WarcraftRealms.com

My friends list is full of people who never log on any longer. Just this week I saw a noticeable population difference in Org when AoC was released. I don't know anything about that game except what I read on the official warcraft forums. The amazing part is Blizz is leaving the posts up. Also Death and Taxes the #1 guild who had almost all the First Kills of Bosses besides SK Gaming left WoW for the game. That should be a wake up call to Blizz.

Personally WAR is the game I am waiting for, and I just wonder how many more WoW people who are sick of the pvp status of the game right now with arenas, bg's, farming, etc. Right now even people who just farmed arena pts have all their gear, and 5k saved up. They have 75k honor, and all their marks for s4, and have nothing to do. I can imagine how bored everyone must be. I don't know if wotk is going to make the game any different. Its just going to be another greens > epics, grind 10 levels, world pvp for a week or two, and than back to the farm grind for honor, arena pts, etc.

I can barely even stand grinding my alt to 70 right now. Even though quest, and xp is alot more than old school days it still the same boring grind to the same places you have been with your other 20 alts. DAoC implemented /level early in the game. Once you had a char to max level you could create an alt, and /level up to level 30 instantly which means you only had to grind out the last 20 levels.

This game has come to me buying/selling in the AH my whole time. I am not sure what to do with all the gold, but its become fun to find stuff on the AH that some idiot put up for 20g, when it sells for 500g. I normally have about 300 auctions running at all times, and bids in for 150 or so. I make so much gold that I put gold farmers, and people who do dailies to farm gold to shame. It has literally become so addicting.

Well it will be interesting to see the concurrency numbers for this month, and the coming months with Summer here, and people so bored. I bet alot of people will go enjoy RL for a few months since they won't be really missing much until the xp pack comes out.

I also was just thinking, and realized its been several months now since they offered FREE server transfers to low population servers. I feel like I can tell a difference on my high population server I hate to see the ghosttowns on servers that already had low populations.

Also by looking at these charts it shows about a 10-15% drop in activity levels since January where it peaked which is around the time S3 came out, and the patch.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyact ... actionid=2

I think it's too early to say really. And you'll have to look closely to gauge concurrency numbers unless there is a drastic drop. Summer often equates to lower numbers, at least as far as my guild and friends list is concerned!

Way too early to tell yet but from everything I've read AoC did quite a few things right which should make a dent in concurrency numbers for WoW over the next couple of months in addition to the usual summer lull... Too bad they don't allow free trial, me and my wife are more likely to wait on WAR to take the plunge being long time DAOC players.

What's going to be interesting is if AoC and/or WAR manage to make a dent in concurrency how much of a drop will it take to make the game feel desolate, we know from earlier dicussions that servers with concurrency numbers at 70% of the high population servers tend to feel rather empty and inactive.

Alanthus wrote:Way too early to tell yet but from everything I've read AoC did quite a few things right which should make a dent in concurrency numbers for WoW over the next couple of months in addition to the usual summer lull... Too bad they don't allow free trial, me and my wife are more likely to wait on WAR to take the plunge being long time DAOC players.

What's going to be interesting is if AoC and/or WAR manage to make a dent in concurrency how much of a drop will it take to make the game feel desolate, we know from earlier dicussions that servers with concurrency numbers at 70% of the high population servers tend to feel rather empty and inactive.

I am going the collectors edition for WAR. Supposedly you get to start a week early, and get an extra xp boost too. I really wish I could do the beta. I am so disappointed when I read quotes in their newsletter of people in it that say they are only playing it a few hours a week. I say lock their beta key, and give it to someone else who will actually play, and test it. I know with my experience in SI beta with DAoC, and 6 months of WoW closed beta I played alot, and gave tons of /bugreports, /suggestions, etc...

I'll be interested to see the concurrency numbers too, seems atm like everyone who I was spending much ingame time with through the winter and up until the last month or so is gone; I'm feeling mighty lonely at times, although at least I'm getting to know some new people but still... a lot have gone

But not to other games, just the usual summer thing I think, some have new jobs, new girlfriends or whatever, others have just got a bit bored, perhaps not surprising as Quel'Danas has been out a while, S4 is still some time away and there's just nothing new to do now for us more casual people who don't still have raids to clear. I've still got a ton of things I want to do but I'm spending less time ingame myself - summer's arrived and there's RL things to do too

I've noticed one thing people are doing more than they used to is world PvP. About half the time I'm on there's a Razor Hill, Goldshire, SW or Org raid going on, just to name a few. Normal servers seem to get more world PVP action than PvP servers as far as I can tell.
I think the raids are pretty cool and make the game more exciting when lvling. I look forward to the day Horde and Alliance launch full scale campaigns on each others towns, leaving nothing but empty buildings and corpses behind.

