A Litany of Comparison: GW and World of Warcraft

As much as I love GW, me and my guildees have hit the plateau of blandness.

We have done nearly everything except 5-6 elite areas like Slavers, Tomb of Kings, Mallyx etc.

We have many characters maxed out and filled with greens and canes and all the hats one could ever really not need.

Rewards are futile... spending hours in elite areas only to maybe get a golden cane or 212 gold. Blah.

No use in beating a dead horse here but all we do is PvE and it is time to open up the wardrobe and see what "other worlds" are out there for awhile.

As we eagerly anticipate GW2 and its hopeful depth/design beyond GW1, I would like anyone's comparison to Lord of the Rings online, as we are trying out the 7 day free trial of it...

My advice is maybe try HGL... im gonna start sounding like a walking advertisement. But it is a good game, even if you play for free. But obviously its new and still being patched and added to.

Being able to just jump in and do some FPSing and skill up and get aarmor and level up is fun and refreshing compared to the slowness of other MMOS.

I did try HGL demo / beta and it was ok but wasn't for me. We are trying LOTR tonight though... was just curious as to how it stacked against the other MMRPGS (whatevers)

Damn you both, i just renewed my WoW account...

Oh noes, I feel like Tycho!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/31

Remember to Play Horde side as well, You'll find 50% of the content and beautiful environments there as well. You're riding on a $40+ Million dollar MMO. It better be AMAZING.

Yeah, a question about Horde / Alliance.

Is it better if I have my Horde characters on another Realm? Does it matter? Can I mail stuff between Factions?


Also, $40 million?!? Pfft. 9 million players x $15 = $135,000,000. A month. Not including the actual cost of the game.

Blizzard is printing money.

That was the initial expenditure. So you're looking at a 1 Billion dollar/year MMO.

Yeah it's massive.

Same server is good, because once you make friends, they may play hordeside as well. . . And you can transfer wealth very easily, to Twink alts, with a few tricks.


If you've not tried WoW you should, it is the 5 Billion Pound gorilla, But if you're Looking for something fresh and what appears very Viseral and Mature, wait a bit for Age Of Conan by Funcom. It's looking pretty amazing. LoTR, I've not tried, but it's garnering a solid following. AC and to a lesser extent AC2 were really nice games by Turbine of which I did play and enjoy for sometime. Trial them all, then decide.

Hellgate London has a lot to offer but it is very item/stat heavy, Mind Numbingly so. It is an amazing meld of FPS and RPG, fast pace dungeon crawls and lots more. I've bought in as a Founder(I like supporting the underdogs), but am going to wait 6 months or more to play it. Should be a really nice game by then.

Yes, it's way higher than that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment
1.1 BILLION $ of revenue

I couldn't get my hands on recent profit figures, but got this:
http://www.guildcafe.com/Favorite/Wo...enues_Revealed
$520m in 2007

40% profit, this is big. For Anet's numbers, just have the profit:
http://www.zdnet.co.kr/etc/eyeon/int...9160118,00.htm
$9m in 2007, it's only 1.7% of WoW's!

Chinese WoW accounts are very different:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
In China, because a large number of the players do not own the computer they use to play games (e.g. Internet cafes), the CD keys can be purchased independently of the software package. The CD key, which is required to activate an account, is sold for ¥30 (US$3.75) each. The software packages vary in price depending on the items they contain. In order to play the game, the player would need to purchase prepaid game cards in denominations of ¥30 each that can be played for 66 hours and 40 minutes.[32] This equates to exactly ¥0.45 (US$0.06) for one hour of gameplay. A monthly fee model is not available to players of this region.

Two interesting reads too:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=16519
(interesting to know that Blizzard has a "22% royalty agreement with [Chinese partner] The9")

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/villacampa1.html
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=14931 (quite old but very interesting)

(also stumbled upon this but didn't read it all yet:
http://www.monashreport.com/category...nd-guild-wars/ )

Oh I have played Wow.... for about 8 months... that is where I left GW and tried Wow to have it consume my very soul... then came back to GW, Factions, NF, and GWEN.

