World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Even Darnassus and Thunder Bluff have people in them.

Have they become deserted in normal WoW?

 

[Revenant]

Depends on the realm in question. Lower population servers indeed have few people in the capitals, but in Argent Dawn, the prime RP server of Europe, there is a lot of activity in the cities every day, with dozens of roleplayers walking around, talking plus regular players doing their stuff.

 

[Israfael]

Why they would not be deserted? There's like 0 incentive to stay there, only Dalaran has some sort of 'life' in it. You can even have AH in your garrison now, it's just a question of 50-70k gold on EU servers

 

[Ulminati]

Even before Garrisons, Darnassus/TB were ghost towns. At most you might see a few larpers cybering in darnassus on a RP/pve server.

In Vanilla, most of the population went to Orgrimmar, Undercity, Stormwind or Ironforge. They were the hubs closes tot hte level 15-50 content. Darnassus and TB were both out of the way once you got past the starting zones and provided no unique service to warrant lots of people going there.

Once TBC hit, Shattrath became the go-to place where all the lv 60+ population went. (Blood elf and spacegoat towns were always ghost towns for the same reasons darnassus/tb were). There was still a considerable amount of alts levelling in Orgrimmar/Stormwind.

WotLK was much the same. Still some people in Orgri/Stormwind, but a lot fewer since most of the oldtimers already had their alts levelled to 70 and the new class could skip all of vanilla. Shattrath became a ghost town while Dalaran was choked with people 24/7.

Cata saw Dalaran join the list of ghost towns, while everyone went to Orgrimmar/Stormwind again. For a while all was good as people levelled alts through the new "vanilla" content in cata and mingled with the max levels. (Although the signifigantly faster levelling speed meant that the alt base diminished quick).

Dunno about MoP since I didn't pay attention to that.

WoD introduced instanced one-person cities that contained all the essential services (bank+ah). You'll see a few people in warspear and some bored people lounging outside Orgrimmar/Stormwind. But for the most part, everyone is in their own garrison. Everywhere is a ghost town.

The reason is simple: People go where it's most convenient. The cities that used to be hubs for content are out of the way for the content most people want to do. With personal mailboxes, banks and auctionhouse being the norm and LFG trivilaizing finding a group to dungeon/raid/pvp with, there is no incentive to go to the cities anymore. So people don't.

Legion is going to be like WotLK/TBC with the entire world being a ghost town, except for the new continent. With dalaran being a no-pvp multifaction hub that's choked with people 24/7. Slight progress I guess.

 

[Caim]

Only reason to go to Darnassus and Thunder Bluff is for the dailies to get your achievements.

Come to think of it, the cities have become more and more useless over the years. Back in the day you had to go there and learn skills, recipies, get special quests to grow your character. But now? Only to learn some recipies and get the occational mounts. Which is kinda sad, because it makes the cities feel very dead and only reinforces the limited work Blizzard put into them.

 

[Sceptic]

GarfunkeL Great post. My disinterest in the social aspects of vanilla are entirely my fault and I'm well aware of this - I was playing with RL friends who introduced me into the game, so I had no interested whatsoever in meeting or interacting with other people (and of course no interest in playing alone either). I'm clearly not the target audience if I'm approaching the game like this. I don't know if I can add anything to your post, you've made your point extremely well.

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.

This does actually sound like a cool system, even to a non-MMOer like me. However it does also kinda prove my point about vanilla WOW being shit Thing is, when you make PKing so easy for the killer, you are shifting the annoyance onto the being-killed. Since the killer loses absolutely nothing, why wouldn't he slaughter every single lower-level that he encounters, just to annoy them? And of course the corpse-running is still there, so he's wasting their time without taking any risk himself (even less now that everyone flies everywhere - not that this was ever an issue if you're a rogue). That said I can't say I disagree with you - a risk/reward mechanism would make the game that much more exciting. And why would people even complain? You don't want to risk losing XP and items? Then don't be a dick and don't go around leeching off lowbies. It's a typical case of wanting your cake and eating it too.

Legion is going to be like WotLK/TBC with the entire world being a ghost town, except for the new continent. With dalaran being a no-pvp multifaction hub that's choked with people 24/7. Slight progress I guess.

