October News/Discussion

[TheDragoon]

Personally, I had a blast with this event. I think it was very creative and a fantastic idea for an event that players could actually participate in. My only complaint was that I wasn't able to attack zombie players in Shattrath and I didn't understand why until after the fact when I was reminded that Shattrath is a sanctuary zone. If they could have fixed that to allow you to fight off the zombie hordes in Shattrath more effectively, I would have had no complaints, at all.

I would also note that I just recently bought Warcraft 3 (I had never played it before) and have been going through it to follow up on the lore elements that were brought into WoW. The fact that this event happened about a week after I played through the campaign where you slaughter the residents of Stratholme was good timing, from my point of view.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to seeing what else happens before the release of WotLK! If it's as fun and interactive as the zombie infestations, I will be primed and ready for the expansion when I can charge into Northrend to take the battle to the Lich King and his minions! :)

[RTM]

I too had fun. The end was kind of abrupt but I'll reserve judgement on that until the full Pre-WotLK events play out (assuming there's more).

This was a once in a lifetime lore event! Your anger shouldn't be aimed at Blizzard, it should be aimed at Arthas!:)

[Taelas]

Lore events shouldn't interfere with basic day-to-day functioning (such as going to the AH and the bank).

[Mordekhuul]

Lore events shouldn't interfere with basic day-to-day functioning (such as going to the AH and the bank).

Why? For like 5 days...

[Kevin]

I'm really surprised to see how negative some people are on the ghoul event. I loved it, a great piece of lore and you got to participate. Maybe I've just been on a pvp server long enough that leaving one area for another due to ganking is just second nature and part of the game for me now. I had little trouble avoiding it when I wanted to. It was a good excuse to do things I wanted to do that didn't involve a major city. With the invasion out there, the HH event, and baron's mount up to 1% drop rate my day was filled. The only thing I hated was how far the run back to my body was from the Shatt graveyard. I did get infected a couple times I wasn't trying to, I still had fun with it after I turned. I infected a couple people, died, and went about my business. The last day and a half was the only time it was out of control, I did get worried they would carry that for the remaining weeks to the expansion and that WOULD have been dumb. But they didn't. IMO thumbs up to Blizz for the event.B)

I can't fairly assess the event. My schedule lately has given me very little in game time and even less out of game time to do stuff with the game.

I died twice while trying to finally get a spec applied to my main and had no clue what wad going on since it was like day 3 or 4 of the event. That was frustrating. I was already annoyed because I couldn't just jump on and play like I wanted to. I needed to figure out spec, try and figure out gear changes, try and figure out glyph crap, try and get my mods going. So I was already saddled with doing stuff that I didn't want to do already, and now I'm dying for no reason that I can understand? I was not happy about it.

But again I know my circumstances weren't the same. Most people probably did what I was trying to do the previous week, the week the patch hit. However I got to log in for all of 25 minutes the week 3.0 hit. I hadn't had time to do any of that stuff. I STILL haven't had time to do much of it. My specs have basically been asking guildies to just get me a spec and just toss me glyphs because I don't have the time to look it up and when I DO have the time to look at a list of glyphs I would rather spend that time doing something more fun.

So I guess I can assess it from the point of the extremely casual player, and it sucked from that point of view because there was too much other crap to worry about.

However, if my situation had been more like it was in the past, I think I would have had fun with it. Right now I'm on the annoyed side because I didn't have time to do anything with it. I also haven't really had time to go after the HH or work on some other stuff that requires other people and I'll never get to do because by the time I do have time for it wrath will be out and they won't want to stop exploring wrath for the older static content.

So losing 20-30 minutes of my time to this event when I only had about 120 - 150 minutes to play that week, yeah, that was not something I was happy about. Again, my situation isn't normal, but with 7 million people playing I couldn't have been the only one that had an unusual situation either. :)

[TheDragoon]

Lore events shouldn't interfere with basic day-to-day functioning (such as going to the AH and the bank).

Personally, I agree that they probably should have made AH and bank NPCs immune to it just from the point of view of not preventing people from using those. That said, this event would still have interrupted using the bank or AH NPCs in many cities just by allowing zombies to zombify the people going to use them. And any way to make it IMPOSSIBLE to disrupt activities like bank or AH would have likely required dumbing down the event to the point that it wasn't really as epic as it was. In my opinion, they did a good job of making things manageable (I was always able to use the AH or bank when I needed to so I think people exaggerate the problems they had) but still ensuring that it felt like the status quo in WoW was under assault. :)

[Bolty]

This was a once in a lifetime lore event! Your anger shouldn't be aimed at Blizzard, it should be aimed at Arthas!:)

That was Blizzard's line as well. The whole point of the event was to make the players want to go to Northrend and kick some ass, because the whole world was threatened.

