The Double Edged Sword of Playing WoW

I was talking to a few of my study mates about games we liked, and whenever I do that with people, they say “yeah, you’re the WoW-player“. For some reason I’m known as the WoW-player, and I have no idea how it happened. I usually say that there are plenty of other WoW-players in our year group, some which are better and far more progressed than me, some that raid for real and have legendary weapons.

I then realised why I’ve become the WoW-player: I don’t play Far Cry, Fall out, Call of Duty – whatever. The game I have played the most and know the most about is pretty much WoW. So yeah, I am the WoW-player.

It’s not a game you consume

I then asked them “How come you don’t play it? It’s a great investment, it’s not a game you consume“. And it’s true, it’s not something you complete in the course of 7 days (by far). It’s a game that keeps on going and all the time you’ve invested already, will not be wasted, but will rather be another brick in your virtual self – your character. For me that is a major selling point.

But the game never ends either

One of them answered “well, that’s exactly what I don’t like about WoW, that it keeps on going“. It makes it compelling to play, but they’d rather not get hooked on the threadmill. The fact the game plays on without you, and that taking a break could have greater consequences than just pausing an ordinary game, acts as a stress factor.

I was going to reply that it’s easy these days to play on a very casual level, like I do, but I see their point. Everytime I talk to a non-WoW player or an ex-WoW player, they say the same: They are kind of uneasy about the prospect of getting too caught up that it’s safer to just avoid it altogether.

Investments can easily be lost

I came to think of the time investment I mentioned earlier. In the light of wanting to quit WoW, the time you invested would then be converted to wasted time – a wasted investment. What did you really get out of all the hours spent playing, you can ask yourself. And that answer will in some way have to correspond to a lot of good reasons to have played, a lot of good experiences while playing, that made it all worthwhile.

I get the strong feeling that a lot of players feel this way in the end – that the time spent doesn’t justify itself by all the awesome things that happened while playing. It’s the nature of this type of game – the farming, the grinding, the waiting, the sitting around. Typing /played can feel as daunting as having to check your empty bank statement, only the numbers are ironically reversed.

So is WoW worth the investment in the end?

I can’t help but wonder why so many WoW-players feel bad for having spent a lot of time in the virtual world of WoW. What would they have done with that time instead anyways? Watched all episodes of all seasons of Lost?

On the forums, you sometimes see the troll forum police telling people to “get a life” or “go outside“, despite the obvious irony of them sitting there themselves dictating the rest of us, as if that is a more noble doing than actually playing the game.

I’ve never seen it up for discussion: a lot of time played is bad, a little is good. Add that to the fact that good gear is good, bad gear is bad: so spending little time getting good gear is good. But this is at the same time what a lot of people dislike, because this caters to the casuals, to an easy play style. Casuals are the new noobs really, and tier 9 is their badge. Getting the best of the best, is still reserved to the raiders, which will take time, especially if you don’t want to strut around in your tier 9 set which reeks of casualness. So you will most likely have to face being a bad good player with good gear, or a good bad player with bad gear, or a casual – gasp!

Living up to the ideal is hard, when making more time investments is a double edged sword bleeding with waste and sparkling with achievements. How can you possibly win then?

Memories of a Noob – and the Power of the Wand

I used to be a noob – a real noob. Infact, whenever there’s an expansion out, I have to work hard to crawl up again out of the most obvious state of noobness. As time passes, I have learned to disguise it though.

Part of ascending from noobhood, is being able to recognise all the times in the past when noob was your middle name.

My first noob mistake was with my very first character back in Vanilla 2006, which was a warrior. I specced her protection and thought this would help me die less.

Later I made a druid on a PvP realm, specced her balance, geared her with agility and always ended up healing in Warsong Gulch. Needless to say my druid and me didn’t do a very good job at anything.

Then came my rogue. I played her right up to the release of the Burning Crusade. Mostly I did Warsing Gulch at low levels. I was proud of this character and thought I was really cool. She was mildly twinked and I therefore did well in battlegrounds. I liked the speed of daggers and thought combat was a brilliant tree to choose, improved sinister strike and all that. I’m thankful that inspecting someone didn’t let you view their spec back then, or it would have been evident to everyone how clueless I was.

Worse was that I believed defence rating was a useful stat for me in PvP, resulting in what people would call a ninja in Blackrock Depths for this trinket. The paladin that was tanking got upset and I repeatedly stated that this trinket was good for especially combat rogues, the trinket description even mentions being “struck in combat” – it doesn’t get more obvious than that, now does it?

I still remember the paladins name, and years later when I took up my rogue again, I found the trinket and shamefully sold it, followed by an immediate respec.

Truthfully, I changed main by leveling my night elf priest in secrecy, as to shed myself of the noob haze that I saw clouding my name. Sadly the noob is in the player and not the character, so the destiny of my priest was in the cards.

