Have Blizzard dropped the ball?

[Hocus]

Hi,

I had high hopes for WoW. My guild and I were looking forward to finally saying goodbye to Ultima Online and making our mark on a new, promising game. But having played WoW for a few days now, I'm started to feel a sense of dread. Blizzard have rushed this game. There is no denying it. At best it's incomplete, at worst it's half-assed. Here are the problems I've noticed in just a few days play:

1) The many quests are just a thinly veiled attempt at disguising the grind that is present. Granted, the grind isn't as bad as in some MMORPG's, but it's still there. After the 50th kill x creature and collect x amount of x item, it really starts to get tedious.

2) Most spawns are overcamped to the point where a ten minute quest ends up taking an hour. For some reason most people are unwilling to group up to make the whole process a lot easier on everybody involved. It's just not fun waiting for creatures to spawn, trying to attack them before anybody else can, and hoping you've done enough damage to get credit for the kill.

3) It seems as if getting the first hit on a monster takes precedence over the amount of damage you actually do to it. This results in long ranged attackers running around getting the first hit on a monster and then letting other people kill it.. and the initial attackers end up getting the lion's share of the credit.

4) The party system is, in a word, terrible. The design of the various quests promotes grouping. And yet, you only get half the xp you normally would from killing monsters solo. It means that a party that does quests together ends up quickly falling behind the curve and having to grind their way through non-quest related monsters.

5) PvP is utterly, utterly pointless. If you win, you gain nothing. If you lose, you lose nothing. There's no sense of danger or excitement. There's no adrenaline rush or a sense of achievement. It's just, "Ok, we managed to wipe that group out, so what?" The Honour system that Blizzard proposed seem reasonable: for every honourable kill you make, you gain honour, which can translate to titles, special clothing or items, even special abilities. What happened to it? It was the only thing that gave PvP meaning. For somebody like me, who is first and foremost a PvP player, it was essential to the overall experience. I've never been a big PvM fan, but I was prepared to do it if it lead to something better, like a fun PvP experience. Except it doesn't. So where's the motivation? What's the point?

6) WoW Launch is shaping up to be the same fiasco that the D2 Realms were on launch. I tried for half an hour to log onto East 4 today.. until I finally gave up and started a new character on another server. Overcrowded and laggy, it makes me wonder if Blizzard have severely underestimated the demand they would experience. And while I am fully aware that this is a Stress Test, and that supposedly the purpose of it is to identify these kinds of issues.. that didn't work for Diablo 2, what has changed that is going to make it work now? I think those of us who remember the Realms in the early days shudder at the thought of living through a similar experience again.

7) There are macro bots and speedhacks already. I can't say I'm surprised. Blizzard have never been well known for the integrity of their servers. But it does not bode well for release if people have been able to achieve it so quickly. Are we going to see a repeat of the Realms, with their various cheats, hacks and dupes?

The scary part of all this is that Blizzard only has eighteen days until release to fix or at least attempt to fix these issues and many others. Are we all going to be paying to play a beta ala Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies? Blizzard once claimed that they wanted to do a MMORPG right, and while WoW is probably a lot better than most MMORPG's on the market right now, it still has a long way to go. There's meant to be a big patch on the way, and while I'm hopeful it will resolve all or some of the issues, at this point I'm not feeling very optimistic at all.

Sigh.

[Treesh]

2) Most spawns are overcamped to the point where a ten minute quest ends up taking an hour. For some reason most people are unwilling to group up to make the whole process a lot easier on everybody involved. It's just not fun waiting for creatures to spawn, trying to attack them before anybody else can, and hoping you've done enough damage to get credit for the kill.

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It's better than the last stress test though. Or at least it is for me. Maybe it's just because I'm slow ( :P to Roland ;) ) and so I'm on the tail end of the rush for these areas, but it's much easier to do this time. Although I will admit that occasionally with my gnome it is a lot more crowded than with my tauren, but it's still not nearly as bad as the first stress test was for me.

