What Exactly Is Wrong With World Of Warcraft?

[Wintermoot]

because there are allot of free alternatives my neigbhour thinks that Perfect World is better then WOW

 

[Fappy]

Grinding like no ones business (Good for some, bad for me).
Unbalanced PvP.
Classes in constant flux.

That's the big three downers for me.

If you have to ever grind in wow, you are doing it wrong.

Have you ever leveled or achieved Exalted status with any (difficult) factions? That's called grinding.

 

[Mockingjay]

I don't like the fact that you cannot play the game casually. I enjoy playing, but I can't afford to play constantly, or f*** up my A-levels for that matter. I also don't like the judgements. People constantly judge your specs, gear and playstyle. It leaves little room for personal innovation and everyone ends up playing the same.

 

[AmbroseBaal]

#3: too expensive
#2: I found it very very boring.. even when I was plowing through stuff
#1: My best friend can never hang out anymore because he always has raids to do

#3: That doesn't make the game any worse, just less accessible.
#2: That's the same with all MMOs, surely?
#1: Once again, personal reaction.

#3 If it drives away customers I would consider it a bad game
#2 I have played many mmo's and this one by far has the most running/flying to places that would make a good portion of the 15$ fee wasted (example-Guild Wars You can teleport to cities instantaneously. Most missions start right outside of those cities and have many parts that take you were you need to be)
#1 Is it personal if it happens to lots of people?

My list would go in no order
#1 Price- Question- isn't the 15$ going to toward making updates to the game and keeping the servers running? The first part of that should make the expansions like Cataclysm FREE because you are already paying for those updates on a monthly basis. 2nd the new mount that came out. I know its not necessary for players to buy it but, really 25$ the mount should be bought with in game money that can be more expensive than any other mount.

#2 Traveling and Waste of Time
I have played the game on both free 14 day trials and on free private servers that are instant 70's so I can't speak mush for in the middle except for my 14 day trials did manage to get decently far
In this game I felt I was running around a "World" that would never stop just going from Ogrimmar to the Crossroads took forever even on the flying mounts for traveling. The cities had lots of confusing routes and made finding stores very difficult even with help from a guard. The multiple levels of floors added to this confusion and you would have to back track to get up or down to the level taht your store was on. For a game I pay monthly for I would think they could create an easier way to buy items and find where to purchase them. Don't even get me started on if you die.

I'll expand on my list tomorrow if I have a chance but I have a 7:45 class tomorrow so...

 

[Silva]

I would dare to say you're a minority on this website then. I'd guess that most gamers buy anywhere from 5-10 new or used games a year. I know when I used to play single player games all the time I used to buy something new at least every other month. Even now that I play mostly mmos I'm still buying console and PC games as well. No way I could only purchase 1 game a year and not get bored of it haha.

Well guess what? You're high in the socio-economic index. Congratulations.

As for everything else, thats subjective man. Maybe you don't see it as value for oyur buck but millions of players disagree with you. =p

And the billions of people who don't play it? I could assume that all of them disagree with you and be little more fallacious than the nonsense you say here.

I wouldn't call the expansions minor either.

The ones I was talking about are. The major ones are a whole new ball game as they are separate from the subscription fee. See my response to Kagim for more details.

Edit: Like I said you find me a hobby that costs less then 100 bucks a year. You won't find one.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA.

Okay, now that I have that off my chest...

Golf, bowling, chess, cards, Risk, Magic: the Gathering, reading, writing, running, yo-yos, soccer, cricket, painting... Do I really have to go on?

Thats why I and many others turn to videogames. I'm not trying to say you should like the game or how mmo subscriptions work. I'm just saying that for people who do like WoW and other mmos this entertainment is cheaper then anything else.

No, it isn't.

The monthly fee is to pay for server maintenance and a very small of that goes to profit. Look up the building Blizzard houses there servers in, its not called "The War Room" for kicks. The thing is massive and just keeping all the servers under surveillance as well as employing enough GM's to even attempt to work every single server along with customer support networks.

What you seem to be asking for is every new expansion is another 60 levels of content and never having to pay server fees but have constant support. That's not exactly possible. Blizzard would go bankrupt. Fast.

You seem to be laboring under the misconception that WoW is a cheap game to produce and keep online. This isn't like the single player games that can easily patch issues. The game costs a significant chunk of the monthly fee to run. Blizzard has made a bunch of money because a ton of people play it, not because they make so much off each player.

