…although I will probably be too tired to do much more than finish the install and play a little before I start falling asleep at the computer. I decided I couldn’t wait until the morning, so I went to my local 24 hour Mall Wart where they said they had an unspecified number of copies for sale at midnight. When I got there a line had formed already, but there weren’t that many people in front so I waited. Then it turned out that they actually only had 6 copies; there was a rumor that they had 40 but someone accidentally sold most of them earlier in the day. Someone called their friend in another city and said the Best Buy there had a couple hundred copies, and they would open the doors especially for diehard geeks like us, so we all stampeded out into the parking lot and migrated over. Apparently a lot of people followed me in my yellow car because I knew the way and they didn’t. Sure enough, the Best Buy had all their WoW boxes stacked directly on the registers, so we could walk in, grab our copies, pay, and go home. One guy triumphantly shouted, “My life is over!” A cop showed up to see why a bunch of weirdos were hanging around after hours, but he was pretty cool. I said, “You should buy some for your kids, or hell buy one for yourself!” He said, “Hey, I could play on my laptop, I’ve got wireless Internet access.” The woman next to me was amused by the thought of a cop sitting in his squad car on the shoulder, playing WoW instead of looking for speeders.
Well, install just finished, must play. See you in Azeroth!
I have to wait until 9:00 tomorrow morning to get mine. My boyfriend has pre-ordered the collector’s edition, and my sister and I are getting the regular edition - we have a pretty cool set-up so that all three of us have computers in the same room, so partying up is easy. We’re never played a MMORPG before, but we did the open beta for kicks and now we’re all addicted.
I’m planning on a troll hunter and a gnome mage. I’ve heard that WOW caters to both casual and more involved players, so I’m looking forward to it!
I played in the beta long enough to get a character up to level 15. I never played “hardcore” or anything, just an hour or two here or there. Everything I’ve read suggests that Blizzard wanted to make a game that you can pick up and play once in a while easily. Seems like they succeeded to me, I had a blast.
It helps too if you have a group of other non-hardcore people to play with. A few people from my website and I ran around together so it was fun on a bun.
The one hardcore person in my group just created two characters. One to use with us and one for while he’s playing during the other 22 hours of the day.
Apparently there is some sort of resting system, where if you log off in an inn or main city, you accumulate experience faster. I think I read that if you log off for a week, you earn double the experience than you would normally because you’re in a more “rested” state.
The resting system is pretty cool: when you enter a major city or an inn (or, I think, whenever you log off), you enter a “resting” state. For every 8 hours of rest, you get a bubble marked on your experience bar equal to 5% of the experience it’ll take you to reach the next level. Until you’ve filled in that bubble, all experience you earn is at double the normal rate.
For example, I’m gonna reach my next level when I get 10,000 XP (note that your XP resets to zero every time you gain a level), and I log off for 16 hours. Two 5% bubbles fill in, equal to 1,000 XP. If the next critter I kill would normally give me 80 XP, instead I’ll get 160 XP, and this will continue until I’ve earned another 1,000 XP from killing critters.
If I get XP from another source, i.e., from completing a quest, that doesn’t affect the bubble: I just get a new bubble that accounts for the quest XP.
I’ll be getting my copy over lunch, and making a Horde character on the Argent Dawn server (a roleplay server on the East Coast). See y’all there!
Daniel
Well, I just ordered a new iMac G5 1.8GHz, just to meet the WoW system requirements… it just won’t run on my decrepit 604e or my wife’s 130MHz PII. I already have a copy of the game. (Inside connections.)
My gaming group is going to play Alliance characters wednesday evenings on Lightbringer (west coast US PVE server). I expect to be playing a Paladin to start.
I’m going to restrict my play to 1 evening a week. The rest of my gaming group, though, have already played the beta totally hardcore, and will be starting a Guild as soon as they defeat the adminstrivia mobs.
Of course, it helps that one of them has a relative on the Dev team.
