YES

Really? You’ll let me play ten days of a game with no actual way to win for FREE?

Gosh, how do I pass that up…

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What Exar said, plus you do win even if it isn’t in the way you’re thinking. The game’s divided up into many, many, many, many quests that you do for people. So if somebody tells you “go and kill this guy because he is a dick”, and you kill the dick in question, and return to the person who told you to kill him, you “win”, and you get a reward.

Also, you’re only a year older than me so you might remember back when adventure games (such as Space Quest) were big. Those games were all about guiding your character through a story and solving puzzles to figure out how to move on to the next chapter. With WoW it’s pretty much the same thing, as there are a lot of stories in-game

Give you an example. When you arrive in one place, somebody tells you that the son of his chieftain has gone missing and asks you to investigate. He tells you where to start and what to look for. After you look there, there’s another step, and eventually you wind up killing a couple of bad guys and bringing them to a witch doctor so he can bring their heads back to life for you to interrogate. 🙂 Once you find out where the guy is, you have to go and save him, and once he’s back with his family and his tribe safe and sound and everything is back to normal, you can consider that a “win”. Then you can go on and look for other things to do. There are more interesting and difficult quest chains than that one, but even summarizing them would make this comment much too long(er).

There’s also PVP combat, where you win or lose battles or gladiatorial bouts against other players. In the case of the gladiator stuff, people actually form teams with other players to participate in a “season” of arena combat where teams advance or are eliminated over time in a tournament, with the last ones left standing getting an awesome prize.

At the very least, try it before you form an opinion one way or the other. Hell, it wasn’t all that long ago that you were talking about how much you hated people who said that certain comics sucked even though they were not reading said comics and therefore wouldn’t know.

Not that I’m gonna say WoW is all perfect or anything.

For one thing, the reason that so many people spend too much time playing is in part because much of that time is spent either traveling from point A to point B, which is boring and wastes time.

Also, before WoW there was the Warcraft series of RTS games, and in Warcraft III there was a good story in between–and during–missions with some great characters. Now for WoW, Blizzard has decided that it would be awesome for players if they got to fight and kill those same characters, so Blizzard has turned many of them into bosses and made them turn evil so that they need to be taken down. Once they’re dead, that’s the end of their story, meaning that they’re never gonna turn up in a Warcraft IV.

For one guy it goes like this: “…after narrowly escaping death he went back home. Then he went crazy and started doing terrible things that were totally out of character for him, tormenting his people, until finally some nameless nobodies who happened to be real tough came along and killed him. The end.”

You might not be able to fully appreciate how much this sucks for people who like a particular character unless you know the whole story about that character, so I’ll make up an analogy using a character that you do know and like. Let’s say they made a Legion of Super Heroes game that was considered canon by DC. In the game, Brainiac 5 goes crazy and turns into a villain (which has happened before in the comic, so it’s not too far-fetched). So your character, whom you have custom-designed and who doesn’t really have a back-story or anything beyond the fact that it’s you, is supposed to defeat him and kill him. DC just assumes that Brainy has died at the hands of players, makes it canon, and in the next issue of LoSH Brainy isn’t there. He’s dead. He died off-panel, at the hands of…somebody or other.

That would suck hard, wouldn’t it? If you have a good character who is liked or loved by lots of fans, then the character deserves to go down in a blaze of glory against a worthy foe, as opposed to some interchangeable anonymous player character.

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“f the answer to the question ARE THERE ELVES AND DWARVES IN YOUR MMO? is “yes” or “sometimes” or “possibly” or basically anything but “absolutely not in a million fucking years,” I’m out.”

That’s racist.

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I just saw the William Shatner commercial for WOW. The Mr. T. commercial above? 1000 times better, especially with the bitch-slap to the director. -grin-

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MBK: I am perfectly fine with being that kind of racist.

I probably shouldn’t have put that statement on the internet.

Rob: But, the possibility of elves and dwarves is still there. I’ll take my CoX any day of the week; I get jazzed leaping around cityscapes way more than I ever could running across endless fantasy-scapes. Different strokes.

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“MBK: I am perfectly fine with being that kind of racist.”
I shall file that away and quote it out of context sometime when I need to torpedo your political career.

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I shall file that away and quote it out of context sometime when I need to torpedo your political career.

SNRK! 😀

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