Still have all my Wow stuff on ice... but not deleted.

Wanted to try LOTR just to see how it was...

I know the feeling. I tend to stay with a game for several months and migrate to something else. When times get really boring, I sometimes head back and play old ANSI games like Nethack for a few hours for grins. I was real excited when I downloaded the public beta for LoTR and I even pre-purchased. I'm a big fan behind the LoTR lore but I found the game kinda lacking. If you do get the game, just don't start out in the Hobbit lands. I found those quests there to be some of the most boring in the game. There might be some quaint titles for pie and mail running but the rest is snoreville. I'll probably stick with GW until AoC comes out in late March.

I don't know. How do you think?

Actually, I'm not. Nor am I implying it. I even did a Firefox find search with my browser and did not find myself saying that.

I'm saying you can make one without. But it won't be as complex as one with. Here: You take *THE* most advanced and complex graphical advancement system. It could do fine standing alone and without numbers. Put in numbers, leveling, etc. and you have an even more complex system.

Well, if the fact that ANet is considering adding an unlimited level cap in GW2 is any indication...

I am sorry to sound like a douchebag to you Cacheelma, but you are picking a fight you can't win. If you read my posts, it is not saying Elitism is unique to WoW, nor is the whole armor thing. What I am saying is it is unavoidable. Bryant read my comments too fast as well, but when prompted to re-read them, he also realized I wasn't just mindlessly attacking WoW. WoW by nature is fundamentally different than GW. In GW, if someone is harrassing me (which has never actually happened to me more than twice), all I have to do is walk into an instance, /ignore, and poof, I never get bothered by him. In WoW, I have had two assholes come up to me, sit there saying something in general, then when I go to "run away", they follow me, kill everything in the area. Thats not fun, especially since it has happened the last three times I have attempted to start the game. I am a soloer at heart, and I don't need some killjoy ruining my game experience.

Simply said, I can not come to say "WoW sucks!" because I simply think comparing one game to another is distinctly useless. They are completely different in function.

The griefing I encountered in WoW, and the mundane beginning have kept me shelving it each time. I am making a concerted effort right now (and no greifers yet), but I still am getting bored too quickly, and if I have to make a concerted effort to enjoy something in the first place... well, you shouldn't have to. I want games that engage me from the get-go in either immersion (HL2ish) or gameplay (which I find GW to be exemplary at). That is my personal desire, and no one will ever be succesful in convincing me otherwise.

Simply said, for you benefit Cach: GW = Physically ignorable greifing. WoW = Mentally, but not physically, ignorable greifing.

Wow, that sucks. Can I ask what level this was at?

So far, in the albeit very early stages of the game, I've had nothing but help / requests for help from other players.

Both also have an ignore list, just to throw it out there.

But can you ignore a guy walking around you and killing monster you want to kill (to steal XP from you I guess)? This looks very annoying.

I also heard of RMT spam getting more aggressive in WoW?

I'm just saying that there is an ignore list.

RMT?

Real-money Trading. A.k.a. Gold-selling.

That's definitely not fun, but I never had trouble "losing" griefers. For chat, a simple "/ignore NAME" does wonders. If they pestered you or followed you around, that's crummy. But still, it's not that hard to get away from jerks in WoW -- if only by playing an alt or hopping on a gryphon and heading off somewhere new for a while.

My worst experience in WoW was once when I was mining and some jerk kept harassing me that I was "stealing" his ore -- never mind that he had a mount and was higher level than me. Sheesh. I also had an obnoxious paladin berate my ranger for inadvertently causing a wipe with my pet. I was new to an instance and did not realize that pets sometimes don't jump but instead "take the long way down" bringing a mob with them. People have too little patience, imo. I was doing my best, but I just made a mistake. I didn't deserve getting cussed out for it, however.

But don't let the griefers/turkeys get you down, bud. I kept to myself mostly, but usually the people I met in WoW were really pretty nice. Of course, you do need to turn off general and trade chat occasionally -- or you will quickly go insane.