[Tal]

1) The many quests are just a thinly veiled attempt at disguising the grind that is present. Granted, the grind isn't as bad as in some MMORPG's, but it's still there. After the 50th kill x creature and collect x amount of x item, it really starts to get tedious.
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:blink: I can't say that I have felt that way. Granted the kill x and collect y of z creature quests do get a bit old after awhile but there have been many more quests that were much more than those. And I'm not talking the fed-ex quests either. This is really one of those cases of play more and you'll see what I'm talking about. :)

2) Most spawns are overcamped to the point where a ten minute quest ends up taking an hour. For some reason most people are unwilling to group up to make the whole process a lot easier on everybody involved. It's just not fun waiting for creatures to spawn, trying to attack them before anybody else can, and hoping you've done enough damage to get credit for the kill.
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EnoYls has posted that they are implementing a beefed-up version of their spawning system in the next patch to address this.

3) It seems as if getting the first hit on a monster takes precedence over the amount of damage you actually do to it. This results in long ranged attackers running around getting the first hit on a monster and then letting other people kill it.. and the initial attackers end up getting the lion's share of the credit.
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Yes this is as it set up. He who taps it gets it. WHen someone from a distance taps the monster move on and don't help them kill it. If someone is following you around and repeatedly tapping the same monsters as you are trying to kill then you need to report it.

4) The party system is, in a word, terrible. The design of the various quests promotes grouping. And yet, you only get half the xp you normally would from killing monsters solo. It means that a party that does quests together ends up quickly falling behind the curve and having to grind their way through non-quest related monsters.
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Experience in groups is less than it would be soloing because you're not facing the same peril as someone who is soloing. The designers have stated though that the xp for instances is not where they would like it to be and they will be upping it in the next patch.

6) WoW Launch is shaping up to be the same fiasco that the D2 Realms were on launch. I tried for half an hour to log onto East 4 today.. until I finally gave up and started a new character on another server. Overcrowded and laggy, it makes me wonder if Blizzard have severely underestimated the demand they would experience. And while I am fully aware that this is a Stress Test, and that supposedly the purpose of it is to identify these kinds of issues.. that didn't work for Diablo 2, what has changed that is going to make it work now? I think those of us who remember the Realms in the early days shudder at the thought of living through a similar experience again.
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East 4 was at the artificial population cap yesterday so that they could test the server load. Ogre stated that they were testing this so that they could avoid this happening in retail.

7) There are macro bots and speedhacks already. I can't say I'm surprised. Blizzard have never been well known for the integrity of their servers. But it does not bode well for release if people have been able to achieve it so quickly. Are we going to see a repeat of the Realms, with their various cheats, hacks and dupes?
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I've been playing Beta for almost 9 months now. I've got characters near the level cap, the middle and very low. I've also restarted a character on the Stress server recently. In the entirety of that time spent soloing, grouping both in guild and in pickup groups I have yet to run into a macro bot or a speedhack. If you have seen this you need to report it to the GMs. They can investigate it and do their voodoo. ;)

[Drasca]

Sounds like WoW is not for me.

The scary part of all this is that Blizzard only has eighteen days until release to fix or at least attempt to fix these issues and many others. Are we all going to be paying to play a beta ala Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies? Blizzard once claimed that they wanted to do a MMORPG right, and while WoW is probably a lot better than most MMORPG's on the market right now, it still has a long way to go. There's meant to be a big patch on the way, and while I'm hopeful it will resolve all or some of the issues, at this point I'm not feeling very optimistic at all.
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WoW doesn't seem better than other MMoRPG's right now.

Ahem. Where's the better part? Instanced missions? That concept was patched into my last mmorpg and I'm not impressed.

I'm not in the beta, and as I am on dial-up.. I'm not going to. 2.6 gigabytes is insane. Do-able over 2 weeks of dedicated download... but with failed downloads going around--I am not going to be in the stress test. Impossible.

Um. Has WoW done anything right? I'm only seeing a half-baked lame attempt of a mmorpg. Worse, not better, than any other start I've seen.

[Bun-Bun]

Sounds like WoW is not for me.
WoW doesn't seem better than other MMoRPG's right now.

Ahem. Where's the better part? Instanced missions? That concept was patched into my last mmorpg and I'm not impressed.

