What's Wrong With WOW - Timesink

Opinion from Matt - Tuesday, 04 May 2010 @ 12:33pm

It’s a little known fact that World of Warcraft is a gas. It expands to fill the space it’s given. And then just a little bit more.

Unfortunately as WoW expands it can also start to push things out of your life, steadily replacing other activities. At best those things could be other leisure activities, reading comics, watching TV, or whatever. But sometimes it can grow and consume social occasions, jobs, and even children and marriages.

WoW is relatively unsatisfying to play for short periods. It demands a degree of dedication that makes it the opposite of a casual game. Much of the gameplay is inherently boring, let's be honest. It consists of what essentially comes down to “grinding” something or other to achieve your goal. This process of grinding comes to its peak in “rep farming”, achieving reputation levels with groups to get minor rewards, sometimes through painfully repetitive trivial jobs.

Blizzard has made a serious effort in recent years to reduce the grind, and to make the game and the experience more welcoming and enjoyable for new players and for players with shit to do. But all of this is relative. In fact, time in front of WoW is startlingly relative. Terms like “casual” are redefined for the World of Warcraft player to sometimes include very long periods. It's like "casual sex" if you had to be married first.

How much is “a lot” is relative to how much you play yourself. Many people come home from school or work and log straight on, leaving only to go to bed at 3 am. They’ll spend 8 hours a day playing. They play quite a lot. Many others spend a few hours a day, several days a week. That’s normal. To someone like me, who rarely plays at all it seems insane.

Except that I don’t “rarely play at all”. I just think I do because multiple hours a day seems like a reasonable baseline. So the few hours a week I spend – more than on all other games combined - is not much at all to me. But to a loved one who doesn’t play at all, it seems like an eternity.

World of Warcraft can be a satisfying and enjoyable hobby if you do it right. Like a dog, or a woman, you have to establish clear boundaries so they don’t get out of control.

How can it be fixed?

It probably can't, completely. The MMO genre is essentially a timesink by definition. Blizzard has added certain things to World of Warcraft to try to provide a more casual and less intensive gameplay experience for those who can't and won't commit the time to be "real wow players". The addition of Achievements added a "something to do" for those who weren't raiding, and other changes such as the new random dungeon system allow positive progression with a reasonable reward-for-time.

A lot of players complain about these changes, of course. They feel the game has been "dumbed down" and call the gear these players have "welfare epics". Still, despite the criticism from the elitist assholes I think Blizzard has done a reasonable job at supporting multiple play styles and levels of commitment. There's just only so much that can be done within the genre.