Failure is relative of course, but according to Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, 40% of the people that left WoW for AoC, returned later on. As some people have remarked, if the president of Blizzard mentions it, it must have meant that they lost a significant amount of subscribers to Age of Conan. Which means there's a market out there for a good title. And Warhammer Online could fill that hole.
But, 40% of the leavers returned, which means those people gave something else a try, didn't like it and came back to WoW. Will this impact sales of the next new title to come along? After all, they're leaving a perfectly stable game without too many bugs, which, apparently, they still enjoy. Otherwise they wouldn't have come back. And chances are you won't really find what you're looking for in that new game either. Why take the risk, go through the whole "I'm a newbie" experience, waste time on the levelling grind again, and leave all your friends in WoW, if you already have a maxed out character and loads of friends in a game you still play with passion?
Well, some people enjoy levelling and exploring new stuff. My guess is those people would have tried Warhammer Online regardless, because it's new content. But end-game players that tried out AoC and came back, possibly won't be as inclined to give WAR a try after their AoC experience.
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
WoW Recruit a Friend program
Today's top headline on the World of Warcraft main page is their updated "Recruit a Friend" program. Previously, if you referred a friend, they started playing World of Warcraft and paid their first month's subscription fee, you would get 30 days free game time. The new program awards you with:
This new scheme limits the time you have to play apart from each other, and you can easily level up an alt in the process. If your friend gets ahead of your new alt, because you were raiding or whatever, he can easily allow you to catch up by awarding your character extra levels. Your friend will be level 70 in no time, at which point you can truely start playing together with your "mains". In the past, I've had a couple of friends who gave WoW a try. But the game was already mature at that point, I was max level and my friends got bored having to play alone most of the time and gave up. This is an excellent counter to that.
And of course the free zhevra mount will motivate existing players to actively start recruiting friends. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of these "friends who start playing" will be secondary accounts of existing players who are only after the exclusive mount. If people are willing to spend more than $200 on an in-game social pet, they won't think twice about shelling out for an extra account for two months so they can get their hands on a new mount.
- As it was previously, 30 days of free play time if your friend pays for 30 days game time.
- An exclusive zhevra in-game mount when your friend pays for 60 days of game time.
- If you and your friend are grouped together, you'll both earn triple experience.
- For every two levels your friend earns, he can grant one of your characters that's lower level than your friend's character, an extra level.
- You and your friend can summon each other once every hour.
This new scheme limits the time you have to play apart from each other, and you can easily level up an alt in the process. If your friend gets ahead of your new alt, because you were raiding or whatever, he can easily allow you to catch up by awarding your character extra levels. Your friend will be level 70 in no time, at which point you can truely start playing together with your "mains". In the past, I've had a couple of friends who gave WoW a try. But the game was already mature at that point, I was max level and my friends got bored having to play alone most of the time and gave up. This is an excellent counter to that.
And of course the free zhevra mount will motivate existing players to actively start recruiting friends. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a substantial number of these "friends who start playing" will be secondary accounts of existing players who are only after the exclusive mount. If people are willing to spend more than $200 on an in-game social pet, they won't think twice about shelling out for an extra account for two months so they can get their hands on a new mount.
Sunday, 3 August 2008
WotLK Beta - Built-in threat meters and more stable slots
This morning I had to download a new patch before I was able to log in to the beta. It wasn't too big, about 22.5MB in size, but it still contained a few things that'll make people excited.
The first highlight is the fact that stable masters now have an additional two slots, for a total of four slots for hunter pets. The first new slot costs 50 gold, the second 150g. I have a level 70 hunter myself, and personally, I think this is long overdue. I always suffered from not having enough pet storage room while levelling up, especially when training new pet skills. Currently you have to tame a certain beast in the wild before you can learn a spell. This means that you have to stable your regular pet if you want to get a new skill or the next rank of a skill for your companion.
Ironically enough, they're doing away with this system in the expansion, all skills are now learned via visiting an NPC trainer or via the new pet talent system. So I guess the extra stable room is actually a little less needed in the expansion than it is right now on live servers. Oh well… Better late than never I guess.
