Posted On Friday, April 11th, 2008 By Jay
I read an article over at Wolfshead Online. Go ahead and read that then come back.
One can’t ignore the key points in that article when it comes to WoW. WoW is a niche MMO. Its primary market is everyone! How is that possible. Simple. This game isn’t for just one set of customers(hardcore, casual, pvp, raid) its for each and every one of them. This stance is definitely commendable. Financially it is the most successful, it is the bar with which to judge all future projects. But who cares?
The MMO community, and more specifically is gamer base, is used to niche games. We’ve just never seen this niche. This market, the mass market has never been targeted. Take the following 4 mmos(there are 100s, these are examples I’m familiar with that you the reader may not know about) City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Maple Story and Everquest. Each of these was a niche product. Each dev house internally(this can never be verified) that sometimes and with some gamers, this game might not be for you.
Risen from Alleria made this statement. Continue Reading
Posted On Friday, April 11th, 2008 By Jay
I’m a big fan of the balancing of Starcraft. The asymetrical warfare. The absolute efficiency and synergy of each races units was amazing.
Shamus Young Stacraft Study
Starcraft historically is the best RTS ever made. Something that always nibbled at the back of my mind was the lack of assymetry in WoW. Vanilla wow had an attempt at assymetry with the Shaman/Paladin classes but forsake that route and gave both classes to either side with its first expansion. The purposeful choice on the part of Blizzard to equalize both sides has merit from a business stand point. Attract the most amount of customers and alienate non of them.
Posted On Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 By Jay
I was really excited by the prospect of the Nagrand PVP daily. I tried it out and was sorely disappointed.
Pretend La la land!
Defeat ten baddies, not too bad eh? Earn a wee bit of honor, 200ish and a couple gold. What do you have to do? Defeat 10 enemies in Halaa. Super easy!
Actual Result
Unlike BGs where players consent to PvP, in the open world players rarely commit 100% to pvp. That is an issue in and of itself, perhaps another post in the future. On to Nagrand! Here are the problems with Halaa:
Grave yards are not close if you don’t hold Halaa. Considering the defense spawns directly in town(which is a huge benefit), the distance of the graveyards on the attack are a huge deal.
Players are accepting this quest with the mentality that it is a quest and is easy to accomplish. The issue here is player expectation versus perception.
The open world pvp quests are competing with the new dailies. Why bother spending 15-45 minutes getting ten kills when you can spend that exact amount of time earning 150 gold. Risk versus reward isn’t a good way to Continue Reading
Posted On Monday, April 7th, 2008 By Jay
Braids over at Out of Mana beat me to the punch. Here is an excellent article on how to gear up to be competitive in PvP.
Posted On Monday, April 7th, 2008 By Jay
Last week with much debating, we reformed our 3v3. PWM is our latest foray and we loved it. I found the class composition to be very complementary. We went 11-6. Very successful week. Here are my observations.
Kill the hunter.
Just do it. Our first match we went after another target first, lock and pet I believe to lock down the fears. The hunter own’d me in about 5 seconds. There was nothing I could do, I even pillar danced fairly well. From this point forward we destroyed every hunter first. When we killed the hunter, we won. A common group was hunter/lock/X. We killed then in this order.
I’m at my best when I can perform at my best.
We won every match when my team mates protected me from nasties. Those nasties include: Hunters, Warlocks, Rogues and Warrior. In that order. Every other class I can 1v1 effectively while they take out a target. Of particular note, Frost Nova > Warrior. This is the single best priest defense. I know alot of magesmage, use frost mage to protect your team against warriors.
already Continue Reading
