Now that the major part of the story for MoP has been wrapped up with 5.4 I started watching videos about Warcraft lore and noticed something. To me it seems like that the RTS series Warcraft (especially Warcraft 3 + Throzen Throne) builds story, heroes, villians, atmosphere etc. far better than WoW does.
Until MoP a very large part of the content patches and expansions had been built around characters that had their story built up in the RTS series or even before timeline wise. With MoP Blizzard proved that they can pull an expansion out of the blue, which is basically based on nothing, or at least nothing that we already knew from before, but it simply feels odd and out of place.
I do not mean to offend here or anything but personally I have never felt any excitement or attachment when dealing with Pandas, Klaxxi, Mogu, Mantid or the people of Pandaria in general. The only pleasant surprise was when Vol'jin (whom I love as a character) was made Warchieft and he is kinda an old timer as well.
My point is that I feel like for WoW to get exciting again we need a new storyline, new heroes and new villians that we can all love and hate. We need to feel connected and attached to really make us immerse in the World... of Warcraft again. I am almost certain that a lot more people feel related to Illidan or Arthas than to Ji Firepaw or Lorewalker Cho. There are some big names left out there like Alleria, Turalyon, Queen Azshara or an Illidan redemption (IT'S COMING!) and a few more but not many.
So where can we get all this from? A Warcraft 4 between the next expansion and the one after. Warcraft RTS is just a so much better way of developing the story and building up characters that I don't think it can be compared to WoW. It's cool to step into The Black Temple but it is cool because we know about it already. Having something in the RTS series that is later added to WoW brings a lot excitement with it.
|
Yo,
I live on a server with a quite big market/population so generally you can find everything you desire on the AH. You could sometimes even find the TCG items like Swift Spectrals or the Magic Rooster, Rocket etc. The value of these items was really high, sometimes as high as 700-800k for a Swift Spectral or half a million for the rest. In the recent months I started to notice more and more Spectrals around (these are the most visible due to their looks). Now they are being traded for as low as 200-300k gold which really isn't that much anymore. Their price dropping alone wouldn't be a problem. As far as I know, Spectrals (like all other TCG items) are/were limited. They were part of the Fires of Outland deck which is mostly, if not entirely sold out and has been sold out for quite some time due to people mass buying it for the Spectrals. The only possible way to still get more than the ones which are originally left (which I guess is a really low number due to them being like 5 years old now) is the random TCG box thing. I am one of those people who got the Spectral when the Fires of Outland deck came out (back than the model wasn't even complete and looked pretty bad ^^). Even on a big server you could rarely see a few running around. Now I walk into Orgrimmar and they are becoming as common as the Celestial Steed when it hit the shops, you see them literally everywhere. This brings me to my point. If Spectrals were so scarce how are suddenly so many of them? Did someone open a lot of cards all of a sudden? No... they are 99.999% sure being duped (duplicated) by gold sellers like how they did with the sand for Vial of the Sands. This is wrong and I wonder if anything is planned to address this and if all duped TCG mounts are to be removed. I'm not saying this because I felt like a "special snowflake" back than and now I don't (I have mounts to swap around). The whole duping destroys the economy, makes these TCG items lose the uniqueness and worth and it's simply against the game rules. Also if this problem is here now than I guess in MoP you can expect these hackers to dupe the expensive JC mounts, the yaks or basically anything. |
|
Honestly I just can't stop thinking about MoP being rushed. The class balance seems to be nowhere even near done and there are only 60 days left to balance it out. Seems like a very short time to me.
I was expecting MoP no sooner than end of October but I could have easily imagined a November/December release. Now don't get me wrong here, 4.3 is over and done since months ago and this is arguably the worst patch in the history of WoW but still what is done is done and I don't want to think of the start of MoP as it was in WoTLK/Cata start. Seems like 4 tier expansions work out better or they should have given 4.0 and 4.2 more time before moving on. Either way as it currently stands this expansion is the shortest one (even shorter than TBC) and it never felt more rushed to me than now. |