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.

 

 

 

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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!!!)

 

 

 

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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! =)

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Sorry about the late reply... this topic literally got buried fast.

I did try out World of Warcraft for a bit... which is why I experienced the frustration of having to anticipate playing the game, only to be stopped to download a dozen or more patches, each of which I had to do individually because Blizzard either doesn't care or didn't think of new players to the game having to deal with multiple patch downloads. Out of the few days that I could play the game, I wasn't too impressed, but then again, maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance. I won't know though, because I'm not too keen on paying for a couple of month's of gameplay, which I can spend on getting two other games for my 360 or Wii, or just save and continue what I'm doing anyway with snagging games for my PC in less-than-legal ways. (Maybe that gives me even more bias against pay-to-play games...)

Blizzard did a handful of good things with the game that I've read about and that you guys put into the spotlight, such as the whole concept of gaining an additional bonus to your experience relative to how long you've been away from the game (although I'm sure this is limited to a constantly-paying account, which makes sense in the money-grubbing marketing world). For what it is, the graphics are still pretty decent for a four-year-old game, and most computers can still run it at a decent framerate. (Even my aging HP zd8000 with the old, mid-range ATI Radeon Mobility X600 with 256MB of VRAM can still render the game at near-high quality @ 1400x900.) Maybe the variety of things that you can do gives it a plus also, whether it be questing by yourself, doing a raid, sitting at the auction house like an eBay hawk, etc.

If the game wasn't pay-to-play, I would sure as heck give it more incentive to give it more of a chance than I did. But with the bi-monthly fee (by game card), combined with the initial frustration and continued frustrations of frequent and bloated patching, combined with my lessening interest in RPGs doesn't give me much of an inclination to give World of Warcraft the credit that over a million other people praise it with, especially if there are a ton of free other MMORPGs out there, with new ones developing and with the opportunities to learn from and even adapt the concepts and features that make World of Warcraft such a better MMORPG than its other competitors.

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I agree on most of the points being made to point out that WoW is a great MMO. As a former WoW player and an anti-wow fanboi now, most of the features works in some way but if you think again...

To explore the high end instance, you need to be in an active guild who does raids 3 days a week or more and you have to obey to the class build they requested. Took me a solid good month to petition on staying as a DPS / offtank warrior than main tank since i do PvP alot.

To do heroic instance, you will spend time standing in orgrimmar or ironforge just to get the group you want. Time wasted the most in there. Not to mention, the group pairing is class spec dependent which even lower your chances to get grouped.

The patch for WoW isnt bad if you go to any trusted files mirror sites, you can do your patching much quicker without the slow speed of torrent. There is a full patch for every major release so you can consider getting it to avoid the incremental patch that open and close your WoW client.

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i've played the game and have met so many interesting people while playing it so I'm hesitant about spouting any negative comments about it, because i do have a lot of great memories in wow. In WoW, its not so much the game itself thats attractive, its the environment. Of course you have your occasional griefer who might cheat you out of in-game gold or items every now and then but its also a great medium to meet people, given that you look in the right places. The downside of wow is that yes, you have to spend an inordinate amount of time in the game to get anywhere significant or noteworthy, the grind is long and takes precious hours of time you could be spending doing something more productively. However, if you've got lots of spare time, or say, you're bored on vacation from school or work and have nothing to do, its worth playing, but I tend to think the fun wears off once you spend too much time on it. After all, real life engagements come first.

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One of my friends who plays World of Warcraft complains about the amount of time wasted waiting for party members required for a raid constantly. You would have to wait anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours waiting for the right spec'd Shaman or whoever to complement your raid party before you could even think of commencing the raid. And if you don't do raids, you apparently miss out on good gear, experience, and opportunities that are specific to raid players.



I saw the mirror file sites, but my chief complain in this department is the requirement to even patch at all after downloading a trial of World of Warcraft. Why is it that I go out and download the game from the server, only to find out that I downloaded outdated files and have to wait even longer to patch the d*mn thing? And the incremental patching doesn't help either... it's a roller coaster ride where you anticipate jumping into a game, then the enthusiasm slumps because you have to download another patch... then you apply that patch, fire up the launcher, anticipate playing the game, then slump again, seeing that you have to patch again. And again. And again. How Blizzard manages to keep pulling people into the game this way, I have no clue. It's a small something that they can do to keep people happy and enthused to play. It's not hard to include patch files on a CD with the release of new expansions, or update the trial download to be post-patched, or something to that effect. Maybe I'm asking for too much? Or am I just expecting what a normal, sensible consumer would expect?



