5punk

It's a technical clusterfuck basically.

For a Start, they've been DDoS'd to fuckery and back, but that's pretty much under control now.

As far as development goes, they've done massive amounts of phasing stuff, but given the bottlenecks and the lack of content, huge amounts of players are getting hung up in certain areas causing huge server load and general hardware lag (rather than network lag)

Basically, rather than as with most expansions where they have a few options (new race/class, a few different zones to start in) you get a boost to 90, and pointed at the dark portal, which fires you at proto-outlands, into an introduction zone, which you then quest through into proto-blades edge mountains. Unfortunately, this means everyone is in a smallish zone, trying to interact with one person using them at a time objects, and lagging the servers out.

Then there's the Garrison (your own personal town*) which is an instance using magic to be in the world, but is private. now you have countless thousands of people all in a very small amount of space, all in (in theory) their own instance, but without enough instance server capacity, so that's everyone in the world in another small spot, lagging servers out.

On the plus side, pings have never been this low, ever. generally looking <50ms.

Also, after the world server crashes, it runs brilliantly for 5 minutes.

Basically, I think they didn't really take into account the silly load of new expansions, combined with the fact that it's all concentrated in one spot.

I think it's time to talk about the postives of this expansion - there has been much wailing and gnashings of teeth already (much by yours truly, it must be said)

I'm in my garrison right now, it's not much (though it was responsible for the majority of problems directly after launch) but this is my little chunk of Draenor to develop and progress to my own design. It consists of a skeletal Tannery building where I can manufacture leatherworking materials and buy recipes, a barracks where I can...umm, not go that far yet - Berk? and finally a town hall - small tent.
The townhall is the building that gets the most use. In here I can command my small army of followers to do various tasks which produce various rewards at the end of them - some reward gold, some reward items, some reward more followers. Each mission grants XP to the follower taking part which helps to level them up, which in turn makes them more likely to complete missions successfully. When not employed on missions they can be assigned to work at various buildings or they can be seen just mooching around your garrison - a nice touch I thought.
I'll be honest I thought this was going to be as naff as the panda land farm which allowed you to...well, farm and lacked anything to keep you interested beyond farming cooking ingredients. But it has turned into something else, the management of my minions/followers has added a nice extra level to the gameplay - something that benefits me and keeps me coming back to reassign missions and collect on the completed ones. It is a little bit more complicated than that, you have to choose the right followers for the right task and juggle them around so that they all get XP etc...

As a nice touch, some of the followers not on missions can be recruited to explore the world by your side like combat pets.

Speaking of the world, I've not explored much of it yet - spent all my time in Shadowmoon valley so far - but from what I've seen so far it really is a nice place to quest in. The trees, the grass, the water - everything looks beautiful and themed perfectly. Of course, some of these updates are actually in the rest of the game too - character models were updated a month before patch release, the behavior of long grass was changed to part as you run through it...little things that make is seem less of a flat textured world.
Also, if you wander into some areas you might find additional side quests that are more like the way Guild Wars 2 or Wildstar do them - nothing too complicated, kill x of y but you receive the rewards on the fly.

I'll not say too much about the opening experience, but it's well worth a play through and it nicely introduces each of the titular Warlords and the in-game cinematics are good too.

Now I've got to go, I'm about to upgrade my garrison...

The garrison allows you to assign followers to work in your buildings.

So I have a bloke in the barracks who in theory will follow me around and help kill shit, not quite worked that out though, and I have a woman in my engineering shop who makes handy gubbins for not a lot of money, like a miserable jeeves type thing.

All told, now the game has some stability and function back, I'm pretty impressed, reminds me more of wrath than any other expansion so far, and they've made it prettier, again.

Oh, Dungeons are pretty fucking nails, which is nice.

Did I say the aesthetics have gone back to wow, rather than generic Asian? Well they have, and it is good.

Generally it just feels a lot more like wow than it has done during MoP, which is nice.

Today I ventured into the jungle.

If you remember TBC at all, this would be where Netherstorm was/will be. Only right now this is a pretty rich and lush jungle with no sign of any drug addled blood elves hell bent on producing the biggest meth mana lab ever seen - yet.
What it does have though is homicidal plant life, and lots of it.
The trees want to kill me, the vines want to kill me, the little pond plants want to kill me and the podlings...oh the podlings...they want to kill me most of all.
Podlings are the new murloc, only not quite as annoying and without the face palmingly terrible battle cry, basically they are pretty cool little plant dudes with spears and war paint:

Ok, that one didn't have a spear but that one was in shadowmoon valley and was trying to persuade me he was helping me find a lost caravan before luring me into a cave and trying to eat my face - something that I've had happen to me on a Friday night in Leeds.
Shortly after landing at this place I was sent in search of survivors of a previous expedition - nohting like throwing good money after bad right? - and I have set up a forward base of operations. The speed crazy, tank driving smashing dwarf I rescued gave me the choice between a lumber mill or a gladiator arena for my outpost and seeing as I was in a large forest of killer plants that could do with some cutting back I took the obvious choice and built an arena, later I plan to capture podlings and make them fight murlocs to the death - if nobody likes them on facebook they all die.

Not feeling very druidic right now.

I like murlocs.

