30. how to enjoy playing WoW - part 1

As time has gone by I’ve become increasingly phlegmatic about this game called WoW. Below are a bunch of ideas as to how to enjoy WoW. The intention is not that you do them all at the same time; many are contradictory if taken together. They’re simply a bunch of things that I’ve thought about as I tailor the way I play this game to counteract the built-in methodologies that Blizzard employs to keep you burning your RL time on their game and correspondingly keep your wallet open and your sub active.

In order not to crit you for 9000 with a wall-o-text this post is in three parts.

Stop it before you go blind
Counterintuitively, one of the best things you can do to enjoy WoW is to stop playing it! WoW is designed to get you to sub each month and keep you playing repetitively, reinforcing the habit. As such like many MMOs it employs various techniques to keep you in; large MMOs are not always working in your interests. Take a month off and see what else is happening in your life. At the very least you should be able to monitor and control the amount of time you spend and keep it to a level that’s fun. Grinding anything for 10 hours at a time is ‘not’ fun.

Don’t grind (and the exception: grind when the grinding’s good)
WoW is a grinding game. Everything is set up to entice you to carry out actions on a daily basis. But doing the same things on a daily basis, especially when you may not enjoy them is not called a game, it’s called work. Grind if you think the reward is good and worth it but don’t simply move from one mindless grind to another.

Try new stuff
Try different specs, modes of play (pve/pvp) – work to the strengths of the game. Try not to get hung up on ‘perfecting’ your art. Blizzard deliberately ‘unperfects’ your art at each xPac (and recently at each patch) so perfectionism in WoW is a losing game. Wow is large, complex and pretty interesting, built to try to meet the needs of as many players as possible so launch into it and try something new!

More tomorrow folks.

: )


Mogul.