My son is a lazy gamer. In Warcraft III, he prefers to play the god games where you gather all the power ups and then are pretty much unbeatable. He knows where they all are, grabs them, waits for people to find him, then puts his guy on auto while he watches TV. The other players send wave after wave of lower powered units at him and he just mows them down.
He’s having trouble finding those sorts of games now. I suggested trying the more competitive maps where ranked clans go to train, but he doesn’t do as well on those.
He’s been kind of lazy in MMOs, too. I don’t mind, I really don’t think MMOs are a very good way to spend your time if you have anything else to do. I don’t, so I’m okay with my time spent on them, but I’d rather my children lived real lives.
He got to his fifties on EQ1 with his monk before giving up, and his mid-forties with his brigand in EQ2. It’s harder to find groups past these points, and very hard to find any that will support random AFKs to do IMs, watch TV a little, or play a round of football on the PS2.
I was just playing around in WoW, running my 36 rogue solo through Deadmines (my favorite WoW instance) on my laptop while my main computer downloaded the EQ2 beta. My son came up, wondered what I was doing. He’d seen me play WoW before, of course — it was my main game for months — but until he saw WoW on South Park, it wasn’t cool.
He took the laptop, made a new Tauren druid, got that to 7, restarted as an undead warlock, was having fun with that. I got thinking… this might be the one MMO that really catered to people who like playing in short bursts peppered with bunches of AFKs… I definitely saw lots and lots of kids just like him when I was playing. Trashtalking people with short attention spans… doesn’t that really define the typical WoW player? It sure did for me.
My son got me to install WoW on his computer so he didn’t always have to be on my laptop. Warcraft III is more or less forgotten.
I was just about to cancel WoW, too, and save that money for another game. I might do as I did with City of Heroes — just cancel and go to gamecards. That way, when my son loses interest and moves on to the next big thing, I won’t be left with a recurring fee.
2 thoughts on “My Son vs the World (of Warcraft)”
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I was looking for a paragraph I had previously read on your site when I came across this article. Since you haven’t yet cancelled your WoW account yet, if you want people to do Deadmines with, we have several people in levelling twinks or their rerolled mains.
Not only do I, the guild master, love Battlestar Galactica, Eureka and Firefly, the guild is full of people who love cats. In a guild of thirty, we have a vetinary surgeon (Fizzik), one vet (Kaidra), one person who worked at vetinary hospital (Ninjawombat) and one person studying to become a vet (I forget).
I won’t litter your web site with more spam, but take a look at the link above. Come to the Forums. “About Us” has a lot of stuff that I’ve written which might make interesting reading if you’re bored at work. And scanning the “Recruiting” forum would allow you to see who your guildmates could be.
And please do feel free to reject this comment. I really am interested in you the player and not free advertising. As you can see from the following link, I’m willing to pay for my ads:
http://www.gunpowderandmagic.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=9&mode=&order=0&thold=0
I did finally cancel my WoW account. After a brief bit of interest from my son, he returned to Warcraft III. Everquest II is just more fun for me. I wouldn’t worry about advertising; I doubt many people come to this blog any more for WoW news.
WoW is a nice way to pass the time, but once you’ve played through Alliance once and Horde once, you’re not getting anything different any more. I tried restarting on another server, I tried rolling alts… nothing could match the fun of the first time through.
It’s true that WoW would have been a lot more fun if I had known anyone in the game, but it seemed everyone I met was either super hardcore and spent ten hours a day farming mats, grinding faction and running instances, or were total weenies who got pissed if they ever thought they weren’t the center of everyone’s attention. On Vent, my guildmates seemed to be young boys from around 12-15, and it really became clear just how little I had in common with most of the people I met.
The drama was horrid. I’m not sure how much I blogged because at the time I played WoW, my guildmates read this and I didn’t want to make things worse than they were. But people were always leaving en masse for stupid reasons, forming short-lived guilds, saying we should BG PvP more or world PvP more or push into BWL or do endless MC trash runs or half a million other things which all funneled into what they thought would benefit themselves the most.
I wish you luck with your guild. When I leave EQ2, it will probably be for something new rather than something I have already done. Twice. WoW will survive as long as, somewhere, there is a twelve year old boy with a power fantasy and a computer.