Kinda. I’d lay good money on Warcraft’s getting better reviews than EQ2, though–response to EQ2 from reviewers has kinda been, “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”
Warcraft, from my understanding, is faster-paced, more convenient, more story-driven, better for player-vs.-player (if you want it–it’s not necessary), and better on the game-economy front. EQ2 has more realistic-looking graphics (although I’ve heard complaints about the creature graphics, complaints that I’ve not heard about WoW), a more interesting tradeskill system, and more character classes.
i won’t get mine till NEXT YEAR! NEXT YEAR!!? OG SM- ahem i’m fine, really. i can wait. sure i can wait. (for 20 minutes) don’t you guys want to settle on a server so that you all might meet up maybe?
yes. the graphics are different and it caters to the casual gamers as well as the not so casual ones who likes PvP. i’m sure someone else more articulate will come along. in the meantime, a search for “WoW vs EQ2” will get you plenty of reviews.
Well, got my copy today but have to work so haven’t done more than install it. The install is a royal bitch…took about half an hour for me to fully install. I played in both the alpha and beta though, so I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve heard from some in game friends of mine from the alpha that there are some lag issues though. Hopefully they will be resolved after the initial rush. I’m sure there are serious bottlenecks right now in some of the newbie areas.
Yeah–as I understand it, they’re strictly limiting access to realms for the first few hours, for two reasons:
They want to encourage people to spread out across realms rather than cluster in just one or two, so that people won’t experience bad lag over the lifetime of their characters; and
They don’t want hte newbie areas to be overcrowded.
They’re constantly but gradually upping the maximum people allowed in a server right now. My suggestion would be, unless you’ve got some friends you want to play with RIGHT NOW who are on a busy server, to look for a less-populated one to join.
I found the RP server to run butter-smooth, with no waiting times to log on at all; indeed, it was running far better than it ran during the Open Beta.
Install is major suckness, but if you have the beta client installed already it only needs to connect to the server and get an update. The authentication key is associated with your account rather than with the installation, which actually makes more sense anyway.
So far I have an orc hunter named Dokandis, on the Silver Hand (RP) Pacific server. It’s a bit sparsely populated at the moment, but there’s a refreshing lack of moronic drivel clogging the chat channels. I’m planning on a dwarf paladin as soon as I decide on a name, and available light has a night elf hunter named Moonsong.
I am totally loving this game. Every area has its own distinct look, all the quest giver NPCs are fleshed out just enough to make them interesting, and there’s lots of oddball humor and just plain coolness. One of my favorite moments so far (this is from the beta) was fishing on the beach at Auberdine. It was late afternoon, some people were fishing, other people were running along the water with their pets, crabs were scuttling about - a typical day at the beach. Except most of the people were purple and had really long ears, their pets were lions and tigers and bears (no, really), the crabs were about the size of small dogs, and the fisherfolk might just as well reel in weird gnomish gizmos or treasure chests instead of fish. Another cool moment was riding the subway from Ironforge to Stormwind, buying a firework, riding a gryphon back to Ironforge, and launching the firework from the front gate.
AFAICT, the servers are dedicated to specific time zones, but there is no limitation to who can actually join, provided your connection is responsive enough.
The day/night cycle is matched to that of the real world. So therefore, to have accurate effects, the game needs to be matched to the time zone of the players. They do this by offering servers devoted to each time zone.
So, if you live on the right coast and play with friends on the left coast, then you can play, but it may still be light in the game but dark outside your window.
Me, all my friends are close enough that we play tabletop RPGs regularly.
Or, we used to. The last few times we got together we spent 90% of the evening talking about WoW. :dubious:
On other aspects: I like what Blizzard’s done to make the game appealing and rewarding for casual players. I don’t have to play every day to keep my character advancing with those of my friends because a) the experience bonus for logging off, and b) they can have enough characters to reserve one for the times I can play with them.
I used the friend key to make an account for a friend of mine in germany … i have visions [since I understand the euro version isnt shipping for a few MONTHS] that he would get sorted into a euro server because of his account information…well, and I also created a place holder character for him to make sure he would get the name he really likes=)
What I really dont like is not being able to chat with horde members, that seriously sucks=( most of my friends except for 1 are all alliance, but he really wants to play a tauren, so we wont be able to communicate at all=(