You cannot mail items between factions in WoW. You can, however, transfer items in other, more roundabout ways. I would say it is better to have your horde characters on the same realm. Sometimes I would have my level 63 tauren druid "help" my lower level toons -- Alliance or Horde -- with certain quests, logging on the high-level guy to clear stuff and then logging on the low-level guy to pick up some hard-to-reach quest item or other. This method would work in certain situations.

Mostly, however, as someone else posted above, you will make friends and find that they have horde alts on the same server, which can be fun.

As for me, I always played on the RP servers, having heard that the griefing on the PvP servers could often be game-ruining, particularly if the horde-vs-alliance balance was way, way off. Since I don't like PvP anyway, it was an easy decision to make. As for RP versus Normal, behavior on RP servers was a tad better. But only a tad.

RMT spam has been dramatically reduced

patch 2.1 was the 1st major change for reducing gold spam tells
- and making you wait 1 hour to receive any game cash from auction purchases or player sent money from a different account

in the last month,
Bliz also handicapped Trial accounts so they can no longer invite people to groups

http://www.massively.com/2007/12/17/...sers-to-shush/

I'd rather play EverQuest2 than WoW but to each their own

Thanks for the info Ninna. (well not sure it answers my question as the third comment after the article says that spammers already found a work-around) The massively.com website looks interesting.

A quick question to the hybrid GW-Wow players: do madness such as the "Mini Polar Bear crisis" also happen in WoW? (with people getting mad about one item or event, raging on forums, poiting fingers everywhere, etc.) Thanks!

Mordakai, I honestly can not remember names of places, I have stopped playing too quickly to be too good at stuff like that. Right now I am in the Night Elf starting place and it is so far so much nicer. Still feel like I am too bored to keep playing though . What I am on now is a trial account though, since I did not feel like starting a new regular account, I might this time though, we shall see.

Most of the other times in the last year or so I played on a budds account since he was bored with it. I still prefer GW "soloing" to WoW soloing, but I have "tried" to hard to like WoW, and am starting to realize its just not for me. Hence my not bashing it, but some people like games and other don't.

Oh okay, that's what RMT is.

Not anything in that form, but there are a few mounts that have incredibly and massively low drop rates.

But nobody goes real "apeshit" over it, they just say how lucky they are.

there will always be work-arounds
but the gold spam is *significantly less* than 1 year ago

Actually WoW is all about collecting items, they're is a never-ending scourge of Ninja looting, kill stealing, stealth kill steal farming, areas over farmed by bots, GW times Ten. . If you can imagine it, it happens in spades in WoW. Constantly. Just search the WoW forums, nothing but similar complaints.

Your right I did the same search and nadda. I'm glad we finally agree on something: Stats/Levels/NUMBERS are not what make an RPG MMO Deep. Complex, yes. Deep, no.

Complexity is not the same thing as Depth. {shall we Dance?} Complexity in any game is a double edge sword. Complexity is very bad if it is gratuitously WoW like.

Considering, yes, not the same thing as Doing. But why would that mean players of GW are content with an endless Grind for numbers/levels/stats? Comments, replies, another waltz?

WoW forums are infamous for trolling / QQ / etc
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/bo...&forumId=10001

but thats not a reflection of ingame play - only the forums

Thanks for the link. And regarding the relationship between games and their forum, a few months of XP on GWG teaches you that it's quite different .

Certainly haven't ever seen it myself. I did see someone with a Spectral Tiger mount, and all he got was compliments. As for forums I couldn't say, this pit of insanity is enough for me.

Re: The arguments about depth and numbers / stats...

Personally, I find the depth for me comes from the ability to craft (trade skills) and the journey itself. I don't PVP (yet) and the guild I'm in seems to exist purely of alts, so me and the hubster tend to duo everything. Which obviously means we don't get to do the instances until the loot in them is pretty much useless to us. But we still have a lot of fun.

With doing enchanting (and tailoring) I can improve my own weapons and gear, make money on the side from the tailoring etc. This for me is what's missing from GW, something that has a higher level of immersion than 'buy 50 Elonian Leather Squares' and make your amour. When I craft or enchant I'm physically doing it (as a character) not just swapping mats and gold over.