I am not trying to convince you your wrong about whether it is worth your money or not. If you don't feel its good enough for your cash then good on you. What i am trying to explain is that its not the evil scheme you seem to feel it is. Blizzard isn't charging for the game just because. If that was true D3 would require a monthly fee. WoW is an incredibly expensive game to maintain alone, i remember a blue post stating only about $4 dollars of each monthly fee is profit. The rest pays for the amount of work it takes to keep the game running.

In short the subscription fee is almost entirely about keeping the servers running 24/7 with no hiccups while employing thousands of worker to constantly monitor the servers. If you must glitches would be part of that.

Patches are not however. Most patches are content patches. Those are given out for free.

As well this last statement is confusing.

"Since you pay extra for the "major" expansions like Lich King, the latter is the truth."

Do you mean Northrend? Wrath of the Lich King was a Major expansion. It added the next ten levels, a brand new class, brand new profession, as well as nine new Zones.

As well the revamp coming up for old world Azeroth is being given to all players regardless of expansion status.

Your trivializing the sheer amount of work that goes into all of that. That's what's bothering me about your post. You make it sound like they slapped it together in a month and released it. In actually it took over a year to make. That's a year's worth of employee wages and bills. Blizzard spends a shit load of money on each expansion.

To summarize:

1)You seem to think WoW servers are free to cheap to maintain. They're not.
2)You seem to think i am trying to convince you to play the game or change your mind if its worth your dollar. I'm not. If its not your game it's not your game. Just don't trivialize other peoples work.
3)Your over trivializing and that's kinda irritating when you know how much work goes into making a game.

If ArenaNet can do non-subscription fee MMOs by splitting releases into proper game releases, with a few cuts to other services, and make a fine profit, then so can Blizzard. Servers are not free or cheap to maintain, but that doesn't mean that a multi-billion dollar company can't still make a profit while having them free. It's possible. It's been done before. The trick is not spending so much on unsustainable practices, or wanting to make a massive profit at the expense of the consumer.

I'm not accusing you of telling me to play the game. To be precise, I wasn't accusing you of anything. But now, since you presumptuously accuse me of trivialising something that I actually acknowledge (the massive amount of work that goes into every Blizzard game), quite rightly, I'll accuse you of "trivialising" my discussion of a payment system that is archaic and designed to rip off gamers by taking advantage of their addictive tendencies.

$4 of the monthly fee as profit, if that is truly the correct statistic; I will question it until I see it, is more than enough when there are thousands of people who are losing their homes because of the drug-like way the game rewards you at small steps and large steps, tricking the money nerve to make people think they're getting "richer" when they're just getting more virtual gold or "stronger" when they're actually getting fatter while the numbers on the screen rise. The foolish and the vulnerable are very much a victim of the design of WoW, and it's trivialising the matter to say that the design has no part to play in that outcome. Yes, most of these people already have mental problems, but that doesn't mean that the design isn't made to deliberately take advantage of said problems.

Long ago, when there was a shred of decency in the industry because without it it would sink, people thought that taking advantage of the disadvantaged was a weak move. Now however, it gets the defence of thousands of people because it's their fault because they're disadvantaged. Protecting those vulnerable to addiction seems to be an idea lost in the mists long ago these days, and if Blizzard ever decides to contribute, I'm not sure if all the money they ever made would solve the problems that they indirectly, but certainly, caused.

What you say about my "confusing" statement seems to imply that I said "minor" instead of "major". I said "major" to change the focus slightly, because before that point I was discussing the minor updates that fanboys like to claim are part of what the subscription fee go towards, to justify paying such ridiculous amounts every month. Lich King had its own price separate to the game, so it was not a part of the first example, but rather a compounding second point and example that helped prove my point. If you count the cost of expansions as well as the subscription fee, without even considering the latest shiny micro-transaction pony rip offs, you will note that there is much more than $180 being made here per person every year.

 

[lapan]

These are just my personal reasons:

1. I dislike the graphic style and was never really into the warcraft francise
2. grinding to Level 80 seems like an awful chore to do
3. A game must be really, really good to convince me to pay monthly fees

I tend to like games like Guild Wars more.

 

[RelexCryo]

I did check the search bar a few times to find something like this, and it failed. So, here goes.

