Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

so, anyone playing the World of Warcraft beta?

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 4736

EQ2 > WoW

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

bump!

Well, the open beta ended today and around the globe over 500,000 people are going through the cold-turkey Hell of MMORPG withdrawal.

After playing the beta prettymuch solidly for the last ten days, this will be the first online game that I will be happy to pay the monthly fee to play. Blizzard really got it right with this one, even the trade skills system was relatively suck free.

I tried out a few variations, didn't really take to either of the pet classes, the Rogue was the most fun for me, though from what I hear the Shaman is the most versatile and yet there was a real lack of them on the servers I played on.

As for race, the Dwarven city is just awesome, though my friends will be playing Horde in retail, so I'll probably take a Troll since the +'s to throwing axe and beast damage suit a rogue w/ skinning.

With tradeskills, I've come to the conclusion that the easiest way to prosperity is to have two collecting trades and skip out on the crafting altogether. If you look up the items you're after on thottbot.com and find out how to make them, you can often have your items crafted free of charge if you just carry the raw materials to whatever profession trainer and find someone looking to advance their crafting skills. This is much easier than collecting 10 times that amount of leather and making throwaway gloves and belts to build up your skills to the level where you can craft your own armour, and since most people seem to be going with a matched collecting / crafting pair, raw materials are in fairly high demand at the auction house, especially high end metals.

The Player vs Player on the non-PvP servers makes much fun for rogues. You have to type /pvp to enter PvP mode but even then you can't attack the non-PvPers. Also, you can't turn PvP off, once your flag is up it stays up for 15 minutes. The catch is that assisting a PvPer will automatically put your PvP flag up, so seeing a high level priest with their PvP off start to resurrect someone you've just killed is priceless. The 10 seconds it takes them to cast is more than enough to sneak up behind them, and an ambush / stun / backstab / rupture combo leaves them wondering what the hell hit them, meanwhile you're dropping sprint to slaughter the freshly resurrected player a second time as they try to flee. Then you stealth and wait for more backup to arrive. Good times!

So who else from here was playing it and what were your thoughts? Going to play the retail version? Got a class, race or profession preference?

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 4736

I might play, but balance is so incredibly fucked it's not funny.

WoW currently reminds me a lot of EQ1 in the late Kunark/early Velious era. Pure casters are screwed, hybrids have issues, pure melees dominated and shamans are godly as a support class. 'cept druids in WoW are actually cool.

As for the shaman thing, people probably won't really gravitate towards the class initially. As a support class they are incredibly powerful, but that power is indirect. You don't get a bigass icon floating about your head saying "omfg, i rewl", which reduces it's appeal.

And EQ2 > WoW

Last edited by macker on 11-19-2004 at 09:33 PM

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Registered: Nov 2004
Location:
Posts: 82

well, im from DAOC but my comp fried recently, so the new one is in the mail, but my plans is to play eq2 with my bud from down town, but i do plan on getting the retail WOW to play, im a mmorpg whore so i try them all , but im so impressed by DAOC's combat system i dont know if i will like any other game,

i dont really like that eq2 doesnt have any pvp, so i might shy toward WoW depending on the combat system, but if that doesnt live up and alot of my friends dont leave daoc i will prollly go back to DAOC for the catacombs expansion release.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

I never played EQ since I like art in computer games. That's probably a good part of the reason I like WoW so much as well, the art and design is consistantly beautiful. I assume the bigass icon thing is an EQ reference... nobody gets a bigass icon above their head in WoW unless they're getting buffed, and everyone gets that.

Honestly macker you're the first and only EQ2 advocate I know of, and I share a flat with a guy who still runs an EQ website. EQers are like rats off a sinking ship, the predominant attitude here towards EQ2 being - whatever else it might be, it's still Verant, therefore it's going to suck. I'm not really up on the whole verant thing, but didn't all the good people leave before they even started on EQ2 or something?

DAoC I liked, though I only played the beta and the first few months after it went gold before getting bored with it. The combat system in WoW is quite similar in essence to DAoC, as is the RvR aspect, but with a lot of issues nicely addressed. It's pretty hard to greif in WoW.

And then there's cosmos, the open source, XML based, UI uber-mod. they've even gone to the extent of writing 2 player games like chess and connect 4 into it, and this while the actual game was still in beta. I bet the guy who wrote the chess clint is kicking himself now since the one thing that EQ has which is missing in WoW is downtime. Personally, I didn't need all of that extra clutter in cosmos, so I only installed a couple of parts of it, and also a fantastically dodgy little mod called freebuttons which just lets you create extra buttons anywhere on screen.

And what pure caster class is screwed? The mage? The mage pulls better with polymorph than the hunter can, and dishes out more damage than the warlock. The priest is two metric fucktons better than the shaman as a support class, and one of the key game design points is that you can easily solo as any class. I recall in DAoC no one wanted to group with runecasters, for example, but WoW just doesn't have those issues as far as I can tell. You can work around just about any grouping of classes, with the possible exception that any group of five going into an elite instanced dungeon really, *really* wants some kind of healer.

