I've been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft over the last few weeks. Not a huge amount, mind you, but enough to progress from "total clueless newbie" to just "somewhat green".
I've tried a few MMORPGs in the past. I tried Ultima Online soon after it was released and gave up after a few days. I came back a year or two later and played it on and off with an online friend who had vanished completely into the game, but it just didn't stick.
Everquest, if memory serves me correctly, had me playing for all of three hours before I decided it wasn't for me. The Sims Online was a really neat chat-room hobbled by a painfully bad in-game economy, and insufficient mass-appeal.
World of Warcraft, on the other hand, sucked me in quite effectively. I think what really did it was the well-designed quest system. From the moment you appear in the world of Azeroth, you're not just plonked down in a free-form world and left to your own devices, you're given things to do. The game is balanced so that you can do most of these things alone if you want, but sometimes you might form an ad-hoc group with other people at the same level of questing to finish off a particular foe.
This is neat, because it's like being back in one of the old Ultima games, before they started sucking. The world is full of people with problems, big or small, and your job as the hero is to go around solving them. But instead of the world being populated with filler characters who can only say "I'm too busy to talk right now", it's full of other real people, who can only say "STFU n00b".
I like the questing, because the social aspects of the game are really only a cool background thing. It's nice to occasionally grab other people to help with quests, but given I'm only a casual player, logging in at random times when I'm not busy with something else, the chance of even meeting the same person more than once is slim.
The ultimate problem, as I've started to discover, is that thanks to the necessary mechanics of an MMORPG servicing hundreds of thousands of users, questing is a frustrating thing. In the Ultima games, after you'd cleansed some town of the evil that had been afflicting it, the evil would be gone, and the town would be full of villagers who would thank you profusely before saying "I'm too busy to talk right now". In an MMORPG, once you've cleansed the town of evil, it hangs in limbo for five minutes... and then resets itself for the next guy.
This behaviour is absolutely necessary for the game to work, but at the same time you're left feeling powerless. I mean what's the point of doing the quests in the first place, if you're not really ridding the world of that ancient darkness, and the big evil red crystal will be there for hundreds of thousands of other people to destroy every day for the lifetime of the game?
(I mentioned this to Alan on Friday, and he pointed me to "I Saw God and I Killed It" -- the story of a group of Everquesters who banded together to kill a supposedly invincible monster)
It's no wonder that games like this quickly end up revolving around leveling and getting more powerful items - you can't change the world around you one iota, so the only thing you have the power to do is change yourself.
I don't know how much you've played, but up to level 20, the quests are really just leveling quests without much content: kill 15 x there, bring Y to Z, etc etc. Once you get further in the game you'll start finding longer multi-stage quests that have a real story line and you'll be starting doing instances with groups. These are the 2 main areas that I love about World of Warcraft. Also, don't forget that besides leveling, finding gear and money, there's your professions and trade skills to take care of. I really like trying to find unique recipes or having to search several areas to find just the couple of ingredients I need.
The game really gets better and better, and don't forget, according to Blizzard it only really starts at level 60 ;-)
If you like WoW for that, you should try Dark Age of Camelot. I think you'll like it.
Your comments on WoW are positively pleasant compared to Tom Miller's comments (on Wow and Blizzard). He really went to town on them in February:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tmiller/archive/2005/02/28/381913.aspx
(Tom is project manager for Managed DirectX).
A big help in this game is to find a clan. I joined WoW because my clan already had a large amount of people who played it. Right there i already have a powerful massive source of info and theres usually that one person whos finally run out of things to do who is willing to help. It doesnt change the fact that it can be hard to put a team together but youve always got ppl there to assisst you
A big help in this game is to find a clan. I joined WoW because my clan already had a large amount of people who played it. Right there i already have a powerful massive source of info and theres usually that one person whos finally run out of things to do who is willing to help. It doesnt change the fact that it can be hard to put a team together but youve always got ppl there to assisst you
The games license is extremely prohibitive and entitles them to many things I would personally not be comfortable with. Here are a few choice selections from the agreement you accepted: (Pay particular attention to the last one)
"you may not utilize any "packet sniffing" software, regardless of the operating system utilized by such software and regardless of whether or not such tools are running on the same computer as the World of Warcraft software or any computer connected to the World of Warcraft software or its network, or otherwise monitor World of Warcraft's network connection while you or anyone else is playing World of Warcraft."
"You may not use or "exploit" errors in design, features which have not been documented, and/or "program bugs" to gain access that is otherwise not available, or to obtain a competitive advantage over other players."
