This means WAR...craft!

by MickM | 05-10-2009 | Blog 544 views

Some of you know I play World of Warcraft. And I know you're gonna whine and all, but imma let you finish, I'm one of the few casual players.
"But you can't be casual with WoW, it will dominate your life." ... No, it won't. Only if you have poor self-control or nothing better to do. And quite frankly, everybody does in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the game. Heck, it may even be in my top10 best-games-of-all-time, but the thing I hate about it, is also the thing that makes it good. The second M in MMO. Multiplayer... It may also be caused a bit by the first M since that's an exageration of the 2nd M, but my point is, that no matter how good you are, or how much you like the game, or how much you know about the lore, or how much you actually care about the game and not stats and leveling up, the multiplayer-part is always gonna smack you in the face with reality.
People can be assholes.

Sure, it's fun and all playing with friends or doing some quests alone, but normal gaming-principles state that if a player does not get rewarded for certain actions, the player feels neglected and starts to dislike the game.
Look at Tetris! We all know Tetris right?
Well, in Tetris, when you play good enough, you can stack blocks and make rows disappear. It's your reward for stacking the blocks in the right order. Now in WoW, you get rewards for doing quests or doing various other things. And it feels nice. So nice, it's actually one of the reasons why people play WoW so long. Because of the amazing singleplayer-reward system.
But here's the catch. You cannot program a rewardsystem for multiplayer. You just can't. And if you create such a big game like WoW, the variable "random" is almost inevitable, dispite it being terribly frustrating.

How does this work in the game? Well, I wouldn't call myself a pro-gamer, but I love games. I really do. I love em so much I try to play a lot of games if the time lets me. Playing lots of games gives me certain skill provided by my experience, so you could say I know how to game.
As for WoW, I'd say I'm a pretty better-then-average player. But if I look around me, I see all these people, some better and some worse than me, getting rewarded for all these things they haven't even done.

And what's more frustrating is the whole social teamwork-thing. A friend of mine, who started playing 2 months after I started, and is now almost in his end-gear (best gear in the game) and no, it's not only due to his super detication. That would be obvious. He's lucky enough to know people that help him around, give him ingame money, arrange connections and do stuff for him. And aparently LOADS of people do that. Now don't tell me I don't know what WoW is all about because I know this is a part of the game that's been around for ages. But still. It doesn't have to be great.
I for one cannot form a fake friendship and pretend to like someone just to get stuff from him/her. Call me a panzy!

A year ago, at the launch of the current-latest expansion pack, Blizzard introduced Achievements. And achievements are those nice little things that makes someone get a compulsive need to increase their virtual penissize. And for the women that would be.. vagina.. depth? Anyhow, Xbox had achievements for a long time and showed that with achievements, even the crappy games, get played more often because people wanted to increase their score.
That's what Blizzard thought as well. Little did they know that they created a way for the community to have a new set of made-up game rules again. You see, in order to be invited into a raid (a large group of people) to venture into a dungeon (a place with tougher encounters and cooler rewards), you must have the achievement showing you already did that dungeon. But you cannot get that achievement, because you will never get invited into a raid. You see the pattern?
Turning 11-year old frustrated children into monopolising landlords that control the gametime of other players.
It's a bit silly eh?

It could also be that I have the biggest set of bad luck on the planet (of Azeroth) because in my time of the occasional farming a rare mount or trying to achieve something where "random" was the key-factor, I've NEVER succeeded. My lucky friend however, almost everytime. Even people who shouldn't be entitled to what they did because they simply got helped by players of a higher level.

And aside from my frustration, I really hope the next expansion pack will be nice, and even though I'm kind of in a hate-wow-style right now, I am looking foreward to the expansion pack. Why? Because I love games :)