My WoW folder is 28gigs. That's with 2 expansions and most of the data for the next expansion. It's huge, for sure.

Right now my folder is sitting at 25.3GB

32.6GB for me, but I have a lot of screenshots at 1920x1200 and mods dating back to November '04

So we finally managed to pull a few members of our guild together and down Lich King last night. It was definitely an interesting fight. I wish I'd gotten to see it before some of the mechanics were made trivial.

No you dont. I had 46 wipes on sindragosa 10m back in May and 33 wipes on LK25 before we downed him. I like the one pull kills now much better.

Ive got my main parked with 25 dailys to turn in for Cat. Im ready to go. Time to work on the alts.

When Wrath launched I thought the old quest turn ins did nothing?

holy fucking shitballs


blizzard really knows how to put together an amazing trailer, furthermore, using all IN GAME graphics. They've really upgraded the texture/poly detail and view distance over the years.
Skywall looks absofuckinglutelyamazing.

25 daily quests will give 33% of a level at 80. Fishing, Cooking and Weekly quests don't give XP. I'm not prepared for any kind of rush to 85. I tried it last time and was leading until about 76 until until another Hunter passed me using "clever use of game mechanics" got to 80 about the same time I turned 77. I'm pretty much completely broke besides a lot of Northrend mats I'm sure will make a profit.

Oh nice im never in a rush had couple guildies take a week off work and play almost non-stop to 80 I got there 3 days after they did and I got sleep :D

played a little last night, and felt like a noob with all the talent changes. liked the changed landscape but didn't appreciate all the portals being gone. dealing with portal pimp
mages can be a pain in the ass.

http://l27.sphotos.l3.fbcdn.net/hpho...3_110918_n.jpg

Alexstrasza vs Deathwing, Caught this screenshot as they came crashing down the side of the mountain by Ironforge.

Very cool cutscene.

So I think I finally decided to come back after all these years (since BC first came out.)

I downloaded the game instead of installing with disks (cause I lost them). My account is still there, and it still says burning crusade is there (which is what I've bought up to). I want to play again, but I wanted to make sure that when I downloaded the game that BC will still be available before I pay a monthly sub fee.. I really don't want to have to buy BC again.

Does all that make sense?

So does the download come with all the expansions? And so long as their on your account you have access?

Anyone know? I'm having trouble (read: can't) posting on the official forums to ask. And calling support takes literally 30 minutes of waiting (had to because of some errors yesterday..unfortunately I forgot to ask this important question).


....yes I'm poor enough that 14 bucks matters enough to risk...its also kind of a principle thing. It'd piss me off and make me not want to play. And I want to play again, I now know 3 or 4 real life friends that all play. Should be a lot more fun knowing real people.

Yes. When you bought, installed, and logged into BC, you essentially upgraded your account to BC. This allows you to download up to BC from the account at anytime, which is what you did. I threw away my disks and was able to d/l up to WotLK this way.

As soon as you pay for a month subscription, you're good to go in Outland, etc.

Yay, sweet! can always count on you BG! Such a timely response!

edit: next question: should I buy lich king +new or just buy the new expansion and skip lich king? Are the lands in lich king expansion kind of dead now?

No problem. Obsessive-compulsives are good for this kind of thing.

But do you know if there's a point in buying both expansions or just one?

Well, you might as well finish BC first. If you aren't level 68 or higher, there's no point in buying WotLK yet. Just as well, getting Cataclysm won't make sense either, as it's generally for level 80 to 85. You will have access to some new stuff, but not the new areas.

If I were you, I'd hold off until you have a character who is actually ready to use the new material.

Oh well, too late :D got both as an early christmas present to myself. The download is taking forever though...

Any thoughts on the new races? I really wanted to play a goblin druid but that's not allowed. Worgen druid just seems pointless racial ability wise. Druids basically get all those movement speed things already.

I don't have Cataclysm, and I'm not sure when I'm going to get it.

My views on race selection, however, were always based on aesthetics and how much I love/hate the starting areas.

The goblin and worgen starting areas, alone, warrant, at very least, starting one of each and playing them to 10, in my opinion. They both have incredible story immersion (more in a silly way with the goblins, though), and it only takes an hour or two to experience all the content involved.

