On an unrelated note...today you are MOTB!

Oh Man I so can’t wait for this game.  You’re so lucky.

Nope… I’m not jealous.  Not me!

*grumble*

How did you become a beta tester?

Hey!  Nice pic over on the Empress’ site!  You’re a supah-stah!!

Nice eyebrows.  They can make em fly.  I’m jealous

This doesn’t look quite like the Warcraft I remember.
Have they given up on the strategy market?

Spocko, I don’t think so, the patch 1.17 for War3 has some new heroes and other nice things. I guess they are just concentrating real hard on WoW right now, trying to expand to new markets and stuff…

The european beta is coming soon this month. I sure hope I’m in it, but I don’t put too high hopes in that. Only leads to disappointments.

Thanks, BTW, for posting the screenshots

Is the levelling as fast as they said? I’m almost afraid it’s too fast and the long-term motivation may suffer.

Empress, sweet! I had forgotten all about that. I’ll have to stop by and check it out!

Chris, I missed the closed beta when they first announced it. Then this week they announced that they were opening it up to ten thousand more people for stress testing for a week and that one I got in on so it’s only going to be good for this week. Still, beats a sharp stick in the eye.

Spocko, they’re not giving up on the strategy market at all. They’re just trying to take their most successful franchise in a new direction by turning it into a MMORPG and I must say they’ve done an excellent job so far.

Guido, leveling can be pretty fast at the moment depending on how you do things. If you just stand around beating on critters it’ll be slow going as I’ve yet to see one give more than 150XP with character as high as 9th level. However, quests give out big XP rewards so if you do every quest you can find you can level up pretty fast. In the day and a half it’s been open I’ve managed to get two characters on two different servers up to 8th or 9th level. The thing to keep in mind is that things could slow down after 10th or it could also be that they’ve increased XP for the beta so they’ll have a nice spread of characters. When I was beta testing Earth and Beyond leveling up was really fast until just before launch when they reduced the XP handed out.

Glad to hear they’ll continue their strategy games - I’m a big fan of that genre. I haven’t played many RPGs (Gothic 2 was excellent) and no MMORPGs. I’ll have to give it a try!