Anyone watch the US presidential debate last night? Any opinions?
 

I just cancelled my WAR subscription.

I feel like I'm in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I joined a Low Pop server in the hopes that I would avoid queues, but then public quest participation was low, and didn't see much action in RvR, and went through level 12-20 with no scenarios played. I also find it a pain to have to travel to other lands to queue for their scenarios. Can we just join all the queues in a warcamp or something like that? Maybe allow a Rally Master there so we can warp back? It's tedious!

Also, the dealbreaker: there are lair tome unlocks in open RvR areas, and if you haven't done them before you hit a certain level, I don't see how you can unlock them. Example, the lich in the empire/chaos t1 RvR area.
As a completionist, knowing I will never be able to unlock that tome entry without making a new character?

Goodbye.
 

As a completionist you're screwed anyway. It is technically impossible to get all tome unlocks on the same character, as some of them are Order only or Destruction only. I got a very nice "Doom Bringer" title from killing some dwarf on a boat in Barak Varr, it would be impossible for an Order character to get that title.
 

MAybe you can talk about WAR: Why doesn't anyone TALK for gods sake? The chat is empty ...

One obvious reason is the map of WAR: it tells you always where to go for quests and where to return. This deletes all needs for chat like "Does anyone know where xyz is..."
 

Yes, strangely for such a "social"/grouping game in WAR there doesn't seem to be much actual communication in terms of chat.

WAR has made it easy to group, but that doesn't mean that people actually interact with each other while doing shared tasks.

Of course, it is different if you have a guild... but I wonder how much the "friend" feature is going to be used in the game?

Mind you, I don't miss the communication about "noobs", gear etc. that dominates the chat of other games....
 

Are the devs/decision makers of WoW out of touch with their customers?

A recent official announcement that with the upcoming WotLK expansion all accumulated honour points (HP) and battleground tokens (the "currency" for buying PvP epic gear with) will be wiped resulted in a massive protest storm on the forums (see http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10043252440&sid=1).

The apparent reasoning behind this decision is to prevent players from stockpiling honour currency beforehand, then rushing to level 80 when the expansion is released, and then grabbing the all new and shiny level 80 PvP epic gear before anyone can say "pwnage" (although with the current cap on HP and prices of the new gear this practice should yield no more than 3 pieces). Wiping the currency supposedly levels the playing field.

Putting aside the fact that forum posters are a small, albeit vocal, minority of the overall customer base, someone at Blizzard HQ must have foreseen the s**t hitting the fan, since the honour wipe affects all players indiscriminately. Even those that won't buy the expansion right away or not at all. So why "punish" them as well?

The dev's decision appears unsophisticated, heavy-handed and all in all not well thought-out. A quick and dirty solution to a seemingly minor problem that's bound to annoy the majority of customers unnecessarily. This smells like hubris on the dev's part.
 

WoW honor wipe: clearly the designers feel that the game would fail without it.

Whether that is true or false is arguable, but I from my own perspective I have have quit WoW due to the inability to catch up with gear.
 

WAR is no more quiet then WoW for me. I left general and trade so I didn't have to read 12 year olds go back and forth on whatever funny meme was out there at the time. Or better yet, all the e-peen stroking. People actually miss that?

WAR chat is just as lively for me as I keep it to my guild and friends.

Blizzard doesn't want you to burn through their content in the expansion so they wiped honor/marks. There is no other reason. They added arena rating requirements to slow the progress of those who are mediocre at PvP to force a floor into the arena system and to slow progress of gear acquisition. It's a horrible idea that will probably backfire on them (like attunements, etc). A lot of 'casual' PvPers liked to accumulate gear in BGs even if it was subpar compared to the arenas. These 'casuals' gave up on aenas as it's not fun being the redshirt.

As an aside, anyone try out the new King's Bounty game. I bought it the other day and so far it's a blast. Highly recommended if you enjoyed the original.
 

