I’m writing this post for three different reasons.

1)  I want to put another post up.

2)  I love Warcraft unconditionally despite the abuse it puts me through.

3)  I hear lists are fun.

It is no surprise to anyone who has played any game of any type, be it on a computer, with a deck of cards, or on a board, that everyone has different ways of playing games.  Just as Monopoly can range from a light hearted exercise in casual sparring using passive business acumen to a three-day friendship breaker ending in somebody having to call an ambulance, any Massively Multiplayer Online Game can be played in many different ways.

I’m going to look a little closer at some of the ways I’ve witnessed my own particular online poison of choice being played.

If you have absolutely no interest in online games, or in Warcraft in particular, feel free to skip this post.

1. Casual Questing

As gaming has grown as a pastime enjoyed by a mainstream audience as opposed to a select few, two very notable tags are often thrown around between two very (although not always) distinct groups of gamers.  We now have casual and hardcore gamers, and interestingly enough, members of each group often consider being called a member of the other group to be an insult.  There’s probably some comment on the deeper psyche of the human personality hidden away in there, but I’ll let you write that yourself.  Casual Questers probably make up the majority of the player base of Warcraft and will generally play for shorter periods of time, completing one or two activities before logging out and continuing to live a rich and fulfilling life away-from-the-keyboard.

Incidentally, there is a good reason that I’ve started with this method of play, because for most people, this is exactly how it starts.

2. Compulsive Leveller

Or as I would describe it for my own particular playing career, “stage two”.  Due to my chaotic indecision, I would have described myself as being one of these in the past.  In the game, you play a character that you have created and then subsequently build up through completing tasks and killing monsters in the world, starting at level one and stretching all the way to level eighty.  A compulsive leveller does this with more than one character, as the game allows you to create something in the region of fifty unique characters.  I think the thing appeals to me about this approach is that every new character has so much promise and potential.  It’s almost like having graduation day all over again on a really micro scale:  You can now go and do whatever you want.  Of course, with so much choice, this can, like in real life, become crippling.

Some players manage to keep up multiple characters all the way through to the endgame content, which is a real achievement.  How people manage this is beyond me, and brings us nicely into our third category.

3. Hardcore Raider

I don’t want to sound biased or set in my ways at this point, but (this sentence normally indicating that whoever has just said it is about to sound biased and set in their ways) Hardcore Raiders normally frighten me a little bit.  These are players who play the endgame content in order to completely master every facet of the game for their character and class.  Although this may not sound like much, as the game is constantly updating, this can become a gargantuan effort in grinding through new content with a dedicated team and grinding through other content in order to maximise any attributes of your character that will help you defeat said new challenges.

In short, in order to keep up with all of this, you need a massive time commitment.  An acquaintance of mine recently joined a guild of hardcore raiders and stated that it killed the game for him due to all the demands that were suddenly made of his play time.

The time needed and the organisational commitment needed can in many ways start to make the game feel a little bit like a job.  Of course, some people really enjoy this, which brings us to method number four.

4. HR Manager

Groups of players can form up into guilds.  These guilds should be thought of as either small teams, societies, clubs, or quite often small businesses, bringing together players that want to get the same things out of the game.  For example, a group of Hardcore Raiders would obviously group together because they would then be more likely to get what they want out of the game than if they were stuck with a group of people who weren’t spending quite as much time online.

With any society, club, or business, these structures need some sort of management, coming to us in the guild structure as guild leaders and officers.  These individuals often tirelessly and thanklessly keep the guild running making sure that everyone is happy, organising group activities that require co-operation and also making sure that anyone breaching any agreed rules gets “disciplined” for want of a better word.  As players play this game in many different ways, there are sets of behaviour that the majority of players find to be unpleasant or unsavoury, and so most guilds will have to enforce some sort of policy to make sure their guild is a pleasant place for everyone to play.

This sort of management does not sound fun, but I have it on good authority that some people do genuinely enjoy this aspect.  I remember reading an article a year or two ago on The Escapist that was written by an actual Human Resources Manager for an insurance firm who played Warcraft and ended up doing pretty much the exact same job online for her guild and loved it.

5. Social Pariah

More accurately, this is someone who actively attempts to make themselves an outcast.  I’ve seen a friend of mine do this and the play style really puzzles me.  Essentially, the trick is to annoy as many people as possible and be as obnoxious as possible to other people, or just lie and cheat your way through, or even just mess around without really caring.  It doesn’t have to be malicious, but it often is (I hasten to add that my friend wasn’t malicious, although sometimes skirted rather close to the line.  He got married in a game at one point.  He was the girl.  I’m still not sure if his “husband” knew the score…)  I can see a certain attraction in it, but the problem is that you are doing this to real people.  These sorts of players are the sorts of players that the guilds have to create rule sets and “codes of best practise” to deal with.  Essentially, it’s a line of thought that reads “if you’re making someone else lose, you’re winning”.