The whole event has been hashed to death on sites all over the Internet, and it can be summed up with:

Pros:

• If you're a lore geek, the worldwide threat and destruction/plaguing of major cities was the Bomb. Especially on RP servers, there were common descriptions of players forming "safe zones" and defending them for hours, while those who were zombified attacked them. I heard of one server putting up a tight defense in Stormwind's Cathedral district for literally days straight as those players who were zombified assaulted it non-stop. All in good fun.<>
  
• Fun with game mechanics: as a zombie, undead NPCs would be friendly to you. People explored the world trying to see if there were any undeads who would now talk to you if you were a zombie, such as the lich in Andorhal. Fun fact: Brutallus in Sunwell was neutral to you if you were a zombie. Go fig.<>
  
• For a brief few days, you could play a "bad guy" in the game. A refreshing change of pace.<>
  [st]
  Cons
  • Shattrath was a mistake. Obviously, the Sanctuary rules applied there enabled zombie players to grief NPCs while non-zombie players could do nothing to stop it.<>
    
  • Lower level characters were basically screwed and could not quest for long periods of time. If you are a level 20-something questing in Ashenvale as Alliance, good luck doing anything once the Astranaar guards, level 40ish, were turned into zombies and would wreck you when you'd come within a mile of the place.<>
    
  • Casual or limited-playtime players who are heavily affected by not being able to use an NPC for 5-10 minutes faced extreme annoyance.<>
    [st]
    Personally, I enjoyed the event. Previous "invasion" events had Blizzard avoiding the Cons above because they were worried about the backlash, and as a result they had many complaints about how pointless such invasions were. The last Scourge invasion, years ago, was routinely made fun of by players because it gave no feeling whatsoever that the world was under siege, which was the impression Blizzard wanted to give. You could completely ignore it and go on your merry way.
    
    Not so here. Players were forced to deal with it, like it or not. If major NPCs could not be affected by it, then it wouldn't matter, and that would break what Blizzard was trying to accomplish. Arthas launched a plague upon the world, and it reminded all players that this isn't a static world. It can live and breathe, and there are actual consequences. For a while.
    
    That said, I understand how other players hated it. I don't think there can be a happy medium. If Blizzard wants a one-time event that heralds in a new grave threat to the world, prompting players to combat that threat, it's going to have to come at a price of inconveniencing some of the populace. Otherwise they just won't care. I kinda wish the events leading up to the AQ40 gate opening were sort of like that too - "omg, the Silithid are taking over the world, do something!"
    
    For me, I had logged out in Darkshire on Saturday night after reading the last book needed for the Well Read achievement in the inn there. On Sunday, I had read online that the plague had advanced to insane levels, basically leveling almost all cities, and rushed to log in to see it. I was not disappointed. The inn was empty, and I heard sounds of zombies fighting outside. I ran out to take a look and...
    
    ...the whole town was under attack. Zombies were everywhere. We're talking Night of the Living Dead stuff. One of the zombies saw me and came for me, bringing 6 friends in tow. I ran back inside, and started fighting them, constantly retreating. Up the stairs I went, pulling back, pulling back. I fell back to a bedroom, and knew I had no chance. There were simply too many of them...as I was overwhelmed and zombified, I thought, "wow, that was just like a horror movie."
    
    I shuffled outside and murdered 3 of the Night Watchmen, forcing them to join my undead comrades, then let myself die out. Res, hearth, back in Shattrath. I enjoyed it completely and didn't find it disruptive at all. If I didn't want to participate, I could have just hearthed out the moment I logged in.
    
    I also think that a year from now, many players will look back at the whole thing and say "you know, it was annoying, but it was kinda cool too," once they become bored at the static, unchanging world once again. But that's just me.
    
    And again, I think the greater your hatred for all things PvP, the more you hated the event. It was PvP in nature, since in order to make the invasion REALLY effective, it had to come from the players. There's no way it could get that invasive with scripted, NPC-driven content. You're not going to have 15 zombies waiting in the Mage Tower for fresh victims to port through unless it's players doing it. And it wouldn't nearly be as much fun to assemble a posse to assault the tower and clear them out unless it's player-vs-player content.
    
    Oh well. In the end it comes down to this: it generated some publicity (Fox News picked it up as a story), and got other people interested. I heard of quite a few players reactivating their accounts to log in and see it because they found it exciting. If the number of people joining WoW based on this event > the number of people leaving WoW (like Pete) because of this event, Blizzard wins.
    
