Bulldung. I will now waste my time to tell you why.
1. It calls itself a true roleplaying game, and yet, it has "levels". Yes, I know many games have this, but WoW repeatly tells us that it's RP and yet, levels would just not exist in such a time and land.
2.
cgi.ebay.co.uk/World-of-Warcraft-Level-60-Undead-Priest-w-2-301-gold_W0QQitemZ230075171299QQihZ013QQcategoryZ4596QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem'Nuff said. The amount of account foolery in WoW is just silly. Basically, with all the sites offering to buff up your character in return for a truckload of cash, it's just the rich peoples win. Horrible.
3. In order to actually make an acount using a free trial, you have to give up your credit card details. For something that's free. Just.. why? They claim that it offers you a semeless gameplay experiance, but that's just silly..
4. You have to pay.. For expansion packs.. That. Is. Just. Stupid. They are making you pay for updates to the game that should be free.
5. The graphics, arn't actually that good, when you look at them. You'll argue your tounges off, until you start playing this: 9dragons.acclaim.com. It's a free game, and the graphics are amazing.
6. The combat is a grind. Generic combat goes like this: Start attacking a monster and click on some spells at the bottem of the screen. No skill. People win based on time devoted to the game.
7. Community control. The players did absolutly nothing in developing the story line, all of the story is just played through by Blizzard. That's not a roleplaying game, because the people can't decide what to do.
8. On a normal server, I will see about 5 people advertising sites that sell gold. How is that, in any way, Roleplay.
9. The classic new player and best player convosation:
New player: Hello, do you know where I can find a <insert lame quest item>
Best Player: Get lost, n00b.
I tested it with a friends acount, since I refuse to give away credit card details to make one, and the above sentence happened too many times to count.
10. Walk over here, kill something there, do a quest round the corner, and do a bit of crafting. Rinse, wash, repeat.
WoW is, well, boring to say the least. Don't get me wrong, I am a great fan of MMORPGs.
But WoW doesn't deserve to be called an MMORPG.
Massivly Multiplayer Online: It may as well not be online, other players are only good for trading and hunting.
Roleplay: It just isn't.
Game: Not nearly.
1: 99.9% of RPGs do. Saying it's not a role-playing game because it has levels is like saying Reboot wasn't a cartoon because it was made with CGI. 'Levels would not exist in such a time and land'? Please. That's not even logic. Levels NEVER exist. Levels are an OOC method of keeping track of the relative power of your character compared to other characters and the enemies you face. Saying WoW isn't a role-playing game because it has a completely out-of-character system for keeping track of your own power and abilities is... Fairly unintelligent. By this definition, Dungeons and Dragons isn't a role-playing game. And if you try to say D&D isn't a roleplaying game, you need to study your RPG history.
2: Account foolery is against the rules. Selling an account will get that account deleted by Blizzard Staff if you are caught (And putting the account up on eBay is the biggest way to get caught,) and roughly 70% of all 'Powerlevelling services' are scams. The rich tend to lose money and accounts and time trying them out. Account foolery exists in every game for which you have to make an account to access. It's an inviolate rule of humanity: In every game, there will be cheaters and other people willing to ignore the rules. WoW is no different from any other.
3: I did not have to give up my credit information. Blizzard has never gotten my credit information. I got a 14 day free trial, bought the retail, bought a 60 day game card. At no time has Blizzard ever gotten personal information past my name, phone number, and address. They have 0 credit card numbers on file from me.
4: I agree in principal, but not in theory. We SHOULD get access to everything for free, but then Blizzard would start HEMORRHAGING money. There has been a single expansion pack so far. So we're not talking Everquest/EQII here, where they release a new expansion every couple of months just to PATCH THINGS and charge as much for the expansions as they do for the retail game. Blizzard has repeatedly said they aim to keep the number of expansions released low, and very infrequent, so that when you buy one you feel like you're getting a totally new game and not just a couple of new skills.
Also, the expansions are not required to continue playing, they're only required for access to the contents of the expansion. I play WoW, and do not have Burning Crusade. And even then, I can access about 50% of the stuff in the expansion because not all of it was specific for BC. So they do not FORCE YOU to go out and buy the expansion to continue playing.
