My World of Warcraft

Categories:

Games, Personal

Tags:

world of warcraft, wow

Published:

8:58pm on Sunday 24th January, 2010

I don’t often mention things I do in my spare time on this blog, but this week I’m going to make an exception and talk about the only game that I could really claim to play: World of Warcraft.

Now I’m not much of a gamer

I have Call of Duty 4 but never play it, and a couple of Lego games on the Wii, but I’ve never really dedicated all that much of my life to completing video games. There’s no reason I couldn’t get myself a Playstation or Xbox, but I tend to think that taking over the living room television to kill terrorists or trash Liberty City is kind of unfair to my wife, who prefers to use the telly in the evening for what is, to be fair, its intended purpose.

So, no real console, and as a Mac user I’m not exactly blessed with a wide selection of computer games to choose from.

Luckily one of the few games to get a Mac conversion is Blizzard’s runaway success, World of Warcraft.

For The Horde!

I originally started playing in late 2008 after avoiding it for years, and was immediately sucked in by the immersive world, rewarding progression and social interaction. Sucked in a little too far, as it turns out; when I found that I was spending more time reading strategy guides and wowwiki entries on DPS gearing than I was enjoying the game, I uninstalled it and cancelled my account. I didn’t want to be one of those guys with spreadsheets full of cross-referenced armour points, committed to four hours a night raiding. I left my Level 53 Priest on his horse in Un’Goro Crater and quit.

Last year I went back, but this time it’s different. I don’t care about gear and quick levelling - no addons for me this time around - the only reason to play is for the fun of it. And whatever its detractors might say about geeks pretending to be elves, it is a lot of fun; it’s got that perfect balance of carrot and stick to constantly have you questing after the ever-so-slightly-better weapon or piece of armour, and the satisfaction of bringing down a particularly troublesome bad guy with the help of a random bunch of people willing to stop what they are doing and help out a stranger is better than any Xbox achievement.

Of course, the real reason for this post is that I wanted an excuse to use the new, embeddable Armoury viewer and show off my current main character:

I’ve kind of reached something of a platform now that he’s Level 80. Once you hit that top level it gets harder and harder to avoid needing to know your stats if you want to progress, but I really don’t want to be constantly comparing armour bonuses and running the same dungeons over and over for that elusive cloak. I did my first raid today (until latency overcame me and I had to drop out), but that becomes even more a time-suck.

Still, Cataclysm comes out this year, bringing with it two completely new races to play. Oh, and destroying the World As We Know It as well, which should go some way to eliminating the boredom that is just starting to creep in.