Apparently if you hang out in neutral territory (not that I know how to get there…) and talk with people from the opposing faction long enough you can pick up the language. Or maybe yammer at each other incomprehensibly is a better term. Once you can understand each other you can group up.
Got to play for about forty minutes before the lag got so bad I had to quit. Tried another server, but it was just as bad. Still, what I saw was very cool. I’m looking forward to playing this once they get over the opening day jitters.
So far, I’ve got Gurtok, a Tauren shaman on Hyjal (PST, normal) and Declan, a human warrior on Cenarion Circle (PST, RP). I think I like the RP server better. When my Tauren spawned, half the characters around him had cow puns in their names. :rolleyes:
I got it loaded up and played a little bit last night. I’ve never played a MMORPG before so I spent most of the time getting familiar with the controls. Of course I wandered a bit astray and ended up a dead level 1 mage twice, but I wandered around Stormwind(?) a bit before heading back to the starting area to kill some wolves and stuff. I got all the way up to level 2… (yeah, YOU try to find something alive in the newbie area with 50 others doing the same thing ;))
After I get home today I think I’ll read up on the gameplay and figure out if the melted candle and wolf teeth and pelts can be sold.
I have to travel over the weekend, so cannot get mine til Monday. 
I am a long time Asheron’s Call junkie, been looking forward to this game for PVP. I have not played Beta at all, but all I read is good.
Played for a good 5 hours last night - quite fun. 
Worked my NE Priest up to a level 6 on Mal’Ganus before my group decided to switch servers due to the queues, then made it to level 9 on Sageras. It’s a blast. Tonight I’m going to try to get up to level 12 or so then do some traveling so I can meet up with the other people from my website in Menethil.
I think I have to go through the PVP area (that swamp full of gators) to get there though. :eek: Last time I did that (in the stress test) was a riot. I was travelling with another ugy who was leading me through the swamp to the other side. A gator sprang out of nowhere and started tearing him up in front of me. I knew when I looked at the thing and it said “Level ??” that we were screwed, so I ran off the road and hit my “Shadowmeld” button to go invisible. I waited for the beast to finish off my friend and wander off, at which point I moved in and hit the resurrect. Of course, that spell takes a couple of forevers, so I was praying the gator wouldn’t decide he wants seconds. I watched the progress bar scroll across the bottom of my screen… almost… there… c’mon…
Then, WACK! Some undead bastard came up and nailed me with two shots. 
My friend was apologetic, but I thought it was hilarious. I love PVP.
Speaking of death - looks like they reduced the death penalty. Didn’t they take 100% off durability before? Now it looks like it’s just 25%. And no resurrection sickness now? Does anything else happen when you die? Do you lose XP?
Can’t wait to get out of here and head back to Azeroth tonight.
Grrr…the lag is really getting ridiculous.
I thought I’d polish off a low-level quest this morning before work, since I wouldn’t be playing again until Friday. 90% of the way through the quest, lag struck, and I was frozen for five minutes; when it finally ended, my partymate was instantly killed by all the low-level mobs that had spawned around us, and I soon followed.
But that’s not all. The lag came back, and I was unable to resurrect for the next ten minutes, and I had to leave for work. Unless my lovely wife can get me resurrected and back to town, I’ll lose all the benefits of the rest state that I’d normally gain for being gone for 48+ hours.
Grr.
Daniel
How much is the subscription?
$15 per month.
Are the role play servers fun? I’m not big on role play, but I’m thinking the people who play those servers might be older, more mature, and you wouldn’t encounter so many “OMG NOOB!!!” people. Right now I’m just getting my bearings straight on one of the normal servers, but once I get a feel for the game I may try the RPs.
Also, their random name generator is really cool. I hate coming up with RPG names because it’s hard to think up something that’s sort of in character but not too lame… but their random generator puts out a cool sounding name about once every 5 tries.
The $15 per month is only if you pay month-by-month. Unless I’m sick of the game by the end of my free period, I’ll be paying in a six-month block, which means it’ll only cost me $13/month.
The RP servers are, IMO, better. There’s still a bit of the inane chatter on the general threads, but there’s less of it. In exchange, you get the folks doing unnecessary roleplaying–saying, in the general threads, “ALL HAIL THE EARTHMOTHER!” or something like that.
I tend to keep the general thread open when I’m fishing or otherwise just sitting around, or when I have a specific question to ask. Otherwise, I close it out. Also, I remind people of two magic phrases they can use: druids who want to speak the secret druidic language can say, “/join druid”, and engineers who want to discuss their Out-Of-Control machines or other arcane issues can say, “/join ooc”.
Daniel
My troll hunter just tamed her first pet - a level 9 crocodile. I think hunter will be my favourite class. I’m hanging out for a pet giraffe.
At certain times the lag is awful - you spend five minutes frozen just doing nothing, and once my character just keeled over and died, as if she’d had a heart attack (which was particularly annoying because I really hate the tedious run towards your corpse)
Speaking of pets - what’s up with the zerglings and little mini-diablos running around? I assume that’s the “pet” you get with the collector’s edition? Do those do anything for you other than follow you around?
So, I picked this game up at lunch yesterday. Late in the afternoon before leaving work I dropped by the “official” forums. Let me add that most official forums have the worst of posters. Let me also add that I only went to these forums because I don’t know of any third party or class boards. Well, after about 10 minutes of browsing these forums, I couldn’t bring myself to break the seal on the game last night. I’m still thinking about taking it back.
