Tuesday, July 29, 2008

How I Play World of Warcraft

I consider myself somewhat antisocial. I’m not into group activities much. I only have a few close friends. So why in the world am I playing an MMORPG at all?

I’ve always liked RPG games. I played the original game “Adventure” on an HP3000 I would telnet to from school when I was supposed to be looking up college information for people. And I’ve played plenty of other RPG and adventure type games on all types of systems. I’ve always enjoyed them.

In addition, I love games where you have to find everything. I know these games drive some people nuts, but I really like finding it all, unlocking hidden endings, etc. I still dig out Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie every once in a while, but my favorite collecting game was Donkey Kong 64. In that game you could tell if you found everything in an area. So I loved checking the list, and seeing that I had one more banana to find. It used to drive my kids nuts – “Just go to the next area!” they’d shout. Alright, alright. Then when they’d be in bed, I’d go back and find what I missed.

So then a couple of years ago I decided to try a trial of World of Warcraft. And I loved it. Did I run instances with groups of people? Nope. Did I join raids? Nope. In fact I hardly ever joined a group or guild for anything.

I tooled around solo for almost everything and only grouped if someone directly asked me for a little help when we happened to be working on the same thing. I didn’t add people to my friends list, in fact one particularly chatty person has caused me not to play one of my characters until the wee hours of the morning because they seemed to have latched onto me and always want to talk when I show up online.

On a very simple level, my pleasure of finding things transfers to working on skills or finding a complete set of armor, or specific weapons and such. I’m going to get my fishing to 215. I’m going to get all the pieces for this armor set. I can tell you, it sometimes takes more than a month to collect what I’m looking for, and so a character may sit doing nothing other than checking the auction house for weeks and weeks.

And of course I’ve got a nice little matrix of all possible character and class combinations, and I’m making sure as I make characters to always use a new combination – no repeats! Don’t even get me started on all the little checklists I’ve made. All recipes available at vendors from what faction, and on and on.

And Professions – I love leveling up those, finding recipes – I can’t remember how long it took me to get the shadow hood recipe for my tailor! And I love optimizing leveling them. What uses the least materials, or at least sells well.

There are wonderful websites like www.wowhead.com, www.wowwiki.com, and wow-pro.com that just add to my enjoyment of the game and looking up things I could find.

And then the whole process of twinking a character is fun as well. Farming or combing the auction house for what I need. And plying the auction house to make money. I love flipping items that I find under-priced.

All of these kinds of things let me satisfy my OCDish tendencies. But really, I could do similar enough activities on non-multiplayer games. So when WoW is mostly about Multi-player possibilities, why don’t I just play a console RPG? Then I wouldn’t have to deal with other people.

But there’s just something about being in that multi-player environment that I really like, even though I don’t want to chat and group with other players. I like all the random stuff having all the other people there brings to the game. The environment is dynamic, it’s a living world instead of a place waiting around for you.

Also, different than a console RPG, I’m not the center of the story. I can do whatever I want basically. I could level up without doing any quests at all if I liked. I get to be a bit player instead of the central figure.

What’s interesting is how much that mirrors how I like to work in real life as well. Which leads to the bigger question, how much does how people behave in MMORPGs reflect how they behave in real life? Considering some of the behavior I’ve seen, I certainly hope it doesn’t in most cases. But I still get a kick out of seeing the crazy stuff some people do, so I'll be playing for quite some time to come I'm sure.

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