MMO Adventures 1: The Not-Playing

I spent the last week in an MMO frenzy. I was ravenous to play something online, with rpg elements and a persistent story. The fact that I read WoW.com daily, and haven’t played WoW since 2008, probably has something to do with this. The fact that I read Massively.com on the daily as well does much to explain how this urge could come upon a man.

So I spent literally the entirety of last week engaged in a project to download and patch WoW. Spring Break was coming up, and as my college provides two whole weeks for that celebration, it seemed like a good time to jump back into the game and see how my Warlocks (I have three, one for each spec) were doing.

I managed to get WoW onto my computer, though it took approximately 30 hours to do so. I was using a free trial, just to be sure that I still enjoyed the gameplay, but after an evening I was confident that I’d like to spend my time grinding, skinning, mining, and engaging in all the other joyous repetitions WoW provides. My defunct account is licensed for the Burning Crusade already, which meant I could try a free trial of Wrath of the Lich King. I clicked yes to that…and thus broke everything.

Despite a night of searching, I’ve yet to find any way to just upgrade to Wrath from Burning Crusade; I have to re-download the entire client. Which, again, takes ages. My ten-day trial is already a third over, and I’d say I could just wait it out and then go back to playing BC; except I deleted the game in order to try downloading the new client. I have the DVDs for the original game and BC, but it doesn’t seem that they’re usable; I can’t install that much of the game first and then just pick up the Wrath expansion. That puts me in a position where I need to spend 40 dollars to get the expansion plus also pay the monthly subscription fee, as it doesn’t appear there’s a free month’s service included in the Wrath price.

I’m not complaining, really. WoW is awesome, it’s doing very well for itself, and I’m glad of it. I’m simply in a situation where 15 dollars is very different from 40, and already feels like a wild expenditure. Luckily, partway through my WoW travails Fallen Earth came to the Mac. I’d followed the recent columns about one player’s journey through the wastes of that post-apoc game, and it struck my fancy…mostly as a substitute for Borderlands, which my poor laboring Macbook could apparently run if not for the DRM on the game, which prevents my running it through Steam/Crossover Games. I live in a world where my great interest in games is unfortunately combined with a near-total inability to play any of them.

The Fallen Earth client was, unfortunately, a 4.9 gig download that died halfway through the process (this, too, took a day). I fell into a deep despair.

And then

Then I remembered I had installed a few free-to-play MMOs through Crossover. I played Last Chaos for a time, but it failed to grab me, largely do the catastrophic slowdown I suffered any time I went into town. I had also attempted to get Perfect World working, with no success…at the time. Well, whatever problem PW had, it’s functional now. That means I actually have the capacity to play an MMO, get my grind on, fill them bars, and otherwise experience the joys of playing an rpg on the internet.

Great Story, eh?