Most forget that Blizzard isn’t Blizzard anymore. They were purchased by Activision who seems to feel the need to stupidly screw with a good thing. Blizzard made some mistakes with WoW before Activision but after Activision, Blizzard seems to be making even more mistakes.


I think the Panda is a sad class to have as an addition to WoW. IMO WoW should not be turned even more into ToonTown.


BUT the Panda may never get to the finish line anyway. By going with a battle Panda Blizzard may run afoul of copyright infringements (Google DreamWorks Kung Fu Panda and look at the similarities).


Mostly, the small mistakes that Blizzard makes will not matter. While a battle Panda is a stupid addition to the game, overall it will not do a great deal of damage to the game.


What most MMO players and most (perhaps all) Mythic people never seemed to grasp is what players really need in an MMO (‘need’ is different than ‘want’). Most players need uninterrupted fun and for the most part WoW delivers on that. WoW may not be the type of fun that you want, but what you want is not what matters most.


Mythic still does not seem to get it.

Players do not want to still be alpha testing 3 months after the Xpac/patch goes live.

Players do not want to need a second account just to compete.

Players do not want to need a third/fourth/fifth account to PL plat/gold as fast as the next player.

Players do not want to sit to regen for 3 min out of every one min in battle.

Players do not want to beg for a horse/stacking pots/better UI/etc . . . and then to be lied to by Mythic and told it is impossible to code into the existing game (or to be given some other lame excuse).

Players do not want each patch or expansion to make old world areas obsolete.

Players do not want . . . .(with DAoC the list could go on and on and on and on and on).


While WoW has a few small problems here and there, WoW has nothing like what DAoC has as problems.


PLAYERS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN. Players do not want to be frustrated with stupid bugs or frustrated by an unpolished game.


While WoW is an inferior game concept to DAoC, at WoW players can immerse themselves into the game and are not constantly bombarded with bugs or stupidity that pull them out of their immersion. WoW is an inferior game concept to DAoC but WoW has far superior implementation to DAoC.


Even today Mythic still gives lame and stupid excuses for not doing what should be easy to do (i.e.“the new Herald is more difficult to code than it seems”), even today Mythic is making old world items/areas obsolete with things in a patch, even today Mythic pretends players are mushrooms, etc. . . it is as if Mythic has not learned a thing over the years.


(Isolated exceptions do not change a general rule or trend.)

 

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Yes they are making money but are losing subscribers fast.

They have gone from semi hard-core, to mainstreem to now retarded 8y old safe. I mean wtf, pet battles? and thats a big "THIS IS IS IN THE EXPANSION ZOOOMG BUY IT NOW! PET BATTLES; COLLECT PETS AND FIGHT YOUR FRIENDS!"

wtf?!?





It looks like crap and has almost nothing to do with what WoW is all about. It is catering to pokemon loving 8 year olds.

Kung Fu Panda was cool.

Pokemon was cool when I was 10.
Sounds like an awesome expansion imo

 

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Blizzard Entertainement a Disney Studio.

 

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I play DAOC for the RVR. In WoW it just has never been the same. It's like comparing Quake to Battlefield 3 or whatever the latest FPS, nothing compares to the raw fun.

 

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I question that. Not the fact that we all want to have fun with our games of course, but your reasonning about WoW-Blizzard.

I was there at the launch of WoW Europe, in january 2004 iirc. It was filled with bugs, there were 1~2 hour queues to get in game for several months in EU prime time, there were horrible 5minutes lag spikes as soon as there was a little crowd logged in (not even the prime time), lags, bugs aplenty, multiple server crashes.
They shutted servers down the whole wednesday for weeks because they simply couldn't manage without it, memory issues i suppose.

Worse than EU WAR launch(itself pretty bad), by a good margin.

Regarding the "fun part", when i got up to ~40 back then, i remember getting awfully bored: pvp was a joke, battlegrounds weren't fun at all, and pve was just the same thing all over again, with just a change of scenery and, once in a while, an original method for killing a named. I might add that at the time, while i already loved DAOC RvR, i also liked pve a lot.

Yet, players stuck with WoW and not with the newer games such as Aion, AoC, WAR. It's probable a sensible part of WoW success is just due to Blizzard having such high consideration from a lot of players, not the sheer fun provided by the game.