    -Bolty

[Treesh]

Personally, I agree that they probably should have made AH and bank NPCs immune to it just from the point of view of not preventing people from using those. That said, this event would still have interrupted using the bank or AH NPCs in many cities just by allowing zombies to zombify the people going to use them. And any way to make it IMPOSSIBLE to disrupt activities like bank or AH would have likely required dumbing down the event to the point that it wasn't really as epic as it was. In my opinion, they did a good job of making things manageable (I was always able to use the AH or bank when I needed to so I think people exaggerate the problems they had) but still ensuring that it felt like the status quo in WoW was under assault. :)

Or they should have allowed the players to clear the bankers. I had cured other NPCs just fine, but wasn't even allowed to touch the bankers. More times than not, it was the NPC zombies who would infect the bankers when I was around and NOT other players.

[--Pete]

Hi,

. . . it reminded all players that this isn't a static world.

The trouble was largely that this event came close on the heels of the 3.0 patch that broke so much of so many of the mods and the UI. Even straight Blizzard items, like the positions and functions of chat boxes, was broken. Then there was the whole server instability, the logon mess, etc. Trying to clean up the crap that Buzzard's incompetence created (does the concept 'backward compatible' require a genius IQ to get?) was already a PITA.

So, Azeroth not static? Probably good. Servers and code not static? Definitely bad. Both at once?

. . . the number of people leaving WoW (like Pete) . . .

The jury is still out on that. I'm paid up through a <strike>few more months</strike> little more than a month, and since I can't get that money back, I'll just wait and see. But I've got mods to patch, etc., and I just haven't been able to work up any enthusiasm to do it since that 'event'.

--Pete

[LochnarITB]

And again, I think the greater your hatred for all things PvP, the more you hated the event. It was PvP in nature, since in order to make the invasion REALLY effective, it had to come from the players. There's no way it could get that invasive with scripted, NPC-driven content.

It didn't have to be a scripted event. Why is it OK to inconvenience players that don't want to participate to give those that do their jollies? We are all paying customers. Although they seem to think so, they don't do us a favor letting us play their game. They count on us being addicted when they pull this crap. I pay my fee to play on a PvE server. If people want to PvP there, they go to a battleground or arena or flag where others might decide to take pot shots at them. If they would have required folks to flag to participate and make essential and quest NPCs immune, all would be good. There is no way to cut it to make it OK for PvP to be forced on anyone whether they enjoy PvP at other times or not.

[Sir_Die_alot]

It didn't have to be a scripted event. Why is it OK to inconvenience players that don't want to participate to give those that do their jollies? We are all paying customers. Although they seem to think so, they don't do us a favor letting us play their game. They count on us being addicted when they pull this crap. I pay my fee to play on a PvE server. If people want to PvP there, they go to a battleground or arena or flag where others might decide to take pot shots at them. If they would have required folks to flag to participate and make essential and quest NPCs immune, all would be good. There is no way to cut it to make it OK for PvP to be forced on anyone whether they enjoy PvP at other times or not.

I think Bolty pointed out the pros and cons very well. This was a one day thing and if you were level 70 you could easily avoid most of it. I think I got turned twice when I wasn't trying to participate and that cost me maybe 5 minutes of my time. Not a huge inconvenience for me. I saw the invasion coming (ffs who didn't?) and moved my bank alt to Thunderbluff so I wouldn't have my auctions interrupted. Again I say if the way it was on the last day had lasted longer I would probably agree with you, but (at least on my server) it wasn't until the last day that the plague was self sustaining. Most of what is in the game doesn't even require a major city, so with cities down I just did that.:lol:

[Sheep]

They count on us being addicted when they pull this crap. I pay my fee to play on a PvE server. If people want to PvP there, they go to a battleground or arena or flag where others might decide to take pot shots at them. If they would have required folks to flag to participate and make essential and quest NPCs immune, all would be good. There is no way to cut it to make it OK for PvP to be forced on anyone whether they enjoy PvP at other times or not.

You're talking as if Blizzard had signed some contract which stipulated that they had to design content that appealed to everyone, and if they couldn't, to properly fence it off. How does that make any sense? They design the game they want to make, and you decide whether or not you want to play it. If the answer is no, you can wait it out; the event didn't even last a week. There is no way to force PvP on someone, as there is no way to force them to play.

We pay $15 per month to play World of Warcraft, a constantly evolving MMORPG. We do not pay our fee for a static, predictable experience.

[Taelas]

Some people pay 15$ a month to play 15 hours a day. Some pay to play 15 a week.

If you only have an hour or two every day to play, having it ruined by something like this is more than frustrating.

[NiteFox]

Some people pay 15$ a month to play 15 hours a day. Some pay to play 15 a week.

If you only have an hour or two every day to play, having it ruined by something like this is more than frustrating.

Due to this week being the British school half term, the fact that I work as a cinema usher, and the general release of High School Musical 3 being this week (ugh), I only had an hour or two to play per day around my long shifts.

