Blizzard, you had me at “wipe all my hard work away”!
September 24, 2008Sorry to keep throwing WoW snippets into this blog, but as a former player, sometimes I can’t help myself, particularly when Blizz throws out a boneheaded move like today. Their great plan to get me to come back to the game is: triggering a complete reset on PvP honor and marks.
I… I do not have the words. To be cynical, it’s just another move designed to punish players who invest more into the game than others — a kind of communist notion, if you ask me. But if nothing else, at least that’s one less reason for me to ever return to WoW, considering that whatever honor and marks I’d saved up are void because Blizz can’t roll out an expansion without wetting themselves in fear of imbalance.
Waaagh! A Warhammer Online Blog 
Boy, do I ever agree.
Commence ceremonial WoW disc burning. In the name of freedom. ><
Blizzard is funny. They better put their saving in a bank for their next MMO because WoW is dying.
Hardly.
This is a fine move. Why would you allow people to get level 80 gear by grinding level 70 pvp? You could, I guess, but why? I don’t see a problem with this in the least.
Also, WoW is not dying.
Thank you for reminding me of why I now play WAR.
Poor Blizz… It’s kinda like watching that Hollywood stud on the big screen for years and years and thinking that he’s the stuff… then one night you get to meet him at a party and he’s eating boogers in the corner and blathering about the wrath of Xenu.
Yeah, kinda like that.
Oh man. What a mess. Glad I’m out of that scene.
I read a few months back that there was a whisper of this happening. That for me was the last nail in the coffin and the next day I pre-ordered War!
*** Blizzard is funny. They better put their saving in a bank for their next MMO because WoW is dying. ***
WoW continues to grow at a phenomenal, exponential rate. It’s not even slowing down, let alone “dying.”
One reason for people to leave WoW would be that they wouldn’t be up against people who are EONS beyond them after years of PVP. Since WAR will involve similar resets (each time a city burns, the world will go back to square one for a fight anew), I’m guessing they’re trying to emulate that in their own way.
OMFG! I’m at the honor cap right now and pretty close to have 100 of each mark. Needless to say, there is a good chance I won’t be playing Wrath.
I am with Sean – why should you be able to use lvl 70 rewards to by lvl 80 gear? Should I be able to save my Black Temple raid tokens and turn them in for lvl 80 raid sets? No. I have ~35K honor banked and ~75 marks of everything but AV (I don’t enjoy AV and therefore don’t play it). But I played tlots of BGs because I enjoyed PvP, not for loot. And I would hardly call it “work”; it’s a “game.” Therefore I could care less if they reset honor. I find it hard to feel pity for those that play the game solely for loot and seem to garner to actual enjoyment from playing.
WoW continues to grow at a phenomenal, exponential rate. It’s not even slowing down, let alone “dying.”
WoW is not growing. Blizzard likes to tout their “10 million subscriptions” but they havent updated it since then. Dont you think if they hit 11, 12, or 13 million they would be telling everyone and their mothers?
The 10 million subscriptions (no not subscribers) was announced 6 or 7 months ago and we havent heard a peep from them since. I’m guessing there are from 6-7 million individual subscribers.
I wouldnt say WoW is dying, but I would say its population is declining.
See, I think resetting is a good idea. I agree with the people who think it’s silly that you can PvP at level 70 to get level 80 gear.
What I think is REALLY dumb is that they have honor requirements as well as arena requirements for some of the PvP gearsets. As someone who detests arena, that will pretty much ensure I never PvP in WoW again.
Sheesh they should have come to a compromise and maybe put it at half the honour cap. What I don’t understand are marks. Why reset them? Thinking about those WSGs makes me want to puke.
I really enjoy your blog, I really enjoy WoW. And I’m enjoying War so far. I find these posts sniping at WoW a bit off-putting. A bit like your gold-farming story, each encounter with WoW bashing leaves a sour taste.
Maybe it’s time to leave it be – no doubt once upon a time you had great times in WoW, now you’re having a great time in War. There’s no need to slam WoW – let it rest, enjoy Warhammer. Both games can be great, and there’s no doubting WoW is (or, in your case, was) great.
