Some of my friends were wondering why the switch to this old game instead of World of Warcraft.  While I used to play WoW quite avidly, I just don’t have the desire to now.  It seems like they give away the end game content way to easy.  There’s no sense of reward anymore.  Granted I don’t really miss the second job like raiding that I used to do, however I do miss the sense of achievement after learning a hard encounter for the first time.

I’m sure some of you hard core mmorpg raiders know what I’m talking about.  The weekly raids with 20-40 people getting together to beat the other guilds on your server to a server first boss kill.  Especially when it meant something that your guild killed Onyxia, in Molten Core, fighting in Blackwing Lair, or fighting bosses in Naxxeramus.  Even prior to that there was people who got together to do planes raids in Everquest, which was an even harder thing to do back then.

What’s happened to the current MMORPGS nowadays?  There’s no real sense of accomplishment in getting to the end game.  We want that achievement, but games like World of Warcraft have really spoiled us in terms of how we should get there.  It seems like the standard is now to have an easy time getting to the end level, which is where the content starts.  Where as, before the fun was actually in leveling up or even the grind. Its something that I thought I would never miss after playing games like Lineage 1 and 2.  Or even Ragnarok Online.  However, I do admit once you got to your next level you did get that little bit of joy even though you’ve spend most of your day sitting at your computer neglecting your social life.

In a game like Warhammer Online, you play against other people in one of two factions.  Yet there was no stake in the game.  If you died you didn’t lose any items, exp or anything of value to you except time.  You had no stake in any of the keeps, or land that the opposing faction was trying to take over.  There became no real reason to defend said keeps/forts/even capitols.  Even Failcom’s Age of Conan got that part right, by forcing people to grind out their guild cities they emphasized a need for that guild to stay together, and make enemies/allies with caution.  You had a ’stake’ in what you put into the game, and to defend this you actually put in an honest effort since you didn’t want to lose your hard work.

Has it really come to this?  Have we as gamers who have always wanted to skip through content to see the end game now just complaining that we have it all too easy?  I kind of miss the grind, but I kind of don’t at the same time.  Is it just me that feels this way?

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Yes, none other than Ozzy Osbourne himself in a World of Warcraft commercial.  Yes the one and only mischief make who had shot 17 of his family’s cats, and bit the head off a bat during a concert.  He even argues with the director like Mr T. does in his commercial, which I thought nice match up.

And what other class for him is there besides an undead warlock with multiple succubi around him.  Maybe a Deathknight, but I like the whole surrounded by seductive females thing they got going on in the commercial.

So without much further ado, here’s Ozzy Osbourne’s World of Warcraft commercial:

YouTube [Link]

So who’s Blizzard going to make a commercial with using their new Death Knight hero class?

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So about 13 hours after Wrath of the Lich King expansion gets released.  This team Athene power levels a Paladin all the way up to level 79.  He was on par to become the first level 80 character, post release, in the world.

And then he got banned.  Yup, the team had spent 13 hours grinding without much exp benefit for themselves, and after all that time the whole team got banned.  The reason for the banning was their questionable method of their exping.  Soo questionable they had asked a GM about it before the release to see if it would be okay.  That should have raised the first flag for them, but they proceeded anyways.

Their method of powerleveling was to go into an instance area.  Have Darus leave group to ‘tag’, and damage mobs as much as he could before the team finished off the mobs for him.  After the mobs were dead, get reinvited back into the group so that he doesn’t get teleported out of the instance.  This was the method they asked a gm about, and was given the answer that it was a clever use of game mechanics.

Athene has a pretty long *yawn* video giving out quite a bit of details about the whole thing. If you’re interested in watching it here it is for you:

YouTube [Link]

I guess the next GM on duty did not agree with the clever game mechanics use part.  Which paved the way for this fellow here by the name of Nymph to officially become the first person to level 80.  With a /played time of 27 hours.  This Warlock instead of depending on teammates to finish off the tagged mobs, just did it the old fashioned way of non-stop grinding to 80.  With the help of one, nice, out of party healer.