I haven't followed very closely, but weren't there supposed to be class hubs or some such strewn around the old world? Wouldn't people congregate there? That'd make the whole world less ghost-towny, no?

 

[Ulminati]

The class hubs are an unknown quality, but they will be shared at least. But Dalaran is supposed to be where the auction houses, raid/PvP gear vendors, profession trainers, dailies etc are, so it's bound to see some life. Besides, I kind of like the cross faction towns where I can /spit on gnomes

 

[Don Peste]

Gnomes make the best warrior tanks. And they would be great kitty druids! How come you don't love them?

 

[Revenant]

Because

They even put a character named Gorge the Corpse Grinder into WotLK because of this video.

 

[Metro]

The class hubs will probably be about as important as the Death Knight 'hub.' Maybe a bit more. Probably just a place where people pick up a daily quest and leave. The rogue hub is going to be in Dalaran sewers so they don't have to go anywhere.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

WoW in vanilla and TBC was great because it was a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER RPG that got a lot of things right. I will be the first to say that sandbox MMOs have a LOT more potential than themepark ones, but potential is nothing if not realized, and most, perhaps all sandbox MMOs so far have failed to realize it. WoW, in its prime, realized the full potential of themepark and was a hell of a fun game.

As someone mentioned, it was all about the journey, leveling your character took months of hardcore play, and along the way you got to adventure in this massive world, interact with other players and do all kinds of fun stuff, like build out your character with abilities and gear, run dungeons, participate in PvP, and do quests and discover new areas. I've played the game on and off for years during these times (through the WotLK expansion), and I've had so many memorable, unforgettable experiences.

Now, the journey means nothing, as you can level a character in probably 2 weeks with enough boons. Everyone races through the content, and then sits around in hubs waiting for some queue to complete. What that has to do with adventuring or RPGs, I have no idea. But early WoW was a completely different beast.

 

[Metro]

And leveling in Vanilla never felt like grinding because there was a sufficient amount of content. The 'grinds' didn't come until a year or so later when they tacked on reputations. Today even without heirlooms leveling so fast you can skip 60-70% of pre-60 zones and half of TBC and Wrath. It was fun running a dungeon and actually keeping the items you got for more than an hour in-game time. Everyone gets epics so no one gives a shit about rares. There is zero sense of progression. Even Wrath managed to hang on to it with quality heroic rares and items you got from the various reputations (which you could raise whiel doing dungeons). Was all downhill from there.

Going from 90-100 in WoD takes maybe a week of casual play (10-12 hours or so in-game time). It's all scripted as you're funneled from one hub to the next via phasing. Essentially a single player game. It's a Facebook game where you run your garrison like Farmville.

 

[Israfael]

Going from 90-100 in WoD takes maybe a week of casual play (10-12 hours or so in-game time

Much less, if you have flying and HandyNotes addon with all the treasures marked. Just buy few exp pots, fly around and collect the things, level up in 5-6 hours.

In Vanilla, it wasn't 'chore' as the alts were rare beast - most ppl i knew in Vanilla/TBC times had only 1 char, with 2-3 crafting/banking lowbie alts. Then blizzard made leveling easier and 'encouraged' people to level up by adding restrictions on the max profession level that was now tied to the current char level (like you need to be 80 to learn MoP alchemy). So most people went through the leveling content once, or re-visited it in half a year or so. After I leveled my 5th alt in MOP, i was almost going to puke when i reached the Kun Lai region (I hate it with passion now). Thankfully, now the game doesn't provide enough incentives to actually play it outside of the raids/ occasional timewalking with old legendaries, so i only have 3 max chars now, of which only 2 are raiding.

 

[Ulminati]

Now, the journey means nothing, as you can level a character in probably 2 weeks with enough boons. Everyone races through the content, and then sits around in hubs waiting for some queue to complete. What that has to do with adventuring or RPGs, I have no idea. But early WoW was a completely different beast.

