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World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

Revenant

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You don't need to pay real money for a WoW subscription nowadays - game time can be bought for in game gold, which is piss easy to make if you know how to play the auction house.

Not so good ping to commercial servers, maybe that's due to shitty war ravaged Ukrainian internet service providers? Latency is no more than 30 ms here in Lithuania - we have the fastest internet in the world, though.

Language barrier wise, there are official Russian realms in WoW. Hell, battlegrounds are plagued by fully geared ruskie farm teams all the time.
 
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Ulminati

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Yeah. When Scrooge and I run into russkies in pvp they're either hideously over-geared, completely incompetent, running lag cheats or a combination of the above.

Merging PvP across regions was a terrible idea
 

GarfunkeL

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Rebirth and Nost are, I believe, both Vanilla. I think Nost might eventually add TBC iirc.
Rebirth is dead. If you want vanilla WoW, you either go with Kronos or Nostalrius. There are pros and cons to both - I'm on the latter and wouldn't dream of switching.

I've never really been interested in them because I think most, if not all, are PvP. And, yes, I'm a carebear!
Nostalrius is opening a PvE server on the 17th. So in a week. Because their PvP server is massively popular (daily peak player amount is always above 6k and often above 8k) they got the motivation and audience to release a PvE server too.
 

Sceptic

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Divinity: Original Sin
Reason they don't have vanilla/tbc/wrath servers is, indeed, mostly a pride thing. They don't want to admit the 'improvements' they made have been for nothing. Moreover it would discourage people from buying their shitty expansions every two years.
Simple mathematics: they can look at the vanilla server populations, find out they add up to a few thousands at most, compare this to the subs they have now that they have reached the lowest point in 10 years, which is 5 million subscriptions. It doesn't take a genius to notice that the people clamoring for vanilla servers, who will actually play on a vanilla server, who will actually pay to do so, fall in the hundreds. Their subs won't even cover the server maintenance costs.

Besides IDK what current WOW is like but vanilla WOW was complete and utter shit, and I have always made fun of my friends who used to play it back then and tried to get me into it (and failed miserably because, well, it was shit).
 

GarfunkeL

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Well, Nostalrius record is 9k concurrent players. Kronos record is 2k if I'm not mistaken. Considering that there is no advertising for either, that's pretty good. Would those 10-11 thousand players pay a monthly fee? Probably not, you're right in that. Some of them would but not all. However, if Blizzard was serious, they could actually advertise their official vanilla server which would certainly draw in more players than the word-of-mouth on gaming forums and twitch/youtube method that private servers use. But then again, Blizzard would have to provide at least 1 server for each zone so EU-US-CH at least with GMs, which might be a considerable cost.

Just out of curiosity Sceptic, why is vanilla WOW shit and compared to what?
 

Revenant

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The real reason why Blizzard would never introduce vanilla servers is that the quality of the game (in regards to freedom from bugs and convenience, not game design) increased tremendously over the years and Blizzard would never go back to a much lower level of quality, and they wouldn't spend resources to fix it either because it would be too damn expensive.
 

Metro

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Simple mathematics: they can look at the vanilla server populations, find out they add up to a few thousands at most, compare this to the subs they have now that they have reached the lowest point in 10 years, which is 5 million subscriptions. It doesn't take a genius to notice that the people clamoring for vanilla servers, who will actually play on a vanilla server, who will actually pay to do so, fall in the hundreds. Their subs won't even cover the server maintenance costs.

Besides IDK what current WOW is like but vanilla WOW was complete and utter shit, and I have always made fun of my friends who used to play it back then and tried to get me into it (and failed miserably because, well, it was shit).
Eh... there are thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of subscribers now who technically don't pay a monthly fee outside of tokens so that's not very relevant. People who are that into Vanilla wouldn't have much trouble paying in gold.

Unless this new expansion brings back a few million players don't be surprised if they do something drastic. Also don't underestimate the value people place on playing on an official/stable server versus a private one.
 

Sceptic

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Just out of curiosity Sceptic, why is vanilla WOW shit and compared to what?
TO be perfectly fair I'm not the best person to ask. There has never been an MMO that I actually liked, and the entire concept of deriving fun from an MMO is completely beyond me. I'm fully aware this makes me the worst possible person to throw around these kinds of statements, because what I will end up comparing MMOs to, invariably, will be single player. Not game-to-game, but in terms of how mechanics work.