A second important addition in the patch was Blizzard's own "threat meters" system. There have been third party addons that measure the amount of threat you have on a mob for quite some time now, pretty much ever since certain bosses in Blackwing Lair, in pre-TBC WoW, made them a virtual necessity.
And now Blizzard is coming with their own implementation, but contrary to what they usually do when incorporating popular addon functionality, they went for a totally different approach. Instead of a separate window, showing a list of players with the most threat on a particular mob, they now only show each player how much threat only they themselves have, as a percentage. It's added to the combat text, so for each of the mobs you're fighting, you'll see these numbers popping up each time you do damage to them or if you heal someone or…
The problem with this is, it makes it very unreadable, and sometimes you don't know what your actual threat is, because the numbers keep popping up constantly. Especially when you have a lot of DoTs on the target, you see lots of numbers on screen at the same time (see screenshot). I don't know about the rest of you, but it sure confuses me.
A very different approach and certainly not what I was expecting. We'll see if it catches on, but for now I prefer the system the third party addons use.
The first highlight is the fact that stable masters now have an additional two slots, for a total of four slots for hunter pets. The first new slot costs 50 gold, the second 150g. I have a level 70 hunter myself, and personally, I think this is long overdue. I always suffered from not having enough pet storage room while levelling up, especially when training new pet skills. Currently you have to tame a certain beast in the wild before you can learn a spell. This means that you have to stable your regular pet if you want to get a new skill or the next rank of a skill for your companion.
Ironically enough, they're doing away with this system in the expansion, all skills are now learned via visiting an NPC trainer or via the new pet talent system. So I guess the extra stable room is actually a little less needed in the expansion than it is right now on live servers. Oh well… Better late than never I guess.
A second important addition in the patch was Blizzard's own "threat meters" system. There have been third party addons that measure the amount of threat you have on a mob for quite some time now, pretty much ever since certain bosses in Blackwing Lair, in pre-TBC WoW, made them a virtual necessity.
And now Blizzard is coming with their own implementation, but contrary to what they usually do when incorporating popular addon functionality, they went for a totally different approach. Instead of a separate window, showing a list of players with the most threat on a particular mob, they now only show each player how much threat only they themselves have, as a percentage. It's added to the combat text, so for each of the mobs you're fighting, you'll see these numbers popping up each time you do damage to them or if you heal someone or…
The problem with this is, it makes it very unreadable, and sometimes you don't know what your actual threat is, because the numbers keep popping up constantly. Especially when you have a lot of DoTs on the target, you see lots of numbers on screen at the same time (see screenshot). I don't know about the rest of you, but it sure confuses me.
A very different approach and certainly not what I was expecting. We'll see if it catches on, but for now I prefer the system the third party addons use.
Thursday, 31 July 2008
WotLK Beta - Borean Tundra and The Nexus
Today, I managed to unlock two new achievements
This means I've now officially "completed" Borean Tundra, one of the two starting zones in Wrath of the Lich King, the other being Howling Fjord. Or near enough anyway. Apparently you don't need to complete every single quest in the zone, because I still completed four more quests there after I already got the achievement unlocked. Furthermore I've also managed to clear the only non level-80 dungeon, The Nexus. At the end of the zone, I was level 73 and 30% into the next level, with minimal rest XP.
I have to say, without spoiling too much of the zone, that I thouroughly enjoyed my adventures here. There are a lot more storylines in this zone, compared to for example Hellfire Peninsula, the starting zone of The Burning Crusade. There's also a little more variety in the quest types, although obviously the vast majority of quests still has you collecting X number of enemies of a certain type, collecting Y number of drops from mobs or picking them up from the floor, or a delivery quest that sends you to the next quest hub. The zone also introduces you to a few new major races, each one having their own interesting storyline. You also have to help an old enemy race, including one very enjoyable quest, which will probably become an instant favourite of most players.
