Anti-WoW Essay (not mine)

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silenteye

Limp Gawd
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A guy I go to school with hates WoW so much that he actually wrote a 6000 word essay to show how much he hates it and why he thinks it sucks. I used to be an avid wow player, have since quit but I still think it's a good game, just too time consuming. Anyways I wanted to know what you guys think of his essay, I think it sucks and the arguments are solely based on emotions and opinion.....

Anyways here it is...its long so I'll make topics so you guys can pick and choose

A Non-Biased Explanation of Why I Hate WoW

Okay, I’m getting really pissed off because people won’t take my essay seriously. They think it’s biased, and they don’t understand why I wrote it. Time to write an essay explaining my essay in a hopefully unbiased document done in a format where no one can read it so I’ll have to reconfigure it to RTF again. Anyway, on to business.

First of all, allow me to explain my situation. I don’t actually dislike the game. In fact, when I first played it, I really liked it. It was fun. The quests were okay, the ability to solo was a great change from what I’m used to. Though, since the recent update, us FFXI players can solo a whole lot better than we used to be able to. Really, the only thing I hate about it is how people say it’s the best game ever. Take the guy who invited me to play it originally for example: I had a conversation with him on MSN the other day, and he said I was completely biased. Not only that, but he also said that “WoW is the best game in every single way.” Come to think of it, almost everyone who plays and likes it says the same thing.

The irony in everyone’s statement of me being biased is that I’m the only one who’s tried out several different Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). My previous essay wasn’t very biased because I didn’t just compare it to my game, I was comparing it to all games of its specific genre. Keep in mind, I don’t hate the game, I hate how biased everyone is to all other games just because they like one game, even if lots of other people play it. On the other hand, I have a reason for that too. It’s that it’s a better game, it’s that the people who play it aren’t looking for a challenge. It is by far the easiest game I’ve ever played, and when you die, there’s no real downside except your armor is slightly weakened. However, this isn’t a problem since armor is so easy to come by.

Therefore, let us commence with this thing. Let’s start off with graphics, by far my most favourite topic to talk about. It makes me laugh every single time someone says “WoW has good graphics” or something similar. In fact, I’ve heard many people say it has the best graphics in the world, or way better graphics than FFXI. One day, when I was on Google Images and looking up pictures of my current main job in FFXI, Thief, I came across a picture from WoW that really made me laugh. From there, I decided to look up a vast array of things. I looked up specific classes, races, and different things you could do and came up with an enormous array of very bad pictures. Now, another guy I know from our school who worships WoW like it was God, said the pictures I had on my last essay were “set to low quality, you see this should be like this, and that should be like that”. To set-out to prove him wrong and just show how incredibly bad the graphics are, I don’t think every single one of these pictures could be set to low quality.

These six pictures are a small example of what the entire game is like. These are basically six of about two dozen pictures I found just showing the bad graphics. Let’s look at them individually shall we? The first one is an orc called “Blackrock Hunter”, wielding what appears to be some form of polearm. Take a look at his clothes. They are literally painted on his skin, just like every other class in the entire game. There is no actual “3D” graphic quality, just basic Nintendo 64 style polygons. Next we have a troll Rogue of some sort using a pair of knives. You can tell that they spent about five minutes making each piece of armor, because that’s just sickening. Looking at his shins, you can tell that trolls, like all other Horde races, don’t wear boots, just shin guards. Similarly, looking at his feet, you can see incredible blocky graphics and really disgusting toes. The third picture is a “Thistlefur Shaman” of some kind. I honestly have no clue what it is, but as you can plainly see, its fur is, surprise-surprise, painted on his skin. The hands and feet are very low-quality, and there is no sense of shading whatsoever. Moving right along to the fourth picture, you get a glimpse at what a WoW character’s mouth looks like when it’s wide open. It’s essentially a diamond shape, showing the sloths down at Blizzard spent about two minutes on their character animations. This is also a very good example of how clothes are just painted on the character. Looking at his fingers, the finger nails appear to be simply a painting on the already low-quality fingers. You can also tell by the boots that there’s no sense of graphics whatsoever. The second-last picture appears to be a man wearing long johns. Very tight, which is expected by painted-on-the-skin-style graphics. He appears to be in a very bad stance. The feet look like squares, as usual. I won’t even glorify the final picture with a long explanation. Just look at it- bad in every possible way. Now, there’s one more picture I want to show, for all those people who say WoW has better graphics than other games. Comparing the two: World of Warcrap on the left, and Final Fantasy XI on the right:

There is no contest as to which one looks better. They have the same basic shape and look like they’re supposed to be at least similar. However, looking at the detail shows an absolutely horrific display of graphics, especially for a game that came out 3-4 years ago. The teeth are two dimensional, the body has no detail whatsoever, and if you pay attention to the background, it’s not on a beach looking down towards the water, it’s actually taken from under the water, looking up towards the surface. The game is actually so badly made, water has no detail except for the very surface. Take a look at the next picture I’m going to show you. It is a picture comparing World of Warcrap to a game for the Nintendo 64 gaming console which came out about ten years ago. The game that I’m comparing WoW’s graphics to came out about eight years ago. The resemblance is uncanny.

Now before you call me biased for comparing WoW to other games’ graphics, let me ask you this: how many people reading this rant/essay have actually played other games of WoW’s apparent genre? You people call me biased, yet I’m the only one who’s tried out more than one game. In fact, I’ve tried multiple MMORPGs already. World of Warcrap, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains… And how many have you played? World of Warcrap and maybe one more. Don’t say it’s the best video game of all time if that’s the only one you’ve ever played. Online reviews are all bullcrap too. Look at IGN, Gamespot, and all those other useless pieces of turd that give good grades to shitty games and bad grades to the good ones just because they suck at them. That actually explains why WoW is so loved by millions, too. The game’s so easy, anyone can play it. That also explains why its graphics are so childish- it’s meant for little kids. That being said, you like kiddie games; good job!
 
