Getting there faster

World of Warcraft has grown enormously over the years.  Not only in terms of the number of users, which is on the order of ten million in recent years — way up from a million or so back when I joined — but in terms of the sheer amount of land and number of dungeons in the game.

So some changes are kind of inevitable in order to keep players playing.  People will struggle along for weeks or perhaps months to reach the maximum character level and start to taste the end game content.

However, if it took a year or two to do that then the game would be a lot less popular — and that content a lot less used, let alone seen.

One of the things that has changed in World of Warcraft over the years is the speed at which you can get from one place to another.  Not only that but the speed at which you get the ability to speed up your ability to get around has sped up as well.

With the Mists of Pandaria expansion set (and the accompanying WoW 5.x client program) Blizzard has taken some measures to expedite the speed at which people can not only level up but also move around.  Some of these changes are pretty exciting.

• Druids can obtain a glyph from inscribers that lets them carry a rider while in druid travel form.
• Those who do one of the special offers to bring friends to the game get a mount that turns them into a passenger-carrying flying mount.
• Going from one character level to the next goes faster all the way up to level 85.
• Gaining guild XP goes extremely quickly. Daily & Holiday quests dole out 60,000 guild XP.
• With so many towns/inns in the game, doing the holiday quests (Hallows End, New Year, etc.) that send you to a slew of places to meet someone, collect something, or the like now offers the possibility of leveling your character and guild both very quickly.

The game of WoW has also increased its demands on computers to go faster too.  The graphics are becoming more and more intense, even at the so called "low" quality graphics settings, which these days actually look pretty good.

If your computer is overheating, make sure if it is a desktop our tower, that it is not right up against the wall. If it is in a hutch then make sure there is adequate air flow in and out.

If you use a laptop then put it on a tray with some cooling grooves underneath it and never use it on a blanket, sofa, bed, carpet, or the like without such a tray.  Obviously, the little "feet" numbs under the corners of a laptop computer will not be standing off if the material beneath them is a soft fabric.  You want to make sure there is always room and air for your computer to "breathe".  These things are running at upwards of three gigahertz these days!  Three billion CPU clock cycles per second generates quite a lot of heat.

Competing games to WoW come and go.  Most never come close to the number of subscribers that WoW has.  Those that have garnered a lot of attention before and just after they came out gained a lot of interest and subscribers for a while.  But they quickly gave out.

WoW makes everything in gaming go fast, apparently.

Funny how that works out.