“RealID” is what the name suggests: it displays your real life name to friends once you have accepted their request to be a RealID friend. well, i have no issues with that. people that are my real life friends naturally know my real name and vice versa. however, there is a little twist to RealID: a little feature called “friends of friends” quite similar to Facebook with the most notable difference that Facebook offers several layers of privacy options (ok that is up for debate but still) and you can always just use a nickname or fake name on Facebook. RealID uses naturally the name of the WoW account which usually is the name on your credit card and hence you cannot really change it or billing will be messed up.

as mentioned i have no problem with real life mates knowing my name in a virtual world but i am worried by the fact that my real name is visible to friends of my friends who i may not know at all. the most popular argument in this debate is “oh come on, it’s just your name and not your address or any other personal details”. well, it might be just my name but a simple google search using my real name does come up with things about me (professional things mind you) that i do not want people i play a game with to know. i strongly believe in keeping the professional life and the personal life separated and RealID threatens to break down that separation.

one great aspect of the virtual world is that you can be whoever you want to be, you can create a virtual self that can have as much or little in common with your real self as you want it to. mind you, virtual worlds like WoW are a fantasy after all. it’s not like i have something to hide from my virtual friends but it kinda defies the purpose of a virtual life as outlined by Sherry Turkle in her book “Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet“: virtual worlds offer us the chance to have multiple identities and experiment with them as we form in true postmodern tradition something that can be called “patchwork identity”. i am a female tauren deathknight in WoW and a media scientist in real life and i want to keep it that way.

i strongly hope that Blizzard will add some privacy options to RealID in the future that either offer you to display a nickname or deactivates the “friends of friends” feature. i like RealID but as it is right now it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

so the basic promise of the Dungeon Finder is to provide easy and fast access to five man group content. each instance party needs one tank, one healer and three dps and if you queue up you get to select the role(s) you want to take over. for dps classes the average wait time until a group is found is around 20 minutes, whereas tanks (and possibly healers) get a group significantly faster (apparently the wait time for tanks at lvl 80 is 3 seconds!). if some member of your instance party drops out, you can tell the Dungeon Finder to look for a replacement. which works well if your healer or a dps bails, but if your tank legs it, you are most likely screwed.

i love the underlying functionality of the Dungeon Finder to be able to access five man instances from everywhere in the game world. porting you directly to the instance and using the cross-realm battlegroups as “pools” for player recruitment it does enable indeed easy and fast access to small group content. however, the social side of doing instances gets a bit lost. you don’t know which people you end up doing an instance with which can be both a blessing (if they suck) or a curse (if they are awesome). either way, if those players aren’t from your server the chances that you will ever meet them again are slim. so what i would love to see included in the Dungeon Finder is being able to add people from your cross-realm battlegroup to your friendlist so you can invite them to a party and queue up with them for instances if you enjoyed playing with them.

• the epic grind: i can live with seven digit numbers required to level up if the “grind” is masked by doing quests that require you to kill x or bring y or deliver z to some NPC. questing is something i consider essential to any RPG and it should give you sufficient amounts of xp. lotro does it right: there are more than enough quests to go around and you will easily hit the level cap by doing quests only. aion however has a minimal amount of quests (around 5 quests per level) that in turn give you around 5% of the total xp required to level up. so to fill that 95% of your xp you need to grind: kill the same mobs over and over again for hours on end. not my idea of having a good time in an mmo.
• the free for all zergplay PvP: for a game that claims to focus on PvP you expect epic battles and that skill > numbers of players. well, another disappointment here. skill doesnt matter, the side that brings the higher levels/more numbers win. at lvl 25 you enter the abyss, the huge free for all PvP area and there is little protection for lvl 25 characters: they will get ganked/zerged/killed repeatedly by bored higher level characters. at least in WoW you had a chance to move to another area if you got ganked and corpsecamped somewhere.
• the ridiculous harsh death penalty: if you die, you have a permanent xp loss and suffer from soul sickness, which requires you to pay a rather hefty sum of ingame money to get rid off. by doing so, you get a certain percentage of your lost xp back. granted, you dont suffer from permanent xp loss if you die to another player in PvP. however, if you take damage from another player and get some mobs trained on you that kills you, you get permanent xp loss. its not exactly fun to blow 80% of your ingame money on soul healing bills on one single evening. (trust me, that can happen easily.)
• the flying combat scam: flying around and fighting sounds like fun, but in reality it isnt. in most areas you cannot fly and when you can fly, your flight time is limited to 2 minutes tops. so if you fight in the abyss chasing opponents and you run out of flight time and there is no place to land safely.. you plummet to your death. and guess what? yep, soul healer bill here i come.
• PvE instances with bosses who dont drop loot: imagine you do a PvE instance for 2 hours, you fight your way through thrash mobs and when you finally kill the endboss he drops… nothing. not even money or some vendor trash. now how fun is that? your effort of doing an instance should be rewarded in some form or another. having endbosses of PvE instances drop some loot only once a blue moon… outrageous.
• crafting is just a time and moneysink because the crafting process can fail and you can lose the materials you gathered. same goes for slotting runestones into your gear: if your armour piece has 4 slots and you managed to put 3 runestones in it… theres a chance that the attempt to slot a forth one can fail and hence destroy all of your runestones in the item.

i guess i could go on why i consider Aion yet another mmo fail. one thing is for sure that i wont fall to the hype of upcoming mmos again… WAR and Aion did in fact teach me a lesson.

