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Is WOW to - I don't know......
Kryziz
Member UncommonPosts: 127
I'm just wondering about peoples observations. Do you think that you have to enjoy the game game by spending 5-7 hours a night to get good gear, or can you just enjoy the game 1 hour a day. I keep wondering what this game is all about time to time. It seems like you can't get anything done unless you become an addict, and guilds won't let you in, unless you have really nice gear, you attained from being an addict.
I'm wondering if anyone here is successful with the game, and doesn't have family or job issues because of it, and still has a high rating pvp wise and is clearing high level dungeons.
Comments
It depends.. what is fun to you? Having gear? If the whole definition of 'fun' revolves around comparing your gear to other players.. then you probably can't enjoy this game unless you join a guild.
Does your definition of fun involve exploration, crafting, questing, pvp, or just whooping on some mobs.. then yes, you can have fun.
Even if you talk about gear.. it's not that hard to get decent gear. Right now I am sitting in all epic iLevel200 stuff with a few pieces of iLevel 213 stuff. I am NOT in a raiding guild. I pug heroics and I pug 10 and 25Man OS and Vault. None of those things take more than an hour at a time, and they can all be done whenever you have the time to do it (no scheduling involved).
This is what I do every day. I log in and do the cooking daily, and pick up the heroic daily quest. Then i join the LFG tool (for the heroic). I also keep an eye on it for pug OS and pug vault runs. I then do quests or gather mats for inscription. I also make sure to do my 'northrend research' for inscription every day. If I catch a Wintergrasp game, I go in and join that. It is a lot of fun, and even being in PVE gear I do really well.
So far I've seen every heroic multiple tiimes. I've run 10 and 25 version of Vault and OS multiple times, and I even was picked up for a Naxx 10 run (from the LFG channel), so I've seen most of Naxx.
All of this without joining a guild or 'scheduling' anything around the game. Also, since you mentioned 'high rating'.. I'd also point out that you get high rating by 'winning' not by playing a lot. You can have a very high arena rating and get the best pvp gear by only playing 4-5 hours per week. Assuming you win. PVP is not about grind or time at all anymore... which is why bad pvpers complain about the arena system so much
you can have tons of fun without a guild. 1 of my friends was guildless from just before wrath came out to just a week ago. obviously if the only fun thing in the game for you is completing all the raids and end-game then you need to spend more time on it than if you were just questing or crafting. also, you can spend 5 hours on WoW and not be an addict. an addict is someone who is totally dependant on 1 thing and basically can't get away from it without losing their sanity.
as far as guilds go, there are plenty of social guilds out there who just play the game and enjoy people's company, occasionally doing a group quest or a heroic or raid. and with blizzard making the raids easier than they were in TBC, you don't need totally amazing gear to get into a raid.
basically what I'm saying here is its up to you if you have fun playing WoW.
There are several common misconceptions about WoW.
1). End game is the best/worst part.
It's true that most people spend the majority of their time at max level. That's because it's pretty easy to hit max level and most don't then want to start all over with another character. However there are quite a few people that have many many alts. When one hits max level, they start another. Or perhaps they play several at once and it takes a very long time for them to ever get 1 to max level. For these people, they rarely do any of the end-game stuff. That's me for the most part. I have 8 toons at level 70 or above and 2 more at around 40. I actually enjoy playing the level 40's more than I do the level 70's. Why? Because at level 40 it's very easy to get another level. Go spend an hour or 2 and you can gain another level, possibly a new skill or 2, put in a new talent point, etc. It's harder to do that the closer you get to max level and impossible to do once you've hit max level. For me, it's all about the journey to end game. There are a lot of us out there. You just have to know what your looking for.
2). You have to be in a guild.
I am actually in a guild, but there's only about 3 people left in the guild and if I weren't in a guild at all, very little would change for me. I rarely see the other members of the guild and yet I still have fun. No, I don't do any raiding now, but I've done a bit in the past. You just have to find someone who needs another raider and then show up, on time and ready to do your part. It's not nearly as tough as people make it out to be.
3). You have to play a bunch to get good gear.
Simply not true. With rest you can play only an hour or so a day and you will level up quite fast. Once you hit max level there are tons of ways to get gear. Not the greatest gear of all time mind you, but certainly gear that's useable. New gear is put into play much less than you realize, so chances are even if it takes you 6 months to get the gear you want, that will still be before that gear becomes obsolete. Too many people think they have to have the newest gear 2 weeks after it becomes available, but then they sit in that gear for 6 months to a year and wonder why they get bored with it.
I dunno...