I wrote a song about what makes this game bad. Let’s go down the list according to the song. This brings us from “All the graphics blow, they’ll make you go insane.” to “Even the music’s bad, don’t lie and say it’s good.” Really, it just rhymed with the next line, since music is totally preference to an extent. But really, it’s all been done before. I get mixed-up between WoW and Lord of the Rings music. Continuing on with sound, let’s consider the sound effects. Like its childish graphics, WoW’s sounds are equally annoying. All fire spells sound the same, all ice spells sound the same, et cetera, et cetera. The worst part about the game is the character voices. You don’t have a choice of voices, so no matter what, you’re stuck with the most annoying voices ever invented for any video game. So much as typing “lol” or anything involving a laugh like “haha” or “hehe” or “lmao” or anything will make your character burst out laughing in their seriously annoying voice. When I played WoW, I was a dwarf. Listening to my ugly little bugger piss himself laughing whenever I typed ‘lol” got really boring really fast. All races do the same thing.

Every emote is equally annoying to the laughter. WoW’s childishness seems to bring around extremely exaggerated movements. When you laugh, your character laughs out loud, but he’ll also throw his arms up into the air, throw them down and shake all over. Everything your character does is ridiculously exaggerated. Engaging battle, your character will move vigorously around a 5ft or so radius. Unlike your regular battle stance, where you’d see your character possibly shifting from side-to-side and moving their arms a little in preparation for an attack, in WoW, your character will step around, bounce up and down like a spring, and flail their arms violently. Obviously that’s a little exaggerated, but it’s not far from the truth. Granted, Guild Wars is quite similar in terms of that, but mostly only when your character is casting a spell of some sort. As I told my friends, “one thing I like about WoW is how your character can aim a bow and arrow while moving around in such a fashion.” Discussing exaggeration, your character can have a huge load of arrows in their body at any given time. Your character can have ‘spikes’ of arrows all throughout their body, and it doesn’t do anything to his or her movements or attacks. Like my friend said back to me, making a really funny quote, “there’s an arrow in my knee, but it impedes my walking not.”

The next line in the song goes, “People, this is Satan’s game, they even have it in the ‘hood.” This isn’t to be taken literally, as it doesn’t make sense if you do. However, looking at the context of it, it means that everyone plays it, even the jocks. In my school, anyway, it started out as the losers with no friends, then it moved onto the jocks, and finally the nerds. Most of them who played it got seriously bored of it, and those who keep playing it have noticed an enormous drop in marks. That isn’t everyone, though. Several people who play the game still have good marks, especially compared to mine. Chemistry and Physics just aren’t my forte.

This brings us to the chorus line, which talks exclusively about it sucking and that it costs a lot of money to play it. Though you can have infinite characters per account, it still costs twice as much as your average monthly-paid MMO. I know Final Fantasy is only about $12 per month, but WoW can range anywhere between $15-30 monthly, depending on how you pay for it. The only way you can get it as low as $15 is if you pay annually instead of monthly, semi-annually, or quarterly. That isn’t a major problem; if people are willing to pay that much for a piece of dump game like this, power to them. The thing I have a problem is what the heck do they do with the money they get? Blizzard Entertainment is a huge company and they get billions of dollars monthly, yet they don’t do anything of any supreme notice with it. When you think about it, it took them three years to make an expansion pack that truly had nothing in it. Not to mention its updates are very lame and have stuff in them that take about five minutes to make. If the game had good graphics or balanced classes it wouldn’t be so bad, but they just make the stupidest things ever. Not to mention, of course, the cost in stores.

“Unlike all MMO’s, you play a loner here. If you see a friend, you’ll run away in fear.” This line is to be taken all literal, unlike the last one. The definition of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game is ‘community’. You won’t find any of that in this game. The entire game can be soloed, as well as the vast majority of end-game stuff. I unfortunately don’t have any major proof for this, as I only got to Lv.20 in the time I played, but from what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard, as well as what I did in the five days I played the game. Almost everyone I talked to told me it’s easily possible to solo your way to 60, and I can only assume up to 70 now that came with the expansion pack. The second sentence in that line is a direct reference to the fact that people playing the Allied and people playing the Horde can’t coexist. As a matter of fact, you can’t even chat with the other person. I thought the end of Warcraft 3 was the two sides coming together at least a little bit. Shouldn’t that open up a little more?

The question everyone knows the answer to- “A quick question for you: How’s Burning Crusade? It’s a piece of turd after three years it’s finally made.” Yeah, you have to admit, after three years you’d expect a better expansion pack. What did it give you, like two new races and a couple new areas? From what I’ve seen, they didn’t expand anything, they just made it a little more bearable to play. Two new races finally stacks up to FFXI, and a few new areas maybe makes it about as big as FFXI when it first came out some 4-5 years ago. It took them three years to make such a piece of crap. Guild Wars comes out with a new expansion every 4-6 months, and each one comes out with about as much new stuff as a FFXI expansion pack, but the game is slightly lower quality, so it is easier to make, but still, it’s better than WoW in my opinion. Speaking of my own opinion, allow me to quickly reiterate that I’ve only played WoW, FFXI, and Guild Wars for any extensive amount of time, so most of my references will be amongst those three.

