WoW Ruining The Gaming Industry?

Interesting point of view.

 

He has some valid points. There are other mitigating conditions, but his points are pretty strong nonetheless. I certainly have reduced the number of new games I buy. Now whether that is totally all due to WoW, or a real lack of good gaming titles recently, that could be debated.

 

It might be valid. Walmart and other stores are offering less space for PC products. In some stores its down to a 10' area. It makes it harder and harder for us to stay in the business. I was thinking the WoW would help rebuild the PC market but so far it has only taken away the number of players, even for the 20 dollar price point.

 

Spore and Huxley are the only important ones. =D

 

One of the assumptions made that I don't agree with is that there is a limited number of people that play computer games. I do not believe the number is maxed out or static.

Also the next big game, will do to WoW what was done to DAoC, etc. The old games will naturally tend to fall to the wayside, and be replaced by newer and different. Change is inevitable in life.

 

I kind of feel that Blizzard is lowering expectations for 'a working release' with their apparent lack of care about patching/maintaining their game. You would think that a company with something around 6 million people paying them 15/month, would take more responsibility for their product then Blizzard has been.

 

So true.

 

Even with 6million subscribers, I doubt that is even 10% of the gaming population.

The money Blizzard is making is just sick, but I don't think you can blame it on the dominance of one game. And no matter what they do to that game, in the next 3-5 years the number of people playing that game will be well under 1 million.

Although, I have to admit, the 1.10 changes make me want to take a look at my priest again

 

Probably because with the static raid reset timers, the servers being hosed on tuesday and continuously rebooted wednesday really reduces the amount of time raiding guilds have to get stuff done. Instead of ~7 days to get as much out of the big instances as possible, you're down to 5 or so, 2 of which are on the weekend.

Go outside? Most of us have full time jobs or are students. Several of us are married (some with children) or have girlfriends. We raid from about 8ST until 11ST or so on raid nights. We are up to the emporers in AQ40 now (when server lag doesn't preclude raiding). We do get out and have real lives, but we still get shit done.

 

Yes, we lose a night of raiding. Some people don't play wow on nights we are scheduled to raid due to other factors in their life. When they set aside time to raid with the group, they get slightly annoyed when the raid is cancelled due to lag, server's down, login server not working, etc.

 

Hamma's point is that in the end, you are the consumer and if it is that bad, stop giving them your money. But instead, please simply bitch and keep handing over your their money.

In Blizzards defense, you're getting entertainment at 18.75 cents/hour (80hr per month conservative gaming estimate) and it's not like you're doing brain surgery. So if they only have 95% up time instead of 99.9%, thems the breaks.

 

The impression I'm getting from you is that 'they screwed up a patch so what, they gave me free time'.

Do you play on any of the servers that always seem to have character creation disabled? There are some servers out there that had their creation disabled for near 2 months solid, and then had had to repeat the processes! How about one of the many servers that lag so bad that you can go for 30-45 seconds before an instant cast spell begins to cast? Or a server that needs to be rebooted once or twice a day? Maybe you attempt to play on a server that ends up waiting 3 hours on a cue timer? Have you been watching server splits? Those servers end up with more population on them then the servers the characters originated from because someone has the brilliant idea to make 8 servers split to that new one.

When I posted last, I'm looking at the global issues that are plaguing this game. Yeah I agree, patching any MMO game is a ticking time bomb. But Sony seems to have figured out how to keep their games from blowing up after a patch.

Think about it. 6,000,000 users * $15/month. I'm not the best with math here, but isn't that like 9 million dollars a month? Better yet, lets just round it all down and assume everyone is paying for 6 months at a time. That's 13/month. 7.8 million dollars! Every month! And your telling me your OK with the fact that these servers have these problems.... still?

I'm not trying to piss and moan about this. I don't read forums. I've got toons on 24 diffrent servers, my account is maxed out at 38 characters. Anytime I want to make a new character I need to delete an old one. What i'm saying here is from experiance, and I wondering if you realize the scale of what's going on with these servers?

 

You can predict what will happen when you deploy a patch. It just requires that you understand the code you have written, and any libraries you have linked against.

The only persistent problem with WoW is that they seem to be unable to manage their databases. They're using Oracle, which is both buggy and difficult to work with, and requires a lot of optimization to work well with smaller datasets.