I left Gorgrond today, I was quite happy about this as the scenary gets pretty boring after you leave the jungle area and not having any trees means I don't have any lumber to feed my garrison and turn into resources (currently a hotly contested resource for farming, unless you are Alliance on my server in which case you are a minority and your starting zone is empty, so farm away) the Gron will also be happy that my genocidal purple ass has moved on.
Anyway, my presence has been requested in Taladar at Fort Wrynn, I've never been there before but I think that is the area around Auchindoun/Shattrath if you remember TBC.
Ooh, another construction choice - artillery tower or arcane sanctum.
Hmm, decisions decisions. Do I want to bombard my enemy and stun them or electrocute them for 30 seconds. I don't like either of these choices. Balls, arcane sanctum it is, seems the best bang for buck right now.
Ooh, look a rare! oh! trees!
Oh look, another level 100 hordie farming lumber.

I've killed several rares in this area already, the new rules regarding rares are nice. There is no tagging of the mob, so griefers can't just keep killing the same guy again and again to prevent others getting achievements, and you only get loot off them once - so no farming of them.

Khadgar wants to see me about some ley lines, says he needs me to see his tower - this seems highly sus if you ask me, someone put this cupcake on a register.

Turns out it was actually a tower and not his "tower" eh, who can tell these days. It's populated by kirin tor one of which can help me connect ley lines to my arcane sanctum...which also sounds a bit sus.
Anyway, there are belfs and taurens everywhere here - which is weird because by my reckoning Jaine Proudmore is very fucking pissed off at the Horde right now so I'm not sure why they are not getting blasted to pieces - I'm missing some lore here somewhere, can someone clarify.

Also, do any other Horde races exist apart from BElf and Tauren? everybody else seems crazily under-represented.

Level 96! woo, might actually make 100 before the anniversary raid gets removed...cast rejuvenation in cat form? don't mind if I do!

Yesterday I hit 100. I can't remember how I did it, I think it was during an instanced mission for the arrokoa but I'm not entirely certain.
Anyway, I was at a little bit of a loss for what to do - then I remembered my garrison. At level 100 I can upgrade my townhall to a castle!

Incidentally, I'm writing this whilst playing hearthstone - I have the guy beat and he knows it so he is letting his turn time out to annoy me, i-people don't seem to realise that the rest of the world has two monitors /shrug. What I'll do next turn is draw his defeat out as long as possible, use as many minions and cards as I can and wait for the timer to be almost gone before ending it - I don't mind, I have this to write.

Back to the castle thing.
I have one, it cost me 2000 resources to build and I can't build anything else right now as that was my entire stash but it does mean that when I do raise the resources (next 24 hours should give me enough automatically) I can build more buildings, including an inn which should give me random daily quests as well as random followers - not sure how that works, whether I get them permanently or only for a day - and a dwarven bunker which gives me armour scraps for transmog/minion upgrades and a double chance at an item upgrading when I loot.
I should probably explain that when you loot a quest reward or boss drop you have a chance of that item upgrading. It's happened to me a few times now, the last item was the weapon I obtained from completing the bronze Proving Grounds - it was a rare that upgraded to epic, which was nice - unfortunately epics don't upgrade to legendary. In fact, epics don't upgrade at all - which has happened to me more than once and I kinda feel like I've wasted a roll but RNG etc...ANYWAY! this building gives you more chances for that upgrade to happen.

I've tried PvP for a bit, Ashran is the new Wintergrasp and thoroughly fails to live up to the experience of what I regard as still the best open world PvP area in the game. I'm not entirely sure what is going on in that area but it seems like a massive tug of war involving ancients and ridiculous amounts of people. As before, casters and plate wearers have an easier time. Rogues were dropping me within 5 seconds which I was really happy about but my gear isn't the best - despite obtaining a neck piece which says it upgrades my gear to level 675 in PvP (I've yet to see any evidence, no increase in stats or hp) There are some side quests that involve collecting artifacts from neutral mobs which I have been attempting but you lose all your artifacts when you get ganked by your neighbourhood social unfortunate, so this has its risks. Also, it is unclear why you are collecting these things - there are several people to hand them in to, I suspect it works like the old days of Alterac Valley where handing in to certain people grant certain things like extra NPC mobs. There's probably a website somewhere.

Was Wintergrasp the big siege one from Lich King?

Dog Pants wrote:Was Wintergrasp the big siege one from Lich King?

That's the one

I liked that. I think I got jumped by a rogue every single time I went in.

So, they released the first proper raid this week, so far I've killed some really basic tank swap thing, kinda like the dude after the boat in ICC, a patchwork type boss (the dude in naxx who walks up and down) and professor putricide on a beach, with some mushrooms basically.

All told, good fights, complicated enough to need some co-ordination and an IQ above potato.

House mate is making we download this again, completely against my better judgement. I feel so horribly dirty.

He's on Aggramar Horde so will start a fresh char on that to check it out again, but if (IF IF IF) I get completely hooked on crack drugs cocaine death again I may resub Friz. You guys on ED or moved to a different place yet?

Me and wifey are raiding on Stormreaver these days (along with the ever cheery greyhoof), but I love horses is alive and well on ED.

coff and beli are still on ED, no idea where anyone else is.