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: MadCo
Posts: 1801

I'm going out of town next week, so I'm not gonna get a chance to play this for another week and a half So sad. I'm even tempted to get the strategy guide so that I have something to read about it while I'm at my wife's parents house...I wonder if they'd be offended if I spent all my time on the computer?

Melesse

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 4736

quote:

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Originally posted by slight
I never played EQ since I like art in computer games. That's probably a good part of the reason I like WoW so much as well, the art and design is consistantly beautiful.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

yea i saw the smiley =) wasn't meaning to give you a hard time macker, was just curious since you obviously know what you're talking about. i see what you mean about the equipment now tho.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Boston, MA, Center of the Universe
Posts: 4509

How did they end up implementing the XP system? I haven't paid much attention to WoW at all since the very beginning of the beta. Do you have to grind through levels? Did they end up keeping that "rest" system?

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

it's not much of a grind, if anything you level a bit too quickly, but that is offset by the fact that you only get new abilities available at every second level. The rest system is still in, but the effect is so minor that it only comes into play when you log out for an extended period. I heard the figure 1xp/minute, so if you just go to town to sell and skill up for half an hour, the next mob you kill will give you a bonus 30 xp for the 30 minutes you spent 'rested'. To put that in context, an average mob kill is worth around 100xp.

One thing I noticed is that killing above your level does not make you level faster as it does in other games (compared to DAoC, i'm told WoW is similar to EQ in this regard) The XP increase from higher mobs is minor in comparison to the increased difficulty. This works both ways, so that if you wanted to level soloing, the fastest way is probably slaughtering a whole lot of mobs 2 or 3 levels below you. The difference is there is no downtime fighting below you, and you're getting maybe 80% the XP per kill of what you would be fighting equal level mobs. Of course, fighting above your level does give you better loot for your trouble. Items tend to be 4 or 5 levels below the mobs that drop them. ie, the axe dropped by a level 26 mob would be all kinds of kickass for a level 22 player.

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: atlanta
Posts: 6346

ultima online forever

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: greta white north
Posts: 530

quote:

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Originally posted by Avondale
ultima online forever

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DAMN FUCKING STRAIGHT

I'm gonna ask for WoW for Christmas and try it out. I'm liking the Druids, they sound fun.

But right now I'm recently once again addicted to UO, but the shard I played just went down

Avondale, you weren't playing the IPY server on UO were you?

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: atlanta
Posts: 6346

nope. atlantic.

whats IPY?

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: greta white north
Posts: 530

IPY was a free shard. I guess there was some thing started called RunUO. People were able to start their own server and such. IPY (In Por Ylem) was started around this time last year. It was to replicate the UO days back in '98. Before Trammel, thief nerfs and such. The good ol' days wen meditation, anatomy and evaluating intellignce kicked in. It had 1500 players online earlier this year. If ya want a good read about UO, read www.ipyuo.com and read what the GM had to say when he took the shard down last week.

UO is so addictive, I quit when Trammel came in though. Tried it a year later, ripped newbs off at Haven then got sick of it an quit.

I was on the Catskills server on OSI.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Baba Kueria
Posts: 3146

only a few hours to go until WoW begins!

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Beatrice, Nebraska
Posts: 18490

What's the thing with MMORPGs? I really don't understand the appeal of paying $50 for a game and then being forced to pay a monthly subscription fee to play the game I just threw $50 down the pisser for.

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quote:

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Originally posted by bad-moj0

UO is so addictive, I quit when Trammel came in though. Tried it a year later, ripped newbs off at Haven then got sick of it an quit.

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yeah i stopped playing about a year after trammel kicked in. 98 and 99 were the glory days of UO. back when tank mages ruled pvp. i remember using my 5xgm mage to cast explosion, precast ebolt, equip a halberd, hit target with halby, target ebolt, and the person was most likely dead.

pvp used to be much cooler.

hehe, scamming noobs was fun. i was a multi-millionare in game, because i did house scams, and made a fortune from it.
i remember when they were giving noobs gifts on their first logins. hair restyle deeds, and ranger armor, etc.
i logged my thief on, and went to town, stealing from all the noobs

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 4736

quote:

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Originally posted by SocialParasite
What's the thing with MMORPGs? I really don't understand the appeal of paying $50 for a game and then being forced to pay a monthly subscription fee to play the game I just threw $50 down the pisser for.

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Registered: Nov 2004
Location: Detroit
Posts: 665

Nothing will ever compare

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Beatrice, Nebraska
Posts: 18490

quote:

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Originally posted by macker
Persistant worlds, with an appropriate population for the worldsize.

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Registered: Apr 2004
Location: Insatiation
Posts: 8980

Currently EQ free for a full year now after playing for four full years. I got $650 from some fool in Australia for my wizard to boot.

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