The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>World of Warcraft is surprisinly good for an MMO. The best way to describe it is a dumbed down MMOrpg with little down time. I have a level 16 night elf rouge on Kil'Jaeden. The only bad part about this game is the fact i have finals next week and I am finding this game addicting</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Yes, Blizzard is good for putting out addicting games. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's because it's not a MMORPG, more like Diablo 3 Online.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Oh give it a rest. :P</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Seriously. They should rename their company Crack Games Co. or Crystal Meth Inc.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>Lvl 16 NE rogue on Lightning's Blade here.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Still whoring out Everquest like it's God's gift to mankind?</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>I'm surprised he didn't pick up EQ2 instead.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Don't get it twisted, Don enjoys Blizzard's addicting games as much as the next man. lol. Even he isn't immune!</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>because EQ2 isn't anything like EQ1 maybe?</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Most people can't recognize a good game if one slap them on the face. That said, WoW is a fun game, but leaves a lot to be desired from a progression point of view. Actually, it's like a step backwards in MMORPG, sacrificing playability for a larger audience.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>I wouldn't say that.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I don't have the time (or desire) to put in the crazy hours some of my friends do though and so I've fallen behind. But it's fun making impromptu alliances for tough missions or just going off and doing your own missions....</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Frankly, I haven't seen an MMO yet that is worth playing for longer than 1-2 months. Churning out level to level is fucking boring after a while. Eventually, you realize that you're just trying to make some stupid numbers go up a notch.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>I like a muliplayer game where i can log on for a half an hour, play, have fun, log off, and have done something more than just ran from one town to another that took the whole half hour. I was a huge fan of D2, i like FPS's like counter strike, and RTS's... most of which are all single player MP's.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's why WoW is not really a MMORPG but more like Diablo 3 Online that you happen to play with 2000 other people and pay a monthly fee. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just that it's not a MMORPG.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>To quote Kreugen from FoH, WoW is only fun when you get a group of people who have absolutely no idea how to play, because winning is way too easy.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I did an elite quest with 4 other guys, 3 of them have no idea how to play their class (the last person at least know what Sap is, though we failed to stop the people who pulled before we can Sap), and it is quite fun with multiple pulls and whatnot. If I have my standard handpicked EQ-ish elite group the quest would've been cake, but it also would've been pretty boring, and I might as well be playing EQ.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>i agree, i tried out the genre, didnt like it, and havent picked up a new one in a long time. I wish i did like it because it sounds like people have tons of fun with them, but i just cant figure out how.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>There's really no way for you to feel attached to a community if it didn't require so much time to play together. It's like you'd never consider the guys you play with on Diablo 2 as part of a community because you probably play with the same person for an hour together at the most.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Way too easy? I've gotten my ass kicked quite a bit, thank you very much. But then again, I might be one of those people who don't know how to play by a MMORPG veteran's standard. I have a blast playing it though...</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>I don't think that makes it *not* an MMORPG. It's just an MMORPG centered around questing rather than simply killing monsters. Also it's not like Diablo 3 because there was nothing "massively multiplayer" about Diablo 3.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I have my fair share of deaths playing solo. But the fact is that if I actually feel like playing like a wimp (i.e. never going anywhere close to anything with a concentration of mobs) then I will never die. Of course that's also pretty boring.

2 people can easily take out 3 things and that's about as many as you can expect to get without doing something horribly stupid. It's trivial if at least one person has a CC ability of any sort (Sap, Poly, etc).</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It just happens if you kill 10 or 20 of a certain types you get 2000 XP to go along with it. 95% of quests are copy and pasted from the 3 basic templates (kill X, collect X, kill boss), and you've lore written by a guy who used to write bad EQ fanfiction.

