World of Warcraft; my thoughts.

World of Warcraft is an MMO, or “massively multiplayer online role-playing game”, though, there is no real role-playing in the game at all. More like a “choose your own adventure book”, or “Fighting fantasy” game book.

True role-playing is different, since it is mainly in-character role-playing, or acting as your character would. In ALL MMO’s your character is simply an avatar in the game setting predefined throutes and behaviors, that can only be changed by emoticons and simple gestures. In MMO’s the town/city/world/etc.. doesn’t change based on your interaction with it. In true role-playing your choices have consequence, not a 10min death sickness timer.
The game released in Nov, 2004, almost six years ago. It has 11.5 Million players and charges 14.99 a month (or there bouts depending on if you buy monthly or long terms).

The game is fun. Like farmville with achievements and a feeling of worth as you gain new and better items, or learn new things. However, the closest simile to farmville, is that there is no way to win the game. That’s right, unlike the aforementioned game books, or even true role-playing, you cannot win.  This leads to long hours of gameplay and attempts to figure out the system. For a little insight into this, do a search for “gold sellers”,”leveling guides” or “dps builds”.
The game does however have a good social element. If you can find like-minded people who want to enjoy the game, the way you want to enjoy it. I have sat in the game and listened to general conversation ranging from rape and “she/they wanted it!”, to talk of pedophiles and other less than ok chatter for anyone under 18, or maybe at all.  This is very much an adult game.
Sure they do have content filters, so that some bad words get removed, that is why people say “A N A L”(notice spaces), so that the raunchy language isn’t blocked for anyone. Even when your character dies around some players, they will use “animated actions” to pretend to sit on your head, making it look like a pornographic act.

More to the competence of the company and programming skills, I posted a few days ago that you can start a camp fire in water. This is of minor annoyance, since the lack of programming skills in other places is much more pressing. Patches, these are small add ons to the game that change a function or functionality in the game, these can add to the game or remove things from the game. Every patch from Blizzard, the creators of WoW, has been met with everything from people no longer able to play the game, to complete reinstall of the game to play, and most often incredibly long downtime on the servers. Take for instance today, 6/22/2010, the servers taken offline at 3am  until 11am, unfortunately, 4:28pm same day, servers are still down. There will be no compensation in-game or out of game for this lost time. After 4 years, you would think Blizzard would be able to do a server update without losing that much time.

With all of this though, the game is fun and has a lot of good press, and customer reaction. My opinion, I could take it or leave it. But, as long as i am playing it, I will play it the way i want to and have the ignore command close at hand (my ignore list has upwards of 20 people in it).

I still play and will until either it’s not economically viable to play anymore, or i just get bored with it.