offered.
New Talent Trees
WoW allows players to individualize their characters by awarding them "talent points", which may be spent to enhance certain aspects of a character's spells and abilities. Each of the nine player classes has received a complete revamp of their talents and spells, and all across Azeroth (WoW's virtual world), "Tree-form" Druids, "Felguard" Warlocks and "Dragon's Breath" Mages could be seen enjoying their new skills! Keeping things new and interesting is the cornerstone of a successful online game, and with content like this, WoW will maintain its stranglehold on the MMO market.
The Arena System
With the removal of the player versus player competition which ranked everyone against one another, the Arena system has been introduced. Players will be able to form teams of up to 10 players (including a backup bench) and will engage other teams in 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5 skirmishes in newly-created arenas. Teams will be required to take part in a certain number of matches per week and will be ranked based on their number of wins and performance during those wins. Competition must be fueled by a way to know who is "The Best"; this is it. Arena ratings will be reset once per quarter, allowing new teams to earn their 15 minutes of fame during the next season of play. Rewards for the Arena matches are not yet implemented; these are expected to be put in place with Blizzard's retail expansion, The Burning Crusade.
Looking For Group Interface
Tuesday's update included a new tool for players to find one another; the looking for group window. Previously, players seeking others to do a quest, or explore a dungeon together, had to find one another using a global chat channel. This "looking for group" channel was mostly used for random chatter and spam, making it difficult for people intending to use it for its intended purpose.
The new Looking for Group window makes the process very simple. If a player is seeking to join others, he simply states what he is looking to do, and other players forming up a group for that task will see his name and class appear on a list. The group leader may then send the player an invitation and begin their journey. As more players get used to this new system, the level of simplicity this offers will make it a huge hit.
Many other changes were introduced. To see the full list of changes, please visit www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/
Published by John Lindsey
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Reality Check: Blizzard's press release (found at www.blizzard.com) defines customers as, among the obvious, as follows: "Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers." This, to me, would be a fair assessment, that if someone plays their 2-hours in the last 7 days that they are considered a customer. This press release (from January 06) also cites hitting the 1 million customers in Europe, a number easily believable, with the amount of active EU servers. Regardless of how they define a customer, and whether or not that number is padded (I do not believe it is), the fact remains that WoW has shattered all subscription records beyond what anybody thought possible, and one only need look at the amount of servers (and how frequently new ones open) to see that they aren't making up their population boom.
John Lindsey: Chinese cutomers never close accounts. They are pay by play. So if accounts aren't being played they still go into the 7.5 million total which in fact unplayed accounts generate 0 revenue.
Rakaiah, they had to increase the time it took because people were obtaining some of the best items in the game within a matter of days. While their method may not have been the most favorable (many suggested a hard-cap of honor per day allowed), it was most certainly necessary.
"Reality Check", they disclose exactly what they count as a "subscriber", and I highly doubt they have any reason to pad their numbers. They are already leaps and bounds ahead of every other online game that's ever been made.
They infuriated alot of players especially the casual player segment with the honor nerf. It isn't 30% It's FORTY TWO PERCENT.
That's right. 42% reduction to your honor. So Blizzard didn't just lie to you about reducing costs on GM weapons. They lied about the actual honor reduction too - which incidentially raised the cost of said weapons by 42%. Not to mention ALL the other PvP items too.
7.5 million subscribers is cooking the books.
The9 claims 5.9 million are Chinese customers. Chinese playesrs can only play 2 hours a day. That means WoW has a total of 1.6 million customers total outside China. So that tells me Warcraft is losing customers.
"The honor only affect the bonus you get from games. So it does not affect casual that much in the first place." That's inaccurate and wrong. After the hotfix, they had to spend 43% more time working the battlegrounds to get the same amount of honor points. However both of you don't recognize the problem is that you're completely fine with the fact that you want Blizzard to have the customer hook line sinker into their game more spending more money out of their pockets per month. They won't implement a daily cap neither will they implement some kind of slow down process after you earned x number of honor. Instead, they reduce the amount of honor you just earn overall and they expect the casuals to pay out of their pockets to grind grind grind whenever these people can find the time. Like I said, you two don't see this problem at all.
Even with the recent honor nerf, I love this new pvp system. I can get the rewards at my own pace at last.