All in all a very enjoyable zone, it rates much higher than Hellfire Peninsula in my opinion, and most of the quests seem bug-free at the moment. The one thing that The Burning Crusade did better was, when you first enter the new zone, you immediately see Alliance and Horde forces, battling it out with huge demons, which made for a very impressive opening of the expansion. This is somewhat lacking. Although you are immediately dropped in the middle of a siege, it misses the same epic feeling.
The Nexus itself is a very atmospheric dungeon, although it remains a conventional dungeon crawl. It has four bosses and the two last bosses have an interesting mechanic to them that I hadn't seen before. Especially the last one has a nasty trick up her sleeve that might not get noticed in the heat of the battle. At least 3 out of 5 people in my party didn't notice it, and we only just managed to kill the boss.
All in all, it took us about one hour to clear the dungeon, but my group kind of overgeared the instance. It's a level 71-73 instance, and I was the lowest level player there at 73. The tank and another warlock were level 75 and all of us had tier 6 or season 3 gear, so it went quite smoothly.
Well, this zone sure wet my appetite for the remainder of the expansion. Hopefully the rest of the game is as enjoyable as Borean Tundra.
This means I've now officially "completed" Borean Tundra, one of the two starting zones in Wrath of the Lich King, the other being Howling Fjord. Or near enough anyway. Apparently you don't need to complete every single quest in the zone, because I still completed four more quests there after I already got the achievement unlocked. Furthermore I've also managed to clear the only non level-80 dungeon, The Nexus. At the end of the zone, I was level 73 and 30% into the next level, with minimal rest XP.
I have to say, without spoiling too much of the zone, that I thouroughly enjoyed my adventures here. There are a lot more storylines in this zone, compared to for example Hellfire Peninsula, the starting zone of The Burning Crusade. There's also a little more variety in the quest types, although obviously the vast majority of quests still has you collecting X number of enemies of a certain type, collecting Y number of drops from mobs or picking them up from the floor, or a delivery quest that sends you to the next quest hub. The zone also introduces you to a few new major races, each one having their own interesting storyline. You also have to help an old enemy race, including one very enjoyable quest, which will probably become an instant favourite of most players.
All in all a very enjoyable zone, it rates much higher than Hellfire Peninsula in my opinion, and most of the quests seem bug-free at the moment. The one thing that The Burning Crusade did better was, when you first enter the new zone, you immediately see Alliance and Horde forces, battling it out with huge demons, which made for a very impressive opening of the expansion. This is somewhat lacking. Although you are immediately dropped in the middle of a siege, it misses the same epic feeling.
The Nexus itself is a very atmospheric dungeon, although it remains a conventional dungeon crawl. It has four bosses and the two last bosses have an interesting mechanic to them that I hadn't seen before. Especially the last one has a nasty trick up her sleeve that might not get noticed in the heat of the battle. At least 3 out of 5 people in my party didn't notice it, and we only just managed to kill the boss.
All in all, it took us about one hour to clear the dungeon, but my group kind of overgeared the instance. It's a level 71-73 instance, and I was the lowest level player there at 73. The tank and another warlock were level 75 and all of us had tier 6 or season 3 gear, so it went quite smoothly.
Well, this zone sure wet my appetite for the remainder of the expansion. Hopefully the rest of the game is as enjoyable as Borean Tundra.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
WotLK Beta - New titles!
I quickly logged onto the Wrath of the Lich King beta after our guild raid last night, and spotted an alliance character who had a new title I hadn't seen before: Elder! I asked around but nobody seemed to know where it came from and since the character in question was alliance, I couldn't even ask him.
Well, today I found the answer. Apparently the Elder title is a reward from visiting every single Elder during the Lunar Festival world event, which is one of the achievements of the new Achievement system Blizzard is going to add in the expansion. And there are more of those. For example completing all quests related to Midsummer gives you the Flame Keeper title for Horde, Flame Warden for Alliance.
Hurray, more fluff! The completionist in me really likes these little rewards for achievements and they're exactly how they're supposed to be. Give the character some bragging rights for doing something out of the ordinary, but don't make it something you have to do to stay competitive.
