This is how a Universe is born.
At the time of this recording it is September 6th, which means tomorrow is September 7th and that can only mean one thing. After 7 years of development, Will Wright is finally releasing the hugely anticipated Spore. In just the last few days, I have seen the Spore commercial on television, seen articles on it in major media and even heard a report on it on National Public Radio. Some posters out there are claiming to have played it already and the news is not good. According to these sources, it gets repetious and boring fairly quickly, but I am going to urge all of you to run out and buy it anyway. And Ill explain why.
There are very few games out there that are truly innovative. And if anyone has been listening or reading my blog ( no one reads my blogs boohoo ) you know I believe innovcation to be one of the two most important factors in gaming today. Spore offers two such innovations. First it has found a way to send large amounts of information in very small packages which allows for the second: Once a player enters the space exploration phase of the game, it reaches out across the internet and grabs planets from other players from all over the world. This means that as long as people play the game there will always be more to explore because Spore is the first ever virtual infinite universe in the history of man. The very concept is mind boggling. In addition, it is estimated that within a month of release, the number of creatures created by players within this virtual universe will exceed the number of species currently inhabiting the Earth. The metaphysical implications of this are too many and far too fun to discuss here, but the vision and scope of this project are immense and This is something we in the gamer community should support. So get out there, buy your copy of Spore. Support innovation like this and demand the same out of the box thinking from other developers.
Content Patch coming within weeks
A big thanks goes out to Eyonix for recently letting us know that a content patch is coming within the next few weeks. It may even be live by the time this podcast hits Itunes. Just as before Burning Crusade hit store, Blizzard is patching in a bunch of content prior to the release of Lich King. And while the list of things he gave us was not comprehensive, he did said Blizz will post the full patch notes when they're available. And I for one am happy to see Blizzard patching these things into the game soon as it means Lich King cannot be far behind.
here's the list:
Stormwind Harbor will be added
Babrershops added and functional in capital cities ( I think this means Org and Ironforge only...or is Stormwind the ally capital? I dont know. )
Something about zepplin towers outside of org and tirisfal glades. Theres zep towers tehre already so they must be getting a redesign to accomodate the new zepplin paths to Northrend.
Two brand new Arenas!! with new layouts, terrain hazards and moving ( yes moving ) obstacles....Oh I hope there two spike walls that clamp shut at crazy speeds and send little gnome parts exploding across the arena!!!!! I might actually do arena if I could see that once in awhile
Guild Calendar ( About time!!! )
hunter pet skill revamp so all you hunters can relearn the way your pets work PRIOR to trying to grind out another ten levels in Northrend
And last and certainly not least Burning Crusade players will be able to learn and skill up Inscription to 375!!!!! Once they have Lich King they can take it up beyond that as will all crafters.
So we will be able to skill it up, but no word yet on if we will actually be able to USE the inscriptions prior to Lich Kings release...seems like there will be a huge outcry if that is the case, so we'll just have to wait and see.
Now does anyone remember how long between the last content patch hit and Burning Crusade was released?
Four European servers close!
With patch 3.0 four EU realms will close for good. The realms, Molten Core, Shadowmoon, Stonemaul and Warsong, apparently were the homes to the vast majority of Russian players who have now migrated to the new Russian servers and left these realms ghost towns. Characters still on the servers will all be given free transfers to as yet unannounced EU realms.
New 1 - 60 record set: 19 mins 34 secs. Thanks Recruit a friend.
A wow player named Bryan has posted a video at Gametrailers.com under the name bwonderve which shows him leveling a level 1 paladin to 60 in under 20 mins all while in stormwind, and it wasn't a hack. Hows it done? All with Recruit a friend. Seems BryBry leveled two characters to level 60 using the 300% exp gain, then used those two characters to grant 60 levels to the pally. A crowd formed as the mass dings occurred and it was obvious some were perplexed.
jmathews said: so you still needed to make two other characters lv 60 right? seems kinda pointless to me...
bwonderve said: Those 2 extra characters get 300% experience, it only takes 1/3 of the work to level them up.
I get 3 characters for less than the work of 1 at regular difficulty.
Could ComCasts new Bandwidth cap lead to something far worse?
Internet Service Provider Comcast has had a long reputation as an enemy of the peer to peer community. There have been many reports over the years of Comcast sending out letters of warning to customers stating the customer was using too much bandwidth per month and they needed to stop. These customers were paying for "unlimited" plans but that didn't seem to deter Comcast. Without stating a hard cap, they have been known to disconnect customers in good standing ( meaing they paid their bills ) after Comcast deceided their badwidth comsumption was too great.
