The Politics of WoW

Once again I find myself writing about World of Warcraft, which is sad. My relationship with Blizzard is a delicate one, in which I am the Gimp. Blizzard wears the pants in this sorry union, while I merely smile and pray to God that my server is actually running on the day I decide to play. I have forgiven them for the endless patches, the flawed honour system that has caused so many higher-level Horde to gank me relentlessly and the fact that I actually pay them monthly for all this frustration. I have even forgiven them for the sad reality that a decent mount costs more gold than even a freaking Genii could supply….but I digress.

I cannot quite explain what is so addictive and compelling about a game that is essentially about ‘collecting things’. I understand that this is one of the fundamental things needed to define a ‘quest’ (see any legend or myth and you will see I’m right). For the knights of old it was the Holy Grail or the left toenail of St. Paul…for me it seems to be Centaur ears, Murloc eyeballs or the rotting gall bladder of the bloated swamp beast of Burning Steppes. Ok…so I made that last one up, but be it my endless pursuit of sexy armour, my collecting of strange and wonderful artefacts or my endless slaying of creatures for their furry pelts…I am endlessly collecting stuff. It’s interesting that the most desirable item at the beginning of the game is a bag / sack with enough slots to hold all this stuff. Perhaps it is fitting in a world driven by materialism…but if I have one more quest where I have to collect some skanky body part from some foul creature and then return it to some NPC that is the in game equivalent of my running by foot from London to Paris…well then I just might go mad. In fact, my only wish is that I had actually spent as much time running as my character.

But the real reason I decided to write this post…was to have a little rant about the politics of WoW. By this I mean the fragile relationship that exists between one and one’s guild. I recently left my guild…not because they weren’t a bunch of cracking, high-spirited young lads with a sense of humour to boot – but because I simply wasn’t able to quest with any of them (as they pretty skilled…to say the least). So…guild-less and slightly panicked at the prospect of not having a nifty title above my head…I set about finding another guild. But who to chose from? With guilds named ‘Dopeland’, ‘Accept Defeat’ and ‘We Kill Horde’ what was a fashionable girl like myself to do?

Also, dear readers, there is the strange phenomenon that predominates the World of Warcraft that I like to call “the bloody twelve year old Swede”. In all my life…I have never met so many Swedes as I have on the European Server. It worries me deeply…not because I have anything against Swedes…but simply because there are so many of them…or so it seems. But as the saying goes ‘if you can’t beat them – join them’…so I joined a guild that seems to consist largely of Swedes. Whether they are twelve year olds – remains to be seen…but I have a sneaky, sneaky suspicion that this could have been a bad move….we shall see.
If I could clone myself, or have an army of pretty elves (kind of like the Necromancer in Diablo II just not dead of course and not skeletons) I wouldn’t have need of a guild. However necessity is the mother of invention…so I await to see whether my new guild are a bunch of pillocks or valiant noble knights ^^