Here’s the main reason I dislike this game, and the reason I say it’s not as good as people think it is, and similarly the exact same reason most people like it. “It wouldn’t be so bad, if things weren’t all the same: graphics, maps, and sound. It is so very lame.” Really, you guys, it’s so easy. This game was intended for children. Most people who I show the graphics to say ‘oh its for kids so the game should have childish graphics’. I agree, but you’re 17-18 years old and yet you’re still playing the childish game. It’s too easy. You can ding the max level of 70 in about a week and a half grinding and soloing. Heck, I hit 20 as one class for every race in the five days I played, as well as tried-out every single class and tried out every possibility. The problem is, everything was the same. Comparing it to FFXI, you can choose between three starting nations, and the only benefit you get for picking the suggested race/area combination is a ring which you can get later on in the game anyway. Every area is totally different and has a completely separate storyline until later on, when all of the areas come together, yet still have totally different storylines. As for Guild Wars, it has about the same thing as WoW in terms of starting off. When you start off in both games, you go to your class-specific NPC and do a little quest, then go out and do more and more quests for these people. On the other hand, in Guild Wars you can choose from a brand-new area to start off in per expansion pack. In WoW, your race determines where you start off, and you don’t have much of a selection of quests until much later on. I will say, however, the quest system is a lot better than ours in FFXI. Comparing the two systems, in WoW, you get a very specific log as to who gave you the quest, what you do for the quest, and how much you still have left for the quest. You also get much more useful rewards for completing the quests such as vast amounts of experience and money. This is opposed to FFXI and how we have very unspecific quest logs that don’t tell you much at all, and the rewards are generally useless items that you end up either throwing out or selling.

However, still on the topic of quests, even though the quest system is far superior in World of Warcrap, the quests themselves are way worse. In FFXI, not one quest is the same. Very few quests involve going out, getting items, and killing several of a certain monster. In FFXI, they can span anywhere from travelling across the globe to get a certain item for an NPC, to killing a super-powerful boss to get a really powerful item. In WoW, I’m sorry to say, but every quest I did in the hundreds of levels I acquired all included killing several things like wolves or boars and getting their drops to give to an NPC and he gives you experience points and money, or maybe an item. This actually brings me to a completely different line, “All quests are the same. They’ll consume your life.” Going back to the previous line, let’s look back to the graphics, maps, and sound. All graphics are the same. If you go into an area, all of the walls are the same. It’s just a massive, tiled mountain with the same graphic repeated over and over. The same goes with the character graphics- all characters look the same, because even though they have more things to choose from to start with than FFXI, only 2-3 faces and hairstyles look any good whatsoever. To be honest, the graphics are so repetitive, I was in one area and died, but then my ghost respawned in a totally different area and it looked the same as the last area I was in, so I was running the wrong way for like 5 minutes. Since the game goes by linear distance instead of a geographical distance, it actually took me about 20-30 minutes to get to my body so I could resurrect myself. Looking at maps now… Seriously, this really ticked me off. I always thought “oh, WoW is so big because it has like a jillion areas,” but I was wrong. Look at the maps. Every map is the exact same. Every dungeon map is so similar, I actually experienced a deja-vu. And it’s not just within one area either. I went into three ‘different’ dungeons as one character and they were the same, then I started off as not only a different race, but this time I was the Horde, and it was the same thing. The 1-2 dungeons I was actually in were the exact same. Every town has the exact same layout as the other too. As for sound, just look at it in the way that each face has the same voice and every spell has the same sound effects, including the contact of the spells (in the same spell set like fire or ice, etc) all have the same sound effects.

In the previous paragraph, I accidentally skipped one of the lines, which is a pretty irrelevant line to why the game sucks, and actually has a bit to do with graphics. “Chicks look like men with boobs, don’t hit on them, guy. They’re all played by men who make our good Lord Jesus cry.” What makes Jesus cry? I dunno, how did Peter Griffon make the dinosaurs die out. Does that answer your question? Hope so. Seriously, though, they look like the male of their race with boobs implanted in them and less fat/muscle. The best example of this is the elfin race. They actually look the exact same in pretty much every way. Everyone I know who knows WoW says that people do nasty things to female elves. This is disturbing since they look like males, but with breasts.

Moving away from the song now, since the rest of it is pretty irrelevant to any true information. In my last essay, people would always read it and say “Guild Wars copied WoW, not the other way around. WoW came out first.” Actually, my whole conception of that idea was entirely based on how similar the games were to each other, especially noted in this one video I saw on the internet. I also noticed that every Blizzard game was very similar to games prior to it. Diablo and its sequel are from a game I can’t think of the name of, but came out a long time ago for one. Looking at Warcraft, it was a complete rip-off of the RTS king (opinion) Command and Conquer. Now, I will agree the Warcraft series was a good game, but I’m just stating that. Then they made Star craft (which I also thought was a good game). They’re very similar games, but have a different storyline. Look at the C&C series and the Red Alert series. Which came out first, hmm? And then C&C came out with a first person shooter version of one of its games. What did Blizzard immediately start doing? They started making Starcraft Ghost, a first person shooter version of Starcraft. When MMORPGs became popular, they started making one of their own too. Haven’t you noticed just how similar Guild Wars and WoW are in quests and whatnot? Now here’s my proof. A friend of mine lent me a trial version of a game called City of Heroes, which was made by NC Soft (same guys who made Guild Wars). The game had terrible, polygon-like graphics, but everything else from the opening menu to the tutorial to the controls were the exact same as Guild Wars. Then I noticed this game came out long before WoW was even a spark in someone’s imagination. When NC Soft was making Guild Wars, I speculate Blizzard thought they should get their game out first, so when they copied NC Soft’s games, they totally neglected all graphic quality. music quality, and didn’t have enough time to make a vast array of quests and make the maps and areas different.
There is very little variety in the characters. Since you literally cannot chat to players from the opposite faction, if you want to play with your friend, you have to choose to be on that friend’s faction. Also, since a good three-quarters of the people who play choose alliance for reasons I’ll discuss later, it makes it even less likable to start off on the horde. This is similar to FFXI, where on our server at least, a good half of the people start in San d’Oria out of the three starting nations. However, in FFXI, you can change your allegiance, and in WoW, your race and job choices determine what faction you start in. Also, every allegiance in FFXI can chat with every other allegiance, and can do stuff either with or against other nations, depending if you’re partying or fighting other players. Despite the fact that there is little conflict in FFXI, there are still “raids” in the form of Besieged and Assaults. Back to WoW, though. In the character creation page, there are a lot more things to choose from as opposed to most MMO’s I’ve seen. On the other hand, only one or two of the faces, hairstyles, skin colours, and whatever else you can customize actually look good.

