The Funeral of WoW Gold

Preview Weekend was such a success with the community that we had two dedicated Allakhazam forum members eager to talk about their experiences and how they see the state of the game at this time. Please welcome Tenebrae and Allegory as they talk about Preview Weekend!
Please introduce yourself and tell us what your favorite realm, army, and careers are so far in WAR.
Tenebrae: “My name is Tenebrae. In the MMO community most people know me as Tepetkhet or Tep. I started off playing D&D in high school in the 80’s (yes, I’m older). My daughter got World of Warcraft ( Buy its Currency: wow gold ) for a Xmas present from her father. I was sucked in by the shinies and bought my own copy shortly after…and that was my first experience with a true MMORPG.
For Warhammer Online, Dark Elves seem to be a logical choice. I like the imagery and the ferocity. I tend to side with the “evil” characters because, gosh darn it; they just have better fashion sense. I’m really digging on the Witch Elves and the Disciples of Khaine so far.”
Allegory : “I’m a long time poster of the Allakhazam forums. I found the site a few years ago when I was searching for FFXI information, and I it has carried me through FFXI, WoW, Lotro, and hopefully WAR. I plan to roll a Greenskin Shaman, but I have to say Runepriest might actually be my favorite career.”
Tenebrae and Allegory talk further about the community, their preferences in choosing a realm, and more. Click on the “More…” link below to read the rest of the interview. Thank you Tenebrae and Allegory!
Do you have any previous experience or familiarity with the Warhammer universe? Tenebrae: “Not really. When I was into D&D, I knew some people who were into the tabletop gaming. I tended to shy away from the guys playing with “painted metal Barbies”, though, and besides, dice were cheaper.”
Allegory: “The PvP focus was what initially caught my attention. There were a lot of MMOs coming out and I knew a lot of them would flop. WAR was the only game where the updates continually impressed me. I never felt like any of the revealed information about the game was taking it in the wrong direction. Once I finally had the chance to play it during Preview Weekend I knew I was hooked.”
What can you tell the community about the game that will give them more of an understanding of what to expect when they first get a chance to play?
Tenebrae: “This is a world at WAR! It’s important to understand that. Everywhere around you there is conflict. Battles rage both large and small. If you are squeamish about battle or torture and hope the two factions can get along and hold hands, it will be apparent right from the start that this is not the game for you.”
Allegory: “First and foremost WAR is a PvP game. Mythic is offering “PvE servers,” but even those will involve a healthy amount of PvP. If all you want out of an MMO is to grind scripted AI enemies in encounters that are designed for the player to win then WAR will probably not be your cup of tea. If you want dynamic and fair player based combat then WAR is definitely worth your time to investigate. Second is that the game also focuses on convenience. WAR tries to make it as easy as possible to do what you want to do. 1. Respeccing is free; there is no penalty for testing different masteries or switching often from a PvE spec to PvP. You swap your starting zone in as little as ten minutes. 2. Your friend rolled a Dwarf, you rolled an Empire character, and you want play the first 10 levels together? No problem, just do your first quest for some cash, walk 5 minutes to the flight master, fly to his zone instantly, and then walk minutes to his starting camp. 3. Scenarios are easy to join and leave. There is no need to travel to a city or outpost to talk to an npc. You click the button on your mini-map to join a scenario, quest while you wait in the queue, and then join the scenario. The best part is that when you are done with the scenario you spawn exactly where you left off. You can leave in the middle of a quest, do your scenario, and then instantly pick up the quest again. 4. Quest locations are marked on your map. Need to retrieve 5 skulls from the tomb of doom, but don’t know where that is? No problem, just head towards the big red circle on your map. There is no need to alt tab to a quest website for each and every task you need to do. 5. No exp loss or durability loss from death. When you die in WAR there is a 10% max hp debuff that last for 10 minutes. The good news is that when you select to respawn (no corpse run), you spawn right by a healer npc who offers to remove debuffs for a very minor fee, certainly less that what most other games charge you.”