I loved it.

I knew from the off that normal business would be normal business would be disrupted, so I never even really attempted it (That said, since most of the zombie outbreaks were in the capital cities, that meant one could easily continue with their normal lives outside of the big outposts). I bounced between trying to figure out the best way to infest, say, Garadar and joining in with defending Orgrimmar from the horde (Ooh, irony.). The interruption with Hallow's End didn't concern me, since I knew that the only reason to run it was for the Hallow's End achievement (And, in the end, the It's Been A Long Strange Trip achievement) and I just knew that there was no way the RNG would let me get the helm and the squashling in treat bags or from the Headless Horseman (Just like how every single roll on a Brewfest mount went to either an Undead Warlock or a Blood Elf Paladin when I ran Corin every damned day.)

Disruption was actually minimal on my server. Granted, Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff were cleared of bankers and auctioneers, but the banks in Shattrath and Undercity were safe, and rarely did the hordes get close to the auctioneers in Undercity and Silvermoon. Since I do all my selling through a mule character, all I had to do was shift everything I had to sell to her and wait out the event.

As for questing disruption, about all I can say is that the zombies were nowhere near as effective as, say, a bored Alliance raid of 40 constantly stomping down on the Crossroads for hours on end. I've been through worse than what this event threw at me; the only disruption I faced was when The Rokk had been killed (But he was offering Revenge is Tasty. Again. For the third time this week) and at the very tail of the event where the quest NPC in Thunder Bluff was killed during an infestation of Elder Rise (Which I initially fell victim to and then cleared singlehandedly - Pets don't spread the disease if you send them to attack zombies and roaches, even if a 45-yard Arcane Shot instant kill on a roach transfers it back to you).

It really was an event you had to join in with. And even if you didn't want to join in, we were hardly talking an absolute pandemic on every server. Major flashpoints such as the IoQD were probably overran, but that shouldn't have stopped anyone questing elsewhere. Truthfully, my time could have been spent towards running dailies to help feed my mount addiction (23 so far!), but I had fun with the event; alternating between shooting zombies in the face and eating brains (Not that many in Shattrath, unfortunately, though the guards around the badge vendor were easy and fun to infect).

The only two regrets I have is that it didn't run longer, and that the questline involving the search for a cure wasn't longer. Hopefully there'll be an update in a few days.

[Lissa]

There were several big problems with the event that showed that Blizzard didn't think.

First was the sanctuary problem in Shattrah where player zombies could not be attacked. The fix to this would have been setting the PCs to the status of demons (which are now killable within Shattrah in order to fix the bug with Demonic Sacrifice not working within Shattrah's city walls). If this had been done, Shattrah would have been a better place.

Second was placement of the Argent Dawn healers. Initially the setup of the AD Healers in Shattrah was good with one in each bank, one near the zone in point from Teleports/Portals, and one at the flight master. As time went on, the ones in the banks disappeared and the one at the flightmaster got overwhelmed due to the closeness of two large groups of NPCs (with the inability of PCs to be able to deal with Zombie PCs and Zombie PCs realizing this and the range of the AD Healers). In the capital cities, it was even worse where there were no AD healers at the Teleport/Portal spots, noting at the flight masters, and no real defense in the banks or AH. While players could effectively deal with PC Zombies cause they were attackable, the lack of AD healers hurt some of the efforts.

If these two things had been corrected, things would have been a lot better. Overall, world events should be there for you to participate if you want to (e.g. AQ Gate opening, first Scourge invasion), but you should not be forced into participation if you don't want to participate.

[Sir_Die_alot]

Second was placement of the Argent Dawn healers. Initially the setup of the AD Healers in Shattrah was good with one in each bank, one near the zone in point from Teleports/Portals, and one at the flight master. As time went on, the ones in the banks disappeared and the one at the flightmaster got overwhelmed due to the closeness of two large groups of NPCs (with the inability of PCs to be able to deal with Zombie PCs and Zombie PCs realizing this and the range of the AD Healers). In the capital cities, it was even worse where there were no AD healers at the Teleport/Portal spots, noting at the flight masters, and no real defense in the banks or AH. While players could effectively deal with PC Zombies cause they were attackable, the lack of AD healers hurt some of the efforts.

The only healers I saw disappear were ones guarding the front of major cities. The various other ones were killed by hordes of zombies. It would have been nice to be able to kill player zombies though. Keep in mind it WAS intended for healers to be overwhelmed and die eventually.

I still think people are over reacting. Most of the game is not done in cities or towns. If you wanted to trick or treat LHC was open for business. The guards there are the only really effective ones in the game and believe me I TRIED to infect the place. Yeah I had to wait for some NPC spawns too but it was not the first time and won't be the last.