So, I’ve been reading one of the more recent World of Warcraft novels, Arthas, by Christie Golden, and I happened to skim over her biography at the back of the book (while I was looking at the notes on further reading–I love lore, and I need to learn more and more of it as I keep playing WoW) to see that she is an “avid player” of WoW.
So that got me musing (and I really shouldn’t muse before I check WoWInsider for the information, but I digress). If I was the author of World of Warcraft novels (amongst others–Golden writes Star Wars and Star Trek novels; I may have to pick up Omen (Fate of the Jedi — she’s working on the series with Aaron Allston and another author whose name escapes me at this time) at some point…..what sort of gameplay aspect would I be focusing on? Good question, right?
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, WoW has about three main foci for gameplay: Roleplaying (my personal favorite), raiding (the pennultimate goal of PvE, largely), and PvP (in all its varied forms). Personally, I’m discounting PvP entirely–most people just don’t play WoW for the PvP, most have moved on to Warhammer because of the “superior system” of PvP to be had there. That leaves Raiding and RP. As much as I love RP…I’m thinking that she may well be a raider. And here’s why.
Both of these aspects of gameplay are total–and I do mean total–time sucks, but one can be less all-consuming than the other, and that’s raiding. Raiding is scheduled, rigid. You set a timetable because you have to get 10-25 people in the same place at the same time and get them all working toward the same goal–all at once. This definately requires a certain degree of scheduling and organization. This makes it less of a time dump than the more organic time-sucking of roleplaying.
I call roleplaying organic because it is. I’m guild lead for one of the oldest (and larger) RP guilds on the Sentinels (US) server–a roleplaying server, not as old as most, but still older than the two most recently opened (and personally hated by me) RP servers (these would be Moonguard (US) and Wyrmrest Accord (US) — I’ve lost too many people to these so-called “meccas” of RP to have much respect for them or much love. Quality over quantity has been my mantra for a long time, and from what I understand, there may be RP everywhere on these servers…but it’s not the quality that I’ve been accustomed to). I know how random RP is, and how rarely scheduled events seem to do well (though I’m hoping that the most recently scheduled events on the server — Miko’s For the Herd! event and RoA’s own Round Table of Azeroth tournament will have good turn-outs) and that’s because people do it at random. It’s just what happens. And when RP starts…unless you put a hard-stop time on it (which most people don’t) it goes on for hours. And hours. And hours. That’s just how it is. It’s what happens. It’s a bigger time sink than raiding ever is and ever can be because it’s not scheduled.
Don’t let anyone tell you that a successful writer’s life isn’t scheduled, because most successful writers have a strict schedule of when they work and when they do everything else (which is probably why I’m not very successful, largely because I fail very hard at doing this at this time). Therefore, raiding is more conducive to a writer’s life.
Of course, maybe WoWInsider will tell me I’m wrong. I have to check up on that. Until I do, though…this is my story, and I’m sticking to it.