Cross-Realm Dungeon Feature Coming Soon

Originally Posted by Tyrianth

Since when are we talking about transfers? This thread is about the new realid feature. Raids are not included in this.

Again there are 11 end-game heroics in this game. With 4 friends you can queue for any dungeon you want. With the instances taking an average of 45 minutes, i think you'll have more than enough instancing to do.

You cannot queue for any dungeon you don't meet the ilevel requirements for regardless of how many people queue with you. This is about paying to play with your friends and I was making a comparison between this service and the paid character transfer service and the cost of playing with those friends.

You're being forced to pay to play with your friends on other servers simply to run instances, and if you choose to start on a new server, you're still paying to play to level/gear a new character, and once you're there and gear/leveled if you still want to play with characters from your original server that's more time that you have to put in to keeping the original character up to par, and if you decided to server transfer, you're paying a server transfer fee to play with the friends you choose and an additional service fee in the form of this new realid service to pay with the friends that you may have left on your original server. You are absolutely positively paying to play with your friends in every possible imaginable and conceivable scenario in which you would want to play with your friends.

Originally Posted by Snes

Not going to play star wars myself as I'm not big on the franchise, but yes, let Blizzard go through with this and slowly destroy themselves, it's for their own good.

Guild Wars 2 is where it's at.

This debacle just confirms that Blizzard is sliding down the hill to failure. It's been seven years and the game has had a good run--the industry needs change. No king rules forever.

Originally Posted by Kaeleena

You cannot queue for any dungeon you don't meet the ilevel requirements for regardless of how many people queue with you. This is about paying to play with your friends and I was making a comparison between this service and the paid character transfer service and the cost of playing with those friends.

Actually you can. Believe it or not, there was a time when people had to find 4 additional people and RUN to the instance of THEIR choosing. If you still decide to use these archaic methods, your ilvl doesn't matter. So once again: no, there is no "catching up" to run heroics with friends

Originally Posted by Tyrianth

Actually you can. Believe it or not, there was a time when people had to find 4 additional people and RUN to the instance of THEIR choosing. If you still decide to use these archaic methods, your ilvl doesn't matter. So once again: no, there is no "catching up" to run heroics with friends

Dude, heroics have lockouts, you're limited to running the heroics one time per day even if you have 4 people to carry you. What do you not get about that?

Originally Posted by Kaeleena

Dude, heroics have lockouts, you're limited to running the heroics one time per day even if you have 4 people to carry you. What do you not get about that?

About 8.25 hours of gameplay a day.

edit: read that as "What do you get out of that?"

Still even with lockouts, you can run all the instances for gear / points. Which would take more than 8 hours.

Originally Posted by Tyrianth

about 8.25 hours of gameplay a day.

This feature still won't allow you to do that because you'll still need to meet the ilevel requirements because the feature functions through the already existing LFD tool.

And you don't get any valor points if you don't use the LFD tool.

Edit: Either way, you're paying a fee(whether it's through additional game time or paid character transfer fee) on top of your subscription fee to play with your friends, and you're forced to choose between them.

Originally Posted by Boubouille

Cross-Realm Dungeon Feature Coming Soon

Originally Posted by Slorkuz (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

This makes me sick. How many more "premium services" are they going to come up with, just to find ways to soak up your money? I guess it makes sense though... paid faction changes, race changes, recustomizations, pixelated items (mounts and vanity pets), and so on...

Is this the scheme they came up with the make up for the lack of revenue due to the loss of 600,000 players?

Whatever.

Originally Posted by Dexiefy

note to self...
dont ever buy any game that activision have branded... unless you want to pay for EVERYTHING other than basic game that is overpriced as hell anyway to begin with.

i just really hope that blizz will snap out of this shit and break any deals with activision they might have... this piece of shit company will destroy the greatest game making company in history :/

I'd actually like to chime in here -

It's not just activision. I'm honestly surprised that Activision-Blizzard is so late jumping on this bandwagon. Console makers have been getting away with this kind of crap for years. EA apparently figured it out as well. (I'm very unhappy with Dragon Age 2, it feels like they sold me half a game, and I'm betting I'll get the other half as DLC).

Digital Distribution has cut costs for software companies to next to nothing. Now, all they have to do is give you enough to hook you, and then milk you slowly. Apparently some of these business nerds did a case study on how drug dealers make money and decided to apply it to the real world.

For all of you that are upset about this and think SWOTR is going to develop along different lines, I'd like to congratulate you in advance on your aneurysm

RealID was not the end of wow.

It was the beginning of the end. Expect huge backlash over this new development. Expect the rift between players and developers to become visible from space.

Remember when Blizzard said they would never charge you money for anything that you need to stay competitive or get better gear etc.? Well they lied. This is a feature you will need to have to lower que times and maintain cross realm friendships, and consequentially have more successful dungeons to get gear. Blizzard lied.

"Dear Blizzard,

You lied."

This is bullshit.

Playing the game is a goddamn "premium service".

Paying for something you already offer, with a minor tickbox added, the Dungeon Finder, screwing you out of money the Blizzard way.

