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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 2805414" data-attributes="member: 12332">WoW is so successful because the 3,550,000 12-28yr olds that dig on that sort of thing can play.  The 49,000 people who like role playing and character development can ALSO play, of course.I should know.  WoW swallowed my wife whole for about six months.  She got tied up with a guild, writing and playing in huge epic storylines, role-playing in-character online for 6-10 hours at a time about 3 times a week and then grinding to level for another 20 hours.  She's not a big power-gamer, but she was utterly addicted to the game for about half of last year.  Finally she realized it was endangering her degree and stopped playing entirely.I started playing 2 weeks before she did (my playing is why she picked it up ... we each have a PC and we were going to 'play together' ... HA!).  By the time I gave up on it my character was 28th level ... hers was 48.  She quit around 59, I think, just shy of 60.  I'm not much of the demographic, I suppose.  I really REALLY like that kind of game when I have friends I like to play with.  People I know off line.  But whenever I tried to play with somebody, it didn't work out.  The power system of the game means somebody even 2-3 levels different than you can blow you out of your shoes and the challenges they face totally outstrip you.  If there's a 10 level difference, it's just a joke.  So unless you level at pretty much the same rate, ONLY playing with eachother, somebody's going to get ahead.  The game's system is such that it encourages solo grinding about 30% of the time, and 90% of the time for the first 20 levels or so.  It's really hard to start characters together and just PLAY.  D&D ... you have a group of people who have to share certain expectations.  If somebody, or more than one somebody, doesn't, then things are really sub-fun.  Now, I'm not going to categorize, because there are huge variations ... but a game like WoW leaves NO VARIATIONS.  There's a hard-coded expectation in the game, and 99% of the people will play that way and a crazy 1% will try to do something else like Role Play.  I remember my wife playing a Role Play Event that involved her group "taking over" an enemy-run town ... in-game, there was a quest that involved you running in and killing everything in the town and a few other things.  Five minutes later, everything respawns so another group of people can come in and do it again.  Her huge high-level RP group took over a tower and spent the better part of an hour RPing like they'd taken it over and were using it as their new home ... but every 5 minutes they had to blow up all the respawned enemies.  It was ... crazy.  I really wanted to play with a group of friends, casually, maybe slight RP, but mostly getting quests and killing things, taking their goodies, rinse, repeat.  Started, but it wasn't really that great.  Nobody would be on at the same time, the hard-core guy with alot of free time solo'd constantly and leveled hugely, the monsters at that level were so small and easy that we had to totally depopulate areas to grind as a group, so we just split up.  Then, 20 levels later, the designers decided to "introduce" the group aspects of the game, with lots and lots of missions that require groups to complete.  Here's where a group of dedicated friends would be great, but by this time there WAS no group ... so I had to try and make a group out of random passers-by every time I wanted to do a quest ... script-kiddies and the like, mostly.  People with a grind-grind-grind already-played-this-with-another-character mentality.  Seriously not fun.But it's just a fact of life that for most people that grind-grind-grind get-loot-kill-stuff sort of game is what they want to do, so the whole game was designed for that.  It's pretty obvious when you get into it.  To maintain the Horde/Alliance split, there's no in-game way for players on either side to communicate.  The chat programs actually transliterate your posts into the "language" of your character, so if a Dwarf and a Dwarf are talking they speak in Dwarven and another PC can't understand it.  But there's no way for people to learn other languages and the "Common" of either side is different, so there's no way to RP between sides.  Everything has to be finely balanced so the script-kiddies don't get things out of whack, so every month or so your character pretty much gets rebooted because the designers changed how ______ class or _______ ability works and they refunded all of your character points in case you want to spend them differently, etc.  (Think of it like having a tact-fighter with Improved Trip and a Spiked Chain, and halfway through the campaign WotC just decided that Spiked Chain was broken and Improved Trip needed a rewrite so they removed them both and your 10th level fighter had all of his feats returned to spend again at the next session.)  Eh.  I liked the game for what it was ... I'd like it alot more if it catered to the things I like to do a little more.  But it wasn't, and every month it's changed even further in that direction, because 3,950,000 people enjoy THAT style of game more. --fje</blockquote>

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