Why I Don’t Play WOW (or other MMOs)

World of Warcroft. What is there to say about it? It is the most popular MMORPG ever created and has become a huge cash cow for its creator, Blizzard.

This game makes so much money that, most likely, if Blizzard would just donate its next five years of earnings to the Treasury, we’d have enough money to bail out the economy, pay off our national debt and have enough left over to buy Iraq.

With nearly 11 million subscribers each paying $15 per month to play the game plus the cost of buying the game and expansion packs, Blizzard could only make more money if they invented a vacuum cleaner that sucked dollar bills straight out of people’s wallets.

But despite the rampant popularity of the game, I haven’t even tried it. I’ve never once set up a character or even bought myself a copy. I’ve watched others play it, and have to admit that it looked pretty cool, but I can’t see myself actually jumping in.

Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

AOL Disks and WOW

photo credit: compujeramey

Back in the nineties, AOL disks were everywhere. Even though my family actually used AOL back then, we still received one or two of those disks a week.

For me, this was great. With a quick format the floppies became useful for storing my school papers, my early Web sites and anything that I wanted to hide from my parents. For a time, my entire data storage was made up of entirely of a collection of AOL disks, which were fortunately color coded for easy location.

But alas, when AOL moved to CDs, those glory days were gone. Instead, people were stuck making thrones and other tacky items.

The point is that AOL had an interesting business model. Shoot out the CDs as far and wide as you can get them, then charge people per month to use the service on them.

This actually made sense, if you were going to pay for the service, the tools to set it up should be free.

In 1997, it was Blizzard itself that pioneered the opposite model. It, with the launch of Diablo, opened the doors to Battle.net, an online gaming server that was free to use. Customers paid top dollars for the game, then got to play online for free.

Neat.

But while Battle.net continues to this day, and will even support the upcoming Diablo 3, WOW does not use it. WOW has its own servers and, in order to use them you have to pay the monthly fee.

While that’s not a problem, Blizzard hasn’t exactly been giving away those WOW disks, much less the expansions. Though you can get some good deals, the game has traditionally been offered at full price or very close to it.

Sure, you get a “free” trial with the game itself, but is that really fair? Think about it a second. Blizzard makes you pay full price for a game that they then expect you to pay a monthly fee to keep playing it. It’s like a bar charging a cover AND having a two-drink minimum. Sure, you can do it and even make it work, but you’re still a jerk if you try.

No, the WOW pricing plan is greed driven and they get away with it because people are helpless and have to give in. They know they’ve created something more addictive than cocaine and are going flog it at every turn.

I can’t blame them, I’d do the same thing. However, it doesn’t mean I’m going to sign up for my own monetary drumming.

No Time to Spare

photo credit: shelms

That addictive factor is another factor that worries me. I’ve seen what WOW does to people, including many of my good friends. Sure, some people are able to have a real life at the same time they play the game, others, however, are turned into vitamin-D deprived shut-ins.

I don’t have a particularly strong addictive personality, but I seriously worry about how a game like this could affect my life, marriage and work.

Besides, I really don’t have enough time to spend on this type of game. I’m what most apparently call a “casual” gamer, which means that I have less than six hours per day to play video games. I love my Wii, my Flash games and a few computer games (Will work for Portal).

In fact, some of Blizzard’s games are already on my top-ten list of favorite computer games. Diablo 1 and 2 are both games I’ve enjoyed and the second I actually played with my wife via LAN. Great times. Starcraft is another great game though I personally have more fond memories of the original Warcraft games.

But those games I could walk away from. If I had to eat I could shut down the computer and go grab some food. No one else depended on me, save my wife who was sitting next to me, and I knew that the game would not go on without me. With WOW, I have no such luxuries.

It’s easy to see how people get sucked into the game and that seems to have a lot of consequences other than just pale skin.

Online Play Sucks

The biggest problem I have, however, is a more general one. Online gameplay sucks.

I know it is supposed to be this big craze with XBox live and so forth, but I don’t see it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on the Internet it is that, when people get behind a glowing screen they lose all sense of decency. But where people on the Internet are routinely jerks, in online games you add the competitive element and get outright assholes.

For an illustration of this, I recommend this chart.

I love playing games with my friends. When I was in college I would LAN together my dorm floor for games of Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and whatever else was handy. Those were great times. Win or lose, no one got mad.

Online games, with complete strangers, are generally obscenity-laden insult festivals that dig to new lows in misogyny, homophobia and general ass-hattery.

I have a pretty thick skin, you have to when you stop plagiarists for a living, but just because I can take insults and not think twice about it doesn’t mean I’m going to race home to hear more. I can listen to the sound of my dog barking without wanting to hurt him, but that doesn’t mean it is in my iTunes.

What makes it worse is that these types of communities are hardest on the “noobs”, which is exactly what I would be. It’s kind of strange that Second Life takes so many steps to make new users feel welcome while WOW and other online games go so far out of their way to feel like they should never come back.

If ever I decide I want to be called a series of vile names or hear someone rip me apart for a simple mistake, I’ll just go down to my local argument clinic. The door for abuse is down the hall.

Conclusions

So here is what WOW has to offer me in a nutshell. I get to pay full price for a game and buy a monthly subscription so I can listen to people call me all manner of insulting names. If things go really well, I might just get totally addicted and lose everything I love in the real world.

No thanks.

I’m sure I could learn to enjoy WOW and still have my real life, but I don’t see much point in trying. It’s too much money for too little reward and too much risk.

I’ll wait patiently for Diablo 3 to come out, I know my wife and I will enjoy playing that one too. I’ll be keeping the LAN warmed up.

In the meantime, anyone know how to get Titan Quest to actually work?