Hi, my name is Rihahn and I’ve been WoW free for six months…
I’ve played a lot of MMOs… A *lot* of MMOs. I’d say they are my favorite form of entertainment even.
MMOs are interactive, challenging, social, and even fun, and they cost conciderably less than a lot of other forms of entertainment… A typical MMO costs $15 a month to play – a typical two hour movie costs that much, and more if you pick up some popcorn and a soda and factor in the $3 a gallon gas you burned to make the trip… And that’s just one night’s worth of entertainment.
Justification aside, I’ve started playing ‘World of Warcraft’ again.
What drove me away from the game was the time requirements for the end-game raiding I was doing. It was becomming a second job to be at the right instance at the right time and then spend the next 5-6 hours (on a weeknight) with the ‘team’ turning that instance upside down… It was fun, but I just don’t have that kind of time with work and all.
So I quit – cold turkey… I even sold off my seriously epic level 70 priest just to not have any temptation to play again.
Since I quit WoW I’ve played ‘Lord of the Rings Online’, ‘Tabula Rasa’, ‘Eve Online’, the beta for ‘Mythos’, ‘Horizons’, ‘City of Villans’, ‘Everquest 2′, “Dungeons and Dragons Online’, ‘Pirates of the Burning Sea’, and ‘Vanguard: Saga of Heroes’… Some with folks from work, some with folks I’ve played the particular MMO with in the past…
But all of these various MMOs just aren’t as fun as Warcraft – in some cases they are simply not as good as WoW and other cases even border on broken (I’m looking at you Vanguard…).
There is a real reason 9 million people play Warcraft… Everything else is a various level of ‘not as good’.
So, yeah, I’m playing Warcraft again. This time though I’m thinking I’m going to try a different tack to things.
My past experiences in Warcraft (and the MMOs I’ve played in general) have all been high-end raiding guilds which, as I’ve mentioned before, require almost second-job levels of dedication to succeed. This time I’m going to set things up purely for Battleground and Arena competitions.
In Warcraft there are certain structured player-versus-player elements that one can participate in – almost mini-games even – that require somewhere in the 30 minutes to an hour timeframe to complete and, due to the player-driven aspects of them, are even more fun than boss fights. These ‘Battlegrounds’ range from a simple team-based capture-the-flag game to a full-on war zone where the object is to kill the other side’s leaders.
The other player-versus-player game in Warcraft is something called the Arena. The arenas are structured areas where teams of 2, 3, or 5 players duke it out, last man standing style. There are strict matching rules based on points, and there are no external elements allowed so what you bring with you is all that you have. A typical Arena match lasts about 5 minutes wih a long one lasting for about 20 minutes.
With both of these types of game play there are certain awards for winning in the form of weapons, armor, and other items, and these awards are on par with the stuff a high-end raiding guild can recover from the depths of an 8-hour instance.
So, my goal now is to form a guild of like-minded players specifically for these PvP aspects of Warcraft.
I figure I should be able to pull this off easy enough… I have achieved a “Duelist” title in season 1, meaning I was in the top 3% of all PvP players in my battlegroup (a collection of around 10 servers), I have achieved a ‘Warlord’ title back when you could earn ranks in Battleground combat, and have worked with a raid guild all the way through Illidan (the last ‘Boss’ in the game currently). So I think I have the chops to put together something epic, I just need some good players.
So, in this regard I will be forming a guild on the Alliance side, on the “Tanaris” server. I have a couple of people from work who might be joining in as well. If you’re interested, roll up an Ally character on Tanaris and drop “Valinye” an message in game.