This Persistent Life #7

4. Attunement requirements should be less stringent

"It's a no-win situation for both the newer players, who may have "missed the boat" so to speak, and the high-end guilds, who are going to have trouble recouping from the losses-by-attrition that inevitably happen in those sorts of organizations."

Progress report: As of version 2.1.2, attunements are no longer required for WoW's "entry level" 25-player raid dungeons, Serpentshrine Cavern, and Tempest Keep: The Eye. For the same reasons I originally cited, Blizzard removed the lengthy quests required to gain access to these raid zones, opening up this high-end content to a more casual set of raiders. A post on the official boards from Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan, a Blizzard designer, states that those who have already completed these difficult attunement quests can eventually look forward to some high end rewards: "At a later point, we are considering adding a final reward step to those quests as well (that way those who have already completed them would not miss out on a *new* reward)." Kudos to Blizzard.

5. The spam needs to stop

"Even the most casual WoW player will attest to the insane frequency of goldseller spam these days. It's gotten out of control in the past month or so; you literally can't go 10 minutes without someone with an unintelligible name offering you piles of in-game currency for pennies on the dollar."

Progress report: Another big win for Blizzard: following version 2.1.0, a series of reporting tools were implemented that enabled players to immediately report unsolicited in-game messages and ignore any whispers from characters on offending accounts for the duration of their play sessions. The result was a dramatic decrease in the amount of gold spam in-game. Nowadays, the peddlers have to be more ingenious--rather than simply spamming an entire world with a single message, they have to dupe players into joining raid groups in order to solicit their goods and services. Again, well done Blizzard.

6. We need guild housing

"Currently, guild leaders have to rely on mule characters to hold their group's collective largesse. This can create a multitude of problems, not the least of which is the one that can arise when a disgruntled bank-alt holder decides to ditch the guild, and vendor its hoard."

Progress report: In the July issue of Games for Windows magazine, Blizzard revealed its plans to implement a pretty comprehensive-sounding guild bank system. From the sounds of it, it will be tabbed and indexed, granting, when fully upgraded, hundreds of extra inventory slots for guilds. Guild masters will set permissions that limit what sorts of items individual players can withdraw from the bank, as well as allow members to repair their equipment using guild funds. Still no word on guild housing, but this is a definite start.

7. Too many dead servers

"Every other day, a new series of petition posts pop up on the official boards, detailing, in all sorts of inflammatory language, just how underpopulated / Alliance-skewed / Horde-dominated a certain server is. That these sorts of posts pop up so frequently belie a potentially serious problem with WoW: that there are entire servers full of players who aren't having as much fun as they could be."

Progress report: Unfortunately the outlook hasn't changed here. On the plus side, no new realms have been opened, which would only aggravate the problem. There is some indication though that Blizzard is thinking along these lines: the two least-populous Battle groups (Battle groups being groups of individual servers lumped together for the purposes of PvP matchmaking) have been merged. Frenzy and Cataclysm are now Retaliation. This should help alleviate the lengthy queues that these servers' inhabitants had to endure in order to PvP. If only Blizzard would take a similarly assertive stance on the proliferation of ailing servers...

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