Let me pick a specific example, because there has been a lot of debate in this thread about PvP and "carebearing" and so on. You're walking around the world as a level 10 or whatever doing your shit, then some level 60 comes out of nowhere, moving at twice your speed, and slaughters you in two hits. You click release, and spend the next 2 minutes ambling back to your corpse, then another half minute waiting for a resurrection timer, all the while thinking "this was a rogue, there's a good chance I'll die again in the next 10 seconds and have to go through all this again, or just log off and go play another game." Every WOW lover (or ex-lover) will rationalize this: of course you got ganked, it's an MMO! There's other people playing! This is another person! Isn't this awesome? The game is penalizing you for dying, it's so much better as a result!

I don't care about this line of reasoning. I'm a single player gamer, and this carries along with it the mindset of: what's my experience like, and am I having fun. I don't care about other people's experiences and fun. And here's the thing: the only way such a thing would happen in a single player game is if the game decided to spawn a high-level enemy in your low-level zone for the express purpose of killing you and making you waste several minutes of your life. Before you start clamoring about SP vs MMO, stop and think about this for a second. And remember: I don't care about the rationalization, I am talking purely from the point of view of what you experience in both scenarios. I don't care that in one case it's an AI and in the other an actual human being; I can't talk to the human, he can't talk to me, I've no idea who he is, I couldn't care less about it. He could be an AI-controlled bot for all I know and I'd never have any way of knowing the difference. All I know is that the game was specifically designed to penalize me for having a random high-level spawn and kill me for no reason.

Of course there is a reason why the game was designed like this: to waste your time. Everything about the game is designed to waste your time. You grind identical-looking generic quests that follow the same 3 or 4 templates to raise levels. You grind random monsters to do the same. You grind your weapon skills. You grind your professions if you made the mistake of choosing any. You grind dungeons for this or that item. I suppose if you get to the raid level you'd do the same there to get raid gear. You grind reputations. Everything is a grind. The entire structure of the game is based on grinding - and of course it has to be, because this is the only way you get people to keep playing the same game year after year. There's no way you can include enough meaningful content that isn't a grind and keep people who play the game hours and hours every single day occupied for so long. So you make everything grindy. And then some people will actually try to convince you this was meaningful gameplay and that it was fun. You'll have a whole bunch of people (scroll back earlier in this thread) who will try and convince you that sitting there for hours doing absolutely nothing while waiting for a dungeon group to fill up was fun, and that this is the kind of gameplay that if put back into the game will have the millions of players that have quit WoW flocking up. Those same people BTW will play on a vanilla server whenever a new one is released, tell you about how much fun they're having getting to level 5 or 10, and then never mention it again because, let's face it, is this really fun? Now that you're no longer a teenager who is wowed (ha ha) by anything, do you really want to spend another God knows how many hundreds of hours leveling up?

I had an interesting discussion about the whole vanilla WOW thing a while back, I think with Grunker (or maybe it was you?). Clearly a lot of the good memories vanilla players have was due to a sense of community that, by all accounts, no longer exists. I can understand specific elements tied to this that people liked about the game, even if they hold zero interest for me personally, and that's not what I will criticize about the game even if I don't like it. But let's face it, whenever people refer to the endless grinding or to waiting an entire evening for a 5 or 10-man group to form just so that they can actually start playing, as "good times", they're either being sarcastic or completely blinded by nostalgia. I have frequently attacked the nostalgia and "good for its time" arguments quite vehemently because I can point to specific elements of old games and say "this is good, this is better than the New Shit, here's why." There's no way anyone could convince me that the grinding and all the pointless time-wasting inherent in WOW design is a good thing. And read some vanilla players' posts, whenever Blizzard does something to reduce the tedious grinding they cry decline. I mean, the reduction doesn't particularly entice me because it doesn't deal with the inherent design, it's just a reduction, but having more grinding was somehow synonymous with incline and challenge?
 