I've ditched WoW for now to play AoC and as TheDeamon says it's very shiny and new. But in reality from what I've played so far (first 40 levels) it's really just WoW Lite. Less combat options, less tradeskills/resources, quests are fairly trivial as they tell you exactly what to do and where to do it (to the point for most you don't even need to read the quest). Other major negatives are the level of instancing, to the point that there's several instances for even outside areas and if you want to group with people and they're in a different instance, you swap instance but end up being ported to a res point which can be miles away from where you were originally and party members aren't shown on the map unless they're standing right next to you. UI seems laggy (might be my computer but I doubt it) in the sense that clicking a spell button might not activate it. UI and communication features are generally poorer (the background to the chat box isn't dark enough so that some text can be read against bright backgrounds). In terms of server performance, it's been remarkably good, significantly better than early day WoW, though the first few days of EA had lag and lag spike issues.

From reading around the around there is really only 4 classes, the 3 sub classes only being differentiated by different Feats (Talents effectively). Boss fights so far have been simple tank and spank with the occasional ad added in, nothing revolutionary. One major plus is the community seems to be adult not come across anyone immature at all so far in the past week of play.

The only thing that's massively different is the guild towns, which seem to work really well and is something that I hope WoW incorporate in terms of a guild house or similar for guilds to invest time and effort in. This is about the only part that the mass instancing seem to lend itself to (3 guild towns per instanced zone).

I'll play my 30days and see how it goes, but in all expectations I'll likely be back when WotLK is released.

I have a few friends that have switched over to AoC, and none of them have been very impressed. It's different, and they like that since it's hard to get bored with new stuff to do... but the general consensus is that it won't be holding on to large numbers of people unless they upgrade some stuff.

Personally, I'm willing to try out anything that my cousin shells out the money to buy for me to try It's actually how I got into MMO's in the first place, and for me the pull of the game is playing with my group of friends now that we don't live anywhere near each other anymore. Exactly what we're doing is pretty much inconsequential. I mean sure, I'm sure we could find something free to do if it actually was more entertaining than playing WoW, but so far we haven't found anything. Chances are at some point we'll switch, but only if someone actually develops a game that's challenging yet fun for casual (3 or 4 days a week) players. I guess we'll see. As a group we've tried out 5 or 6 other MMO's, but overall they've all been lacking enough to where the shiny newgame smell wasn't enough to hold us past the first month.

Back more on topic, I haven't noticed a significant population difference on Mal'Ganis much at all... although with summer here, I've been seeing a lot more alliance than usual.

Jokester wrote:In terms of server performance, it's been remarkably good, significantly better than early day WoW

Going to take this back, it has become increasingly apparent as you access higher level content that there is a significant level of bugs still in the game. Large numbers of quests just don't work, are easily broken if you do something out of order. There are large numbers of issues with crafting, unclear guidelines on how to complete crafting quests (to the point that no one actually knows how they actually completed a quest as it appears to just randomly complete). Socketing gems can cause soft crashes. The level 40-50 zone (the only one playable solo!) causes random soft locks as much as every 5-10mins which can then take several attempts to reload the game successfully. Multiple stories in guild of player spells breaking. What's worse is that GM support is near non-existent, even if you do get a reply it's typically "yeah, it doesn't work, it's being looked into".

I think Funcon have said they've taken 400,000 subs since release, they're going to have make some major improvements if they're going to retain anywhere near that amount.

Paid for beta I believe is the phrase.

Well that's what happens when Blizz settles for Mediocrity. Considering they've been around for years and they've stood the test of time I'd say they know what they're doing. I've been noticing a drop on the servers I play on both Horde and Alliance and the attitudes of those left behind. Mostly folks just say "Go play XXXXX MMMO" or something like that if someone complains about anything.

No doubt the players themselves would know about a drastic population change. Seeing as Blizz doesn't delete WoW Accounts this just means they give folks the chance to do their own thing and come back and play some more XD

I'd say WotLK will spike Population on all Servers. People on Uther have been saying this might be the knockout blow for Runescape RS players have been dreading. I am expecting alot of old players to come back and level to 80 and get their Death Knight XD

/jealous

Loving all I'm seeing in the way of leaks; I'm not following storylines etc in huge detail until I can experience them for myself but the information about changes, additions etc, really has me excited now.

The downside is I'm getting into the stage I was in before TBC where it felt there wasn't that much point working on live server characters because so much will change when WotLK comes. Having said that, I really should make the most of the chance to experience current lvl 70 content, as any future alts after WotLK just won't see most of it, none of the factions, probably miss most the zones (given I always ding 70 in Blade's Edge, without having touched netherstorm or SMV), so I should make the most of it while it's an active part of the game!

Deamon, which server are you on? I'm on PVP, Horde, Bizztoo

Lapriest on some server or another....

Balgair wrote:
(given I always ding 70 in Blade's Edge, without having touched netherstorm or SMV)

I usually avoid Blade's Edge like the plague... most of the quests there are a pain without a flying mount. I hit 70 in nagrand on 3 of my 70's (the other one I did mostly instances with so I actually hit 70 while mopping up quests in terrokar, haha.) I don't usually do netherstorm or SMV until after I hit 70 as well.

As far as beta stuff goes, considering I'm not playing it, I'm not following most of the changes closely due to them revising them a lot before they actually hit release. I'd rather be surprised, tbh