I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but just from a perspective of realism rather than optimism, I’m anticipating that 3-day early access to be 2-days of login queues and disconnects and 1-day of unexpected downtime. So then when the real launch occurs, all the wrinkles will be ironed out and we’ll all say hi in the opening sequence.
Even if I let the optimism leak through, tho, I don’t think 3 days will be enough for most people to get too far ahead. The elitists and bots, maybe, but I think most people will just be playing and won’t even hit max level. Unless we delve deep enough to find a pond of magical frogs that drop all crafting reagents, of course.
Haven’t they rolled back the magical frogs in the past? Even if we do find them, we will get no permanent benefit, and may even face action to our account, lol.
Most peoples more realistic plans for early access I have seen are…
i) level to 80 - unlock adventure mode and world quests (which wont be available until after launch) - 1 day for levelling + 1 day for hold-ups and drama
ii) go get all the profession treasures for alts - depending on how many alts - for me half a day - plus get all the bags of goods and 200aa from a one off quest.
iii) do some profession levelling if possible with the bags of goods
iv) do some gathering…
That will be my prepatch - and that will be about average. Sure there are fast levellers / no lifers who will level 5 toons to 80 etc. - but most of us will always be behind them.
I expect my closest warcraft friend who is starting at launch time to have caught me by the weekend - he is faster and plays more hours.
I wish there was no prelaunch. I wish if there was that they’d be clear about what the rules are.
Because they wanted to make pre-sales.
It’s easy to be shady about what you’re selling to make a sale then pull the curtain away after the lionshare of sales are made and say, “we wish we were more honest when we took your money” to appeal to the most naive people you took money from. See the character select screen reveal on the day pre-sales were opened compared to what we actually got…
Blizz are still doing this in real time, caught in 4k, as this last month has seen the most dense cluster of nurfs to the game I can remember, after everyone has already decided if they’re buying the game or not. Wasn’t AI nurfed literally with today’s maintenance and the game comes out in 2 days or whatever?
No, a 3 day head start will not give players a massive advantage over others. Especially since the first few days the vast majority of players will still be levelling.
Yes, but by TWW, blizz has nurfed the economy so hard, that the effort you’re putting into gathering doesn’t have as much value as you remember it having. The value is in the knowledge power and other gimmicks of crafting order crap.
Normal Dungeons are available.
Delves up to lvl 3 are available.
Professions are available.
Leveling to 80 and completing quests is available.
No weeklies until full launch next Tuesday.
No BoE’s available until next Tuesday aswell.
Profession CD’s and Specializaion points will be unavailable.
All of these are confirmed across multiple interviews, posts, etc by Blizz. That’s what we know 100% will and won’t be available.
I don’t see the big deal. Professions literally don’t make a real difference at all. Not having a piece of crafted gear won’t cripple your parses I promise. The gold won’t matter, I promise you that. Even if people buy carries with the gold, you can easily see the non-existent parse, or that beautiful gray 14. Either way a little extra gold is pretty meaningless in the end. I promise most of you won’t be in the hall of fame, so stop worrying about it.
