MMORPG Blood money!

I just got done watching G4 talking about WoW and I needed to get this dork nerd rage out of my system. Since I haven’t posted in a while, I figure I’ll make this one about a few things. First off is regarding the release of WoW’s new Expansion “The wrath of the lich king”. Blizzard has a good reputation when it comes to making games and expansions, and are well known for taking their time when making a game… I.E. Starcraft 2, but when they do finally make it, its badass. So their either lazy, or really slow at doing their job. Now me and Jen use to play WoW, went to level 70 – so this review isn’t really bias. In short, the World of Warcraft has become the short bus and the Wal-Mart of the MMO world. Short bus – because kids as young as 10 are playing this game and talking trash, anyone is able to pick this game up, and mash a few buttons to play it –Hence why it’s so popular, people like simplicity, which is pretty much Apples motto (however I’m not saying apples suck, just saying they’ve gotten as far as they have because of user friendly material.. well and everything they make is sexy and clean).

When it comes to WoW being like Wal-mart (stick with me) A lot of Wal-mart goods don’t last long (at least they haven’t for me) and they’re made with poor material so they can mass produce items at a low price (not to include their work ethics that have been taken into court). Blizzard has been nothing but reproducing the same idea in every expansion and creating it in low detail, It always consist of “Here’s a wicked item to make you bad ass – and you have to do X, Y and Z to get it, and that will take you one month’s worth of grinding” it feeds off the basic human need of reward and pleasure just like any MMO – However the problem with WoW is that month it takes – on top of having to do it with 5 other people running an instance just for 1 of 6 set piece items. In which of course by the time you get the entire set, next month they will be releasing a new update/expansion that will void out how awesome that set was. The reward system shouldn’t be monotonous. But if it is – it gets people hooked, wanting to complete the next simple task, because the next ones going to be just as simple, but time consuming. Meanwhile blizzard this year will be making a mind blowing (and quite unbelievable) 195Million dollars a month off your subscriptions around the world – and 2billion 340million total this year alone off your wasted time grinding.

Here’s another area they’re shorting you, They give you a little taste of every MMO out there, but not the full pie. Here’s some specifics if you’ve played WoW and have made it this far in my wrath fighting WoW. In Azaroth there was one (only 1) area where you could capture towers to hold rights to that land, it was pretty lame had could have had much better potential. In the following expansion however, after realizing people liked that idea “The Burning Crusade” entirely consisted of the capturing land idea which isn’t anything new to MMO’s before WoW. Now Blizzard is releasing “The Wrath of the Lich King” which will consist of Siege weapons, and a book of knowledge along with titles. Can they think of anything more original? I’ll tell you now though that the users will get hosed once again though, because even though they’re just copying other MMO’s now, their new ideas will never effect the main land of Azaroth, and only be used on the small new lands they create with the expansion, which is lame as hell. Its like playing in a cage. Point with this is – Users loved these ideas in games such as Dark age of Camelot in 2001, now being used by the same creators with the MMO Warhammer. However WoW players wont be experiencing the full intent of such an idea.

As for Warhammer? What can I say, it just came out, they’re having less bugs then when WoW first came out, and a million less gold spammers because they actually care and implemented a proper filter for them. The entire game gives you a feeling on constant war and fighting which is cool. And you can latterly go anywhere all over the world to fight with our restrictions. Not to add they have level buffs for PVP scenarios (Battle grounds) so everyone’s the same level and items get buffed to the same level. SO no more loosing because you’re out leveled by the other team. There’s thousands of the Tome of Knowledge unlocks, item unlocks, the ability to change color levels on your items, each piece seems to have several levels which is awesome (WoW hasn’t stolen that idea yet). Oh and how could I forget, you can also Level in PVP Scenarios. So you can latterly join a scenario right when you make a character, and be fighting and killing people as a level 1 (if you’re lucky cause you won’t have a lot of spells) but you can still do it! There’s also cool things called public quest which are everywhere, and each of one of them drop X amount of bags (one for how many people it should take to beat it) it’s usually 6 bags it will drop, sometimes being a purple or a more rare one. Point is you never even have to be working with a group to do them. You can just be running by, and see a bunch of people doing them, and just tag along killing shit for it. Nothing sucks more than not being able to group up with people to do something. Warhammer wise that problem doesn’t exist, not only can you just jump in on a public quest or castle take over. But you can see who has open group in your zone so you can join them for whatever instead of having to ask in a channel which always sucks and usually leaves you with no response.

In the end I’ll never go back to WoW, there is one thing I will always love about that game though, and that’s the idea of the flying mount which was released in the burning crusade, Awesome! But I refuse to go back to a game which is based around grinding for hours. Warhammer had one of the smoothest MMO releases and is starting out just as big as WoW did, and I can only hope it gets the respect and millions of subscribers as it deserves (its at 1 million now). Spells are a little bit more complex to understand for a kid who’s 10 year old, so I’m glad I wont be seeing any of those in WAR and WoW can keep them.
-Later days - WAAAARGH!!!