You Have The Right To Remain Silent, Not The Requirement

Session Time: 2h30m. Progressed to Level 9, cleared out quests, made money. Note a distinct lack of anything that requires other people.

All right. Maybe it’s something I missed when the server was started up, but is Anvilmar one of the Eastern European servers or something, where nobody speaks English? Oh, wait, it can’t be, because the incessant and irritating prattling in the General Chat and Trade channels is in (extremely poor, when it wasn’t indecipherably abbreviated) English. I’m not looking for Dickens here; I just want some of you WoW elitists to make like Coldplay and talk to me! Nobody said word one to me during the entirety of the Interrogation on Wednesday. For two hours. Complete and total silence. Even when I sent whispers asking general questions– in polite, phrased, well-formed English– I was completely ignored.

Hooray for the WoW ‘community’!

So, what did I do during that time? What the #@$% else is there to do? I ran the grind. Killed monsters, completed quests, and managed to get some rather interesting drops. None of which I could use AT ALL. Right, a Shaman has a whole hell of a lot of use for a Short Bastard Sword of Stamina. So, once i was done, I decided that the Auction House would be an excellent way to make more money than selling the item to an NPC. I put it and three other green-tagged items (green meaning “Uncommon” quality) up for two-hour auctions and went to bed.

The next morning, they were no longer on the block, I hadn’t received the money, and there was absolutely no indication that they were in my mailbox save for a small icon near the (now almost perpetually-ignored) minimap. After scouring Thunder Bluff for a mailbox (and asking, in vain, other people where it was), I eventually found it and got my items back. In spite, I sold the stuff to an NPC anyway because I was not about to throw away more money listing the items again. For the record, this is exactly the first time that the manual provided with my copy of the game has proven to be accurate in its representation of how the software functions.

So, to sum up, there are apparently six million people playing this game and not a single one of them can be assed to stop grinding for ten seconds and answer a simple, polite question.

Of course, you know, this means war.

The Good: Brother, are you looking at the wrong post…
The Bad: I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the deafening silence.
Opinion Change: Way, way, down. The gameplay is what draws a player to an MMO, and in the case of WoW that’s all right. Nothing special, as I’ve said, but it’s all right. The community is what keeps a player paying his fifteen green a month, and so far as I’ve seen here there just ain’t any. We’re halfway through the trial, and things do not look good for Blizzard in the “getting me to continue playing” department.

3 comments August 11th, 2006