Well, recently Comcast announced all customers would be held to a maximum of 250 GB bandwidth per month. Now this worried alot fo WoW players and Eliah Hect over at WoW Insider posted an article to ease their fears. Currently. a MMO player even a very hardcore one would not use up a 250 GB cap in an entire month of play. But what happens when other ISP's begin follwoing suit?
Eliah Hect took into account only WoW play, which is great for most of us, I on the other hand have a family. A family that loves their internet. My kids are crazy for XBox Live, I love to download podcasts...alot of podcasts, I record a podcast, I play WoW, My wife absolutely loves streaming video, I love WoW movies...and all that has me wondering if my family might hit that 250 gb limit some month down the road, especially when my kids get a little older and start playing MMO's of their own.
250 GB seems like an awful lot of bandwidth, but is it alot when divided by four heavy internet users all uner the same roof? That leaves my personal bandwidth use limited to 63 GB a month and that should be enough right?
But what happens when other ISP's follow Comcast's example and limit bandwidth...but they limit it lower...at say 200GB or 100GB. And with the local or regional monopoly most cable companies enjoy, how will this limit us as players of MMO's? Or even just internet users?
The internet has almost completely replaced Television for me as a source of entertainment. Any limiting of the entertainment worries me. What about all of you? Contact us at Thegrindpodcast@gmail.com and let us know what you think. Operators are standing by.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
This is how a world ends
Blizzard made a change this week to the leveling curve in the WotLK beta. Gone is the easy experience that was getting players from 70 to 77 in a week or so ( Had the leveling cap of 77 not been there, most would have reached 80 already ) and it's been replaced with a system that requires 80% more experience to level. Yes, you heard that right. 80%! As you can imagine, players went ballistic on the beta forums.
Now to be fair to Blizzard, they made the leveling process quite quick in the beta to begin with in order to get some players up in levels to test various aspects of the expansion in that level range. With the second wave( possibly third or fourth by the time, this podcast hits Itunes ) of beta invites, they needed to slow down the leveling to the normal pace in order to efficiently test the vast multitude of quests they have placed into Wrath ( over 800 by the last count we made here at the Grind )
However, instead of just telling players this, and trusting the playerbase,the only response from Blizzard on this was in a thread started by a player pretending to be selling his Beta account due to his now inability to level in a reasonable amount of time. Blizzard responded wonderfully by saying:
Your ability to post on the forums is a privilege, as is your chance to participate in the Beta. Constructive criticism is far different from complaining, and we'd prefer you to utilize the former.
This coming from the people who hired Furor Planedefiler as a quest designer, the most notorious complainer in MMO history, who posted the now most infamous "Fix it or I quit" post ever. And one of the designers who helped to bring us the broken and bugged C'thun and then insulted the WOW version of himself for calling Blizzard on it in EXACTLY the same way Furor called Sony Online Entertainment on the broken Planes of Time.
I am here to tell you beta testers you SHOULD complain if you think something is wrong. And you should do it as LOUDLY as possible. Create as much of a stir over this as you can because the rest of us non beta tester can't. If you don't then you are not doing your part to represent the rest of us and help to steer Blizzard in the directions that will be the most enjoyable for the player base as a whole. And though some may disagree with me, seeing whats coming has quickly turned from excitement to disappointment to downright disdain for me personally. And Blizzards attitude on this has become decidedly more and more SOE. Maybe it's has something to do with success or just years of the constant trolling on their official and nearly unmoderated forums that just kills a developers spirit. Maybe developers need to move on to other games to keep from silently hating the source of their livelihood. I don't really know, but game after game, for over a decade, we in the MMO community have watch great games go bad and the very developers that created something wonderful slowly stab their creation into a bloody mess.
After seeing the downrank debacle hitting the forums this week, I realized that the information that Blizzard was giving players was different in different places. So I posted about it. It was a simple post pointing out that while Blizzard claims that downranking was "never intended" they had gone to great lengths to support it in the past. Look at the Warrior class. When a warrior receives Heroic Strike Rank 2 it completely replaces heroic Strike rank 1. But new ranks of spells don't replace old ranks of spells. Why program one set of abilities one way and another set of spells another? The only logical explanation is they INTENDED players to cast lower ranked spells in certain situations. otherwise, having to program different spellbook methods for different classes is just a bunch of wasted time and unnecessary work.
