World of Warcraft is enjoyed by millions upon millions of people nearly everyday and has been declared as one of the most successful MMO’s if not games in recent memory. Then pray tell why do I hate this game so much. Every piece of media in our world today has its haters and detractors, based solely on the fact that it is loved by someone else. A good example of this is the Twilight series. Naïve teen girls all over the country flock to the books and films while others rail against it’s popularity and it’s poor representation of vampires. World of Warcraft also suffers against this however instead of it’s detractors being the majority like in Twilight’s case it is the inverse.

I have found myself to be a very small voice in a massive forest of praise for the World of Warcraft phenomena. For years I have found it’s simplistic art style to be off putting, it’s character creator laughable, and the mindset of it’s players to be overly enthusiastic for a otherwise mildly mediocre game. Naturally the argument can be made against me is that I haven’t played the game fully enough to understand it’s inner workings and it’s blossoming new culture of players. Sadly I can’t argue against that simple line of logic, so I have decided to combat that view by playing the game (god help me).

MMO’s are not a complete mystery to me and I quite enjoy them, but I feel that they are like a good horror film, very few good ones exist in a massive sea of bottomless shit. My first MMO was a little piece of work called Earth and Beyond. The game had the same basic trappings of all standard MMO’s but in the end the game was just boring. I had my run in Ultima which proved to be fun with friends and nothing more. I tried out The Matrix Online which only proved that the series had died out well before I wanted to admit. Diablo became a cornerstone of my online persona for nearly a full year and my Pole arm Barbarian was just too much fun to play at times. But it was my foray into the world of City of Heroes that became my undoing.

As of today City of Heroes is a barren wasteland of superheroless alleyways and skyscrapers but once upon a time it was bustling with do goodery. I played CoH very early on at the peak of it’s power even before World of Warcraft was released. For nearly two and half years I played CoH nearly exclusively with my friends and family. We where all on the same server and I created many a superhero persona. My greatest hero was Robo Sam a boxer that, under unusual circumstances, had to have his mind implanted into a robot body. Robo Sam was a member of the Robot Death Squad super group and defeated many an enemy. Combined with an incredible in-depth character creator, a mildly simplistic combat system, and a believable comic book style world to play in CoH had everything this gamer needed.

Naturally after some time and several characters later it was time to hang up the cape. After a couple of stints back into again Diablo I watched several of my friends enter into the arena of World of Warcraft. Initially I chided them for getting into, the by then the massively popular, game. Realizing my hypocrisy I decided to download the free trail. For a week I played as an Orc Warrior. I was on my own and in a desert. When I left the starting area I discovered there was more desert which I continued to play in until I felt like a thirsty homeless man humping a dying cactus. Long story short I stopped playing.

That was some time ago and no other MMO’s have captured my attention. I’ve had the itch to get into a new game with my friends and become a part of a new community of players. Well Star Trek Online does come out for a little while and I’m very tired of the Star Wars Universe so I will not be playing that anytime soon. A couple of days ago my friends decided to get back into WoW after a few months off and they wanted to gear up with all new characters. I found this as another opportunity to try and get into the game and figure out why this phenomena is so wide spread.

Therefore I would like to write down my experiences once a week to get a feel of the game. For me this will be like an exploration into the wild unknown. I tipped my foot into the waters before but this time I’m going for the entire swim into this Olympic sized swimming pool. I’m betting that sometimes I’m going to be mad, sad, and extremely frustrated and hopefully this will provide a humorous read for anyone who would like to ride along. Well here we go.

We will all choose how we die eventually--either actively, through an advance directive, or by default, through the substituted judgment of others -Jacob M. Appel