I have been fairly vocal about my hatred of World of Warcraft (WoW) ever since I knew what it was. Apart from being the most stereotypically nerdy thing in the universe, I really don’t like games which are overly complex (probably why I like Guitar Hero so much). A certain person who will remain nameless told me that I was completely hypocritical for dissing WoW when I had never actually played it. I thought about it, and he was right – so a few weeks ago I decided that in my university mid-semester break I would trial WoW with as much of an unbiased opinion as possible; and if I hated it after I had played it, then I would have complete justification to continue saying that WoW is stupid.

All I knew about WoW was from my all time favourite episode of South Park – ‘Make Love not Warcraft’. From the reviews I saw, the episode was fairly accurate to what actually happened within the world of Azeroth – and the impact the game had on Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman was fairly obviously detrimental to their health.

My General Thoughts

My experiences did not start off very well – after I created my account and started downloading – it wanted to store 4gb of data on my laptop – I didn’t have enough spare storage on my internal HD – so I had it save onto my external HD which has all my old documents and photos on it – when the installation corrupted half way through, it took a nice chunk of my hard drive with it – so I wasn’t impressed with that. I’ve been able to resurrect most of it back luckily, but there’s still photos which probably have gone forever. No surprises I was rather pissed off – especially when it meant that I had to redo the entire thing. Luckily, a few WoW nerds on Twitter told me there were a few settings I could configure to get it to stream instead – which made things so much easier.

When I finally got it up and running, I decided on making a character that looked like me – because it makes the game a lot more personable. I decided on a human warlock because the female characters wore pretty dresses (I am aware I have fantastic justification skills). This is what she looked like:

So I started off in some random place, and after innocently walking around, I start getting killed by all these weird creatures. I end up getting killed so much, I lose my weapons – which means that I’m fighting with my bare hands. The only benefit to fighting like this is that you die a lot faster than if you had any sort of weapon, which kind of makes the whole game fairly redundant.

I gave up fairly quickly on this character.

My second attempt at a WoW character turned out to be a lot more successful.

After spending 10 minutes trying to work out a name (the random name generator kept on giving names that were already used up – bit pointless, don’t you think?), I finally got the name “Tyallia”. She was a Night Elf and seems to look at lot more threatening than my Human. After my experiences with the first character, I knew what to expect when psycho animals came running up towards me. I really hated the fact that one of the wild animals was a spider – I have arachnaphobia, and I did not enjoy running up towards spiders that were the size of my character – let alone the giant ones, which took up my entire screen.

However, in most cases, I was killed. A lot of times. I believe I probably hold a record somewhere for the number of times I died during the trial period.

For the n00bs out there, when you die, you become a ‘spirit’ of your character (seen below) which starts off at the nearest graveyard and you have to go find your corpse to resuscitate and then you are able to continue playing the game. I give WoW credit for putting where your corpse is on the map, so you can just follow it, but sometimes it took ages to find your spirit, which could be really frustrating when you wanted to get quickly back into the game.

However, this method of ‘finding your corpse’ can also become extremely frustrating depending on where you die. After following a quest (think of it as a mission to find a certain object) to the very ends of the island I was situated on, my character fell down the side of the cliff into a crevice and subsequently died. I returned as a spirit and went to find my character. After coming to the same area, I went down the crevice and did not stop where my character stopped – I fell all the way down to the sea surrounding the island. Needless to say, I was pretty lost and screwed.

Things were made a lot worse when I wasn’t able to get out of the sea – every time I would try and climb a rock face towards the island, I would fall down to the sea again. I wasn’t able to automatically resuscitate as I wasn’t near my corpse, and to my knowledge at that point, after you died you couldn’t die again. After wandering around the island for a while (at least 10-15 minutes), I thought that as a corpse I could just swim out to a different island and be revived there. However, after swimming out for a few minutes, a flashing bar told me that I was dying…again…which I didn’t think would be possible – but soon enough my spirit burst like a balloon, and I was returned to the graveyard where I had to unfortunately sacrifice 25% durability of all of my armor to be revived there.

I will admit, playing WoW does have its good moments. Each character race has special powers – and my race (Night Elf) had this really good power where they could become invisible until the character started moving again. This was really great because whenever I was about to be killed, I could use this move and restore my health and mana (magical power juice) by waiting around. However, the downside to this is that when I got to a higher level, it would take more time to sit around and wait for my character to heal.

