Of Worlds and Warcraft

by James on Aug.14, 2010, under Personal

MMOs have been out for quite a long time so this is probably not very new to everyone but bear with me anyway. I have played some browser based MMOs for quite some time, notably KoL and Urban Dead. But I had never played any of the client based MMOs made popular by World of Warcraft.

The first one that I tried was Dungeon and Dragon’s Online (DDO). I tried it specifically because it was one of the “free to play” games. For the most part it is true. There is no up front cost thought accounts are limited to a total of two characters and the classes and races that you can play are restricted (though the classics are available for free). Anything fancy, like more character slots, races, cool gear, and more of the world map must be bought with points.

While you accrue points in-game in order to keep with the whole “free” mentality, you accumulate them very slowly as an incentive to get you to buy them. Eventually, I found this system annoying so I figured I’d give the free ten day World of Warcraft (WoW) trial a go.

I must say that so far I am enjoying it, much more than I thought I would. One of the first things that I noticed, coming from DDO is that, except for a few exceptions, everybody coexists in the same world. In DDO all the quests take place in their own instance (which is apparently what they call it in WoW).

There are advantages to this method. Because it is always just you or your party, DDO quests are much more tightly scripted than in WoW. Also you don’t run into the problem of everyone trying to grab onto the same quest goal and having to wait around for it to respawn.

The downside to this is that, since you only see the other players in taverns are going to and from quests, the world feels rather empty while WoW feels more alive.

My biggest complaint, so far, is tedious wholesale slaughter of the fauna of Azeroth. WoW often feels like it should be used as test for people who may have personality disorders because killing small animals is a large part of the game.

Some guy with and exclamation point over his head will tell you to run out into the woods and kill 50 squirrels and then come back. Or even worse, he’ll tell you to bring back 50 squirrel tails. This is my most hated type of quest because apparently, not all squirrels are gifted with tails and only ten percent of the damn things will have tails.

While there are many interesting quests, some of the quests make you wonder if the game designers weren’t just phoning in content. My personal favorite so far one where I earned a bunch of experience points ferrying messages between two NPCs that were standing about fifteen feet apart. It felt like one of those family get togethers where two people aren’t on speaking terms and I’m stuck in the middle.

The way the trial itself is set up is strange. They give you ten days to try it out but then limit what you can try out. Going out and adventure with other people, hell no, you can’t form your own groups. Want to chat it up, nope chat functionality is limited because since it’s a social game we might as well eliminate that from the trial. Seriously, Blizzard, it is a time limited trial so you might as well let the player try out everything so that they can make an informed decision.

Despite these complaints, it is otherwise an entertaining game. The sheer volume of are to explore and the available content is staggering. Having all of the players roaming the same world gives it a feeling of really being alive. Right now, having reached the level cap, I’m stuck trying to decide if paying Blizzard money every month is worth the experience.

As a neat ending, WoW has a character viewer that you can embed into websites, so here is Bonebox in all his glory.

Ten free interents if you can guess the character’s name reference.

Related (maybe) posts:

:Game

7 Comments for this entry

Mark
August 15th, 2010 on 09:30
Sadly the reason the free trial being limited is due to the rule that a few will ruin it for the many. Basically the two reasons I heard unrestricted free trials became throw away accounts for laundering gold for the farmers and a platform for harassment.

Basically one of the ways it was happening is. Gold Seller A would hack your account through the use of keyloggers (pay the 6 bucks for the authenticator to solve this) then trade the gold to a trial account. Next Gold Seller B would post a useless item on the auction house for an insane amount of money. The trial account would then buy the item at which point the stolen gold would disappear from the server and Gold Seller B would find fresh gold in his mailbox. Then in 10 days that trial account is deactivated and stuck in database limbo for the chance that you might pay to keep it.

Blizzard has put an insane amount of tracking into every item, transaction, etc that is ever generated in the game. Sadly it hasn’t reduced the amount of account theft etc.

In terms of harassment. Some immature person gets pissy he/she didn’t win purple pixel sword of awesomeness. He makes a free trial account and runs around harassing the raid leader, the loot winner, being a general pain to anyone in /y distance or general chat.

If you do choose to start playing WoW. You picked a good time they’re just about to redo the whole continents of Azeroth and Kalmidor with the next expansion and all that playable content you’re seeing right now will be gone forever. I can also direct you towards some good folks to play with on the Terenas server alliance side from back when I played.
Chris
August 15th, 2010 on 18:01
WoW is only worthwhile if you have a fuck-ton of time on your hands and no other way to spend it. You would be better off with something like xbox live. You can just put that crap down and walk away from it. A lot of the FPS games on it don’t have to take a lot of time or tedium to make worthwhile.

If you do decide to pursue it, I will tell you how to get the WoW service for free. It’s also another way to abuse Wal-mart. Wal-mart offers a accidental, no questions asked warranty you can buy for $12. Buying the game box includes a code for a free month. Buy box, get code, return game, repeat. Larry is currently up to a free year, only because he ran our local Wal-mart out of their stock of game boxes.
- James
  August 15th, 2010 on 21:30
  
  My only problem with Xbox Live and online FPS:
Chris
August 16th, 2010 on 13:42
First, I acknowledge that as true in an earlier post and will say that you can mute people and I think I have half of xbox live muted. Second, WoW is full of similar fuckwads.
Mark
August 16th, 2010 on 15:26
Even after WoW started offering a random dungeon grouping system, I still only ran into a handful of really rude people. For the “serious” dungeons (raids) I grouped with the same 15-20 people all the time. If there are a huge army of asshats out there it’s fairly easy to not have to deal with them.
- James
  August 16th, 2010 on 15:43
  
  That’s my experience also. The overwhelming number of people I’ve dealt with have been perfectly civil.
  
  Occasionally you get some flak from the 80 level players who think their so cool with their flaming armor and Tauren penis sheaths.
Chris
August 19th, 2010 on 05:16
Same goes for xbox live. If you only run with the same people that aren’t fucktards, then you won’t have to deal with fucktards. If you venture out into the population, then you find the fucktards as defined in John Gabriel’s G.I.F.T.