There are many misconceptions about World of Warcraft that float around the Internet. Some are spawned from pop culture while others are spawned from rumors and misinformation. Here is what I think are the top five misconceptions with WoW and the real truth behind each.

Top Five Misconceptions About World of Warcraft

In no certain order.

• World of Warcraft requires a commitment of hundreds to thousands (!!) of hours to do anything within the game.

  This is a very popular misconception that many people have and spawns a good deal of stigma with the game. It comes in different forms and differnt wording but it generally in some way or another says that WoW requires you to literally devote your life to it in order to progress anywhere within the game. Sometimes it simple says to level up and other times it's talking about PvP and other times it's talking about raiding. The reality is that out of all of the MMOGs I’ve played, WoW is one of the few that actually allow you to play when you want, where you want, and how you want. With the expansion, World of the Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, things were changed so that you don’t even need to spend massive amounts of time to progress to elite (purple) gear with the battlegrounds and winged instances. To get to the highest level cap is easier than ever and with the way questing works and inns you’re rewarded for not playing with extra experience. As for the end game and raiding…..

• World of Warcraft is all about getting the loot, which the average (casual) player will never obtain or it takes just too much time.

  Another popular misconception. Loot is an integral part of the game and separates players based on what loot they have. A long time ago, before the first expansion, this was rather true. It was possible to get decent gear by just running 5-man instances and Zul’Gurub added some awesome epic gear that was obtainable in an easy and relaxing instance. However, with TBC and the arena changes it’s possible to get epic gear that’s really good with just casual play. Honor can be obtained through the battlegrounds which can be used to buy the penultimate arena sets and PvE reputation grinding can get PvE/PvP gear. Many 5-man instances and heroics drop epic gear as well and Karazhan is a 10 man raid instance that’s easy to run as well.

  Raiding still requires time dedication and still offers the best loot, but with 25 man raids you don’t have to take forever to get 40 likeminded and skilled players together. There really is no excuse for anyone with a little bit of time to find themselves unable to get something decent!

• The WoW playerbase is comprised mostly of prepubescent young ne’er-do-wells who will ruin gamers’ experience for their own entertainment or are just too ignorant to actually converse with or etc.

  This is another somewhat popular misconception with some somewhat true roots. The WoW official forums are usually the source for this where you can often find various posts ranging from extremely insightful to downright useless. With the ability to post as much as you want, within the time limits, you often get a lot more static than actual noise so they’re regarded by many to be somewhere where you’ll either find good posts or just posts filled with nonsense.

  However, in terms of the actual game, you’ll find that many of the players are actually over the age of 18 (mostly due to the credit card requirement) and that much of the game is filled with insightful, cool, and mature people. By the nature of being open to anyone, the game is also filled with players who are immature and act very inappropriately, but the encounter rate is rather low outside of public chat channels.

• World of Warcraft requires you to buy gold from secondary websites in order to get anywhere within the game.

  This isn’t one I hear often and is so ridiculous that I’ve no clue how people still think this. Money is easy to farm and all the gear you could ever need is given to you through either PvE or PvP. Flying mounts… you can get the one to just travel around with for really cheap and the epic flying mounts take almost no time to farm up. This brings up one last major misconception…

• If an item is epic (purple) then it’s automatically good.

  An items color tells you what the quality of the item is. Grey needs to be sold, white means you probably need it for something, green means that it’s good, blue mean it’s great, and purple mean it’s awesome. That’s generally what the colors mean but there are often times when they’re either a little misleading or just in no way optimum. For instance, Bind on Equip items are in most cases nowhere near as good as Bind on Pick-up items meaning that blue and purple items from the Auction House generally are nowhere near as good as items you can obtain from instances.

  Another scenario is that some items that even drop from instances may be purple but they may not be specifically for your class or build. Just because an item may be good doesn’t mean it’s good for your class or your build.

So what do you think? Do you know of any other misconceptions that you dislike a lot when people ramble on about them? Talk about it in our forums.

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