And after months playing Dragon’s Age, Aion and Borderlands, I felt it was the time to dust off my WoW undead warlock from its catacomb.

I stopped playing WoW at the same time of many of my fellows, in January, and once I returned last week (late July) I only found one of my raid contacts online during the evening prime time. He told me he had stopped for months as well and that everyone really left the realm or quit playing. He was considering moving back to Blackrock, renowned realm of the Arena superstar players.

To give an idea of the social panorama, according to unofficial player community gathered data from WoW Census and WoW Heroes, the realm in question (Bronzebeard) had 2600 lv 80 horde warlock characters by January 2010, and I was listed in the #8 position gearwise. Bronzebeard now has only 1000 horde warlock characters (reduction of over 50%), and I still list among the top 50 best geared warlocks even after 6 months of inactivity. This data suggest a mass player evasion from the realm, due to inactivity or migration, as well as the player difficulty to successfully raid Icecrown Citadel. While really few elitist guilds could successfully enjoy the raid right when it was released by Blizzard, most players in the realm are far from experiencing the high end game content.

One could argue that this divide is common between serious and casual gamers, and that, really, many casual gamers are not interested in raiding, reserved to the players who enjoy more challenging game content. Yet, as a player from Bronzebeard, I saw players moving and quitting the game no matter if they were casual or serious. Many say they are waiting for Cataclysm while playing other games (just like me), others moved to another realm, may it be to top hardcore player realms or simply to play together with real life friends/family. How many times I got messages in my mailbox saying “Hey Damashii, I’m gonna miss ya, Im moving to server X to play with my cousin/friend, goodbye, good luck” or even “This server sucks, Im transferring to the top realm x, it was really nice to raid with you, goodbye”. I’ve heard “Icecrown Citadel is too easy, boring, I’ll be back for Cataclysm ” as well as “Icecrown Citadel is this big bad wolf, I’ll stop for a while and try to be kingslayer once Cataclysm is out and everyone is lv 85”.

And my experience contrasts to that old picture of World of Warcraft as the “massive online game where 11 million players from all around the world play together as a community”. Well, the players are divided by different realms and geographic regions; North Americans don’t play with Europeans and Asians, while Latin Americans mix themselves in cultural anonymity in the North American servers….Also, the idea of World of Warcraft as a massive gaming addiction seems awkward, since the player activity is very sensitive to the content released by Blizzard as well as other game options in the market…. My experience also contrasts that positive picture of the virtual community where people find themselves “home” and peer support. While indeed, certain players can find themselves in the tönnesian Gemeinschaft guild where they spend their evenings, many other players won’t ever find such social oasis, and many many others are really not interested at all in such kind of sociability.

So here I am, decided to get back to the iceflame ballet, Keleseth tanking and frost badge farming, to get that damn Wyrm mount before Cataclysm. And for such, I’m paying those 25 dollars to transfer my character to a decent realm. To my aid, I have several information websites listing WoW demographics, raid progression, history and so forth. Of course, I want the “perfect realm”: a top realm where ICC successful progression is not an issue, a non-crowded lagged server, east coast realm time, a good battlegroup where Horde get fast queues for battlegrounds and dungeons, Wintergrasp dominated by Horde, an active inflated AH economy, and a bully-free environment.

And of course, such realm doesn’t exist. The more elitist the realm, the more bullies. For example, Mal’Ganis, Illidan and Blackrock players are considered famous elitist bullies in dungeons when interacting with cross-server players. When the dungeon system came out last year, I levelled a protection paladin (from 1 to 80) in the Dalaran realm pretty fast just grouping with people randomly in dungeons. Dalaran server shared the same battlegroup as Mal’Ganis, the top #1 north American realm, and often I read discussions in trade chat about how unbearable were the Mal’Ganis players. In my own experience, yes, bullying was common in the groups I was placed with them. “We are the best in the World, all of you guys suck”. How many times did I hear that? *sigh*

I have to admit that they were very skilled players, and my runs were very smooth and efficient, and most times, I wasn’t the bully target (since the quality of my performance was rarely bad). But many times the players were very rude. For example, imagine leading a group where your healer says “move on bitch, I’m ready”. These situations of total aggressive disrespect were common, and my answer was always strict: “hey kid, learn to respect others and find an idiot to tank for you, I’m logging, goodnight”.

