17 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
WoW TBC: A sad expansion for a sad excuse of a game.
Date of Review: Sep 19, 2008
The Bottom Line: Do not buy.
When WoW and TBC were first released I bought it to play with my friends. My friends slowly got sick of WoW, I got to 70 and then I stopped caring about WoW. I'm going to try to keep this review objective, but this is a negative review.
Positive comments
The release of World of Warcraft: The Burning crusade promised an additional two races. The Protoss... I mean Drenei are Aliens from another planet crash-landed their ship to Azeroth allying themselves with the Alliance. The attractive Blood Elves joined the Horde after the Alliance and the high elves had disagreements. There are no longer 4 races per faction to choose from every time you decide to make another character, now there's five!
An increase in level cap by 10 insures that additional content was added to the original WoW.
There is a whole new continent to explore with the introduction of the Outlands. The Outlands are roughly the size of an Azeroth continent.
Negative comments (the order in which these comments appear do not bear any special ranking)
1. Poor tech support - The tech support has failed in every capacity whenever their assistance was needed. The tech support I refer to is both in game GMs (game master) and out of game. The tech support at Blizzard has a high tendency to place blame on individual hardware and software configurations despite the fact that problems that arise often plague a mass amount of players. Solutions are often offered by other players rather than Blizzard employees which prompts the question "What are they being paid for?"
As a side note, a lot of their patches have been known to cause serious problems with the game. The problems have been known to take anywhere from minutes to hours to fix during which the game is completely unplayable.
2. Overbalancing - Blizzard often tries to overbalance the game in order to make it fair. The balances only affect players and not NPCs (non player-controlled characters). Imbalances in games sometimes make the game fun so removing imbalances removes some of the fun.
The "Balances" implemented are often times nerfs. The only time I've been aware of buffing is when something is useless unless it receives a buff.
3. Lack of End Game Content - Blizzard should have learned that an MMORPG isn't played for a day or a year instead spanning as long as one can imagine. There are currently only 4 things to do once you hit the maximum level cap of 70: Raid (a dungeon requiring more than 5 people to complete), PvP (fight other players in battlegrounds or arena), Farming (Continuously kill the same thing over and over again in order to gain wealth), or Heroics (a mode setting that makes a regular dungeon even harder).
If you decide that you wish to be more casual, often times it means getting gear through PvP. Prepare to get ridiculed for obtaining "Welfare" because that's what people in WoW call PvP rewards. It is labeled as welfare because people believe that it's easier to get by running around naked than running instances and raids. I remind people that all instances and raids are is a series of battles with NPCs. NPCs are antiquated AIs which can easily be overcome and offer no variation at all. PvP requires a bit more skill against real players. The exception to this being people that enter into a battleground or arena without any gear/weapons and people that use an automated bot to fight their battles for them.
It can be hard to get a group of people together to raid. Often times this leads to pick-up-groups (PUGs). This can be a poor choice as it can lead to inadequately geared and inexperienced groups.
Farming for profit is lucrative but also very boring. The value of currency of the game is also devalued every day that the game is out because the pool of money in the economy continues to accumulate from daily quest rewards.
Heroics fail to provide rewards that would be expected of a dungeon that had requirements to enter. The good news is that every boss killed usually gives at least one badge of justice. The bad news is that the price of anything decent items could range from 10s to 100s. The heroic difficulties are more difficult than the normal settings so there is a minimum amount of gear thought to be acceptable to enter the instance. Players also must obtain a key to be able to enter the heroic instances.
4. World Size - Usually a big world is a good thing because that means there's more to explore, but WoW has a bigger terrain than even the most avid gamer likes to travel. It would be a fair assessment that whatever your goal, you'll most likely spend at least half the time traveling.
5. Monthly Fee - There is a monthly fee of 15.00 USD to play WoW. In addition to the fee, I feel it important to mention that some places add an additional 1.00 USD in taxes. Free MMOs do exist but many are lower quality than WoW.
6. Gear dependency - There is little variation between characters besides their talent point distribution and gear they have on their characters. Since talent points can be redistributed at the cost of gold, gear becomes the unique aspect of a character. This game is not for the casual player as it can take a significant amount of time just to get a single piece of relatively 'good' gear.
7. Addiction - This game is very addicting. Once you play, it is very easy to get so enthralled that decide that it is "your precious". Seriously, I thought that the function of a game was to have fun; not to feed a habit. Addicting <does not equal> fun.
8. Account Hacking - Account hacking has become so prevalent that Blizzard has now started selling authenticators to try to deter hackers.
9. Bot Spam - There are automated preprogrammed characters that stand in front of public places and spam messages about selling virtual WoW game content for real money. There is no end in sight.
10. Blizzard monopoly - Everything I have written about is regarding a trademarked video game that is owned and copy written by Blizzard Entertainment owned by Vivendi. The eggheads at Blizzard have become real scrooges. As stated in their End User License Agreement (EULA), You cannot sell your character, account, or any content because it is owned property of Blizzard Entertainment. This is somewhat contrary to how software is usually sold because licenses are usually transferable on software. Another clause in the EULA grants Blizzard Entertainment the right to scan your random access memory (RAM) as you play.
My final thoughts:
WoW is a great buy for someone with no life, no hopes, no dreams, and no sense of fun. Save your money for a game that is actually fun.
