Zone Previews, Challenge Mode Testing, Blue Posts, Shirts Sale, GW2 Sells 2M Copies

[Ettan]

"We've been working on maintaining balance through the levels as much as possible, but ultimately, the development team is tuning for level 90."
No you have not been working on maintaining low level balance atall. My prediction is that this is going to fuck you over when mop hits as new players are going get the full experience of being oneshoot by penance all the way to level 85. The overall pvp unbalance from 1-85 will ruin the game experience for new players and make them quit.

[medievalman1]

Levels and stats scale down. Even if you are level 20, you can go to level 4 area and be scaled down to level 4 with stats too. This doesnt work other way tho, it does not scale you up so you cant just jump into last zone etc..

Ah, I see. I can see the appeal of that. I can see the cons to that too. Either way, neat idea.

[Necrotica]

I find my self coming to this site less and less. Every time I look they are posting about other games right besides wow. It one thing to give them their own sub forums. Another to give them front page spot light. As I said before no other fan site would put wow next to their game of choice.

I like when MMO-champion mentions other MMO's in the news when it's major news involving those other MMO's.

[jakj]

Basically, the entire game of Guild Wars 2 was implemented as if it were a neverending Challenge Mode, Blizzard's proud new concept. GW2 is not as assiduous about it: Overlevelling does have some -small- effect, making the tiniest of trash mobs easier, but actual Champion (and up) ranked enemies (and even a lot of the Veteran ones) are still as hard as ever. There is no "go back and solo dungeon X twenty levels from now" in GW2, so you still have level 80s going back to newbie zones.

In addition, there is no mob tapping, all quest objectives and items are shared, and even a lot of quest items (like things you pick up off the ground) are instanced, so there isn't even competition for "run around and collect the broken gears". I remember a blue poster saying that they weren't quite sure how to get rid of mob tapping in WoW (was it during the AMA?), and my answer is: Go copy what GW2 did.

I find my self coming to this site less and less. Every time I look they are posting about other games right besides wow. It one thing to give them their own sub forums. Another to give them front page spot light. As I said before no other fan site would put wow next to their game of choice.

It's MMO Champion, not WoW Champion.

[braxx]

thoses videos did not make sense

[Siddown]

F
Levels and stats scale down. Even if you are level 20, you can go to level 4 area and be scaled down to level 4 with stats too. This doesnt work other way tho, it does not scale you up so you cant just jump into last zone etc..

Not sure if I'd enjoy that or not. The only game I've played that did that was Oblivion, and having every enemy scale to your level was a bit annoying. So the bandit I killed at lvl 5, now is lvl 20 with the equivalent of Epic gear? I always found that strange. Some bandit living in a hovel just outside a town shouldn't be dangerous to Uber-Hero-Swordsman-who-has-Killed-Dragons.

But good for them, the MMO market has been a slaughterhouse for everyone not named Blizzard for the last 5 or 6 years so I'm happy for them.

[jakj]

Not sure if I'd enjoy that or not. The only game I've played that did that was Oblivion, and having every enemy scale to your level was a bit annoying. So the bandit I killed at lvl 5, now is lvl 20 with the equivalent of Epic gear? I always found that strange. Some bandit living in a hovel just outside a town shouldn't be dangerous to Uber-Hero-Swordsman-who-has-Killed-Dragons.

But good for them, the MMO market has been a slaughterhouse for everyone not named Blizzard for the last 5 or 6 years so I'm happy for them.

It doesn't scale them up: It scales you down. It's intended to be viewed as a sort of flashback, basically, that you are meant to have a mental disconnect between "I am big and powerful, more powerful than this area" and "I am doing things in this area". Keep in mind that experience and rewards scale, too, so if you're level 30 in a level 20 area, you're getting items up to level 30 and not just up to level 20.

If the fact that you've numerically outlevelled an area stops you from enjoying it, then you would not like it at all, but if you take it as a mechanism for "some people like skipping areas, so they can, and some people like not skipping areas, so this way it doesn't suck when the game balanced for people skipping areas outlevels them".

[Weezx]

GW2 sold 2 million, then 1 million of those have remain inactive for the last two weeks

[EyelessCrow]

I hate saying stuff like this but that penance comment almost proves blizzard doesn't like paladins. They jumped all over the "nerf this/nerf that" bandwagon even though it was balanced at 90 and not low level but when people notice penance is doing the exact same damage they tell people to stop jumping on that same bandwagon and that penance is balanced at 90 and that's all they care about.

[totmachor]

Guild Wars 2 Sells Two Million Copies

Cant be possible! The fanboys told us already 2 weeks ago, that there are 4 million people playing .

[Fnx-]

Some pretty cool vids I would say !

[Mukki]

"Wait, so I cannot queue up Looking For a Challenge (LFC)? Guess I won't be doing challenge modes. Thanks for more content I won't be doing!"