I managed to avoid the “wand spec” back then and I was invited to a small guild, whose members were mostly level 70 but only doing heroics. When they had enough members, we would raid Karazhan. I remember being very proud of this raid offer, but I had really no clue to what raiding really meant.

Being stupidly poor, I didn’t want to spend gold on mana potions and found what I thought was a clever way to preserve my mana – wanding! When the tank told us to let him get aggro first, I wanded. In fact I wanded a lot in Karazhan to the point I should probably have put those 5 points in it!

During the mana extensive fight against Nightbane , I wanded so much my damage done fell below the tank. Remember tanks did less overall damage in the Burning Crusade, than they do now, so I must have done like nothing. I was afterwards carefully approached by the tank, with the notion my dps was too low, and that I needed to push more. This concept was new to me, I was just cruising up till now, and how did he know I did less damage than him?! I was utterly confused that my actions were being monitored, then embarrased in front of the rest of the raid, to whom the woosh of the wand shooting must have been so telling. I honestly didn’t consider that wanding wasn’t feasible in a raid.

Later a friend told me his other friend wouldn’t invite him to do Gruul’s Lair until he had geared up more. I was appalled and told him I thought this friend was snobbish, this was his best friend IRL and he treated him like this? He then informed me of how every bit of damage mattered, and that if you’re undergeared for a certain encounter, the team has to compensate – or just wipe, it’s about math in the end. This conversation made me realise that raiding is not just about friendship but also about climbing a gear ladder and enhancing with gems and enchants.

I’ve learned the raid ethos now, I understand what is expected of me, but Cataclysm still scares me. The fact I will have to study my classes over again and incorporate new ways of playing makes me feel incompetent already, and we’re still in the Lich King expansion.

Okay – I only play two classes at max level, priest and shaman, but that just doubles the chance that I’ll be a noob again!

Second Life meets WoW – about Virtual Worlds

Field trip to WoW is a blogpost by Vaneeesa Blaylock (In WoW “Veebee”), a Second Life performance artist, who invited her friends along for a trip around various virtual worlds, WoW being the second in line.

I thought it could be fun to make myself available as a tourguide, since it could give me a new perspective on something I’ve grown accustomed to: How I percieve and understand WoW. Also being able to chat to people about our different virtual worlds and avatars was a great bonus.

The “Second Lifers” entered World of Warcraft through the means of a trial account, which is free although restricted. Vaneeesa’s guide to setting up a trial account is actually very helpful and I recommend it, if you should be interested in taking a hike here as well (and should you be needing a guide, you know who to contact!).

I chose my draenei shaman as my character, and brought along Zenevieva the kitty druid to accompany me. We started off in the starting zone for night elves, Teldrassil.

The group grew quickly but was surprisingly silent. Trial accounts using /say is not visible to ordinary players (due to goldsellers advertizing), and we spent most of the trip having forgotten this, and thus lost out on a more synergic experience for the first part of the tour.

Planning the route became pretty simple, when it dawned on me that trial accounts only have access to vanilla WoW, meaning they only get to see the game as it was created in 2005/6.

I couldn’t take them to the floating city of Dalaran, nor Silvermoon or Exodar which I think are beautiful cities.

Instead, we took a trip to:

1. Dolanaar
2. Darnassus – the capital of the night elves
3. Boat to Darkshore
4. Boat to Stormwind – the capital of humans
5. Deeprun Tram to Ironforge – the capital of the dwarves

6.  And in the end watching the view over Dun Morogh from the ledge at the Ironforge Gates.

…avoiding Goldshire was a given.

A horde tour could possibly have been more scenic, using the zeppelin between capitals.

Virtual time + virtual distance = real space?

When we had to pick up Frossl and later Ransvor, in order to add them to the group, a major difference became evident: Distance and time in WoW and Second Life are not the same.

We had already earlier established how the day cycle differs: In Second Life a day is 4 hours long (3 daylight hours and 1 nighttime), in WoW it follows earth hours, depending on which geographical server you are connected to.

TP’ing means teleporting. Mages can teleport in WoW and Warlocks can summon, but it’s not openly available to go wherever you want in WoW in an instant.

Vaneeesa writes: “You really were in a place, and other places and distances had real meaning. TP-ing in SL is very convenient and very powerful and IDK if I’d give it up, but it really does diminish the experience.“ (Field Trip Report: WoW!)

Distance is in direct relation to time, as what really matters about travelling, is how long it takes. It’s a choice to make, when creating a virtual world. The time it takes, to travel somewhere inside this world will, besides it’s actual surface area, act as a projection of percieved size. Second Life, as I understood it, is much bigger than WoW, but travelling is not an issue (besides teleporting you can fly without a mount!) In WoW you are bound to slower means of transportation, often land- and flying mounts, not to mention gravity.

