Folks keep bringing up “experience” and how this was not good for providing players a good demo of what the game will be like when it goes live.
You have all failed to understand what this 48hrs of testing is for!
It is for STRESS testing the server. It is not a beta, it is a stress test for blizz to try and ensure that their hardware and coding can handle the extreme load they will likely see at launch. Anyone that has been around long enough to have played Vanilla will understand this, and I commend Blizz for taking this sort of step to ensure a more smooth launch. It is something that they have struggled and failed to handle well in some past expansions. What some of you saw lastnight was minor compared to those of us that were live at launch of TBC. Lack of mobs and scorched earth landscape due to severe player load is nothing compared to entire servers flat out crashing completely so you cannot log in just because of the number of players trying to log in. Spawn rates and phasing/load leveling can be fixed easy these days, but only if the servers can handle the initial hit of player load.
It has nothing to do whatsoever with player enjoyment RIGHT NOW, at all. It is all about ensuring quality of experience at launch.
BLIZZ - Keep it up! I was having flashbacks of my 1st toon (which I rerolled for this test) Please do NOT change tagging either! Other than initial launch mayhem tagging needs to stay as is, it is what brought people together into groups which made vanilla such a good experience and built friendships many of us still have today. I got more group requests in 2hrs lastnight than I have in months of Live.
While testing this morning, LOTS (2 levels of grinding mobs) of weirdness with looting. I killed a mob, it had the “bag” icon when moused over, so I click the mob, it makes the sound of the loot window opening and there is a brief flash of the loot window on my screen. Nothing went into my bag. This happened at least 50 times before I gave up on counting it. Mobs who had quest items dropping from them would sometimes drop the quest item and sometimes something else (as would be expected), so loot did work sometimes.
That is working as intended, it’s in their “not a bug” forum post. These mobs simply don’t have any loot, but the game still tells them they are lootable
Thanks Bornakk! I had a wonderful time. I was able to get my 'lock to 15, and some trade even developed… sold a bunch of wands, bought other green armor pieces, blew away the horde in WSG. And then for the capper a level 6 priest /w me wanting to buy my 25s AH wand for 10s, so I just gave one to him for free, since he made the effort to whisper me. Made his day :-).
What a taste of classic this has been! Well worth re-subbing for a month.
I did notice a ton of minor issues, plus several major ones related to pet control. The attack mode seems to work ok, sorta, but the pet doesn’t stick to the target. The ‘defense’ mode can’t be working properly. I distinctly remember the pet would attack any mob that I attacked OR which attacked me, not just mobs that hit me (which is the modern WOW mechanic… and it sucks, by the way. The original mechanics were much better). Also, passive mode keeps resetting the pet if I try to sick it on something. In all the modes if I sick a pet on a mob it just doesn’t stay there… it keeps going to another mob or coming back to me (in multi-mob / multi-control situations). Very annoying.
There is also a large 2+ second delay in the pet reacting to any action… doesn’t seem to be due to lag. I notice it in the modern game too. The original game most definitely did not have that.
In the original game the pets actually had an aggro table and you could queue an attack sequence in reverse, and the pet stayed on the mob you told it to attack. That was changed sometime post-vanilla to the current really horrible pet controls. I really hope Blizzard is able to restore the original pet mechanics that classic had, they were a big part of how the pet classes operated.
Other than the braindamaged pet controls, I only saw occasional lag on server 15. Definitely a bit of database lag but it generally didn’t impede the game and it recovered back to normal fairly quickly. Very much better than the huge database lags that vanilla had in the first few months. And there were a lot of people in northshire. Yah servers!
I really don’t like how I have to sub to play a test for 48 hours, It’s honestly lame and pathetic. I got really hyped seeing I could download it but when I selected a server and get the message I need a sub to play, I exited the blizzard launcher and almost uninstalled. Now, I’m disappointed and will just wait till classic is out to resub.
So I did your stress test. My first thought is no cross server/phasing/realm of any kind. The starting areas were very congested. Quests took much longer then normal due to this.
My second thought is I feel you should push the classic version back further then the one you are planning on releasing. There was allot of little things players were noticing that were not.
My third thought on the stress testing, their is a great deal of trolls coming over from the main game, trying to tare down classic wow. Though they put forth good sounding phrases, if you know what your looking for you can see right through them. My guess is at launch of classic their is going to be allot of trolling from this crowd both on the forums, and in the classic servers.
Lastly I thought I was done with wow, I really did, I thought maybe classic to me was about reliving old memories. This of course you can not do. Instead I found my self loving the game again, from ammo, to the extra trips, to everything else. Also I would put out a definitive answer, on a question I saw pop up allot. People were wondering if they were going to keep the characters they created during this stress test.
Oh and before I forget classic orgrimmar so much more horde like then the current version of bfa.
I do not know, because of layering I decided to uninstall WoW completely and will only come back to play if layering is removed 100% from the game. Good luck on w/e you are trying to make here but I am sure there are many in the no layering crowd.
I participated in the first 2 stress tests, but after running to the main city to find out I was alone and had to be invited to a layer to fight the summoned boss, I knew that was it for me.
i know you have it up as june 19-21 but maaybe the folks at blizzard could make it till july 1st? <3 lol… dont wanna be bored waiting around for the next stress test to roll back out xD ( assuming it too is an open stress test for active subs)
Had a great time. Second day much smoother than the first few hours of day 1. Played on realm 3, no issues, very smooth. Was great to see the Old World and Old Orgrimmar! It was also nice getting my preverbial tush handed to me by a mob 3 levels higher. The challenge is back, the feel is back. Really looking forward to release day.
Found a bug in the ui window when you open two windows. Its a brown vertical line running though the middle of the second window. I took a pic but cant post it here. If you contact me I can send you the pic.
Played on server 3. Was decently crowded, but at the time there were only two servers up. Lots of competition for quest mobs.
Only layering issue I encountered was zeppelin travel. Herb nodes would appear on my minimap upon loading into the new continent, but disappeared when I tried to get them. No other players nearby.
I love the beta at 40, but blizzard the server is a ghost town, does it still need to be so exclusive? With 8.2 coming out there will be a lot of people that go back to that
Learn to invite others to group with you so you all get credit for the kill. THAT was vanilla, THAT was MMO-interaction. WoW as a single-player game didn’t come into being until much, much later. Had a flashback to original WoW with strangers passing by me throwing buffs, and seeing “ty” and “np” in the chat window. Partying up will enhance your experience, not degrade it.
I just was able to download and play it last night, but I never received an email for it. The stress test is over, so that means I have the actual beta access? or ?
Layering was used far too much here. The server seemed like a ghost town. Compared to the last stress test which there were soooo many people. (Which was awesome!!) Personally I understand the gripe about not being able to tag mobs but IMOP it is meant to be that way. I would much rather kill boars for 30mins or more too see all the people on the same quest than kill boars with only like 3 people around. (and complete in 5mins)