Kutulu

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex
I think every single thing they dropped was a bad idea, hunter melee, ammo, ranged secondaries, class quests.
Shaman Class quest was a fucking achivement, you had to visit like 10 places on both continents, took hours.

Blizzard also doesnt get that pvp is kinda important, so important that a shitton of people switched to become human cuz free trinket.
Also Neckbeards enjoy pretty females, so they are pissy that bloodelves are horde & all play human female.
If Blizzard introduces new races, horde will get the pretty one again cuz the imbalance.

Game is still better than all Korea Grinders and i opt in for 2 month every expansion, thats enough time to consume any content that doesnt require joining a raid guild.
 

GarfunkeL

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No fear Sceptic, that was a good dissection. The only reason that I started playing on Nostalrius was indeed nostalgia. The two reasons that have kept me playing since February are 1) Seeing all raid content again in their proper context and 2) community in both good and bad.

That's why I can't understand people like Wilian who insist on playing on almost abandoned servers while jerking off on their largely imaginary superiority, because an MMO without players is pointless. I didn't have to wait hours to form a dungeon group because there were so many players that groups were formed all the time. I didn't suffer corpse camping because I either quested in a group or, if that wasn't possible, moved to another zone if a persistent guy was on my ass. You have to talk to the other humans, you do have a social connection and that makes all the difference. The worst thing that Blizzard did with WOW was introducing the Looking for Dungeon. Yes, it made finding groups easy. But it also killed off one of the major reasons for social interaction. Why play an MMO if not for social interaction? Don't answer, we all know the neckbeard-autists who play them for pixelated penis enhancements.

The difference is massive. Blizzard recently offered me - once again - one of their free week trials. I accepted and went for a spin. My old server is a ghost town even though they now have merged many old servers. I was literally the only player in the starting area. Reading the official forums and listening to retail players, it's pretty much the same on every server. People log in for raids and otherwise idle in their garrisons. I don't even know what those are. Why would anyone play an MMO like that is beyond me. Meanwhile, I can log to Nostalrius on any time of the day and there will be multiple players in all starting zones. Ironforge and Orgrimmar are bustling with hundreds of players - Stormwind and Undercity almost rivaling them. Even Darnassus and Thunder Bluff have people in them. Every zone is populated, dungeon groups are easy to find and you can get people to help you with elite quests most of the time. There is no magical interface that teleports you to dungeon with random people that you will never meet again. You add good players to your friend list to play with them again. You join a good guild to hang out with and to raid or do pvp with.

Of course almost any SP rpg will be a better gaming experience than any MMO. But you won't have social/human aspect in it. That's why I didn't keep playing those F2P MMOs like DDO and STO and TERA and what else - they've made playing so easy and convenient that nobody has any reason to be social with other players , which - as you said - leaves you with nothing but an inferior gaming experience. But vanilla wow is difficult enough that it actually encourages the social aspect. Sure you can grind yourself to 60 without ever talking to anyone and pretend it's an singleplayer game but that's just madness.

So yes, it was nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses that drove me to try it out but it was genuinely a blast healing my four party members while we rolled over Horde in STV while questing, forming ad hoc groups for kill quests and elites, participating in improvised world pvp over which faction gets to grind stone elementals in this particular valley, managing to keep a crap party alive through the whole of Maraudon and actually getting thanked for it afterwards, calling for help when a ganker repeatedly kills me in Un'Goro and seeing other Alliance ride to me rescue - and then bit later getting to do the same to other players in Burning Steppes. And dozens and dozens of similar anecdotes and little stories.

Unfortunately not even many MMO players themselves realize this when they complain that something is boring or difficult or challenging. Yes, it's fucking annoying having to run across half a zone because there is only one graveyard - but that motives you not to die. When Blizzard made graveyards prevalent, they made death trivial. When most elite mobs were turned to normal mobs it certainly made questing faster but it completely removed one social aspect of the game. And so on and so forth. I'm repeating myself like an old record. I hope you get the gist of it.
 

