I just had my greatest moment in gaming yesterday!

[LordFarid]

Well there's the official world of warcraft site which has a lot of information. You can find that at www.worldofwarcraft.com. For reviews i would say gamespot review and their case for game of the year are both nice reads. Also there is the world of warcraft blog on gamespy which is very interesting.

I'm currently playing on an athlon xp 2000 and have a ati radeon 9800 pro videocard and i can set the settings to quite high without any troubles. My computer is older than 2 years by now, so nowadays I would say that a cheap athlon powered computer with a very affordable 9800 pro videocard should be more than enough to play both half life 2 and world of warcraft.

These are the minimum system requirements:

Windows® System 98/ME/2000/XP OS:

800 MHz or higher CPU
256 MB or more of RAM
32 MB 3D graphics card with hardware transform and lighting, such as GeForce 2 or better
4 GB or more of available hard drive space
DirectX® 9.0c or above
A 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection

I would say spend 600 dollars on the computer and at least 150 dollars on the videocard to be sure of a wild experience (because even on my two year old computer this game looks amazing).


I'm not sure at what frequency they open new servers, i know they opened a couple of new ones in europe after a week and will probably open more. For the american situation i would check the world of warcraft forums on the official websites, perhaps you could ask that question there. I do know that the american servers are also overcrowded, and that many more people will probably join up (considering everquest lasted 5 years) so it is inevitable they will add new servers.
Mind you, world of warcraft will be a fascinating experience even regardless of the server, so if its not possible don't worry to much about it because fun you will have anyways.

[Snack Eater]

I never got into MMORPGs because they all require you to pay fees monthly, which is fucking aggravating.

[strech]

They just added 5 new American servers (2 PvP, 2 RP, 1 Normal); these were the first additions since a week of release. They may be more common now, though, Blizzard stopped selling copies of the game in the US for a while.

You need a lot of ram. 512 is good and 1 Gig is ideal. This is mostly to do with loading when you enter areas with large numbers of people. Beyond the RAM, I have no issues with an Athlon XP 1800 and a Radeon 8500, both getting pretty old now.

Oh, and a comment on PvP -

PvP as a war with raids like LordFarid's experience is around on PvE and RP servers as well. You don't have to watch your back all the time so there's the "constant danger" part lost, but town attacks are frequent. It's consensual, but that means you need to put your "pvp flag" up to be attacked by another player, and things like attacking the other side's NPCs (or anyone with their pvp flag on) will automatically put your pvp flag on. There's also a command to turn it on yourself. After 5 minutes of not doing anything that would put your flag on it expires.

This has the drawback of a lot of people don't "flag up" and just watch, and some people decide to let their flag expire and annoy people or dance when a real opponent shows up. On the other had, if you just want to solo quest you don't have to worry about the other side unless you want to.

This sunday the Horde on my server (US, RP, Cenarion Circle, still mid population I think) hit 4 towns with decent size groups at the same time, in addition to the normal scattered harrasment by small numbers of horde elsewhere. And the Alliance response was impressive, considering their defense message channel must have been lighting up like a christmas tree. Somewhat disorganized, but large and fast.

It's been a while since my first PvP experience, which was a wonderful late-night defense of a town with others against attackers mostly higher level than me, as I tried not to get killed while helping finish off attackers or root them in one spot so someone that could do real damage to them could manage it. Also stuff like tracking a group of 20+ mounted attackers as they moved through the Barrens to attack a (relatively) low-level city after trashing a higher one before anyone could even slow them down, and worrying if we could repel them. (And hoping they didn't notice me, as I stayed as far away as I could while keeping them in vision).

[neutralmilk]

dude i could not make it through the long posts but it seemed very intriguing and i shall try again. seems like Risk but for console.

[Mike Bracken]

God, I wanna play this game so bad...I really need to go buy a PC for gaming.

Mike B.

[LordFarid]

I would just like to report, that like people have been saying, I've had experiences the last couple of days which where vastly more impressive and satisfying than the first pvp experience i had. Now I'd like to warn some people on the point of buying this game, it has minor spoilers to what the regions in world of warcraft are like. Not any storylike spoilers, but if you are planning on getting this game soon, you may want to not read my pieces and discover the land on your own.

