The Problems I Have With WoW

I enjoy WoW. A lot. But there is a growing list of reasons why I think I will not be paying for it from here on out. I understand that many of these points have been well debated. And some of them are trivial. But all of the negatives are adding up and I'm calling Uncle.

My main and most persuasive point is the community. There is a massive community of WoW and I won't say the numbers are lacking. In the contrary, people seem to be flocking to this game, and staying for years. There's thottbot.com and the official forums are full to bursting, the in game /who is generous, lots of guilds and plenty of people wondering by. However, this positive note is itself the problem: people are morons. To counter any elitist tone I may have, half the time it's me being the tard and causing the problem. But my point stands, human beings are foolish, loud, greedy, rude, hateful and generally obnoxious creatures, and as a rule I am at my happiest when I have to deal with a select few of my favourite ones, or none at all.

WoW is detrimental to my escape from the squabble of human society. I've heard that one of the selling points / main problems / most well pulled off aspects of WoW is it's ability to drag you away from the dreary or harsh reality of life and replace it with something better. I call foul: there are human beings in this game, it can't be better, only worse. Sure, on my screen there is a delicate female night elf with a deep aversion for violence against nature and a cause to rectify any wrongs against the world. But that same night elf is going to hit on me in a bland and offensive manner. With the username PoopyPants. Or beg for 'goldz plox'. Or steal all of the group loot. Or ruin an instance by pulling every mob in sight. Or quickly say "damn back in just a sec" and disappear, never to be seen ever again. Or convince me that they know what they are doing, and then completely waste my time [and therefor money] for absolutely no reason. Or any other list of things that a normal, pimply, hormone driven, generally insane, annoying, ridiculously flawed animal would do. This is not better, or escapism. This is the local mall meets Lord Of The Rings and then thrown into my living room. And I pay for this?

The next main problem is the time it takes. I don't have a machine of my own with the stats to play WoW. I have to borrow my wife's. She enjoys her wonderfully up to date machine quite a bit, so my opportunities to play are very limited. But WoW was built to be a way of life. You must play hours and hours and I just don't have the ability to. I'd like to join a group, but my fellow Alliance members get a little annoyed when I warn them I can only play for two hours. "crap wat can we do in taht time :[". Not too much, by the sounds. How sad.

I think WoW just isn't for me. MMOs in general just aren't for me. I like to get a little bang for my buck. I don't pay for cable tv, I get cable internet instead, and stream or download any tv shows I really want to watch [which are few]. How can I be this finicky about WoW? I can't. I pay for a month of gaming, and if I log in for ten minutes for that whole month, tough cookies. I don't like that.

WoW doesn't change. It's static. Set in stone. I cannot affect the lands of Azeroth in any fashion. None. If I kill something, it will reappear in ten seconds. If I slay a member of the Horde, I know he will rez, right where I killed him, and all he loses is a bit of time from the corpse run. I can run an instance, and know that there are 20 other copies of the same jail being run by other night elves who look just like me, using spells that are identical to mine, using them the same way I am to get the same items I'll get. Tomorrow, there will be same guys, same instance, same show.

What's the point? I play HalfLife2 for hours on end, what do I get out of it? Nothing, but it was fun! Those four hours of cheating to get the organic grav gun, picking up headcrabs and using them as ammo, blasting scripted NPCs and throwing around there dead body "copies", playing catch with a two ton dumpster, none of this gets me anywhere later on, but it was fun while I was doing it! I was laughing half the damn time! I wish I could get fraps to work, this stuff is golden I promise you.

In WoW I walk for twenty minutes from one side of Ashenvale to the other. Then I realise that there is no one there, and I can't do the quests alone. So I hearth to Ironforge. I call out the good old LFG basics and I use the LFG system. I'm teamed up with some promising looking people to do.. the instance in Ashenvale. Awesome. So I Teleport To Moonglade, take the flight path to Darnassus, then the flight point to Ashenvale, which just has to weave through Auberdine first. Then I walk for twenty minutes to the instance. Twenty minutes, not five, because my new group members are complete fools. And they are talking to me. And demand an answer. So I must take the time to stop walking and reply [or autorun off a cliff]. And I get ganked by some horde. By the time I get to the instance gate I realise that these moronic children are far too much to handle and I ditch the group. An hour has easily been wasted, as to my horror my hearthstone is already that light white of readiness. So I jump back to Ironforge. I LFG call again. I wonder over to Stormwind. I amble over to Redridge and actually get a quest or two done, and gain 10% of the experience I need for another level. A half hour later I'm automatically teamed up with some pot head who, although quite strange, seems to know what he is doing. After being lead through Stranglethorn for 30 minutes and three corpse runs, I get the nerve to ask [between his conversation about such things as "asl" "this plac is nice" and "is weed legal where u liv"] as to where we are going, and just what we are doing. He responds that there is a boat that will take us to an awesome place to level. Where, I inquire? Ashenvale, he replies after walking into a tree. Before the stupidity and helplessness of that answer sinks in, we are ganked my a mob that neither of us were ever going to be able to handle. A fellow member of the proud Alliance shows up, with a level more than capable of handling the beast. I guess he thought that we running non stop away from the mob, at top Dash and Sprint speed, was some sort of quest because he left us to it after watching for a moment. After staring at my wispy form for about a minute I realised that this game had officially lost me, and I logged out.

None of this was fun!! WoW is always about tomorrow's fun. This quest is boring, but I'll do it for the experience points. Then I'll level, and things will improve! This area is bland, but I'll stay and level, because I'll get to the next area, and then things will improve! This PUG is full of brain donor patients, but I'll stick with it, because things will improve! This profession is getting me nowhere, but I'll make ten thousand belts that even a vendor would probably pass on, because I'll get profession points, and then things will improve! This game sucks, but end game content is where it's at, so I'll get to level 60, and then things will improve!

I can't help but feel that the future me has dropped in today, given me the lotto numbers, an accurate weather forecast, warnings of any future terrorist attacks [none] and the pertinent information that WoW did not improve!!

I'm not sure what I'll be doing with my character and account. I have heard many grave stories of people quitting WoW, only to return due to some addictive, "smokers mantra"-like thought process "it sucks but I can't stop". Scary. I think what is best for all involved is a little deletion here and there.

I've read a lot today online about the negative attacks and positive defenses on WoW. Most of the people leaving make some dry and sharp comment about "returning to real life" but I shall do no such thing. I have no convictions of ever having "a life" as most describe it and I have no inclination to get one. I enjoy passing my days on this zoo of a rock with reading, jerking off and the odd bicycle ride. Not to mention playing catch with virtual dumpsters, of course.

If you like WoW so much, please, by all means play it. If you play once a week for two hours, enjoy. If you dumped your girlfriend so you could have more time drooling over a naked night elf, don't think badly of my post or my opinions of WoW. I was that naked night elf and your stares made me happy, for a time.

I'll miss the moonfire spam - Indref.