Is Wrath of the Lich King good?

[TheElf]

As you remember, I tend to explain, if there are gold sellers in a game, there are people who buy the gold and / or powerleveling. And if they buy the powerleveling they pay other people to play the game for them. Most of these people either don't enjoy leveling / getting gold in the game, so they aren't happy with some parts of the game, or feel they have no chance to get to the content they want to see, and buying gold and powerleveling is their attempt to solve the problem.

Such problems aren't normal. World of Warcraft was made to be an "acceptable" game for all, and not an excellent for a few. And if it can attract enough people, the size of he community will attract even more and the game will grow that way too. Also when you judge a feature you shouldn't only judge how good it is, but also what players would think about it?

Where is the difference? Look at instances as an example. To me, instances and "replayability" isn't a good thing. Why? From a roleplaying perspective doing te same thing, killing the same important person again and again in same battle isn't something that is part of the story, and we speak about a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game.

And people who like World of Warcraft and speak about "what is the best MMORPG" with Guild Wars fans point out instancing prevents you from encountering other groups, so takes away some massively multiplayer element as well. But instancing makes the life of the developers easier. Much easier. To make a game Massively Muliplayer you need lots of players in your game world, to make this feasible you would need enough adventuring areas to support this population.

A big enough area would present 3 challenges for the designer: How to optimize travel to allow you to visit various areas? How would you make sure your players will be in different parts of the world? And how to design this amount of content. As you see this problem is hard to handle, but there are different approaches to fix it. One of them is instancing.

Since multiple copies of same place is created on demand, there is no need to "design" all copies. Saves work. No quesion about travel. And You can't have a lot of people in a single instance. You avoided the whole problem easily.

When they speak about replayability they speak about grinding, doing the same thing over and over, even if it is boring. You can undestand how repetitive tasks lead to problems like powerleveling services. As you see the high replay potential for an instance is a mixed blessing. But for many players: Instances are the places where they can do something with a group (yes, key to multiplayer experience) and get decent loot so they are happy with more instances, right?

As you can see this coin has many sides. With The Burning Crusade we got heroic instances, a way to make instances adjust to your level, and in Wrath of The Lich King we see "hard mode" for some bosses. This option makes instances better for players since they can adjust difficulty. Sadly they don't auto adjust and old instances don't have this option. And there is only two difficulty levels. And with loot that can scale with your level, it is hard to say: it would be too hard to make auto adjusting dungeons possible.

Sadly BoA loot is somewhat limited, and I am unsure if it would help with gear problems of high level alts. As you can guess my feelings are mixed about this. But it can be a nice improvement since it can reduce the amount of work you put in a new character.

Sadly there is no crossrealm crossfcation mailing system. So BOA loot cannot help you if you plan to move to a new realm or faction, so doesn't help with population related problems either.

But there is one thing that can help with these problems: Death Knights. if you can start at level 55, that can help a bit with leveling your new alts, and I think this is an important change. It is a strong class for solo PVE, and it can be realy good to support other characters on a new realm. Sadly most player made guides assume when you start a death knight, you have a higher level character to support him.

Death Knight is strong in many areas, good at soloing, but shouldn't be "universaly strong"in parties or raids, the balance here is important, and I think the new hero class works well.

And if you start playing with one, you can see a new feature: Phased areas. Where there are multiple different version of the same area present, and while doing some quests a zone can look different from its normal look, ad it can be goo to expand the playable world without the problems mentioned above. It can add to the story, and can be fun.

While videos are used in most games, in most MMORPGs you only see them in the intro. And besides these ideas we can see player controlled siege engines (we seen such things in other games before) which makes the expansion a good value for your money.

[zergnase]

no clue who good wow is at all. but i know one of my friends who is playing his wow deathknight know... and he can´t fly in <some region> and is trying to level up to <something near 70ish???> pay heaaaps of gold so he can finaly fly...

[zergnase]

gryphons with onboard navi system ... funky

[TheElf]

Only 1000 gold or so, I think? but you haven't told me the name of the region.

[zergnase]

iirc something with "cold" in it ? maybe totally worng...

he needed 3000 for his deathdragon?

and then more to fly in whereever region and a couple more levels there

[alioshin]

WOW is growing booring every day
I am indeed looking for a good replacement to play untill AION is released !!!!!!

[zergnase]

AION ?

o0

what is that about? setting etc..

can you give me a short overview ?

[alioshin]

I will do better

Aion: The Tower of Eternity

I am extremely positive about this game for many various reasions:
1) It seems to be focused on RPG and not on Monster-slashing
2) The Backgroung, which u can almost fully review at the above link, is intresting: Angels and Deamons struggling for the control of thier Plane witha 3rd faction, the dragons, putting on its own plan and mechanics.
3) the Graphic and the character customization, they are PRO !
4) last, it cames from the same company who have already stuck the market with titles like : GUILD WARS and TABULA RASA (2 excellent MMORPG, imho)

[TheElf]

I am not that happy with Guild Wars to say the least, so for me this is a reason against Aion. But I think you can see my reasons agains it already

[zergnase]

sounds interesting will AION be paid like Guild wars?

once bought, you can play it online as long as you want without additional fee? or is it fee-based again?