Free Candy For Everyone

More Crazy Cattle adventures in Uldaman are chronicled on the guild page. Enjoy.

I was out looking for a new theme to use on my WoW guild’s website (Crazy Cattle), and my search brought me to the site of a Wordpress theme competition, which includes many nice themes. One of them had an amusing name, so I clicked it. It had this really awesome image in the banner which you can see below:

Nice rejection shot there. I happened to be chatting online with a friend while finding this, and sent him the link so he could see the banner too. He responded with a link to Exploding Dog. Good eye, my friend. Turns out that’s who made the artwork. I then proceeded to spend a good 30 minutes clicking through and looking at the artwork. It isn’t exactly for everyone, but it’s definitely my sense of humor.

Here are a few that I particularly liked:

the glass is half full
you are a big bug
sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks
WARNING: there is a trojan on your computer

Go, explore, enjoy.

Yesterday I dropped on by Gaming Steve to see if he had any news about the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 1.10. He’s usually a pretty reliable source of information. What I found was this poll about how many hours people have put into WoW. If you scroll down and read the comments, you’ll find a lot of animosity towards the game. One guy sums it up pretty concisely,

I hate WoW. Boring. It’s the only thing people talk about.

Is this how all you non-WoW players feel? Is WoW talk driving you mad? I’ve definitely noticed the “watercooler” conversations have drifted firmly into WoW talk. Just the other day, there was an impromptu gathering in the hallway of about five of us talking all about our characters and progress and plans (it doesn’t help that almost all the members of my Crazy Cattle guild are my co-workers).

At lunch, I probably bored another co-worker greatly as I talked all about my plans to respec my Tauren druid and explained what that meant. Is there a point at which enough is enough? I’ve cut back on my actual time playing WoW so that I can fit in more of my other interests. I haven’t really cut back on how much I talk about it, however. Is this a problem?

I’m not sure. World of Warcraft is a truly fantastic game. It is engaging, feature rich, expansive, and ever growing. The world is large and there are still whole areas I haven’t visited. It is possible to exhaust the content, but I haven’t come even close to doing so yet. The game lends itself to anecdotes. Even before WoW, I would frequently have conversations sharing stories of gaming experiences. “I was playing Civ last night, and the Mongols tried to take out my capital but my culture was strong so it converted right back!” We would talk for quite some time about strategies or tell stories of any game we were excited about. We’d contrive anecdotes for games that weren’t really anecdotal. But now we’re playing a game that really is about telling stories. The idiocy of fellow players is a frequent favorite. The new abilities we acquire or the rare drops we receive are all great cause for excitement. Is it any wonder that we can’t stop talking about it?

I understand that there are people out there that love games but don’t play World of Warcraft. Yes, WoW gets a ton of attention from media, from bloggers, from folks at the watercooler. But we’re all willing to talk about something else. It just needs to be really great to pull us away from our regularly scheduled programming.