The details, and what spec Nymph the Warlock used are posted in detail here, and here.  As well as another YouTube video as well if you want to watch it here:

YouTube [Link]

I dunno I’ve stated before that my interest in World of Warcraft has waned, but power-leveling stories like this one, having 36 World of Warcraft accounts, or the level 1-60 in 20 minutes one still piques my interest.  Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be heading back to Warhammer Online.

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world of warcraft cake

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Associated Press video on Machinima and their interview with the makers of Spartan Life via Halo.

The Machinima channel on Youtube with some nice Machinima vids.  This channel has quite a few pieces of machinima with Halo.

And finally Monty Oum’s “Dead Fantasy 2″ machinima.  This one is definitely a must see.  The guy uses characters from Final Fantasy, and Dead or Alive making them go all out against each other in an 11 minute brawl.  I swear they need to make a video game like this.

Dead Fantasy is an excellent piece of work, but for some reason I couldn’t get the gametrailer version to work correctly.  The above video can be found in better quality here, and he even made one with no sound effects here if you don’t like the grunts etc from the girls.

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I did my own non-accurate mini research though, and found that according to xFire stats, the numbers are down about 40% for Warhammer online, compared to the initial release (xFire tracked around 13,000 users back in September).  The good news for them though is that the amount of time played by the remaining users haven’t changed since the release by very much.

Warhammer Online usage:

By comparison World of Warcraft numbers have actually gone up the last few weeks.  Meaning those refer a friend promotions that Blizzard has been doing is bringing some people.  Well sometimes 1 person with 36 World of Warcraft accounts in some cases.  Either that or people are probably dusting off their characters in preparation for Wrath of the Lich King to come out.  My guess is that people are doing player transfers so they can meet up with old friends, and play with them on the same server before the rush of game release.

World of Warcraft usage:

I know that xFire stats aren’t an accurate representation, especially since it really depends on the genre of the game you play for you to use xFire.  (first person shooter players use it alot to join their friend’s games easily).  But its still a pretty large sample of people to pull from, and with that large of a sample you can get a pretty decent estimate of a games usage or in this case subscriber retention rate.

With World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King coming out in less than 10 days from now how many of you people will pick up the expansion?  I’m already burnt out of World of Warcraft myself so I’ll be sticking with Warhammer Online for a while yet.

If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy yet, you can get it from New Egg for $37 bucks with the link below with free shipping.

Or from Amazon for $40, also with free shipping.

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Yes, you saw it correctly.  This guy has 36 World of Warcraft accounts, and pays $5711 a year in subscriptions.  If that isn’t crazy enough as it is.  This guy can play the accounts simultaneously using this setup:

Can you guys imagine playing against this guy in Alterac Valley with a main assist macro, and getting your face melted by 36 simultaneous frost shocks?  According to the post, he wants to raid some 10, and 20 man instances for gear as well as some battle grounds.

He even remembered to chain refer a friend himself so that he can powerlevel some other classes like druids/mages and priests so that he has different classes for raids/instances.  When Wrath of the Lich King comes out next month, he plans on picking up the game for all 36 accounts.  Which will cost him about $1500 plus tax.

If that isn’t a crazy addiction, I don’t know what else to tell you.  I prefer to be addicted cute World of Warcraft Cosplay like the ones from the recent Blizzcon 08.  Especially this elf girl:

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How’d you like to get paid to study a MMORPG game?  Well these guys somehow managed to convince people over at the  University of California Irvine to give them $100,000 dollars for a study on World of Warcraft.  Yea that’s right studying a pc game for college, what’s this world coming to.

So let me get this straight now, this prof Nardi wants to find out:

Chinese people play the more challenging form of World of Warcraft almost exclusively. They find the less challenging form of the game ‘boring.’ Here, about 50 percent play the challenging form of the game and there, about 95 percent do.

I’m not really sure what she means by ‘more challenging’.  The game can be pretty challenging if you don’t use mods to your game such as damage meters or threat meters on very aggro picky boss fights.  Also it might be downright hard for someone with lessor than optimal reflex skills to watch for heals or cures on other fights.  I wonder if that’s what she meant.

Nardi also wants to find out why Americans product far more mods to the game than their Chinese counter parts to ‘enrich the gaming experience’.  Can she not accept that Americans as a population are just plain lazy?  Also here’s a hint to that answer in her own words.