Originally Posted by drakonblayde

I'd actually like to chime in here -

It's not just activision. I'm honestly surprised that Activision-Blizzard is so late jumping on this bandwagon. Console makers have been getting away with this kind of crap for years. EA apparently figured it out as well. (I'm very unhappy with Dragon Age 2, it feels like they sold me half a game, and I'm betting I'll get the other half as DLC).

Digital Distribution has cut costs for software companies to next to nothing. Now, all they have to do is give you enough to hook you, and then milk you slowly. Apparently some of these business nerds did a case study on how drug dealers make money and decided to apply it to the real world.

For all of you that are upset about this and think SWOTR is going to develop along different lines, I'd like to congratulate you in advance on your aneurysm

You're lumping content and service into the same cateogory. They're two completely different things. The DLCs(while totally overpriced) that Bioware(who's owned by EA, another giant gaming conglomerate, imagine that?) puts out add additional content to the existing game. If you have read a single review before the game was released you would realize that it was simply a 25-30 hour game at base, unlike the originals 50 hours+. Just like all biowares games so far, you pay for the initial game and then pay for additonal content packages(aka "Adventure Packs") that add additional content to the game but not additional service. If you think Bioware would be shortsighted enough to release new service features to SW:TOR and charge players to use them, you're really speculating. As far as I know WoW is the first P2P game I've ever heard of that charged for additional service features on top of base content.

[Entering this instance requires a World of Warcraft Diamond account]

Originally Posted by Kaeleena

Edit: Either way, you're paying a fee(whether it's through additional game time or paid character transfer fee) on top of your subscription fee to play with your friends, and you're forced to choose between them.

This is a little bit melodramatic.

You always have the option of playing with your friends. There is no premium service check box for 'play with friends'.

You just happen to have to be on the same realm. Being forced to play with your friends would be something along the lines of being forced to pay a premium subscription to group with any guildmates, anyone on your friends list, or any RealID friends.

WoW was designed as a server/client model that was seperated into different realms for scalability reasons. That was the only way to do it back then (and even then it didn't always work so well... anyone who remembers the Ahn'Qiraj gate event will remember how badly the game has handled many people in the same place at the same time). I'm sure that future blizzard MMO's won't be so restricted in the nature of realms - technology has advanced to a point where it's quite possible to distribute the workload among a large amount of machines and not be bound so much by physical hardware.

But for any of that technology to make it into current generation games, that requires the technology be bolted on.

Blizzard is not taking anything away from you. Saying that you have to pay to play with your friends is saying you can't play with your friends right now. Blatantly incorrect. What you're really saying is that blizzard is a fee to play with your friends in a manner that's more convenient for you.

Of course, when put that way, it sounds like you're whining. Welcome to a free market economy - convenience costs money.

Don't know if it has been mentioned already...but it clearly states "certain elements of", but it doesn't say that the service itself will be a premium. I guess that's what I get for going to law school, where every comma and word is dissected more than frogs in high school.

They're going to charge people to dungeon with their friends?

Hello Activision! So glad I cancelled.

Originally Posted by drakonblayde

But for any of that technology to make it into current generation games, that requires the technology be bolted on.

Blizzard is not taking anything away from you. Saying that you have to pay to play with your friends is saying you can't play with your friends right now. Blatantly incorrect. What you're really saying is that blizzard is a fee to play with your friends in a manner that's more convenient for you.

Of course, when put that way, it sounds like you're whining. Welcome to a free market economy - convenience costs money.

Implementation of that technology costs money, which comes from your monthly subscription fee. Maintenance of that technology once implemented is cheap. If maintenance fees have exceeded subscription fee, they should raise the subscription price, but it hasn't and the fact is that you can't play with all your friends right now without paying, and this is just another way for them to get money out of you. The next thing you know they'll be charging RL currency to respec, regem, reenchant, and maybe they'll go down the path Allods went and charge you to remove rez sickness everytime you die. It's a slippery slope.

Edit: Remember, all of those things are a "convenience". Why shouldn't they charge you a convenience fee for all of them?

Well tally-ho lads, paying for shit that should be free shit is the shit amirite?

Originally Posted by Kaeleena

You're lumping content and service into the same cateogory. They're two completely different things.

Not from a business standpoint. If you can hold something back, and sell it as an add-on to increase your revenue stream, you probably want to do it. It's bad business not to. You have to walk the tight rope between giving too much away, giving too little, or leave folks just hungry enough for more.

If you think Bioware would be shortsighted enough to release new service features to SW:TOR and charge players to use them, you're really speculating. As far as I know WoW is the first P2P game I've ever heard of that charged for additional service features on top of base content.

I think you're assuming that Bioware still has a choice in the matter. If they develop extra functionality, of whatever manner, and big daddy EA tells them to sell it as opposed to just patching it in, what are they going to say? No?

Game companies are in business to make money. Stringing people along with hopes and promises of a better tomorrow or a bigger better thing is a time honored way of seperating people from their cash. It doesn't matter what the intentions of the developers are, and what they want to do, not unless they're funding it entirely themselves. When the landslide starts, it's too late for the pebbles to vote.

And Activision rears its ugly head...