Criticism of World of Warcraft

There are a number of controversies and criticisms associated with World of Warcraft.

Problems

The following lists some of the varied criticism of World of Warcraft.

Server instability

As with other online games, server and network stability is critical. Due to failures in these, there have been times when the game has been unplayable by a large number of players. For example, in September 2005, Blizzard gave all European players two free days of play as compensation for repeated network failures. During the early days of World of Warcrafts U.S. release Blizzard also gave out free days to compensate players for days lost due to problem on their end, a policy which was, and still is, rather common in the industry at the time. The issues were suspected to be Blizzard's upstream Internet service provider .

The sale of virtual property

See also: Farmer (gaming)

This controversy is faced by many online games. This includes the sale of virtual objects (such as gold, items, or characters) for real life assets. Blizzard claims this is against the terms of their End User License Agreement (EULA) and to date they have banned more than 20,000 user accounts for engaging in this type of activity.

Queue times for the PvP Battlegrounds

Though this has been addressed to an extent in recent patches and with cross-server clustering ('Cross Realm' Battlegrounds), it is still possible to have to wait upwards of 2 hours to enter certain battlegrounds (the special team PvP zones of WoW), Alterac Valley in its entire level range (51-60) and Arathi Basin at the highest character level bracket (60's only) most commonly. In addition there is no way to tell the game to only put you in a battle that is just starting. It is not impossible, though it is uncommon, to wait upwards of an hour to enter a battleground only to be put in in place of a player that either quit or who disconnected. This means you only get to play a portion of the battle before it ends, potentially less than 1 minute. This uses up your spot in the queue, so you have to start from scratch if you'd like to enter another one. A functional example of this would be to wait over an hour to enter a battle that is already 55 minutes done of approximately an hour long, get to play for only the 5 minutes, then be forced to wait over an hour again to try and play in another battle. Blizzard has stated on their official forums they want to resolve these issues and may try to in the upcoming expansion, though few exact details have yet been released. Though it is unlikely that it is possible to totally remove this hindrance due to the faction sizes. Where on the european servers the Horde side is underrepresented (and on asian servers Alliance) this will always leave the overrepresented faction with a queue. Because the Arenas, a PvP battleground added in 2.0 and to be modified in Burning Crusade, will sometimes pit players against their own faction, some believe that this may help with server queue problems but not entirely fix it. For more information on PvP Battlegrounds, please see the main World of Warcraft page here on Wikipedia, the father section of this sub-section of criticisms.

Exploits

As with all massively multiplayer online games, World of Warcraft has had its share of players who exploit the world of Azeroth. Such abuse ranges from gold farming to selling accounts online (on sites such as eBay). One common exploit was the use of leet to communicate between the Horde and the Alliance, since symbols and numbers were left unmodified in otherwise scrambled communications. Blizzard has since stopped this by modifying the linguistics engine to remove punctuation and numbers from the text.

Known types

• Speed Hacking/Teleporting/subterrain travel – Since character position in World of Warcraft is determined by the client side, it is possible for players to send out artificial positional data and be instantly transported to any part of the world (even underground) or used to speed up traveling speed by increasing positional deltas.
• Botting – A player who runs a third party program to control their character. The bot will kill monsters, loot gold, mine ore, collect herbs or gain levels automatically without the player having to be in front of the computer. Ever since Blizzard opened free trial accounts, bots have also been used as means to spam and advertise virtual gold services.
• Game Mechanics Exploits – There are also other exploits involving the physics of the game, sometimes in conjunction with items. This includes using wall-walking (removed in patch 1.9) to get into unfinished areas or abilities like the Sentry Totem to make one's character unattackable by other players. These exploits are usually not discovered right away and continued use is at the players own risk, as Blizzard in the past has both allowed exploits to be legal until fixed, as well as banning players who use it before it is fixed on other occasions.

Legality

The World of Warcraft End User License Agreement specifically forbids these kinds of activities. Blizzard can temporarily or permanently suspend the account of anyone who exploits the game by "speed hacking" or making the other game alterations listed above. So far, Blizzard has banned well over 50,000 accounts.

Blizzard makes heavy use of a system known as The Warden on the Windows version of the game in order to detect third-party programs, such as botting software. There has been some controversy as to the legality of The Warden. The Warden uses techniques similar to anti-virus software in order to analyze other running software on the players' PCs, as well as the file system. However, unlike anti-virus software, it sends a portion of this information back to Blizzard, which caused privacy advocates to accuse it of being spyware. The Warden's existence has not been acknowledged by Blizzard.

Real-world Criticism

Treatment of gay players

Blizzard garnered criticism for their decision in January 2006 to ban guilds from advertising sexual orientation preferences. The incident occurred after several players were cited for "harassment" after advocating a group for gay-straight alliance . Blizzard initially responded by saying their objective was to, ".. promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast."

Blizzard later reversed the decision to issue warnings to players promoting GLBT-friendly guilds. Included in this decision was the announcement that they intend to set up in-game channels intended specifically for guild advertisements, as well as provide "sensitivity training" for their staff after players complained of homophobic language being used openly and without punishment.

Game Addiction

World of Warcraft has also come under criticism for stories of game addictions to the popular video game. In June of 2005 it was reported that a four month old child had suffocated due to neglect by her World of Warcraft-addicted parents who were reportedly at a nearby cafe playing World of Warcraft. In August of that year, the government of the People's Republic of China decided to enforce control over how many hours the country's 20 million gamers can play.

Many internet sources have dubbed the game "World of Warcrack", or simply "Warcrack", by its addictive nature, an allusion to the addictive effects of crack cocaine. Dr. Maressa Orzack, a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, was interviewed August 8, 2006 stating that of the 6 million subscribers are addicted. She is quoted as saying "... 40 percent of the players are addicted." Note that the 40 percent figure was not derived from a scientific study overseen by Dr. Orzack, but rather came from "a forum that Nick Yee runs". She added in an August 2006 interview that "even if the percentage is 5 to 10 percent which is standard for most addictive behaviors, it is a huge number of people who are out of control." Also, according to Dr. John Grohol, a colleague of Orzack's, "Dr. Orzack is not claiming that up to 40% of World of Warcraft gamers are addicted based upon any actual evidence or surveys of players. This is just her opinion, based upon her own experience and observation of the problem."

But there is still much speculation of a gaming addiction problem. A November 14, 2006 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer featured individuals who admit becoming addicted to World of Warcraft and other MMORPG's.

Grinding

Many reviewers feel World of Warcraft is more about hours played than skill, and that to get ahead in the game, players must constantly "grind" for gold or quest rewards.

See also

• World of Warcraft
• Corrupted Blood
• Gold farming

External links

• Ward, Mark (May 2006). "Problems plague World of Warcraft". BBC