Diablo III, Boredom, and the Paragon System

I've never really understood the appeal of Diablo's endless, repetitive style of play - insert World of Warcraft joke here. The whole gameplay system revolves around the acquisition of items. Said items make you a more effective killing machine, enabling you to acquire more items, and so on. In Diablo III, you literally experience every bit of content the game has to offer by level 30 (or sooner, depending on how quickly you progress through Normal difficulty). From there, you slog through the content another two times to hit 60, which opens up exactly nothing new except the Inferno difficulty. The only thing you're potentially gearing up for is the PvP system, which Blizzard has already stated will be a "for fun" addition and not a balanced potential eSport.

Bottom line, people are getting bored with the game; I took a monk into Act 4 Inferno, wondered why I was still playing, and stopped logging on about two months ago. Player numbers are steadily falling, with some estimates from July putting the number at about a 65% drop-off. Fewer players means fewer items are being picked up, which hits Blizzard where it hurts - the wallet. Blizzard takes a 15% cut of every item sold on the real-money auction house (RMAH), so their potential income stream dries up a little bit more every time someone steps away from the game.

WoW Mists of Pandaria Cinematic

Blizzard released the Mists of Pandaria opening cinematic today at Gamescom. While I don't play WoW any more, I've got to admit that the guys at Blizzard know what they're doing when it comes to cinematics.

Mists of Pandaria will be released on September 25th.

WoW the Third: Thrilling Conclusion

This is the last part of my World of Warcraft discussion. For the initial post, a description of my four years spent playing WoW, click here. Part two, what I believe to be some of the game's current flaws, can be found here.

Looking back at my two previous posts, it's easy to see that World of Warcraft can quickly become a second job. The game has both depth and breadth of content and allows players to experience each part of the game at their own pace. I took the progression of my character pretty seriously and ended up spending a significant amount of time improving said character over the course of four years. My WoW resumé was and still is pretty solid, but in the end, where did that get me?

This was probably half of my play time.

Tallying up both the time and money I spent on WoW was pretty sobering. I accumulated over 325 days of play time and spent over 900 bucks on WoW over the course of 4 and a half years. That's basically 20% of my time; factor in 8 hours of sleep every day (which I'll admit is generous) and I spent almost 30% of my waking hours logged into WoW during a 4-year span. Sure, some of that time was spent AFK or using the game as a glorified chat room, but the large majority of that was active gameplay. I guess you could say I got my money's worth and then some.

WoW Continued: The Flaws of Blizzard's Billion-dollar Amusement Park

Here's a continuation of my thoughts on World of Warcraft, Blizzard's multi-zillion-dollar MMO success. For Part I of the series, a not-so-brief review of my time in WoW, click here.

untitled (Tim Ove Bjånesøy) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

I cancelled my WoW subscription at the end of 2009. I jumped on a couple of free "please come back to the game" trial offers since then, but I've basically been WoW-free for the last couple of years. If you manage to keep your head down while playing the game and keep handing $15 checks to Blizzard month after month, you'll find that there's an ever-increasing range of stuff to do in the game. If you take a step back and look at your subscription history, you realize that you've paid hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars over the years to basically do the same thing over and over.

World of Warcraft is an amusement park with a $15 admission fee. Once you buy a ticket you can ride everything as many times as you want, all month long. Every few years they throw a new coat of paint on everything and open up another couple of roller coasters, but when you've been lining up for the same rides every week for the past four years the thrills aren't quite the same. Every new ride seems like a pieced-together version of previous attractions with a few less loops and a lowered height requirement.

History of the World (of Warcraft): Part I

In deciding which game to write about for my first game-focused post, I figured I should start with the title that I've played more than any other game in the past 10 years or so. Heck, it's probably my most-played game ever.

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 during my freshman year of college. I had played a little bit of Warcraft II and heard one of my friends talk about Warcraft III, but to be honest I wasn't that interested in WoW. I remember sitting in a Multivariable Calculus recitation one day, looking around the room while the TA went over a homework problem. 5 or 6 kids in the room were playing WoW and paying little attention to what was going on around them - the university required everyone to have a pretty beefy laptop coming into their freshman year, so basically everyone on campus had a portable WoW-capable machine. I wondered why anyone would want to pay $15 a month to play a game.

Fast-forward to 2005. One of my online friends with whom I had fragged with for 3 or 4 years finally convinced me to give the game a try. I managed to pick up the game for around 30 bucks, so I remember thinking to myself, "If I play out my free month and then pay for a couple more I'll be on the hook for $60," basically the cost of any other game out there.

Four years later I finally cancelled my subscription.