What's The Deal With World Of Warcraft?

First off, this opinion is going to be biased against World of Warcraft. And I'm going to tell you why, along with all the cons of playing this game. (Apparently, 10.5 million people can't be wrong... so I'm one of the odd ducklings out.)

So here's a massively-multiplayer online role playing game. The concept seems neat, and a lot of people world-wide love this game for some reason. Maybe it's the vast in-game world. Or the plethora of instances/quests that have you find this person, kill this thing, kill everything, get this thing. Or the fact that it's an easy, hack-and-slash game that most people would be able to pick up and mindlessly use their all-powerful characters to kill anything in their way.

I am not an RPG guy anymore. Since Diablo II, I've lost the fancy for bunny-bashing to save up meager amounts of gold to buy something slightly better than what I have to make my character a bit better. Something about taking the time to level a character up to level 60, which is a feat in itself that takes up a lot of time, only to find out that I can only max out at level 60 (which now is level 80, with Wrath of the Lich King out) and none of the things I kill matter to my experience point level anymore. A handful of friends that I know that play the game are perfectly content with being in their guilds, skinning stuff for their leatherworking ability and selling their goods, finding motes and rare items, and going on repetitive, mindless quests to increase their reputation which grants them availability to better items.

I don't get the incentive to do all of this constantly for years on end, considering the fact that World of Warcraft came out in 2004. That's FOUR years of playing the same game, day by day or even once in a while.

Think of that time table. Now think of how much this costs the hardcore gamer.

I'm sure that World of Warcraft came in at a vanilla price of $40 at least when it was released. Burning Crusades followed it at the same price... an expansion that would then cost more than the game. Now Wrath of the Lich King has come out, which I grudgingly bought for my girlfriend since she loves that one game so much... for $40. So far, we're up to $120 on software, assuming that we bought these at retail and around the time of release.

World of Warcraft was released on November 23, 2004, according to Wiki. It is almost the four-year anniversary for the game. World of Warcraft is a pay-to-play MMORPG, which hits the wallet at $15 a month, essentially. If you followed this game since inception, you would have forked over $720, not to mention the $120 on the software itself... giving you the sad number of $840 for the continuous play of ONE game.

Ouch.

I understand that there's a social component to the game too, and my girlfriend really plays to help out her guild as well as "hang out" with her friends virtually. The funny thing is that anyone can already do that with a multitude of free, online games. They are not what World of Warcraft is, by no doubt, but at the same time, is World of Warcraft that good of a game?

I actually sat down last week to give the game a shot, since it would only be fair for me to try it out, not to mention that I wanted to add something to the list of things that my girlfriend and I (as well as some friends) could do together. My experience was more than disappointing and frustrating, even though I KNEW what I was going to be going through. Well, for the most part, anyway.

If you are going to start World of Warcraft now, keep in mind what I had to go through... look at my arguments against the game, and then ask yourself if it's really worth it.

I began my trial by receiving an invite for the game from my girlfriend. I set up my account, then I got the link to download the trial version of the game. After downloading it, I realized that Blizzard's web site passed on to me a slip stream version of the trial, which wasn't going to work due to servers being bogged down to content updates. (This instance won't happen all of the time... I just have bad luck.) So already I'm a little peeved for wasting my time to download something that won't do me any good, and then I proceeded to download the trial version of the game that would work.

All 5GB of it.

After day one of my trial gone (as I let this download overnight), I was ready to play. I ran the WoW client, installed the game, then ran the game.

A splash screen came up, graying out the Play button and putting up the notification that it was downloading a patch. After some prompting, I agreed to download the patch... which was a 25MB file. Not bad for bandwidth nowadays... although DSL users would have complained. So I applied the patch and ran the application again.

And again.

And again.

The client would not let me play the game. Each time I ran it, another patch would have to be downloaded and installed. This was beyond stupid, as each patch required you to sit there and wait, prompt you that it was done (which required you to acknowledge it), and the killer was that you had to do this each time for each patch, instead of downloading them all at once. I believe I downloaded about 3GB worth of patches, so now we're up to an 8GB game.

Now here's my gripe about the trial: Why couldn't they incorporated all of the current patches into the current trial download so that you wouldn't have to suffer through this crap? Or even at least consolidate all of the patches into a trial-to-X.X.0 patch? Or something that would make more sense than what I just had to do?

Ridiculous.

So now with two days of my trial, dead, I'm left with 7 days of my trial. 7 days to enjoy a game that I'm already pissed at.

