World of Whorecraft: Battle for Asseroth

[Xor]

I took a 7 day free trial and played for about an hour before uninstalling again. In some ways it was good seeing my old characters again, but the game just isn't fun anymore.

If you hate yourself enough. You can now pre-purchase Warlords of Draenor for 50 US Dollars. Alternatively if you want the world to know just how much of a sucker you are, you can buy the Digital Deluxe edition for 70 US dollars. The game will be released December the 20th this year. So what remains of their playerbase will have to suffer 9 more months of Mists of Pandaria.

Fifty dollars for an expansion? Fuck that. $40 already felt like a ripoff.

 

[DragoFireheart]

If you hate yourself enough. You can now pre-purchase Warlords of Draenor for 50 US Dollars. Alternatively if you want the world to know just how much of a sucker you are, you can buy the Digital Deluxe edition for 70 US dollars. The game will be released December the 20th this year. So what remains of their playerbase will have to suffer 9 more months of Mists of Pandaria.

holy shit I almost pissed myself reading that. :D

 

[Scruffy]

Fifty dollars for an expansion? Fuck that. $40 already felt like a ripoff.

lol just haev ur dad buy it for u

 

[Keshik]

Well they can release it earlier "on or before 12/20/14", but unlikely. I was expecting a release sooner than that.

Hm, must be a fun storm on the official forums, heh.

 

[Caim]

So what will Warlords of Draenor be about, actually? Something like with Hellscream escaping custody and fleeing to Draenor (didn't that place get teabagged with the scrotums of a million demons or something?) where he's going to make his own Hordeo with blackjack and hokers and hatefuck Azeroth to death because they ran out of interesting plots?

And for Warcraft fans: what COULD make an interesting plot for an expansion?

 

[Xor]

So what will Warlords of Draenor be about, actually? Something like with Hellscream escaping custody and fleeing to Draenor (didn't that place get teabagged with the scrotums of a million demons or something?) where he's going to make his own Hordeo with blackjack and hokers and hatefuck Azeroth to death because they ran out of interesting plots?

From what I understand, it involves time travel. So you're going back to Warcraft 1 and 2 era Draenor (which gives the opportunity to go back to Warcraft 1 and 2 era Azeroth). Could be good if they had a villain who didn't wear out his welcome two expansions ago.

And for Warcraft fans: what COULD make an interesting plot for an expansion?

Part of the problem here is that they're out of interesting villains (aside from Sargaras, who is a "hard mode only encounter in the last raid of the last expansion" kind of threat and the old gods, who I think they've just forgotten about), which is why they had to make one up from scratch. So I'm not really sure what they could do that taps the existing lore at this point.

If we had to have an expansion about time travel, why not explore multiple time periods instead of just one? There are plenty of historical events in the Warcraft universe that could be interesting to explore. Off the top of my head, the war of the ancients would make for an interesting raid at the very least and could probably also make up a zone or two. Also, a revamped Karazhan with the "mirrored" underground section that they hinted about before TBC and an insane Medivh as the boss would be a fantastic raid. That could be tied in with the event in Warcraft 1 where he's killed. The entire expansion could revolve around the infinite dragonflight where it turns out Nozdormu was actually behind it as a way to prevent his own death (or did they resolve that already? If so, it was a waste) with hints that an old god was behind it by corrupting him, only to have that old god emerge in the last patch after Nozdormu is defeated in some kind of shattered time labyrinth with references to all of Warcraft's past where you and historical characters battle the old god as it attempts to destroy time itself.

At the very fucking least, that sounds more interesting than Garrosh 2: Electric Boogaloo.

 

[Caim]

So what will Warlords of Draenor be about, actually? Something like with Hellscream escaping custody and fleeing to Draenor (didn't that place get teabagged with the scrotums of a million demons or something?) where he's going to make his own Hordeo with blackjack and hokers and hatefuck Azeroth to death because they ran out of interesting plots?

From what I understand, it involves time travel. So you're going back to Warcraft 1 and 2 era Draenor (which gives the opportunity to go back to Warcraft 1 and 2 era Azeroth). Could be good if they had a villain who didn't wear out his welcome two expansions ago.

