WarCrack

If your thinking about buying the game World of Warcraft, you should seriously consider re-evaluating your life.  I’m sure most of you saw the South Park episode that deals with this, but just so you know, IT’S ALL TRUE!  There were no exaggerations in that parody whatsoever.  You literally get sucked into an online world where the only thing that matters is how much of your life you have wasted running around a virtual world.  If you are still thinking to yourself “Ah come on 4ngryG4mer, if 6 million people play it, it can’t be that bad…” continue reading.

You start off in what I like to call, the complete-and-utter-NOOB stage.  You start to level your character by running around clicking on the same 2 buttons to kill things over and over again.  Meanwhile the acronyms, pointless arguments, obscure terminology and stupid Chuck Norris jokes constantly flying across the chat channels aren’t helping you figure anything out.  Just when you get to the point where the 100 people in your particular chat channel are not calling you a noob for asking stupid questions that you would otherwise have absolutely no way of knowing, BLAM someone asks you if you want to go on a raid. 

A raid, in this game, when you first start to do them, happens when some random person shoots you a “whisper”.  Then, after you get ridiculed by 15 other people already in the know for asking how to “whisper” someone back, the conversation usually goes something like… 

SomeToolbag:  “Want to do stockades?”

Immanoob:  “Huh?”

SomeToolbag: “We need a mage”

Immanoob:  “What do you need me for?”

SomeToolbag:”Go to SW”

Immanoob: “SW?”

SomeToolbag: “OMG Stormwind”

Immanoob: “How do I get there?”

SomeToolbag: “Fly from IF (Iron Forge)”

Immanoob: “I don’t have the flightpath”

SomeToolbag: “You will have to run, head south down to Blackwood Forest”

(25 min later)

SomeToolbag: “r u coming?”

Immanoob:  “sorry, died, running back to body”

(25 min later)SomeToolBag: ”are you here yet?”

Immanoob:  “I’m here, where do I go?”

SomeToolBag:  “Where are you?  I’ll come find you”

Immanoob:  “I’m by this giant fireplace looking thingy”

(25 min later)

SomeToolbag: “where are you?”

Immanoob: “I fell into the canal and I can’t get out”

…and so on…and so on. 

So then, finally get the raid started.  A few dozen wipes (that’s when everyone dies and you all have to run back to your bodies) later, the entire group is yelling at you for getting agro (that’s when you “aggravate” a “mob”, a “mob” is a computer enemy).  At this point,  the group usually disbands and you just wasted 4 hours of your life trying to learn how to do an instance, which, in the grand scheme of the game, you should have been able to defeat with your left nut.  

The next phase in the game is what I like to call the “Questing-to-level-phase”.  This is where you get to watch your character spend hours flying from place to place, where upon arrival, you get the click the same 15 (you have new spells/abilities by now) buttons over and over again to complete the tasks that you are given.  Meanwhile, while your doing this, you die all of the sudden and you have no idea why.  Never mind, you can just spend 5 minutes running back to your body.  Oh, but then when you finally get there and resurrect, you die again.  After completing this cycle a few times you figure out you are being killed by a much higher level of the opposite faction over and over again for absolutely no reason except that he or she is a complete asshole and has nothing better to do.  (This is called “camping”)  You then spend your days dreaming of the day when YOU are the high level asshole who is camping other unsuspecting noobs.  You finally get there.  You are level 70.  Oh wait, we forgot to tell you.  Since you spent all of your time trying to quickly level your character, your character has items from when you were level 45, and that being the case, you might as well be trying to shoot them with a rubber band, because it doesn’t hurt them. 

At this point you realize that you need to get better “gear” for your character.  So you do the next logical thing and join a guild.  This is my all-time most hated thing on the entire earth.  A “guild” is a group of players that do raids and other in-game activities together to fight enemies that would be otherwise impossible to defeat.  Blizzard, in all of their wisdom, made the end-game “mobs” so powerful that you have to band together with 39 other players at the same time to beat them.  What a great idea.  Now, it takes 40 people to be at their computer, not taking a piss, not getting yelled at by mommy and daddy for playing all day, paying attention, and NOT FUCKING SUCKING ASS at the game.  PLUS, if/when, after multiple wipes because johnny 13 year old had to go to bed, or Timmy The Toolbag’s roommate who actually HAS a college social life came home drunk and puked on his computer,  you finally DO defeat the enemy, he drops 3 or 4 items if your lucky.  This is where the ultimate douschebaggery comes in. 

Now it’s time to decide who gets the loot.  These completely biased decisions are made by the guild “officers”.  Guild officers are the absolute biggest losers on the face of this earth.  Pick the nerdiest, dorkiest, socially inept loser that you have ever met in your entire life, multiply that by 75, and you have yourself a guild officer.  These are people who spend all of their time working out solutions for in-game social problems amongst the guild members.  They derive a sense of power and responsibility by performing the tedious, but oh-so-important tasks of: A) Keeping track of DKP (This is a sort of in-guild currency that a guild member can use to gain access to items that the guild earns) B) Deciding who gets to go on a particular raid.  C) Deciding who gets to join the guild.  And last but not least, D) Leading a raid. (deciding which buttons the particular raid members are responsible for clicking)  

After several hundred days (literally full 24 hr. periods) of your life spent questing, flying around, farming for gold/items, watching the auctions, waiting for people in raids, running back to your body, running from horde, getting stuck/lost in a cave, dropping out of school, losing any sense of a social life, gaining 35 pounds, and conquering countless monsters or players of the other faction, you can proudly plant your character outside the gates of iron forge and scoff at all who challenge you to a duel.  You will feel the awe and enchantment when level 60 character with tier 1 gear gets off of their mount, bows before you and respectfully asks where you got a staff that has +346 spell damage.  Never mind the girlfriend that left you months ago.  Never mind getting kicked out of college for failing all of your classes that start before 3:00 pm.  You will have the greatest character on your server.  And if, because you are such a incredibly talented MMO player, you ever decide that you have conquered the World of Warcraft and it is time to move on, you can sell your character on ebay for around $600, amounting to .000001 cents per hour as compensation for your time.

Have fun toolbags.