The Realm of Order is considered to be the “good” faction, while Destruction is considered to be the “evil” faction. Do you get a sense that the two sides are unique enough to satisfy those that wish to play a good or evil character?
Tenebrae: “Yes! The quests introduce you to what is going on and give some information about the race you have chosen. Each faction has career choices mirrored in the opposing faction, so there are enough similarities that choices can be based on roleplay / lore or aesthetic reasons.”
Allegory: “They definitely have a very distinctive atmosphere. The Chaos zones definitely have a dreary and malevolent appearance, and theHigh Elves have their bright and shiny structures. But when you look into the lore of Warhammer you see that really no realm is truly the good side. the Empire isn’t fending off the evil Chaos hordes ; they want to wipe them out! Witch Hunters are inquisitors who would turn in a friend if they showed the slightest sign of heresy. The aesthetic of good vs. evil is there, but the story changes as you go deeper into the lore.”
Some say that WAR looks a lot like world of warcraft
; however, Blizzard actually borrowed some elements from the Warhammer universe. What are your impressions of the graphics compared to other MMOs?
Tenebrae: “The graphics in WoW tend to have a cartoon-like feel. I have found the graphics in Warhammer Online to be much more beautiful and complex. The gear alone wins aesthetic points in my books; especially since right off the bat you get a chance to dye your armor (with enough wow gold). Even the “newbie” gear looks epic in Warhammer Online. The screenshots speak for themselves. I have been showing screenshots to my friends and co-workers who don’t even play MMOs and they are considering picking it up based on that alone.”
Allegory: “The comparison of WAR with WoW is very valid. Warcraft stole their lore from Warhammer, and WAR stole many gameplay ideas and styles from WoW. I guess Blizzard and Mythic can call it a draw now. I like WAR’s graphical style a lot. It’s a very stylized look, and not too dissimilar to WoW’s. I don’t like hyper realistic graphics in MMORPGs. If I wanted to see a very realistic looking character in fantasy garb I would visit the medieval fair. WAR lets you watch your “funny looking” goblin beat up a “funny looking” dwarf because that is entertaining. I laugh every time my goblin does his Homer Simpson spin on the ground dance.”
Have you picked a guild yet? What kinds of guild features do you really like and dislike about WAR?
Tenebrae: “I haven’t had a chance to explore the guild features yet. I run a PvE raiding guild in World of Warcraft, so chances are I will create an offshoot in Warhammer Online and run it myself. ;)”
Allegory: “I liked this game enough that I put forth the effort to create my own guild. Warhammer offers several tools to do what players have previously been doing outside of the guild. WAR lets you form formal alliances with other guilds, mark dates on your own guild calendar, the ability to tax members (boo), and a guild vault. Two features stand out the most, guild banners and claiming objectives. Banners offer another element of strategy and customization to guilds. Banner may be carried or at later levels planted in the ground to provide an aoe group buff to your guild members based on the tactics you have slotted. Banners also let guilds claim keeps they have taken over. When your guild takes an objective that benefits your realm everyone will know that it was your guild that did it.”
WAR has been building a strong sense of group combat since it was first announced. To be successful in this the game must support strong community tools. What features do you find the most useful and which ones do you wish could be improved, or even added into the game in future expansions?
Tenebrae: “The Public Quest system could use some work. There is not a very social feeling to the game at the moment. The fact that there isn’t an “official” forum system means that there is also not a central community and so a lot of the information and fans are spread out over many different boards. I think I am in the minority in my opinion of the public quest system. It’s a great idea because it DOES allow solo players and anti-socials to accomplish quests and gain rewards. In my short time playing, I didn’t see anything yet where I needed to group up or where I was rewarded for doing so. Heck, people didn’t even know how to send tells to others and people weren’t even talking in the general chat…”
Allegory: “As I mentioned earlier the game provides lots of catalysts for grouping. Open groups and public quest are both tools that strengthen access to group activities. One option I would like to see added at a later time is the option to put a tag by your open group stating its purpose. This would make it easier to join a group focusing on the type of activity you want to do.”