I just want to ask you Escapists, what exactly is wrong with World Of Warcraft?
Before you answer, there are a few rules I have to lay down.
'It's overrated' or 'It's a waste of time' are not legitimate arguments. I want to know what's wrong with the game itself, not the consequences of, or the hype surrounding, it.

See, now I play on a private server, so I get only a helpful community, and of course can avoid the irritating children and the gold farmers. This does not mean, however, the server is without its idiots. I will admit there are a few people I simply do not get on with. This does not take away from the game, in my opinion.
What good is a virtual alter ego, so to speak, if he doesn't have any enemies? Dealing with people we can't tolerate is part of our everyday lives, so why should our online lives be exempt from that? If we lack that fundamental part of our being, we start losing the ability to communicate altogether.
So long as you aren't filtering out all the bad people and the naughty men with opposing views, WoW doesn't actually detract from social skills. At all.
As for time wasting - that can be said about anything. I would say going to church was a waste of time, but a lot of people find it a rewarding experience. The argument genuinely goes for anything at all.

So I repeat my question. What exactly makes this MMO so hated?


EDIT: When I say THIS MMO, I mean this one in particular. Not the traits of all MMOs, just why everyone shouts about how bad WoW is compared to, say, Aion or Flyff.

It calls itself a roleplaying game, but the last time I checked gameplay made roleplaying nearly impossible. When I left, you had to run the exact same dungeon 300 times in a row to complete an outfit- and there was no canonical explanation for *how* you could run the same dungeon 300 times in a row.

When I left, there was a *best* suit of armor, always. This prevented individual expression.

Character models of a given species all look alike. Also cuts down on self expression.

When I left, 40 players would gang up on an NPC boss of the same species as the players. Using a skin of a player race for the boss rather than a skin of a 15 foot high demon made it impossible to roleplay as an honorable warrior, since the only way to beat many bosses who were memebrs of your own species was to gank them. I wanted to be an honorable, powerful warrior- not a wimp. My complain is not that the bosses were too tough, but the skin that was used.

So in conclusion- prevents self expression and indiviudality, core gameplay was hostile to roleplayers. The game was also overwhelmingly focused on guilds, with little to no content for individuals end game at the time I left it.

 

[Vitor Goncalves]

For me, its dull. I really like my RPGs and don't mind the odd fetch/grind session but not for years on end! Then again I only did play the free trial a while ago, maybe its improved? Also what happened to the RTS?

Generally though I think WoW just has a really, really bad rep, based upon a few extremes and generally does not represent the average player.

RTS games died, think they have to kill the MMORPG to come up with a warcraft 4, but that would be like killing the golden eggs chicken.

Average players in WoW are rare, probably like 10%. 45% are elitists and 45% are noob crying babies.

 

[Auric]

Its an epic grind fest like every other MMORPG.

Also i cant justify ~30 dollars a month + Game + Expansions + Expansions that are likely to come out at a later date. Especially when most of the gameplay isnt fun according to most people i know, and its only fun when you get to level 80.

 

[mornal]

I played for a while and nothing was wrong with it gameplay-wise, although I'll admit I didn't get to the high-end raids and what not.

However, I didn't enjoy how much time it sucked out of my life so when I hit a boring patch of leveling or something I was able to quit.

I will say financially it makes sense. If you don't pay for any extras and just do the basic $15/month sub. you save money because: 1 year of WoW = $180, which is approximately 3 console games and I doubt any of us could survive on 3 new games per year.

 

[I Fiend I]

1) Too expensive
2) the graphics, even for the day of the release were horrible, the art design is not good.
3) The quests are really boring and there arent any markers to where you need to go, only tells you the area and then you have to search the whole area for 1 little thing.
4) So many people are turned into zombies by it, all they ever do is play warcraft. To be honest I was scared to try it, didnt want to get sucked in, but when my friend gave me a trial version I really didnt like it, even though I gave it a chance.

 

[I Fiend I]

Because it's a vampire that drains you in more ways then one.

So's a prostitute, but we tend not to warn each other about those.

Lol. Yeah well, at least a prostitute gives you instant gratification... and she'll make a man out of you boy.

Lol. World of Warcraft will make a boy out of you man.

 

[Aeshi]

It's the "mainstream" MMO and that means you can mindlessly hate it regardless of whether you've actually played it before.

