We love to talk!

At least I do anyway. However I’m seeing a more worrying trend among WoW players, in PUGS especially. People just do not talk at all! What ever happen to the days of casual chat as you roll a dungeon over? I always try to start of conversations during group play. Its one of the main way of getting to know new people, and help build up your network of online friends.

It just seems things have gotten very results driven over the years WoW has been out.

Going into my gaming background a little here, so be warned! During my time on Everquest 1 and 2 for that matter, people spoke loads more than they seem to do on WoW. Again I’m talking about pick up groups here, obviously guild groups talk between each other a fair amount. But I can’t seem to work out why WoW has this issue? I’ve spoken to some people about the subject and most of them come back saying the same things, along the lines of:

• “The majority of WoW players are simple, unintelligent types, who really can’t be bothered with talking.”
• “What is there to talk about? WoW is a pretty straight forward and ‘easy’ game.”
• “WoW is the MMO for the console generation.”

Lets hold up on posting peoples views and break down each point raised, after the break of course!

First point – I can only assume none WoW players or people playing other MMO games have some kind of innate reaction to WoW being for retards! But why the hell is this? I’m no retard and I’m sure everyone reading this will agree they ain’t to.  So why?  Most people will know what Leroy Jenkins means, they will heave read or been told about grouping horror stories and when you get down to it you really could put together a good argument about WoW’s childish graphics (just to clarify I really like the graphics and do not look upon them as childish in any way, stylized is a good word to use).

Second point – There is no denying that WoW is a very easy game to advance in character levels.  I have taken toons from level 1-70 without even getting killed in solo questing.  I agree that WoW is easy to play and that’s the beauty of it.  Ever wondered why its the top MMO game in the world and has the most players? Yup that’s right people like ‘easy’ things over hard stuff (since most people are lazy gits ).  Not all of WoW is easy though it just depends on your play style and where you want to take your characters.  Below you will see how i see the game as being broken down.

Solo play = easy.

Party play = easy to medium difficulty, however some heroic dungeons do require a fair amount of group co-ordination.

Raids = medium to hard.

Yes there are some exceptions to these rules but that’s pretty much WoW.  When you put time + amount of players needed, you can get a rough gauge of the difficulty of a certain task.

To recap the second point then, WoW is easy for 80% of people playing the game, but the game does also cater for the more hardcore and better player (not saying hardcore = better player, most of the best players I have ever come across in MMO gaming would be classed as casual given their play times, if only they had the time to raid).  So the argument goes both ways, its both easy and hard…just depends on your point of view (or line of sight haha).

Third point – This term ‘WoW is the MMO for the console generation’ seems a fairly common term knocking around these days to describe WoW.  Its easy to play, gives players a sense of achievement for not doing really all that much, there’s no real negative effects to constant player death, easy to learn the basics needed to play, easy enough to obtain a fairly high level of player gear etc etc.

MMO for the console generation?  Seems to be generalising console players under the mighty ’stupid banner’.  Console players are not stupid and neither are WoW players, for the most part anyway.  I can’t really come to terms with this statement.  I guess it was just an attempt by somebody somewhere to brand WoW and console gamers with the retard stick?

Voice comms are another issue, people like to use them over typing.  The benifits are obvious thats why we offer free Team Speak services here at WarAnvil.  However this article is relating to PUGS and not established groups of players, that being guilds and close nit groups of players.  Its very unlikely you would have people using voice comms when playing in PUGS.  WarAnvil is trying to change this and it would be absolutely fantastic if people would join our servers during PUG play.  We can always dream

It would be good to see peoples reaction to this topic.  The next party you join try to start a conversation off, you never know where it may end up