It’s interesting – why would game developers choose for us to travel slowly, basically wasting our time, when the fastest means of transportation is a choice of design?

I would imagine travel defined by avatar percieved geographical relations, time is one of the tools you can use for your virtual world to resemble realistic space.

Are you an Avatar or a Character?

It became clear to us, that our new friends from Second Life were impressed by the WoW world as it was created  by Blizzard, but unimpressed by the fact they couldn’t add to it, there is no user-content. (In fact, all of WoW is owned by Blizzard, even your lvl 80 character is virtual property of WoW, you are just renting it and the access to the rest of the package deal. It feels absurd to me, that my hard-earned gear, gold and my characters, that i’m personally attached to, isn’t mine, never was and never will be).

Also the character design options were much fewer, than what they were used to, as in Second Life you can be anything.

Despite the samples I found above, I get the impression most people feel more comfortable in a human like avatar.

I noticed straight away our various ways of defining our visual representation in whatever world we were in.

In second life, they use “avatar” or “resident“. I’m not sure of the difference, other than resident being tied to Second Life termonology, and avatar being a broader term, meaning a direct representation of a person.

In WoW we primarily use “character“, I also have friends who prefer “toon“.

“Character” ties to the idea that only part of someones identity is represented, and toon addresses the fantasy style that is WoW design.

Character also means: “a person represented in a drama, story, etc.” WoW being based on a substantial catalogue of lore books, perhaps explains the choice of the word. This storyline is also the framework within which characters are defined and interpreted.

How many alts does it take to make a main?

Near the end of the tour, we automatically ended up discussing the idea of having alts as a reflection of the different aspects to an identity, as Vaneeesa writes:

“While a lot of SL peeps do create alts for various reasons, I think a lot of SL peeps also powerfully identify with a “main avatar.” That may also be true in WoW, but it seems like multiple avatars there is much more encouraged.” (Field Trip Report: WoW!)

Having a main is widely the norm in WoW too, both for roleplayers, PvP’ers and raiders, because more time invested means more goals achieved.

However in the forthcoming expansion, Cataclysm, I believe players will distribute their time more equally between mains and alts, perhaps even having two mains (if that doesn’t defy the definition), due to the shared lock out of both 10 and 25 man raids.

In Second Life you can only have one avatar per account, but that one avatar can change appearence to whatever whenever. That is in no way the case in WoW, as a character’s appearance is bound to many factors: race, class, gender, level, face, skin color and name (Hair style and color can be changed at the goblin stylist shop, the rest can be achieved through buying a character makeover/race-, faction or name change through Blizzard. These are however considered big decisions by WoW players).

Due to the restrictions in the WoW character creation, factors such as class and race encourage you to try out a different playstyle to change and perhaps expand your game experience.

Realms and Community – In WoW it’s all about which server you’re on.

Ironically, WoW players are not connected completely, we are bound to a server/realm and therefore live in identical parallel universes. On Argent Dawn EU during peak hours, there’s approx. 3200 players online at the same time (Data based on Aug 2010).

The RealID friendslist has although changed the complete segregation, and if you have befriended someone, you can chat cross server, but still not meet in character through fx simple teleporting!

The feeling of belonging to a community, I’m guessing, is stronger in Second Life. In WoW a realm acts almost as a nationality, and that is practically true with a realm such as Crushridge, which is largely Italian.

Lag – at least RL doesn’t have it!

The day the tour took off was a nice lag free evening. Most days are lag free in WoW, and if they are not, the forums and chat channels fill with complaints. Combat becomes unplayable with only a little lag, so players have a very low tolerance. “Going from Second Life to WoW was like an iron lung victim making a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Two words: Frame Rate.“, Vaneeesa writes.

Second Life uses an average of 80 kbps downstream. WoW uses 30-40 kbps, which is comparable to Second  Life while remaining stationary. The difference lies within the game system, the way in which data is being handled.

Underneath is a picture of the floating city of Dalaran – the place that does lag quite often, due to it’s current status as the most interconnected capital in WoW, and thus most populated.

I have all of WoW on my computer, it takes up almost 18 GB (as of patch 3.3.5). All skins, meshes, objects – everything is not downloaded, but instead preinstalled. The only thing that needs downloading and server response, is relative postitioning and interactions between me, other players and npc’s. This helps keep the framerate down and steady.

Second Life exists on different external servers, rather than the individual computer, and thus needs to be downloaded when travelling to different regions, which makes the downstream spike, reducing framerate. So downloads can go up a lot when exploring in Second Life. Lag is the price to pay for user-generated content.

In the end I can say that I’ve grown more curious about other virtual worlds, including Second Life, which luckily for me, is free to use.

Pictures courtesy of: Field trip to WoW, Field Trip Report: WoW!, http://vaneeesa.blogspot.com/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaneeesab/sets/72157624629145651/, Higher Education as Virtual Conversation