Friday 12 January, 2007

One of my favorite parts of World of Warcraft is the ability to interact with people from almost anywhere. Just as I was finishing my first gamelog my real life best friend messaged me asking if I wanted to do some battlegrounds with him. Upon logging onto my character I received a group invite from him and in less than a minute I had signed us up for a battle with Alliance (opposing player faction) from other servers.
The ability to be able to send group invites across zones and then be warped into a battleground from anywhere in the world saves players tremendous amounts of time and tedious running and is one of those minuscule but absolutely crucial aspects a good game must have to maintain flow. It wasn’t always this way in WoW however, one used to need to distant parts of the world to enter a battle ground queue and were only eligible to fight groups of opposing players from the same server. After joining the queue it could be hours until you began fighting! As you can imagine this wasted tremendous amounts of time and they apparently got enough feedback to change it to the current system where one can queue up themselves and their friends for all three battlegrounds from one room in any of the main cities. Waiting more than two minutes for a fight is unheard of now. The adaptability of WoW is its main strength, despite tantalizing efforts it is still nearly impossible to create a game that doesn’t need refining. Blizzard is able to take advantage of the feedback they get from their millions of subscribers in their weekly patches to constantly evolve their game to their player’s demands.
Also simplified chat features save players from having to repeat chat prompt commands, helping them make fewer mistakes. To direct who you are speaking to you must select a channel by typing either /g for guild, /w to whisper, or /1 for General chat. However, unlike previous MMORPGs I’ve played, once you speak in a channel the next thing you type will be directed at that channel without needing to repeat the chat command. It’s the thousands of little features like this I had always dreamed of having in other MMORPGs WoW has integrated that makes me appreciate the years of design put into it so much.

Grizzel

what server are u on?

what server are u on?

Gorgonash, Horde

Gorgonash, Horde