Posts Tagged ‘ WoW ’

SWTOR free, WoW loses a million

If you follow the news, you already know that SWTOR will become free-to-play in a month and that WoW has lost another million subscribers (down to 9 million globally).

The funny bit comes from Michael Pachter, a consultant and game industry pundit, who projects some amazing stats for this brave new world for no-subscriptions.

Ultimately, Pachter believes that Star Wars now has the potential to “attract at least 10 million MAUs indefinitely, with upside to perhaps 50 million.” He added, “Thus, we believe that contribution from the model shift could be significant for years to come.”

Yes, just imagine 10 million Jedi fighting against 40 million Sith. The force [of imagination] is strong with this one.

2012
08/07
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One percent talent

Another Blizzcon post, this time dealing with WoW’s new talent system. Or rather, lack of talent system:

Today’s Blizzcon announced many exciting things, including the removal of one of vanilla WoW’s crown jewels, the talent tree system. Completely gone. You now pick a “spec” and then get to pick one talent every 15 levels. No more points, no more trees.

Personally, I’m appalled at the this new direction. I have two hunters – one is Lvl 70, the other a Lvl 29 twink. I picked their talents in a very meticulous way. The twink, of course, was min-maxed with a few tweaks that complemented my playstyle.

The Lvl 70 Hunter with whom I played both PvE and PvP, I specced in Marksmanship despite the fact that both the Beastmaster and Survival specs offered superior stats when it came to PvE and PvP respectively. I played on a roleplay server, so I think it was OK for me to be a dwarf marksman with a gun. I briefly had to switch to a bow (higher DPS) but I worked tirelessly to collect the needed ingriedients for a Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer.

Talents were the ONLY way to customize your character and now this is gone. The equipment came and went but at least your SPEC stayed the same. Everyone who knew me, knew I was specced Marksmanship just as they knew I often kept my pet at my side in instances to serve as off-tank, if the need arises. Since I did most of the DPS, the pet could be kept on a leash for 10 or 20 seconds with no big decrease in DPS. (In vanilla WoW, the pathfinding for pets was so bad, that this was the wise thing to do.)

Blizzard’s background in RTS games has made them blind to the fact that RPGs are about CHOICE and not about balance. In Starcraft 2, I want balance but in WoW I want to be a dwarf marksman with a gun. Take away my gun and I’m done.

2011
10/30
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EA lowers MMO expectations

GameIndustry reports today that EA has stated the following about its upcoming MMO: Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR).

EA’s CEO John Riccitiello said:

500,000 subscribers will be substantially profitable, but it’s not the sort of thing we would write home about… Anything north of one million subscribers is a very profitable business. Essentially it turns on a dime from being quite sharply negative in terms of its EPS impact to positive the day the product ships.

500k subs is low even compared to Warhammer, which had over 1M presales, let alone users. The real problem is that after the initial free month, most new MMOs implode leaving both players and publishers with a bitter taste.

So what’s John up to? Two things: 1) manage investor expectations who hope every new MMO is the mythical WoW-killer; and 2) inflate stock price when 500,000 sales are surpassed (almost certain it will sell more than that). What happens 6 months post-launch is left to EA’s next CEO.

Update: Sure enough, the stock was up 16% today!

2011
02/03
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Everybody hates healers

I just stumbled across this post form Ghostcrawler, who’s got the unthankful job to explain to the WoW healers why Blizzard hates healers.

Now, before you get into his 2-page post and the 600+ comments below it, let’s make one thing very clear: Everybody hates Healers! Even healer hate healers, judging by the comments.

The reason is quite simple: healing was never meant to be a player activity. The fun factor simply isn’t there. Yes, you had MediPacks in Doom and a good player needed only a few, while bad players couldn’t pass the level because they always got hurt more that the MediPacks could heal. Similarly in Diablo 2, a bad player had to go through two dozen full rejuvenation potions in order to kill Diablo.

Healers became part of the MMO triad (tank-healer-nuker) because game designers decided that the way to create a challenge for a 20-person raid was to bump up the boss’ hit points to a bajillion. Even if the boss hit for 1HP, it took 30 minutes to kill him, so the tank needed a lot of healing. In practical terms, someone had to push the heal button every once in a while alt-tabbing to watch Starcraft replays on Youtube.

The solution is radical but simple: Remove the healer PC and substitute it with a NPC (i.e. a real heal-bot). Make it upgradeable, so it keeps up in level and that’s it. Most people (I know) have put those conveyer jobs of the industrial age behind them, no need to re-apply for the Healer position. At least, that’s how it is at Riftforge.

P.S. To make matters worse, most healers are females played by males. So there, they are no single women either.

2011
01/22
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