"As part of your registration process and in consideration for the privilege of accessing World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment has the right to send your computer one or more "cookies" without any further notice to you, and Blizzard Entertainment has the right to obtain certain identification information about your computer and its operating system, including the identification numbers of your hard drives, central processing unit, IP addresses and operating systems, for identification purposes without any further notice to you;"
"In order to assist Blizzard Entertainment to police users who may use "hacks," or "cheats" to gain an advantage over other players, you acknowledge that Blizzard Entertainment shall have the right to obtain certain information from your computer and its component parts, including your computer's random access memory, video card, central processing unit, etc. This information will only be used for the purpose of identifying "cheaters," and for no other reason."
Noah, why is this license agreement a problem?
The first two paragraphs are Blizzard's attempt to thwart the most obvious avenues through which one could destabilize its network protocol and game balance via legal reasoning. I would expect as much from any company who wishes to protect its assets. (Of course, whether the license will actually do this is a subject for further research, but it is a good first step.)
The last two paragraphs outline Blizzard's preliminary plan to prevent piracy by uniquely identifying each player based upon hardware serial numbers, which are themselves unique for each computer system. The same approach is used to generate GUID's in some cases.
I hope that Blizzard's attempts to protect itself don't make you waywardly "uncomfortable."
Johnnie, while I accept some of your reasoning I still find there licence unacceptably non-free for me to install on my system.
The piracy you speak of is the wrong term to use - propaganda spread by publishing companies. How is copying a program to share with your neighbour in any way related to sailing the high seas - marauding and killing people?
The term piracy was originally used to describe other publishers who were publishing baned books and distributing them to the public. This term has been turned on it's head to wrongly imply that the act of sharing software with your fellow man is or should be a morally bad thing.
I would also like to pick you up on your use of the word "protect." By restricting the users like so via agreements and licences Blizzard are not protecting anyone - they are restricting the users and striping away some fairly fundamental freedoms. You have to understand that copyright was not designed to protect the authors, but to trade of some freedoms of the general public in order to promote the development/authoring of new works for the benefit of all.
With the dawn of the digital revolution, copyright is now woefully unable to correctly deal with various things (such as software) as originally intended - which was to benefit the public.
While the game looks enjoyable, it is a shame it is not free [1] - does anyone know of any free software which is similar?
If you are a developer and you want to turn copyright on it's head to protect the users instead of restricting them I urge you to copyleft your work and use the GPL [2].
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Johnnie, while I accept some of your reasoning I still find there licence unacceptably non-free for me to install on my system.
The piracy you speak of is the wrong term to use - propaganda spread by publishing companies. How is copying a program to share with your neighbour in any way related to sailing the high seas - marauding and killing people?
The term piracy was originally used to describe other publishers who were publishing baned books and distributing them to the public. This term has been turned on it's head to wrongly imply that the act of sharing software with your fellow man is or should be a morally bad thing.
I would also like to pick you up on your use of the word "protect." By restricting the users like so via agreements and licences Blizzard are not protecting anyone - they are restricting the users and striping away some fairly fundamental freedoms. You have to understand that copyright was not designed to protect the authors, but to trade of some freedoms of the general public in order to promote the development/authoring of new works for the benefit of all.
With the dawn of the digital revolution, copyright is now woefully unable to correctly deal with various things (such as software) as originally intended - which was to benefit the public.
While the game looks enjoyable, it is a shame it is not free [1] - does anyone know of any free software which is similar?
If you are a developer and you want to turn copyright on it's head to protect the users instead of restricting them I urge you to copyleft your work and use the GPL [2].
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Johnnie, while I accept some of your reasoning I still find there licence unacceptably non-free for me to install on my system.
The piracy you speak of is the wrong term to use - propaganda spread by publishing companies. How is copying a program to share with your neighbour in any way related to sailing the high seas - marauding and killing people?
The term piracy was originally used to describe other publishers who were publishing baned books and distributing them to the public. This term has been turned on it's head to wrongly imply that the act of sharing software with your fellow man is or should be a morally bad thing.
I would also like to pick you up on your use of the word "protect." By restricting the users like so via agreements and licences Blizzard are not protecting anyone - they are restricting the users and striping away some fairly fundamental freedoms. You have to understand that copyright was not designed to protect the authors, but to trade of some freedoms of the general public in order to promote the development/authoring of new works for the benefit of all.
With the dawn of the digital revolution, copyright is now woefully unable to correctly deal with various things (such as software) as originally intended - which was to benefit the public.
While the game looks enjoyable, it is a shame it is not free (as in speech, not beer)- does anyone know of any free software which is similar?
If you are a developer and you want to turn copyright on it's head to protect the users instead of restricting them I urge you to copyleft your work and use the GPL.
Johnnie, while I accept some of your reasoning I still find there licence unacceptably non-free for me to install on my system.
