My son is a lazy gamer. In Warcraft III, he prefers to play the god games where you gather all the power ups and then are pretty much unbeatable. He knows where they all are, grabs them, waits for people to find him, then puts his guy on auto while he watches TV. The other players send wave after wave of lower powered units at him and he just mows them down.
He’s having trouble finding those sorts of games now. I suggested trying the more competitive maps where ranked clans go to train, but he doesn’t do as well on those.
He’s been kind of lazy in MMOs, too. I don’t mind, I really don’t think MMOs are a very good way to spend your time if you have anything else to do. I don’t, so I’m okay with my time spent on them, but I’d rather my children lived real lives.
He got to his fifties on EQ1 with his monk before giving up, and his mid-forties with his brigand in EQ2. It’s harder to find groups past these points, and very hard to find any that will support random AFKs to do IMs, watch TV a little, or play a round of football on the PS2.
I was just playing around in WoW, running my 36 rogue solo through Deadmines (my favorite WoW instance) on my laptop while my main computer downloaded the EQ2 beta. My son came up, wondered what I was doing. He’d seen me play WoW before, of course – it was my main game for months – but until he saw WoW on South Park, it wasn’t cool.
He took the laptop, made a new Tauren druid, got that to 7, restarted as an undead warlock, was having fun with that. I got thinking… this might be the one MMO that really catered to people who like playing in short bursts peppered with bunches of AFKs… I definitely saw lots and lots of kids just like him when I was playing. Trashtalking people with short attention spans… doesn’t that really define the typical WoW player? It sure did for me.
My son got me to install WoW on his computer so he didn’t always have to be on my laptop. Warcraft III is more or less forgotten.
I was just about to cancel WoW, too, and save that money for another game. I might do as I did with City of Heroes – just cancel and go to gamecards. That way, when my son loses interest and moves on to the next big thing, I won’t be left with a recurring fee.