Give us your more exciting and disappointing experiences during Preview Weekend.
Tenebrae: “Most exciting: Logging in and being able to select a server. Serious close second: Seeing a dark elf army pouring out of a Black Ark with a hydra leading the way.
Most disappointing: That I was exiting out of the game when the hydra was coming out and didn’t get a screenshot!!!
Serious close second: No Black Guard. I can’t wait to see them in game.”
Allegory: “The greatest disappointment for me was in the lack of responsiveness of the abilities, which they are currently fixing. As a healer it is very important that the instant I finish casting a heal the target receives its effect. Too many times I would find my target had died in a scenario in the half second I finished casting and when they affect went off. Thankfully this issue is being addressed. The highlight of my Preview Weekend was when a few guilds got together near the end of the weekend and we took all of the tier 2 greenskin/dwarf objectives and keeps. We almost took control of the entire zone. It was definitely a thrill!”
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Game Informer Magazine
“Diablo III”
PLATFORM: PC
STYLE: 1-Player Action/RPG (Multiplayer TBA)
PUBLISHER: Blizzard Entertainment
DEVELOPER: Blizzard Entertainment
RELEASE: TBA
Whenever Blizzard announces a new game, it’s an event. At this year’s Worldwide Invitational in
Paris, the esteemed developer revealed its next project: “Diablo III.” While this demonic apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Blizzard is doing what it does best: refining the design and polishing the gameplay until it sparkles.
The general idea of clicking on monsters until they pop like loot pinatas hasn’t changed. Likewise, randomly generated levels punctuated by set-piece boss fights are back – with the addition of the occasional scripted event. However, everything that surrounds these core tenets has gotten a makeover.
A new health mechanic headlines the gameplay changes. Rather than recycling the potion-chugging gameplay seen in most action/role-playing titles since the original “Diablo,” “Diablo III’s” monsters occasionally drop health orbs that restore a portion of your entire party’s hit points when touched. As lead designer Jay Wilson explained it, this results in more exciting “positional gameplay” where players have an incentive to charge headlong into a pack of monsters to get the health they need, or try to lure the enemies away from the health orbs. Ideally, this throws another twist into the endless hack n’ slash to keep the experience grind from becoming too repetitive.
One of Blizzard’s goals is to encourage players to use more than the one or two skills that most past “Diablo” character builds utilized. To facilitate this, a more modern MMORPG-like interface replaces “Diablo’s” traditional two-button system. From what we saw, it closely resembles “Titan Quest,” with numbers bound to hotkeys and a very clean, simplistic heads-up display leaving the screen free to showcase the constant carnage. Wilson admitted to exploring a “world of warcraftt”-like customizable interface for “Diablo III,” but the idea was ultimately rejected as adding unnecessary and undesirable complexity to what Blizzard envisions as a streamlined, more simplistic role-playing game.
Blizzard refused to discuss character progression, other than to say that the team is exploring several different ways of handling the acquisition and improvement of skills. Ultimately, the goal is to offer plenty of differentiation between the five hero classes, but the skill system’s specifics are still under wraps.
The two classes Blizzard showcased, the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor, seem like the kind of powerful, unique heroes that players expect out of “Diablo.” Leaping in and out of combat and dispatching swarms of enemies with a giant hammer and dual-wielded axes, the Barbarian appears very similar to the “Diablo II” version. The Witch Doctor, by contrast, fights with the assistance of pets and disease- and decay-based magic powers. Horrifying groups of monsters with a fear skill, bombing them with lobbed fireballs, and swarming them with plagues of locusts (which also spread to nearby enemies and the Doctor’s own pets, draining the life of baddies and augmenting the pets’ attacks), the Witch Doctor is a fitting addition to the “Diablo” universe. Blizzard was mum on the identity of the final three classes.