The game itself looks cartoonish in-game... not really close to the cinematics that are shown to bolster the "cool" factor of the game. You can customize your characters from a set of faces, hairstyles, skin color, and facial hair, as well as gender, race, and class. I can't remember if you can change your clothing or not. When in-game, there is a decent tool-tip function to figure out the mechanics of the game, but a lot of the stuff I had to learn for myself, which was okay because I'm used to that kind of thing. Not very fun to those just entering the MMORPG world...

The game seems somewhat based with Dungeons and Dragons mechanics, and I know because I used to actually roll some dice when I was younger. It was nostalgic to see how my elven rogue character couldn't wear anything better than cloth or leather as per D&D tradition, and some things I recognized which felt good that they stayed to the traditional aspect of things. I should have known that the dice rolling would have been a killjoy to the game experience (in my opinion), since the tacky damage numbers that arise from damage per second (as opposed to damage per hit) made things just look... well, tacky.

Then again, I'm a guy that likes to see my sword connect with what I'm hitting before the dice roll calculations make up how much damage I do to my target and determining if I slay them or not, as opposed to the damage per second where the enemy lays dead after a delay in information processing in-game. Horrible.

I got up to level 4 before I had to stop my gameplay because I wanted to sleep. Most gamers stay up past the wee hours of morning on raids and instances for this game... thankfully enough, my girlfriend was not one of them.

The next day, I looked up the cool stuff I would be missing out on if I didn't follow up with this game. A lot of the abilities and skills that I could do seemed kind of neat, but I'm afraid that my Backstab ability for my rogue would end up being a lackluster animation that would lead to XX points of damage and a insta-dead enemy that the server lag would cause in-game.

That's another thing. Lag.

My friend just tried playing the other day and couldn't even log into the game because WoW servers were so bogged down with players that there was a waiting list. In his case, his queue was 600.

He didn't even bother to play that night.

My girlfriend who just got the Wrath of the Lich King, itching to play, was fortunate enough to jump onto the Moonrunner server. It would have been cool to try out the new expansion... but when everyone else in the world was trying to play the game and checking out the new additions to it, and along with the waiting lists and the immense LAG, I could feel her pain. Her 1-4 frame-per-second pain.

I know I'm not an RPG guy at heart anymore... or at least I don't have any special place for World of Warcraft, so of course there will be heavy bias against the game itself. Anyone would like to defend this game? Like I've read somewhere online, 10.5 million people can't be wrong... so prove me wrong.

Im an on and off player of WOW, i used to play runescape a few years ago and enjoyed the mmorpg aspects of levelling, questing and crafting, but alas RS is full of 13 year old kids who are obsessed with saying "noob" every time you kill them. i mean if I'M the noob then why the **** are YOU the dead one? I never worked that out, so i left. I tried MU online but it was rubbish... Then along came WOW. I agree that the patching process is dumb, however bear in mind you maybe only have to patch every 2-4 weeks and most patches are less than 20mb its not that bad. Admittedly the first download of the game is hell.... 5 hours after beginning the download: "YES!!! I can play now... hey.... DOH!" as the patches arrive....

But if your GF already has it you can just copy the game folder from her computer (assuming its local to you and not over the internet) sorted... So then you login and choose a server, most of the time you will get in instantly, i think ive been queued due to heavy load only 2 or 3 times in about 2 years of play, so not bad IMHO! (it gets busy on certain special days like WOTLK release and such...) So im in and im in the starting area after choose my character, you cant customize the clothing of your character so for the first 1-10 people look mostly the same. The starting areas are great for learning your class and the story of it. If you read the quest text you will learn that the night elves used to be all powerful magical beings but after a few went bad and summoned a dark god from the twisted nether to kill everyone the night elves vowed never to use magic and hence no night elf mage... Then you have the blood elfs (in the crusade expansion) which are essentially the evil night elves who almost always use magic, indeed their city is pretty "magical". Also in the starting areas you get simple quests "While i was collecting flowers a spider stole my cookie, go kill 10 spiders and come back to me" and so you learn the fighting mechanics of the game, eventually get told to see a trainer and are taught how to use skills, talk to people etc.... So by level 10 you know almost everything about the game that you need to know. The only parts you will need to learn on your own are how to trade/private chat, how to use the in game auction house and how to effectively PK to defend yourself.

