Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan blocked from the WAR Beta, notes server imbalances
by Michael Zenke 
Oct 16th 2008 at 6:00PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Betas, Fantasy, Warhammer Online
John also asks the WoW honcho about his opinion of Warhammer as it is post-launch. Kaplan, like many players, is working with a Destruction character and is finding the game's population imbalance a bit frustrating. "I'm at the point where I'm thinking about quitting because it feels like the best way to level up is in the battlegrounds ... it takes me 30 to 45 minutes to get in the battleground queue," he said. Check out the brief interview for more on Kaplan's view of Warhammer, and head over to Broken Toys for some background on this exchange via Scott Jennings.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Leshrac said on 6:09PM 10-16-2008
LOL!!!!!
Breakout your asbestos WAR fanboy suits, here they come!!!!!!!!
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Mr Angry said on 6:11PM 10-16-2008
Haha you just beat me to it!
Mr Angry said on 6:09PM 10-16-2008
WAR nerd ragegasm in 5,4,3,2.........
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Buckshot said on 6:16PM 10-16-2008
Uh, the best way to level is in the scenarios, people f'ing hate questing. If wow would discover that, they might get some players back.
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Leshrac said on 6:34PM 10-16-2008
He said he was waiting 30-45 minutes for the queue, how is the that the best way to level? I wanted to eat a bullet after doing Phoenix Throne over 40x.
WoW is NOT perfect, and I hate to break it to you guys, and I don't want your panties in a bunch but; WAR isn't perfect either. Accept it, its ok, take your Ritalin, do your breathing exercises......there ya go......ahhh - feel better?
Buckshot said on 6:49PM 10-16-2008
Must be the wrong server, I run on Dark Crag (the original RvR server) and it's never more then 5 minutes per scen.
Dudar said on 8:04AM 10-17-2008
... which they sorely lack!
JP said on 6:19PM 10-16-2008
You two like to call out WAR fans, from your ivory white WoW tower. Get a grip. And glasses, b/c you obviously have a hard time accepting negative-propaganda spreading dribble when you see it. Unless you're jsut to stupid to see it.
How many shitty articles Massively alone) have been posted in the past week? blizz's gajillions of $$$ is paying for this BS. I'm just wondering how long EA will put up w/ it, before they start spreading their own hardcore slander-slanging shit.
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Mr Angry said on 6:28PM 10-16-2008
An outstanding five star effort here, but I feel others can do better!
Lethality said on 6:28PM 10-16-2008
Well, I can't blame him on the competitive issue... don't want trade secrets getting around.
But I hope Jacobs listens to what Tigole said, because he is spot on. The game population and imblance is just stupid, Mythic made stupid decisions.
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Grunkaz said on 6:37PM 10-16-2008
Would anyone really expect him to come out and say "This game is so awesome. I can't stop playing it. Way better than WoW"
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Leshrac said on 6:44PM 10-16-2008
Jeff Kaplan and Rob Pardo were actually super EQ nerds, they were in the guild and they claimed a lot of the first world downs. He is an MMO fan first, Blizzard employee second. But no, I wouldn't expect him to come out and say WAR is better - the sub numbers will speak for themselves; at its height of popularity WoW hit 11 million subs. But WoW is in Asia which is where a bulk of the subs reside. WAR needs to get into Asia, which I believe they're trying to do since EA owns a share of The9. But Asia is Blizzard crazy, so anything Blizzard does is immediately picked up.
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Leshrac said on 6:45PM 10-16-2008
What I was trying to say above but the text writer didn't like my parentheses; Rob and Jeff were in the guild "Legacy of Steel".
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Vrain said on 6:46PM 10-16-2008
He's commenting on slow queues in WAR? Even after they created Battlegroups I still had 15 min queues for AB and WSG and 45 for AV on an alliance character, if I was grouped it took even longer. On Order on Phoenix Throne I have 5 minutes at the worst in the middle of the afternoon for a scenario and many times one will pop within 5 secs of clicking "join all".
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Jeni said on 11:03AM 10-17-2008
I'm not a hardcore blizzard fan girl, and I don't pvp very often and rarely at peak times (I enjoy pvping in the mornings, Eastern time)... I rarely wait more than 10 minutes for a BG. For AV, I'm in in less than 2 mostly.
Leshrac said on 6:53PM 10-16-2008
Order is outnumbered 3:1 on most servers, he was playing Destruction. And yes, BG queues in WoW can be horrid - but at least there is other stuff to do to pass the time, in WAR it's; PVP, RVR, some PVP and RVR with some more PVP.
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Abriael said on 7:11PM 10-16-2008
which is an absolutely false statement, but can't expect anything else from a blind wowboy.
Abriael said on 7:35PM 10-16-2008
And by the way, i'm sure you have solid hard data to base the 3:1 proportion on (which is absolute science fiction).
Funny, though, that Kaplan complains about balance in warhammer, when the balance between alliance and horde has always been absolutely awful in wow. hypocrite much?
Reader said on 3:24AM 10-17-2008
3:1 LOL. The worst server is currently at 1.5:1. Overall population is something like 1.2:1. The servers that get the Order bonus are pretty much balanced since the queue is longer for Order than it is for destro (last I checked).
Stop spreading FUD and at least dis WAR on what's actually bad about it (which a player could go on longer than any WoW fanboy could hope to, simply because we've been there to pick out the little things that irritate us). Can anyone argue that WAR has not had the best launch in MMO history? Even WoW, complimented for its polish was crap the first couple days. Latency was awful, loot on dead mobs would never populate, etc. WAR just has had little bugs, but nothing that made it unplayable.
Abriael said on 7:11PM 10-16-2008
Kaplan has been (not surprisingly, knowing his average level, which is very low), extremely unclassy. It's pretty obvious that, if he feels like he needs to start some negative propaganda against a competitor, he sees that competitor as a threat.
Looks like he ignores the common golden rule of business: "if what you have to say about a competitor isn't good, shut up"
In any case, it's been definately a good move to shut off industry competitors from the beta (which was a well known fact to anyone that applied, no one from the industry nor from the press were allowed, for obvious reasons), since as soon as featured became public, Blizzard begun copying them.
I find quite funny though, that the poor sod goes as far as crticizing a game that he's copying all the waym while his own game is faaaar from perfect, and was AGES behind what warhammer is now one month from release.
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