Banshee16 said:
The difficulty with finding a group is why I dropped my subscription. Generally, I played at night, after my wife went to sleep, for 1-2 hours, and I increasingly found that about 60% of my play time was spent looking for a group, leaving not much time to accomplish anything.
Yeah, that was how I originally played the game too. TBC got me back into playing, but there are a few things that keep me around.
1) Ventrilo - it's nice to have live chat in the background between real people. Sometimes I feel like talking, but even just listening makes me feel less isolated when playing the game.
2) Friends - as I said, I'm playing with RL friends, who happen to be a lot higher level than my little warlock, but it's nice to have the occasional help and someone to talk to.
3)Solo mindset - One of the reasons I chose a warlock was because I wanted to be entirely self-reliant. So far I've ignored almost every quest that required a large group or would take me into instances. In 35 levels I've grouped a handful of times, and each of those was with a friend.
Also, when I'm playing I try and do other things as well, particularly listening to music. Once you get the hang of WoW and know where you're going it's pretty easy to just put yourself on auto-pilot and think about something else.
LFG has been kind of a crapshoot since day one. There's not a great in-game mechanic, and if you're just looking for random people, you never know what kind of player you're going to find.
Guild Wars at least allowed me to get hirelings who could give me a hand when I couldn't find someone to play with, so I could theoretically play large portions of it solo.
Guild Wars is a great game. Sometimes I really miss it, but I won't even think about going back until I get a better machine. But by the same right, Henchman can get pretty useless (at least before the Nightfall expansion) and at later stages of the game can actually get you into more trouble than a real person ever would.
For all the problems I've had with WoW, the journey to level cap is completely soloable. Some classes do it better than others, sure. But everyone can, and each class has a talent tree tnat is really excellent for leveling and dealing consistent damage. Running with groups and instancing can actually slow you down, especially if you factor in all the waiting time while spam LFG.
