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The world's most popular and highest rated MMORPG

Summary

World of Warcraft is currently the top MMORPG to date, with the most subscribers and highest revenue ever from such a game. Aside from being the most popular and well-known MMORPG, it has an infamously bad userbase, filled to the brim with trolls, noobs, and the like.

With each successive release, Blizzard has simplified the game and made it more attractive to "casual" (used as an epithet in-game) players, who further raise revenue streams. With each of these changes has come class balancing issues, which are further compounded by PVP being only part of the game but affecting things that are not necessarily related to it. Often a class or profession will be "nerfed" and made far less powerful in order to satisfy the complaints of poopsockers and the like.

Community

With WoW being an ostensibly social game, it was only natural for various communities to rise from its userbase. Three of the most well-known of these have been the Official WoW Forums, Elitist Jerks, and Goon Squad.

Official forums

The official forums may be a community of sorts, but it's a highly dysfunctional one at best. Blizzard offers players areas to discuss their classes, their realms, bugs and other issues, and various other aspects of the game. These forums are typically a cesspool of old memes, trolling, and assorted other idiocy. Most good players avoid them at all costs.

Elitist Jerks

Elitist Jerks is a site, its associated forums, and guild dedicated to more intelligent discussion and theorycrafting, and often the best character builds are extensively researched and developed here. They proudly live up to their name and often the best players can be found amongst their ranks.

Goon Squad

Something Awful, being a huge and well-established community, naturally has a large population of WoW players. There is a sub-forum dedicated to WoW, and quite often members of Elitist Jerks are goons as well. The discussion here is a bit less serious, and goons are well-known for trolling or griefing, especially on the Mal'Ganis server, which Goon Squad's main guild calls its home.

Foreign forums

The WoW forum on Baidu itself became well known when the Jia Junpeng meme, about a Chinese mother asking Jia Junpeng to come to the dinner table, appeared there. It went viral in China.

Origins

The game was first announced in 2001 and was extensively tested until its release. It built upon the stories and setting of the Warcraft series of RTS games, first introduced in 1994. It is said to have been developed by fans of older MMOs, most notably Everquest and Dark age of Camelot.

Current status

The most recent expansion, Cataclysm, was released in December of 2010. With each expansion, the level cap for players is raised. The base game allows players to reach level 60, with expansions allowing them to reach 70, 80, and 85, respectively. It is still going strong, with over 12 million subscribers.

Facts

Images

There are those who've played WOW their entire lives!	Jia Junpeng, stop playing WoW and git to the dinner table, NAOW!	Typical players desktop	The official Wow trollface
Dance!	The Boring Crusade.	What does this look like to you?	A typical enemy mob
Lookin' cool!	A typical player.	The next expansion?

Videos

Related Pages

Blizzard Entertainment

Dark Age of Camelot

EverQuest

EverQuest II

Gigi

Jia Junpeng

Leeroy Jenkins

Real ID

TERA

Wafflepwn

External Links

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