It has been announced that the semi-official Italian server for World of Warcraft will be: Crushridge

I’ll keep playing on Mannoroth and I do not plan to move on the european servers (at least I won’t even make an alt till they won’t allow me to access those servers with my american account).

This announce is intended as a warning for those deciding where to go. Italians love to gank even more than Koreans, “we” are naturally catasses, so stay away from that server if you don’t want to be zerged by them and hear incomprehensible bitchering everywhere. They’ll be on both factions, mutually ganking.

BTW, my former italian guild at least know how to build a website that doesn’t suck: Samas Gildae.
(I believe they’ll go on their own, not with the big italian group)

Maybe it’s just the standard whining but I believe it’s one of the rare situations where the message sent isn’t that wrong. Currently the official World of Warcraft boards host a good numbers of complaints about the lack of updates to the game (the last, somewhat consistent, patch was on the 18 December). Blizzard always did a decent work at mantaining and supporting their games based on Battle.net, now that standard is opposed to a new model. While for Diablo and the Warcraft serie the players had just to buy the box and wait for fixes released after the months and years, now they are asked to pay a monthly fee.

It’s not a case that now those old and affectionate customers are also expecting something more. Instead Blizzard is still adopting its classic approach. The work on the game slows down, the team is reorganized and new possible projects get considered. The approach is the classic “fire and forget”. The game is done, you just need to apply a fix or a patch so that you can keep milking money from it while the focus of the team moves on the next big title.

I already stated my opinion. I wouldn’t be surpised to know that a good chunk of the programming team is now already working on a new expansion or other projects. Obviously all this is legitimate and there’s not much to criticize if they choosed this way.

The point is obviously that they wipe off the real potential of the genre, as I explained in the other comment I linked. The nature of a mmorpg should be the possibility of growth, evolution. The age as an added value, not as a ballast. It’s after a game’s launch that the most intensive development should start and the money should re-enter the process to strengthen the dev team, expand it, add new minds, new processes, start those plans that weren’t possible till that point.

Instead the mmorpg, as a genre, is just seen as a FAT, multiplayer game that, once and if you are gone through the tragedy of a release, becomes a money-cow to milk in the long term. A faucet, if you put it in a good place it will spill money on the long term. Wow, it’s a dream. Now the problem is that, as a paying customer, I’d like to see my money be used in what I pay for. And not to fund “World of Diablo” or “Starcraft, the FPS”.

So the point is, why I’m the only one in the world who believe that, even from the marketing perspective, is more important to use ALL the resources you have to give a strength and evolution to the current project. without the need to wipe everything and restart from zero, without taking money from a place to transfer it to another. If I’m playing and paying for THIS game, it’s because I find a value here and I’d like to see it develop. I’m not paying for DAoC so that Mythic can release Imperator.

Another good point for Eve-Online:

(compiled from the full versions that can be read here and here)
CCP has 40 other staff members, where of 7 work for me in the Content department, the rest is split between Programming, Art, Testing, Marketing and Financials.

We have the whole development team working on EVE the whole year.

I hope this helps a bit understanding how we work. All of this is included in your subscription (as you might have noticed) and we will continue to provide free Expansions to EVE Online. We consider this being part of what you pay for with your subscription. Why? We’re gamers and we hate it as much as the next guy having to buy a box in a store to get new stuff from someone you have been paying for 2 years.

The fact that Eve-Online is showing a constant increase of subscriptions even with the launch of new, bigger titles, maybe, is the demonstration that passion and dedication sometime offer paybacks. Even money paybacks.

While World of Warcraft, aside unstoppable records, will probably also set one of the highest churn rate ever. Or at least this is my point of view and expectation.

P.S.
Rants aside, I’d love to see Blizzard revealing honestly and openly informations as CCP did with Eve-Online. I’d be curious to know how many devs are currently on the live team, how many on an expansion and how many have been redirected to new projects. If my assumptions on this message are wrong I’d be glad to be disproven. As always.

You all know how fast is Blizzard to push out load of content and evolve and introduce new game mechanics into World of Warcraft. Today they set a new milestone.

There’s this small “localization patch” that adds nothing aside an overdue nerf to a Paladin skill that was broken back in beta, a few minor fixes to the interface and other fixes to annoying graphical bugs with the auction house and the loot system.

This patch was supposed to go up the past week, then delayed because they had to work on the servers and they didn’t want a too long downtime. We were lucky because even if this three-lines long patch was tested for almost a month on the European servers it still resulted bug-ridden to the point that it risked to slip again the new target date of tomorrow. But things went smooth and Ordin commented a few hours ago:

We have tested the patch in the EU beta for over a week now, and have been able to iron out a few kinks. We expect tomorrow’s maintenance/localization patch to run smoothly.

You know, it’s hard to screw things with a three-lines long patch. Now we have a new post on the forums:

The localization patch referred to here: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/patch-05-02-04.html has been pushed back due to an issue discovered late in QA testing.

The current plan for the release of this localization patch is the next weekly maintenance on the 15th.

Were we waiting for an overdue ‘content’ patch? No, really?
I think we should throw a party if they even manage to release this goddamn fix.

So I’m currently camping savagely an auction in World of Warcraft for a two handed axe that I cannot let go (also because I’m retarded and sold the good one I had while switching equipment for those damn repairs). I’m bored and I cannot leave because it will be over in less than twenty minutes.