And for Warcraft fans: what COULD make an interesting plot for an expansion?

Part of the problem here is that they're out of interesting villains (aside from Sargaras, who is a "hard mode only encounter in the last raid of the last expansion" kind of threat and the old gods, who I think they've just forgotten about), which is why they had to make one up from scratch. So I'm not really sure what they could do that taps the existing lore at this point.

If we had to have an expansion about time travel, why not explore multiple time periods instead of just one? There are plenty of historical events in the Warcraft universe that could be interesting to explore. Off the top of my head, the war of the ancients would make for an interesting raid at the very least and could probably also make up a zone or two. Also, a revamped Karazhan with the "mirrored" underground section that they hinted about before TBC and an insane Medivh as the boss would be a fantastic raid. That could be tied in with the event in Warcraft 1 where he's killed. The entire expansion could revolve around the infinite dragonflight where it turns out Nozdormu was actually behind it as a way to prevent his own death (or did they resolve that already? If so, it was a waste) with hints that an old god was behind it by corrupting him, only to have that old god emerge in the last patch after Nozdormu is defeated in some kind of shattered time labyrinth with references to all of Warcraft's past where you and historical characters battle the old god as it attempts to destroy time itself.

At the very fucking least, that sounds more interesting than Garrosh 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Huh, that actually sounds like it could be fun. From what I could tell the Old Gods never really gave two shits about the people of Azeroth (with the whole Orrey of Infinite Assfuckings and the accompanying raid in WotLK). Maybe they will continue with this without ruining the lore too much?

 

[J1M]

From Blizzcon:

The key theme of the expansion is "savage". It is about going to a savage world and surviving savage things.

Garrosh takes current technology back in time with the help of a rogue bronze dragon. He then gives the asskicking orcs of the past modern technology and they form the "Iron Horde", which invades present-day Azeroth when the Dark Portal of that alternate past is connected to the Dark Portal of present-day Azeroth.

Basically, Blizzard admits that they used to be way better at making awesome characters and wants to reuse characters that were long-dead. It also serves to cross-promote the movie they are making. It's ok that we kill this alternate version of heroes past since this new Iron Horde involves the orcs being racist and enslaving/killing other races instead of working together with them.

The raid tiers will be about tearing apart the Iron Horde, eventually facing Garrosh's father, Grommosh Hellscream. (Whose "primary timeline self" slew Mannoroth, freeing the orcs from their demonic blood curse.) The other point of note is that the alliance main city will be what eventually becomes the Black Temple from TBC, and we will get to see the orc push to exterminate that Draenei city, probably as the final raid zone. Savage.

 

[Wilian]

Savage in story only. It'll be savage just like WotLK was dangerous. AKA 1 manning 5-man quests because they were scared that people might die.

 

[J1M]

Savage in story only. It'll be savage just like WotLK was dangerous. AKA 1 manning 5-man quests because they were scared that people might die.

Don't be silly, they don't make group quests anymore!

 

[Wilian]

It was more of emphasising on how easy WotLK was despite us going into the heart of Northrend and in terms of story, facing the death itself. :p

 

[Caim]

It was more of emphasising on how easy WotLK was despite us going into the heart of Northrend and in terms of story, facing the death itself. :p

And it just keeps getting easier. People have been soloing the Lich King since level 85 (maybe even lower?), so doing it at level 100 should be a breeze.

 

[Wilian]

It was more of emphasising on how easy WotLK was despite us going into the heart of Northrend and in terms of story, facing the death itself. :p

And it just keeps getting easier. People have been soloing the Lich King since level 85 (maybe even lower?), so doing it at level 100 should be a breeze.

Well that's just natural progression in the game where you level up and content doesn't scale to your level. (Hue hue hue). There's nothing particulary wrong with being able to solo content that you outlevel by a large margin and gear. The problem is when the main content aimed at your current level and gear is so out of balance with player power that you breeze through them without any sort of thought or real input required beyond basic motoric capabilities for which WotLK was so notorious about. The reality of game never, ever matched up the supposed setting or location.

