World of Warcraft - what am I missing?

The Game Room
1

I am one of perhaps 3 humans who have not played WoW, seen anyone else play it, or even seen a screen shot of it.

I know I’m missing something. The thread in the Game Room is amazingly long, and has had continuous action since the original posting.

So, can someone give me an idea of what I’m missing out on? Also, what is the age of the average player? Is this something like DaD, and this is just the web-ified version of it, or is it something much deeper?

I can’t imagine spending the kind of time on this (or any other) video game, but I am clearly in the minority. It seems that WoW has a life of its own.

Is it fantasy? Role playing? Any first-hand knowledge would be appreciated.

thanks,
SFP

2

Make that 4 because I am the same as you.

3

There are a lot of aspects to it, and it really depends on what you want to focus on. You can focus on massacring other players. You can experience it like an RPG quest game. You can even do roleplay-by-text while you do it.

What seems to be the big thing, though, is the social aspect. That’s how I started–I started playing because my friends were playing, and I like doing things with my friends. The game allows you to do that super easily.

I don’t really like any other videogames, either.

4

I just wish the world wasn’t so static and that things actually, you know, changed significantly in terms of which factions have the power, and which don’t, among many other things. A wargame writ large (yes I know about World War II Online, but you can’t win or lose in that either).

5

So, when you play, you are on-line, correct? So your social aspect is you sitting at your house, and your friends sitting at their houses, looking at a computer screen, playing WoW. Is that a fair description? Or is there more to it than that, such as on-screen chatting? Or do you all sit in the same location and play together, looking at the same screen?

I don’t understand the phrase “roleplay-by-text”. Can you explain that?

From a playing perspective, do you have one “life”, or can you have multiple lives? Or are your lives infinite? If someone is playing the game differently than you (you are role-playing, they are killing other players), I’d think that would suck pretty hard if you were killed by a total stranger and couldn’t use your character any longer.

I’m not trying to insult you or anyone else with my questions. Honestly, I just have no clue and I’m trying to understand the appeal.

And also, can I ask how old you are? I’d appreciate knowing the age of anyone that plays, and if I’m just too square to be hip?

6

It’s pretty much online D&D, yeah. Massive online D&D where you can do anything from do some quests alone to fight in a major player-versus-player battle of dozens of people on a side ranging across a large landscape. Hundreds of people can be on in the major “capital” cities, letting you get advice on your character’s setup or placing an order with someone to make you a particular piece of armor.

If you want, you can join a guild, which is basically a “club” of players that comes with their own personal chat channel. Some guilds just socialize in their chat channel while playing, others do casual raiding together, some are hardcore dungeon raiders that have strict participation requirements. Some are all about player-versus-player (PvP) competition with the “other side” in the game - it’s Horde (orcs, undead, tauren, trolls, blood elves) versus Alliance (humans, gnomes, dwarves, night elves, draenei).

Besides the preset private chat channel, guilds can opt to set up their own websites and Ventrilo (voice chat) servers to talk during raids or to just socialize.

Average age? No idea, probably 18ish? My husband and I belong to a casual raiding guild - people do their own thing or group up together, and we have a few 10-person raids per week, occasionally getting together with others to form 25-person raids. Our group has young teens, college students, married couples, even a grandparent or two. Plenty of women, though most are already in couples. We’re also pretty gay-friendly and have a fair number of out members in the guild. We have a voice chat server that we use for raid coordinating or socializing.

Why is it so successful? Blizzard built on their history of Warcraft games and has a pretty rich backstory that you can tease out by doing quests and listening to NPCs (non-player characters, computer-generated) talk. You can get to the top character level (currently 80, will go up to 85 at the next expansion) by never grouping with another person and doing quests/killing monsters all on your own, or you can group the entire way. You can do solo play with any character class - some are easier than others, but not overly so.

There are 5-person groups where you can fight through a little dungeon together in anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple hours, 10- and 25-person raids with massive dungeons that can take a few nights to conquer and may require strict strategies and multiple tries to finally figure out.

If monsters aren’t your thing, try your hand against smarter, faster opponents - other players. Group up with people from your “side” and fight in small or big battlegrounds to advance in level and get gear.