5: 9Dragons? I was in the beta for another game handled by Persistent Worlds, Carpe Diem. Their service was terrible and the company seemed staffed by amateurs. The game looked terrible and was HORRIBLY grind-based. On top of that, the game was afflicted with a bug that caused problems with people with my video card; They never got around to fixing it, and basically told us 'Tough beans.'
Plus Persistent Worlds went bottom-up, Carpe Diem died and 9Dragons was passed off to Acclaim America. It's been plagued since day 1 with every problem imaginable
It's not just the graphics, it's how a game is
handled. World of Warcraft is handled extremely well.
And honestly, if you say World of Warcraft has terrible graphics, your bias against it must be blinding. The graphics are, for an MMORPG, outstanding.
Also, this point is moot. The design teams for WoW and 9Dragons were going for TOTALLY DIFFERENT EFFECTS on the players. You cannot compare these two games. 9Dragons is a a Chinese Martial Arts game set in ancient China. World of Warcraft is a high-fantasy game set in the fictional world of Azeroth.
Saying 9Dragons is better is like trying to convince someone that papaya is better than tomatoes. There's no common ground, no basis for comparison, other than you eat them both.
6: Another useless critique. All RPGs are time-based. The amount of time you spend in-game determines everything, even in pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. Combat works the same in WoW as it does in 99.9% of other RPGs. You target the monster, click your skill buttons. Even your 9dragons game works on this system. Combat takes considerable skill as you have to learn what skills to use at what time, what you can handle and what you should run from.
7: You have no clue what role-playing is, do you? Blizzard sets the world. They set the arching plot, the main storyline, the big scene. Each player makes a character that is a part of this arching plotline. What they do with those characters, from an in-character point of view, is totally up to them. The players did not develop the original storyline because that is NOT the players job, that is the Dungeon Master's job, the game creator's job. The player's job is to make characters within the DM's story to take part in it, and determine its direction. The DM should have minimal input as to what the characters do once they're established.
Blizzard gave us the overarching plotline in the war between the Horde and the Alliance, and later on at higher levels, with the battle against the Scourge and other factions that would threaten both the Alliance and the Horde.
Our job as players in this game is to set characters within this plotline, and roleplay them.
Why you keep insisting there are no role-play elements I can not understand.
8: Selling gold is counter under account foolery. Blizzard bans these people and deletes their accounts as quickly as they can. It is not roleplaying, it is a violation of Blizzard's rules and as such should be ignored by anyone trying to roleplay.
9: I will admit, there is a lot of elitism. The high-level/epic players usually have very little to do with low-level characters, and look down on them. You'll find this happening in ANY competitive game. It is not a WoW-only occurance, and is not a reason to decide the game is bad.
And I get lots of help from higher-level people. We aren't all assholes.
10: Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you really don't know what roleplaying is, it's the only way you could reach the conclusions you've reached. Role play is where you pretend to be the character you've made; You give your character a backstory, a personality, and pretend to be that character when interacting with other people and elements of the game.
First of all, if you want a roleplaying experience, you have to go to Roleplay Servers. They're clearly marked as such. All other servers will be full of people treating the game as a competitive PvP fest. They're only concerned with their ability to kill things and other players.
I play Roleplay servers. They are full of people willing to role play. Go figure.
MMORPG: Massively (There are over 8 million separate accounts.
Multiplayer (Again, 8 million seperate accounts.)
Online (Self-explanatory)
Role-playing game (You create a character, go into the world and plot created by Blizzard, and assume a part in the massive story that involves you and everyone else you meet.)
WoW meets every requirement you've given, and a lot of them that you haven't, for being an MMORPG.
And it is, honestly, one of the best MMORPGs I've ever played. And I've played a LOT of MMORPGs.
All the points you've made against the game are points made from a blinding bias against it. I don't know why you have these issues with WoW, but don't try to pass off biased ravings as being facts.
Server: Baelgun
Faction: Horde
Character: Manicora