Worgen druid actually seems like a really good fit, though.You can travel form outside and if you need a boost of speed inside you essentially have two dashes at your disposal. Also their crit booster will help any druid spec. Increased skinning can help being that you wear leather. Plus, they're shapeshifters anyway...

Of course my druid's a troll now. I love the look of their forms, and that's what's most important to me in a druid.

Oh, and good thing you got both. You can't run Cata without WotLK.

They greatly reduced the XP requirements for getting through the older zones for BC and LK. If people were able to get worgens and goblins to 80 by day 2 of cata it's not inconceivable to get through them pretty quickly.

The real question is do you want to play end game content or do you want to play leveling content. End game play is very different than leveling play.

I finally will get to play tomorrow night but I'll be running Naxx Immortal run so I still won't see new content until Tuesday afternoon, and then it's raid night so really it's Wednesday until I can start leveling.

Cyn, You're still raiding LK content?

I've hit 85, leveled my mining and engineering to max and made my epic goggles. They're pretty sweet but I can't afford the meta gems on the AH.
I finished 1 heroic dungeon and I have no plans to return without a guild group for at least a few more weeks. There's just too much coordination required to be running with random people. We got off pretty easy with Halls of Origination being a relatively easy heroic(except the trash) but I've had friends that wiped in Deadmines for about 4 hours straight because they just didn't have the necessary CC.

Our last official LK attempt was Dec. 5. I assume I will still be trying to do LK because I am upset that too many guildies left and we kept having to start from scratch to re-gear newbies at least 3 times. Each time it made more guildies left and I think that guild is no longer viable in any ways or means.

I purchased digital copies and holy cow is it taking forever to DL and upgrade. Its been hours and I still haven't even gotten to cata yet.

---------- Post added at 01:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 AM ----------

Argh! Apparently you don't get a free month of play with the expansions? Grrr that's messed up.

I don't own a credit card, so now I have to go back out AGAIN and get a time card. Assuming I can get this thing to finish DLing and upgrade to cata.

Ok after 41! minutes waiting for support (on the phone) they told me that because I bought it digitally I won't be able to play for 2-3 days because of confirmation processes. Would have been nice to know ahead of time...sigh.

weird. if you had a time card and downloaded it digitally i would think that you could jump right on, BUT I bet that is the MO of the gold farmer hackers so the delay is probably a counter measure.

That's really weird, I bought Cataclysm digitally 6 hours before the launch and I was able to play at midnight (well 1am my time) when servers launched.

Lucky. Heh thanks for rubbing it in. :D

So what are the initial thoughts on Cata?

It's really fucking hard. Just how I like it.

I spent 3 1/2 hours cycling through party members in heroic randoms, trying to do heroic deadmines. I don't forsee randoms getting good at heroics for quite a while, took a guild group, not even geared enough to run randoms yet (wont let them queue) and did it in just around an hour.

Achievements - Shaukdotdj @ Galakrond - World of Warcraft

logged out in my lame dps gear cuz I had a daily to do. Oh well.

I just started last night. Wife came home after being gone almost the whole week. Somehow in that time frame, the cat hid the authenticator so we spent 50 minutes trying to get our accounts accessible.

Now, I"m 5 bubbles into 80 underwater. It's fun, interesting and different but still familiar and the same.

Yay finally got everything ready. Now my problem is all my friends play on another server...

Since I played WoW I joined a dungeons and dragons group and they all play on feathermoon I think. I can't transfer there for free, and I can't afford the 25$ after dropping a 100$ to upgrade :( does anyone know if I call support they may have sympathy and do it for free?

Sigh, nope. They wouldn't do it for free. Not surprised I suppose. I find it annoying though since I just dropped 110$ to upgrade.

Just one more reason you should have went with EQ2

Tried it. Didn't like it. I used to play original EQ, loved it. Miss it. EQ2 took out all the good stuff from EQ.

You know, that's one thing I've always felt they needed to work on. They do a poor job of offering incentive to come back to the game if your reason for quitting is that guilds mass transferred off, friends quit playing, or server imbalance has become too noticeable

1stly, I think they need to address pvp servers with an imbalance.
Mal'ganis for example is something like 95% horde, and the only reason people play on that server with that kind of imbalance is for PVE reasons. Not pvp. They need to offer free faction changes to level 80-85 characters that qualify.

