Think people in wow are starting to get very bored. Especially since the new isle patch was the last content patch and those dailes are getting extremely boring. It's just not enough to hold people over till xmas.

Will wotlk be a huge success ? Commercially I dont doubt it ;).
 

The developers shouldn't forget the golden rule:

He who has the gold, makes the rules.
 

Actually most of the alpha leaks are legit. Blizzard "accidentally" made the alpha client to everyone for a short time, so the datamining is being done by people who aren't under any NDA. Blizzard has now properly password protected the client again, but its mirrored all over the place now so feel free to dig through the mpq files on your own to confirm it yourself.

Some stuff is fake though, and its an early alpha so tons of things will change between now and release.
 

In addition, if you want further confirmation as to the validity of the information, Wowinsider ended up posting a lot of the info, and then, at least according to them, was asked by blizzard to take it down, which they did. As much as it may be scary to take that leap of faith and open yourself up to looking like a fool...At this point, it's pretty well documented.

If you want, you can search through the original topics going through the data mining process and the search for information.
 

You have to realize that a few of the ideas blizzard gets are from the forums, though they will never admit it. Even fake "leaked" patch notes like the one that included Titans Grip was full of potential, and blizzard would be fools if they didn't at least look at it for consideration.

That is to say those notes were even fake. Titan's grip may have been something they've wanted to implement for a while, but never found the place for it. Notice you now have an incoming class that is designed around 2h weapons. DKs will have the opportunity to tank with 2h weapons. It's the perfect time to revisit something like Titan's Grip and test it out in Alpha/Beta.

But keep in mind the leaks, which from my own data mining of the client are accurate, at least the images, are from private ALPHA. If you were around during beta and paid any attention to the Paladin class you know how quickly blizzard can change something.

There's no reason to be so quick to label these as fake, especially if you don't even try to verify some of it yourself. As a warlock some of the proposed talents are strange, like demonic sacrifice is still there but another talent with an even better buff... but without the sacrifice... is down the tree. They have a talent to put the warlock into Demon form, giving them a ton of armor and special demon abilities. That's something Warlock's have been wanting for a while. Are they really going to add these? Possibly, but i'm sure they're going to change immensely between now and launch.

If i were to post fake notes i would at least add that warlocks are getting green fire ;)
 

I forgot to point out... the leaked images of a starting death knight in armor look exactly like Blizzard's updated DK page, http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/deathknight/gameplay.xml.

And all i can say is it looks fantastic! If only it was a full suit of armor you can put in the shirt slot so once you hit outland you don't replace it with a clown suit.
 

"They have a talent to put the warlock into Demon form, giving them a ton of armor and special demon abilities"

Oh, please be true!!!
 

Morph a lot of people have been bored for 5 months. And I predict WOTLK will be worse. 3 months of good content max. They really need a team whos sole job is to come up with some sort of content patch every month or two to string people along.

But I'd guess the corporate "maximize our profits" is preventing that type of common sense from happening.

But I'll be surprised if they rush it out by christmas. At this point the player base is so disgruntled a screwed up content patch would be worse than a late one. Especially with WAR releasing before Christmas.

A late patch that's decent they'll get a lot of people back. A bad xpac at the same time as WAR and they'll run a lot of people off
 

I should point out...
The total sales for LOTRO in a 6 month period according to NPD sales was...

200k

This seems really low...and probably does not take into account online sales...

But, if AoC can even get 300k, they will be doing just fine..

Now..as to issues of speed levelers who are running out of content..
This may prove to be a slam on AoC's part and may scare some power players away...
Should be interesting, and going to have to watch this until the dust settles...
Say 3 months? then we will know if AoC is worth a darn...
 

They are absolutely 100% false. Just look, according to the leaks, Shamans will get a form of CC. Completely impossible.

Oh and resilience not active in PvE instances. Lolerskates.
 

If WAR beats WoTLK to a release date, I will definitely be signing up with WAR and, if it's good enough, I may just forget all about WoTLK.

It's time for Blizz to grow up and follow a real schedule and consider the business side of things if they want to remain top dog.
 