Ninjerk

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When I got back on Nostalrius there's definitely a nostalgia factor, and as I said before I abruptly quit playing because, ironically but perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the playerbase there pretty much came "full circle." Full circle in the sense that they probably didn't play vanilla WoW in the first place, started with maybe Wrath and as such are used to the entire leveling experience being trivial and uninspiring. In vanilla, if you can look at it through "the eyes of a creator" (using this loosely), you can see how the entire leveling experience is tailored to bring you along slowly to the ideas it has on offer: classes without extensive AoE or CC tools will want to pull mobs from range, mobs with dragons on their frames will fuck you up, your HP relative to various things, etc.

They also really nailed the writing and lore for the product they were making. The placement and staggering of quests is really quite impressive if you follow some of the plot threads they have going on. Newbie areas typically introduce a very narrow plot, and subplots are woven in as you get to the higher level zones (esp. the most heavily trafficked ones)--the Deadmines are, I think, a pretty good class struggle insertion for a game with a fairly simple narrative premise.
 

Naraya

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I agree wholeheartedly with everything said by GarfunkeL. Even though I'm only mid-twenties, I can feel the classic vibe on Nostalrius. Population-wise it's quite amazing, with zones and cities bustling with players (yesterday in the evening there were 8k people online).
I'm taking it easy as I plan to play more seriously on the PvE server - this past weekend Ashenvale and Stonetalon were nigh impossible to level in because of the god damned undead rogues :P

BTW, I tried TrueWoW yesterday to get that WotLK feel and it does look and feel great indeed, however its main problem is that it's quite empty.
 

Revenant

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The title of the thread is "What's next for WoW", therefore it regards the official WoW and its future only
 

Bester

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"What's next for WoW", therefore it regards the official WoW and its future only
WoW has no future.

You're walking around the world as a level 10 or whatever doing your shit, then some level 60 comes out of nowhere, moving at twice your speed, and slaughters you in two hits.
Of course there is a reason why the game was designed like this: to waste your time.
You think this is designed to waste your time, but it's completely untrue. The first MMOs had some very good World PvP mechanisms. You could kill someone (about your level) and they'd drop their gear and you'd pick it up, but then you'd be flagged as leech food to be killed by ANYONE for the next 20-60 minutes. If you die just trying to kill someone, you don't gain anything, lose your own gear and a huge amount of XP. If you succeed, you can still be killed by anyone in the next hour unless you hide really well. A well balanced system that leads to interesting situations and interactions, something you'd call "emergent gameplay" nowadays. This system is now entirely forgotten (thanks to WoW by the way), lost to humanity.

Now when WoW came out, they thought "we'll copy all other games, but we'll take out things that frustrate people", and so when you die - you don't lose anything anymore. And the killer isn't flagged. Nothing happens basically. World PvP became meaningless and shallow. It even looks like it's designed to waste your time indeed. Their problem is that they forgot that there's no pleasure without pain.

Of course they still had some "pain" in Vanilla, for example most people couldn't even lay their eyes on t2/t3 content. This changed of course, because as more and more addons came out, there was less and less "pain" in the game as it was becoming more and more of a theme park. But I digress. At the time I thought vanilla was too casual. Now I just wish a game like Vanilla came out and I'd hug it like it was the best game in the universe.
 
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Revenant

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WoW has no future.
your country has no future

Filthy alliance carebear :argh:
Yup, serves him right for playing alliance. Speaking of which, anyone wants to kick some ally ass together on Europe? Add Revenant#2836 if you do. I also have been looking for someone to run rated arenas with, as I could use upgrading my mostly honor gear, for I have only one conquest piece yet and can't be arsed to run Pashran or casual BGs.
 

Israfael

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The problem for WoW is not that WoD sucks (although in terms of hype/actual result ratio it leads with a great margin over all other expansions), it's just that the market is shrinking, which creates a knock-on effect for WoW, compounded with the changes they did to cater to this faux-hardcore, 'I like vanilla (although i never played it)' crowd.

There's several facets to it:

Gameplay::::
Game has long ago shifted from the 'journey' style MMO (leveling is the progression, with an extra thing like dungeons / raids / organized pvp slapped on) to the end-game content mode. One can argue if it was bad or good, but it changed the game completely, restructuring the community permanently. Since mid-MoP blizzard made it abundantly clear that the only thing they care about is the maintenance costs reduction. All the recent changes that had neutral or negative reception - CRZs, connected realms, ability 'pruning' (more like butchering), removal of stats snapshotting, planned multistrike removal and 'legendary weapon for everyone' - it all reeks of budget cuts. No wonder there's basically nothing lasting in the game, apart from what become its core feature - raids. In short, Blizzard decided that 'less is better' and started to cut options without offering anything in return.