 

[MetalMonkey74]

Activision

 

[Avelestar]

I played it for close to two years, raided 4 nights a week for just over half that time. It was AMAZING. I loved leading a raid, the joyous moment when you take down a new boss after a nights trying, the sense of belonging you get from talking to 24 other people. It meant so very very much to me, but it was so very very bad for me.

I don't drink, smoke or do drugs, but I have an addictive personality when it comes to things like WoW. I failed 3 of 4 subjects at uni, shrugged it off as nothing (because I was changing courses anyway, from chemistry to biology) then failed 3 more the next semester. Got a big red letter from my uni saying "DO IT AGAIN AND WE KICK YOU OUT, FINAL WARNING!"

Finally realised it wasn't worth ruining my life, so I threw out all my discs and uninstalled the game. My account is still around, as its linked to my battle.net account, but i've not touched it since that day.

tl;dr eats up all your time, you start to priorities things differently, don't even realising you're going wrong...or at least I did.

WoW is awesome, and for those of you that can balance RL and WoW all the more power to you. But I think I'll just stick with actually studying for uni and leaving my room once in a while.

 

[Rocketboy13]

2) the graphics, even for the day of the release were horrible, the art design is not good.
3) The quests are really boring and there arent any markers to where you need to go, only tells you the area and then you have to search the whole area for 1 little thing.

I think the graphics are supposed to fall into the simple and cartoony variety so that a processor could handle it. It is an easy way to get a larger audience for a game that probably was originally intended to be casual in nature rather than the meth it has become.

And the markers thing has been solved, the map now shows you markers for all the quests you have active in an area, I hadn't played the game since 2008 and came back to find that the interface had become sooooo much more friendly to those of us who don't have days to fart away searching a field.

 

[Rocketboy13]

I will say financially it makes sense. If you don't pay for any extras and just do the basic $15/month sub. you save money because: 1 year of WoW = $180, which is approximately 3 console games and I doubt any of us could survive on 3 new games per year.

You need to buy some cheaper console games, the last 6 I bought were all under the 30$ mark, bargain bins and waiting a month or two does wonders for your gaming budget, I have a backlog of games and I don't feel like I have over spent in the least.

 

[iLikeHippos]

Gankers, raids guilds and noobs + pros in PvP games.

Those three are a major factor the game got annoying and boring to me.
Please read if you find my opinion worthy of your time.

<spoiler=Gankers>First of, the gankers (Well, if you play on a PvP server, suit yourself) can be real assholes sometimes. Especially the ones that you can't even fend of. And if you try ask for help from someone in the area, they will fucking TROLL you! Making your mood go down even further.
The only escape is to logg on another character, which isn't the favored option most of the times.
<spoiler=Raid Guilds>
The raid guilds can be a real *****. I can remember I joined 3 of them. And only one of them let me go as far as 3 bosses in Kharazan. Than the guildmaster noticed I had put my trust in the guild and put 200 gold and potions into the guildbank, so he immediatly heartstoned, stole all the potions and gold, than left the guild to "sell" his character.
The other guilds never even fucking raided at all.
<spoiler= Pee Vee Fucking Pee>
There was also this uncanny system of PvP, where the other team always won 90% of the games.
Why that is, I don't know. Maybe because the other team was already a guild with super items who got a good system.
Wouldn't matter what side you'd go on, the victor would always be the other team, who'd always win, no matter how hard you'd try or how sneaky you'd be. That really pissed me off sometimes.

 

[Vilcus]

I don't hate it at all. I just hate the fact that I keep going back everytime a new expansion comes out. I also hate that my computer sucks too much for me to play it on settings above absolute crap.

My biggest gripe is that I've quit over 15 times now, and I just know that I'll be back in the future. It's almost like someone that you despise, but at times it almost seems like you can get along with him.

 

[T-Bone24]

It's incredibly, incredibly boring.

I played it non-stop for 3 fucking weeks, and not a single thing in it, the community, the mechanics, the art design, or the backstory managed to engage me in the slightest. Rarely, if ever, does that happen.

I respect peoples differing opinions, but in this case, I cannot see why anyone would find that game 'fun' in the slightest. I certainly didn't. Waste of two trial subscriptions.

Well, I enjoyed it mostly because I found a good guild, so I could just have a chinwag while slaying Murlocs. I enjoyed it mostly for that than for the actual gameplay. Yes, I found it as a glorified chatroom, essentially, only with more inexplicable velociraptor-killing.