Returning to Azeroth – World of Warcraft (PC)

2004 seems like such a long time ago.

That’s all I could think of when I was offered to try out the demo for Wrath of the Lich King and the Burning Crusade, the first two expansions for World of Warcraft.  With the upcoming release of Cataclysm the next expansion slated for release later this year, Blizzard is keeping the addiction going for the many War-Crack addicts.

Upon re-registering my WoW account with battle.net, I had a wave of nostalgia wash over me like a bucket of gravy was thrown in my face.  Sure, it was delicious, but it wasn’t very healthy.  My characters were all still there as were their items and such.  Of course there were changes to the game since I last played it almost 5 years ago.  The addition of new races and a class were nice, as were the additions to the professions and items.

I have to admit however, that I am a little lost in the lingo on the regular chat channels.  Linguists and anthropologists could write several research papers by just hanging out in any major city in-game and watching the players.  There is a lot of culture that has developed around the game.  I am playing on the same server I played on since the inception of the game, back before release.  Since this is one of the original servers, almost every player has a character that hit the current level cap of 80.  This also means that almost all the players know where everything is (dungeons, cities, villains, etc.) and assume that everyone else knows where everything is in game as well.  There are other servers that are newer and encourage newer players to join them in order to distribute the population and make the game more interesting to new players.  The whole big fish in a small stream metaphor comes to mind.  I do know a few players on the server from my old days and have rejoined their guild as well.  They mostly go on “raids” which at this time is more of a guild status symbol, which can be addictive.  As the expansions roll out, new raids are created and guilds can get some notoriety by being the first guild to beat those raids.

“Hello, my old friend.” I say cheerily to grinding.

Yes, grinding is still a part of World of Warcraft and you can spend a huge chunk of time doing it to just get within the ranks of the other players that hit the level cap and then and only then can you join their raids and have a little social interaction.  This is kind of a sad state of affairs when it comes to an MMO.  The whole concept behind a good MMO is playing with other people.

PvP is also a big part of MMOs now-a-days.  The PvP system in WoW is slick and takes some getting used to.  There are “Battlegrounds” in which teams of characters can fight one another.  But on some servers attacking NPCs of the other faction (Horde/Alliance) will flag you as PvP and player characters of that faction can now attack you.  This is especially a problem in high population servers of high level characters.  This “griefing” of newbs really grinds my gears.

I guess the gist of my experience with my revisit to World of Warcraft is that the game has changed a lot and it is worth a revisit.  The social environment of the game has also changed a lot.  The auction houses are definitely geared toward higher level characters as a majority of the players use them on the older servers.  If you are new to the game, try the servers made for new players.  It is not a skill thing, but rather an environment thing.  You will probably have more fun building up characters around the same level as other players than soloing your level 10 character amidst a server full of level 80 ones.

Just take it easy when it comes to any MMO.  They can be very life consuming.  Don’t become a WoW hermit.