Hey guys,

Have you ever wanted to try that supposedly-epic-and-all-around-awesome MMO that’s been around for, oh, the last eight (more or less) years that we call World of Warcraft, or WoW?

Well, here’s your chance! Blizzard has released a feature on World of Warcraft (as well as on Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2) where you can play a limited portion of the game for absolutely free – with some restrictions, of course.

In WoW’s case, you can only go up to Level 20 and such. Here are the restrictions, straight from Blizzard’s website:

Players on Starter Edition game licenses have the following restrictions:

• Characters cannot exceed level 20, 10 gold, and 100 trade skill ranks.
• Characters cannot participate in Pet Battles.
• Chat communication limited to say and party.
• Cannot send whispers unless the Starter Edition character is on the recipient’s friends list, or unless the Starter Edition character is replying to a whisper.
• Cannot trade, create or join guilds, invite players into a party, create calendar invites, or disable experience gains.
• Cannot use the mailbox or Auction House.
• Voice chat and Real ID features are disabled.
• If there are login queues, the system will prioritize players who have full accounts.
• Starter Edition accounts are not eligible for value added services (character transfers, faction changes, etc.).

So, if you’ve ever wanted to try World of Warcraft, but don’t want to pay to get it and then not like it, try this out!

Okay, enough with the facts. Here are my true opinions on this.

This may not help people really get into it in my opinion. Many say the game starts to get fun at Level 80. Well, this game has came and gone for many people. Some will start playing to Level 20, feel it’s a grind, and then let it go and not buy it. That could really hurt sales for Blizzard. You know what – they should move to a Free to Play model. Being it’s WoW we’re talking about here, Level 20 isn’t enough of a test drive. They could have it F-2-P, then have a premium account subscription service that gives you all this cool freebie stuff that the hardcore players can’t pass up. That way, they will get more people playing and possibly subscribing. Some people might play to Level 80, and start paying because they want those uber-awesome features. WoW should ALREADY be Free-to-Play… the MMO market is making a big shift in that direction, and to keep WoW on the top of the mountain as the king of the hill, Blizzard needs to make it Free to Play to some extent, or at least Buy to Play.

Also, do you want to know another opinion of mine? It’s complete bullcrap that players must buy ALL OF THE EXPANSIONS to play, since you must have each expansion IN ORDER to play the latest one, which is MANDATORY, since the latest expansion is the ONLY EXPANSION YOU CAN PLAY unless if you go onto a private server (which is illegal because private servers infringe Blizzard’s copyright, by taking their stuff AND allowing players to play WoW for free… absolutely FREE as long as they have the expansions).

So, what do you think about all of this absolute crap where a company milks out the SAME EXACT “HIT GAME” for what, 9 years?

I smell Cawadoody all over the place.

Okay, I’m gonna stop raging and take a Guild Wars 2 break…. mmmm…. dat non-WoW-ish gameplay…. mmm…. ‘dat tastes GOOD!

Also, here’s some leaked gameplay footage of YET ANOTHER WoW expansion that they have in the works, but hush-hush at the moment. They just came out with Mists of Pandaria, I mean, come ON! Tsk, tsk, tsk…. Here’s that link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

-by Gavin Trutzenbach