Nardi is a WoW fan who has already done lots of cultural research on a game that has 10 million players worldwide. As I noted in an earlier post, she spent time last year observing WoW gamers in the Internet cafes of Beijing.

Where exactly are majority of the players in China playing from?  The simple answer to it might just be that we play at home, and they play in internet cafes where they don’t allow mods to be installed on the computers.

So now that I’ve figured that out, do I get a sliced of that big $100,000 pie?

I wonder what she’ll be spending the money on.  Lets see, $900 for an Alar mount, and $10,000 to buy a World of Warcraft char.

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In the last month there’s been some buzz about the recent refer a friend feature in World of Warcraft.  For those of you that haven’t heard about it yet.  It has some new features that has makes leveling up to the end game pretty trivial, and one of those new features enabled someone to level up to 60 in 20 minutes or so.

Back about three years ago, leveling up to level 60 used to take quite a bit of time back when the game was first released.  In fact one of the first things I used to put up Google Adwords ads for was, when I was getting into making money online, for World of Warcraft leveling guides.  (Joana’s Horde leveling guide, and Brian Kopps alliance leveling guide).  In fact back then it took people an in game /played time between 5-8days.

Now fast forward to present time, with someone posting a video of a character leveling up to 60 with a /played time under 5 minutes.  How are they doing this?  With Blizzard’s new refer a friend benefits of course.

Lets take a look at the video:

Now you’re probably wondering, how the hell they managed to pull that off.  If you’re like me you might have stopped playing World of Warcraft a while back, and haven’t been keeping up on the ‘new features’.  So here is some, in regards to the refer a friend program, that might catch your attention.

For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases two months of game time, you will be able to give a character on the account you sent the invitation from an exclusive in-game zhevra mount. This unique mount can be claimed through the website, is only available to Recruit-A-Friend participants, and can only be applied to a single character.

Woo epic mount! Might not be as good as the $900 Alar phoenix mount, but still its something different. That is if you can call a striped horse with horse different.

1. Characters on both accounts can summon each other once per hour.
2. While adventuring with your linked friend/family member, you will each gain triple experience.
3. For every two levels the new player earns, the new player can grant one free level-up to a lower-level character played by the veteran player.

You catch that? Yup,TRIPLE EXPERIENCE when leveling while in the same party as a person you referred to the game.  Not only is it regular experience, but from quest experience as well.  They really are making the game easy now aren’t they?  But no wait that’s not all, read that line number 3, which explains how the person in the video gained 59 levels in 20 minutes.  Whats this?  Not only can you level at three times normal rates, but when you do level up you can give up to 35 of those ‘hard earned’ levels away.

Don’t get me wrong though, Blizzard seems to have put in quite a bit of stipulations to try and make it harder to use those benefits.  For example the triple experience only works if the linked players are in the same party, AND the same level.  If you’ve played WoW you’ll know how hard it is to maintain the same levels as someone else.  Especially if one dies, disconnects, or even goes away from keyboard to eat dinner.  The guy in the video up top had referred two friends, both of which had to level up past level 60(required level to give away levels), then have those friends give those levels to him.

I don’t know about you guys, but leveling up was the fun part of the game.  The part that bored me was the repetitive end game content.  The only thing this ‘experience on crack’ feature is going to do is get people to the end game content where they’ll be bored, and quit.  That’s my 2 coppers.  What do you guys think?

[Source] via [Massively]

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Blizzard has always made awesome cinematics trailers for their games as far back as I remember.  I remember being awed be Diablo 2’s awesome lifelike movie scenes.  This one looks like it has just been released by Blizzard not too long ago for World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

So I’m pretty sure you’re all just aching to see it so here it is:

Also if you want to download the Wrath of the Lich King Trailer in high definition follow this link here:

So as I was saying yesterday, I’m waiting for a good MMORPG to come out. I wonder if that means I’ll be going back to World of Warcraft again too? If you haven’t seen some of the features for the new expansion here’s a list of some of them:

If they do a good job with the epic sieges unlike Age of Conan, then I’ll probably be convinced to play this game. Also if you haven’t picked up a copy yet, here’s a link to Amazon.com so you can reserve a copy.

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