What Your Warcraft Life Will be Like At this point, if the press releases are to be believed, then like 8 billion, kajillion people are currently playing World of Warcraft. Soon, an expansion for the game will be released, and fresh hordes will be sucked in. And many other consumers will play its competitors, like Vanguard and Warhammer Online and Lord of the Rings Online and other similarly doomed products.
So, if you haven’t played a massively multiplayer game yet, you will soon be the only one. Loser. And, since you’re probably feeling left out and are considering experiencing the massively multiplayerlyness for yourself, this is a rough, informal guide to the various stages of your time in fantasyland will be like. Forewarned is forearmed.
All of these games have a standard progression: Alone to few to many. In other words, as time progresses, you will need to work with larger and larger groups of people if you want to gain power and glory and shiny armor that shoots out little sparky particles and glowing skulls.
In the beginning, you will be a noob. Alone, shivering and afraid, with no armor or weapons to speak of. You will be quarantined in a beginner’s area, where you will slap haplessly at your keyboard, drool on yourself, and kill wimpy monsters that you can handle. You will get and complete quests to kill ten goblin toddlers or gather seventy bricks and take them to Farmer Joe so he can complete his pile of bricks.
As time goes on, you may notice that other people are around, beating up the same toddlers and grabbing the same bricks. You may team up with them, in quivering little groups of two and three. You will start learning about the other sorts of characters and their capabilities. You will learn the chat shortcuts and acronyms (like LOL = “Laugh Out Loud" and NOOB = “You".) You will learn not to get up to go get a Coke in the middle of a fight, FOR GOD’S SAKE.
As you gain levels and power, you will find yourself pushed to be in larger groups, needing to work together better to fight tougher foes. You will meander up through the levels, realizing that, even at its best, the game is kind of tedious. And, if you want to continue, you will have to put some real hours in and spend a bunch of time playing with other people.
At this point, you may decide that you have had enough of this fun, quit the game, and get on with your life. We will assume that you don’t.
Also, at this point, some people will get really, really into tradeskills. This means that you buy a fishing pole, stand on the shore, and spend hours catching the same fish again and again. We will leave those people here.
At a certain point, to do interesting things, you have to get a full (i.e. 5 or 6 people) group together if you want to see the exciting stuff and get the better treasures. Of course, you can stay by yourself just killing toddlers and collecting bricks, but then you might as well be fishing. Why play the game if you don’t try to have real adventures and be a hero?
So now you learn to work in a full, unified group, taking on challenging dungeons and encounters. You will figure out the weaknesses of bosses, learn to handle large groups of attackers, and spend your precious leisure time with some of the dumbest people on God’s green Earth. Some people are just bad at games. They don’t know it. But they are.
But you will eventually find good groups, defeat impressive foes, get treasure, feel competent, and get all of the treasures that the game will let a small group of people get. Your humble goals will be accomplished.
At this point, you may decide that you have had enough of this fun, quit the game, and get on with your life. We will assume that you don’t.
Eventually, you will grow dissatisfied with getting together with random knuckleheads to get the sort of lowly, piddling treasures you only find in dungeons. You will now graduate to working with an even larger mass of people. You will join a guild.
Guilds in online games are sort of like cliques in a junior high cafeteria, but with swords, and not in the real world. The maturity level, backbiting, and general level of angst are all the same. Why put up with it? Because, if you get enough people together, you can raid!
This means that you will get a pile of people together (in Everquest, over 50, in World of Warcraft as it stands now, 40) and go kill really big foes for really impressive treasures. The dragons, Gods, demons lords, and so on you are killing now will require you to coordinate your tactics with dozens of people, instead of a few. Although, in such a horde, it’s much easier to slip away from your keyboard unnoticed to get a Coke. Or watch an entire movie.
Assuming the players in your guild are reasonably competent, they will begin to, as they say online, “Progress." You will kill big things, take their weapons and armor, and use them to kill bigger big things. If you are male, and you probably are, your sperm count will rise.
You will continue like this for a while. Every ten or so hours of play or so, you will get an item that is kind of better than what you had before. (Character improvement per hour spent raiding is sloooow.)
But eventually your guild will reach the limits of its competence. The foes you meet will require many hours spent dying again and again and need more skill and dedication than the members have. Players will get frustrated. They will quit, and you will have to recruit new members to replace them. But these new members won’t have good enough equipment, so you’ll have to go kill the old, boring enemies to get more swords and shields and stuff, and this will frustrate the older members, and they will quit, and this cycle will continue until your guild implodes and disappears and you are left out in the cold again.
At this point, you may decide that you have had enough of this fun, quit the game, and get on with your life. I really hope you do. We will assume that you don’t.
You will find a bigger, more competent guild and repeat the process. You’ll kill tougher and tougher foes and then “farm them" (i.e. fight them again and again until you go mad with boredom). Eventually, your guild will meet stuff that’s too tough for it to beat and it will get frustrated and dissolve and you can find another. And so on until you burn out.
Also, sometimes, there is cybersex.
And that’s how it works.
If there is anything to learn from this, it is that these games are a fascinating and bizarre combination of fun and work. Let’s call it “furk." The big innovation of multiplayer games is that, since real people are involved, your failures will let down other human beings. So you’d better be online for the big raid, even if you don’t want to. Otherwise, you will disappoint your “friends.”
And we’ve learned one other thing. If you ever feel like quitting and living your life, go with that. Run as if the hounds of Hell are after you. Because the compulsion to play lasts a lot longer than the fun does.