World of Warcraft…the name evokes images of crazed roleplayers playing online for days at a time, paying hundreds of dollars for other people to level their characters up. Must be a pretty good game for more than 8 million people worldwide to be playing (and paying), huh?
Well, I figured I’d see what all the fuss was about, so I decided to pick up a free 10-day guest pass and play on one of the game clients installed on a computer in an internet cafe on my college campus. Within mere minutes of my creation of a character, I was dead at the hands of some wild animal. All right, no biggie. I’m a newbie, what’d I expect? So I decide to work on levelling up…killing things that couldn’t fight back, since I’d be killed by anything bigger than a rabbit.
So fighting rabbits and deer wasn’t getting me levels very fast, and it ended up just ruining my sword. The next logical step was to buy a new one. But with what money? I managed to get 12 bronze coins by selling loot I came across, but that was only enough to buy me back what I had sold.
If it wasn’t bad enough to resign mysef to fighting rats to gain experience, I had to fend off duel requests from nearly everyone I came across, which ususally resulted in accusations of cowardice on my part. I mean, come on. Who seriously expects a level 1 newbie to accept a duel when he has no armor, a crappy sword, and a wooden shield?
So, it seems I’m not the kind of person to appreciate a MMORPG like WoW. I don’t have the patience to spend days gaining levels through menial tasks and trying to find my body after being killed by some monster while exploring. Now, I love RPGs. Single-player RPGs, that is. I like having a somewhat linear story to go through. It’s just not fun to do whatever, especially when there is nothing for me to really do, or at least nothing I can easily find to do.
Whatever the case, World of Warcraft, from my experience, is not a game I would play for free, much less pay a subscription for. I really don’t understand what people see in this game. I mean, it was a nice game, and a really awesome in-game world. I’m sure if I took more time to play it, I might take a liking to it. But not for $15 a month. WoW didn’t wow me that much.
