Playing WoW comes down to what you want out of it.
As a game, WoW just isn’t very good. It’s designed around the fun to win (rather than fun to play) paradigm like most MMOs, except there is no ultimate victory condition a player can ever reach, so they keep playing, sustained by small and temporary “wins” along the way that are ultimately unsatisfying. This results in something like the Sunk Cost fallacy combined with a Belief In Enjoyment, that drives them to keep playing towards that fun of winning that they’ll never actually reach, which is often mistaken for addiction.
As a social platform it’s better, at least on the realms that have established communities that are friendly to newcomers. To a lot of players its a role-playing platform first and a game second.
As a virtual environment it’s among the very best. You can spend an amazing amount of time just flying around and taking screenshots of the scenery, and everything has a story behind it. As a fan-fiction writer, it may even be the optimal fictional universe, since it is rich and diverse enough to support pretty much any story one might wish to tell. And have you seen the machinima?
Playing WoW comes down to what you want out of it.
As a game, WoW just isn’t very good. It’s designed around the fun to win (rather than fun to play) paradigm like most MMOs, except there is no ultimate victory condition a player can ever reach, so they keep playing, sustained by small and temporary “wins” along the way that are ultimately unsatisfying. This results in something like the Sunk Cost fallacy combined with a Belief In Enjoyment, that drives them to keep playing towards that fun of winning that they’ll never actually reach, which is often mistaken for addiction.
As a social platform it’s better, at least on the realms that have established communities that are friendly to newcomers. To a lot of players its a role-playing platform first and a game second.
As a virtual environment it’s among the very best. You can spend an amazing amount of time just flying around and taking screenshots of the scenery, and everything has a story behind it. As a fan-fiction writer, it may even be the optimal fictional universe, since it is rich and diverse enough to support pretty much any story one might wish to tell. And have you seen the machinima?