World of Warcraft (WoW) is an [AAA](aaa.md) [proprietary](proprietary.md) [game](game.md) released in [2004](2004.md) by [Blizzard](blizzard.md) that was one of the most successful and influential games among [MMORPGs](mmorpg.md). It's the mainstream kind of fantasy MMO, considered pretty easy to learn and play (compared e.g. to Eve Online). It's a successor to Warcraft III, which was a real time strategy. World of Warcraft had -- in its beginning -- one of the best aesthetics of all games in history, however later on it adopted more "modern" aesthetic and ruined everything of course.
It seems the game is written in [C++](cpp.md) and in 2009 had something like 5.5 million [lines of code](loc.md) (see also [bloat](bloat.md)).
There is a [FOSS](foss.md) implementation of WoW server called [MaNGOS](mangos.md) (now having some [forks](fork.md)) that's used to make private servers. The client is of course proprietary and if you dare make a popular server Blizzard (or whatever it's called now, it's probably merged with [Micro$oft](microfost.md) or something now) will just rape you.
The classic WoW (mostly the vanilla but we can possibly extend this to the end of WOTLK) lied somewhere in the middle between good old and shitty [modern](modern.md) games, it had many great things like the iconic awesome [low poly](low_poly.md) hand painted stylized graphics, big open world, amazing PvP and PvE, but the modern poison was already creeping in. The WoW of today is of course 100% pure [shit](shit.md), it's [bloated](blot.md) beyond any imagination, the graphics is absolutely ruined (semi realistic style, everything looks like a cheap plastic toy, with the retarded shit like character outlines, it looks much worse and is also 10000x heavier on the GPU), it's extremely [censored](censorship.md) and [politically correct](political_correctness.md) (you can literally change gender of your character at barbershop lol, they did this out of fear of [LGBT](lgbt.md), they also removed the *spit* emote because it was "offensive" -- yes, a game that's all about [war](war.md) and killing and literally has war in its name must restrain you from hurting someone's feelings by spitting on the ground). You can also make any weapon or armor make look like any other weapon or armor ("transmog"), that just kills the whole point of an RPG, some players also see a different world than others ("phasing") and so on. Also basically every race can now be any class, even if it doesn't make any sense, like Tauren rogue (in the past this used to be a [joke](joke.md) but today jokes are made into reality) -- otherwise it would be [racism](racism.md) or something. A rat in level 80-90 area is 1000 times stronger than a bear in level 1-10 area, that's just fucked up. The game has about 1 billion expansions while the lore writers had already ran out of any ideas after like 5 of them, so they now just started to mess around with time travel and alternative timelines (resorting to time rape is always that desperate last resort move which signifies the work has been dead for a long time by then). The game is so bad Blizzard even started running official vanilla, no expansion servers ("classic WoW"), which is the only thing holding it above the water now. Of course before this they nuked all the popular unofficial private vanilla servers with legal threats so they could force a [monopoly](monopoly.md) -- this destroyed great many communities but Blizzard is a corporation so they could do anything they want.
{ For me the peak of Warcraft was [Warcraft III:TFT](warcraft.md), it was perfect in every way (except for being proprietary and bloated of course). As a great fan of Warcraft III, seeing WoW in screenshots my fantasy made it the best game possible to be created. When I actually got to playing it it was really good -- some of my best memories come from that time -- nevertheless I also remember being disappointed in many ways. Especially with limitation of freedom (soulbound items, forced grinding, effective linearity of leveling, GMs preventing hacking the game in fun ways etc.) and here and there a lack of polish (there were literally visible unfinished parts of the map, also visual transitions between zones too fast and ugly and the overall world design felt kind of bad), laziness and repetitiveness of the design. I knew how the game could be fixed, however I also knew it would never be fixed as it was in hands of a corporation that had other plans with it. That was the time I slowly started to see things not being ideal and the possibility of a great thing going to shit. ~drummyfish }
