Bash My Face In

When I first got into World of Warcraft, the whole aspect of modifying the user interface was amazing to me; it gave me yet another thing to do besides questing, leveling, and battlegrounds.

There was quite awhile where I quit caring about what my interface looked like, I have a job, and my play time was limited to about an hour a day.  Why waste that time setting up a interface?  I think that my default interface was actually preventing me from playing my best.  I was a clicker, my frames were too big, so I couldn’t see stuff… I wanted to make a change.  I was listening to The Instance podcast at work, and they mentioned a compilation that someone had put together called CoehlUI.  I downloaded it and setup was very quick and easy.  So now, my interface looks pretty.

What does your interface look like?

I ran across a post today that mentions that, “For a few people I know personally, the game just isn’t interesting anymore, and they say that Warcraft has started its crash-and-burn, the downward spiral into oblivion.”  Now, there’s a lot more to the post (it’s huge) and you should go read it when you have some time, but I don’t agree with this at all.

Back when I started playing World of Warcraft, there was so much to do, the world is massive and there are a ton of quests, so many instances; I couldn’t imagine this game ever having an end, ever coming to a close.  Then when the first expansion came out, it confirmed my belief that this game could never end, it would never end.

I missed the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, I definitely joined the party late for that expansion.  However, when I did join, there was still so much to do, so much to explore, so much lore (that I actually felt a part of, unlike any other expansion), and so many achievements to get, I was pumped and still am.  I haven’t even started raiding!

From what I’ve seen in the past, when a new expansion is planned to be released, people get apathetic and they don’t want to run instances/raids anymore.  When burning crusade was going to be released, all I heard was, “What? Why would I raid, all my gear’s going to be outdated in three weeks, anyway” and I think this is going on now.  Players have caught wind of the new expansion, the next big thing, and they’re starting to see what they’re doing now as, pointless and possibly even obsolete.  Like Pixelated Executioner says, they released information about Cataclysm way to early from it’s release date.

World of Warcraft has been apart of my life since mid 2005.  That’s over four years of the time of this post.  I’ve put so much of my time into this game, that it’s very difficult for me to believe that the game will ever finish.  I just added up the time played on my characters and I have 200+ days played amongst my characters.  This might be a small number to some people, but it’s a pretty big number for me.  I’m attached to my characters.  I don’t want them to fade into history and not get any attention.

Now, I’m not arguing that World of Warcraft will be supported by Blizzard forever.  I’m not niave enough to think that people will always want to play, no matter what, or that Blizzard will even want to keep World of Warcraft alive, they’re developing a new MMO as we speak.  We’ve seen several “WoW Killers” come and go (Warhammer, Aion, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online),  if something’s going to kill WoW, I think it will (and should) come from Blizzard.  But, I do think that as long as Blizzard keeps pumping out good content for World of Warcraft, people will keep playing and the game will live on.