“Thanks for the loss, any other Lv11s want to leave?”

Session Time: Ninety minutes split between early afternoon and late evening. No level progress on either character, but…

Tonight I decided it would be a good time for me to go ahead and do some things I’d been told were the best ways to experience World of Warcraft. The first thing I did was log back into my Night Elf hunter– remember her?– and go about getting a pet. Well, the wonderful thing about that was that I picked an owl as my first pet. Ordinarily not a bad choice– I mean, come on, if it’s good enough for Harry Potter it’s just fine for an anorexic blue-skinned idol that I know at least one person has masturbated to (and no, it’s not me– why that guy thought I would be impressed that he mentioned that is quite beyond me, although at least someone was talking to me). The one thing that in my careful calculations I failed to realize was that the owl must be fed properly if it is to remain on good terms with me (read: won’t go all Hitchcock on my skinny blue ass). Yes, I did know that pets needed to be fed, per se; I did not realize that they were in fact picky eaters. I went through my entire stock of beef jerky in about the first thirty seconds after realizing that the owl was “rebellious” and “unhappy”. This made the owl “happy”, as evinced by the indecipherable little square smiley face under its icon. This also made me “poor”, as evidenced by the fact that after getting beat down by several monsters in a row, the beast was now “unhappy” and refused to eat the perfectly good mushrooms I still had left. I made a mad dash back to Darnassus and started looking for a vendor.

That’s when I discovered that, apparently, Night Elves are vegans. There wasn’t a fleck of meat to be found in the whole damn city. So now I’m not just playing a blue-skinned fap target with an eating disorder. I’m playing a blue-hued fap target with a half-assed eating disorder, who doesn’t eat meat but throws up what she does eat about twenty minutes later. The Barrens isn’t a wasteland, it’s where the collective gastric juices of all the chunks blown by the population of Darnassus runs off to. No wonder the Horde’s pissed to share the continent with them.

Did somebody say Horde? Why yes, I believe I did. After I spent my entire savings (about five silver) trying to bid on anything that remotely resembled meat, I realized that the longer I stayed logged in, the more my pet’s pleasantness would deteriorate. So I jumped over to my Tauren and decided I ought to try this PvP thing I’ve heard so much about. I signed up for a match at Warsong Gulch and was presented with… another queue message.

WoW: Waiting on Whatnow?

All unreasonable bitching aside, it was a less than a minute wait before I was prompted to teleport to the Gulch. Fair enough, I thought, and I jumped in. Immediately the Hordeside “leader”, a Tauren whose name I shall not utter here, began bitching everyone out for being too low level. He was the only one bitching that I heard, actually– the first leader made some stupid remark and left immediately. Now, I’ll say this– yes, I knew I was probably not going to be of a whole hell of a lot of use during the match. However, I was of some worth– healed a couple people when they needed it, and dealt significant damage to the Alliance thugs who eventually did make off with our flag. Warsong Gulch is set up as a Capture the Flag match; it plays pretty similarly to any FPS CTF game except you’re using the WoW combat engine instead of your run of the mill BFG9000. To be honest, I half wanted to whip out the Big Freakin’ Gun and start team-killing. The whining did not stop. At all. “Come back when you’re level 16 please.” “Thanks for the loss, noobs.” “Any other Level 11s want to leave?”

One lone voice of reason did say, “Shut up. They have as much right to be here as you do.” I would have said “thanks”, but a) I didn’t want to expose myself to further ridicule, and b) I was too busy playing the god damned match.

Was I too low level? Probably. Warsong Gulch is set up for levels 10-19. I didn’t have my second totem yet (still don’t, actually– going out to the Barrens is my next stop tomorrow), and I was still a little shaky with keybinds and battling on the run. Did I have a right to at least give it a try? Blizzard thought so.

In real life you’re not always given the chance to pick and choose who you work with. This is a lesson I know all too well. There are three things you can do in the event that you don’t like the people you’re near. One, you can always leave. Two, you can bitch and complain and make everyone’s experience as miserable as possible. Or three– and this, ladies and gentlemen, is usually the Right Answer– you can shut up, deal with the problem at hand, and try to politely correct the faults of the people you’re near. Granted, right now I’m choosing Option Two: bitch and complain. But that’s because I was using Option Three throughout the entire game. I was dealing with the problem at hand– there were Alliance in r base, they were killing r mans. (Nevermind that by “dealing with the problem” I was in fact “slowing them down only ever so slightly”. A small contribution is still a contribution.)

While playing, actually, I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong with WoW. I’ve been looking at WoW as a multiplayer game. It’s clearly not intended to be that way– if it was, people would, you know, cooperate. Nope, World of Warcraft is, quite simply, not meant to be a multiplayer experience unless you’re with a bunch of people you know not to have their heads so far up their asses they look like an Escher painting when they open their mouths. I happen to know a good deal of people without that particular strain of craniorectal inversion. Unfortunately, none of them play WoW. Coincidence? You be the judge.

The Good: I’m actually happy with the game now that I’ve had my big paradigm shift. It’s an excellent, immersive single-player RPG. I don’t know why it needs that silly online requirement.
The Bad: What has consistently been hailed as the be-all, end-all reason to play World of Warcraft, the PvP combat, sucks. It’s ridiculously unbalanced and totally hostile to anyone who deigns go in with just an inkling of curiosity. The players who are “hardcore” PvPers don’t exactly help this much.
Opinion Change: Hard to say, really. I’m definitely sure I don’t like the idea of continuing to pay for a single-player game. However, it is a good single-player game. The multiplayer component is terrible, though. Since that’s all that anyone ever talks about, though, I’m going to have to say opinion down greatly.

4 comments August 30th, 2006