Thats another GREAT thing about WOW, the PKing system. you may know there are two factions, the alliance which are essentially the goodies, and the horde which are essentially baddies. Alliance are night elves, humans etc... and the horde are orcs, undead etc... The basics of it are that PK is OFF by default, and you cannot attack anyone of your faction (so no alliance V alliance and no killing Alliance NPCs) and you can also NOT kill the enemy faction. Not at first. Lets say im a human mage (which i am ) and i see a hordie come into my alliance city and attack an Alliance NPC, as soon as they take the first hit against the NPC they are flagged for PVP and i can whoop *bottom* and defend my city (how cool is that, you can get raided by the horde and have to defend your city and NPCs and noobs within, excellent system! google Ironforge Raid ) you can also turn PVP on by typing it in the chat bar and then any enemy faction can attack you. You can also duel outside cities with anyone (except PVP enemies) which is a good way of settling disputes and showing off since the duel ends just before you die. There are also battlegrounds, each has its own story, warsong gulch for example is a fight between horde and alliance in a contested lumber area where both factions want wood. The game itself is a capture the flag, each time has a base and 10 people per team. 3 flag caps and its all over! Arathi basin is a domination style with 5 different resource points, controlling them gets your faction points up to the limit of 2000 when you win. All BGs (battlegrounds) are horde V alliance.

The auction house is also excellent, a few MMORPGS have AH (auction house) but the WOW one is the best IMHO. You can sell an item by going to the AH, talking to an NPC and placing it in the slot and typing a price and selecting a time limit on it. You can also buy items here from other players by searching for it. If you win an item or sell an item the item itself or the gold from selling is mailed to you using the in game mail system, in each city is a mailbox or a few of them and there you can send/receive letters containing text and/or items and cash. All very useful!

The chat system is however annoying... horde and alliance cannot talk to each other in any way. The text is scrambled to them, so i type "hello" and they get "akkrg" or something. The idea of course is to maintain the fact that alliance and horde are suppose to hate each other, we dont really but if i see a hordie killing newbs or alliance NPC's ill take him out, or try! But other times we have a laugh using the emotes like "XXX aplauds you loudly" etc... and dancing and dueling, its good fun!

The amount of "space" within the game is amazing too, theres just so much to explore. each race has its own starting areas a short distance from its main city. Humans have elwyn forest with the starting area and stormwind city (one of the best IMHO). All alliance players are welcome in alliance cities but if we try to enter a horde city the guard NPC's will take us out and as soon as we retaliate we are flagged PVP and the hordies come in and whoop us! So there are, i think, 10 distinct areas, all which take about 10 minutes on foot to cross, so theyre big! But in addition to that there are probably about another 15-10 areas of equal size... So its damn big! the WOTLK expands that even more adding a few more areas. They are split into two continents and to cross the large sea you have to take a boat if you are alliance or use an airship type thing if hordie. There are two other areas now too, one introduced with the burning crusade and one with WOTLK. It would take you days, maybe weeks to completely explore every part of the WOW world without stopping. But of course you couldnt do that unless you were level 80 because the mobs would just put you down.

the mount system is also great, at level 30 you can get a mount, depending on your race, humans get horses, night elves get giant tigers, orcs get giant wolves etc... which give you a 40% speed increase. at level 50 (or is it still 60?) you can upgrade to 100% speed increase. at 70 you can also get a flying mount for use in the extra "outlands" introduced with the burning crusade. These mounts let you fly all over the place at 240% movement speed

As said there are also dungeons, they are instanced so only you and your party are in there. So if i had a group (AKA party) and went into a dungeon, and then you and a different group went in after me we would both have our OWN dungeon, a complete copy just for us to play in. These places have "elite" mobs which are harder to kill but give excellent XP and drops, so its worth it!! There are also world bosses which are immensely powerful. Back in the day of the BC (burning crusade) there were bosses that would take 10 level 70s (the highest in the game) to take down, and that would require maybe 3 healers to keep the damage dealers alive!

The last feature im going to mention is the "go anywhere" approach. unlike point and click games where you cant enter water etc.. you can run around the place with the arrow keys, so you can swim in the water, go under water, jump around, jump up things run up hills, jump of buildings, hills etc.... brilliant. They have an innovative way of stopping you swimming off the map too, with "fatigue" so you eventually die if you swim too far which is cool!

As for lag i dont really get that much, xmas and valentines day are lag fests in the cities, stormwind is by far the worst city for lag, because it looks the best you get more people there than other cities and it does lag there, especially if you log in while in SW its a nightmare. Ironforge tends to be better unless you go near the bank. In general out in the field ive found lag to be very low. I have 8mb/s internet and shared with my bro so not particularly fast, i get throughput of about 5.5mb/s so if you can get 3/mbs throughput you shouldnt get much lag. Turn down the graphics settings too, that helps!

