Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

The opposite of alt-itis

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Unlike my friend, Stargrace, who has problems completing games because she plays a huge assortment of them, my problem is the exact opposite – I have problems completing games because I can’t bring myself to play more than one game at a time.

Such is the recent case of my purchase of Cataclysm, and I’ve played less than 2 hours of it since. FEAR 2, which is I bought during the last (read 2009) Steam Christmas sales which I made a vain attempt to complete 3 weeks ago is sitting about 80% completion. I averaged maybe an hour a day or less in it per day. For Baldur’s Gate, started a month back, I clocked less than an hour. Let’s not even talk about StarCraft 2, which I was swooning over like a fangirl about to meet Justin Bieber before launch, but failed to even  complete the campaign, much less get into the competitive aspects.

Each time, I faithfully return to The One Game and spend copious amounts of time on it. For the moment being, it’s Battlefield Bad Company 2 and its recently released Vietnam DLC. Every minute spent in another game has me thinking “I’d rather be playing Battlefield”. It’s an issue of over-dedication and over-specialization. The normally latent achiever in me would rather I excel in one game (or one character within a specific game) than be a jack of all trades. If I can’t be good at something, I’d rather not play.

To those who can truly enjoy playing a variety of games simultaneously, I salute you.

Wrath of the Lich King trial level cap

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I had this bright idea of flagging my World of Warcraft account for Wrath of the Lich King expansion trial, thinking that I could get 80 in the 10 days provided by the trial period. Unfortunately, the trial caps the experience gain at 99% into level 70, preventing one from reaching 71. Drats!

Also, two years ago I made a post lamenting WoW’s billing system, and I had the exact error upgrading to WotLK and had to once again, apply the zip code trick. It is perturbing that an error like this could go unsolved for two years. Then again, it took Microsoft 17 years to discover a bug in their software. When it comes to mammoth software companies, never underestimate what they are incapable of.

Custom interfaces

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It is both a good and bad thing that applications are skinnable or extensible. Being skinnable or extensible means that an application is well written enough that there’s a certain level of abstraction between the interface and the application itself. It also means that users can customize it to their preference, and implement their own features on top of what’s available.

At the same time, when the first thing most players do after installing World of Warcraft is to look for a custom interface at one of the humongous sites dedicated to providing them, and people constantly talk about a list of “must have” addons, it becomes obvious that the default UI is sorely missing much needed features that should have been available right out of the box.

This is not a problem unique to WoW, it applies to any application that presents themselves as being extensible. The same charge has been levied at Firefox again and again – why don’t the developers look at the top five extensions people are using and incorporate them directly into their product?

Blizzard, I am truly disappointed in you

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Blizzard has one of the worse billing systems ever, and the conversion from a trial to a paid account is an unpleasant experience too.

First of all, I tried to update my trial account to that of a fully functional, paid account. After being firstly greeted with an invalid credit card number while trying to do so, I proceeded to try a second time, thinking that I must have mistyped some bit of information even though I’ve committed my credit card details to mind a long time ago. Nope, it did not work, but I took out my card, verified, and preceeded to try another three more times. At this point I suspected the error might be on their end and did a Google search for it.

The result is this thread here on the official WoW forums. 449 posts and 23 pages since 2007 of the same problem. Reading the users comment, I checked with my bank and there were four billing requests totaling up to a over SGD$100.

The suggested fix by one of the posters was to enter the last four digits of the card number in the zip code field, and that worked for me. Though having over $100 on hold, and me praying hard that they get released after a few days and don’t actually get charged makes me a really unhappy customer. It makes me want to dish out all the slurr for WoW I’ve always held inside me.

I’m frankly shocked at how a company that boasts a 6 million subscription figure can have such a huge problem with its billing system.

Not done yet, this is the first MMO that I’ve came across that actually takes time (up to 72 hours) for a trial account to be upgraded to a full account. It’s 3 hours and counting and having paid for my game, I’m still waiting to be given permissions to talk in the channels, to IM people, to use the broker, and so on. It should require nothing more than for a few shell scripts to run and execute and few SQL update queries the moment I hit the upgrade button. I sure hope it doesn’t have to be done manually.

To summarize, my WoW experience was great until I actually tried to get a hold of the game, which was where it took a sharp ninety degrees downturn.