by Chuck Hoodak

Created on: June 13, 2008   Last Updated: March 04, 2011

If you are a gamer and have not played World of Warcraft, you will find yourself in an odd place: you are a minority. With over 10 million subscribers, the World of Warcraft, or WoW, has become the one of the largest MMORPG in history.

Since 2004, Blizzard's mammoth online game has managed to not only increase it's player base, they have managed to retained a large portion of it through the years. How do they do it? Probably the best explanation is that the game is "complexity through simplicity". If that seems like a contradiction, then you haven't played the game. Having a lot of depth of play and making it simple has been a formula for success that hasn't been rivaled by any competitors yet.

Any game can have a multitude of features; getting all of the features to work in harmony is World of Warcraft.

*Character creation

Choose a side: the Alliance - Night Elves, Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes or Draenai; or the Horde - Orcs, Trolls, Blood Elves, Tauren and the Undead.

Once you have decided on a faction and a race, you will choose a class: Hunter, Warlock, Warrior, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Druid, Shaman and the Paladin.

Some classes, like the Druid and the Paladin can only be played by a particular race, so you must explore each of your choices to make sure that you get what you want.

Hunters and Warlocks get the use of pets to help them. Warriors and Paladins use heavy armor and can go toe-to-toe with most opponents. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Priests and Mages wear only cloth armor and are more fragile, but they make up for that with their devastating ranged attacks. The Druid is hybrid class that can shape-shift into different forms to allow the Druid the flexibility to perform tasks. The Rogue has the ability to stealth around and distract his targets and use the element of surprise. The Shaman uses totems for healing and attacks.

Once you have chosen a character, you begin in a starting area and you are on your way!

*Advancing in levels

Your main objective in the game is to level up your character. The higher you level, the more abilities and features you can have.

You can level up by doing quests, and by running dungeon instances. A quest is a task that you receive from a NPC (non-playable character) that requires you to retrieve an object, or defeat an creature or a combination of both. An instance is a dungeon that is unique to you and the party you are in, and requires a few quests to complete it. Both quests and instances are locked into a level

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