And the lore in World of Warcraft makes even less sense than EQ's Dragonball style 'these guys can wipe out guys who used to wipe out the universe' lore. I mean, how do the Alliance ever lose so much ground to random thiefs/orcs/whatevers when the said opposition would've gone extinct if they didn't respawn every 25 seconds? Not that I'm worried about such things, but questing implies that the game has a believable story, and WoW is not a believable world. I see East Logging Vale in Elwynn (next to Stormwind, HQ of the alliance) getting slaughtered and no one even cares because there isn't any important quest NPCs and they come back in 30 seconds anyway.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It just happens if you kill 10 or 20 of a certain types you get 2000 XP to go along with it. 95% of quests are copy and pasted from the 3 basic templates (kill X, collect X, kill boss), and you've lore written by a guy who used to write bad EQ fanfiction.

And the lore in World of Warcraft makes even less sense than EQ's Dragonball style 'these guys can wipe out guys who used to wipe out the universe' lore. I mean, how do the Alliance ever lose so much ground to random thiefs/orcs/whatevers when the said opposition would've gone extinct if they didn't respawn every 25 seconds? Not that I'm worried about such things, but questing implies that the game has a believable story, and WoW is not a believable world. I see East Logging Vale in Elwynn (next to Stormwind, HQ of the alliance) getting slaughtered and no one even cares because there aren't any important quest NPCs and they come back in 30 seconds anyway. It's like congratulation you killed soandso the head of the bad guys responsible for all the mess, except he'll be back in 1 minute to continue terrorize the villages again.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>But what can you possibly do in an RPG besides kill and collect stuff? Nothing, which is why that's not a fair point. What makes it good is how the pieces of the game come together and how well things are implemented. I think Blizzard came up with aces on all fronts.

As far as there not being "important" NPC, I suppose you mean truly unique powerful NPCs. This doesn't bother me at all. I enjoy the fantasy feel of bringing my character through a fantasy world and being the one to have an impact on everything. So what if the guy respawns in 2 minutes for someone else to take out? Doesn't bother me one bit. (Besides, at higher levels I think there may be some truly unique NPC out there, but I don't know this for sure.)</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>The story no doubt will get juicer, I'm eagar to do a raid and kill Sylvanis and Thrall, still a big ? if you can attack the Lich King though. Illidan is supposed to be the most powerful NPC in the game.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>I just want to know how the orcs (and by association the tauren and trolls) got into an alliance with the Forsaken, besides the need to have two equal factions.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Just standard handwaving, the enemy is your enemy deal. I mean why on earth are the factions at war at each other again after saving the world from Burning Legion? Even real humans aren't such warmongers.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Kinda convoluted, but I think it goes something like this. The Burning Legion used to control the Orcs (along with the undead). After the orcs were freed from them by Thrall, the Orcs started teaming up with the Taurens and Trolls. But they're all grouped as the Horde...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>In case you hadn't noticed, Humans are a dying race in WarCraft. All of Lorderon belongs to the Undead. They have reason to fight.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Go to Stormwind and it looks like this:

Status of human paladin who died.
Plaque of a new paladin hero who died in War 3.
and somewhere in the game is a new paladin hero who is still alive.

Repeat that for all the heroes. The alliance never runs out of them.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I couldn't get pass the second town every time I played Diablo 2 because the gameplay got soooo boring. There's only so many times you can employ the exact same strategy over and over again. At least RPGs had different strategies you had to employ for different creatures.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Story? There's a story in MMOs?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>And what if you do die? "OH NO!!! I'll need to actually walk to my body and take no penalities!" Dying in WoW is about as trivial as dying in judge-dominioned FFTA.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Dying is when I take time to chat to people (if any happen to be on). It's so pointless you might as well never die in the first place.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>And yet you do the same thing in WoW. Sure there's a lot of ways to NOT do things correctly but there's only one or two ways to do things right.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I've never found Blizzard games to have interesting plots, or RPGs in general for that matter. All of Blizzard's game goes like this:

Bad guys come
Good guys win
Expansion comes out
Bad guys win

Repeat for the next game.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Somebody's gotta step up, what you wanna trade realism for uber bosses? :) Arthas rocks dude. He's one of the coldest villians I've ever seen.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Ha ha, you punster, you.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I don't play WoW. That's my point.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>It's like the opposite of AO's death scheme. Man, was that ever brutal.</div>