You can take up tradeskills (like making armor or jewelry) but don’t have to. You can auction created or found loot on a massive, automated auction house.

Explore the world! Pull off feats of daring like running naked through an enemy city and see if the guards - or opposing players - can manage to take you down! Enjoy the world’s regulary holiday celebrations. Fly on the back of a dragon and take pictures of sunsets.

Blizzard has a great mix - the game is not too hardware-intensive so lots of people can make it work on their computers. They allow user interface addons to make the interface work in all sorts of great, customized ways. They’ve got a great formula for addictiveness - constant small rewards and reachable bigger awards, opportunities to be rewarded even from short playing times, lots of variety.

7

It’s kind of funny. Among people who don’t play WoW, there’s still this antisocial nerd stigma that comes with the game. Among people who do play, there’s none of that. It’s just something people do, same as how some people get together at a bar or join up for book clubs or whatever.

The people I play with a few nights a week are not at all young. I think there may be one teenager, but most are in their 20s or older. At least a couple people I’ve played with and spoken to over voice chat are grizzled veterans, at least 40+, and one time we had to take a break while one of them went to get his horses that had broken out of the corral. :stuck_out_tongue: Sure, there’s tons of immature unsocialized little pissants that subscribe to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory running around, but plenty of normal adults play as well.

8

Missed the follow-up questions:

You have infinite “lives.” If you die, you either run back to your body and “repop” there, or you choose to resurrect at a nearby “graveyard”, which penalizes you with some damage to your armor and a temporary “weak” period where you aren’t so good at fighting. (Typically graveyards are pretty safe places, so you can choose to just hang out there if you like.)

Most people play from their homes on their own computers. My husband and I sit a few feet apart, playing on our computers. We log into our guild’s voice chat server and use headsets with an attached microphone to talk to our friends online.

Killing other players: There are many “copies” of the game world out there, called servers. This is to keep down crowding and make it easier on the mainframes that run the game worldwide. You pick a server and typically stick to it, because your characters are saved just to the server that you start the character on. (If you decide later on that you want to play on another server, you can pay real money to transfer them over.) Some servers are PvP servers that allow more-or-less unlimited killing of players that are on the other side, while others (PvE servers) only allow it in special PvP battlegrounds or if you temporarily set your character to allow that kind of fighting elsewhere. (This temporary thing, called a “flag”/“flagging”, lasts 5 minutes from the end of your last PvP fight.)

9

Oh yeah, I forgot. My husband and I are both 39. As I mentioned, our guild has lots of married/committed couples or half-couples, from their mid-20s and up. One guy is a grandpa, and a friend in another guild is a retired woman, in her 60s. There are all kinds of jobs, too - our guild has high school and college students, a convenience store employee, a celebrity photographer (not a paparazzi, and she’ll correct you on that) who doesn’t log in on nights when there are gala Hollywood events, a lawyer for a federal government agency in DC (and she brought in a friend from work into our guild, who’s a computer tech at the same agency), a full-time mom and her Canadian Army telecom specialist husband, an English teacher in Pakistan.

10

I’ll try to answer your some of your questions rather than posting my own thoughts (which are largely in line with what others have said anyway).

Correct.

Everyone is at their own computer seeing the same common world environment, including each other’s characters (if they are in the same part of the world they are). In addition, you can talk to other players privately or in groups via on-screen chatting.

Some players play the game as if they are the character themselves (role-playing). Therefore everything they say or do in the game will be “realistic” for that character to do. Others (myself included) make no pretext of this and use my “own voice” in chat and even refer to my character in the third person.

Your lives are infinite. There is a small penalty for being killed by a computer-controlled character, but none for being killed by a player-controlled character.

Morever, the players are divided into two “factions”, and it is likely that your friends will be the same faction as you. You can not kill players of your own faction. There are also numerous ways to make it so that you character can never be killed by another player (entire servers where this is not allowed unless you explicitly allow it).

I am 30. Most of the people I play with range from 20-40. I’ve played with a few teenagers as well, and there are certainly many of them, but by selecting an adult guild or playing with people you know in real life it is rather easy to avoid them.