Another hilarious thing I found was the names that some characters had. The way it works is that each username must be unique, and a user can have one or more characters. Each of those character names ALSO have to be unique, so in some cases it’s really hard to find a nice name for your character that hasn’t already been used. This leads some users to calling their characters really stupid/sex-related names. I remember one time a “BigJuggs” came to me and wanted to pair up with me to complete quests, and another time I found this character chatting on the local chat server:

Seriously. Who calls their character Leghumper? To be honest, I feel it kind of draws away from the entire “you’re in a completely different world” thing by calling characters stupid names.

My Review

For my overall review, I am going to grade what I thought were key components of a WoW Trial Account:

• Setting Up Account: F … There really needs to be an obvious option to allow for users to stream! I shouldn’t have to be forced to download 4gb of data for something I am only going to be playing for 15 days.
• Initial User Friendliness: B … WoW is great in the sense that it provides tips for users whenever they start a new type of task, but sometimes these tips come too late or not at all.
• General User Friendliness: C … Finding help in the help components really doesn’t solve any issues you may have as they only provide answers when you have the exact keyword- which is hard for those who don’t know WoW slang. More contexual help is needed (maybe a keyboard function/right click will provide an explanation to an object etc.).
• Activities Performed: C … Being on a low level means you perform pretty dull tasks. The general way things are run is that you: find a task from a person, go to the location, kill some animals, find the quest item, go back to the person. This can be fun for a while, but when you are performing 5 quests the exact same way, I got over the game for the day. There are no duels, or fighting big characters until level 80 which is way too long to wait.
• Trial Capabilities : A  … The only time I was limited by my trial was when I wanted to auction a product. Apart from that, I feel that the rest of the game would be played exactly the same way.
• Collaboration: C … You don’t really find many lower level characters lying around to collaborate on quests with. I collaborated with one of my friends who was above level 80 and they were able to kill characters in one hit, instead of the 5-10 hits it would take me. Although it was fun to play with them, I felt more personal satisfaction achieving quests on my own because I would be able to kill everything myself.
• Data Usage: D … I will admit, my internet is not the greatest – however, playing WoW made things extremely laggy at some points and I think I went over my cap a few times just by playing it with the lowest level of image quality. WoW needs to autodetermine the quality of images/sound whenever someone plays to ensure they have the most optimal experience.

So… do I still dislike WoW?

Yes, and no.

I only say no just because I know it can be fun to some extent. However, as you can see from my review, I believe it’s a fairly mediocre game. As I wasn’t at level 80, I know that there are possibilities for more exciting activities out there such as this one here:

P.s. I only found out about this half way through my trial – what a n00b.

But I really don’t have the time, or money, to invest my life in another world – to be honest, I would rather be completing quests in the real world and achieving great things for myself than being a legend in Azeroth. Personally, I think its a joke to be paying $30-$40AUD a month to play a game which most people will only play a couple of times per month. I think it should be an hourly rate i.e. you pay 50c/hr (or some other standard cost) for you to be able to play: so those who only play a couple of hours a week get a longer lasting membership (and utilise it more effectively than those who spend their entire lives on the servers.

It would be really funny seeing a WoW addict putting “I am on level 80 on WoW and have been a part of 300 successful raids”. However, just the other day, one of my future work colleagues posted up a link to a Deloitte US report, which happened to be on World of Warcraft. Its supposed to be about how a Knowledge Network leads to increased improvement in WoW groups, however I think it’s supposed to head-fake to general organisations collaborating in the environment (but it doesn’t really say that in the paper which is quite silly). But it’s funny that a major organisation would talk about WoW in a business sense, as I would have thought there would have been more focus on the use of Second Life and other social networks in organisations (e.g. Yammer). So maybe there is light at the tunnel for WoW nerds bringing their character’s abilities into the real world? But realistically, most people who are not from an IT background probably would look down upon someone having a focus on WoW because it really does stereotype someone as a massive nerd.

In summary, although I do still dislike the game after my experiences, I do now have the understanding to why so many people around the world love it.

My Stats

For those interested in how I finished up after my experiment, here are my general stats right before I logged off for the last time: