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Life & Arts

'Warcraft' hooks gamers for good

Leet Speak

Derek Lanphier

As much as I am against prostitution, I am a consumer whore when it comes to a little company known as Blizzard Entertainment. 

Not only do I fork over $15 a month for its online game, World of Warcraft, but I have found myself hooked up to a slowly feeding cash flow outside of the monthly subscription fees. 

I'm talking about merchandising, and I eat up World of Warcraft merchandise like candy. I've got the Undead Warlock figurine just because that's what I play in the game. I've bought the World of Warcraft Atlas, although I can say that is useful for the most part. I even pre-ordered the World of Warcraft board game, and despite the somewhat heavy price tag I have enjoyed the game a lot. I've even convinced a friends who don't play WoW to play the board game and they have enjoyed it. Some have picked up the real game after trying the board game. 

Of course, I'm absolutely drooling about the collectible card game coming out very soon, and I don't know why.

I've never been hardcore into Magic: The Gathering and whatnot, so why would I be obsessed with this one? I don't even know if it's fun to play or not. I'm sure, though, that my obsession has something to do with the special cards with codes you can enter in the game to obtain special items, which is downright evil. Blizzard knows how to market ? that's for sure.

As much as I love (read: am addicted to) the game, my biggest problem is that, despite its hugeness, there are many aspects that are broken, and there bugs that need to be cleaned up. But the real problem is that they keep adding more content, even when the old content is bugged out. Every major patch seems like they add some huge amount of stuff, which is OK because that is what the monthly subscription pays for, but there is a lot to do in the game already, even after you reach the level cap.

In a perfect world, Blizzard would say, "OK guys, in this patch we are just going to balance everything and fix all the bugs in our game. No new content, just fixes," and I would be elated. That would give all the players a chance to catch up on their reputation-grinding and guarantee that most of the issues in game would be addressed in the next patch. Of course, that would never happen.

In the next patch they are adding weather effects and another huge raid dungeon. That's great and all, but why not fix the bugs and latency issues in the current instances already in the game and save the new stuff for later? It's not like there isn't anything to do in this mammoth of a game.

Until that happens, my wishy-washy attitude toward the game continues. One day I'm in love with it, the next, I want to throw it in the trash.
 

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