My Free Trial on World of Warcraft
June 1st, 2008
gamesI finally got around to using my 30-day free trial in World of Warcraft, and I have a few thoughts about my experience. Not everyone enjoys in-depth analysis of online role-playing games, though, so first let me share a brief summary for those people who wonder what the big deal is, but don’t care about the dorky details.
World of Warcraft: Short Version
World of Warcraft is a lot like Diablo (also made by Blizzard), or really any other single-player first-person point-of-view “role-playing” computer game, except it has a lot more content and over 6 million players. Though you can only see a small fraction of those on the server that you’re locked into, and only a small fraction of those are online at any given time.
Many people talk about how addictive it is, even going as far as likening it to crack cocaine. Here’s why: from almost the first moment you log in, you’re given “quests”, which are menial tasks with clearly defined and eminently achievable goals. When you turn in those quests, you get more quests, and each accomplishment gives you experience and items, and when you get enough experience, you go up a level. Levels and items give you more options, making it easier (and cooler) to achieve those earlier goals, but of course the new goals you get are increasingly difficult. For all the game’s faults–and there are more than a few–Blizzard has created a remarkable balance between difficulty and achievability. It is undeniably fun to achieve goals and quantify progress, no matter how mundane the tasks nor how arbitrary the scale.
Overall I enjoyed the experience, though I was getting a little burnt out after 3 weeks or so. I pushed through and played that 4th week anyway; I really wanted to play a month and be done with it. I met some interesting people, including two serving in the U.S. military (one currently in Iraq). I’m glad I played, and I’m glad it’s over.
If I play another MMOG, I’d like to try EVE Online.
World of Warcraft: Dorky Details
It’s a bit out of character for me to play a pay MMORPG like WoW. I do many things compulsively, and I love to play games, but I’m also cheap when it comes to my entertainment. The privilege of wasting a colossal amount of time in an online world is not worth $15/month to me–I can do that just fine for free, thank you very much. But as long as I had a “free” trial (a friend had bought me a copy of the game two years ago), I was going to get the most out of it.
So after putting off my friend for over two years, I finally set out on a Friday evening a month ago to install it and maybe spend a few hours playing that night. But after installing the initial 5 DVDs from the box, which took the expected 2 hours, the game had to download and install several updates totalling 2GB, which over my 60kb/s cable internet connection took over 8 hours. I actually finished installing all the updates on Saturday evening, and finally started playing.
The first challenge is choosing a name for your “toon” (MMO lingo for “character”). I tried 5 different names, and each was already taken; I finally picked ‘Solly as my moniker. But there’s no “confirm this as your name” step; you have to commit to a name before they’ll tell you if it’s taken. And your first, second, and third choices are all taken. This leads to such names as “Phunkdis” (someone I played with occasionally), which I’m sure was just typed in impatient frustration and wound up sticking.
The game supposedly has 6 million players total, but only a small fraction of those are on any given server (and it costs $25 to move your character from one server to another). There are still too many people to keep track of, so players naturally aggregate into Guilds of 50-100+ players. I was invited early on to join a guild called “Fallen Legends”, with some friendly members who were very helpful.
You notice right away that you spend a lot of time traveling around. An awful lot. This is actually my primary complaint of the game. You run from city to city and from region to region, and it’s just dead time; you can’t automate it, and nothing usually happens. Even when you acquire “flight plans” so you can charter a gryphon around (for a price of course), it can take over 5 minutes, and there’s nothing you can do during that time but watch the scenery go by.
Now, a friend told me that “the real game doesn’t start until level 70″, and of course by that point you have all kinds of special powers and abilities to help you get around more speedily, or friends and guild members with those special powers. But even then, there’s a lot of waiting around for other things, like for 40 people of the right level and skill sets to be online at the same time so you can go on a “raid” (a high-level dungeon instance); or killing umpteen spawns of the same monster, waiting for him to drop the rare but useless item you need so you can complete a quest so you can get the awesome item you need to make your character powerful enough to fight the next level of baddie. It’s all shaving the yak, but I can see how that’s “fun”. The unfun part is noticing the low fun:tedium ratio and watching your actual life slip away.
It’s also kind of a pain-in-the-ass to figure out where you have to go for this quest or that quest. There’s an in-game Quest Log that tracks what the quest-givers tell you to do, and you’re supposed to figure out from the text where you need to go. But while I’m sure there are some brilliantly written quests with clever verbal puzzles to figure out, by and large these descriptions are cranked out by Assistant Game Designers under deadlines and with substantial formulaic constraints, and they wind up being not very rewarding to muddle through.
So around level 20 I got the hot tip about QuestHelper, a plug-in that maintains a huge database of all the quests in the game. It shows you explicitly where you need to go to fulfill whichever batch of quests you and your party happen to be undertaking, and optimizes your path so you spend as little time as possible traveling around. I had a few qualms at first about subverting the natural gameplay that the designers intended, but since I was already looking to maximize the fun:tedium ratio, it quickly became essential. I never installed any other plugins, though I briefly toyed with the idea of dusting off my Lua skills and learning the interface, just to see what it was like.
In the end, I actually played for over 120 hours total, getting Solly the gnomish mage to level 36 and acquiring over 75 gold before my trial unexpectedly expired. This was mostly my fault, as I hadn’t been keeping track of my end date; a “your subscription is ending in N days” message would have been nice. I kinda wanted to say goodbye to some people and give away all my stuff. Ah well. Maybe I’ll check in again when I have a few hundred hours to kill.
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LEME USE YOUR GUY FOR WORLD OF WARCRAFT?