However, I’ve never cared that much about in-game graphics in a video game. Nor do I care about the sound or music. I don’t care that chicks look like men with boobs, and that you play a loner although it’s an online game. Why am I writing this then? It’s because people say the exact opposite. “It has great graphics, amazing sound, chicks look hot, and you need people to beat the game.” Frankly, I’m sorry but all of that isn’t what it is. The game isn’t God for crying out loud. What I care about in a video game is gameplay, and this game has little to none of that whatsoever. The speedy creation of World of Warcrap led to equality problems amongst the races, factions, areas, and especially different classes. You already know that the alliance is overpowered and the horde is very weak. You already know classes are race-specific, meaning many races are better than others. And you should know that monsters were copied and pasted amongst everything in every area. In fact, there’s probably four or five different monsters in the game, and everything else is just a copy from another faction’s race. I know as a Gnome to start off, I fought Trolls in some cave nearby to do a bunch of quests. But that’s not even the major point. The point is WoW was so rushed, classes are all in a hierarchy of power. There is basically one ability in FFXI that makes the game much more equal and makes the entire game very all-round and much more strategic. That job ability is “Provoke” learned by Warriors at level 5. This job ability produces a large boost of enmity (hate, aggro, etc) towards the user on the monster it’s used on. Since you can sub different jobs, you can get that job ability as any job in the game, especially for other tanks like Paladins and Ninjas. In World of Warcrap, not one job in the game has any major enmity control ability or spell, and if they do it’s very minimal. And since the only real “tanks” in the game are Warriors and Paladins, hate control is very bad.

This leads me to the hierarchy part. With no hate control, the damage-dealing classes have to be taken down a little bit weaker so as not to take hate from the tanks. Tanks have to have high defence to withstand several hits and high offence to keep hate. Mages have to use weaker spells to keep their hate lower. And finally there’s the Priest, the god of all classes in the game. They have defence to protect them from hate they get from healing, and offence so they can solo. The fact that in WoW you can solo appears to be a bane, not a boon in this case. And because of all of this, it should not be considered so much as an MMORPG.
 
I found a really good forum recently which is dedicated to doing all things “geeky” apparently. I found it by looking-up “why WoW sucks” on Google. The best post I found on there, and I quote “WoW was made four-year-olds and is played by four-year-olds and people who act like four-year-olds.” It can’t just be coincidence that like 400 different people all agree with me in everything that I’m talking about. He gives the top ten reasons why WoW sucks that ends up reminding me one major thing I forgot: GMs and servers. Let’s start off with the administration by talking about the in-game Game Masters. The guy who started the forum, Nils, has an example about a Game Master totally ignoring him. Face the facts, WoW is a very expensive game to pay per month. $15 U.S. is a lot of money to pay every month. Anyway, so the guy had just started but he had only played the game for eight days before they started charging him for the full amount that he’d pay for a month. The first call he tried to get a GM, no one answered him. The second call, the GM answered him and told him he has to pay. The third call, the GM was a complete ass to him and made him quit. Now what’s fifteen bucks to Blizzard when they’re making forty-five MILLION dollars monthly just to make a guy quit. That’s bad service in my opinion. Most people who play are really immature, and since that’s the truth, the administration doesn’t kick anyone off for any normal reason. People can go into Stormwind or Ironforge and totally lag the crap out of the area by being a jackass and spamming words or spells or something. Two hundred people can call a GM to kick the guy off, but they won’t do anything about it. I know in FFXI, if someone’s spamming, GMs don’t even need to be called, they’ll just kick the guy off for being disruptive. GMs will intervene with anything that hinders the game without making themselves noticed. What they will do is take the player to a “jail” zone and talk to the player. If the player is still being a jackass, they will be suspended or banned completely. One major thing I’ve been particularly proud of when it comes to Square’s Game Masters is the reduction of RMT or “Real Money Trade”. After years of doing minor things to the game, we finally have a negligible amount of gil-sellers. On the other end of the spectrum is WoW, where they don’t give a crap about RMT because it just means they have more and more players. The more players they have, the better they look. Really, though, it makes the game unfair and not fun at all. Especially since the game is based on gear instead of skill. One guy even said, “The difference in raw power between those in ‘epic’ green gear and those in ghetto gear is very small in Guild Wars. Whereas in WoW, it means the difference between hitting for 500 or 2000.” A four year old kid could play his dad’s character and beat a veteran player if his gear is elite instead of normal quality. Once again, a question of balance.