If by Shaman CC you are talking about the Temporal Rift spell, I think you may want to re-read the 'leak'. The way I understood it is it places the target into a "temporal rift" that increases incoming damage by a percent. For every 2000 damage the target takes the shaman gets a 'shock charge', whatever that is. The ability is channeled to boot, and judging from the lack of mana cost or other associated info, it's more likely a boss or mob ability than anything else. Either way, it's not so much CC as a means of focus-fire that helps the shaman blow stuff up good.

I could be misunderstanding things, but since the ability's existence is itself debatable, the argument is relatively moot.
 

The guy in the suit better just not bring the hammer down - he needs to expand the development team.

The quest design team for WoW is still the same size as it was for Burning Crusade, and burnout is taking a serious toll. Blizzard is an insulating company that likes to play their cards very close to the vest - this does keep the Vision Thing focused...but slows down development time. You can have fast, but not perfect. Or you can have perfect but slow.
 

Remember also that the "suits" are now Vivendi suits this time around and they're gonna want quick payback on their investment
 

There's an old saying that great men are finally brought down by their strengths, not their weaknesses. I wonder if this is WOW's fate. The meticulousness and attention to quality that made it such a great game to begin with are what led to small expansions being released infrequently. As a result, players burn through the content faster than it's produced and hence get bored.

Unless Blizzard massively increase their development team, I fear the game will die a slow, lingering death by apathy.
 

Well, the WoW PvP designers have had over a year to innovate, since there has been nothing much new on that front since TBC release.

The quest designers pretty much been freed up from TBC since November, given that patch 2.4 was a nondescript collection of daily quests.

The artwork people reused existing templates like the BE template for the Isle, and didn't exactly knock themselves out on the Sunwell / S4 gear models.

The instance designers had to come up with exactly one new instance in the entire lifecycle of TBC.

The raid designers had stuff to do in patch 2.4, and that's no biggie since they are pretty much the only team that has to put something out in every patch. They'll have to put out the WotLK Kara-equivalent bottleneck and can rely on 10 levels + a myriad of attunements for breathing room.

Game components like voice chat and combat system have been overhauled with our maintenance dollars rather than in the expansion, a move that is smart for Blizzard. But that also removes any excuse for a late or bumpy release since WotLK will amount to a gigantic content patch.

There is absolutely no excuse for WotLK to be released later than November, or be sub-par in any way, especially after the extremely content-poor 2.4 patch.
 

AOC, LOTRO, and WAR.

Death by a thousand cuts.
 

I somehow doubt its that the dev team needs to be expanded. It needs new blood. It needs new life. They've gotten lazy and complacent. Arena's were the great fix for everythign. Less dev hours more people playing. People put up with it for awhile because they were getting geared up. Now they are bored and fed up with the mind numbing grind that is arenas.

They'll either get the message and shift gears or they'll suffer subscription loss till the suits fire some of them and bring in new blood. And that will either be a great thing or an even worse tragedy. No way of knowing till we see the content they push out.
 

I think TBC just hurt WOW so much, they completely screwed PvE there is no reason to do any of the instances cause they can be easily replaced my PvP gear. If they want to have PvP and PvE more balanced they should just remove resil from the game. WOW has become a game for the people that have like 12 hours to kill, getting weapons, armor or trinkets in tbc took forever to get and when u finally get the item u want they release a brand new dungeon the next day or another season of arena has just come out. WOW used to be so much fun back in the day, but now it's just focused way too much on the hardcore gamer. Also when u lvl up a character it's no fun at all the leveling process is just too slow, the combat get's boring after the 800th time and when u finally get to 70 there's just nothing much to do because it requires way too much time and it's not even that fun. Really how many people have actually had a chance to even get into black temple, on my server darkspear there is only 2 guilds in the entire damn server that have actually entered black temple, but it doesn't matter anyways cause i still kick there ass because PvP gear beats out PvE gear. WOW has to very concerned about where the game is going cause Age of Conan looks alot more appealing than WOW right now. Oh ya and way to fucking go with nerfing Shamans up the ass, ya let's fuck up one of the most fun classes so they can be forced to become healers.
 

TBC was a big improvement to WoW imo


40man raids were horrible.
and pvp had no purpose at all really