I'm not in the beta, and as I am on dial-up.. I'm not going to. 2.6 gigabytes is insane. Do-able over 2 weeks of dedicated download... but with failed downloads going around--I am not going to be in the stress test. Impossible.

Um. Has WoW done anything right? I'm only seeing a half-baked lame attempt of a mmorpg. Worse, not better, than any other start I've seen.
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Despite all my kvetching, I think Blizzard has done a very good job at creating a MOG aimed at me - a somewhere between casual and hardcore, mostly solo player, who prefers PvE to PvP. There are other audiences it may appeal to, including the PvP crowd, but I'll leave assessments of that to the PvP server mavens.

You're seeing a lot of worry from people who expect great things, and are seeing the prospect of those great things being diminished by a rushed release. What you don't see is the tremendous amounts of fun the beta testers are having while awaiting those great things.

Some things they've done right:

1) The art is gorgeous (if you like the style - some don't)

2) The quest system is excellent. It's almost impossible to run out of things to do, even if you skip the awful collection grind quests.

3) The sense of a large world is well-preserved without forcing insane travel times. Travel is difficult enough to encourage working within an area, but it's not prohibitive to go across the world. Hearthstones provide the sense of working out of a base camp, and the option to get "home" quickly at the end of a session.

4) The Talent system gives considerable ability to customize your character. The druid tree (which I have the most experience in) is actually pretty well balanced and offers options on how to deal with combat and grouping situations.

One of the big beefs on the release date is that Paladin and Hunter talents won't get enough testing. I'm in that camp; it's pretty unlikely they'll do a 100% bang-up job right out of the gate. I hope to be surprised. :)

5) Tradeskills, for all their incompleteness, are interesting and fairly valuable. This is also something that can be tuned as the game economy evolves.

6) There's enough variety to keep the game fresh as you progress.

So I don't think it's a half-assed attempt. It's just a bit less complete than we'd like. It may not be for everybody; if you want more complex tradeskills or a less cartoony art style, EQ2 or something else may well be better for you.

[MongoJerry]

I had high hopes for WoW. My guild and I were looking forward to finally saying goodbye to Ultima Online and making our mark on a new, promising game. But having played WoW for a few days now, I'm started to feel a sense of dread. Blizzard have rushed this game. There is no denying it. At best it's incomplete, at worst it's half-assed. Here are the problems I've noticed in just a few days play:

I understand your frustration. I've had those same frustrations on "first days" when I was starting characters along with thousands of others. The game gets much much better as you go along.

1) The many quests are just a thinly veiled attempt at disguising the grind that is present. Granted, the grind isn't as bad as in some MMORPG's, but it's still there. After the 50th kill x creature and collect x amount of x item, it really starts to get tedious.

It looks to me like you're basing things on the first few levels, which is understandable, considering the importance of first impressions. However, keep in mind that the newbie areas are there to help get people started, so the quests are designed to be simple while you're still getting used to the user interface. The newbie area with the most interesting quests to me is night the elf area, by the way, but I imagine that it's too late to suggest that to you. Keep playing. You'll find more interesting quests as you go along.

2) Most spawns are overcamped to the point where a ten minute quest ends up taking an hour. For some reason most people are unwilling to group up to make the whole process a lot easier on everybody involved. It's just not fun waiting for creatures to spawn, trying to attack them before anybody else can, and hoping you've done enough damage to get credit for the kill.

Yeah, that's a standard problem whenever they let in a lot of new people to the game. The population tends to spread out over time, though, so again it does get a lot better. Also, consider exploring the world a bit. There are areas of the game that tend to be undercamped. Night elf definitely and many horde areas are certainly less camped than the early human and dwarf areas.

3) It seems as if getting the first hit on a monster takes precedence over the amount of damage you actually do to it. This results in long ranged attackers running around getting the first hit on a monster and then letting other people kill it.. and the initial attackers end up getting the lion's share of the credit.

