Originally posted by: Mik3y
is it really worth spending $16 a month to not have a life? 6 million people seem to think its worth it.
I could argue that those who don't play MMORPGs don't have a life; wasting hours sitting in front of a television which offers no social interaction, watching "good entertainment" such as people eating slugs, perhaps drooling a bit...
Regardless, you can have a lot of fun with WoW no matter how much time you have to play - if you just enjoy the experience for what it is. If you want to be level 60 ASAP and have all the nice purple gear you see people using, know that it requires a huge time investment. In addition, IMO the people for whom that's all that matters are missing the whole point of it. The "it's a journey, not a destination" idea applies heavily here.
Edit: The poster above me is FOS. That's how
he has decided to play the game and far from the only option. My more casual guild has up to 3-4 raid per week with absolutely no attendance requirements. Even the folks who don't get to play much due to family / work have gotten some nice gear. If you choose to level to 60 (some people have fun playing a number of classes, none to the level cap) there are some very nice rewards to be had from PvPing rather little and from content which doesn't require a guild nor a large time investment.
All that being said, the game does have its problems. One big one is lag - it's absolutely awful; many servers have login queues of 30-60 minutes or more, mail & vendors take forever to use during peak hours, crafting does as well, PvP is ridiculous as players' positions aren't updated in anywhere near realtime, etc. You can choose a low-population server to avoid this, but chances are before long it will become a high population server, due to people starting anew on it or due to Blizzard opening up transfers to it from a high-population server. Once you get started and have a time investment in your character(s), switching servers will be a laughable proposition (but one which fanboys will suggest anyway, should you peruse the kiddy corner.. oops, I mean, the official forums) Another is bugs; rather, Blizzard's apathy toward fixing or even addressing them. Many are game-breaking; the evade bug, for example, can wipe a group or raid through no fault of their own. It has been live for
ten months now. As bad as Sony was (they were awful; I'll never purchase another Sony product due mostly to my experience playing EQ), the longest they ever took to fix a truly gamebreaking bug was one month; longest on moderate-severe bugs was 2-3 months. Yet one more is the average low age/intelligence level of the playerbase, though most online games are no different, and many are probably worse.