What an asshat

I agree, that guy you quoted is literally the epitome of what's wrong with the WoW community.

Seriously, if there was a whining competition, this guy would get the gold medal!

"WAAH! EVERYTHING REQUIRES A QUEUE"
"WAAH! CHALLENGE MODES CAN'T BE QUEUED!"

[Kaleredar]

"We've been working on maintaining balance through the levels as much as possible, but ultimately, the development team is tuning for level 90."
No you have not been working on maintaining low level balance atall. My prediction is that this is going to fuck you over when mop hits as new players are going get the full experience of being oneshoot by penance all the way to level 85. The overall pvp unbalance from 1-85 will ruin the game experience for new players and make them quit.

New players don't usually give two hoots about PvP balance while they're leveling. They're already insta-gibbed by players in heirlooms, and before that it was players in twink gear. And they didn't quit then.

[Siddown]

It doesn't scale them up: It scales you down.

Well, that's just a semantic difference really. At the end of the day, lvl 5 mobs can kill lvl 20 players, which just seems odd to me. I can kill powerful dragons, yet a thug that I struggled with back when killing said dragons was a pipe dream can still take me out.

It's intended to be viewed as a sort of flashback, basically, that you are meant to have a mental disconnect between "I am big and powerful, more powerful than this area" and "I am doing things in this area". Keep in mind that experience and rewards scale, too, so if you're level 30 in a level 20 area, you're getting items up to level 30 and not just up to level 20.

If the fact that you've numerically outlevelled an area stops you from enjoying it, then you would not like it at all, but if you take it as a mechanism for "some people like skipping areas, so they can, and some people like not skipping areas, so this way it doesn't suck when the game balanced for people skipping areas outlevels them".

I understand why they do it, it keeps content relevant longer, but from what I remember about Oblivion the mod that changed it back to a more traditional leveling system was one of the most popular. Bethesda changed things after Oblivion (in Fallout and Skyrim) to be a more of a hybrid between the two systems, but at the end of the day, in both games you moved back to having mobs being lower level than the characters (and sometimes by a significant margin like in Skyrim).

I know GW2 isn't exactly the same because scaling only goes down and not up (so lvl 5 characters taking on lvl 20 dragons isn't an issue) but it still sounds odd to me. Imagine those very low level mobs outside a city attacking you every time you stop into Org or Stormwind. It'd be a chore.

[chaud]

Did you decide to stop posting GC's tweets again or are you just collecting for a future news post? I was kinda enjoying getting them here in an easy to read fashion

Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! At least for this week I will be using them on Sunday when there is a lack of blue posts. I am still putting it together manually, so doing it every night is a lot of work right now and there is a lot of other news as we get closer to release day.

[veerik]

And Lastly, the customer service and more importantly the security for GW2 is atrocious. We've just recently found out that they don't have the tools to restore missing items or characters. That is beyond terrible. So the reality is you can play GW2 solidly for a few months straight, having built up a character with a ton of cool stuff, get hacked and it's game over. Stupidest thing I've read in a long time. If they couldn't get the tools to back up information and things on your account they had no business releasing this MMO. Simple as that. It's going to hurt them big time moving forward when word really spreads. They're just lucky as hell that it wasn't leaked before launch or they would have been screwed. Thank goodness I never shelled out 60 bucks. And I mean that in a good way. It's not a knock on the game itself. They put an incredible amount of work into the game and I'm glad it's doing so well. It's a knock on what's going on behind the scenes.

They will be able to restore characters and items in the future. No game has offered this feature right at the start, you have to give them time to start recording everything. With how large this release was (the biggest) give them a bit of time to get things sorted out.

[totmachor]

They will be able to restore characters and items in the future. No game has offered this feature right at the start, you have to give them time to start recording everything. With how large this release was (the biggest) give them a bit of time to get things sorted out.

no .... since they released they should be ready ... or is this whole game just a big alpha?

[deplorable]

i'm not looking forward to the first MoP day....

server issues aside. The quests, I mean in Vanilla and BC, even wrath to a degree you could skip quests and come back at quieter times. Now, you have to complete them to open up the "next path".

And there's one alliance quest which involves getting 6 "turtle flanks" which have a droprate reminiscent of westfall's boar "livers"...

yes that's right, on a crowded area with little to no mobs to go around..... to open the next path.

it's going to be hell. And this is an area they redesigned in beta.. and they still fail hard.

[Szilia]

Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! At least for this week I will be using them on Sunday when there is a lack of blue posts. I am still putting it together manually, so doing it every night is a lot of work right now and there is a lot of other news as we get closer to release day.

It's cool, thanks for the hard work I did imagine it being a bit more time demanding than stuff from the blue tracker, but I'm glad you're doing it.

[Reirae]

No womens tees for sale? D: That's disappointing.