So, I had been playing lots of World of Warcraft over the past few months. So much, in fact, that very little else was getting done. The game is quite addicting, and it is definitely loads of fun to put together a group of 4 or 5 people and go tromping through a dungeon together (especially when you win).

One thing that surprised me was the enormous number of people whom I already knew who played WoW already. Most of these people were work associates of myself, or my wife. Once they found out that we had started playing, they all wanted to see if we could play together. At first, I thought this was a really wonderful thing — defiantly a better way to make contacts than playing golf, and it could be a lot of genuine fun! Alas, this was not to be. Blizzard has dozens of WoW servers, and its pretty much random which one you use for your character, unless you know beforehand which servers your friends are on (note: your friends will all have different servers, unless they know each other). Since you can’t play with people on different servers, this pretty much means that you can’t play with any people you meet, even though they play WoW also. Blizzard will allow you to transfer characters to another server, but it takes several days, and costs around $30 — completely unacceptable. I really don’t understand why they have this restriction. If I could have easily played with people I met after choosing my server, I would play the game much longer.

Another problem of playing with friends is that you have to all put in the same amount of time. If your friend plays longer than you, for example, or more often, they will level up faster. Once there is a discrepancy of more than a handful of levels, you really can’t play with each other in the same party, since neither of you will get much experience for killing any monsters.

The biggest downside to the game, however, is the sheer amount of time it takes to get anything done. For example, the process of putting together a group of players and completing a dungeon can easily take 4 or 5 hours, if not more. Of course, Blizzard Entertainment did this on purpose, because the longer you play the game, the more you pay them for a subscription. However, the slightly good feeling you get when you and your chums complete a dungeon doesn’t really justify spending half of your daylight hours (or sleeping time) logged on to your computer. Also, you can’t break this time up into multiple sessions — if you log out halfway through a dungeon you’ll have to start it over again from scratch when you next log in.

Certainly, there are terrorists running around in Rainbow 6: Vegas which will make me much more satisfied to eliminate than yet another Savannah Huntress. For reference, I played several different characters up to level 27 or so, for both the Alliance and the Horde. Now we’ll see if canceling a WoW account with Blizzard is any more challenging than collecting spider ichor.