I'm not knocking GW, far from it, I love the damn game and am still playing happily after 22 months... but I'd like to see more PVE depth at times.

Totally agree with this: GW2 needs a crafting system.

I made a rifle in WoW last night, and it's so cool to have a weapon that you feel personally attached to. (Not to mention it says "Crafted by Lugh" in the description. Nice touch, Blizzard!)

I'd say limit your searches to realm forums, since people always complain on the general forums.

It's only as deep and complex as the developer's make it. Dungeons and Dragons' leveling up system (preferably third edition used in NWN) is remarkably deep, a bit complex, but still fun. Too complex, though, and you'll start losing people.

I actually like the deep complexity that WoW has, but it ain't everyone's boat.

I'd say since it's something that's been asked for since GW1 (and since announced has seen very little negative feedback) that it'd be in their best interests to go ahead and do so.

Why do you assume that high levels will equate to grind?

Cool story: A few weeks ago, I ran into the same person who made my shirt that I had been wearing for over a year! It was just a level 48 NE. I probably totally freaked him out I was so stoked.

Also another story for Fril: There was this one hilarious gold seller who would keep killing himself as a Gnome in Ironforge so a bunch of his bodies spelt the URL where you could buy the stuff. You gotta admire that kind of creativity! (link)

I've been taking a break from WoW for a few weeks and this thread got me fired up again. I should be able to hit outland by next week..

Props to Zinger for starting a thread that's had interesting content, and has stayed for the most part flame free.

Saw that a while back. It's marketing at its best as the comic says

It seems from the Blizzard person's post that they had to ask players to report these bugs in order to fix them. So each "realm" runs its own little world or a copy of the global world, or something like that?

Basically you're telling me you don't know how to get rid of some people in WoW, thus make it a bad game when compared with GW?

Hah!

For your benefit, Aeri: Ever heard of Hearthstone? Or maybe, Gryphon? Or if level 10 is a little too early for a ride, try die & spirit rez. There're so many ways to get away from someone. You didn't even try.

Or maybe you know all of those, but you just want to "come here and say that WoW sucks" so you pretend they don't exist.

And of course I can't win in such fight. I don't ever stoop THAT low.

Which obviously makes it perfectly acceptable and means that the community is fine, so long as you ignore it.

And hey! This post is fine! Providing you ignore my point. (Why, WHY can I see this happening regardless?)

While you could ignore the person who's harassing you or abandon him through numerous methods of escape, per se, you can't do jack when the griefer is killing off all of the monsters that you need for a quest.

I got my lv. 70 in WoW on a RPPVP server. If there was a lv. 70 Alliance in the area eliminating all Horde players, I just moved to a different area. Not too complicated.

I've had lots more trouble with jerks and irrational people in GW than WoW. There is an old thread in which I posted screencaptures of such accounts:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...postcount=2437

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...postcount=2570

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...postcount=2619

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...postcount=2703

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...postcount=2841

It's a shame that thread was locked.

"lol cause they know it's suicide"

Hah!

And what game is in the top 10 selling list everytime you look for the last oh several years since WOW's release? Hrmmm? Yeah we all know who. GW's gets in the top 10 for about a week except the last two Nightfall and GWEN and then it is gone FOREVER! As I said it's for the poor and for parents who don't want to tend to their kids. There's a few that play it because the love it, but, hardly a majority like poor and lazy parents and just kids in general as one can easily see from the general chat all over the place. Hardly an ADULT game as some would like us to believe.

It's good for adults in terms of a schedule, I guess?

And if WoW wasn't associated with Blizzard, Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, it'd be just another MMO.

That's all it has going for it. WoW is neither innovative nor groundbreaking. They took the tried and true MMO elements and rolled them all together, but it doesn't do anything exceptional. I played WoW for a while, and it reminded me of a late 90's computer game. I guess I'm just bitter; I really liked the Warcraft RTS games, and now that WoW is out they're pretty much dead.

I don't think GW is perfect, but it is fun, has no monthly fee, and the graphics are much better than WoW's, while still not requiring a top end PC to play.