So, what the opinion of the stress testers of WoW?
#1
I guess here's the run-down of mine.

I've been playing a NE rogue, making it to lvl 20, and a Human Paladin, to lvl 12. The paladin was on a PvE server, the rogue is on a PvP one.

What do I think of WoW?

Well, for instance, there's the lag spikes. Now, I know that it is a stress test. But horrendous lag, at 6 am, with 700 people on a server? :blink: I won't say another word about them, as I only died twice due to them.

I'll ignore the commonly-occuring crashes, for the sake of argument.

Then there's the graphics. Pretty, but nothing special. The "Things are invisible, until you are within 75 meters of them" effect pretty much spoils them, if you are looking at the horison. The game also runs pretty slow, for the graphics quality. Especially when I take a griffon flight, into, say, Stormwind. Enough about graphics.

The audio is allright - nothing memorable, nothing bad.

Now, the gameplay...

It may be just a temporary occurance, but I am completely stumped at level 20. I can't find any more quests that aren't orange, red, or green to me, except for the Duskwood spiders... Due to the slow exp gain, which I was suffering from since level 19, I seem to be spending more time farming areas for the sake of farming areas. The quests I have are too difficult to do, even for a party of my level; killing the lvl 26 gnolls in Redridge, the Elite uniques there, and the quests in Blackfantom Deeps. That can of course be amended, later in development. I've hit a similar roadblock before, at level 14, though it went along great, after I got out of the NE areas.

PvE combat, at least as a rogue, has some strategy involved - choosing whether to Sap, garotte, or simply pull, avoiding getting spotted by enemies are all part of it. However, once the fight begins in earnest, if it's a solo fight, it's either Gouche/Backstab spam, or use of Sinister Strike/Eviscerate in group situations, with an evade thrown in every so often. Due to the nature of the skills, it seems that pretty much every character will use the same ones...

PvP combat, on the other hand, has little depth. I have been in several large-scale attacks on Horde territory, and one small-scale assault. The large-scale attacks usually went well... Right up until we died. Due to the chaotic nature of such engagements, there is no feeling of accomplishment when you kill an enemy, as there are 30 more behind him. I have pretty much given up on that kind of combat.

I have also invited another rogue, a lvl 16 to join me in the barrens - that assault was much more sucessfull. We were doing pretty well, at something like 50 kills, 14 deaths, but again, there was not much strategy involved in combat. Go for the mages, backstab, backstab, gouche the fighter, finish the mage, if he runs, use throwing dagger. Drink a potion, if you are in really big trouble, then gouche/bastab/eviscerate the fighter.

The quest system is allright - if it weren't for the horrendous spawn/drop rates for some enemies, and it's not because other groups are going for that quest too... I know that that can very well be amended on release.

So far, I'm not all that excited about WoW. Meh.
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#2
Hi,

Then there's the graphics. Pretty, but nothing special. The "Things are invisible, until you are within 75 meters of them" effect pretty much spoils them, if you are looking at the horison.

Have you tried changing settings in the Config.wtf file in the WTF sub-directory? I find that the with the settings pushed up to the max, the game looks very good, but is unplayable on my ancient machine. For your info, the text of a Blizzard post follows (slightly changed on values since I never thought I'd need to share it).

--Pete

#############################################
Edited to the values actually used by me (PPM)
#############################################

Here the the values that are worth mentioning. Feel free to change their values to find the best combination for your system. If you experience any problems, just delete the file and all the settings will restore to default.

SET lod "1"

Toggles terrain LOD on and off ... looks much nicer with it off, but draws about 2-3 times as many polys. If you have a 2ghz+ processor and a GF4 or better, you can usually turn this off.

SET fullAlpha "0"

Leave this to "0" ... almost no objects use full alpha, and this setting does not affect spells or particles. Turning it on will slay your framerate if you do get close to an object with full alpha.

SET doodadAnim "0"

Setting this to "1" will enable environment anims, such as windmills, birds, etc. All animation is very CPU intensive. I wouldnt suggest enabling this with less than a 1.5ghz machine.

SET mapShadows "0"

Turns display of terrain shadows on / off.

SET lodDist "50"

Generally leave this at 50-100. Sets the distance at which the terrain LOD change occurs. Only meaningful when LOD is "1".

SET DistCull "150.000000"

The absolute max distance an object (not terrain, but objects on it) will be drawn. Much like SmallCull, this value heavily affects framerate on lower end machines. On a high end machine you can set it to the same as your farClip setting. It should be a good bit less than farclip on a slower machine.

SET shadowLevel "1"

Sets the resolution of the shadow maps on the terrain. 0 is high, 1 is low.

SET trilinear "1"

Any good video card (GF3 or better) set this to "1".

SET frillDensity "8"

Sets the density of the foreground grass, rocks, etc details. "8" for a lower end machine, "16" for a mid range machine, "24" or greater for a fast machine. Goes up to 256 max i think. 256 is not for the feint of heart and might crash you.

SET farclip "177.000000"

Matches the farclip slider. Range is 177 to 777. Dont ask why the weird numbers =P Farclip is the single biggest setting that will affect your framerate. Experiment!

SET specular "0"

Specular cannot be used without pixelShaders. Enables specular highlighting on certain terrain textures. Looks nice and shiny!

