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‘Burning’ expansion leaves players WOWed
Higher character level caps, new continent among features
By Sean Quast
Each new snippet of information left players counting the day as if they were 4-year-olds waiting for a sexy Santa night elf to give them a present. I died in about 1.5 seconds. I was overjoyed.
About a year ago there were about half a million people playing “World of Warcraft.” Now that number is around 8 million. And all 8 million of the players who were playing on Jan. 16 haven’t stopped since.
That was the day when the long-awaited expansion title “The Burning Crusade” was released to the masses.
For months now beta testers had leaked precious information about the expansion. Every once in a while Blizzard Entertainment would even whet the whistles of players by officially announcing details. Each new snippet of information left players counting the day as if they were 4-year-olds waiting for a sexy Santa night elf to give them a present.
How is it that 8 million people spent nights dreaming about a fantasy world? Well, “World of Warcraft” was the game of the year when it was released. It brought simplicity to the realm of online role-playing games. This is one of the main reasons that the game has maintained its market dominance.
I must admit I was one of the few who had been salivating over this expansion.
What did this offer me? Well, the character level cap has been moved up from 60 to 70. A whole continent, Outland, has been added for these higher-level players. Two new races have been added to the game.
The Alliance gained the race of Draenei, which have the ability to be Shamans, a character class unavailable to the Alliance before.
The Horde fraction of the game gained the Blood Elves that have the ability to be Paladins, a character class unavailable to Horde players before.
As I stepped through the Dark Portal into Outland for the first time, I walked directly into a randomly occurring event where the portal is attacked by monsters much higher than my level 60. I died in about 1.5 seconds. I was overjoyed.
My first attempt to run through a dungeon ended much the same way. This time five players died in about 12 seconds.
Each hour I played I got new and better gear and found new and intriguing monsters to fight. The design of Outland and the story created there brought the game to a new level. It was everything that higher-level players asked for.
Higher-level players found better and better gear for the character with each quest and dungeon raid. The treasures for playing seemed limitless.
Now for new players to game, having the new races gives them a strong advantage to their leveling and to how they will play in end game. The two new races seem grossly overpowered compared to the eight previous races. Their abilities and classes suit them perfectly.
The only problem is that the older realms are overpopulated. The wait to play during peak hour is insane. It’s reached over an hour and a half. Blizzard is attempting to fix this by offering free server transfer for players to less-populated servers, but from the responses I got asking other players, not many are thinking about doing it.
If players voluntarily switch servers, the servers will be divided, potentially splitting players from their friends.
Although this is all Blizzard can do now, it seems that maybe there could have been a way to prevent this from occurring.
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