Moreso than in most other games of its ilk, “Diablo III” has different enemy types working together to create new combat situations. We witnessed shield-bearing skeletons guarding highly dangerous archers, which were dispatched by first stunning them with a massive shockwave to remove the nigh-impenetrable shields from the equation. Without the added protection, the soldiers and their archer compatriots were easily annihilated. Wilson stated that this sort of cooperation is something players will see throughout the quest.
Blizzard’s consistently excellent art direction continues to wring the best presentation possible out of the rendering technology. The graphics speak for themselves, though you have to see the game in motion to truly appreciate how much the smooth animations, environmental destruction, and integrated Havok physics help bring the world to life. Sending a zombie flying into a wall and watching its limbs flail lifelessly as it crashes to the ground is much more visceral and immediate than seeing yet another pre-canned death animation.
For our money, the “Diablo III” first look was worth the wait. Now we just have to endure the months (hopefully not years) between seeing this glimpse of the game and playing it for ourselves.
For more video game news and reviews, check out the latest issue of Game Informer or visit the magazine’s Web site at www.gameinformer.com.
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A couple of guys with way too much time on their hands rigged up a contraption that translates running around in World of Warcraft (Currency: wow gold ) to a real-life experience, risking life, limb and dignity in the process.
Aaron and Eli of ManaPotions.com took it upon themselves to conduct an “RL Race Across Azeroth,” modifying a pair of treadmills to let them actually experience an in-game run through World of Warcraft. “We’ve always wondered what it would be like to run the same distance in the real world that we run every day in world of warcraft
,” the pair wrote on their website. “We had been wanting to connect a treadmill to Warcraft and calibrate the speed for a long time. Probably since we started calling Warcraft “RunCraft” because neither of us had mounts.”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be quite that simple. After searching the World of Warcraft forums to determine a “stock character” running speed of 12 MPH, the pair bought two cheap treadmills and wrote a script allowing their speed to be sensed by a mouse. But as it turned out, they were unable to get the mouse to track at much more than four MPH, and so were forced to incorporate bicycle tires, duct tape, mouse pads and another custom script to get the job done.
To ensure the integrity of the science, the pair also donned Warcraft-style costumes, including swords, elf ears and neon-colored wigs, as well as “the cheapest heart monitors [they] could find.” They elected to run from the gates of Shadowglen, through Dolanaar to the sentries of Darnassus, using level 1-2 elves to ensure an appropriate risk of attack along the way. They maintained a fairly even running pace, although not without some difficulty. “About three minutes in, my heart rate reached over 205 BPM, and my max is around 195 BPM,” Aaron reported. “I had to slow down to a walk because I thought I was going to pass out. Running in WoW is no joke.”
The duo also attempted to test other actions commonly engaged in while running in World of Warcraft, with consistently poor results. “Drawing a sword? Fail. Drawing a bow? Fail. Drinking spring water? Choke, and then fail. Eating an apple? Crunch, choke, apple chunks everywhere, fail,” they wrote.
Ah, science. You are indeed a cruel mistress. A full report of the wig-wearing “RL Race Across Azeroth,” including a video of the whole ugly thing, is available here.
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Mythic VP and lead “Warhammer Online” designer Mark Jacobs said it wouldn’t take a billion dollars for a competing MMO to take on “World of Warcraft” (Currency: wow gold )— maybe only $100 million.
“When certain people throw out ridiculous numbers, you know they’re throwing out ridiculous numbers because they want to scare off competition or they want to make themselves seem invincible and that sort of nonsense,” he said, referring to a statement Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick made at an investor meeting earlier this year.
“Realistically, if you’re going into this space for the first time, and you want to compete with ‘WoW’ and you want to compete with us — because we’re going into that same space — you’ve got to make sure that you have at least 100 million dollars,” he said.
When I sat down with Jacobs last week during a demo of the game, we talked about what makes an MMO successful. Having worked in the industry creating MUDs in the ’80s, online games in the ’90s, and Mythic’s biggest hit “Dark Age of Camelot” in 2001, he had some advice for those wanting to make it in the MMO business.