11

Is there a monthly cost or a 1 time fee or both?

12

Both. You purchase the game and then pay a monthly access fee. You must also purchase the expansion packs (generally there have been bundled discounts when a new expansion is launched, which happens later this year).

13

What is the monthly fee and the cost of the expansion packs? Are the packs needed because the software is updated so you can’t play without the update?

14

It’s a monthly cost. Most people who’ve never played a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) hate this idea. Once you’ve done that game model, you’re understanding of what it costs to keep the servers running, keep Game Masters and tech support people around to deal with it, etc.

The game is $15 per month if you pay month-by-month. If you pay 3 months at a time it works out to $14/month, or $13/month if you pay 6 months at a time. Considering that this gets you essentially unlimited play hours, it’s not so bad. The company will save your characters for months or even years if you cancel the account; just keep the login info and reactivate the account if you want to play again.

You don’t have to buy the expansion packs. If you want to stick with the basic game, that lets you get to level 60 and play in a decent portion of the game world. You’re only locked out of levels 61-80, two continents (out of four) geared for those levels, and one character race. You do have to do online patching to fix bugs, etc., but that’s free for any level of play.

15

Shallower, really, but it’s pretty much impossible to create a video game that has the potential depth of a table-top RPG.

16

I am not into this kind of stuff but $15 a month is not bad when you look at the cost of things like movies, concerts, sporting events, and so on.

I think some people are so hung up on the idea that the web is 100% free that they can’t deal with something that is not free.

17

Monthly fee.

Some people really don’t like this about the game (Guild Wars even has an in-game dig referring to that) but hey, if you don’t like it don’t play. It’s about $15 a month. There are several ways to pay, so the price might be slightly higher or lower depending on your choice (best deal is paying for 6 months at a time).

Personally, I find it a better entertainment buy than cable TV.

Correct.

Usually everyone is at their own house at their own computer. LOTS of on-screen chatting. There are also means to use headsets for chatting in your own voice.

You can have up to 50 characters total (but only 10 on a server).

Death is an inconvenience, not the final end. There are several ways to come back from the dead.

In addition to death being very reversible, some servers allow people to kill other players any time, and other servers only permit it in certain locations or if both players agree to combat.

No problem - ask away.

I’m over 45.

While most folks are, I’d say, under 25, those over 25 are a substantial minority and it’s not unheard of to run into 70 and 80 year old players.

Last I heard, Blizzard said 40% of WoW players are now female - but most characters in game are still male. Some women don’t advertise that they’re a female human at the keyboard because some men are jerks so they play all male characters. I know of one man who plays only female characters, and he role plays all of them so most people who meet him in game don’t realize it’s a guy at the keyboard.

Much hilarity can arise from this sort of mis-match.

I hear that may be changing soon - some significant territory will change hands in the next expansion. Unless you meant something else…?

18

Add me to the list of non players.

But I must admit Mr. T has me intrigued lately. If I could become all powerful in WOW and run around plastering nerds with mohawk grenades I think that is something I could get interested in.

19

You don’t have to be all-powerful. Mohawk grenades are available near all starting zones (though not continuously).

20

I recently lost interest in video games due to the fact that I’m just getting older and my interests have shifted elsewhere when it comes to what I want to do with my spare time. But I can say this as a staunch gamer for the past 25 years. WOW was the most entertaining, I played it for 4 years.

When you load up the game there are tips displayed during the loading screen about the game and one of them is goes along something like this " Take your friends to Azeroth (WOW) but don’t forget to go outside with them as well" meaning don’t get addicted to the game because people do.

I’m pretty sure I’m done with gaming I think the only thing that would perk my curiosity to come back would be a wow equivilant of the Blade Runner/Cyberpunk genre if it was along the same scale, gameplay, mechanics and support that WOW has.

Part of the appeal of wow for myself anyways is that it’s obvious the developers are fans and players of the game its evident based on their frequent updates and expansions of the games. They are there to fix imbalances, get rid of glitches and work on expansions. Something you rarely see in other pc games, the rest of the peeps make the game cash in their chips and head home. WoW is the exception probably why it’s so popular.