Warcraft 101-A primer

So I play a little game, you may have heard of it: World of Warcraft.

For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game, MMORPG, or MMO for short.

According to Activision-Blizzard, the creators and maintainers of the game, there are approximately 11 million players worldwide.

WoW currently has a subscription-based model, with players required to purchase the game and it’s three expansions from $5-$30 a piece, and then pay $12-$15 a month for access to the servers where the game world is hosted.

There are many realms to house the 11 million players, so if you were to jump into the game, you would not see all the people playing at any given time.  Each realm is a distinct rendering of the world, with it’s own population of a portion of the player base.  If you do decide to start playing Wow, and have friends already playing, make sure to find out which realm they are on, if you would like to play with them.  There are 238 realms in the US version of the game, as well as realms localized for Europe, Asia, and Latin America, among others.

As a player of WoW, when you are creating a character to act as your avatar in the world, you can choose to be a human, dwarf, gnome, night elf, draenei, or worgen and be a part of the Alliance(Go Alliance!) or you can choose to be a troll, orc, blood elf, goblin, undead, or tauren and be a part of the Horde(Boo! Hiss!)

In making this decision, you choose your side in the war portion of Warcraft.  The two factions have been fighting on and off for the better part of 30 years, only stopping long enough to defeat world threatening evil.

Now that I have the basics out of the way, in future posts, I hope to elaborate on why I enjoy this addiction so much, and why I just can’t give it up.