The lore and you.

Goodmorning/afternoon/evening/night/

As some of you might know i'm really interested in the story behind Warcraft, the lore as they call it. I've read most of the books (atleast the ones i was able to get a hold off, damn you proxis for not shipping 1 book i still don't have !) and are a frequent visitor of wowwiki to read up on major lorecharacters/events and items.
I think it's a very compelling and solid story that provides a decent backbone to the game(s) we play today. From Warcraft 1 throughout Wow the story has been further developped and explained and new stuff has been added. But not everything is as appreciated by the fanbase as Blizzard would've liked, especially when TBC was first launched / announced lore-addepts were up in arms about the Draenei and the Bloodelves because it wasn't "true" to the lore we have known for such a long time.
I can only imagine people needed a bit of time to accept the fact Blizzard wants to further develop their story as they probably have everything lined up for the coming expansion(s) and warcraft games. The same is happening again with this expansion where we will face 2 gigantic lore-characters in the form of Arthas/Lich King and Malygos and possible/maybe beat/kill them. Now, i do say this carefully as that is not known at all, we might just subdue them or they might flee from battle after we've reduced them to a pile of rubbish.
But nonetheless this is a catalyst for those lore-addepts to start up the QQ-train on the forums again, spouting random statements as "blizzard is destroying the lore" and "omg, we can't kill arthas for x and y reasons".
Let me say one thing: A mmo is all about progression, that counts for everything: skills, gear, professions, content and yes....storyline. So start accepting the fact the story won't be stuck in 1 certain phase forever, it will further develop and new faces will show up (for example the son of Grom Hellscream, Garosh)

So far my little rant

-Dave out

Achievements

Hello there, it's been a while but i've been busy PLAYING BETA. Yes, that's right, yours truly has a betakey /flex. So i was able to test out a few tidbits of the new Wrath of the Lich King and i can tell you this: it's very, very awesome.
But that's for a later post, first i wanted to review the new achievementsystem Blizzard has put in and its use.

So, what is an achievement? An achievement is something you get for doing something special, reaching a goal ingame. This could be discovering all of outlands or simply dinging 70.
The first thing that i noticed was that this system is very friendly towards all groups of the game, either to the hardcore players who want to achieve bosskils and to the casual players who are limited to their playtime and aren't able to raid all that much/far. This is very blizzlike tbh, they cater to the 2 major groups ingame to decrease the whining from the community.
For every achievement you get (you'll see it when you achieve something, it has a little animation and a fancy textured messagebox) you gain achievementpoints and an entry in the achievementpanel. This achievementpanel is also something new, it's a window where you have all the types of achievements you can get (raidachievement, exploration, dungeon, misc,...) and you also see what achievements you haven't completed yet, which sets a goal and gives you a direction what to do next.
Anyway, back to those achievementpoints. At this point in time there is not much use for those but they promised us to do something with the achievementpoints. I really wonder what it could be, although there are enough rumours on the internet about the use of those achievementpoints, nothing has been confirmed yet.

Now, this system seems like a good addition to the game and it looks like a system that satisfies the community....buuuut the wowcommunity wouldn't be the wowcommunity if it haven't found something to cry about.
"Cheap content", "Stolen from xbox live", "omg too much time to complete them all",....You can probably continue the list with multiple lines of "QQQQQQQ"
I don't think this is cheap content, it's not something that we've seen before and it's again a goalbased system. It will keep players busy in times when they are a bit bored (between raids, between battlegrounds,...) It's a little addition to the game that will be very good for the completionists in this game, who want to achieve everything possible (for them) in this game.
And when it's known what will be done with those achievementpoints it could be even more involved for other groups of players aswel.
Is it stolen from xbox live? C'mon, do you really think xbox live was the first system with achievements? Baldur's Gate had achievements for pete's sake.
Achievementsystems is a system that has been popular in the last wave of consoles (xbox live, playstation online) and it's not strange for Blizzard to jump on this bandwagon and implement an achievementsystem in their game. It will keep people playing and aiming for higher achievements, which should be the main goal in an mmorpg. Improving your character, testing the limits and achieving all you can while having loads of fun.

Wel, i did my achievement for the day *zzzziiinnggg* "Made a blogpost"

-Dave out