Another major problem with this game is lag. Lag by definition is having a very slow frame rate due to a lot of action done in any online video game. Frame rate is how fast the graphics load onto the computer and how fast the game receives your input such as typing or pushing other buttons. I know for a fact that even if you have the most high-end computer ever invented, your game is going to lag out ridiculously in any area. I can easily compare the lag of a minimally-populated area like a small village to lag in Al Zahbi in FFXI during a Besieged, which has 750 players (max) and 170 different monsters in one area about the size of a WoW starting area. I actually get a better frame rate playing on my Playstation 2 in Al Zahbi during a Besieged than going to Ironforge on the low curve of players throughout the day. The lag in that area is actually so unbelievably slow, when you fly a griffon into the area, you get maybe four different frames in about thirty seconds. The frame rate is actually so unbelievably slow, you have to press “left” about five seconds before you actually turn left. This is a major problem because of the hot lava in the ring around the major areas of Ironforge. Once again, I blame faulty planning, as they did not install “zones” into the game. The only zone line takes about two minutes to zone into, and everything else is in the same zone, meaning lag travels all throughout the game.

One final line on this administration junk is that Blizzard just doesn’t ever seem to care about its games or its users. Take the RMT as a quick example. They care about income, so they let their players suffer for their money. The game is very simple yet it’s effective at generating revenue. The GM example shows just how much they care about their users. How long did it take them to create not only this game, but its expansion and all of their other games? Several years, to be honest. And when you look at the login queues, it can sometimes take upwards of half an hour just to log in. In FFXI I know for a fact it doesn’t take more than about five to ten seconds to log in and there are no queues. Best of all, there are only 24 servers in the game, whereas in WoW, you have hundreds of severs, and more servers being made every couple of weeks. Speaking of servers, every few weeks, they’re down for a large period of time to fix something wrong. They just don’t do it right in the first place, so they have to fix it all later and make all its players suffer. One week, they were down because someone got into the servers and implanted a virus in one of the monsters. Any real MMO wouldn’t allow anything like that. They probably didn’t even ban the guy for all I know.

Everyone I’ve seen talk about this game, including guys who enjoy it, have all said the auction house is very disorganized and hard to do anything with, so I won’t glorify it with my ranting. However, one thing I have to add is weather effects. This isn’t really anything major in the game, and I’ve never actually heard anyone talk about it in real life, but it’s something worth mentioning. Weather effects were just recently introduced in the game, and only a very select few areas have them. The only effects essentially include rain as I was informed, and that’s still only in about two areas. I’m sure there’s more though; not even WoW’s that lame. Rain lags out players in the area, though. It’s also comical how areas immediately go from desolate and dry to luscious and green to snowy and cold without even so much as a zone. It just kind of has a little line between one area to the other. Between the green fields of Ronfaure and the snowy expanse of Beaucedine in FFXI, there’s a large tunnel which gradually goes from mossy to snowy and dry. Similar effects are all throughout the game. Every area has its own weather effects too. You see rain in Pashhow Marshlands probably 90% of the time for one example.

Just one last paragraph before the conclusion of this essay. There’s nothing to do until level 70 (before Burning Crusade, level 60). Even level 59’s have nothing to do, and can’t join the fray because every level in WoW makes a difference so enormous, it’s sad. Even then, all you can do is raids and player versus player. Since certain classes outrank others, PvP is very limited, and raids are repetitive. And since the only thing you do prior to 70 are mindless, repetitive quests and pointless grinding, it’s not even fun getting up there. “I can start a fight, then go downstairs to get a drink, and return to loot the guy. No fun,” as a final quote.

In conclusion, I don’t so much hate the game as I hate how incredibly obsessed people are over this game. I know what you’re thinking right now, “this kid doesn’t have a life writing a 6115-word essay on why this game sucks.” This is true, but consider the three million people who play this game, including you (assuming the reader is one who is reading this awesome-sauce essay) who have no life at all. If your life is dedicated to playing it, so too is mine into hating it. I tried to make it non-biased and as little opinion as possible. Yes, I compared it to Guild Wars and FFXI, two games that I enjoy, but I’d like to hear your rebuttal to all of my many statements against the game.

Ok guys thats it. I really want to hear your thoughts and possible debate. Sorry for the triple post as I wanted to fit the whole thing. And no the pictures that he mentions are not including in this thread, but they were taken unfairly in my POV.
 
I'm guessing this one of those stupid "I played your game for 2 years and I hate it" things.

The only sentence I read was how "bad" the graphics are and immediately dismissed the entire "essay". The graphics are stylized and are good for that reason.
 
awful.. this is not an essay. Theres no structure at all. It's like asking a valley girl what she thinks of makeup, and letting her blab on for 6,000 words.
 
Actually the guy only played it for a few weeks.
Please read this though just for the issue of debate, ya its not that well written but still.


He said in the course of 5 days he leveled 5 characters to 20, immediately suggesting that he went through hundreds of levels.
And then saying that endgame is only grinding, argh it bugs me.

The graphics thing is bs, he compares everything to FF eleven (his favorite game :confused: )
 
I stopped reading when the first point was graphics but skimmed over the rest. The entire thing is stupid so if you didn't read it you didn't miss much.
 
dopee123 said:
awful.. this is not an essay. Theres no structure at all. It's like asking a valley girl what she thinks of makeup, and letting her blab on for 6,000 words.
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I'd have to agree. if you had put blog instead of essay i might not judge it so harshly, but it is an extremely poorly written essay. Secondly, if it was that bad 8 million people wouldn't be playing it, end of story. I know there are a lot of idiots out there, lets say 50% of the world population is an idiot, you still have 4 million people paying to play this game.

