I considered pointing him at the Draenei starting area, but we were both on the road at the time, and I figured one large demo file was probably enough to start with (since the later, and better starting areas are part of the Burning Crusade expansion).

I also find the perspective of a fresh player fascinating, especially a fresh player with an eye towards the game mechanics. I would agree with the comments expressed above; the game becomes ever more complex and engaging as you put more time into it. This has always been a high point for Blizzard. But I also think you’ve done a good job of capturing the essence of the starting experience.

I mentioned on Twitter that I was an officer in Joi Ito’s guild We Know. It’s a great guild full of fun people playing the game a lot, but casually. But in my opinion his raiding-as-organizational-structure theory doesn’t quit work. The problem is Warcraft is still just a game with no real world consequences. People behave very badly in games sometimes, ignore authority, etc all with no consequence. If someone at my company was always late to meetings and interrupted people rudely during discussions they’d be fired; but in a guild, not so much. Similarly there’s not a lot of reward for excellent in-game performance compared to excellent work at a job. It’s a good thing games are more relaxed than jobs, but it makes it different.

PS: “I’d love to fly around and explore Azeroth with no such requirements, at my leisure, and with no other players to interrupt or distract me”. That game exists, it’s called Morrowind

It’s probably inevitable that I’d miss out on a lot of the deeper aspects of the game, given that I’m talking about it only from my limited preview and free trial (which prevents me from, for example, engaging in any guild play).

I’ll be interested to see what design lessons Diablo III ends up taking from WoW.

So I played a bit. I was very impressed that it ran perfectly smoothly on my 2004-era Mac Powerbook (my newest machine). A big hand to Blizzard for treating those of us behind the tech curve like people, not dumb schmucks.

Also, it looks good. I’m sure I would have eaten this up with a spoon when I was 16. However, as an adult I don’t see a reason to care. There’s no reason to care about the Orc character I created and they didn’t give me any reason to care about the world he inhabits, other than to see what it looks like. Where’s the drama?

I *do* find the economy that’s risen up around the false scarcity of the MMORPG’s very interesting. Check these guys out: http://www.wowmine.com/wowgoldus.php?sfid=gl&gclid=CMv9h72tnJgCFRlcagoddQHZng

We can only hope they require their gold farmers to submit TPS reports along with their imaginary work product.

I’m going to plug two RPG style games I’ve played recently that I’ve definitely enjoyed. Here ya go, lovers:

http://playgreenhouse.com/game/BASLX-000001-01/
http://playgreenhouse.com/game/HOTHG-000001-01/

- S!

One particularly powerful thing about WoW: they’ve managed to keep it compelling even for the nerds who’ve played the game for hundreds of hours and finished most of the scripted content. The design of the endgame raiding and PvP games is an impressive monument to making the most out of your content development budget.