World of Warcraft: My return
Yes, alas I have returned to World of Warcraft. What a terrible fate, I know! However it is one of the few games that runs well on my laptop. I transferred to a new server; Gnomeregan, which is a Western US server. My friend Jeff is there, as well as my other friend Richard. While I don't really play with them as I do not raid, I still enjoy hanging out with them on occasion. Sadly my TF2 server seems to have died / I have really lost the will to try to keep it alive. See a post about TF2 I made a few months ago which may hint at why I don't really find the game enjoyable anymore. I will keep the server going however so long as people still play there every now and then, and donate. Civ 5 is also a great game, and does surprisingly work reasonably well on my laptop. However the games usually last forever, and can't be completed in a single night. So then there is World of Warcraft. My first impressions after returning from a 1.5 year absence was that leveling a new character is really fricken easy now. All you have to do is grind away at the fairly easy starting quests until your level 15... Then use the LFG (Looking for Group) tool and find a random group for a dungeon. Keep spamming dungeon runs and before you know it you can easily be high level within the span of a couple weeks of casual play. The LFG tool combines you with a group of people made up of players who also used the LFG tool... but they may be on different servers then your own. So the requirement for you to find a group of friends to rely upon for grouping is no longer existant. Now you don't need to socialize with anyone. I find it kind of ironic that a multiplayer game now acts more like a single player game then anything else. For me, half the fun of playing wow was meeting people and the desire to be a good respected player. So in a way, while the LFG tool is nice. It pretty much killed the social aspect of the game. Another thing I notice is that the game is far easier now. As a solo level 30 warlock I can easily solo 2 elite mobs in gnomer without breaking a sweat, while the rest of the group kills other things. 2 years ago, that would of been a death sentence. Seems like human players take less damage now, regenerate health and mana quicker between fights (eliminating the need for food or drink), and gain more xp per kill. Apparently I have been told that End game heroics are also easy like that as well now. So where is the challenge? Personally I don't think its right that Blizzard caved to the whiners who couldn't handle the game the way it was made. I suppose this opens the game up to more casual players who may not have the time to play for long periods - like myself. But it kills the whole base of the game.