The piracy you speak of is the wrong term to use - propaganda spread by publishing companies. How is copying a program to share with your neighbour in any way related to sailing the high seas - marauding and killing people?
The term piracy was originally used to describe other publishers who were publishing baned books and distributing them to the public. This term has been turned on it's head to wrongly imply that the act of sharing software with your fellow man is or should be a morally bad thing.
I would also like to pick you up on your use of the word "protect." By restricting the users like so via agreements and licences Blizzard are not protecting anyone - they are restricting the users and striping away some fairly fundamental freedoms. You have to understand that copyright was not designed to protect the authors, but to trade of some freedoms of the general public in order to promote the development/authoring of new works for the benefit of all.
With the dawn of the digital revolution, copyright is now woefully unable to correctly deal with various things (such as software) as originally intended - which was to benefit the public.
While the game looks enjoyable, it is a shame it is not free [1] - does anyone know of any free software which is similar?
If you are a developer and you want to turn copyright on it's head to protect the users instead of restricting them I urge you to copyleft your work and use the GPL [2].
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Noah your a moron man haha the privacy is there to protect blizzard AND the Normal Average persone who only wants to play the game, If your Not doing anything against the law then why worry about it? If your not hacking or trying to manipulate the game its not an issue, If your just going to download the game and log in and have fun then it Is Not An Issue. Also you dont really need to post your opinion 3 times in a row reading your blabering one time is enough.
I played final fantasy xi for over a year, then got into the open World of Warcraft (WoW) beta. From then on I slowly became a WoW devotee and am no even more addicted to WoW than ffxi.
Shortly after WoW was released I started up a guild, Scions Of Azeroth, www.scionsofazeroth.com,on the Cenarion Circle server. We have 60+ members (25+ lvl 50-60) from all over the world, Australia, NZ, Canada and US. My WoW experience wouldnt be the same with all the wonderful helpful and friendly people in our guild. I couldn't imagine playing without them!
If anyone is interested in picking up this game then please let me know and get on the Cenarion Circle. Scions of Azeroth are always looking for new members, regardless of lvl and experience. A great attitude are the biggest requirements.
As far as the scare of getting banned for the use of hacks is concerned and the depth of Blizzard's policy...Blizzard has been and always will be the laziest bunch of hacker trackers known to man kind.
Ive already seen so much hacking in WoW for such a "well protected" game its enough to make me sick. Especially the use of a "portal hack," which allows you to portal to the exact location of a questing zone at any time, thus eliminating the ever so boring "travel time." Yes this is a nice feature but also against blizzards rules and it allowed a friend of mine to go from lvl 1 - 51 in 4 days!!!! Meanwhile myself and the rest of the people around me do it all the hard way...this is sort of frustrating.
There are more but I haven't figured them out exactly yet so i dont want to post any unknown info.
Personally I hope blizzard tightens the restrictions and removes all of the remaining hackers, I really dont wanna end up with another D2 only this time have to pay to keep up with hackers.
Charles,
I'm not sure if it's something for you - taken from your comments on the game - but if you like, I can provide you with one (or several) strategy guides from our website. Just drop me a small note via our contact form and I will set up a free account for you.
regards,
Karsten
The next patch will blow you away. I tested out the Battlegrounds patch and it is going to be amazing. You fight to control towers and graveyards etc and they even call in air-strikes. So this will be a chance for you to make an impact on the environment around you.
Much Love,
Altimas
WoW is not bad at all... and you picked a bad server, I haven't been in a fight with more than 5 people and I have played for atleast a month. People help out a lot, don't go around asking level 60's though, they have shit to do so if that is what you're complaining about, good try. If you see another person your level or even a few higher they will help you if you ask.
Overall, WoW > Plenty of MMOGS, the game has to reset itself for others because, you obviously aren't the only one playing.
Nothing is perfect ,but this is the closest thing to it
Nothing is perfect ,but this atleast gives you lots of fun hours.And thets what games are for;wasting time
Nice post i feel the same way about almost every aspect i played ultima as well i like WoW but my account has expired can u set me up with a free 1
what the fuck are you talking about,,, WoW is the best game ever !!!
I am (or was) a fan of blizzard throughout its rise to MMORPG-hood.
I have however, always seen there lack of employee's on important game issues a major problem. When WoW started I played constantly, but things take too long for them to update. They can't keep up with those with nothing to do but reverse engineer their game. I really dont think there is enough true role playing involved and their storyline, while it is huge, is never really shown to you as a WoW player. As for the licenese agreement, Its just the same as almost any other agreement. read your license agreement for windows. You just might take a dump in your pants. and dont worry, cause macintoshs agreements are usually worse, especially with the new addon of ipod.
WOW rules people.
It's not perfect though http://mmorpguides.com has tons hacks and exploits and stuff that proves that