What Your Warcraft Life Will be Like
At this point, if the press releases are to be believed, then like eight billion, kajillion people are currently playing World of Warcraft. Soon, an expansion for the game will be released, and fresh hordes will be sucked in. And many other consumers will play its competitors, like Vanguard, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online and other similarly doomed products.
You will figure out the weaknesses of bosses, learn to handle large groups of attackers, and spend your precious leisure time with some of the dumbest people on God's green Earth.
So, if you haven't played a massively multiplayer game yet, you will soon be the only one. Loser. And, since you're probably feeling left out and are considering experiencing the massively multiplayerlyness for yourself, this is a rough, informal guide to the various stages of your time in fantasyland will be like. Forewarned is forearmed.
All of these games have a standard progression - alone to few to many. In other words, as time progresses, you will need to work with larger and larger groups of people if you want to gain power, glory and shiny armor that shoots out little sparky particles and glowing skulls.
In the beginning, you will be a noob - alone, shivering and afraid, with no armor or weapons to speak of. You will be quarantined in a beginner's area, where you will slap haplessly at your keyboard, drool on yourself, and kill wimpy monsters that you can handle. You will get and complete quests to kill 10 goblin toddlers or gather 70 bricks and take them to Farmer Joe so he can complete his pile of bricks.
As time goes on, you may notice that other people are around, beating up the same toddlers and grabbing the same bricks. You may team up with them, in quivering little groups of two and three. You will start learning about the other sorts of characters and their capabilities. You will learn the chat shortcuts and acronyms (like LOL = Laugh Out Loud and NOOB = you). You will learn not to get up to go get a Coke in the middle of a fight, FOR GOD'S SAKE.
As you gain levels and power, you will find yourself pushed to be in larger groups, needing to work together better to fight tougher foes. You will meander up through the levels, realizing that, even at its best, the game is kind of tedious. And, if you want to continue, you will have to put some real hours in and spend a bunch of time playing with other people.
At this point, you may decide that you have had enough of this fun, quit the game, and get on with your life. We will assume that you don't.
Also, at this point, some people will get really, really into tradeskills. This means that you buy a fishing pole, stand on the shore, and spend hours catching the same fish again and again. We will leave those people here.
At a certain point, to do interesting things, you have to get a full group (i.e. five or six people) group together if you want to see the exciting stuff and get the better treasures. Of course, you can stay by yourself just killing toddlers and collecting bricks, but then you might as well be fishing. Why play the game if you don't try to have real adventures and be a hero?
So now, you learn to work in a full, unified group, taking on challenging dungeons and encounters. You will figure out the weaknesses of bosses, learn to handle large groups of attackers, and spend your precious leisure time with some of the dumbest people on God's green Earth. Some people are just bad at games. They don't know it. But they are.
In any other sort of game, I could start out playing someone competent and immediately do stuff. In role-playing games, I have to prove that I deserve to be competent by enduring tedium. Then it lets me do the heroic stuff. And multiplayer games are like that times 10. Anyone who ever spent an hour in World of Warcraft killing 50 goblin chiropractors to collect 10 chiropractor shins knows what I am talking about.
I may play one again someday. All I need is a huge surplus of time oppressing me that I need to kill with extreme prejudice. And, until that happens, unless a game can be finished in under 10-12 hours, I'm not interested.
And the games I write are no better. They do exactly the same thing. Sure, it might be cool to make a game where your character starts out a level 50 badass and then just trashes bozos. But it just wouldn't sell as well. The addictive, statistic-increasing, time-eating quality isn't the problem with these games. It's the point.
I'm tired of starting a new game and being a loser. I'm tired of running the same errands to prove myself. The next time I enter my fantasy world, I want it to not assume that I'm a jackass.
So now, thinking about playing an RPG just makes me tired. I may play one again someday. All I need is a huge surplus of time oppressing me that I need to kill with extreme prejudice. And, until that happens, unless a game can be finished in under 10 to 12 hours, I'm not interested.
Next, I'll talk about the thing that every RPG has and everyone hates. (Hint: trash.)
Jeff Vogel
Spiderweb Software
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
/spit
