(Stovokor - Sean, Maeviis - Andrea, Alvius - my brother Jon)Guest Writer: Andrea
Well, my own World of Warcraft story begins with my oldest brother introducing me to this disturbingly addictive game. I’ve been and still am a huge huge fan of computer/video games like Monkey Island, King’s Quest, and Zelda. These games are more about thinking through the situations, with the occasional fight tossed in, and having ridiculously cheesy and awesome graphics and jokes to keep you jovial and peppy while playing. I just don’t particularly enjoy having my hands sweat as I try to navigate through abandoned space stations only armed with guns and grenades and have to avoid getting mounted and sliced by some freakish alien thing around the corner. But I’m a girl, so I’m excused from having to like games like Halo 3 (Seriously, it looks so dull. I don’t even care that I might be the only one that thinks that, which it looks like I am). But back to my Warcraft tale…
I created a female human mage, named her Maeviis (after a favorite Phil Hendrie character Mavis Leonard), and proceeded to enter this goofy yet fun fantasy game. I loved it. It’s a Medieval-style setting, with all different landscapes and inhabitants. I was in awe of how much land there was to explore, and the idea of doing quests to progress in the game was exciting. It felt like playing Zelda, except it was more personalized and you could talk to real people and play along with their characters.
I think one of my favorite aspects of the game is the guild names that are out there. Guilds are really just clubs or teams that one or two people form and name and then try to recruit others to join. Once you join you have that club name under your character name as you run around the cities. I get a kick out of some of the names people come up with, like [Hold My Beer and Watch This], [Set Course For Pie], [My GF Is Letting Me Play]. The one I and my brothers originally joined was [Circus Midget Deathsquad]. Pretty awesome name, no?
It took a few months and way too many vacation days solely spent on this game, but I got my character to the max potential of level 70 by completing quests and killing bears, trolls, and undead. Once you hit the limit that you can do alone, you have two different paths before you, or both depending on how much time you have to waste in the game. The first is Battleground and Arena. Battleground is where you join a queue for a team to do games like Capture the Flag, or where you have to protect your bases and try to capture the other side’s bases. Arena is you create a team, either 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, or 5 vs 5, and then go in to battle in an arena setting. You gain points from killing the other side and from winning the games, and those points can give you the ability to buy really nice gear that makes you harder to kill. The second route is raiding, which essentially means you needing way more people to kill the mobs and bosses, and the gear that comes from killing these things are superior. This you do mostly with your guild, and the normal size of raid teams are either 10 or 25, depending on which place you’re going to. Since [Circus Midget Deathsquad] was too small of a group for raiding and I didn’t enjoy battleground/arena too much, I decided to join [Eden] (following Sean after he joined), which had a need for my mage at the time. It was a lot of fun for the first few months, and going through these new places and getting pretty gear for Maeviis was completely addicting. I enjoyed learning the little tricks and moves you needed in order to defeat the bosses, and then hoping that certain gear drops.
BUT… when I became one of their permanent raiders, they started requiring me to be there at least 3 of the 4 nights every week, which really is as bad as it sounds. Not to mention the time I had to spend making back gold to pay for repair bills and replace different consumable items that I needed to have Maeviis remain a killing machine. I also had a problem with actually liking the people in the raid. You spend hours and hours with them and most are either creepy, big goofs, or downright dumb. I seriously only liked 2-3 people in the whole current 25-man team. And I don’t really have anything against southerners, but when 40% of the team’s voices are a southern drawl and it’s beat into your brain for hours and hours, there weren’t very many happy moments. I would take my headset off to play in silence and just guess at what the team was saying rather than suffer through that garble. Throw on top that I was in school with projects, tests and a grad school application to worry about, and I was quick to whip out that mean and wilting sarcasm on them. When it got to the point where I had to leave from social gatherings early or couldn’t go out to eat on a Sunday afternoon because I had stupid raid to attend, I knew that this had become too ridiculous. So I quit the permanent raiding team and in the process gained some sanity back. I still play, albeit much less now, but it’s gone back to being pleasurable.
Thankfully, the Warcraft overload hasn’t killed my love for adventure games. I still salivate when I look at the Zelda website, a game of Rollercoaster Tycoon still makes me happy, and I continue to troll the Internet hoping to find some news about a new Monkey Island game that might possibly be in the works. As long as Nintendo lives, I will support.
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My absolutely biggest complaint about Warcraft (I have many, and boy does Sean know), is how many people with kids and a wife or husband play this game. Sure, casual play is cool, sort of, in strong moderation. But these people are the ones that are playing 5-6 days a week for hours on end. I’ve heard kids crying in the background, a player needing to take a 5-minute break to go change a diaper, or needing to tuck the kid in to bed. Seriously, what the hell? Why are you wasting your time on this game when you have a family that should take priority over a bunch of lame strangers in a guild? These players that are 30 years old and older make me sad. I’m 22 and I feel like a schmuck for playing. If I was married and my husband suddenly developed an obsession with a game, I wouldn’t hesitate to seduce him away from the game console or computer and then when he wasn’t looking just destroy the demonic thing. That’s how I roll.
