Joannas Diary: a TGirl Blog : Warning, May Contain Nuts

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

World of BBCraft

Articles like this continue to make me wonder whether the BBC has some kind of deal going with Blizzard and World of Warcraft. There seems to be a new WoW story every few weeks... yet Everquest 2 (and most other MMORPG's) seems to be ignored by them. Ho hum....

Games bringing out an expansion is hardly news. EQ2 is now on its second one.. Kingdom of Sky came out last week with a whole load of new zones to explore and a level cap raised to 70. So I have a lot more grinding to do ;-)

6 Comments:

At March 01, 2006 9:30 AM, Becky said…

I think it's something to do with subscriber figures, WoW currently has more than 5 million, roughly 10 times more than Everquest II. At it's peak of popularity, even the original Everquest topped out at about a million. That's a news story in itself, the first MMORPG to truly break into the casual gaming market.

Also, most of Everquest's players (around 80 percent) are in the US, whereas WoW seems to be more widely spread around the globe, particularly in Europe. I wouldn't be suprised if the ratio of WoW to EQ players in the UK is even higher, which would make it less suprising that the BBC choose to report on it.

Finally, the sheer number of people playing WoW makes it more likely to generate news stories, in the same way there's more stories about Windows viruses than Mac ones, etc.
At March 01, 2006 9:41 AM, Joanna said…

You're right that WoW is probably the first real MMORPG to really hit the bigtime, Blizzard has a faithful following anyway and also more people are inclined to play these games now with the availability of broadband rather than having to worry about dial up costs.

It was just the way they were talking about an expansion as something that was a new idea that would cause problems, when this is something that all games have done.

EQ2 is very much the red headed stepchild as far as the young PvP playing market is concerned.. although now EQ2 has just set up its own PvP servers and rulesets maybe we will see more of the L337 D00Dz coming into EQ2 as they get bored with the level caps of WoW.
At March 01, 2006 10:36 AM, Becky said…

Yeah you do get the feeling that someone at the BBC is playing WoW and finds it easy to bang out stories about it. :-)

A friend of mine recently went to EQ2 from WoW because of boredom, so I think there is a movement in that direction. But then again he had played WoW for about a year, including 6 months of long-term leave due to a bad back, so I guess he had every right to be bored! :-)

I myself have recently started playing WoW again after 6 months away, and I'm really enjoying it. EQ2 has done a lot to make itself more fun in the last year, partly to compete with World of Warcraft's popularity. If anything EQ2 players have WoW to thank for making Sony raise it's game.

Oh, and just be glad you're not playing Star Wars Galaxies, they've REALLY borked that up. :-)
At March 01, 2006 10:44 AM, Joanna said…

Yeah, the competition is good for all games. SOE has raised its game to cope with WoW and is catering for the less hardcore player. The hardcore mob will probably move on when Vanguard comes out which is more for the real old-school gamer who likes everything to be as difficult as possible and loves 3 day camps.

Dungeons and Dragons Online is also currently in beta, but from what I have heard so far they need a hell of a lot more content before they go live.. the world is so small and there are not many dungeons.

I still fancy trying that car wars one sometime ;-)
At March 02, 2006 4:31 PM, Connie Cox said…

I have so far managed to resist any MMORPG but there seems to be so many coming based on such things as Star Trek and Stargate that I may end up trying one.

And there do seem to be a lot of BBS stories about WoW.
At March 08, 2006 10:37 PM, Leah Blake said…

dungeons and dragons online beta was poor, you need an extra arm just to use all the controls, you would have more luck lacing yourself into a corset than sticking to D&DO. ive recently started playing WoW after playing COH/V for nearly 18 months, you dont see any news on coh/v!, but SOE lost 75% of thier customers after the SWG revamp, the moral to this is dont try and fix it if its not broken