In some cases, the serious gaming activity is embedded in very negative social values and practices that are not related to the stereotype of the introspective techno-intellectualized nerd (as the common sense would think), but actually constituting niches where intolerance, white male elitism, racism, misogyny and homophobia are considered the standard accepted values.

But let’s get back to the main topic here. While checking the realms data, I noticed that the Dalaran realm, which in January had about 15k horde players, nowadays has a horde population of only 3k….. which means 80% of the population moved or quit the game. What is going on then in World of Warcraft? Summer vacations? Cataclysm anxiety? Diaspora to top realms? Icecrown Citadel boredom/frustration? Game market competitivity? Would it be the time when WoW become a game of the past?

So I try to trace realms according to geographic location, to see which ones would be in the east coast. To my surprise, none of the 10 top realms are in the east coast, most of them operate in west coast time and thus probably have a predominant population from the west coast. For an active raider in the east coast, it means that raid times would be usually from midnight to 3AM, so…. no thanks.

From my experience in Bronzebeard…. been there, done that, and won’t do it anymore in any circumstance. And by 3 Am is when the player encounters the more confusing bosses, like Thaddius “turn positive, turn negative, negative again, go positive”, or Freya “hide under mushrooms, get back, aoe lashers, single target, big adds, back to boss”, or the Twin Valkyr “be black, be white, attack black, attack white, pop cooldowns”, and Professor Putricide “green ooze, orange ooze…” I’m definitely getting old, and I can’t hide under healthy mushrooms, be positive, pop my cooldowns and hit the green ooze at 3AM, by this time I want my pillow. And in my humble opinion, a raid with 12 encounters is too much.

But it makes me wonder: why do west coast realms have a better performance than the east coast ones?
To my surprise, the best east coast realm in raid progression is Warsong, a realm characterized by the predominance of Brazilians and Portuguese language as main language spoken in the realm (says wow wiki). While some could think that it would be ideal for me to play with my cultural peers and interact in my own language, the idea seems really uncomfortable for me. The bullying from the Mal’Ganis boys seems irrelevant compared to Brazilian misogyny. In my imagination, to play in a Brazilian raid, any misclick, death or low dps performance would be judged as “she’s a woman therefore she sucks”. The north-american serious gamers might picture women as bitches, but I notice they think that gender is irrelevant regarding technical skills and player performance. Well, except when a couple play together, then in four different occasions/raids/guilds I heard that someone’s girlfriend/wife is not a good player but had to be tolerated in the group just because she’s someone’s wife/gf…

I think that many World of Warcraft players can identify with my situation: I want to play the game and experience all raid encounters, enjoying the group challenges and so forth in a comfortable social environment, but this seems impossible. While playing in a social guild, the raid is foremost a social event, while jokes, chats and occurrences are a blast, while the challenging raid encounters will usually end in failure due to technical inability, lack of focus in gameplay performance. While playing in a serious raiding guild, nobody will ever be your friend and individualism will be extreme, ego fights will be common, and yes, there will always be some extremely bully/intolerant/racist males. As players say: “guilds=drama”.

So WoW is the first online game where I notice that sociability, social integration and cooperation are an issue. While few servers as Illidan develop a history, identity and thus tradition as a solid “united” online community, a hundred realms hold a great mass of anonymous players with weak social integration ties, poor raid performance….

I dream with a one man raid option. Yes, 1-man.

Maybe it is better to stay in Borderlands… until Civilization 5 is released, and one day check out Cataclysm….