Testing WoW

[Carr0t]

Various of my friends play WoW, and have mentioned somethign about getting a 14 day free trial with the game to give to your friends and get them hooked. Fileplanet has free trials available, but only for use in North America, and said friends can't find theirs any more. Are they just making it up, or do such things exist for the UK, and does anyone have a trial key I could have if they do exist? Plus, if they do exist and I get hold of one, where do I get the game from? Will I have to borrow a friend's install CD, or can I download it from somewhere, or what?

[suicidal_monkey]

don't do it!

[Doorman]

Are you mad?

[Blunt]

Free Trials don't exist...urban myth

WoW isn't taking new customers as the servers are full...Armi had the last slot and is now a level 5 Leprechaun :narnar:

[Carr0t]

Relax guys, i'm not going to get addicted to the game We're trying to get it working on the campus network for our students, without allowing all the 100 or so ports the downloader wants as well (after all, the patches are available not via the downloader). According to the Blizzard FAQ all we need to allow is TCP 3724 in and outbound, but it ain't working. Thing is, their FAQ also talks about allowing traffic from 'unknown hosts' through the Firewall (i.e. rather than the host behind the Firewall/NAT initiating the TCP stream, and thus all traffic being associated with the stream and the client machine that we know about, the server does the TCP startup). Our students are on a private address range, and we don't have 1:1 NAT, so if the client doesn't initiate the connection we're stuffed, but if it does I dunno why it ain't already working. And I can see no reason for the server to initiate connections.

The plan was to install it on my home machine and fiddle around with iptables on my own NAT gateway, to see if I could work out exactly what is needed.

[GhostMjr]

I bought Wow whilst in florida last year. I didn't have a clue how to work it and neither did alot of people in game. It probably is a great game for some but i didn't like it at all. I played it twice and that was it pretty repetitive tbh. Support was not too good either <_<

[TeaLeaf]

Originally posted by GhostMjr@Jan 28 2006, 03:08 PM
I didn't have a clue how to work it and neither did alot of people in game. It probably is a great game for some but i didn't like it at all. I played it twice and that was it pretty repetitive tbh. Support was not too good either <_<

[post=110819]Quoted post[/post]

[/b]

Errrm, I'm not sure I can let this pass by without comment, so I'll stomp on it right away  :narnar:

Support:  When WoW came out it set cutting edge standards for support.  The 24/7 availability of in-game Game Masters to help you (and they usually respond within a very short space of time) was amazing - they answered my first request for help in 10 minutes, my second in 30 minutes.  They continue to resolve most problems with in a few hours from in-game requests and they regularly patch and update their content to improve the gaming experience.  Much as I hate Blizzard's self-induced, lag-inducing popularity, they continue to invest in their hardware infrastructure to improve the gaming experience and reduce network congestion.  

If you're talking about 'your game won't run on my PC' type of problems then that's almost certainly down to your system GhostMjr, not WoW.  You've had a constant series of problems with your PC (well documented on these forums) and I believe it's likely that many of the problems you experience are not the sole fault of the software you have bought.  Certainly there are not the wealth of 'support related complaints' out there on the web which there would be if the Support were poor.  The Blizzard Support itself is one of the biggest of any online games, just take a peek at Valve's support for a good comparison of how good it really is.  Coupled to that there is a huge online community for the game, with independent addons and massive communtiy support for player problems.

As for your assessment of the game, well: if you only played it twice then you haven't played the game at all and are not qualified to comment.  The quests you will have done in those two short sessions were designed to get you as a noob player used to the user interface and your character out of nappies, not to grasp you by the balls to impress upon you the quality of the game.  If you had bothered to actually play the game for any meaningful period you would begin to see its diversity and start to enjoy the community side of the game. I bet you didn't join a guild, establish regular playing partners, party with folks, choose your professions and gradually increase your skill in your chosen areas of expertise, master common skills, start trading in the open market with others, explore the continents for example - you won't even have left the nursery area in your two trips onto the server!  You don't have to like the game, as you say, everyone has their own opinion, but your assessment of the game when it has hardly left the box is a little too sweeping and more than a little bit unfair.

Not everyone will like WoW, but it is the most popular MMORPG of all time, has more paying customers than any other game in the world and is often accused of being too addicitive.  That doesn't sound like the 'repetitive' game you described.  

Why not go back and give it a proper go?  Start a character and level it up to L25, making sure you party, join a guild, use their TS server and experience your first 'instance' along the way.  Then come back and give us your review again.


TL.

[A Twig]

:withstupid: Good point, well made, with a lot of quite long words.

Navyfield is good if you want the stats levelling thing but in a completely different environment!