2ndly, offering 2 free weeks of game time or offering on the refer a friend/scroll of resurrection programs aren't really valued incentives.

I've quit for long periods of time over 6 months in one case, over a year in another, etc... at 15$ a month, they lost tons of money by insulting me with 7.50$ of game time if I took their offer, or 15$ of game time if I took a ressurection offer.

Those didn't address the reasons I quit. Guild drama amongst the top guilds? guilds falling apart? transferring? plummeting in quality?

To give you an idea, Kil'Jaeden at one point during the wrath era was the 3rd top most progressed server on wowprogress. There were many guilds doing end game hard mode content, you had options, and you weren't nearly as confined by class makeup then. While the #1 guild might need a DK tank, maybe #2 did, maybe that's why they were #2 instead of #1

NOW? due to so much transferring, they've fallen from 3rd to 30th, and only horde has downed any bosses, it used to be a 50/50 split.
ok just checked again and they climbed back to 12th, the point stands, only 2 alliance options, one of them has a raiding schedule that I cannot possibly meet (they start too early before I'm off work) and the other one has a code of conduct which includes not posting on any forums outside of the guild forum (really, what?)

So yeah I eventually came back, I begrudingly paid that transfer fee for one character, and ONCE AGAIN, the reason I transferred there has disappeared, my friend that I transferred there to play with has left the server. So what are my options now? you guessed it. Settle for a less engaging/less skilled server community, or gamble my money away trying to find a server/guild that meets my criteria.

I would have been ALL OVER any email that said "come back to wow, transfer/faction up to 3 characters for free with a 6 month resub!"

All of the things you're describing are social issues that occur all the time to thousands of players and, for better or worse, are just a natural consequence of human interaction over time. Groups are going to fall apart. People are going to stop playing or start playing on different servers. Guilds are going to poach members. There's nothing blizzard can do to force people to not do those things, especially with a game the size of WoW. Starting a new character at this point in wow's history is absolutely trivial. There are people who got characters from 0 to 85 faster than I got my main from 80 to 85. If you don't like where you are, start over. If you are absolutely in love with your character, then pay the $25.

Any e-mail offer like that would go out to hundreds if not thousands of players and it's a $165 value. I can't fathom why you think blizzard (or any company) would ever make such a generous offer to entice people back to the game, especially in its current state, in which they plainly do not need to make desperate attempts to get people playing.

Blizzard designs the game. It doesn't, and shouldn't be expected to, control the people playing it, especially insofar as guild drama goes or having your friends transfer off server. They very aggressively try to reduce load on overpopulated servers by offering free transfers and they do the same with unbalanced servers by offering free transfers of one faction to another server with the opposite imbalance. I don't know what else you expect them to do, and if you expect them to hand out 11 months subscription value to a bunch of people just because, I think you're being pretty unrealistic.

What they're charging for the service does not imply value.

In all reality, it costs them nothing other than the automation of running a script to move data from one server to another.

Paying 55$ for one faction/server combo transfer is absurd considering what little they have to do. It costs more than the game does. 11 months value "just because" they paid for a 6 month sub is hardly overly generous, it's basically 40-50% off the sub for the year is all it calculates to, and ensures they're making a player happy enough to continue that sub since they're in a better social environment since then.

You aren't including the soft costs of development of the software and scripts to handle it. Nor are you including the costs of the person who executes it.

While I don't think it is worth $55 there are plenty of people who do.

The cost of the game is borne out of the subscription not the loss leader of the boxed CD or download.

As I said, if $55 is too much for you, it has never been faster, easier or more fun to level a character. Other than it costing them to develop and maintain the service, Blizzard doesn't want people transferring faction or server on a whim. I think the somewhat high prices are intentionally higher than whatever "value" you get to dissuade people from using it and make sure that the people who do use it are serious about it.

Don't get me wrong. I understand your complaint and why an intensely social game becomes much less fun when your social network collapses, but I think you can't expect blizzard to spend more time trying to remedy that than they already do, and I think they do give you options both for a slower fix (leveling a new toon) and a faster fix (paying for transfer). If you don't like either of them, then I don't know what to tell you.