I would love to go through this thing and pick at every poorly supported point that he brings up but that would take a 12000 word essay. In an MMO everyone is going to have a completely different playing experience. This guy did not have a positive one. Is that WoW's fault? Some of it si obviously, but I mean I played for 2 years. It has its ups and downs for sure, but the point is there are ups. Are there better MMO's out there? Yes. But it depends on what you are looking for in the game and what you are expecting to get out of it.

Basically this essay is crap. The guy who wrote this needs to make a study or something if he is going to make these claims. human beings are biased. Take a stat class then re write this shit.
 
My attention span says NO.

But who would make such a long fucking "essay" over a game they hate? This just proves how much WoW has taken over people's lives.
 
Yes, this is not an essay. Essays have structure and a defined form. This is more of an editorial rant. And a badly written one at that.
 
Any "unbiased" essay that spells it "world of warcrap" is not unbiased. End of story. I feel less intelligent for just reading that. Ugh. :mad:
 
spugnor said:
Any "unbiased" essay that spells it "world of warcrap" is not unbiased. End of story. I feel less intelligent for just reading that. Ugh. :mad:
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Holy crap! You made it through the whole thing?

I bow to your massive attention span.
 
I read bits and pieces of this, and realized maybe it would be fun to read the whole thing for comedic value. The ravings of morons are always entertaining.

But I remembered I like my IQ where it is and quickly shut my eyes.

Wall of Text attacks, you dodge
 
The administrators of an internet addiction clinic are having a difficult time curing players desire for the PC game "World of Warcraft." The psychiatrists discover the verbose rant above and decide upon an experiment. The subject is forced to read the entire article strapped to a chair Clockwork Orange style. After reading the essay the subject must debate its inane arguments one by one.

Most patients survive the experiment, though the survivors become catatonic before finishing the essay. The living patients who regain their minds revert to their old habits. The insane ones start playing FFXI and Guild Wars, and begin writing their own "essays." The dead patients save 14.99 a month. None of the sane participants drop WoW for FFXI or Guild Wars, and no one is truly bettered.
 
TheCowOfNow said:
Secondly, if it was that bad 8 million people wouldn't be playing it, end of story.
Click to expand...

Maybe you should look up the Top 10 music hits in the US and then try to explain to me how popularity = quality.
 
He doesn't back up a single claim and bases all of his points upon pure opinion.

Frankly im amazed this person can turn on his computer.
 
I must agree unfortunately about this not being an essay.

I dislike the game pretty intensely, it sucks peoples lives away, although that may be the function of the people, not the game.

But grammatically and structurally, that was a 6000 word rant which repeated itself over and over again. I can't say I would be convinced by it.

Now to avoid all the inevitable "what are you, an english teacher" comments, I am just stating my opinion, I was not convinced due to the illogical structure of the essay.
 
I love many parts of his arguement.

"I hate WoW. Not because it sucks, but because so many people like it and think its awesome. Wow sucks. I'm not biased, but World of Warcrap is total garbage. Heres all the reasons I think it sucks, which I started off by saying it doesn't suck, but I'm a pro at contradiction."

Then he goes on to talk about the graphics. Graphics do not a bad game make. I still enjoy the original zelda, and zelda III is one of my favorite games of all time. Final Fantasy 2 rocks. So don't give me "Graphics" in your first paragraph about why WoW sucks. Thats like saying that the new Hybrid Cars are total garbage and noone should buy them because they look teh ugly.

Finally, on the point of graphics, this game is a few years old, and was in development a few years before that. Sorry its not DX10 compatible. There are millions of people playing this game across hundreds of servers. At any point in Org, I'm standing within viewing distance of 100+ people. I don't want my graphics card taking 30 seconds to render each one, thank you very much. The game is plenty immersive for me, the graphics are clean and nice, not realistic. They dont have to be.

Then he goes on to talk about how the character movements are silly. He tells a complete lie saying that characters jump all over the place, then admits its exaggerated. Yes, a character CAN move around all over the place during combat IF the player controlling his movements MAKES HIM DO IT! What a bloody moron.

This line is beautiful. "Wow costs twice as much as your average MMO. For example, FFXI only costs $12 a month, and WoW can cost anywhere from $15-$30". Where did he get that number? According to my bank statement....

04/26/2007 Withdrawal CKCD DEBIT 04/25 BLIZZARD ENT*WOW SBLIZZARD.COM CA $14.99
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Thats the monthly re-occuring payment. So is he lying, or ignorant? Either way, his essay is wrong once again.

"The entire game can be solo'd, including the end-game. I know this because I played to level 20". Wow (Pun intended), you played to level 20? ZOMG GRATS! How about you play to level 70 and THEN write an essay about the end game? Sure, you CAN solo the whole way, and you CAN group the whole way. Thats what's GOOD about this game you moron. People can choose to play it however they want. If people don't LIKE sitting in-game and spamming "34 hunter LFG" for 3 hours, before logging out without getting a group, then they can actually SOLO. How novel!

"Lets talk about burning crusade, which you can't experience until level 60, and I'm level 20, so I'll talk about how much it sucks because I didnt play it!" -- Thats where I stopped reading, because again, he didn't actually PLAY this enviornment, so has no right to compose a paragraph about how much it sucks. It's like saying "I hate golf, I never played it, but it's probably boring".

"You can ding the max level of 70 in about a week and a half grinding and soloing. Heck, I hit 20 as one class for every race in the five days I played". Oh, geee, you got to level 20 fast on your characters, but didn't get further? Welcome to every MMO in existance. I, unlike the people you claim to get flak from, actually HAVE played a lot of MMO's. Probably more than the OP. Every MMO is easy to get through the first few levels, then the difficulty and time investment increases. Again, play past level 20 and we'll talk. I love how he said you can get the max level in a week. LOL.

