World of Warcraft Parents Guide

World of Warcraft is hard on your child’s mouse, keyboard and fingers. The game is intense and it’s easy for your son to get carried away as he pounds the keys and clicks the mouse while fighting bosses like Archavon the Stone Watcher.

It’s important for your child to observe good computer habits to avoid Repetitive Strain Injury. But let’s be realistic: Kids are even less likely than adults to take breaks, look away from the screen, and adjust the mouse and keyboard to a correct ergonomic distance. After all it’s victory if you can get your game-player to brush his teeth or eat carrots.

A good solution is to provide your child with specialized computer peripherals that take some of the stress out of clicking and pounding. I’m not talking about gaming keyboards and mice. These pricy peripherals usually look cool but are poorly designed, made of flimsy materials, and are complicated to setup. Unfortunately, no matter how cool a gaming mouse looks or how many programmable function keys a gaming keyboard sports none of them seem to be designed with ergonomics in mind.

Contour Design, located in Windham, New Hampshire, makes computer peripherals that actually minimize RSI and, as a by-product, maximize WoW performance. The Contour Mouse may not look cool but it’s innovative design ensures it is easy to grasp and makes clicking, scrolling, and pointing for long periods pain free. It even comes in a left-handed flavor!

We bought the Contour Mouse after a long search for a mouse with three real buttons. Most mice have only two buttons with a scroll wheel in the middle that also functions as the 3rd button. It’s hard to get a nice clean click on a scroll wheel and after an hour or two of PvP or raiding it becomes a real pain. The Contour Mouse is a 5-button mouse with the scroll wheel on the side. It provides plenty of extra buttons for key binding game functions without sacrificing joint and tendon health.

Blizzard listens.  Many school-age WoW players have been frustrated because parents (quite reasonably) restrict WoW play time during the school year, especially on school nights.  Adult WoW players have been frustrated because by the time they get home from work, spend some quality time with family, cook, do routine chores, check homework, and get the kids ready for bed, there isn’t enough time (or energy) left to get anything done on WoW.  ”WoW is a time sink,” was the biggest single complaint about playing the game.  Until Patch 3.2 rolled out, it was difficult to progress to higher levels of content or professions without putting in many multi-hour sessions.  With Patch 3.2 Blizzard has reduced the time needed per session to play the game.

1. Patch 3.2 allows high level players to get high level gear by running shorter instances with fewer players.  Much of the gear that was only available through multi-hour raid runs in large groups is now available to kids and adults who only have an hour or two per session to devote to WoW.  A player can now logon to WoW, run a single instance (which typically takes about an hour) with a group of friends or a pug, and over time build up a very high level gear set.

2. Patch 3.2 allows players to extend raids.  Prior to Patch 3.2, raid instances reset every week, and a raid group had to start over again from the beginning.  The highest level raid, Ulduar, has 14 bosses, which get progressively more difficult to kill.  If a team gets stuck on a particular boss half way through the raid or at the end of the raid, when the raid resets each week, the team has to start over again from the beginning.  A raid team devotes an extraordinary number of hours to getting back to the same point again each week.  By extending the raid instance beyond the normal reset date, players no longer have to fight their way through all the lesser bosses each week and can simply resume where they left off.

Blizzard introduced a couple of additional tweaks that reduce the need to logon for long hours each day.  The net result should be less friction between parents and their children.  Prior to Patch 3.2 parental efforts to restrict WoW time to an hour or so per session were met with protests that “It’s not possible to get anything done in an hour.”  The simple fact of the matter was: The kids were right.  Now parents can stand firm.  The kids may want to play for more than an hour, but it is not necessary.  An hour and a half might be a good compromise.

BlizzCon 2009 is over and all the kids are buzzing about the announced changes to World of Warcaft. Blizzard has done a great job of keeping the WoW-franchise alive with massive yet evolutionary changes that keep the game fresh while maintaining a cohesive fantasy universe. But Cataclysm, with it’s goblins, worgens, and sundered Barrens (what will happen to the Chuck Norris jokes?) is at least a year a way. In the meantime there is this great game that has already changed dramatically with some great changes in the very near term: Onyxia and Icecrown.
In fact, so much change is coming–it might be hard for your child to figure out what do it with Warcraft now. Summer is just about over. School is around the corner. It’s time to ratchet down the raids and battlegrounds. This is a great time to take a little time off from WoW. Azeroth is in a lull between major patches. The next big event, WoW’s 5th Anniversary, won’t hit until November. By then your kids should have settled into their school routines.
I’m sure you’ll get some pushback from your warriors and death knights. But here are some good arguments for slacking off with WoW:

• Everyone has hit 80 on their main. The level cap isn’t going to change for a long while.
• This summer everyone has geared up on easy heroics earning emblems of Conquest and Triumph. You only need a few piece of tier 9 to remain competitive.
• If you play WoW too much eventually you’ll burn out and drop the game altogether.

