Oct. 7, 2009
I was sitting down at my computer the other day, staring at the login screen, and I began to wonder, why do I play WoW? While I initially started playing because a friend suggested it to me, over the past 4, almost 5, years I’d say 90% (if not higher) of what I do is solo play. I do enjoy the occasional raid, when time allows it, but that is such a rare part of my playtime it hardly counts. So, in this realm of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, what is it about WoW that keeps me, an essentially solo player, coming back? Well, I thought about that. Part of it is the ease at which I can come and go. I can come on a fish for a bit, or do a daily or two. I can run an alt around. Many, many, many things that you can do in what amounts to a pretty sporadic playtime. But that wasn’t it. At least not entirely. I continued down this path a bit more. I think at the most basic level, it’s the guild interaction. I’m playing with friends…even when I’m off in some other zone by myself. For me, most times WoW is a single-player RPG with an integrated chat client. And I like it like that. I’ve tried just about every other MMO out there at one time or another. I come back to WoW because that’s where my friends are.
This introduces another problem, though. My friends are all over the place. While my home is Area 52, I have friends on Sen’Jin, Thrall, Cenarion Circle, Llane, etc. I tried playing on multiple servers once. It cost me a lot of money. I ended up moving all my toons to the new server…then back again. Don’t want to do that again. So I swore off multi-server living. Yesterday I created a toon on Thrall to harass a friend. I plan on doing this for some other servers too. Giving it another go. While I don’t see any of them taking me away from my home on Area 52, I do have to admit some concern. So I ask you multi-server folk. How do you do it?