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The trouble with Warcraft
Link: http://porkfry.com/?p=8
I took the summer off from playing Warcraft; in theory I intended to do things like work the garden, be social, hike and kayak. Well, I managed some of that -- still need to be social -- but y'know, winter's coming and I need an indoors hobby again.
Warcraft has a major problem for the casual player like myself: in-game gear. In order to run with the big dogs, you have to play like one of them. In order to play like one of them, you need the appropriate equipment and that doesn't come cheap. This is a quote from the former leader of the WoW guild I'm in:
I mean the 60 to 70 quests and such were pretty good but once you got that final “Ding” your mission from then on is to grind rep. That’s whats killing me. Doing the same instances over and over and over again only so I can get keyed to go to some other dungeon so that I can run that a billion times so that I can get keyed to run something else over and over and over again….for some reason.
He's absolutely right. In order to progress to see new content, you have to pay significant deposits into the time sink. That's work, not fun.
Anyway, I reckon I'll sign up for another couple of months and see how it goes. I'm probably so far behind the gear required for any of the instances the guild is running these days that it'll be impossible to catch up.
3 comments
He’s right if you consider your gear to be the sum total of your WoW experience. I’m always looking to improve my gear sets, but it’s never been the only reason I would go on a run. I go to help other people advance, to see if I can find ways of improving my performance, to have some interaction with guild members, and maybe the possibility of an upgrade here and there. When I don’t want to do that, there’s a pile of alts with enough differences in playstyle for a change of pace. It doesn’t always have to be about looking for the next upgrade.
There I disagree; while the ultimate aim is not all about getting the gear, if you don’t have it, you can’t do the other stuff. Seriously, how many people in your raiding group are allowed in with stock blues and greens? You have to work pretty hard, running the same instances repeatedly or farming in a general area to get specific drops in order to have the required edge for the higher level instances.
I suppose what I was trying to say was that, while the effort to upgrade is still a part of runs, it does occur steadily and isn’t enough of a distraction that I find it oppressive. The path to end-game raids can be just a means to an end, or an end in itself. I can see how always being in a constant state of working towards upgrades wouldn’t appeal to everyone, but to me it’s still an enjoyable part of the game.