But where will MMO gamers go to play a game that is much like WoW but doesn’t have a company that is constantly screwing the customers?
Oh, hey, hello Warhammer Online!
Bad move Blizzard, there’s better options out there now, and great way to drive your customers, especially those interested in PvP, into the open arms of Mythic.
Yea that really sucks. I’m now glad I stopped saving up honor points and marks. I had a bad feeling they were going to do that, especially after they announced that they would do the same thing for arena stuff.
I won’t be able to spend marks or honor on anything useful until I get to 80 anyways. At which point the scaling would be different even if they weren’t changing the system and the honor and marks I had saved would not be as valuable.
You want to keep grinding that axe, go ahead.
@ Awnm – Sorry if they make you feel uncomfy, but I talk about what strikes me as interesting. Feel free to skip ’em if I do them.
Couldn’t really care as they are giving enough warning time so one can spend the marks and honor before the reset and not worthlessly bank it.
But they better not touch my useless PVP titles or there will be hell to pay!
They really just need to get rid of the honor point system altogether. Go back to the rank system if they must, but WARs RR system of pvp leveling would be ideal; impetus to go forward w/o the decay that made people chose between a job and getting Grand Marshal.
Why the hell shouldn’t I be able to use the honor and tokens I earned at level 70 to buy level 80 stuff? That’s the way the system works now. I can play BGs one or two a night, more on holiday weekends, from level 11 and save enough to get some cool rewards when I hit 70. Or I can get some neat upgrades along the way.
This sealed it for me, I’ll be canceling when I get home tonight.
Also, WoW doesn’t really have 10 million subs.
It has 5 million or so subscriptions. The subs from China buys by the hour, not a monthly fee. They aren’t really subscribers.
WoW is 4 years old. Its peaked. It’s been nearly a year since Blizz has bragged about its sub numbers, even in their inflated, not-really accounting method. I’m sure the number of real flesh and blood people paying for accounts on a monthly basis is less than 5 million.
Maybe your server is different, but on my server it would be pretty insane to claim that it was a thriving game growing exponentially. You almost never saw new people come in; everyone had been playing for 2 years or more. More people were leaving than coming in. The new servers they started were so low pop people were begging for a merge or free transfers to their servers.
Hell, all the chracter transfers to the new hot servers should tell you a thing or two; the players are voting with their feet and merging servers for Blizz. That ain’t a good sign.
The game is past its peak. It’ll still be around 10 years from now for the diehards (people still play Ultima Online for gods sake), but its day as the ultra mega godzilla of MMOs is coming to an end.
Hell, Blizz bragged about getting 40% of the people who quit for Age of Conan back.
AOC sucked— its a dead game. And 60% of the people who quit never came back? Ouchies. That’s a really bad sign. Sure, WOTLK will bring some people back. Probably not as much as you’d think.
It wont be bringing me back after playing Warhammer for a week
Why do we have to talk about WoW here. Sorry to rain on the WoW hater’s parade, but the game is still infact growing and should peek in 2009. This is taken from a serious research that was done. According to this same study, in 4 years WoW will still have 4-5 million players.
The honor reset had to be done, it’s just common sense.
It’s not common sense to me.
You can BG from level 11, collect marks and honor, and turn it all in when you hit 70 for gear.
Why is it suddenly different now that the new expansion is out?
And who are you to tell Syp what he can and can’t discuss on his own blog? If you don’t like it, skip the post.
I never told Syp what to talk about. I really enjoy Syp’s blog and style and I’m a regular reader. I just don’t like the “My game’s better than yours” talk. Maybe I’m wrong but the reason there’s comments is to allow a discussion about the subjet.
Syp can talk about what ever he likes. And we can all leave comments and have a great discussion about it.
[…] So, as a WAR player, I now read Syp’s WAAAGH blog and came across this. […]
I’m sorry, but this is a WAR blog. If you come here hoping to hear about how great WoW is, you’re doing it wrong.
Well the change was reverted. Probably because of this blog post! >.>