Rage Against the Machine

Warglbl!

I hate World of Warcraft. There I said it.

Seriously Blizzard, you need to cut it out. There’s WoW itself, but then there’s also a card game, a pen-and-paper game, a board game and even now a miniatures game. There are novels, there are comics, and while I doubt that Make Love Not Warcraft counts as a TV show, a regular series can’t be far off. While it’s nice to see a Western geek-centric company take the same route many Japanese otaku-centric companies embrace with their ubiquitous branding, all you are doing is fueling my rage, Blizzard, because I hate your core experience.

Here is the reason for it: I play games with other people online for the opposite reason that I play games with other people in the meatspace. In the real world, with my friends, I like to play cooperative games, for example D&D. These are my friends, I want to have fun with them, not at their expense. (Yes, I know in D&D you ARE often having fun at your friend’s expense, but that’s more a function of the DM, the dice or poor decision-making abilities. Plus I don’t feel as bad when everyone else is laughing). I like Arkham Horror, I like X-Men Legends, I like to defeat systems with my associates in a collaborative setting because there’s nothing better than winning a game with your close friends. I imagine this is how people who play sports for fun think as well.

Online, however, is a different story. When you see me in an online game, typically a shooter or action game of some kind, I am not trying to be your pal. I am shooting you in the f*cking face because I AM BETTER THAN YOU. Yes, it’s primitive, animal-brain stuff. I am in a competition, testing myself in combat against the poor schmucks who have not yet learned to fear my name. The important thing here is that the kind of games I do this in, say the Battlefield series, is that each person’s avatar is the same. Skill is the deciding factor, not how much l33t l00t you’ve managed to skip work to camp. If I beat someone, or they beat me, it’s because of a valid difference in our abilities.

Contrast this to WoW. You spend a lot of time grinding on mobs with guildmates or random people to advance. Rarely do I manage to get enough of my friends online at the same time to make this feasible for me, and Random Internet People (R.I.P.) should in general die in a fire and end up like their acronym. This makes levelling up an ordeal of irritation and loneliness for me. The sheer amount of math that some people haul into this video game is stunning as well. If I want to play a game where I have to do actual calculations, I’ll just play D&D, thanks. At least when a party member gets me killed there, I can fling a D4 at him and put his eye out.

But what about the PVP you say? Yes, I do so enjoy being one-shotted by some internet addict with 20 levels on me, and equipment so rare you have a better chance of finding the Higgs boson, such that it is MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for me to even have a chance of winning. And the joy of doing the same thing to someone else is ameliorated by the fact it proves nothing except that person has more of a life than I do. This “Biggest Stick” game mechanic is not for people looking to have fun or blow off steam. It is a game mechanic for closet sociopaths with too much free time.

I want to like WoW. I really do. The setting of Warcraft seems like something I could get into, the artwork is fantastic, and I really respect Blizzard as a company. Maybe if I had a close group of friends who could all agree to play at the same, it could work for me. But right now, if WoW was a Transformer he would be named Frustrateron, and his only power would be to grab the anger center of my brain and set it ablaze.

On a bed of fire I’m choking on the smoke that fills my home