A preview of WoW:

Having played in both the Open and Closed Beta’s of WOW, I have received a great view of the game and now feel ready to play the game once it goes gold. During the course of playing these two “previews” of the game I have seen some differences and noticed some things that are enjoyable and not so enjoyable.

A Closed View

The Closed Beta of WoW was where I started playing the game, and it was much different then the experience I would have in the Open. Starting in a “Noob” zone, I came to the realization that there were few others there and that none of them were interested in grouping up with others.

So my venture in the Noob zone turned into a vicious rush to kill any quest NPC’s that I was requested too and that I would have no support to do it. Since I was just starting the game this wasn’t the best introduction, but it got me used to the WoW system and showed me how to play the game solo.

Once my trek through Noob land ended I started exploring the wide world of Azeroth and saw that most players seemed to center around the main cities of the game (Stormwind, Ironforge, etc, etc) which I thought was something good since it made sense to happen in a fantasy game.

The mid-noob zones were fairly populated though during my treks through Westfall I was forced to wait quite sometime before enough people were willing to go through the VanCleef instance. Having to go through this instance twice took longer then expected as I simply needed to find people to join with!

However the big thing that struck me about the Closed Beta was the quality of players, aside from the odd question about “where to find X” or if “Y quest was completed” there was little conversation in the chat that annoyed me (normally I’ll turn off the general chat if it gets too annoying for me to read).

My favorite part of the Closed Beta had to be the raiding aspect of it. People of all levels would attack or be attacked on our Beta Server, which was really cool because it was a non-PvP server so there were flags in place to make it more difficult to successfully raid an enemy location.

So, all in all the Closed Beta was a good experience and I couldn’t wait until the Open came around.

My Mind is Opened

I could now start a character in the Open Beta, and I immediately did so! The first thing I noticed about the game was the fact that the noob-zones were filled with at least thirty different players who were butchering every animal in sight to complete their first quests. Thankfully I normally played at 2am until about 5/6am due to my work schedule, so this was not as big and issue as I thought it would be. I only had to wait a few times for specific NPC’s to re-spawn (mainly named characters).

One nice thing about the Open was the fact that in most places there were people willing to group so that you could go around and kill monsters quicker and thus level faster. Plus there were tons of people on the Open who were really into the game and were just generally nice and willing to help. This could be seen a lot in people who had played in the Closed and wanted to help any new people.

The fact that the atmosphere was a bit more comfortable was of course countered by the fact that a literal swarm of 500,000 new players were now coming online asking every question under the sun. Looking back at the closed, there were WAY LESS questions and you could see the annoyance in some Closed players as they listened to the questions continue to appear on their screen. Having pawned a phrase off my boss I would reply with little things like, “I thought this was World of Warcraft, not World of Questioncraft!”. It was something to make me smile whilst leveling up.

Another thing I noticed was the fact that there was little difference in the way I was able to level my Proffessions as for some reason there was an abundance of the items I required to learn them (primarily in my characters case, mines). This was something I was kind of leery of from my herbalism experiences (or lack thereof) on the Closed Beta servers.

Finding a group to instance with in the Open took very little time as there were many people who had yet to try an Instance and were interested in doing one. This was cool from my perspective as I was able to teach some of the new players the main things to know about Instances.

The only thing I found about the Open that really ticked me off was the massive amount of Lag that was forced out by Blizzard (which was understandable when you consider the fact that the lag was put out to stress test the servers). I was just no amused by the fact that it took 2 minutes for my mailbox to properly receive items, and another 2 minutes for me to get the items from the mailbox.

It Looks Gold!

Well the game is going Gold soon and I expect to do another write-up on my experiences with a full retail version of the game! Until then I hope you’re all ready for the great experience that is World of Warcraft!