I'm a level 23 Dwarven hunter now and on wednesday evening i finally started my travel in the direction to darnassus and the lands of the dark elves. On thursday night i arrived (it didn't took 24 hours, i did go on foot most of the journey, but i also had school and my parttime job on thursday, but nonetheless it took me hours to arrive because on my way i kept being tugged into all sorts of quests from other players who needed my help. Anyways, finally there i must say i am truly suprised at what is going on in the dark elven terretories.

I ended up in a region called Ashenvale. Now i've been in a number of contested areas before like redridge mountains (where lakeshire is), duskwood and wetlands, and in all of these areas there is horde activity, but also a lot of NPC protection, and the horde activity is periodically. Often there wasn't any horde at all, and if there was it where small groups of horde adventurers who got lost a long way from home.

That isn't the case in Ashenvale though, Ashenvale is ground zero. Ashenvale is the front, its fallelujah, its war each and everyday in ashenvale, and its elven capitol is under constant attack. This isn't coincidence, the Elves have the unluck that they are right on the border with the orcs and the trolls, and unlike in the human lands, where the undead countries are seperated by dangerous high level zones, Ashenvale is easily accessible for the Horde. You might think this is unfair, but I feel it is fantastic, after all, they could have equally spread the danger among the alliance races, but that would't be very realistic, now would it, as in real life, some countries also have the unluck to have evil dictatorships right across their borders (like Canada, ok that was an evil joke, just kidding ) and others have the luck of being surrounded by friendly countries. Anyways, the elven countries, particularly the contested zone Ashenvale is under heavy pressure from the Horde, constantly. NPC's get killed, strategical points like towers and npc houses get raided and the Horde now even has the brutality of attacking the elven capital Astranaar, and these aren't just sting attacks like in wetlands or like the attack on lakeshire, these are massive raids where they reach the center of the capital, and not once a day, but many times a day. There is a constant siege on astranaar, and if you travel the roads of the ashenvale province alone, you will likely die from ambushes (which is why the lone traveller stays clear of the roads and travels trough the woods, that are filled with monsters and creatures, but relativly is safe from horde). Ashenvale therefore (on the pvp servers anyway) is not for the weak, and elves that want to spend their first 20 levels doing quests without being bothered by horde are not advised on travelling south to ashenvale but could better travel to the more peaceful human and dwarven countries after they did most of the quests in their own friendly territories.

Anyways, on thursday night i spend most of my time defending Ashenvale's many strategic points as well as defending Astranaar but after a while we where getting real pissed about their constant attacks and decided we should strike them back. "We" in this case, where a group of Spanish elves (I landed on the unnofficial spanish server Spinebreaker). The elves called on all their friends, and before i knew it we had gathered an army of about 30 to 40 volunteers to go into horde territory and pay them a lesson. The funny thing about the whole situation was that first of all they where all spanish and second of all they where all elves. I was truly the only non-elf in this group, which you can see on the screenshot i posted on this blogspot:

We travelled far south to the barrens, which is not just contested land dominated by horde, but actual horde territory (which means that you cannot attack horde, but they can attack you in which case their pvp flag goes up for 5 minutes and you can attack them. We avoided some of their big settlements and killed many groups and lone horde travellers (even though they don't have to attack you and you meet occasional "tourists" that just watch us, most horde, even the low levels, have the courage to defend their own land)arrived at a small city of theirs in the central barrens. Before the gates of the city we gathered, and we attacked them and almost got into their city, but as we kept killing horde, more horde gathered to their calls, and just like what happened on, the horde defence was slowly but surely growing into an army. We pulled back and stopped a few hundred meters in front of their city, and we saw a small army turn bigger and bigger in front of the city but they did not attack us yet, and we stopped attacking them. When the horde Army had finally reached a large number they where slowly, very slowly moving forward, while we where very, very slowly moving backwards impressed at the enourmous size of this cities defence. But we werent there just to view their outside gates or to go sightseeing, we where there to fight, to spill our blood for revenge, so instead of retreating permenantly, i decided to storm right ahead. Thats right, i send my pet bear (Boriz) right up their flanks and stormed after him and as soon as i bravely stormed into my sure death i saw others were following my leaves and the elves massivly attacked. Now although we had some high level elves among our ranks, we where clearly outnumbered, but we stayed and fighted right around that city of theirs for at least 15 minutes, at which time there was so many horde there was only one option left, retreat. Now by the time i had died many times and I decided it was time for my retreat, most of the elves had already fled back to ashenvale, and the retreat to ashenvale, with a huge horde army on my back was exciting to say the least. I killed many unsuspecting horde on my way, and i was ambushed and killed myself too many times of course, but at the end of the night (3 am) i was safely back in Astranaar.