So why is $100 million the magic number?
“The reason [you need $100 million] is that no real first-timer has ever succeeded with these games,” he said. “And when I mean succeeded, no first-timer has gone in and said, ‘Okay, I can do this in two or three years and actually do it where it comes out on time and on budget. So it is really tough.”
Jacobs said part of problem with competing against “world of warcraft
” is that the game has a head start on content with all its expansion packs. “[Blizzard president] Mike Morhaime said when you’re competing with ‘WoW,’ you’re not competing with ‘WoW’ at launch,” Jacobs explained. “You’re competing with ‘WoW’ in 2008 or 2009 with all the additional content. That is absolutely true. That’s what we did with ‘Camelot,’ that’s what Sony did with ‘EverQuest’ and that’s what we’re going to do with ‘Warhammer.’ So it will get more and more difficult every year for somebody to come in and compete with whoever the leaders are.”
He also told me that it takes three to four years to create an MMO, and that $100 million is needed not just for development of a market-competitive title, but also for a safety net.”If you don’t want to compete with these games, then certainly you could do it for less,” he said. ”It’s 100 million if they want to be sure that when they mess up, that they have the money to recover,” he clarified. “A lot of start-ups fail because they run out of money. It’s not because they don’t work hard; it’s like ‘Oops, it took an extra year or two, now what do we do?’ If you look at the history of successful MMOs every one of them, except for ‘Camelot,’ took longer than was expected.”
asked if Mythic’s parent company EA spent $100 million on “Warhammer Online.” “No, but you look at what we did spend, it was lot of money,” he said. Jacobs would only tell me that they’ve spent south of $100 million on “Warhammer Online,” and that’s because he and his team have the experience and the technology behind the game. “We are one of the most experienced MMO teams in the industry, and we had to delay the game obviously more than once,” he said. “And if we had that happen, when you have an experienced team with great tech who’s done this before, how much harder is that for somebody who’s never done it? No matter how talented the team is, they’re going to make mistakes.”
With EA and the resources backing “Warhammer Online,” I asked Jacobs how one would measure a successful MMO in the age of “WoW” with its 11 million worldwide subscribers. “I would say we don’t have to get anywhere near that number to be considered successful,” he said. “Would I like us to be number one? Well, of course. Do we have to be number one to be successful? No. I want us to be no less than number two; that would make me very happy.” For the number two spot, Jacobs reasoned that “Warhammer” would need at least a half-million subscribers, which he guessed was close to what “Final Fantasy” and “EverQuest
2” have now. “Let’s just say north of half a million would mean we’re successful. Now how a far north? I wouldn’t mind being a little bit cold.”

According to Jacobs, another way to measure success is to look at the number of servers a game has added in a six-month period. “The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble — that’s not a healthy sign for an MMO,” he said, citing Sony’s January-released “Pirates of the Burning Sea” as a recent example. “It will be the same for ‘Warhammer.’ Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”
But ultimately, Jacobs said they can’t worry too much about the competition. “Activision Blizzard, it’s just another company with just another game,” he said. “It’s a big game, it’s a great game that’s made a lot of money and made people very happy but it’s just somebody else to compete with. It doesn’t phase us; we’ll do what we need to do.”
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Gravitas Gaming continues the ongoing trend of organizations acquiring World of Warcraft (Currency: wow gold ) teams with their pickup of the Duelists.The American team has been solid this year, placing fourth at MLG San Diego and second at MLG Orlando. They also have a second place finish at the CGS Arena Finals.In regards to leaving former team Frag Dominant, DJ “Celex” Roggenkamp said, “We felt like we were giving more than we were receiving.”However, he notes that the whole team is excited about the move to Gravitas.”We can’t wait to play under the GG name and hopefully carry on the same success we have been having.”The team is currently preparing for MLG Dallas.The Gravitas Gaming WoW roster:
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