The best of WoW.com: December 1-8, 2009

I just signed up for a trial yesterday, a friend talked me into it. I downloaded the game-streaming client instead of the full game download...is it totally for shit in highly-populated areas, or does it scale well to the PC it's installed on? I have a garbage laptop, so I couldn't run high settings anyways.

Like all MMO's, they have to lose detail for performance, hence why the new KOTOR MMO hasn't got, say, PS3 quality graphics(It still looks awesome though).

But yes, the game does scale, and the low performance was probably because you were streaming it, however, performance can be crap on half decent machines simply cause of the needs of an MMO

Thanks for answering my question. I haven't even gone into high-pop areas yet, just basically got signed up for battle.net and downloaded the streaming client. I may give it a shot later tonight.

WoW is very processor limited, and coded very badly in addition. For example I'm running an i7 920 w/ 8Gigs or ram and 2XGTX280s and Its still not uncommon to drop below 30 fps in some areas of the game.

There are plenty of MMOs that perform much better. WoW never really seems to benefit much from system upgrades.

Shags, thats the fault of the new dynamic shadowing system (a badly coded one). Drop it down one notch the framerate goes through the roof. Also, turning off "reduce input lag" can give a massive boost in frames.

Thanks Dives I'll try that out.

Your kind of missing the point.

Its cross realm on your battlegroup so it makes finding a group is extremely fast. Its really helpful for those on a low pop server that dont have a great guild yet or dont have all the time in the world to try and pull a pug together and have everyone drop on the first wipe. Its just a simple addition that makes finding a group when you dont have all day to play a little easier.

One of the reasons I don't play MMO's anymore is because it took too long to find a group.

I used to be a pretty hardcore player, was in raiding guilds and had a regular group of friends that I would play with. When I could log on at X time each day and have my "usual group" - things were fun.

But, work, school, real life, etc started to take priority and my 'regular' stuff started to fall apart. (This was back in the EQ days). I quit MMORPGs for awhile, then came back for WoW briefly.

Logging on and either soloing (boring), or sitting around LFG half of the time because I don't have the play-time to dedicate to forming the same type of "regular groups" like I had in the past was boring.

Even if I went through a period of heavy playing and got a semi-regular thing going for a few weeks - real life would sneak in, I wouldn't play for a few weeks - and everyone would out-level me again.

This kind of system is great, it lets me enjoy the social aspect of grouping as I can logon, join a que - get into a group and have fun playing with other people. The alternative to the system like this is just soloing, which is really boring - and why I don't play MMO's anymore.

Tugg, the new tool doesn't make it faster for you to find a full group, it just assigns roles; it's something that took Blizzard infinity + 1 to get around to, despite the obvious overlaps with the classes and especially hybrids.

Hey Tugg, that happened to me and Xbox Live back in Gears 1 days. I probably used to have my first game at 4-4:30, and often would game online for 5-6 hours straight.

Looking back now, I call this 'The Dark Times'. I can't remember doing anything other than game for probably about a year of my life.

"If WoW gets any more casual friendly it will have to supplement Peggle in the title."

I hate to break it to you, but Peggle is in WoW, courtesy of Peggle creator PopCap Games. Bejeweled too.

http://www.popcap.com/promos/wow/