Well, today I found the answer. Apparently the Elder title is a reward from visiting every single Elder during the Lunar Festival world event, which is one of the achievements of the new Achievement system Blizzard is going to add in the expansion. And there are more of those. For example completing all quests related to Midsummer gives you the Flame Keeper title for Horde, Flame Warden for Alliance.
Hurray, more fluff! The completionist in me really likes these little rewards for achievements and they're exactly how they're supposed to be. Give the character some bragging rights for doing something out of the ordinary, but don't make it something you have to do to stay competitive.
Is Age of Conan slowly dying?
It's been a very quiet year so far in MMO-land as far as I'm concerned. Very few new and upcoming games really managed to grab my attention, with the notable exception of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.
Warhammer Online is still in development, but Age of Conan was released in May. The initial hype the game managed to generate at launch was amazing. The game attracted loads of players, entire guilds in World of Warcraft migrated to the new game, while other guilds had a hard time getting enough members online to keep their raids going. Within a couple of weeks, the game's developer, Funcom, reported sales of over one million units, making it one of the fastest selling MMORPGs ever. It was obvious that loads of people were getting tired of WoW and were looking for something new. I gave it a try as well, playing the game when I wasn't raiding in World of Warcraft.
However, the bubble burst quite early after. Reports of bad performance on reasonably recent PCs, frequent crashes, numerous bugs, missing end-game content and features that were promised on release that either weren't in-game yet or totally unplayable were a bad blow to the game. There even was a bug were female melee characters attacked about 30% slower than their male counterparts! That must be the weirdest bug ever in any online game and Funcom reported it would take several weeks to fix it.
Personally, this was the bug that sealed the deal for me. I didn't care much about missing end-game content and bugged boss fights, because I wasn't levelling up all that fast anyway. But the fact that my character was only playing at 70% of her abilities, was too much. Apart from that, I still experienced frequent crashes to desktop and sluggish performance, even on a recent system, so I cancelled my subscription.
Apparently, I was not alone. People left the game in droves. From the players who gave it a try that I know, which would be about 20 players, none of them are still playing at the moment. Even the most avid fans of AoC are now back in World of Warcraft, either playing their old character again or levelling up an alt. Obviously the game was released too soon, with too many bugs still left to be ironed out and content to be added. My guess is that Funcom's cash supply ran out and investors started demanding some returns on their money. The result: an unfinished game with very few people renewing their subscription after the initial first free month was up.
It's a shame to be honest, AoC has a lot of potential and I really wanted this game to succeed. One of the very first MMORPGs I played was Anarchy Online, Funcom's previous MMORPG. AO itself is notorious for having the worst MMORPG launch in history. But when I started playing the game, most bugs were already gone and it was a very enjoyable title at the time. It's my hope that Funcom will manage to do the same again, add all the missing content and get rid of all the bugs and make the game the class A title it deserves to be.
It'll probably be too late to attract the big numbers again though. But if we can learn anything from the AoC story, it's the fact that there's a real demand for a new MMORPG and lots of money to be made if someone manages to release a good game with lots of content and a minimal amount of bugs. I hope the guys over at Mythic are listening.
Warhammer Online is still in development, but Age of Conan was released in May. The initial hype the game managed to generate at launch was amazing. The game attracted loads of players, entire guilds in World of Warcraft migrated to the new game, while other guilds had a hard time getting enough members online to keep their raids going. Within a couple of weeks, the game's developer, Funcom, reported sales of over one million units, making it one of the fastest selling MMORPGs ever. It was obvious that loads of people were getting tired of WoW and were looking for something new. I gave it a try as well, playing the game when I wasn't raiding in World of Warcraft.
However, the bubble burst quite early after. Reports of bad performance on reasonably recent PCs, frequent crashes, numerous bugs, missing end-game content and features that were promised on release that either weren't in-game yet or totally unplayable were a bad blow to the game. There even was a bug were female melee characters attacked about 30% slower than their male counterparts! That must be the weirdest bug ever in any online game and Funcom reported it would take several weeks to fix it.
