Posts with tag revamp

A few days ago, we posted on a very interesting statistic: Only 30% of all WoW trial accounts make it past level 10. On some level, it's been assumed that this number explains why Blizzard's taking such care to smooth out the beginning game a bit, to make it easier and more fun to stick with the game past level 10 or so. In a large way, this makes sense. But there may be other reasons beyond game play in play as well.

If you're picking up a trial account, chances are that you heard about it from a friend or a blog or a news report. But chances are, you were shown or described a massively armored warrior engaged in fierce hand to hand combat on the back of a dragon flying through the air, or a finely robed mage flinging a fireball at the face of the lord of all magic, or something similarly epic. With that in mind, it might justifably get discouraging to show up in game to find yourself dressed in rags, wielding a toothpick, and being sent to collect wolf pelts that inexplicably only drop off about half the wolves you kill.

With that in mind, it's easy to see how a trial account user could get bored pretty fast. But for me, there's one other angle that very few people seem to be bringing up: The social angle.

The folks over at Ten Ton Hammer have a post with some anecdotal data about Hunters -- they claim that Azeroth's ranged DPS pet class is on a decline lately, and they've got only some guild application numbers to back the theory up. Mem over there says that there are a few diehard Hunters still floating around, and lots of alts, but that as a class, it's fallen off in terms of popularity for sure.

Is he right? Fortunately, there's a site that tracks numbers (as reliably as you'll find for public information, anyway -- certainly Blizzard has access to much more information) on exactly that. WarcraftRealms' list of classes over time does prop the "declining Hunter" theory up -- as you can see (from both Alliance and Horde totals), Death Knights took a nice bite out of all the classes for a little while, and Hunters have been on a pretty steady slope down since mid-January, when patch 3.0.8 hit the realms. That, of course, was the harsh Beastmaster nerf, and ever since then, Hunters have had some real trouble recovering (not to mention that all class playtime is declining in general -- despite their slope downwards, Hunters are still in the top three classes played anyway).

Is this the end of Hunters? Not at all -- Blizzard has already said that they are cyclical about balancing classes, and a heavy set of nerfs on one side of the cycle is usually accompanied by a burst of buffs on the other. Not to mention that the most interesting Hunter changes, the ammo revamp, hasn't yet found its way to the game. Reworking of ammo (in addition to some likely buffs there), will probably bring lots of Hunters back to the stables, so to speak. But it's true, Hunters are on a downward turn lately.

[via WoW LJ]

While Blizzard's managed to do pretty well lately in adding quirks and surprises to make fishing more tolerable (or at least more desirable), the fact remains that it's still ultimately pretty boring to skill up and use altogether, and many people believe it's well overdue for a revamp.

It looks like Blizzard agrees, as Zarhym recently revealed that they plan to revamp it. Of course, he had no details or time frame, but that's par for the course for Blizzard.

As to how the revamp should go down, Insider Trader actually recently discussed some ideas. Myself, I'm in favor of the minigame approach. If Popcap can import Peggle, you have to figure it's possible to set up a pretty robust fishing mini-game in WoW. Of course, if all else fails, they could always just let us actually use a Goblin Fishing Pole.

When we first heard about heroic level instances in the Burning Crusade, many of us were thrilled at the thought of revisiting our favorite low level instances. We would have them boosted to an end-game level and resurrected into regular play. Then we found out that only the dungeons in Outland were geared up for heroic levels. At least one player was pretty disappointed by this news. One of our readers, Sean, asked to open up a dialog about old-world heroics.

Running the old world dungeons as actual five-man instances seems pretty rare these days. Sometimes we skip past them due to decreased leveling requirements, and an ability to gear our alts with gold earns on our mains. Often when we actually venture into these instances at the appropriate level, we are tailing a capable level 70 character. It's kind of a waste of space and programming effort for Blizzard to leave these instances gathering dust.