more content, fewer bugs
for all the games i have seriously (i.e. longer than 30 days) played i can only point out one single game where not enough content and too many bugs are an issue. i can’t say that WoW and LotRO lack content or are so bug-ridden that it impairs your enjoyment. the most important aspect of content is the so called “endgame” content since i am not an alt-o-holic and i want to keep enjoying the MMO of my choice once i hit the level cap. again, WoW and LotRO do quite well at endgame level, providing enough group and raid content to keep both casual and hardcore players happy. however, with WAR things aren’t that great really. granted the game is still young but the proposed endgame is not accessible because of stability issues (i wrote about it) and bugs (fortress lord aoe’ing through the floor would be the prime example).

a social world
the ideal MMO has a good balance between solo, group, and raid content. i don’t want to be forced to group up all the time but on the other hand i don’t like to play solo contantly because all quests can be done without the help of a group. in this matter i think WoW has the best balance, whereas LotRO’s focus is slightly shifted towards group play. WAR however emphasizes “soloability” which in turn makes the game feel like a single player game at some times. i do not play MMOs to have a single player experience, i want to interact and play with other players. hence forcing players to group up is actually something good in my book. however, there should be alternatives available if you cannot seem to get a group for a party quest.

point, click, repeat – delete
i honestly don’t mind clicking the same buttons for a few hours but that’s just me. what bothers me more is running the very same instance again and again. WoW (in The Burning Crusade) and LotRO (in Shadows of Angmar) tried to bring some variation to instances by making the encounters more random. the Black Morass instance and the Angmar battleground come to mind: both featured dynamic spawn mechanics. waves of mobs did not always spawn at place A first, then at place B and after that at place C. it was random, you had to observe and react quickly in order to succeed. i’d like to see more of these dynamic encounters in MMOs.

an RPG without a story
from what i have been told about WoW: Wrath of the Lich King so far, the storytelling seems to be impressive with the use of phasing so that your advancement is reflected in the environment. the overall LotRO storyline is awesome as well, complete with cut scenes and you really feel like you are helping Frodo. there is some kind of phasing in place, too: key quest NPCs are placed in instances you can only enter as long as you are on the quest. once completed, the instances are closed to you because in the storyline the NPCs have moved on in their journey. WAR does not offer an ongoing storyline except the war between order and destruction.

for starters, it has very high system requirements and my current gaming rig does not meet the recommended requirements. i do intent to upgrade my hardware later this year when DDR3 prices are in an affordable range but not right now and not because of one game i might (or might not) play for a month or two. i do know that AoC runs on my computer on low to mid settings but i am afraid this will have an impact on the visual quality and i am a sucker for great graphics experiences.

next up, it is hailed to have a “revolutionary combat” system, sometimes even referred to as “real time combat”. my very first mmorpg Neocron featured a real time combat system back in 2002 and it was rather cumbersome to use. real time means that you control the combat more directly, you aim your attacks instead of pressing just one button and wait for your character to execute the attack. in AoC that means that you have to decide if you want to attack your opponent on the left or right or hit him in the middle. from various videos and explanations i gathered that you do not have “skills” per se but the order you hit the mob (left, right, middle) unlocks certain combos that have a special effect like extra damage or so. this sounds like a button smashing frenzy to me and i am very sceptical if i want a combat system like that in a mmorpg with lags and other issues.

AoC is also rated M for Mature, meaning it is brutal and gory. this fact does not necessarily bother me but i am worried what kind of community a game “for adults only” will attract. judging by the ongoing hype of the open beta, a lot of former “WoW kids” will head over to AoC to give it a try. from my experience the WoW community is by far the worst mmorpg around, full of teenagers and leet kids that only want ”phat lewt”.

last but not least i do have the lingering suspicion that AoC could turn into another Vanguard. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was proclaimed as “WoW killer” and failed badly. the hype surrounding Vanguard was enourmous, but the game could not live up to the expectations due to bugs, server performance issues and downright annoying issues in gameplay like a harsh death penalty. the AoC hype is similar bloated and a lot of people i have talked to about it say they will try it for the free month that comes with the game to see if they like it or not. so only time will tell if AoC is the next best mmorpg.

so people are leaving WoW and are looking for greener pastures for various reasons. summertime may be a valid explanation but i think that WoW is really on a downward spiral. i was a pretty “hardcore” player raiding 5 to 6 days per week and still the eternal grind became too much to be enjoyable.

my final exam came and passed, life moved on but i still was stuck in that virtual world. in fact, that only changed six week ago. i woke up from my World of Warcraft slumber: i cancelled my account and quit playing. a few (unfortunate) events this march really opened my eyes. life is too short to be wasted in an online game and it is not the life i want to live. what happened to my dreams, to my passions? some critical minds picture players of World of Warcraft as mindless zombies who are afraid to deal with their real lives and hence “escape” to a fictional world. World of Warcraft made me numb.

i think you really need a dramatic eye-opener to see what your current life is like and that it’s about time you do something about it and change it. i want to live my life to the fullest, embracing every challenge and cherishing every moment. spending five to six hours every evening with mostly teenagers in fictional virtual world doing the same things over and over again and where at the end nothing really matters is not part of that life. “life” in World of Warcraft it is shallow, requires no intellectual effort and can be easily compared with junk food – it gets its “job” done, but it is not good for you and doesn’t leave a good feeling either. it can also be compared with mental hypothermia. i am really glad i woke up thawed out.