"In FFXI, they can span anywhere from travelling across the globe to get a certain item for an NPC, to killing a super-powerful boss to get a really powerful item." Talking about how all the quests are the same, when he leveled 10 characters through the same 20 levels? Gee, I'm sorry that your level 15 character isn't killing an end-boss demon, or slaying magtheridon to get the best sword in the game. Oh, in FFXI you can get a quest that makes you travel half way across the globe? GEE I LOVE WALKING FOR 45 MINUTES! Where do I sign up!?

On the topic of "Warcraft copied C&C.":

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game, developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment in 1994.[1
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The first installment of the series was released world-wide on August 31, 1995 and was simply named Command & Conquer.
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Well done idiot. Research next time before you open your mouth and look stupid. Too late :(. Oh, and C&C and Warcraft were DRASTICALLY different. Sure, they were both RTS games, but, uhm, thats called a Genre. Thats like saying "Reel Big Fish" copies "Less than Jake" because they are both Ska bands. Or like saying UT2k4 copied Doom2 because they are both have guns in them. OMG.

Another major problem with this game is lag. Lag by definition is having a very slow frame rate due to a lot of action done in any online video game.
Click to expand...

Wrong. Next? (P.S. I have a mid-range PC and get NO LAG whatsoever, video or internet)

The rest of his essay prattles on about more things he's never experienced or been involved in, and completely fails like the rest of his piece.

Hurray, you can type. Doesn't mean your words make sense. If you want to actually talk about WoW's short comings, perhaps you should play the game for more than 2 weeks, and get past level 20. Until then, try writing about something you actually know about. You'll get MUCH less flak.

In closing, Is WoW the best game ever? No. I have played it for a long time, and NEVER once said that. I enjoy the game, its fun and engaging and I play with a lot of friends. At some point, I'll stop playing, and pickup something different.

To the OP: Get over yourself. Your words != bible.
 
I read it...really unfair to WoW IMO.

I played the 10-day trial. I loved grouping up and doing stuff with my friends (since we were still all together at school), but at the end of trial...I just didn't like the grinding/quests stuff, and stopped playing.

The only part I will agree with is the tards that run around screaming "WoW is the best EVAR!!!111one". A competently written arguement I can take, but like the Mac userbase, wanton fanboyism is fucking annoying. You use another OS, great, I don't fucking want too though. (I use Linux-primary, Windows-secondary for the record). You play WoW great, you insult many other games of entirely different genres, not so great. How the hell can you say WoW is better than, say, SupCom or something (I've seen this). They don't even compete against each other in any way, shape or form!
 
...ugh.

The fact that I read through a single paragraph of text saying "WoW does this and FFXI does this better," I feel like I want a refund on my time spent.

And just a general fact for the person who mentioned "Look at the top 10 in music...it doesn't equal quality or whatever"...anyone who is able to get to the top 10 on any chart is doing something right (them, or their producers/mixers/soundtechs/writers). Why DON'T you think they're "quality"?

I promise you there are people out there who think they are, including me. I've got a very well versed musical taste, I've played in classical orchestras, bluegrass bands, jazz trios, quartets, big bands, rock bands and funk bands. I could ramble on and on about inversions, triads, scales, chords, and all that. So, I know what it takes to be "technically advanced" in music.

The moral? Technically advanced can, but doesn't have to equal good music.

This applies to anything in life. Sure, it may not be fun to recognize that WoW/Justin Timberlake/Crocs/iPods are doing something right, but the fact that a huge HUGE percentage of the population are buying into it means that they did something right. You could stand there with a stick up your ass saying "WoW/Justin Timberlake/Crocs/iPods suck because reason x and reason y" but guess what, they'll keep making money why you stand there and complain. They're the smart ones, not you.
 
phobic said:
*Wall of text hits YOU for 18937 points of damage!*
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QFT!

My god man, there is no way I am reading all of that.

Before it can really start a debate, it needs to be about 1/5 of the size it is now. Regardless of the point the guy is trying to make, its lost because most people will look at that verbose complaint letter (because it certainly not an essay) and just shrug and walk off. If I was his professor, I would slam that kid with the worst grade I could just for making me read something that rediculously long on such a simple topic.

The guy could, if he had the skill, condence that entire essay into a 5 paragraph essay. 1 paragraph intro, 3 paragraph body, 1 paragraph conclusion. More words does not a good essay make.
 
silenteye said:
I think it sucks and the arguments are solely based on emotions and opinion.
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Duh. Look at the title:

DumbTitle said:
A Non-Biased Explanation of Why I Hate WoW
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Hatred implies bias. One must have a neutral approach to be unbiased, although total objectivity isn't possible. Plus, the essay should be unbiased in and of itself. If the author has to put it in the title, it's likely a flaming piece of unintelligible rambling. Pretentious? Yes.

Look at the first sentence:

ContradictoryOpeningSentence said:
Okay, I’m getting really pissed off because people won’t take my essay seriously.
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In essence, no one has to read past the title, or at most the first paragraph. Your "friend" doesn't seem to understand the concept of bias.
 
WoW?!?!?!!!
Wall of Text CRITS YOU..
You have lost XXXX IQ Points..
You are now as smart as a cucumber....

I too love have this guys rants and raves about how crappy WoW is by calling it World of Warcrap... then talks about the graphics which I know for a fact, by his description, were on the lowest settings. Also, WoW is the only game out there that can be played at the highest settings and create a challenge for modern hardware, yet can still be played on 5 yr old hardware without major problems. Show me a current gen game that can do that with the popularity of WoW.