That was thursday....

[LordFarid]

...on friday i had another experience, perhaps even more atmospheric than the one on thursday. See i had a quest where i had to travel deep trough contested lands to a mountain peak to deliver an item to a magical creature who lived there. The first thing i had to do was find a secret mountain tunnel which was located south of Astranaar, or so everyone said, but it actually took me two hours to find this hidden tunnel (which was a great adventure in itself, because while searching you meet dangerous NPC animals and beasts as well as the ocassional lost horde groups or solists). After i finally found the tunnel, it took me too an area that was also contested area, but Horde friendly instead of alliance friendly with alliance cities like the contested zones i was at previously. Even in this Horde friendly area, which was filled with dark creatures and npc monsters as well as with horde, i was able to solo quite well, although it was challenging and rockhard, i got until the foot of the big talonpeak mountain by myself, a beautiful, fantastic achievement considering the dangerous areas i had to cross. I was basically able to avoid most confrontations with the horde by avoiding the roads, just like in the lord of the rings, the roads are dangerous especially in these areas. But talonmountain is something different. Apparently the magical creature at the top is either an boss monster to the horde or they figured out that this mountain gets climbed by a lot of solo alliance adventurers but the mountain is under constant attack from the horde. This is never a huge problem in this game though, because the simple solution is that you wait at the foot of the mountain and gather enough alliance members who need to go there and then storm the mountain by force. After a few minutes wait i was in a group of about 5 elves and me and we started the climb of talonmountain, where we fought valliantly against small horde groups until we where able to chase them away and reach the mountaintop.

Talonmountain peak is a paradise, its a small beautifully green atmospheric mini paradise in the mids of horde dominated evil lands, and both the music, the setting and the fact that i had completed this immense fantastic quest that took me hours just made me so damn happy to be there, you have no idea.

I can also see clearly now why many reviewers point out this game is perfect for solo players, because it is, you can do many challenging and rewarding quests on your own, and if you end up in a region that has too difficult monsters or a lot of horde activity, you can often survive by fighting alongside (you dont even have to join their groups) other alliance members in the region. This however does not mean the game is easy at all, because there are simply an enourmous number of quests and locations of all kinds of difficulty, meaning you can make it as hard or as easy for yourself as you want. As a low level dwarf you do not want to travel to the horde home territories or to mountains and regions where huge dragons and other monsters roam, but if you want to go there, you have a choice, either do quests until you are strong enough to travel there (relativly safely) or go in groups or in big raids. Your adventure is always is difficult as the quests you take, and since there is an overabundance of quests to take in every region, you decide wether you want to slay huge monsters together with a group, do easier quests with just one or two or three companions, do huge raids with more than 30 other players or even just solo all the time and do the medium and easy quests alone. And many people do this, meaning that everyone is kind of playing this fantastic single player game together. In this sense, this game is the exact opposite of final fantasy 11, where after level 12 your solo career about ended, and you had to sacrifice your time to help your group and had huge responsibilities for the groups you where in. But then, that was Final Fantasy, and this is World of Warcraft, and as a previous final fantasy fanboy i can now confirm that in my opinion the days of final fantasy dominance are truly over. If you'd show up on my door tommorow with a copy of final fantasy 12 in your hands i would tell you to come back in a year or so. Hell, i would probably tell you not to come back at all until you could bring me a final fantasy online experience that comes close to this.

Where's Jet Black by the way? I remember he totally lived in Final Fantasy 11, he must be in World of Warcraft if he knows whats good for him.

I put two pictures on the following website:

http://worldoffaridcraft.blogspot.com/

I just placed them there quickly, but i will put more on them soon. On the first picture you see the elves storming out of the Ashenvale woods (this picture was taken just before we went on the raid, and there where many more elves behind me) and on the second picture you see me and my bear boris inside the secret tunnel that led into the region where talonpeak mountain is.

[Avptallarita]

Thanks for taking the time to write all that down, LF. I really enjoyed reading both experiences.