In addition, the Add On GUI API used to have a CastBySpellName function. Blizzard removed this years ago to help prevent automation, but the function required that a rank be specified in order to work. Why include that if Blizzard original intention was for players to always use the highest rank of a spell.
Additionally, just a couple of months ago, a poster placed a nice little Healing for Beginners guide on the Priest forums. This guide had only 5 sections. Section 2 dealt with overhealing and section 4 dealt with downranking. The Blue responded that it was a great guide and added it to the sticky thread of great guides! If a guide is 40% about an unintended and about to be changed aspect of the game, why sticky it and lend Blue post support to it?
So I posted this. And I got a response from a Blue. Wait...I should tell the truth....I got 14 responses from Blizzard. Not all to me but that's how many times a Blue posted in the thread before it reached its 500 post limit and automatically closed just a few hours later.
Now I want you all to pause a sec and think...during this little rant I have not said one way or the other about my opinion of downranking. I have not said in any way how this change will effect gameplay for better or worse. because that is not what the post or what my happy little rant here is about. My rant is about this:
Blizzard has shown support for the technique of downranking in the past and for them to claim that it was never intended is just very forthcoming with the truth.
Of course the lousy moronic forum trolls immediately jumped in and started a debate on downranking itself but worse, so did the Blizzard employee. The Blue barely answered my concern and then posted a wall of blue text about how downranking needed to be removed, which was no where near the point of my post. But I accepted it, grabbed my stepsons and went to get our haircut.
When I got back home, the thread was 16 pages long and the Blue had posted several times more. I watched it but stayed out of the debate as it was about the pros and cons of the change rather than what my original post was about and then, in response to posters worries that Blizzard was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, the Blue posted that, and I'm going to quote this:
We have reverted things in the past that we felt just weren't working out so I'd hate for people to believe that once in, in forever for everything we do. We don't work like that and I think it misrepresents us by saying this.
At that point, I had to rejoin the fray. You see this particular blue had posted something else in the Beta forums. And I'll quote that as well:
As noted, this isn't a bug and has been a conscientious change in design. This isn't something we will be changing, but that doesn't mean that your feedback isn't wanted.
Understand. This is the exact same Blue poster telling the public forums one thing and the private beta forums the exact opposite. now, I am going to be blunt here and I'm not going to pull my punches. Where I come from, that's called lieing and I dont know about the rest of you, but I don't like being lied to. It insults my intelligence. And I realize the normal cumulative I.Q. on the official WoW forums is a negative number, but that doesn't excuse this for me. By telling players a revert is possible, we are only looking at this, in public, but privately saying its going thorugh no matter what is not only devious to the nth degree, it's downright dangerous to the playability of a game.
I remember logging into Ultima Online after one "minor little " patch and found the game completely unplayable for the next two weeks. And though Origin did eventually relent and revert, their testers on their public test realm had spent a month prior to the patch telling them that the change was bugged. I've seen developer after developer get overconfident and ignore the playerbase only to find their game lose multitudes of players. Dark Age of Camelot anyone? And my worry is that now that Blizzard is firmly entrenched in their stance that they can tell us anything and we will continue to press the payment button in order to get our daily WoW pellet, it will only get worse from here.
Now to be fair to Blizzard, they made the leveling process quite quick in the beta to begin with in order to get some players up in levels to test various aspects of the expansion in that level range. With the second wave( possibly third or fourth by the time, this podcast hits Itunes ) of beta invites, they needed to slow down the leveling to the normal pace in order to efficiently test the vast multitude of quests they have placed into Wrath ( over 800 by the last count we made here at the Grind )
However, instead of just telling players this, and trusting the playerbase,the only response from Blizzard on this was in a thread started by a player pretending to be selling his Beta account due to his now inability to level in a reasonable amount of time. Blizzard responded wonderfully by saying:
Your ability to post on the forums is a privilege, as is your chance to participate in the Beta. Constructive criticism is far different from complaining, and we'd prefer you to utilize the former.
This coming from the people who hired Furor Planedefiler as a quest designer, the most notorious complainer in MMO history, who posted the now most infamous "Fix it or I quit" post ever. And one of the designers who helped to bring us the broken and bugged C'thun and then insulted the WOW version of himself for calling Blizzard on it in EXACTLY the same way Furor called Sony Online Entertainment on the broken Planes of Time.