So I award this guy the "AssHat of the Day Award"
Oh and by the way tell him I play WoW currently, I have played the following games and feel that WoW has the best overall feeling, graphics and playability;
Shadowbane (beta tester and played for 2 years)
Dark Age of Camelot (played for 6=8 months)
EverQuest (played for 6-8 months)
City of Hereos (beta tester and played for 6 months)
Lineage II (beta tester and played for 6 months)
SilkRoad Online (currently playing)
Lord of the Rings Online (beta tester)
9 Dragons (beta tester)
Knights Online (beta tester)

And that is the list of just MMORPG's that I have played......
So tell this AssHat that if he wants to debate it I would love to go head to head with him. But let him know that he should scrub his ass good in the shower because he will have it handed to him on a silver platter time and time again.
 
here's one reason I don't like WOW(like other mmorpgs). you really CANT lose. There are so little penalties for dying, theres nowhere near the rush of playing a game where you can lose everything in a blink of an eye. It's a padded playpen.

PC gamers talk about console games being made to cater to the audience that doesn't want to lose and wants their hand held. Well open your eyes, WOW epitomizes this except its a PC game. This is why I don't consider WOW an actual game. It's like a casino full of slot machines where you're always a winner.

I don't hate WOW, like this other guy, but WOW is like smoking. its addictive, and its enjoyable, but its not a game.
 
damonposey said:
here's one reason I don't like WOW(like other mmorpgs). you really CANT lose. There are so little penalties for dying, theres nowhere near the rush of playing a game where you can lose everything in a blink of an eye. It's a padded playpen.

PC gamers talk about console games being made to cater to the audience that doesn't want to lose and wants their hand held. Well open your eyes, WOW epitomizes this except its a PC game. This is why I don't consider WOW an actual game. It's like a casino full of slot machines where you're always a winner.

I don't hate WOW, like this other guy, but WOW is like smoking. its addictive, and its enjoyable, but its not a game.
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it is a game.

people like you dont like wow because its too easy for new players to do things. you want the top end players to be gods over everyone else, and have the ability to prevent them from reaching your status.
 
damonposey said:
here's one reason I don't like WOW(like other mmorpgs). you really CANT lose. There are so little penalties for dying, theres nowhere near the rush of playing a game where you can lose everything in a blink of an eye. It's a padded playpen.

PC gamers talk about console games being made to cater to the audience that doesn't want to lose and wants their hand held. Well open your eyes, WOW epitomizes this except its a PC game. This is why I don't consider WOW an actual game. It's like a casino full of slot machines where you're always a winner.

I don't hate WOW, like this other guy, but WOW is like smoking. its addictive, and its enjoyable, but its not a game.
Click to expand...

You've obviously not raided much :). You lose all the time, its just that the penalty for losing isn't extreme. The only penalty (really) is that theres no reward. So Win = Reward, Lose = nothing. It lets people try new experiences without fearing that it would destroy them for dying.

In what MMO does dying REALLY suck? In EQ you just get a res, and your exp is all returned. What are you looking for in terms of a penalty?
 
damonposey said:
here's one reason I don't like WOW(like other mmorpgs). you really CANT lose. There are so little penalties for dying, theres nowhere near the rush of playing a game where you can lose everything in a blink of an eye. It's a padded playpen.

PC gamers talk about console games being made to cater to the audience that doesn't want to lose and wants their hand held. Well open your eyes, WOW epitomizes this except its a PC game. This is why I don't consider WOW an actual game. It's like a casino full of slot machines where you're always a winner.
Click to expand...

You make a very rational point there...... Shadowbane was a good example, when you died, either in PvP or PvE, you left a gravestone behind with all of the contents of your inventory in it. Now that gravestone could be looted by anyone that came by and you would lose EVERYTHING including money. On top of that you lose armor/weapon value and have negative XP, then add on top of that the fact that once a piece of armor/weapon breaks, it is gone FOREVER. Then to make things worse, when you do major repairs to things it actually degrades the durability of the items. But you are right, WoW is catered to the hand holders that do not want to spend weeks grinding cash only to have it taken because they got raped by a group of mobs and someone came by and cleaned out their grave. This makes that portion of WoW "e-z mode" for everyone equally. WoW is catered to the general public, not spefically to hardcore gamers. But it is this fact that makes it so popular.
 
Direwolf20 said:
You've obviously not raided much :). You lose all the time, its just that the penalty for losing isn't extreme. The only penalty (really) is that theres no reward. So Win = Reward, Lose = nothing.
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I beg to differ. Lose = I just WASTED 4 hours of my REAL LIFE TIME. Not only that, but I just used another 1-2 hours worth of farmed material (potions, flasks, elixirs, poisons, bandages, food, etc).

edit: I see that apparently it's not necessarily as "hardcore" as shadowbane may have been. But there certainly is a penalty for every raid night you don't down your learning encounter.
 
But you are right, WoW is catered to the hand holders that do not want to spend weeks grinding cash only to have it taken because they got raped by a group of mobs and someone came by and cleaned out their grave.
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Dying is too easy in WoW for a mechanic like that. Equally, WoW is way too populated for there to EVER be a time when you die and someone doesn't happen by.

I would never play a game with a mechanic like that. I could lose everything over one death? Gee, no thanks.
 
phobic said:
*Wall of text hits YOU for 18937 points of damage!*
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*drops dead*


DAMN!



Like others here have said, this is a horrible essay. I started and I think I got 3 paragraphs in when my head actually started hurting.
 
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