tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post9000593992571875350..comments2024-03-28T10:18:05.213+00:00Comments on Inventory Full: WoD's Up?: WoWBhagpusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-434466900678340872014-11-17T11:59:36.894+00:002014-11-17T11:59:36.894+00:00The digital purchase thing is interesting. Other M...The digital purchase thing is interesting. Other MMOs have chosen to throttle those sales, both to prevent untenable pressure on their infrastructure and to create demand by limiting supply. That always gets heavily criticized too. <br /><br />As for Garrisons, looking at the reports I've seen they clearly aren't anything that I understand as "housing". They don't seem to allow either for personalization or construction in any meaningful way. They appear to be an amalgam of GW2's Personal Instances and STOs Officer Missions with a dab of WildStar's functionality. That's not to say they won't be popular. WoW is the achiever's MMO par excellence and Garrisons look to be 100% aimed at that archetype. Bhagpusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-3253887653803267252014-11-17T11:52:56.370+00:002014-11-17T11:52:56.370+00:00It's looking as if they timed it just about ri...It's looking as if they timed it just about right. They got the big publicity hit for the unexpected levels of interest and they got people in and playing before frustration turned to loathing. The next 2-3 quarters of subscriber numbers are going to be very interesting indeed.Bhagpusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-52592236577113473282014-11-17T11:50:14.432+00:002014-11-17T11:50:14.432+00:00I often think that if all MMOs except one were to ...I often think that if all MMOs except one were to close down I'd probably be pretty content to play the one that was left, whichever it was. Well, there would be exceptions but pretty much any with diku-MUD derived gameplay would probably be fine. Also it's so much effort to move - it's like moving house. Popping in to another game for a little holiday is one thing but a permanent relocation is just more effort than most people want to make, I think. Much easier to stay where all your stuff is and you know how to get to the bank.Bhagpusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-90093095984840419012014-11-17T11:44:54.214+00:002014-11-17T11:44:54.214+00:00I clicked through that Metacritic link out of curi...I clicked through that Metacritic link out of curiosity. Only the second or third time I've ever looked at Metacritic, I think. The score has actually dropped a fraction to 3.8 but I would say it's utterly meaningless. That's an average taken from 297 ratings, a number that would be statistically insignificant even if selected through weighted polling, but in this case of course it's self-selected by sufficiently motivated individuals. If you scan through the votes the huge majority are either 0 or 10. Farcical.<br /><br />No wonder businesses hate Metacritic and similar voting aggregators.Bhagpusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03499162165023939880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-3018176598518202042014-11-17T10:54:09.078+00:002014-11-17T10:54:09.078+00:00Well, you don't need to guess: they clearly st...Well, you don't need to guess: they clearly stated that while they had planned for a higher number of players, they hadn't planned for THAT much. Which is easy to believe, in a world of "digital purchases", where the number of last-week buyers can climb up much higher than expected.<br /><br />BTW "failing so hard" is a bit extreme: on saturday it was definitely more playable than some of the smaller MMOs I tested, and on sunday I had no trouble and only a 10-min queue (I'm on a relatively high-population server).<br /><br />It's also a very good expansion (if you like the WoW gameplay). The garrison for example is clearly copied from the housing present in many other MMOs, but it's a lot more polished and interesting than the ones I saw. Questing is less linear than MOP and overall more interesting. Instances are somewhat old-school but with a good balance of thrash-bosses. And the graphics is excellent (which is not really relevant, since ANY recent MMOs has excellent graphics...).Helistarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01435861741164342377noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-43488587480284355292014-11-15T21:58:54.005+00:002014-11-15T21:58:54.005+00:00Reading the comments about the (never DDOS-ed) EU ...Reading the comments about the (never DDOS-ed) EU launch,queues and bugs already posted in Beta but never read apparantly (again; one of the reasons I stopped doing Beta/PTR for Blizz, it's simply not worth your time and effort) etc., I'm glad I stopped playing WoW a while ago. <br /><br />I find it very hard to fathom how a 10-year old game run by a multi-billion dollar company could fail so hard, especially because it's copying old mistakes (e.g. bottleneck-questing, apparently yet again messing up the gearing for PvP by ignoring the impact of the far-too common Faction imbalances on Realms).<br /><br />For what it's worth, the Metacritic Score for WoD currently sits at 3.9 out of 10. Ouch.<br /><br />http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-of-warcraft-warlords-of-draenor NetherLandsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-36270337839702481912014-11-15T15:20:10.313+00:002014-11-15T15:20:10.313+00:00>Their dedicated playerbases pay little attenti...>Their dedicated playerbases pay little attention to competitive offers within the genre, particularly when those offers are in the form of "come back to a game you already decided you didn't want to play". <<br /><br />I think your least part nailed it the most. I know many players (me included) of "niche games" who play many games, including several MMOs. While we might play a different game every evening we just found WoW not to be of our taste and luckily there's enough of variety out there to keep up happy and occupied. :DSylownoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1510920011443550663.post-63996646547960759302014-11-15T11:28:02.381+00:002014-11-15T11:28:02.381+00:00I just logged in to WoW after a 7 hour 45 minute q...I just logged in to WoW after a 7 hour 45 minute queue.. with my successful arrival being 5 minutes before the servers went down for maintenance.. :-D<br /><br />From what I've gathered, it has been something of a perfect storm. An unexpectedly high number of players, trying to play an unexpectedly high number of hours.. and crashing headlong into some scalability issues around the new content (it seems to have particular problems when thousands of people are phasing in and out of the new garrisons). And then the servers being sprayed by a DDOS attack while all of this was happening.<br /><br />Additionally, the server population caps have been lowered in pursuit of stability.. which has resulted in truly epic queues, but my experience has been absolutely flawless once I've managed to get logged on.<br /><br />Oh, and of course, epic queues = people refusing to log off once they finally get on, making the queues even MORE epic!!Carson 63000https://www.blogger.com/profile/10900682924502279486noreply@blogger.com