SET pixelShaders "0"

Enabling pixel shaders allows the world to be rendered in less passes, potentially increasing performance on cards that support them. Pixel shader code is still work in progress, so on some video cards its faster, some its slower.

How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?

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#3
Swiss Mercenary,Sep 9 2004, 04:28 PM Wrote:It may be just a temporary occurance, but I am completely stumped at level 20. I can't find any more quests that aren't orange, red, or green to me, except for the Duskwood spiders... Due to the slow exp gain, which I was suffering from since level 19, I seem to be spending more time farming areas for the sake of farming areas.
The elven lands were the last to be added and so have been the least developed. That's why there are so few quests available in elven lands. At level 20, I suggest: Ashenvale (there are 6 locations to get quests there, btw. People often think Ashenvale has little to do there, because they only pick up the couple of quests in town), Redridge, Duskwood, the Wetlands, and especially start running some instances. My recommendations are the Deadmines (Van Cleef) and the Blackfathom Deeps instance. For me, it's the instance dungeons where the game gets addictive. Oh, and make sure to bring a full party along with you.
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#4
It's gouge btw

And for level 20, there are lots of places to go. Maybe a bigger problem is that Blizzard doesn't lead you to next areas and areas of similar difficulty. Besides Red Ridge, there is Stonetalon mountains (with a few quests to do there), a 15-25 zone, although for alliance its more of a 20-25 level. Duskwood also offers at least 2 more low level quests to kill wolves, but one is in town and another all the way in the north-west corner. Wetlands is another 20-30 area, and you might even find some quests in Barrens (Rathet town specifically). Alliance has a LOT of options to go to, the problem seems to be that people simply don't know about them, and Blizzard doesn't exactly make it easy to find out.
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#5
Ah, I think the problem with the elven lands was not the lack of quests, but the way they were concentrated on specific levels - there are 2 you can do at lvl 11, 2 at lvl 13, 2 at lvl 15, stuff like that. The problem comes when you complete them, and are unable to do the following quests. (Note - the 2 was just an example, there are a good bit more).

Van Cleef... That's just evil. I think I'll wait till 22 for that. I've taken a look at Blackfantom Deeps, though, the first part, with the 21+ mobs, at least. Don't think that I can exactly take em on, even with a full party. Meh, I guess, it's time to explore Ashenvale...

Thank you for the optimisation help, though, Pete, although my machine is getting 24 FPS on 1024x768 as it is - I doubt I could fix the "Objects dissapearing beyond 80 meters" thing, without bringing it down to the teens.
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#6
Swiss Mercenary,Sep 9 2004, 08:28 AM Wrote:I've been playing a NE rogue, making it to lvl 20, and a Human Paladin, to lvl 12. The paladin was on a PvE server, the rogue is on a PvP one.

So far, I'm not all that excited about WoW. Meh.
Overall, I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far. WoW may be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and a "Diabloized" MMORPG, but that's what will make it a big success.

I've encountered the odd lag spike (not too many), quite a few critical errors crashing the game (most of them while quitting) which I'm sure will be fixed by release, and some server crashes; but it has run very well for a stress test (though the Guild Wars demo during E3 was more stable).

Graphics are very pretty IMO, with really different feels in different areas. They're not too detailed, since Blizzard always tries to minimize system requirements, but detailed enough that they look good (whereas in D2 they sacrificed too much graphical quality IMO).

I'm currently a lvl 18 night-elf hunter. (I may not be the fastest lvler, but I have certainly put in my share of time -- a lvl 20 rogue and a lvl 12 paladin must have taken a while even in a game you're not that excited about ;) ) I also got stumped when I was around lvl 12 in Westfall and had done most of the lvl appropriate quests nearby but found all the Westfall quests too tough -- I ulimately went back to the Dwarven areas around Loch Modan and found plenty to do there, then returned later to Westfall; so I guess it's just a matter of exploring a bit to find good areas for your lvl. The night elf island was a bit of a dead loss quest and experience wise though.

Combat does have some strategy, though I do find it a bit monotonous. Having said that, though, I am still figuring out how best to use my skills, especially how to use my pet to tank and attract aggro, so even solo combat does require some thought and experience. (Hunters do quite a bit of damage; even in groups it's easy for me to attract a lot of aggro.)

Quests are mostly pretty routine, but they do succeed in providing an additional purpose to what you would be doing anyway (e.g. collect X if you want to solo monsters; kill Y to encourage partying; and deliver Z to encourage exploration). Spawn rates can be a problem in some overcrowded areas, but I guess that may be largely due to a lot of people being syncronized around similar lvls in the stress test.

I've found tradekills (skinning/leatherwork) fun to work on, even if they're implemented in a very simple way compared with many other games -- again not necessarily a bad thing.

Only started one dungeon crawl so far, to deadmines, but got stopped when the server crashed, so I can't say how that is -- but it seems to me they have deliberately included lots of different aspects to the game (solo exploration, groups, instanced dungeons, tradeskills, raid content...) in a way that is additive rather than exclusive.
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#7
Eh, the rogue didn't take too long - I didn't even notice as levels 6-12 passed me by, as did 14-18. It was 12-14 and 18+ that are the pain...
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#8
Have you tried the hunter's lodge quests in Loch Modan? A wise man pointed them out to me and are quite solo-able. There are also the quests involved with the dam. You may be able to bounce around a few of the early wetland's quests as well.
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