I’ve always been a self confessed wow hater… hmm, more than that. Something more akin to a deep loathing exuding from every pore of my body. I played it once, years ago but that just involved booting up the trial version, making a blood elf and then quitting within an hour because i hated the character, the skills, the combat, the aesthetic and well, the game in general.
I guess by then I’d already been a little spoiled by the modern adaptation and then going back to playing wow was more like trying the inferior product. I honestly still don’t understand the appeal either, I get and even champion the importance of social connections in mmo’s but still.. how could a game this bad get this many people to play.
I also hate the influence WoW has had on the genre too. How near every company creating a mmo in the last decade has tried, and failed to copy the success of wow. I want a diverse marketplace and experiences and what we are getting is just repeating the same style of gameplay. I’m over that and I blame WoW.
I also just don’t understand the success. How in the hell did it even achieve what it did. 12 million players at it’s peak, that’s just insane and nothing has ever come close within the western market. How in the hell after over a year of absolutely no new content can they gain subscribers. Any other mmo doing that would be shutting down its servers about now yet they are thriving. I just don’t understand.
Now this loathing does come down to ignorance and lot of making my own opinions based on hearsay and personal bias and in a way that is a bit wrong. As time goes on I’m also seem to get a little more curious about wow, about experiencing the game that birthed the modern mmo industry and brought it into the general population. To also try and find or at least gain a glimpse of that mysterious something that makes it more than the sum of it’s parts. Having Murf recently bring it up as well, plus a new and i think, popular expansion sealed that interest.
Now I know nothing about wow. I’ve never read up on it, I don’t know the classes, or characters or the lingo beyond basic mmo types of short talk. I don’t know about the lore beyond orcs hate humans and that’s more based on my RTS days. I’m not invested in the mmo in slightest yet I think it will be an interesting experiment going into it this way, as a complete outsider that popped her mmo cherry on the modern mmo’s and remain a slave to their conveniences… plus pretty visuals.
So here I go… On an experiment in Azeroth
Oh and Secondary Post incoming with a poll to pick both my boosted class and the one to level.
#wow #noob
12 thoughts on “Experiment in Azeroth”
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Healing the masses 
Just don’t take it too seriously. World of Warcraft manages to be one of the best casual-friendly experiences you can have in MMOs.
so i’ve noticed
What the actual frack. Is it opposite day and nobody told me?!
lol.. i don’t know. I feel it kind of fills out my mmo credentials to a certain extent and it will be an interesting experiment. And hey, at least i might get a good couple of rants out of it =p
I feel like my AA sponsor just announced they’re opening a pub. >.>
I look forward to the rants!
lol… although that would be more like asking a mormon to be your sponsor or someone like that who has never tasted it. Sure they can support and enjoy other things but they’ll never understand the compulsion.
Here’s hoping I come out the other end with all my sensibilities still in tact haha
It’s getting to feel like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers around here. Is anyone still immune?
I never played any Blizzard games other than WoW. I’d never heard of any except Diablo, which I knew of only as some kind of non-gamer’s easy-mode thing that one or two non-gamers I vaguely knew had tried. Despite trying to get into every MMO beta I heard of from 2000 onwards I never even for a second considered applying for the WoW beta. Despite reading all MMO news obsessively (and there was nowhere near as much then as later) I paid almost no attention at all to WoW.
Moreover, no-one in my Guilds or chat-channels, in which I was very active at that time, talked about it either. There was pretty much no interest in the game whatsoever from anyone i knew. Even a year after WoW launched, when it was impossible to be unaware of its massive and unprecedented success, I still only knew one person who’d tried it and he’d gotten to to the mid-30s before returning to EQ2. His brief review was “It’s ok but its too easy”.
I retained my opinion, informed pretty much entirely by that one comment plus the countless in-game rants by players in every MMO I ever played confirming WoW as an MMO for people who didn’t know how to play MMOs and didn’t want to learn, right up until five years after launch. Then, at a loose end MMOwise, Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally tried it, expecting, like you, to hate it.