It must however be said, that if you get two of these types of players fighting against each other, it can actually be pretty funny.

6.  Romancer

Some people just flirt.  Some people really flirt.  Some people have a string of monogamous online relationships.

There are definite pros and cons to this style of play and using the World of Warcraft as a giant dating game.  The pros are that getting to know someone online before meeting them in person can be incredibly effective as a way of finding out if they’re a decent person or not.  I have to put my hand up and confess that my now-almost-three-year relationship with my girlfriend is the result of a friendship that started online.  We met in real life, but we got to know each other over the internet first.

The obvious con is that people aren’t always straight forward about who they are (see style number five) although this does appear to be more of a rarity than you would think.  If you poke around the internet for long enough, you’ll uncover all sorts of similar stories to mine.

7.  Investment Banker

This one can catch you out by accident.  There is a giant auction system in the game that can, if you’re not careful, become nothing more than an obsession within an obsession.  Someone who started playing at the same time as I did ended up spending almost all of his time fiddling around with the aspect of the game and trying to make as much money as possible.  He even identified certain market trends, especially over the weekend where the price of crafting materials skyrocketed around Friday night and early Saturday, and by Sunday had completely bottomed out as more and more people had flooded the market with their own materials.

It is entirely possible to spend your whole time generating in-game-gold through this, but once again, the process starts to feel surprisingly like a job.  A lot of players even by their character a formal white shirt and a suit if they’re doing this for any length of time.

8.  Roleplayer

Warcraft, and indeed any computer based Role Playing Game owes its existence to that of the original pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons, a game that’s not a game at all and consists of people sat around a table telling each other what their character is doing.  I realise that does not sound fun, but it can be with the right group.  One of the main aspects of the original pen and paper games is a strong reliance on the actual role play as opposed to the game, in that players are actively encouraged to perform actions according to what the personality of their character would allow.  Some players have managed to bring this over, with varying degrees of success, to the World of Warcraft.  I’m a little guilty of this myself to a certain extent, but there are entire sections of the player base who form together to role play together just as there are hardcore raiders who group together to raid in a hardcore fashion.  From what I’ve seen, there tends to be an inclination towards a dependence on over the top drama soap opera style role playing as opposed to anything that mimics Tolkein in any way shape or form.  I suppose in a twisted way, this makes sense.  I’d probably watch Eastenders if all the characters were orcs and trolls.

9.  Theory Crafter

There is an astonishing amount of maths involved in Warcraft.  Some players dedicate themselves to crunching all of these numbers to work out just what skills provide an optimum damage output, or are effective in certain situations.  Any description of the game that makes it sound incredibly straight forward is absolutely correct, but there are differing levels of complexity once you get past that.  A lot of the players that devote huge amounts of time to the game normally have a few spreadsheets that they can calculate statistics for what would and wouldn’t improve their character every time a new piece of equipment becomes available.  This aspect of testing can be highly rewarding if you are mathematically inclined, and is something that also directly benefits everyone else in the community, as often theory crafters will provide useful feedback to the developers themselves, as well as providing loose guides for other players on how to get the most out of the game.

10.  Hybrid

This is a bit of a cop out I suppose, but most players are a hybrid of several of the above elements.  I know that I myself am probably falling into a “Casual Raider” category, which is rare as it’s difficult to find a group of people who want to raid the endgame content and don’t mind when you’re not there for four nights of the week.

It is worth stressing that there really is no limit on how you can play this game.  There are in fact entire blogs and sites dedicated to the many different methods that are popular.   Once you’ve played it for a while, you can find all sorts of things that pique your interest and your style of play evolves from there.  The game is such a huge time sink because of the very fact that it seamlessly morphs to the will of the individual player without compromising any of its co-operative elements.

I’m of half a mind to now slap a reccomendation to test the free trial if you’re curious, but it would look like I was either being paid by Blizzard, which I’m not, or being sadistic in an attempt to draw more poor souls into the time-trap, so I’ll just have to leave it in your hands if you are in fact a reader who has made it this far down that does not play the game.

Additional Notes:

Funny fact:  Microsoft Word thinks that the word “Warcraft” should be changed to “Aircraft”.  World of Aircraft just doesn’t sound the same.