So a fellow gamer critique has a point about the game loop differences in FPS games versus MMOs. A round of UT, Counter-Strike is 4/5 minutes. Then it starts over. If the phone rings, you walk away and get your team killed. What I think he is getting at is that MMOs require more time to make progress.

Yes. This is true. MMOs operate on more of ideas, culture and abstract motivations. Instead of “killing the guy in red”, like you do in a typical Deathmatch game, in an MMO you are looking to improve stats and work on something specific. For example, your weapon skill, crafting something, helping out a friend or travel to a southern coast and improve your fishing skill. Sound boring? Yes and no.

You go to work. Boring. You get money that buys you a BMW M3. Not boring. You are involved in a more complex reward system. What might seem like work is usually a set up to some other more exciting goal. If I do this, I can do this. It sounds like work but all of this doesn’t really happen early on in the game. But yes it does happen later on in the game. The ‘working toward something over a period of time’ is what a MMO is, you probably can’t get away from that if you want new content every month in exchange for a monthly fee.

How is this fun?

Well I guess you have to want it to be fun. RPGs are fun to me because you have a lot of resources packed away (skills, spells, items) and you go around collecting said resources. The RPG genre is more involved and complex than its first person shooter or arcade-eque competitors. The sure-fire way to know if you’ll enjoy a MMO is to move from a FPS to a RPG. If you become more bored then you shouldn’t move to a MMO.

Levels of involvement from low to high

1. Doing nothing
2. Bejeweled
3. NES Tennis
4. NES Excitebike (assuming average track creation)
5. A few CS rounds
6. A few ONS UT rounds
7. RPG like Final Fantasy
8. Getting 100% in Gran Turismo
9. World of Warcraft
10. Final Fantasy XI online
11. Digitizing yourself completely and uploading yourself into the Interweb

It is involved. It is not free. But it also really not that scary. It’s not dental surgery and every gamer should try new things. I should play SOCOM because everyone is nuts over it, I never have played it. I should play Metal Gear Solid. I should play NES Metal Gear … never could get past the dogs in the beginning.

FFXI was my first MMO and WoW is my second. WoW is considerably less hard to my free time and it’s a bunch more fun.

Does being technical help? Yes. I fire up firefox and use a firefox plugin to search wow.allakhazam.com on my 2nd LCD while playing. It’s perfect. I search for addons that make my life easier. I log in for 2 minutes to check on my items sales even with my uber druid. There are very easy ways to get things done in less than 10 minutes. Less time than CS.

At a LAN party at Thanksgiving, named Thanksgibbing, I was able to play WoW and CS at the same time. I bought and sold items, got some other minor stuff done within WoW. Although, it was partially annoying to the other people at the LAN party, I don’t feel that I missed much from Counter-Strike. When I map would load or I would die in Counter-Strike, I would hop over to WoW on my laptop.

I think you should not die and go to heaven without playing WoW or some other really good MMO. MMOs are annoying infinite and they do take more time than others. But within the MMO genre, WoW has tried to change gameplay on many different levels to make it more of a casual experience just as Nintendo did above the Playstation 2 with the Gamecube. Instead of pushing titles like Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo 4, Nintedo pushes titles like Paper Mario and Mario Kart. Very much a casual target market. And again Nintendo is not targeting the hardcore male teenager with the Revolution, they are trying to fundamentally design something different than the violent and flashy Xbox 360.

World of Warcraft does not use the latest hardware to its full potential. It scales down to slow PCs and behind-the-times Apples. It does not try to use the latest eye candy that Shader Model 2.0 can offer, but instead targets the largest audience.

Is it wasted time? Yes. Is working for money and then dying wasted time? Yes. Is that how modern life works? Yes. What I mean is, I figure this networked gaming is the future and eventually we’ll look back on offline games like we look back at NES. Cute.

Am I going to quit WoW someday? Yes. I’m level 59. I could hit 60 tonight in 2 hours (60 is the cap). That was my goal. I promised myself that I would hit the cap before quitting. To me, that is completion enough. I might take a break, I might not. I dunno.

What do I have to show for it? Only slightly more than I have to show for: watching TV, playing Paper Mario, playing Poker, watching a movie. It’s entertainment and it’s totally not neccessary or important.

Is it the greatest game ever created by mankind or any unknown intelligent life floating in the universe? No. You’re thinking of NES Tennis … NES Tennis is to video games as Chuck Norris is to human beings. It’s definitely not the best gameplay if you compare it to HL2, Freedom Fighters or Jedi Academy in a 2 hour timespan. It develops more slowly and is long-lasting. Like a good hot sauce. Even in a LAN party scenario, we’d all have to like it to have fun. Just like we didn’t fire up bejeweled at t-gibb.

It can’t compare to CS:Source for action. But CS:Source doesn’t last 800 hours, at least not for me. Nothing might last for 800 hours for anyone. Neither is better or worse, both are different. And certainly variety is the spice of life.

Making money

You can’t make money in WoW. You might as well paint poorly or write crappy MIDI music. Maybe open up another crafts store. But certainly no one makes a decent living (except for Chinese farmers) playing this. mmo-pro.com used to have a page that described his professional gaming career (he does this full time) but I can’t find the page anymore.

Farmers

Farmers are a problem. They aren’t everywhere though. I’ve seen less and less spam in game. I think Blizzard is cracking down on them or something. Maybe figuring out that they create accounts like ‘bbzyyuidfas088′ and ‘bbzyyuidfas089′. I don’t know how they are doing it.

Certainly you can break the rules and buy gold with your real money. It’s illegal and it’s stupid IMHO. You don’t have to get the most uber super items ever to survive (unlike FFXI). And anyone with some shiney object doesn’t get much attention. “Yeah that’s a nice blah blah of death”, but do they get more party invites? Not really. Groups form and fall apart, some people have to go because of real life issues (cat or dog stuck in ceiling) and sometimes the group folds. But you can quickly start doing something else with little frustration. Unlike FFXI where everyone is poor, everyone is pissed and you wait around for 2 hours to make progress only to have everything fall apart.

Versus Movies

11 months * $15/mo. + $45 for the box = $210
$210 / 884 hours = $0.23/hr
Average movie = $10 for 2.5 hours (I’m being generous) = $4/hr
If I had watched movies instead of WoW = $3,536

Versus Everything

I could have read books. I could have worked on music. I could have worked out. But not really. I can’t read that many books without getting bored. I’m reading more now than I ever have. It only takes 20-30 minutes to jog. And I’m working on music more than I did before I started (mainly because I was sick of playing music when I started).

Variety is the spice of life and you choose your involvement in project mayhem.

Executive Summary

“Everyone is doing it” is the worst reason in the world. But there’s a reason why everyone is doing it. I dunno, $40-50 gets you a month free. If you play it like you play Resident Evil 4 or HL2 every night and weekend, you’ll get some serious fun in and see if you like it. The worst that can happen is you lose out on $50.