I've found myself asking people I know who play and love WoW what it is that has them "hooked"... Because in all the times I've given the game a go, I just can't get hooked... as in "enjoying it enough to play it for the long term".
Not bashing WoW at all here. I honestly wonder if there's something with the game that I'm just totally missing. I'm an avid gamer and love MMOs... but WoW just does not capture and keep my attention for more than a week or two for some reason.
Their answers have been myriad, but none were very "definitive". There was no one or two or three specific things they could hang their answer on. They just enjoy playing. Mind you... none of them fit the ridiculous stereotype of "kiddie carebears who can't handle a real MMO" blah blah... At least some of them came from Lineage 2 (about as opposite WoW as you can get), all are between ages 20-44, except for one who's 19.
One response I did get is "well you're burning out in the really bad part of the game, the 30s and 40s. If you can tough it out and get through those and then get to level 70, it picks up. WoW gets really good at end game."
I have never, ever understood that mentality. When even a fan of the game has to refer to getting through now 1/4th of the game's levels as "toughing it out", that's saying a lot - at least to me. So... if they couldn't definitively identify why they like the game so much.. they've at least identified a reason why I probably can't.
Part of me really wishes I *could* enjoy it... because I'd love to be able to hang out with my good friends online. I just can't stick with it long enough to reach their levels.
Blah :-/
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
That depends on whether it will bother you if other players are higher level than you and have better gear than you. If that does bother you, then yes, you'll have to schedule your life around the game in order to enjoy it. If you're perfectly content to be low level and run around doing low level things and be shut out of a lot on the content entirely, then no, the game doesn't take a huge time commitment.
He said it as best as anyone could. If you're playing simply to have fun for a couple hours a night, be it 1 or 4, WoW is perfect for you. Even with 1 hour a night , you'd be surprised the amount yo ucan get acomplished in this game (I whine about it as being to casual, but I'm one of those people you mentioned that plays like an addict, so the game has become way too easy for me).
sometimes you just have to accept that a particular game just isn't right for you, for whatever reason. I've talked to a few people in other mmo's (LOTRO, CoH, Eve online, etc) and they were the same, couldn't get hooked on WoW. then they changed games and got hooked. I'm the same with the other games, sure I can burn maybe an hour on a different mmo but I could never get hooked on any of them apart from WoW.
QFT.
Between travel and family I rarely have more than a handfull of hours per week (and sometimes per month). WoW affords me a number of options that meet both my play style and time limitations.
Ico
Oh, cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee.
One of the best points to WoW is that you can leave the game for a long time (months even) and still come back and pick up where you left off with little to no effort. Sure things may have changed, but its really easy to get back in the flow of the game.
Like in my case, I left shortly after BC came out and was gone for about a year. I came back for wrath and got caught up to my guild with little effort.
If you try to play the game like its a job thats when it gets old quickly. And like most games, turning off general chat can make the game a little better (Our server seems to have daily chat themes, for example: Tuesdays seems to be anal jokes over trade....)
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
There are a lot of people who play by different styles in the game. Just find a group that shares your common interests and play goals and you will have fun. You might have trouble raiding 10/25 man encounter dungeons, but everything else is doable with your playtime. You might even find groups that do the 10/25 dungeons spread out over several nights once you get to that part of the game.
Short answer is yes, you can get a lot done just playing an hour or so a night. It will take you longer than someone who plays for multiple hours, but the game is not a competition.
I have kids and a full time+ job and have played from one end of the extreme to the other. One thing about the game is you can find just about any type of playstyle you seek.
Take me as a case study. I tried to get grand marshal with my alt by playing 8-12 hours a day. Before that of course I raced my buddies to 60 with two chars using all available time. I worked out of my home so it was f'ing perfect and ridiculas. I think you could safely say I was an addict (and I was popping pain-killers the whole time--a fun two years). Although I haven't quit I'll never be that into it again. I honestly don't let it bother me that I won't have the best gear or be accepted by guilds or even be as good as my friends. It's a game. We're supposed to play it not let it play us. I might go for a stretch where I'm trying to accomplish something and play every night for a week but normally it's just once a week if that. Believe it or not you can still have fun playing once a week. It's a little fix, you accomplish what you can.
It's really the same thing as any other addictive substance. You have people who are totally owned by it like it's their whole identity, people who are like social users and only do it sometimes with friends (like me now), and people who have to quit completely because they can't do it moderately and want more out of life. It's not that either way is right or wrong but the problem with a video game is it gets old and loses value. So if you've just spent a good part of two years trying to accomplish something that now has no value to you you're screwed.