Students Blog

Many gamers like myself at times love mmorpgs and at times also hate it at the same time. The traditional online game has changed into either addictive first person shooter games or mmorpgs that take countless hours to complete and to perfect even as the game is constantly changing with new patches and expansions. In play testing many mmorpgs until I found one that I liked, I realized that in many instances my player type changes depending on each mission and each character that I have. My style of play also depends a lot on which one of the mmorpgs I am playing and how their system is set up.
In the game Guild Wars, the overall interface is relatively easy to understand and to play. I started playing as an elementalist because I wanted to first explore and to achieve at around the same level. Overall, my player type would probably be of the achiever type according to Bartle in that I try to complete the game as much as I can so that I can see the whole storyline. While a warrior or ranger might have been a better choice for just that as an explorer, I also wanted to be able to do well later on in the game and to eventually play more competitively as both a killer in pvp and an achiever in being able to finish the storyline of the game. The storyline and game play in Guild Wars also helps contribute and foster an environment for socializers in that a lot of the missions require groups. In many of these missions, it often takes some time to form groups and to have a certain amount of trust in the abilities of the other people on your team and should the team be successful in beating the especially tough missions, then there is a common bond that is essentially formed even if the other players are from different guilds. The guild factor of the game also plays a major role in the way that the game has towards socializers because the recruitment of the members is not just skills but also communications with even some guilds that are often just groups of friends meeting up online and playing. In playing through most of the games and spending several hundred hours in only a few months, I eventually achieved two characters at the max level of 20 and two more in the process of getting there. For the killers in the game, the pvp segment strongly appeals to them. The pvp world is a playground for both killers and other groups alike. The option to choose a pre-built max level character or to use your own character from the pve world is significant in that it allows a completely different game play and style that has a balance in some of the explorers going to the pvp area and the killers with a certain amount of prey at all times. On my pvp only character, I found that I was very excited when killing other people and this was very exciting to me in playing in the role more of a killer.
In World of Warcraft, the game seems to be slightly less complicated in the way that the system is set up. I chose to be a mage simply because that was what I started off with in Guild Wars so I assumed that it would be a similar style of play. However, because the area and world is so vast, I changed my style from achiever to explorer. The constant need to run back and forth and random drop quests was just very tedious to me making me not want to achieve and diverting my attention. In the process of exploring, I realized that there were a lot of areas where my level was simply not high enough and I was killed instantly. In other cases, I was killed when I accidentally hit attack on someone from the Alliance. I realized that WOW encourages more of killers on certain servers like the pvp ones and encourages other development on other servers. It is also pretty interesting trying to socialize in the game because I became a little worn from trying to level up so much. In this sense, I was also slightly discouraged in becoming an achiever and in turn simply became more of an explorer and socializer where I even tried communicating with someone from the Alliance to see what their reaction would be because I found that they could not understand across the two sides. I also met several other people like that in which they were just playing around and dancing a lot of times at random areas and became quite fun.
In changing to a different game type from Guild Wars to World of Warcraft, I found that my playing style also changed due to the different environment and the way that the balance between the systems was set up. This was cool in seeing how each player may have a main style but will switch with minor changes in the environment. While World of Warcraft was intriguing and entertaining, I found that it was a little weird transitioning and only temporarily playing on a borrowed account so I did not get as submerged into the game play as I could have otherwise. Had I invested more time and effort into the game, I may have changed my style back to the achiever and gotten a better glimpse of the game.