I don’t know how it happened but the whole gamewatchers.net domain went down. Bringing Anyuzer with it.
Someone has more infos? It doesn’t seem the usual technical glitch.
Monthly Archives: November 2004
Hey, I’m on TV
Blizzard just published one of the screenshots I sent them during the closed beta:
Blizzard screenshot of the day
I wonder why they choosed the ugliest. My gallery is still up here:
Wowstory – 58 screenshots from the closed beta
Blizzard’s moderators have issues
No, really. I wrote down a suggestion with an ironic title. The suggestion was about allowing to bypass the queue if you were logged in the last five minutes. So that who crashes or goes LD can still relog without going through the queue over and over and over. Making the game a bit more playable than this.
Well, I collected two pages of mature comments with peoples agreeing with me. Then I was banned for racism and the whole thread deleted.
Wow. Get a rest because you are going nut more than me staring at a log in screen.
I’m in
I managed to get in. I finally have my own account and I feel like it’s Christmas.
As always when I start with a new mmorpg I start to dream about fancy ideas that never become concrete. For example I’d like to build a good guild instead of feeling always unsatisfied and always searching something where I can have fun and build some cooperation.
I’ve been in both small and well-known, bigger guilds but the cooperation has always been an element put aside. Sure, in every guild small groups are built where there’s a real cohesion but I’ve never seen the cooperation as the true focus. And that’s what I’d like to build. A decent guild of mature players with the focus on the cooperation, trying to have a relevant role in the PvP competition. With some ambition, I mean, goals to accomplish, but without betraying the idea that its reason to exist is about playing together to build something bigger and more compelling than a single character.
So I have made my dwarf warrior, on the East/PvP/alliance/Mannoroth server. Its name is Kadath and he has that dream to build “The Defenders” guild.
But everyone knows that I may have good ideas but without the actual ability to make them concrete.
What now?
I’m pasting here a message I wrote on Q23 about the future of this genre.
Have fun till it lasts because after World of Warcraft’s earthquake of these days nothing much will happen for some time.
—
There’s simply NOTHING on the horizon. At least of this scope.
Imho there’s a lot of vaporware on the smaller titles and the bigger ones like MEO and D&D are Turbine-fluff. Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa is again something on which I don’t bet a cent.
What’s left? Guild Wars. But it’s not a mmorpg and it will head into a whole different direction. It will have a very good success but without the impact of WoW right now.
Then? Brad McQuaid’s Vanguard. But it’s just a very steamy idea into the future and all I read about the game is just blurred hype. It could be a worthy major player but also just a new stack of steam with nothing consistent inside.
Nothing else, really. I do not expect interesting innovation from smaller companies nor something changing at the higher levels. The current companies like Mythic are those going to suffer more from the situation because they lived for too long in a completely quiet and calm situation where they settled down at ease. Now WoW directly appeals their target, delivering more on too many levels. It’s all but a comfortable cohabitation.
For these mid-high level companies there’s now an evolutionary need to overcome or their long term survival will be compromised. But these years of relative quietness seems to have made them quite “lazy” when it comes to passion, dreams and expectations. The impression I got is about a motionless, lazy hippopotamus living into a shrinking puddle and no intention to move somewhere else than that.
But the more they are menaced the more they go blindly defensive, losing one by one every occasion of improvement. Exactly the main reason why I don’t think that the direct competition really rises the bar.
This while SOE will start to *suffer* and have its dominion slowly collapsing.
Have fun :)
Local servers for teh win!
It gets more and more fun:
# When choosing your server for the first time, the server wizard will suggest a server with low load to improve your game-play experience. However, if you decide to pick your own server to play on, we suggest picking a server where the population is not high during peak hours (peak hours are 6pm through midnight in your local time zone). This will help you avoid server queues.
# Also, feel free to play in any time zone. The server wizard automatically chooses a server based on your indicated time zone, but this is only intended as a suggestion for playing with people in your region, not a requirement for better latency. Our datacenters are equally capable of supporting users from any region in North America.
1- Go play on a off peak server
2- Go play outside your timezone
LOCAL SERVERS FOT TEH WIN!
This was a launch that was done right
I don’t think this needs many comments. While World of Warcraft servers go to hell, partly because of the retarded local server policy that makes peak times unplayable, I find this comment on Terranova:
Guy Welch:
Full disclosure here — I work for Vivendi Universal Games — Blizzard’s corporate parent. I went to the WOW midnight launch earlier this morning in Orange County and it was absolutely incredible. An estimated 8,000 people were in the parking lot by 11 PM — many times more than the 500 people that a similar event for WarCraft III attracted in 2002.This was a launch that was done right
Yes, a launch done right. Vivendi couldn’t have done this better.
Keep going and leeching money. The cancer of this industry.
In the game space, “ideas are ten a penny”
Taken from Vanguard’s boards. This is “Jon Grande” the guy who links Sigil to Microsoft:
As the guy who “bought” the Vanguard concept/pitch from Brad and Jeff – I can tell you that Slide was the closest to correct with his opinion. In the game space, for the most part “ideas are ten a penny” and the thing that matters the most is whether you can “deliver it on time, on budget”. The real challenge is proving that you have the abililty and know-how to do so.
WoW’s patch 1.1.1
Even at release the game still uses bittorrent to deliver the last patch that you need if you installed the game from CD or Dvd.
I mirrored the file. So if you have issues with bittorrent you can download the patch file directly from my site. Around 20Mb.
Late edit: The old files are gone, the new files are mirrored here.