I am here to tell you beta testers you SHOULD complain if you think something is wrong. And you should do it as LOUDLY as possible. Create as much of a stir over this as you can because the rest of us non beta tester can't. If you don't then you are not doing your part to represent the rest of us and help to steer Blizzard in the directions that will be the most enjoyable for the player base as a whole. And though some may disagree with me, seeing whats coming has quickly turned from excitement to disappointment to downright disdain for me personally. And Blizzards attitude on this has become decidedly more and more SOE. Maybe it's has something to do with success or just years of the constant trolling on their official and nearly unmoderated forums that just kills a developers spirit. Maybe developers need to move on to other games to keep from silently hating the source of their livelihood. I don't really know, but game after game, for over a decade, we in the MMO community have watch great games go bad and the very developers that created something wonderful slowly stab their creation into a bloody mess.
After seeing the downrank debacle hitting the forums this week, I realized that the information that Blizzard was giving players was different in different places. So I posted about it. It was a simple post pointing out that while Blizzard claims that downranking was "never intended" they had gone to great lengths to support it in the past. Look at the Warrior class. When a warrior receives Heroic Strike Rank 2 it completely replaces heroic Strike rank 1. But new ranks of spells don't replace old ranks of spells. Why program one set of abilities one way and another set of spells another? The only logical explanation is they INTENDED players to cast lower ranked spells in certain situations. otherwise, having to program different spellbook methods for different classes is just a bunch of wasted time and unnecessary work.
In addition, the Add On GUI API used to have a CastBySpellName function. Blizzard removed this years ago to help prevent automation, but the function required that a rank be specified in order to work. Why include that if Blizzard original intention was for players to always use the highest rank of a spell.
Additionally, just a couple of months ago, a poster placed a nice little Healing for Beginners guide on the Priest forums. This guide had only 5 sections. Section 2 dealt with overhealing and section 4 dealt with downranking. The Blue responded that it was a great guide and added it to the sticky thread of great guides! If a guide is 40% about an unintended and about to be changed aspect of the game, why sticky it and lend Blue post support to it?
So I posted this. And I got a response from a Blue. Wait...I should tell the truth....I got 14 responses from Blizzard. Not all to me but that's how many times a Blue posted in the thread before it reached its 500 post limit and automatically closed just a few hours later.
Now I want you all to pause a sec and think...during this little rant I have not said one way or the other about my opinion of downranking. I have not said in any way how this change will effect gameplay for better or worse. because that is not what the post or what my happy little rant here is about. My rant is about this:
Blizzard has shown support for the technique of downranking in the past and for them to claim that it was never intended is just very forthcoming with the truth.
Of course the lousy moronic forum trolls immediately jumped in and started a debate on downranking itself but worse, so did the Blizzard employee. The Blue barely answered my concern and then posted a wall of blue text about how downranking needed to be removed, which was no where near the point of my post. But I accepted it, grabbed my stepsons and went to get our haircut.
When I got back home, the thread was 16 pages long and the Blue had posted several times more. I watched it but stayed out of the debate as it was about the pros and cons of the change rather than what my original post was about and then, in response to posters worries that Blizzard was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, the Blue posted that, and I'm going to quote this:
We have reverted things in the past that we felt just weren't working out so I'd hate for people to believe that once in, in forever for everything we do. We don't work like that and I think it misrepresents us by saying this.
At that point, I had to rejoin the fray. You see this particular blue had posted something else in the Beta forums. And I'll quote that as well:
As noted, this isn't a bug and has been a conscientious change in design. This isn't something we will be changing, but that doesn't mean that your feedback isn't wanted.
Understand. This is the exact same Blue poster telling the public forums one thing and the private beta forums the exact opposite. now, I am going to be blunt here and I'm not going to pull my punches. Where I come from, that's called lieing and I dont know about the rest of you, but I don't like being lied to. It insults my intelligence. And I realize the normal cumulative I.Q. on the official WoW forums is a negative number, but that doesn't excuse this for me. By telling players a revert is possible, we are only looking at this, in public, but privately saying its going thorugh no matter what is not only devious to the nth degree, it's downright dangerous to the playability of a game.
I remember logging into Ultima Online after one "minor little " patch and found the game completely unplayable for the next two weeks. And though Origin did eventually relent and revert, their testers on their public test realm had spent a month prior to the patch telling them that the change was bugged. I've seen developer after developer get overconfident and ignore the playerbase only to find their game lose multitudes of players. Dark Age of Camelot anyone? And my worry is that now that Blizzard is firmly entrenched in their stance that they can tell us anything and we will continue to press the payment button in order to get our daily WoW pellet, it will only get worse from here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)