First, it sounds like the launch was less than smooth. That’s expected for a MMORPG, although the server lag sounds incredibly bad. Second, and most important to me, the posters at the official boards sounded like the lowest that I have ever seen for a MMORPG, and I’ve played a lot of them. The people complaining about problems weren’t the worst either. The fanbois were absolutely pathetic. A user would post about lag problems. Five fanbois would pop on with “j00 l00zer!, it’s a l33t gam0rz and u lack” because this person had the audacity to ask for help with a problem.
I respect the opinions of people who last long on this board. So tell me, how bad are the l33t kiddies in this game?
Let me turn it back on you: how much do you want to interact with the community at large in the game?
There are a fair number of idiots (or at least there were during the Beta), but it’s a very simple matter to turn off the general forums and be quit of them. There are also plenty of good people around, and you can create private chat channels that only the good people get access to.
Guilds are an option but not necessary (unlike EQ2, I think, where guildplay is a major part of the later game); the short while I spent in a guild, I found it to be populated by friendly, intelligent people.
The only really negative encounter I had with a dumbass in the game was when I’d partied up with some guy and we went on a PVP mission. Someone chased me down and killed me–completely within the letter and spirit of the game. I made some little comment to my ally, something like, “Gah! Bastard killed me!”
He responded with, “Yeah, what a fag.”
I told him I wasn’t down with gaybashing, left the party, and /ignored him. Easy peasy: he could not interact with me again from that point on.
Overall, I’ve been reasonably happy with the players in the game, and don’t think the forums are a very good sample of them :).
Daniel
Good question. I like to play MMORPGs solo and interact with others when I feel like it. I also do a lot of playing with two real life friends. It’s interesting to see what we can accomplish with less. This worked very well in EQ1.
In EQ 1 I’m also a member of a family/raid guild. The average age of the members in the guild is probably around 30. This is great, however the guild is (or was until the recent game releases) slowly morphing to be more raid oriented which was in turn reducing my enjoyment of the guild. I like an occasional raid, but I don’t want it to be expected of me 4 or 5 nights a week. I already have a job. I haven’t been very active in the guild recently.
EQ2 has turned me off early with their forced dependence. I think they did a lot of things right, but I hate the forced dependence on others in the game. My friends and I have yet to find a combination of 3 characters in EQ 2 that seemed viable for many of the group encounters. Sure we can get by, but you can clearly tell that it’s skewed for full groups. The experience difference between solo flagged and group flagged mobs is annoying.
This is the reason why I want to play and like WoW. From all I’ve read, it will allow me to solo when I wish. This is good. The thing is, I do like interaction with other players too. It was just kind of a red flag when the few mature sounding posters on the official board recommended turning off general chat as soon as you log in. In 5 years of EQ playing, I’ve never had to turn off /ooc once. I will admit that I do occasionally /ignore individual players, but it’s less than one a month.
I suppose I should ask one more question. How viable is griefing of other players in WoW? (ie. kill stealing, corpse camping for PVP, etc.)
Kill stealing is pretty difficult, I think: the person or group that makes the first hit on a creature tags it, and receives any experience or treasure resulting from its death. (If you tag a creature and then run away, the creature eventually quits chasing you and becomes untagged). The only time I’ve seen anything like kill stealing is when two or more groups need to kill the same boss monster for a quest, and it comes down to a twitch-contest to see who can get in the first hit, thereby locking the kill. But since bossmonsters respawn very quickly (maybe 3-5 minutes), I’ve never had to wait very long in such situations.
Corpse-camping is, according to Blizzard, part of the PVP game and is not discouraged. However, if you don’t play on a PVP server, you can easily opt-out of PVP play, and in fact after 5 minutes of peaceful play you revert to non-PVP. So on a non-PVP server, you can’t be corpse-camped for longer than 5 minutes.
I don’t plan on playing much PVP.
Daniel
The random chatter I’ve heard on the public channels has been a little better than I expected. A lot of people with reasonable grammar and in general less “leet speak” and such than I expected.
How does this work in regards to camping a respawn point? I seem to remember that you respawn as a ghost, so maybe it’s not possible. I really haven’t researched this game like I do most new MMORPG’s. Its launch was just too soon after EQ2.
You respawn as an invisible, invulnerable ghost at one of various graveyards throughout the game. You can choose to pay a penalty and resurrect at the graveyard, or to run in ghostform back to your corpse and resurrect there.
People could conceivably kill you close to the graveyard and then watch both your corpse and the graveyard. In such a case, you’d either need to:
- Run to another graveyard and pay the resurrection penalty there (which could be a fifteen-minute run);
- Call for help from your faction-mates; or
- Log off for twenty minutes and then back on, to give them time to get bored and wander off.
Since PVP is faction-based, there’s a pretty strong motive for other folks to help you out. The last day of the beta, some Alliance players (humans, elves, etc.) on my server attacked an outlying Horde town (orcs, trolls, etc.); within ten minutes, a couple dozen horde players had descended on the area to repel the attack, and then launched our own raiding party against Alliance lands. If someone had been corpse-camped, I suspect the response would’ve been about the same. So Option 2 seems pretty viable to me.
Again, on a non-PVP server, this wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
Daniel
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