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A year
and a half has passed since Blizzards release of their massively
multiplayer online role playing game, WOW. On release, there were
a lot of mistakes, a lot of imbalances and a lack of high end content.
Since then, Blizzard has fixed many of its issues, and added enough
content to keep the hardcore gamers interested, for now.
The first month that blizzard had the game live was sketchy at best. The
realm servers were constantly being taken down for maintenance. The
player base was upset with the state of the game. Problems will be
inherent in an undertaking as large as WOW. To those on the
affected servers, the response time from Blizzard was abysmal. Some
servers were down for days. Blizzard made amends by giving free play
time to the players with characters on those servers. Since then,
blizzard has picked up their service, and the only significant time the
servers have problems is the day or so that a new patch comes out.
The raid content of the game on release was limited to The Molten Core
and Onyxia. For the first three months that was plenty, the most avid
WOW players were still busy leveling and getting good gear from the
high level five man instances. The top guilds, however, would have these
encounters mastered in short order once they got into them. After two
months of raiding nothing but these encounters they became tedious. Many
players lacking faith in Blizzard grew bored with the game. Blackwing
Lair was released a few months ago, and has proven to be a sufficient
challenge. Ahn’Qiraj was just released. Those finished with Blackwing
Lair will be looking forward to the new challenges it presents. As long
as Blizzard can keep up with the progression of best raiding group, no
player can complain about lack of activity at level 60.
The honor system and battlegrounds released half a year after the game
hit shelves brought more structure to Player versus Player interaction
(PvP) by ranking and rewarding players for killing other players close
to their own level. While it doesn’t discourage ‘ganking,’ killing a
player much lower in level than the attacker, it provides purpose to
fighting the opposing faction.
At the core of every good video game is a high quality user interface.
It’s the way the player interacts with the game environment. WOW
provided a fine interface at the start, but as the game progressed, it
became clear certain things were lacking. Thankfully, Blizzard supported
Custom User Interfaces by allowing ‘add-ons’ to be incorporated easily
into their game. Using these custom interfaces, players can get exactly
what they need out of the game to play to the maximum efficiency. The
best of the interfaces have been incorporated into WOW’s base
user interface.
Blizzard does a lot to make sure their games are of the highest quality
when they are released. After a full year of beta testing, WOW
was a much better game than when it started. Though at that time, the
game was not perfect, and perhaps not quite ready for retail. Over the
last year, the game has made leaps and bounds to become the best
massively multiplayer online game on the market. With a larger test
group, and user input, Blizzard has been able to shape WOW into
the game it should have been on release.
About the Author
Hunter Crowell is a
researcher, marketer, and an avid online gamer, including World of
Warcraft and also the creator of
WOW Gold Price List, a web site setup to help players
find the cheapest place to buy their WOW gold. Visit his site at
http://www.wow-gold-price-list.com
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