Frozengale said:
Well if your only reason for WoW is to socialize then you have my pity. Minecraft has social aspects as well. And if you socialize over such a pathetic excuse for a game as WoW then you have many other problems. Seriously?! Why does everyone bring up this as their only and last defense for this game? "It's social" "I play it with my mates" "My girlfriend and I pretend to have sex in the forest with our avatars". Well good golly sweet molly! It's not like there aren't a thousand other games out there for socializing. Most, if not all of them, not so shallow and depressingly life wrenching as World of Warcraft. You are trying to defend a GAME on the fact that it is good because of other people, a completely separate element from the game itself. It would be like saying sawing my arm off is a good social activity because my best friend is the one doing the sawing!
Oh, I am not trying to defend Wow. It is doing quite fine without my aid. All I was trying to do is to show yoy a different aspect about the game, you seem to be ignoring. There are of course plenty of other "excuses" to play Wow, as you called it. Here are a few of my personal ones, I am sure there are plent of other:
-I like the warcraft universe. I played the strategy games and enjoyed the lore. Sure you can read all about it on the internet, watch videos of the lore-relevant-boss-fights on youtube, but that's not the same.
-The roleplaying community in wow is pretty large and allows for some decent pping, which I enjoy.
- Wow's basic concept might be boring and easy, but it is hard to master and hard to play perfect. This happens on a level that has nothing to do with items of talents, but with the way you play, with the decisions you make while playing. I can explain that in detail, if you want, but I think doing it preemtively would eat up too much space in the post.
My basic understanding of your position is that you seem to think wow is some kind of evil psycho drug that takes away peoples lives. This is ironic because Blizzard has done a lot over the last years to make the game way LESS addictive. Here are a few changes from classic wow to today's that fall into that category:
-Gold is less important (less motivation to grind yourself stupid)
-A huge portion of your Gear is regulated over points, which have a weekly and daily cap. There is not benefit in playing after you have reached that cap (i.e.: To reach your daily point limt, that you cant get outside of raids, you must play one heroic instance = 1 hour). In classic wow everything was based around drops. You could grind that stuff and you had to (or be really lucky) The raid-instances are a lot faster overall. I remember myself spending eight hours straight in one molten core run, not passing the first three bossses. Today'S radiding content can be done in two to three days per week, each having 4 hours of raiding. So in Summary to play wow at maximum time/reward efficiency (not maximum reward!) you don't need more than 20 hours per week. And with these 20 hours you will already near top on most servers, if done correctly.
-Reputation for the games various factions is now easy and fast to get by running dungeons or doing daily quests (can be done once every day). After that, no benefit. In classic Reputation was a pain in the ass to get and could take several hundred hours of your life.
Of course one could argue that these changes have the effect of "forcing" the player to play every day and therefore are increasing the chance of additiction. But honestly, I don'T buy that. The only stuff in wow that can be done ad infinitum every day are collecting vanity stuff and achievements, which every game has. So this kinda makes the "wow is addictive"-argument invalid for me.
Because frankly, if you manage to get addicted from that, you had problems beforehand.
I can fully understand if you don't like wow, but getting all worked up about how evil it is seems a bit too fox-news-stlye for me.
