State of the Game: October 26

Scheiße! It's a mess, isn't it?!

I finally got my Internet connection restored last Saturday night.  It's a bad week for me, work-wise right now. I don't have as much time to play as I would like, so my exploration is a bit limited. But a lot of what is going on is expected, and a lot of it isn't.

I don't need to recount a list of problems with the game right now. There are many, of course. There are still tons of broken add-ons too. And there are a lot of characters I'm not sure how to play right now.

A couple of things though sorta surprise me:


The game is now over 20 gigabytes
I listen to some people complain about this issue and say that this is forcing them to quit playing. There is a lot of wonder of what adding in the Cataclysm content is going to do to the size of the game as well. (the beta files are 28 gigs).  I think this is more of a problem for people with older systems though. 28 gigs is pretty huge and all, but for anyone with a computer made within the last few years, there shouldn't be a problem.

I think there might be an evolution going on here too. Basically, World of Warcraft seems like the same game it was six years ago. But that's just not the case. Elements of the graphics engine are all new now and from what I understand, a sizeable portion of the underlying code was rewritten this time around.  On the other hand, I don't think Blizzard has done a very good calling attention to these changes.

And thinking of unpleasant surprises...

Power PC Macintoshes have been abandoned. The whole Mac client is kinda wrecked.
I tried to find information to read on my own and got tired looking through the forums, so I'm going with some explanations reported to me by a friend right now.

The PPC problem really starts with Apple Computers, who designed OSX Snow Leopard optimized for their newer Intel-based Macs, and abandoned the PPC market about a year ago. Blizzard is just playing catch up in this regard.  I suppose I can understand this evolution.

But no one even tried to inform the general public about this. Blizzard published its list of system requirements for Cataclysm AFTER they released 4.0.1. Those system requirements should have been out months ago.

One very good friend, a PPC user who regularly reads this blog (Hail, Somaric! May thine blades cut true!) set out to update his game and got an error message stopping him dead in the water. It's unfortunate that this leaves a certain amount of the population in need of hardware upgrades that they didn't know they needed just a few weeks ago.

My Macintosh is struggling graphically right now.  iMacs and Powerbooks that could hum along at max graphic settings now hit 3 fps walls of laggy graphics on a fairly regular basis. There are a lot of crashes too, but I'm not sure if those aren't just the same as the other crashes that everybody is having.

As I understand it, Blizzard developed Catacylsm and patch 4.0.1 around the fact that Apple was going to release a graphic driver update around the same time that would be able to run some of the new  tricks featured in this expansion. Blizzard proceded apace with their plan, and Apple has not released its update yet.  My friend told me that Apple was aiming to release this update on about October 20. It is now October 26, and that has not happened.

Blizzard has nerfed my [insert class name here] into obsolescence!
I dunno what to say about this other than have some patience and try harder. I ran a few hours of a raid yesterday and found my usually mediocrish dps at the top of the charts, meanwhile our former dps champs bringing up the bottom. My mage was #1 on the charts. The #2 position would either be a death knight... or the warrior main tank. Sometimes, the tank beat my dps. WTF?

All this goes to say that the numbers are still off. Blizzard has been making about daily hotfixes to a lot of these and you know that more will be coming.

Secondly, so many of the mechanics of play have changed that I think you have to be in l2play mode right now. And if you're not trying to relearn your characters to a certain extent, then get off your arrogant uber-leet butt and get to it. Or go ahead and quit the game. You've been threatening it, so go ahead and do it now so the rest of us don't have to listen to the complaints anymore.

The only thing bothering me in terms of Blizzard here is that... why is all this stuff only being discovered after the patch came out? What was all the PTR testing about?  And some of these are not subtle changes. At Blizzcon, they said an incoming fix for combat rogues was going to be quadrupling their mastery bonus.  Quadrupling? That means the numbers they had before weren't even close. It's no wonder that a lot of people don't seem to trust developers and the numbers they use.