I levelled a monk 1-78 during a fri-sat-sun with darkmoon faire. Just queuing dungeons as a mistweaver with the heirloom + enlightenment + hat + carousel bonuses. I was running at 200% xp

i was almost going to puke when i reached the Kun Lai region

Well, the good news is that MoP is almost entirely skippable now. I'm levelling a mage to 100 for PvP (yeah... sad world that 1-100 is considered something you need to rush past to get to the game) and the only MoP quests I did was the first region (Hozen, panda town, panda temple, panda farm), having LFG on at all times. I didn't even get to the steps up the mountain behind the panda farm before I was 90 and on to WoD.

I went through 82-86 sunday (Cata) and 86-91 yesterday (MoP) after dinner. I could probably hit 100 tonight if I cheese LFG a little. Doubly so if I find a pocket tank or healer to queue with for faster pops.

All in all if you cheese a little with heirlooms and events and make sure to LFG with a healer or tank (either be one or group with one), you should be able to do 1-100 in a week of semicasual play.

 

[Israfael]

could probably hit 100 tonight if I cheese LFG a little

Just a piece of advice - if you want to get done with that quickly, run around the world and pick up the treasures, it'd be faster than dungeon spam. If nothing has changed, you'd have to do them 8-10 times at lv 99, which is like real bad.

 

[Ulminati]

I havne't bothered to farm rep so I don't have draenor flight

Although if Scrooge has it and wants to repay me for crafting her a Vial of the Sands (hint hint)...

 

[Quatlo]

What is the best wotlk priv at the moment?

 

[Naraya]

^ I transferred my character from retail to TrueWoW yesterday - took a total of 5 minutes. I'm impressed by the community (very mature and helpful) and server quality, however population wise it's bit low (500 peak and ~250 avg). I have no idea if there are more populated WotLK servers around.

 

[Scroo]

I havne't bothered to farm rep so I don't have draenor flight

Although if Scrooge has it and wants to repay me for crafting her a Vial of the Sands (hint hint)...

Lol look at dis guy thinking I'd do PvE just to get flying

 

[Ulminati]

Lol look at dis guy thinking I'd do PvE just to get flying

You wouldn't be doing it for flying. You'd be doing it to have a mage as a backup arenabuddy

 

[Caim]

Can you still do that thing as a Druid where you get a mount with a passenger, fly all the way up, leave the mount and turn into your fast travel form and have the shmuck fall to his death?

 

[Ulminati]

That's why you always carry some of these bound to a hotkey: http://www.wowhead.com/item=109076/goblin-glider-kit

They come in handy for taking shortcuts in areas where you haven't learned flight too.

 

[Revenant]

Goblin glider kits are popamole, characters have engineering and imblue their cloaks with flexweave underlay

 

[Revenant]

BLIZZARD NO LONGER ANNOUNCING SUBSCRIBER NUMBERS

http://megagames.com/news/blizzard-no-longer-announcing-subscriber-numbers

Although today there are games like League of Legends with close to a hundred million active players and smartphone franchises like Angry Birds that have attracted over a billion downloads, one game previously dominated the 'subscriber numbers' announcements and that was World of Warcraft.

At its peak it had over 13 million paying customers, which considering the above mentioned titles are often free to play, is an amazing achievement. Especially since those players kept paying every single month, practically bankrolling anything Blizzard could want to do without issue.

Today of course the numbers are much lower than they once were. 5.5 million at the last count. Perhaps because of that continued downturn - and perhaps the fact that the news of dwindling numbers can create a snowball effect - Blizzard has announced that it will no longer be revealing subscriber numbers to the public.

“There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance," it said in a statement (via VG247).

Although this might sound like it looking to dodge announcing more drops in subscribers, even WoW has finally begun to drop that age old model of paying for MMO access. Many gamers now utilise free to play options with micro-transactions in order to stomp around Azeroth, which makes subscriber numbers ever more redundant.

Do you still play WoW? If so, how do you pay for it?

LOL. I understand that it is harder to unambiguously measure subscription numbers with the Token mechanism in action, but it's still hilarious how Blizzard don't want to acknowledge they have been killing their own game over the years.

 

[Bester]

It's always been like this when the numbers go down. Instead of subscriptions, MMOs start publishing "game hours", "characters logged in" and eventually some pathetic shit like "mobs killed". It's always been like this.