 

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Good to see no matter how long I'm away from VN you'll still be here making polite and well-reasoned comments!




Yeah, I actually agree with you entirely about WoW at release, they did well from their huge existing fanbase to get the game through the awkward phase most MMOs seem to struggle with at launch. I wasn't a fan either at the time. But the reason I'm now playing it rather than DAoC is that the game still has a reasonable feeling of life and change to it - DAoC has had such pitiful development resources pointed at it in the last few years that it feels very stagnant. WoW is still receiving regular balance and major content updates, not to mention continued expansions - I agree that some people question the specifics of it, and some people aren't a fan particularly of its PvP mechanics, but it at least feels like a game that hasn't completely run into a rut due to indifferent development.

 

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I said this before, "(Isolated exceptions do not change a general rule or trend.)"


Did WoW have bugs when launched? Yep, it had lots of bugs. I never said it did not have bugs. But where are those bugs today? (Gone) How long did it take to get rid of the bugs? (Not long). Are WoWs expansions released mostly polished and bug free? (Yes.)


Don’t compare apples to mushrooms. If you want to talk about bugs at launch then compare launch of WoW EU to launch of DAoC EU, not launch of WoW EU to DAoC today. When comparing equivalent events and equivalent times, DAoC is horribly implemented, horribly neglected and the DAoC players are horribly treated.


Blizzard, in general and overall, does a much better job of game polishing and game implementation. Blizzard does far more testing, trying to eliminate bugs, than Mythic even thinks about doing. That players can find bugs in WoW does not change the general reality of the vast differences in quality between WoW and the decrepit DAoC. (Isolated exceptions do not change a general rule or trend.)


Try taking a pet through Co5 today, years after it went live. There are still LOS problems in old world areas that were reported before launch as problem areas. Pets still run through walls in NF (after all these years this is still a problem). The problems in DAoC are HUGE. The problems with WoW, yes WoW has problems, are mostly minor.


In DAoC when I port my pet will vanish about 20% of the time. In WoW my pet will vanish when porting or flying about .1% of the time. Is that a bug in WoW? Yep it is, but it is such a small bug it is negligible. In DAoC having a pet vanish 20% of the time is a big problem.


This list of old and unfixed DAoC bugs could go on for many, many pages. The list is huge.


Does WoW have bugs? Yep. But not anywhere near as many bugs as DAoC’s neglected and rotten code has.


Also, a short period during WoW's EU launch when there are long queues or launch bugs, that is a cheep shot when discussing long standing problems that Mythic has put on ignore.


Long ago, about a year after Win 98 was no longer supported, I read on the WoW boards about a challenge that Win 98 users (only about 100 to 150 players out of millions) had after a patch that changed the WoW downloader. Win 98 users could no longer update the game. Blizzard said they may not be able to change things because technically Win 98 was no longer supported. But Blizzard pulled out an old computer, found a person with Win98 install disks and they found the problem. The next patch fixed the downloader so that those few who were still using Win 98 could download and update the game. Mythic SOP would have been to announce, “WORKING AS INTENDED” and then put the players on ignore.



I would agree and disagree. Blizzards reputation for not ignoring bugs and for producing polished products did help WoW at launch. But I disagree with any who imply that Blizzards reputation gave WoW a pass on long term fun or quality.


While WoW launched with bugs, WoW had more testing than DAoC and the problems with WoW were taken more seriously by Blizzard than Mythic seems to have been concerned with DAoC problems.


While WoW had bugs at launch, Blizzard rapidly polished the game cleaning up bugs and introducing many player-friendly features (features that Mythic still refuses to create).


In short order after launch WoW was more polished than a much older DAoC.


I stand by my evaluation. DAoC is a superior game concept to WoW but DAoC has horrible implementation. WoW is an inferior game concept to DAoC but WoW has far superior implementation.


WoW is generally, for the typical MMO player, more fun than DAoC. While DAoC's concept can be fun, in general DAoC is a frustrating, buggy and neglected game that tends to piss off players until they get fed up and leave. Many that leave end up at WoW, not because WoW is a better game to play, because WoW is somewhat fun and WoW does not in general piss them off while they play.


(Isolated exceptions do not change a general rule or trend.)

 

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Ugh does this mean I’ll have to redo my Pirox scripts to auto level a stupid panda and sell it quick for huge profit to someone dumb enough to buy it as usual?

 

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