Blizzard might be joking regarding WoW as a console game, but I'd say WoW is almost ready to be a real console game. Not a fancy one for Xbox live or anything, no, a good old fashioned RPG, even without the need for internet. All those unknown people in Orgrimmar can just as easily be replaced with NPCs running around, which should make the game more enjoyable for the average player. You want to selNl something? NPC traders will discuss a price with you, also making sure all those that are clueless about the WoW markets won’t get ripped off. You somehow want to do a 5-man? No problem, NPCs will group with you, which would even save you the “lfg” searching time and with an outdated AI from the 90s you can make an NPC play better in a group than the average random these days. Seems like a perfect WoW.   However, it wouldn't be so for me. The main reason I chose to play WoW is because of its group oriented gameplay. Risk Your Life was an awesome game with a fast pace and some cool spells/abilities, but it felt like an FPS. Priston Tale had some insane character develop-

ment, you could always get better items and upgrade items in various ways, but in the end it was an infinite solo grind. Guildwars was a really good RPG, but the content wasn't extensive, at a certain point it came down to “PvP or die of boredom”. WoW was so much better; not necessarily because of the graphics, crafting or character development – no - WoW owned because of the interaction with other players. Almost from the start you could (and in some way were forced to) group with other people to do quests together that seemed impossible alone, going to Wailing Caverns as a group was an awesome experience (yes I skipped RFC, I was lvl 12 or so, what the heck did I know), going to Scarlet Monastery was just insane as shaman, so many good items, I still refer to it as shaman-heaven number one (shaman heaven number two was Dire Maul).

This approach was very successful, but somewhere Blizzard decided it could be even more successful (and make more money) if they changed this some. Being group oriented has its drawbacks, all the people that can only play for a short while each day, and don't even know for how long that might be, will find it difficult to do these group oriented activities, they might have to log out again in 20 minutes, or finding the group takes too much of their precious time. No, solo content is the future. Everyone can do it at their own pace, whenever they want to. Just one problem - in the old WoW the difficulty, and thus reward, of activities was determined by the amount of people that were needed to complete it. Solo content gave crappy rewards, quests which you had to group for had somewhat better rewards, then 5-man activities, 10-man, 20-man and eventually 40-man activities which gave the best rewards in the game. Now this old rewarding system doesn't go well with the new solo oriented approach, so a new rewarding system had to be put into place, as you can't have your new customers run around in gear of a lower quality than those that actually group.

The big drawback of this all is that more and more people have no idea how to behave or play in a group, if you have never grouped (for pve purposes), how do you know how the tank/aggro mechanism works in WoW? You don't. How do you know how to deal with several monsters? You don't. And how do you behave/react when someone else does unexpected things? You don't. Yesterday I used the new LFG system for the first time, wanted to see what kind of PuG I could make, we were going to do MgT normal, a run that takes 20-25 minutes with guildies or alts from guildies (rep runs). Now I made this PuG with me as healer, a tank from a decent guild, 2 random locks and a retri pally, no CC but on MgT normal it wouldn't be needed. What a horror. 20 Minutes later we hadn't even reached the first boss. The 2 locks had insane bad gear and both stood there oom wandindg and not using that oh-so-good warlock ability: Lifetap. The retri pally buffed himself with BoS and then never, ever, attacked the same mob as the tank, always trying to solo one of the other mobs. Now we had a 2nd tank; bad thing was he had a big 2hander and around 9k hp. So no, this wasn't a big success and I disbanded the group before the first boss, we wouldn't kill much anyway.

You must understand this is a 5-man, easy stuff, nothing complex or too demanding, but people manage to fail here already. Makes me happy that I am in a guild where we actually demand certain things from people, I don't think I would still be playing if I had to deal with people that are new to raiding on a regular basis.

Column from week 15: NAXX