Raids:::
More on this, as everything else doesn't really interest me (and yes, fuck world "pvp", it was never good and all it did just served to sate the egos of people who had nothing better to do than to afk at stranglethorn-duskwood junction and gank lowbies). Same 'cost reduction' philosophy, in conjunction to pandering to the extreme hardcore crowd (with return of Afrasiabi et al.) and simultaneous expansion of the popular feature of late MoP, created a true disaster. I honestly have no idea why they still think, after 5M ppl already gone, that singular 20 man raiding format is fine.

What they did, in a gist:
1) For some reason they thought that removing 10 man and 25-man formats would benefit the community, while in fact it killed almost all former 10-man guilds that raided the most difficult content in a stable and small groups. It's especially true for small and medium pop servers, which simply can't support more than one (or just one) 20-man roster with its inherent instability. The server my guild was on for 3 years simply ceased to exist - from 7-8 guilds that dabbled in heroics (and one that cleared SoO (us)) to basically 0, with 1 guild surviving on the connected server that joined our realm somewhere in late summer 2014. We moved on to the different server. If they thought that people from broken guilds will join more successful ones, they are mistaken - 90% prefer to leave the game (because they can't raid anymore with the friends they acquired in last 2 expansions).

2) The problem was exacerbated by the fact that blizzard decided (quite boneheadedly, naturally) to extend the extremely popular flex system that was a success in puggable content in SoO to all tiers of raids below mythic. Flexible lockout system, as well as flexible roster size (in conjunction with the fact that Blizzard paid precisely 0 effort to tune encounters for groups with less than 14 ppl) basically spelled death to the more casual or underprogressed guilds that were either behind the progression curve (what a typical pug can do) or trying to transition to mythic. Now, with those two pug-friendly things in effect, there's basically no sense for a person to stay in a not so progressed guild and try to improve himself or the teamplay - there's always a pug that would give you more gear for less effort, and you are not bound by the pesky raid times and raid rules. So, basically, it's now a paradise for the guild hoppers, freeriders, casuals and hell for the guilds. Death of those 'bottom feeeder' guilds that actually are very important for the game (they serve as teachers and source of fresh raiders) makes recruiting a pain in the ass for everyone.

3) More about 20-man - they promised that with the new format, the old 'every class has its unique niche in the raid' thing will return. In these two tiers of content, there was exactly 1 fight that required a class ability - furnace mythic - which was experienced by hundreds of guilds. Later they nerfed it and made it possible to do without priests, so the end result is the same - why we (10-man raiders) were left with nothing for the sake of 0.001% of the players who participate in the progression race and who wanted to have 1 ruler to measure their wankers. They got what they wanted, of course - many top guilds like Nightmare Asylum or even Method died or fractured, and game reached its worst state in 10 years.
 
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Ulminati

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I also have been looking for someone to run rated arenas with, as I could use upgrading my mostly honor gear

Well, you'd probably be a bit screwed until season 3 starts. Scrooge and I mostly meet people in full gladiator gear when we run 2s. I'm currently levelling a mage to 100 on the side because fuck being DK in the current CC meta without a pocket pally. Once I get blu honor gear on that, I would be up for slumming the sub-700 brakets with the blue people. :3 Should hit 100 sometime next week.
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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Dunno if there will. I think there might be one more season of content before Legion to shore up numbers. Personally I just hope DKs will get a jump/dash/sprint type ability for Legion. We need antikite badly.

Either way, most of the people in arena 2s are full gladiator atm. So if me and scroo took you along you wouldn't be having much fun for the first 5-6 weeks worth of conq cap. Once I have a mage that needs gearing I'd be up for teaming up with you. (Maybe Scrooge wants to chip in with an alt as well). Bear in mind I'd be a mix of greens/blues from an afternoon of battleground chests and fairly inexperienced at mage.
 

Scroo

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Codex 2014 Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
There are achievements for season 3 already in the game so p sure there will be one ^^
 

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