On warhammer populations: It seems something that a lot of people are complaining about, and from what I've heard, the population size issue for various activities seems the issue that will make or break the game.

I'm wondering is Mythic should/should have taken another leaf out of Guild Wars and merged a bunch of servers of the same type into one big group. when small amounts of people are on, everyone gets automatically sent to one server. As more people get on, people are split between servers, and can move around flexibly as they please to stay with friends and such, (I am of course assuming that it is not too hard to get something like this working.)

I also agree that allowing queueing to any scenario is worthwhile, and think that there should be an option for characters to go back to low level areas to do scenarios and quests, with skills and stats reduced down to low level ones, but also getting a slightly higher renown, money, experience, possibly gear (If the drop system could be programmed to produce appropriate high level gear in low level areas), etc., to compensate for the reduced fun factor.
 

WoW's "Honor wipe" should come as no surprise to anyone that played through the TBC launch.


Although I am amused they're wiping tokens too. Guess I'd better find something to spend 200 AV tokens on before the wipe.



And both toons already have the AV mount :(
 

The presidential debate was pretty interesting. I think the vice president debate will be more entertaining tho. And I really start to wonder sometimes what the politics process looks like for someone not from the United States, Id imagine the mudflinging and focus on the most pointless stories just makes American news outlets look more retarded than usual.
~ten
 

-> WoW's "Honor wipe" should come as no surprise to anyone that played through the TBC launch. <-

Well, yeah. It's obvious that every new expansion of WoW invalidates the progress that's been made up until its launch. But, while TBC only did that to items and raid progression, now it's the PvP currency as well.

Given this track record, one can only wonder what a third expansion will target. Gold wipe? Naw, too easily replaced. Reputation wipe? Naw, tons of new factions can be easily created. Oh! Character wipe! That way, everyone has to start at zero again, so it's fairness all round. Old and proven, yet sadly neglected content finally gets used again. See, no need even for new areas. Best thing is, even those that don't buy the new expansion get their chars wiped, too.

"Everyone come for the great Barren chat revival!" ;)
 

Even though it's technically no longer sunday where I live I wanted to bring up the news that PopCap Games have released an addon for WoW that allows you to play Bejeweled. It's a very slickly done addon with inbuilt achievements and sharing of highscores with guildies. The addon allows you to start games on taking a flight and stopping the addon when arriving at your destination, or entering combat or getting a ready check from your raidleader. You can later seamlessly pick up the game where you left it.

http://blizzplanet.com/news/2753/
http://www.popcap.com/wow

I played some games this weekend and am really surprised by the high entertainment factor in playing a minigame while fishing or just standing around chatting in /guild.

One has to wonder why Blizzard makes of all this. On the one hand it's great that their LUA interpreter can do stuff like this, on the other hand it makes you wonder why Blizzard hasn't implemented mini-games like this themselves.
My guess is Blizzard is watching this very closely to see what is happening and thinking very hard on how to make money out of this.

Anyone have thoughts on this? Will we see more of these types of addon, integrating radically different games into the MMO platforms?
 

WAR...
WOW....blah, blah

Always about these games...

Lets discuss how drugged Jeffrey Steefel is about the success of LOTRO..with his newest interview on Rock,Paper, Shotgun

Beauty quotes...

It’s arguably one of the top MMOs in the industry right now – we’ll see what happens with the new games that are coming out, but probably the second most prominent MMO game right now

(Thats right...that is why so many bloggers and news sites discuss your game)

The other thing you do is try and figure out how you can give people play sessions that are not as deep commitment wise – hence the focus on solo play

(uh-huh...thats why you make a massively multiplayer game...to focus on solo content)

As I said on my blog...
Steefel decides he likes the taste of foot.
 

Here's your Next Topic/s: The Un/Enforceability of EULAs combined with our inability as the consumer to return a product for a Full Refund (not Store Credit) after opening the package, reading the enclosed EULA (to which we were not privy at the time of purchase), and deciding we disagree with it.