To be fair on MoP, it improved a little bit on this at least, even though it was nothing massive (mob hp/damage wasn't THAT much out of scale) and lack of group quests in MMO is just shameful. Though I can imagine they have very hard time to incentivize it due to fact that their modern every quest gives you top gear mentality. Why gather group when you get better item soon anyway?

One way to fix group questing would be making them actually hard and demand full well functioning group to win and then reward with entry max level blue gear you can wear on the spot. A bit like in how TBC there was bunch of hard 5 man group quests and the rewards were good enough to last 'til you got raid replacement.

 

[Angthoron]

What, while you can get free gear in 5-minute-long dungeons?

Blizzard needs to turn their whole current design philosophy upside down.

 

[J1M]

They have basically decided that group quests will be replaced by "scenarios", which are 3 person instances that don't require a specific group makeup. This might have seemed like a way to challenge small groups and help people find those on the same quest, but the scenarios aren't connected to the world in a way that makes sense and they aren't available until max level.

So you just find these large interesting sections of a zone that have nothing in them and later learn a scenario instance that resembles them.

 

[Angthoron]

Yeah and the challenge in that is non-existent anyway.

 

[Wilian]

I am one of those who thought that scenarios as substitute for group quests wouldn't be necessarily a bad idea as it'd give out rather customizable scenarios and apparently easy implementation for Blizzard to use to create lot of group content in that manner without having to worry about large scale world things.

Too bad they're only available at max level and from all that are out, every single one is soloable from get-go. So much for that idea.

As of the large empty but interesting sections of zone that actually serve no obvious purpose doesn't bother me. I personally would enjoy more flavour locations that are there just because without apparent usage. Not everything have to revolve around player necessarily, especially in MMO that tries to repersent a world where player is but a pawn among many.

 

[Echo Mirage]

What I found amazing today is that, despite Blizzard trying to focus more and more on PvP and world PvP in the upcoming expansion packs. The server populations are so utterly broken, across the board. With not one server having anything close to a balanced population. So what the hell is the point here?

 

[J1M]

What I found amazing today is that, despite Blizzard trying to focus more and more on PvP and world PvP in the upcoming expansion packs. The server populations are so utterly broken, across the board. With not one server having anything close to a balanced population. So what the hell is the point here?

The pvp zone you are talking about is cross-realm. So are most pve zones.

 

[Metro]

Yeah, a couple years ago they started with cross-realm linking so basically... realms are almost irrelevant (not sure if they did cross-realm auction houses yet but this would be the only relevant distinction). And apparently WoD isn't slated for release until Christmas or later? How long has it been since the last Mists content patch? Seems like at least a year. And still the Blizzdrones believe it every time they're told content will be coming out at a much faster rate! If anything content has been coming out at a slower rate (with less of it, too) ever since Burning Crusade. As Hearthstone gains speed and Heroes of the Storm releases so they can cash in on the MOBA craze I predict they'll dedicate even less time and money to WoW. Subscribers have shown they're willing to pay the same for less for years now. The game has devolved into Diablo with gated progression.

I am one of those who thought that scenarios as substitute for group quests wouldn't be necessarily a bad idea...

Problem is they now use them instead of five man dungeons. I believe WoD is shipping with only six five-mans (one of which might be revamped UBRS).

 

[Caim]

Why didn't they start with the cross-realm auctioning stuff from day 1? Too much traffic?

 

[Xor]

That's not the way the game was originally designed. They had to overhaul the server software to support cross-realm anything.

 

[Rahdulan]

It's kinda hilarious to what lengths Blizzard will go to avoid the PR fallout which follows news about server mergers even though some realms have been ghost towns for years. Oh, and this way they can charge for realm transfers.

 

[Angthoron]

I am one of those who thought that scenarios as substitute for group quests wouldn't be necessarily a bad idea...

Problem is they now use them instead of five man dungeons. I believe WoD is shipping with only six five-mans (one of which might be revamped UBRS).

And it's taking them until Q4 to release this? What the hell.

 

[Xor]

Wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard was moving people off the WoW team to work on other projects. Maybe they're finally getting ready to ramp up development on their next MMO and don't want WoW to compete with it, so they're planning on content-starving WoW to lower its population in anticipation of that project being finished probably a few years from now.