Very, very true. And I think my girlfriend actually balances that quite well with WoW, as well as the balance to keeping it as entertaining as possible. She doesn't play seriously, opting for a guild where getting the latest gear isn't important, being trumped by the social factor and just goofing off. I see that the social factor of the game is a large contributing factor to WoW's popularity, but at the same time, why would you want to purchase a game that you make monthly payments for when you can jump onto the bandwagon with the hundreds of other PC games that are FREE to play online for social interaction?

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World of Warcraft Aint Bad

To be honest i agree with everyone on all points,
I know it is a bit of a cop out but that is how it is, I dont play WoW anymore not after my trial ! reason I dont agree with forking out x amount of £ a month , I am more than happy to play my free MMORPG's such as SilkRoad Online (although trying to get on a sever of late is madness) or the latest one I have picked up Archlord,

The reason I also prefer the free to play MMORPG genre is that if you what this special item or that special item I can just buy it,
And even thought there are not monthly fee's a lot of these games still manage to run very good servers that dont lag half as much as WoW servers

I agree RayzorEdge that Diablo 2 killed of the hack 'n' slash genre in a way but to be honest if I want a fully immersive RPG I will play on my home console such games as Final Fantasy, Valkary etc

But look I know it seems that WoW is complete rubbish but that is one persons opinion or 2 in this case but you know people are like sheep and as soon as there is a lot of hype about a game people will play it, Even if they dont like it they will defend it to the end because that is ho the human race is...

At the end of the day stay away from WoW and come over to a better RPG, But if you liked the game mechanics of WoW and just not the lag etc try out Runes of Magic which is pretty much WoW but free

anyway good questing guys

websey

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I laughed at that. Reminds me of "sheeple," a term I thought I came up with until I found out other people on the Interwebz started using it.

Damn you Internet peeps.

It's sad, too, to say that my girlfriend's subscription just expired last week. Now she's sitting around playing SPIDER SOLITAIRE. Out of all the games that are available to her, she's content with moping about not having World of Warcraft right now and playing Spider Solitaire. I know my girlfriend isn't into the same games as I am, but I asked her to at least try games like Worms and World of Goo, two games that most people would like because they are easy to pick up, fun to play, and have good replay value. Her response? "Blah." She told me that she'll try out new things when she feels like it, but in my eyes, it almost seems like WoW is some sort of addiction, as most people would relate to. Heck, it's referred to as "online crack" pretty often! One of my buddies that works with me has quit WoW and started it back up many, many times. (He's currently on his fix now but thinking of quitting to save some cash.) It reminds me of trying to help one of my Army buddies quit smoking! Crazy... and this is just trying to pull away from a 4-year-old game that apparently hasn't lost its luster, taking away the fact that the core of the game hasn't changed one bit.

Speaking of changes, the same buddy I was talking about was psyched about being able to fish anywhere now with the latest update. My response? "Oh, so now it's like real life where you can fish anywhere you want?"

I think that the only saving graces about World of Warcraft that keeps a 4+ year old game ticking is the social factor and the fact that they keep adding new things into an old world to keep it somewhat fresh. (I think with Wrath of the Lich King, though, they actually added an entire continent, which means more to explore... yay.)

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Servers were down for hours last night.

I was talking to my buddy about how often servers go down, and even if it's for an hour, I think it's absolutely frustrating to not be able to play a game that you continuously pay for WHEN you want to play it. (In contrast, since the servers were down and my girlfriend couldn't play WoW, I got on and played C&C:RA3 for a couple of hours... something that I could do NOW then.)

I also was just thinking about the irony of how the terms and conditions are stated for games that you buy nowadays. In the agreement, it states that you own the license to USE the program and play the game, but it never states that you actually own the game itself. With that agreement, it's kind of ironic that you can't even do what you're entitled to do in the agreement that the game publisher put out.

I brought up the fact that there were a few cases where errors on Blizzard's end caused end-users to not be able to play World of Warcraft and that they were reimbursed for their lost time with additional game time to their accounts. Apparently, they don't do this very often... and I highly doubt that anyone will be reimbursed for their time for the server downtime that occurred last night.

How many of you still love this game, sitting at your desks wondering when the servers would get back up and running so that you can play World of Warcraft, a game that you bought the license to use and play it but couldn't because of things that the hosting company did? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

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