Peter's Blog

One of my aims in playing World of Warcraft was to see if it really was addictive. Well, I woke up at six this morning and my first thought was, great I can get up and play WoW. Which I did, for about an hour and a half till I had to go to work (I just had to reach level 30).

I played it for four or five hours yesterday. I don't sit and watch TV, I'd rather play WoW.

I was trying to figure out what it is that keeps me interested. The game gives continual rewards while you play, you kill a monster and find goodies on it's body, you complete a quest and get a reward, every day or two you earn enough experience to go up a level which makes you more powerful, you can learn new fighting skills and can tackle harder quests. You can save up money and spend it on powerful weapons and armour, the weapons particularly giving gratification.

You can choose what kind of session you want:

• progress quests, kill hard monsters, get glory and advance the game
• go around easier levels gathering materials for making things for money
• fiddle around, make things, seeing what's available in the auction house, plan how you can make your man more powerful. Yesterday I discovered that I could buy a new cloak that had twice the armour value of my old cloak, increased my stats and made my character look more cool.
• in theory you can work on the fishing profession and go fishing. For me this is just too boring, you literally sit there waiting for 20 seconds per cast for the float to bob. I might be able to stand it if I could take my eye off the screen for a second.

The typical routine when playing is:

• I always start off in Iron Forge, a city with all the resources I need (bank, auction house, vendors, blacksmith forge). I could use Stormwind City but that is larger, harder to navigate and the graphics make me feel sick. There are advantages to leaving your character 'resting' in a city: the longer he rests, the more experience bonus you get next time you play.
• Check mail, see if auctioned items have sold. If not then either auction them again (if they are particularly valuble) or just flog them to vendors for a pittance.
• Decide where to go, do I go somewhere easy just to farm goodies for profit (e.g. loch modan, good for copper) or do I go somewhere that I will find quests at my level (currently darkshire or Wetlands).
• Fly wherever by griffin.
• Do quests/farm until inventory is full.
• Use hearthstone to return instantly to IronForge.
• Auction high level items that I don't need
• Sell low level items that aren't worth auctioning to vendors
• If I've accumulated enough items to make something then make it and sell/auction it.
• Store as much as possible in the bank so that as much of my bag space is free as possible as this means I can gather more loot.
• /exit
• Enjoy Real Life
• Repeat

One of these iterations takes an hour or two. Towards the end I normally have full bags and am deciding which items to destroy to make space for new things I plunder. The game limits the rate at which you can sell items to the vendors that you find throughout the land. Once your bags are full and the vendors won't buy any more stuff the main option left is to destroy it. Theoretically I could make more space by mailing items to myself but the mail boxes are in towns and by the time I get back to towns I am ready for a break back in Iron Forge anyway.

Conclusion: it's a very rich game, lots of depth, different things to do. It is constantly gratifying.