WoW - I've got to ask :P

[JudgeKing]

I've got a lvl 37 Tauren Druid on the Spirestone server. I prefer the druid class of the classes in the game. They're a nice mix of offense and defense.

[Teaos]

I dislke druids since they are "Jack of all trades and masters of none"

Warlocks are fun but complex to play.

I hate hunters. They need to be down graded and fast. They are to easy to play and every noob plays them.

Next to Mage I like Priests and Paladins and warlocks.

I find the others boring to play.

Burning crusade was also a big let down. It was to big a change from the rest of WoW and the warcraft world. So I have little hope for WOTLK.

For what you pay Blizzard really needs to have a higher turn over for new content. As it is end game players either have to go hard core raiding or there is little for them to do.

[Sionnach Glic]

Never really been interested in those sort of games, myself.

[Aaron]

Didn't some guy die after spending 36 hours in an internet cafe during a raid?

I think that was a Starcraft player in South Korea, they seem to have a few of them a year. Personally I can't play a game more than a few hours before getting bored.

[Mikey]

Agreed with that last point, Teaos. I have a lot of room for advancement, but I just sort of got bored and and let the whole thing go by the wayside.

[Reliant121]

same here. Although i could play freelancer for AGES before stopping.

[Monroe]

Yeah I perfered the raiding style before TBC came out. Wrath is changing it again. Because Karazhan was so popular they're making it so every instance in Wrath you can beat on a 10 man setting then a 25 man setting. That'll really suck for raiding guilds. 3 10 mans don't = a 25 man team.

[Duskofdead]

Being a WoW nerd with awesome t6 and what not I've got to ask, how many other World of Warcraft players are there out there?

I'm Monroe, Zancon, Ansharr on Earthen Ring (US).

Oh my god. Free time much, Monroe?

I have an account, but I pretty much drop off the face of Azeroth between January and April, when work gets busy. Usually I'm too burned out to be interested in going back till sometime in the summer, since WOW feels a bit too much like work sometimes.

I have a 70, a 65~, and then pretty much a character in every other level bracket above 20. Never owned a single purple.

Oh and Shadow Council.

[Monroe]

Hey I only own one 70. Just happen to be in full t5 and t6 >.>

[Deepcrush]

I'm in a guild called Horde Hotties and all we ever talk about is sex, sometimes WoW and then if we aren't talking about anything we talk about sex. Thats about it.

[Duskofdead]

Hey I only own one 70. Just happen to be in full t5 and t6 >.>

If you spent about as much time in the game as a moderate raider, but you coudln't do it in regular, scheduled 3-5 hour sittings, and had to break it up more over the week... your account would look like mine. A lot more characters well above 20, but none of them "well geared." In fact I only ever did one 40-man raid ever prior to the TBC expansion and that was just because I happened to walk by and they had some dropouts and needed someone to go on the fly. (Normally raid guilds wouldn't even talk to me pre-TBC, because they "didn't need anymore rogues.") I've done ten-man dungeons twice. But aside from that, unless you are in college and your whole dorm floor plays on the same realm or something, the "get a bunch of your friends together and go on your own schedule if you have a life and can't join a hardcore raid guild" is kind of a joke. I really don't know anyone in my offline life who plays, but even if I did, I couldn't imagine I could find 5 or 10 of them who were all around the same level and weren't in raid guilds to do casual impromptu instancing.

I think the design of the game is poor, no matter how much people insist it's an improvement over EQ (which I never played.) If you want to be the "MMORPG for casuals", then do it. Or create a special ruleset realm for it where people won't be insanely rewarded for attaching their life force to the game with superglue. But don't keep releasing tier after tier of excessively overpowered gear which is totally inaccessible to 80% of the playerbase and claim you're the mmorpg for casuals. BG's were a good start because you could earn up tokens and such totally on your own time and then cumulatively cash them in for nice rewards. But I won't listen to all the crying from raiders that Arena PvP gives you better gear in less time than raiding because if people think any old casual can waltz into Arena (where it seems like everyone is the WOW equivalent of a Korean starcraft/diablo II prodigy) and just walk out with purples is deluded. Basically the point is, no matter how many good ideas they actually do implement, they are always careful to intentionally leave or add into new content something for the truly hardcore to go pursue that no one else has access to, which then imbalances most aspects of the game (they can PvE and PvP better than normal players and start to dominate both areas) and so then they do something like TBC or Arena to "balance it out", but then add in Tier 17 raid-only drops or whatever.... so the process just goes on forever.

So in a nutshell I gave up on it, fairly early on. I play when it's fun to play, mostly it's casual stuff with casual acquaintances in game, helping noobs in lower end instances, crafting lower end gear for low to medium level people who appreciate it, etc. Maybe a little farming if I'm bored. But I am not a student anymore and can't really stomach the idea of committing scheduled four hour sittings to a 15 year old in the game on a regular basis in order to advance, and that, or being equally hardcore about PvP, is the only real way to rise above sub-mediocre at the endgame.

[Mikey]

Ummm... ditto. One of the main reasons I lost interest so quickly is that I didn't have the desire to devote insane amounts of time to it, and so sort of "fell behind" in what was supposedly typical advancement.