Overall its a really good game, currently im not playing because at level 60 it was taking AGES to level up! So i got bored and stopped paying. The payment is the most annoying thing about the game, if it was maybe £5 (instead of £9) a month i would still be playing it. But my advice is try the 10 day trial period. If you like it then pay one month and see how it goes! (if your in the EU remember to download the EU version not the american one!!!)

This post has been edited by shadowx: Nov 15 2008, 12:00 AM

Reasons why I thoroughly enjoy playing World of Warcraft....

Firstly, I want to make mention that I am a college student and I do have to apply myself to get good grades. So it is not as though I am either a student who gets away without studying nor a failing student - both of which I have ran into while playing World of Warcraft. Point being, with so many people playing the game, you can run across many types of people and make up various arguements about what types of influence the game has on individuals. It is my opinion that people are going to be whoever they want to be. So if they do not have it in themselves to take care of themselves and have a life outside of World of Warcraft (or any other online video game), it is not the video games fault.

Prior to World of Warcraft I played EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Dark Age of Camelot. The last three I bought at release and played for less than a month. Their concepts were not terrible but the overall feel of the game and entertainment value just was not there for me. EverQuest was the king of mmorpg's back in its prime day but now I would shudder at playing it. In EverQuest you often "camped" in a group in ONE spot pulling mobs (enemies... monsters or whatever you refer to them as) and you might be there for four hours or whatever.. staring at the same scenary and barely progressing in the game. All of that time focusing on leveling your character. Also in order to get decent gear, you had to go on raids and hope you win a lucky /roll or earned enough points within your guild (by going to countless other raids) to spend on a drop. Essentially everything in EverQuest required a lot of time to achieve anything and tons of redundancy in what you did spend all that time doing.

I started playing World of Warcraft in 2006 when the Burning Crusades expansion had not yet been released. I tried out a few different classes getting them to around level 10 and deciding which I enjoyed most. I ended up going with a Warlock because I heard they can do a ton of damage but also were good at soloing. I was tired of having to group to do anything in EverQuest, especially when there wasn't groups available. So the idea of being able to adventure on my own or with a few other people, not needing an entire group to accomplish steady leveling, was very appealing. Little did I know that most all of the World of Warcraft classes could be solo'd.

Within the first 30 levels I discovered so much of the "world" including story plot, unique geography and how everything plays into the experience. This only continued more and more as I was able to explore more and more of the world as I leveled. Being able to choose from many different places to quest and not being stuck with one particular area, is amazing.

As difficult as a technical person might think World of Warcraft is to the more inexperienced users, it actually is not that bad. They progress the difficulties to allow time to absorb how the game functions. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why so many people play the game. Anarchy Online is a science fiction MMORPG and has all sorts of technobabble, it is no wonder that it no longer charges to play because they are fighting to retain its playerbase. Had they kept the science fiction theme but dummied down or been more creative in simplifying their technobabble, they would have a more diverse playerbase. The main reason why their playerbase diminished was their superbuggy launch with superdelayed fixes for paying subscribers, though.

Right away you can choose between a few different professions to work on if you like putting stuff together. There is some benefits to making many of the items, as they add stats to your player or aid players in some way.

One of the most exciting things in any MMORPG, definitely in World of Warcraft, is grouping with others to take on challenging situations. All of the dungeons (instances) and harder quests that require groups, are really well thought out with the story lines and how the monsters or characters give their "parts" to the storyline. It is not just running up to a big dragon and beating on it. It talks back at you and gets angry, all very well played out. An example of this is the introduction quests for the Dark Knight class. Those quests were breathtakingly amazing! It is like watching a movie but being in the movie instead.

Blizzard never fails to make all of the areas very unique and interesting to explore. They never repeat graphics for areas, aside from maybe some of the buildings... but the landscaping is all new and the lighting and colors... it's breathtaking..

I personally find it relaxing to play and explore in World of Warcraft. I like that if I end up being busy with school or some other activity and am unable to play for many days, I can come back to my character and she will have the ability to earn experience at a faster rate (called Rest XP) which was implemented so that players can level together and stay together even if one falls behind. That way if you actually have a life, you can come back and still jump in with your friends.

Speaking of friends... while I definitely have made many through the game, many of the people I know in "real life" (from school, work, etc.) also play and it is something to share, either by playing with them or talking about strategies and experiences.

Rather than make a pro/con list, though, just give it a shot and at least enjoy playing with your girlfriend. Perhaps it will be fun to work on quests or play in the battlegrounds together against the opposing faction!

Good luck with your decision. My guess is, after a few good days of playing it and getting to level 10 or so, you will either love it or hate it (though for some it is both) but you will be able to decide something in the end... my guess is you'll stay playing it.

Take care! =)