Personally, this was the bug that sealed the deal for me. I didn't care much about missing end-game content and bugged boss fights, because I wasn't levelling up all that fast anyway. But the fact that my character was only playing at 70% of her abilities, was too much. Apart from that, I still experienced frequent crashes to desktop and sluggish performance, even on a recent system, so I cancelled my subscription.
Apparently, I was not alone. People left the game in droves. From the players who gave it a try that I know, which would be about 20 players, none of them are still playing at the moment. Even the most avid fans of AoC are now back in World of Warcraft, either playing their old character again or levelling up an alt. Obviously the game was released too soon, with too many bugs still left to be ironed out and content to be added. My guess is that Funcom's cash supply ran out and investors started demanding some returns on their money. The result: an unfinished game with very few people renewing their subscription after the initial first free month was up.
It's a shame to be honest, AoC has a lot of potential and I really wanted this game to succeed. One of the very first MMORPGs I played was Anarchy Online, Funcom's previous MMORPG. AO itself is notorious for having the worst MMORPG launch in history. But when I started playing the game, most bugs were already gone and it was a very enjoyable title at the time. It's my hope that Funcom will manage to do the same again, add all the missing content and get rid of all the bugs and make the game the class A title it deserves to be.
It'll probably be too late to attract the big numbers again though. But if we can learn anything from the AoC story, it's the fact that there's a real demand for a new MMORPG and lots of money to be made if someone manages to release a good game with lots of content and a minimal amount of bugs. I hope the guys over at Mythic are listening.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
WotLK Beta - The in-game calendar
Another feature added with the latest build on the beta servers, is a calendar for organizing your in-game events. A useful addition, considering the fact that third party addons like this have been around since pretty much the beginning of the game.
You access the calender by clicking the huge button on the top right of your screen, near the mini-map. This gives you a month-by-month overview, which already has all the Blizzard-organized events in it, such as the weekly Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Extravaganza and Brewfest for example. Right-clicking on a particular day allows you to create an event. You can give it a name, a description and pick from 5 different categories: Raid, Dungeon, PvP, Meeting or Other. Choosing either Raid or Dungeon then allows you to pick the instance you wish to go to. You can set a time and invite other players.
When these players then hover over the calendar button, they'll see they have been invited to an event and haven't responded yet. When they then open the calendar, they can either accept, decline or remove the raid from their calendar. At the bottom of the screen you can see an overview of the players that are connected to this event and their status.
Looks remarkably similar to Guild Event Manager, doesn't it? It seems like Blizzard is keeping the tradition of "borrowing" the ideas of third party addons and implementing them in their main game. Which is perfectly fine by me, the more people get access to good functionality, the better.
Anyway, this seems like a very useful tool, especially for the more casual guilds who don't have a dedicated website with their own planner or for non-guild groups who do events on an irregular basis. As for the raiding guilds, they'll probably want to stick to their website, because it's a lot easier being able to sign up for something without being in the game.
You access the calender by clicking the huge button on the top right of your screen, near the mini-map. This gives you a month-by-month overview, which already has all the Blizzard-organized events in it, such as the weekly Stranglethorn Vale Fishing Extravaganza and Brewfest for example. Right-clicking on a particular day allows you to create an event. You can give it a name, a description and pick from 5 different categories: Raid, Dungeon, PvP, Meeting or Other. Choosing either Raid or Dungeon then allows you to pick the instance you wish to go to. You can set a time and invite other players.
When these players then hover over the calendar button, they'll see they have been invited to an event and haven't responded yet. When they then open the calendar, they can either accept, decline or remove the raid from their calendar. At the bottom of the screen you can see an overview of the players that are connected to this event and their status.
Looks remarkably similar to Guild Event Manager, doesn't it? It seems like Blizzard is keeping the tradition of "borrowing" the ideas of third party addons and implementing them in their main game. Which is perfectly fine by me, the more people get access to good functionality, the better.
Anyway, this seems like a very useful tool, especially for the more casual guilds who don't have a dedicated website with their own planner or for non-guild groups who do events on an irregular basis. As for the raiding guilds, they'll probably want to stick to their website, because it's a lot easier being able to sign up for something without being in the game.
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