WoW, I have tasted the font of Evil

[CJC]

I plunged into the depths of this MMORPG and found it satisfactory.


Well... satisfactory is not the right word, more like highly addictive.




I downloaded the free version of World of Warcraft a few days ago, and I haven't been able to stop playing for more than a few hours since. This for me represents a dangerous swerve into super-geekdom, but I'm not sure I want to fight it anymore.

I don't have money to pay for a subscription to the game, but if I did, I think I would. I haven't been willing to pay for subscriptions since I cancelled my City of Heroes account back in 2008, so... yeah.




Anybody else hopelessly addicted to this game, past or present? If you escaped... how did you do it?

[Majora]

you'll get bored once you run out of stuff to do. by which I mean, "hit the maximum level and not have a dedicated guild to try end-game content with because the majority of people in that game are a bunch of bastards"

[Glenn the Great]

I used to be really big into WoW. It started when a few friends I had met in college were playing the game and invited me to start playing an join their guild.

I played pretty casually for the first couple years, I would do world PvP and battlegrounds. I didn't do much PvE outside of the occasional 5-man dungeon with friends.

It wasn't until most of my IRL friends lost interest in the game that I left them to join an actual raiding guild. I hopped from about 3 or 4 different raiding guilds until I found one that I settled down in for over 3 years and became established as one of the top raiders on my server.

I started to lose interest halfway through the Cataclysm expansion. This is when the game started incentivizing the 10-man version of content over the 25-man version. My guild converted to a 10-man, I missed the 25-man raiding, but didn't want to leave them. All of my IRL friends had moved on from WoW, and now most of my in-game friends had as well. I cancelled my subscription after we cleared the last raid of Cataclysm and then didn't buy Mists of Pandaria.

I think that I would still be playing just as strongly as I used to play if it weren't for a series of changes made to the game that turned in into something other than that awesome experience that it used to be.
If I had to say what two things killed WoW for me, it would be:

1) What killed my interest in PvP was the introduction of Arenas (which obviated Battlegrounds and World PvP) and Flying Mounts (which further obviated World PvP).
2) What killed my interest in PvE was the introduction of shared 10-man/25-man lockouts combined with the 10-man dropping equivalent loot to 25-man (which had the effect of largely killing off 25-man raiding as it was too much extra effort to recruit and organize 25 people for the same rewards as 10-man raiding). A 25-man raid has a certain "party atmosphere" that I craved, a 10-man just can't compare in this regard.

[ShadowTiger]

True enough. :-/ I was into WoW for the initial "Wow" factor, and the exploration, the lore, and the crafting. For my entire duration of the WoW experience, I was engaged in two private servers. I was the lead content developer on the second one, which was a Mom & Pop server (Literally, a mom 'n dad were hosting it in their office.) and what killed it for me was seeing the forest not only for the trees, but for the atoms that the bark was made of that the trees coated themselves in, metaphorically speaking. I started making three custom dungeons: One in Karazhan Crypts, one in Scarlet Monastery Beta, and another in Stormwind Vault. Fully scripted and everything. That was a time-stealer, yeah. Oh and being the bug-fixer for the server too. I never got to play legitimately, so I stopped.

Reminds me of that episode of Spin City when Paul got hooked on meatball sandwiches to a ridiculous degree, so cured himself by eating two hundred of them. Or something.

[Brasel]

I really liked the game. I've got a lvl 85 Human Pally and a lvl 70 Human Rogue. I haven't played in about a year and I don't anticipate playing again. I'm not very good at team games and I never was able to raid effectively. I'm going to try out The Elder Scrolls Online when it comes out.

[Fiyerstorm]

I've been playing WoW since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion off and on (currently do play) and despite the backlash by lots of non-MMOers, the game is quite polished and is quite enjoyable. In your case if you seriously want to dip your toe in some more, I'd say buy the "battle chest" that comes with the standard game, Burning Crusade, and I think Wrath now and give it a whirl for a month or two. If you like it, great and once you hit the level cap, update to the next expansion, etc.

I don't do any of that hardcore raiding nonsense and I have just as much fun leveling characters, questing, and doing the professions. Though the Raid Finder feature allows you to experience a raid environment without having to be in a raiding guild.