Guess what? We didn’t. Our friend was pretty much spot on: ” “It’s ok but its too easy”. Or, really, I would say “too shallow”. It was fun for three months but I’d pretty much run out of things to do that interested me by then. I didn’t empathize with the lore or the story, the dungeons looked like they might have been good when people did them “properly” but those days were long gone, most of the interesting systems (Hunter pets being a prime example) had been watered down to nothing and there were none of the non-combat activities I doted on on other MMOs like collections, housing or appearance. Crafting was a joke.
I like WoW. I’d play it again. I do play it occasionally on my free account. Like you, though, the reason it, rather than any one of a couple of dozen other MMOs, became the mega-hit it did is a complete and utter mystery. I think it would probably make it into my top 20 MMOs but I’m not even certain of that.
Expect to be underwhelmed. You won’t hate it anywhere near as much as you’d like to. You might enjoy some bits here and there. You’ll be done with it before your sub runs out. That’s my prediction. I think it’s very much one of those “you needed to be there at the start” kind of things now. At this stage anyone joining is just going to end up standing around, bemused, thinking “is this it?”
(I was going to post something about WoiW later today and I’m pushed for time so I may borrow my comment here back for that!)
lol.. I assure you it’s still Eri in control over here.
And yeh, I expect that to be it as well, no strong feelings one way or the other. I so want to hate though.
WOW …never tried…will be following closely and may even create a f2p account (wonders if wife’s comp has enough memory for WOW and LOTRO!)
Good look…I voted rogue in your poll as I like the idea of rogues but like you have no idea if good or bad in WOW…
thanks for voting and yeh.. as a wow noob in this age it should be fun
My 1st MMO was SWG and I fell in love with the social systems. Moved on to EQ2 when it launched and missed the social systems, but liked the actual game more.
WoW launched and I was still really invested in EQ2 and that’s where all my friends were, so I didn’t pick it up anywhere close to launch, but eventually friends drifted out of EQ2 and in to WoW and convinced me to make the jump. Lasted about 2 weeks. Can’t say anything was wrong, but after SWG and EQ2 it felt so generic to me that I never felt any impetus to log in. Back to EQ2 I went.
BC eventually came out and I decided I’d like to try out the Blood Elves and Dranei. I think I got a Dranei shaman to level 7 and various blood elf alts to levels from 2-9 and …. yeah, that was it for me. I’ve never even considered trying WoW again. Again… can’t say what it is about it that is off-putting to me. I really can’t say I found anything wrong with it, I just didn’t find anything right with it either, if that makes any kind of sense.
Coming from Germany, it was pretty hard to play with an American guild in EverQuest. Long raids could go for hours and hours, often you logged out, went to sleep, logged in again just to find that the raid was still running. But I was a student, so I had enough time on my hands. At that time, Blizzard already was a pretty good storyteller. I loved Warcraft II and Warcraft III, mostly because of the story. We played the RTS on many, many LAN party nights.
When WoW first was announced, I could not wait to play it. The exclamation mark pointed you to a quest giver. How cool was that!?!?
As we started out, it wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is now. I played a Druid in Beta, but since I started late, I could just level to 20 (it wasn’t too easy to get in Betas as it is now then). Classes were unbalanced, Whole quest zones were unbalanced. Quest lines were heavy and difficult if not downright unfair. But as they say in the Looking For Group documentary: Lord of the Rings came to the cinemas, the Harry Potter hype was running, Marvel brought out the first good movies. It was fantasy time.
I have never played any game – not even EverQuest nor Guild Wars 2 – as much as World of Warcraft. I did not always play, but I always went back to it. And Blizzard had to face all what comes with a massive customer base. And I think they did well.
I went back for Warlords of Draenor, though the story did not appeal to me. But I am playing since a week again after almost 1 year hiatus and I pretty much like it. Maybe there was too much disappointment in all the other games I’ve tried. With my turn back to World of Warcraft I hope to put an end to all the miserable experiences of the past.
So, shut down the browser, wowhead.com, icy-veins.com and just play the game. It’s going to be okay 🙂