So I wander around and at some point I /wave at a wandering NPC guard from far away. Well this guard stops. Was it a coincidence? No, this guard not only stops, but turns to me, looks a moment and then waves back!

Woot! One of the best moments in a game ever ;p
It’s touches like this one that makes a game great and show that there’s some passion behind and not just ‘work’.

Now I go back, the auction should be over in a few minutes *grins*

This is a thread that appeared on the official board (World of Warcraft). Fangtooth (one of the new mods) deleted my reply and locked the thread. I’m really curious what are the rules I broke this time.

—

Foozle:
Is there some way that you could translate opposite factions language? How did blizzard know what to use when the opposite faction says something?

Fangtooth:
At this time there is no way to translate the opposite faction’s language.

Myself:
Aside leet speak that from the recent comments “works as intended”. There are already plug in for the interface for write/autotranslate that crap.

Also, I wonder what’s the logic of having a strict naming policy “to not break the immersion” and then allowing freely the leet speak.

The latter is way, way more annoying and should be consider an exploit. Also terribly easy to fix (I guess Blizzard loves it).

But the lack of logic is a constant. In a similar way exploiting the “line of sight” is worth a ban if you do on PvE while it’s absolutely tolerated in PvP.

Sometimes I’d honestly like to know the stance of the devs on these completely illogical issues than the class problems and all the rest.

“Too provocative” may be a rule on the forum?

We knew a month ago but now it’s confirmed:

BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT® ANNOUNCES WORLD OF WARCRAFT® EUROPEAN STREET DATE – 11 FEBRUARY, 2005

02 February, 2005 – Paris, France
Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that World of Warcraft®, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), will be available at retail outlets throughout Europe on 11 February, 2005. The European launch of World of Warcraft follows a hugely successful debut in North America, where it broke day-one sales records to become the region’s most successful PC game launch and fastest growing MMORPG. On Tuesday, 18 January, the game was released commercially in Korea, and by the following day had already reached a total peak concurrency of more than 100,000 players.

[…]

World of Warcraft will be available in Europe for Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP and Macintosh® at a suggested retail price of 44.99€ (£29.99 in the UK), and will include a free one-month subscription to the game. ** The game and packaging have been fully localised in English, French and German; a localised box and manual will be available for Spanish and Italian players.

After the initial free one-month subscription ends, players of World of Warcraft will be able to continue playing under one of three different subscription plans. The basic month-to-month subscription plan costs 12.99€ per month (£8.99 in the UK), while the three-month plan costs 11.99€ per month (£8.39 in the UK), and the six-month plan costs 10.99€ per month (£7.69 in the UK). World of Warcraft subscription fees can be paid with all major credit cards, many local cards, direct debit (such as ELV in Germany) and pre-paid game cards, the latter of which will be available in retail outlets where World of Warcraft is sold.

Old.

I posted this on World of Warcraft official boards but it’s already vanished. I’ll archive it here for THE GLORY!

—
Title: Kalgan please, a clarification about warriors

I’m following various message boards commenting all that has been written but there’s a point that doesn’t seem clear.

Quoting directly:

We’ve found that there are indeed a few issues with rage generation as a result of bugs. Warriors (and druids in bear form) are intended to gain some rage on block, dodge, parry events, but apparently this isn’t working correctly. This needs to be fixed asap in order for warriors to meet their total expected rage generation.

Some players are linking what you wrote here directly to another comment where you said that the ‘miss ratio’ of the warriors against some types of creatures is perceived wrong because the potential parries, dodges and blocks are converted into misses to ‘compensate’ their absence on that mob type and mantain the system balanced.

So my question is:
– By design warriors are supposed to generate rage always on parries, dodges and blocks, included those of the monsters, or just ON THEIR OWN dodges, parries and blocks?

I ask because it’s one recurring argument and because it is perceived as broken in the case those parries, dodges and blocks fail to generate rage when they are translated directly into misses.

And finally a last critics that is again shared between most of the community:
– Your extensive explainations make sense but they focus solely on the PvE aspects. In the case of PvP many arguments you used (like the role of a tank Vs. survivability) are nullified because of the basic differences in the dynamics between a PvP and a PvE situation.

If the main role and strength of a warrior is to make a better tank, how this translates in PvP where this exact concept doesn’t exist?

Caydiem, the most intelligent and experienced community manager in World of Warcraft (not a case it’s a ‘she’), wrote on the official forums a silly explaination about the policy on Player Gatherings:

Regarding Player Gatherings Online

We fully understand that players may be dissatisfied with certain aspects of the game, and we appreciate when these players constructively make their voices heard in our forums. We use the forums to interact with the community, and the forums provide a large sampling of what players like and dislike. While we might not be able to respond to every thread that highlights an area of concern, the forums are read actively, and the game designers remain fully aware of what those areas of concern are. As such, the forums are the appropriate and intended place for these types of discussions to take place.

We do encourage players to hold events and strengthen the bonds in their community. But as for gathering in game for the purpose of expressing dissatisfaction with an aspect of World of Warcraft, please be advised that we cannot allow such protest gatherings that cause severe lag and/or server crashes to occur. If a gathering occurs that causes these issues, players will be asked to leave. If they continue, however, GMs can and will take action against accounts. This can lead to a suspension. Keep in mind that holding gatherings that cause undue server stress affects everyone on that realm. Please be kind to your fellow players and respect their desire to play too.

So, as you can read, there is ‘bad’ and ‘good’ lag.

The next time you plan a gathering remember to *smile*, instead of laughing hysterically (the source is here).