[Duskofdead]

Ummm... ditto. One of the main reasons I lost interest so quickly is that I didn't have the desire to devote insane amounts of time to it, and so sort of "fell behind" in what was supposedly typical advancement.

That's the other thing that sucks hardcore, for me as someone who's had an account for a really long time. It's really hard to play with friends because you always have the one friend who only mkaes it on every other week, and then another friend who winds up getting addicted and 2 months later he's in one of your realm's leading raid guilds while sheepishly denying being "hardcore." The level system is really awful for allowing friends to play together naturally, unless they make really roundabout extra efforts to keep characters together in level. Even then there's not a whole lot you can do together once you hit 70 but farm.

[Jabber Swarky]

Thats why i'm liking the look of Warhammer Online's leveling system. While it DOES have levels, it doesnt look like they do anything much other than give you access to new areas and occasionally SOME new equipment or seige engines. I think. So its basicaly just a "Look at me!" thing. They're trying to prevent the "Naked Dwarf Syndrome" Thing you see in WoW, where some level 70 guy could strip down to his loincloth and go around fistfighting and still kick the ass of 5 level 10's at once. In WAR you wont have eleventy billion hitpoints, and even a sword is just a sword, so it should be possible for somone several levels below you to kill you with a little luck and tactics, and it shouldnt be a hurculean task. It's still tricky, but its not IMPOSSIBLE and, besides, WAR is supposed to be about massed ARMIES fighting off against ARMIES, so you're supposed to work together rather than run off and kill an entire tribe of gnolls before breakfast as part of a daily fetch quest. They want it to be so that when you level up, you're not beccomming some kind of diety, you're just a higher ranked officer in your army.

Though, thats not to say you CANT get stronger or faster, or get better weapons. You can, but attributes seem to be controlled independantly of the level system and they wont be massivley different between levels. An Orc Nobb Big Boss is still going to be stronger than regular footsoldiers, but a determined enemy should still be able to kill him without too much trouble. Besides, since the game doesnt punish you for dying you can just get right back into the fighting. Worse things happen at sea, after all.

At least, from what i can tell, thats how it seems to be. I just got a Beta Tester invite for it, so i can say for sure before to long. ^^

[Monroe]

Hey I only own one 70. Just happen to be in full t5 and t6 >.>

If you spent about as much time in the game as a moderate raider, but you coudln't do it in regular, scheduled 3-5 hour sittings, and had to break it up more over the week... your account would look like mine. A lot more characters well above 20, but none of them "well geared." In fact I only ever did one 40-man raid ever prior to the TBC expansion and that was just because I happened to walk by and they had some dropouts and needed someone to go on the fly. (Normally raid guilds wouldn't even talk to me pre-TBC, because they "didn't need anymore rogues.") I've done ten-man dungeons twice. But aside from that, unless you are in college and your whole dorm floor plays on the same realm or something, the "get a bunch of your friends together and go on your own schedule if you have a life and can't join a hardcore raid guild" is kind of a joke. I really don't know anyone in my offline life who plays, but even if I did, I couldn't imagine I could find 5 or 10 of them who were all around the same level and weren't in raid guilds to do casual impromptu instancing.

I think the design of the game is poor, no matter how much people insist it's an improvement over EQ (which I never played.) If you want to be the "MMORPG for casuals", then do it. Or create a special ruleset realm for it where people won't be insanely rewarded for attaching their life force to the game with superglue. But don't keep releasing tier after tier of excessively overpowered gear which is totally inaccessible to 80% of the playerbase and claim you're the mmorpg for casuals. BG's were a good start because you could earn up tokens and such totally on your own time and then cumulatively cash them in for nice rewards. But I won't listen to all the crying from raiders that Arena PvP gives you better gear in less time than raiding because if people think any old casual can waltz into Arena (where it seems like everyone is the WOW equivalent of a Korean starcraft/diablo II prodigy) and just walk out with purples is deluded. Basically the point is, no matter how many good ideas they actually do implement, they are always careful to intentionally leave or add into new content something for the truly hardcore to go pursue that no one else has access to, which then imbalances most aspects of the game (they can PvE and PvP better than normal players and start to dominate both areas) and so then they do something like TBC or Arena to "balance it out", but then add in Tier 17 raid-only drops or whatever.... so the process just goes on forever.

So in a nutshell I gave up on it, fairly early on. I play when it's fun to play, mostly it's casual stuff with casual acquaintances in game, helping noobs in lower end instances, crafting lower end gear for low to medium level people who appreciate it, etc. Maybe a little farming if I'm bored. But I am not a student anymore and can't really stomach the idea of committing scheduled four hour sittings to a 15 year old in the game on a regular basis in order to advance, and that, or being equally hardcore about PvP, is the only real way to rise above sub-mediocre at the endgame.

Its even more for casual players in the next expansion. I think the game has 'dumbed' down a lot. How easy is it to get a couple hundred badges over the course of a few months and have t6 gear? Badge gear doesn't cover everything but you can be epic'd out with chest, legs, hands, belt, and depending on class shoes or shield, pretty easily.