Yep, it's all about the first hit, and I like this way much better than the way other games allow kill stealing. At least you know right away when the graphic goes grey that the mob has been tagged by someone else and you can move on. It's much better than fighting a mob for a bit and then having some party come along and mow your mob down while you don't get any credit for the kill. Again, I'm sorry that things are tough for you right now. It's a function of having tens of thousands of people added to the game all at once and having them all crammed into the newbie areas.

4) The party system is, in a word, terrible. The design of the various quests promotes grouping. And yet, you only get half the xp you normally would from killing monsters solo. It means that a party that does quests together ends up quickly falling behind the curve and having to grind their way through non-quest related monsters.

Wrong. Parties level much faster than individuals. You get the same amount of experience from quests whether you are alone or partied, and since you can kill mobs and move faster in a party, you can finish quests much faster. Especially in the early going, quests provide a huge amount of your total experience gain.

5) PvP is utterly, utterly pointless. If you win, you gain nothing. If you lose, you lose nothing. There's no sense of danger or excitement. There's no adrenaline rush or a sense of achievement. It's just, "Ok, we managed to wipe that group out, so what?" The Honour system that Blizzard proposed seem reasonable: for every honourable kill you make, you gain honour, which can translate to titles, special clothing or items, even special abilities. What happened to it? It was the only thing that gave PvP meaning. For somebody like me, who is first and foremost a PvP player, it was essential to the overall experience. I've never been a big PvM fan, but I was prepared to do it if it lead to something better, like a fun PvP experience. Except it doesn't. So where's the motivation? What's the point?

We'll have to see in the patch what they intend for the honor system, since the first real system is supposed to be added then. The game developers have talked in great detail on how it's going to work, so it's not something that's been slap-dashed together. However, in this case, I would agree with you that this is an example of the game being rushed due to Christmas and EQ2.

6) WoW Launch is shaping up to be the same fiasco that the D2 Realms were on launch. I tried for half an hour to log onto East 4 today.. until I finally gave up and started a new character on another server. Overcrowded and laggy, it makes me wonder if Blizzard have severely underestimated the demand they would experience. And while I am fully aware that this is a Stress Test, and that supposedly the purpose of it is to identify these kinds of issues.. that didn't work for Diablo 2, what has changed that is going to make it work now? I think those of us who remember the Realms in the early days shudder at the thought of living through a similar experience again.

As you said, this is a stress test. All I can say is, we'll see.

7) There are macro bots and speedhacks already. I can't say I'm surprised. Blizzard have never been well known for the integrity of their servers. But it does not bode well for release if people have been able to achieve it so quickly. Are we going to see a repeat of the Realms, with their various cheats, hacks and dupes?

It's entirely possible, but all I can say is that I haven't seen them. I certainly haven't seen any mass item dupes, and the nice thing about the game design is that the best items are automatically soulbound anyway, so being able to dupe won't do a person much good. I can imagine a bot that would allow a character to grind a particular area while they're sleeping. OK, so they level a bit faster than other people, but the additional treasure added to the economy would be a small blip on the radar screen. Like I said, the best items are fixed-loot items off bosses and quest rewards which are automatically soulbound. (Before someone mentions epics, they aren't going to be the best items in the game for very long, and the useful non-quest epics have a very low drop rate, so even a robot grinder will have a hard time getting many of them. This isn't a pindlebot situation).

The scary part of all this is that Blizzard only has eighteen days until release to fix or at least attempt to fix these issues and many others. Are we all going to be paying to play a beta ala Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies? Blizzard once claimed that they wanted to do a MMORPG right, and while WoW is probably a lot better than most MMORPG's on the market right now, it still has a long way to go. There's meant to be a big patch on the way, and while I'm hopeful it will resolve all or some of the issues, at this point I'm not feeling very optimistic at all.

Well, really, more than a month and a half. The version of the game you're playing is the same one that's been out for a month, and even then the version beta testers received wasn't the latest build on developer's desktops. When we get the next patch, we'll have a much better idea of what Blizzard has in mind for release.