This last point is the most interesting one. I’ve seen lots of kids burn out on WoW and move on to other pastimes. I’m sure many parents are relieved when this happens: “Whew! That awful WoW thing is over! Finally Johnny is doing something else like watching reality TV, hanging out on the street corner, or Xbox.”
There are many benefits kids experience when playing WoW (building self esteem, learning how to work in a team, solving complex problems) and none of these benefits can be found in watching TV, hanging out, or even Xbox. While at first you may welcome WoW-burn out, in the long run you’ll miss those night when your child was safely at home DPSing down a monster instead running around who-knows-where getting into who-knows-what.
So encourage your kids to take a break from WoW. Give them some interesting alternatives, and fire up their accounts back in October in time for the 5th Anniversary events. Used in this way WoW is a parent’s best friend.

The World of Warcraft is vast and complicated. And it’s constantly changing. Strategies and tactics that worked well for this patch may not work at all for the next patch. It’s almost impossible for a kid to keep up with all the WoW news, trivia, and rumors let alone a parent. That’s where WoWBlues comes in.

Blizzard employees are constantly talking to players through posts on the World of Warcraft forums. There literally dozens of hints and tips posted every day in response to player questions. WoWBlues aggregates the Blizzard employee posts into a single well organized web site. You can search for specific information or browse by category.

WowBlues takes it name from the term “blue posts”. Blizzard employees posts are printed in bright blue on the forums to make it clear the information comes from an official Blizzard representative. In WoW blue doesn’t mean sad, it means true.

Several of the blue posters have become WoW celebrities and every word they type is analyzed for cryptic messages in the same way that financial analysts pondered Alan Greenspan’s comments before the mortgage crisis.

My favorite blue poster is Ghost Crawler, a lead game designer at Blizzard. We may never know his true name but with WoWBlues we can track his every word!

One vexing question that often comes up for parents of a WoW player is PC or Mac? World of Warcraft is one of the few 3D computer games that can run on just about anything with an Internet connection. But can run and runs well are two different animals. The good news is the PC or Mac question doesn’t really matter when it comes to playing WoW well. Performance and network connectivity are far more important than the increasingly minor differences between Microsoft’s and Apple’s legacies.

If your child is playing casually, a vanilla PC or Mac, desktop or laptop, with wired or wireless networking is fine. The one thing you can’t do is run WoW over an old style analog phone modem so a DSL or Cable modem connection is required. For best results you’ll want 2GB or more of RAM and a 2GHz or faster CPU. For all the details you can look at Blizzard’s system requirements.

If your child (or you) is playing more seriously (hard-mode raiding or arena matches) then you’ll need a high-end gaming rig. Again the choice of PC vs. Mac isn’t the main concern. An Alienware ALX X58 is going to pack as much punch as an Apple Mac Pro and cost more or less the same. However, on the high-end, the PC does have an advantage: Many of the really cool gaming peripherals, like the Logitech G9 mouse and Razer Tarantula keyboard, work best with the standard PC platform. There are workarounds for the Mac so all is not lost if you lean that way.

At WoW Parents guide I use a MacBook Pro 15″ with 4GB of RAM, an Apple keyboard with numeric keypad, and a Logitech G9 Mouse. My frame rate (how quickly WoW can update the screen) is usually > 60 fps and my network latency is usually < 100 ms. (with the critical Projected Textures video effect turned on). To get the G9 mouse to work with the Mac I use SteerMouse. I don’t get all the features of the mouse but the responsiveness and weight of the mouse is more important than a couple of extra buttons. Right now this whole setup costs about $1850.00 (as of today) and is extremely powerful and portable.

My kids use a gaming PC we built as a family project a year ago. It took a couple of weekends and had some scary moments but it was a fun way to learn about the inside of a computer. You’ll need to do a lot of research if you want to DIY or your can just buy an Alienware or a Falcon.