Most of the items on your list have to do with the problem that any on-line game is going to have when you add tens of thousands of people to a game all at once. I don't want to minimize the feelings you're having on this. It's important for the game to make a good first impression, but short of making every newbie zone an instance (I suppose that could have been a possibility, although then you have the added complexity of getting your friends into the same instance), I don't see a way to solve that. My advice to you is to play in less popular areas and play at less popular times at night to level your character and get out of the newbie zones. The higher your level, the more choices you have on where to go, and the more likely you are to get in more in-the-clear areas. Then when you're high enough level, you can join instance dungeon parties where you won't have to deal with any crowds at all. These issues are temporary problems that will automatically resolve themselves as the crush on newbie zones weakens.

The PvP stuff is agreed rushed. We'll see what they have in store for us with the next patch, though. It's clear from developer comments that PvP is considered a vitally important part of the game and that they have been working a long time on it, so if we don't see a lot at release, we are likely to see a lot more PvP system improvements as time goes on. However, if as you say you're primarily a PvP person, then I can understand if you decide that you don't want to buy the game until that system is put into place. For my part, I'm mostly a PvE person who only dabbles in PvP, so it's not as critical of a factor in my decision as getting the classes and zones polished.

Finally, regarding dupes, hacks, etc., if you tried to hold a game until it was impossible to create hacks for it, you'd be holding it forever. There have been some mentions of hacks on the boards, but they've been non-specific, and I wonder how real or dangerous these hacks that people have developed really are. All I can say is that I haven't seen it in beta. Now maybe all of the hackers have gotten smart and have been able to hold their tongues for all these many months (btw, I'm not sure what you mean by "if people have been able to achieve it so quickly," since people have had access to working versions of the game for over a year now), but most of my experience with hackers is that there is usually some blabbermouth who gives up the goods. The fact that hacks and cheats haven't been a problem in beta bodes well for the game. In fact, it's clear from the architecture of the game that Blizzard has put supressing hacks and cheats as a top priority item. (They try to limit the amount of information that the client gets that the player isn't supposed to know). Finally, unlike D2, the game will have on-going subscriptions with a well staffed on-going support team whose job it will be to supress these hacks and ban people who use them. Will there be hacks? Of course. But will it be a D2 situation? No. And if you see someone using hacks, make sure to report it to hacks@blizzard.com.

[Crusader]

1: true, there are 3 quest types. : kill x monsters, collect x items (usually involving killing monsters) and fed ex quests. while this may seem a bit poor, I have a hard time thinking of other ways to get players to work for their XP and quest rewards.

2: This is due to the stress test just starting. On release there will be more servers and the population will be somewhat spread. If the beta test is any experience, you will rarely find certain spawns camped long.

3: yes, the first hit means you (and your party) will get 100% credit for the kill. the creature's name will go grey if someone else tagged it and the best thing you can do is let go and have the original attacker deal with it. again, I blame this due to overpopulation, as it is quite easy to walk around 10 minutes without seeing a soul (which will not happen in the newbie zones, mind, which are currently bursting with new players).

4: true, but then there are instanced dungeons with elite monsters, which give a lot more xp and are impossible to complete without a party. This (elite monsters) is where grouping truly kicks in. All other quests can be done solo, should you want to. granted, some are hard, but all are manageable. You also seem to forget that when grouped you kill monsters a LOT faster, compensating for the partial xp.

5: Blizzard stated that PvP will undergo radical changes and the current system is merely a placeholder of sorts. there will be a reward system based on reputation and honorable deeds. Reputation, in turn, gives access to certain titles, items, etc.


6: Stress test. The name says it all. I think Blizzard will be well prepared. time will tell.

7: macro bots? speed hacks? You surprise me, as I have yet to see them and I have been playing since day 1 of the beta. Blizzard is rabid on any cheating, and losing a character/account (each player has only one account bound to his key) on WoW is a lot more painful than losing one on Diablo2. If there is cheating of any kind, the 24/7 GM staff will root it out. There is a macro system that allows custom macros to be made, but as far as I know one cannot meddle with the system as it works now.


I have to agree that the release seems premature, but that's Vivendi's fault, bot Blizzard's. Blizzard mentioned a lot of content that's going to be added in the future that won't make it before release, but will be added in patches. it's a pity they are rushed by Vivendi, but the game as it is now seems good enough to last for months.