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Broadband Time Thief. A thousand hours is a long time. Well, maybe it’s not a long time to get around the world, but it’s a hell of a long time to play a videogame. But that’s what I’ve spent on Warcraft III. The arrival of Warcraft III coincided with my leaving the company shared house (think students-with-money and it’s not far off, certainly the delivery kebab place in town would think so) in Preston and relocating to Newcastle, and therefore also the arrival of broadband. I could talk about what it was like trying to get broadband in Preston, but I’m still in therapy. I very nearly offered had to resort to extreme measures with both Telewest and BT on the occasions when they put twenty-foot high broadband posters at the end of our road when we still couldn’t bloody get it.
It was a pretty big move for me. Furthest I’d lived previously – if you discount the three months I mistakenly spent architecting chips in Silicon Valley – was Manchester, and being a student there it was always easy to find something to do and someone to do it with. Newcastle’s a bit different. Fortunately, it’s a fantastic place, and t’other half’s large extended family dug me out a season ticket for St. James’ Park, which went a very long way towards the necessary getting me out of the house and to know the place (or, at least, the bars between the Haymarket and St. James’). It also turned me football crazy, which most people who knew me ten years ago would have found highly surprising.
Where were we? Aha. Warcraft. Well, I’d picked up a copy just before relocating and spent the week waiting for BT and Pipex to hook me up knocking off the single player campaigns. Blizzard’s usual highly polished stuff, not incredibly original, nod to Michael Moorcock in the hero-going-barmy-with-aid-of-evil-sword department, terribly fun all round. Then broadband’s in. Ping time to Linx is an impressive 30ms, I’m thinking I’m in with a cracking gaming connection here, and Warcraft III started to nicely fill many evenings that, if I hadn’t just moved a hundred miles North, I’d probably have found something else to do. I’d played many a LAN game in my time, but never any online games. Which may seem strange for a technophilic 30-year-old, but I was never really interested before the combination of broadband and strategy games. While being regarded very much as a 7th Dan master of strategy around our end, I proceeded to get my buttocks delivered to me on a plate on a regular basis online for a week or so before it all started to click. I eventually settled on big random team play with the odd Free-For-All. 1v1 was boringly predictable, and 2v2 just too frustrating if your partner wasn’t up to speed. At least with larger games they progressed into the middle stages rather than being decided by a banzai rush after five-minutes. I played 3v3 initially as 4v4 games weren’t enabled on the European servers, but then I moved virtually to the US. This was a mixed blessing: while I didn’t miss the odd game that had to be conducted largely or partly in schoolboy French or German (or, on one inadvisable occasion, Swedish), I inflicted upon myself infinite numbers of teenage Americans.
Now, I’m sure that most of them are very nice people, but crikey there are a lot of racists and so many people who are just overconfident and incapable of working in a team. The latter dies down a bit (as you progress up the leaderboard to the point where I was only playing against players with winning records). But not the racism and anti-Semitism. I was, and still am, quite shocked about the quantity of it on the US game servers. I also learned to avoid playing early evening during the school holidays, evening games in the UK being much higher quality unless school’s out.
And I did alright. I made the top 100 RT for a few weeks playing 3v3 and the top 300 playing 4v4 random team after the expansion set came out. I’m pretty proud of that, as they don’t separate the RT ladder out between different game sizes, and the vast majority of RT players on the leaderboard were 2v2. I’m pretty sure I was the top large team player by level for those brief periods - yes, I was sad enough to hand-search the list looking for other 3v3 and 4v4 players. Both times I dropped back again as real life intervened or another holiday came round. I couldn’t stop playing it. For two years, I’d have said I averaged an hour a night at least. This year, it was nagging me that this was way too much time. There wasn’t a lot of variety in play, and although it was still enjoyable, the high frustration level at my own or my team’s ineptness hadn’t gone away. It was dominating my gaming, and interfering with real life a bit (although thankfully not work, I’d kicked any danger of that out of the door early on). I made the decision to put it down a couple of months back. I’ve only played the odd game since, and that’s becoming less likely as my skill level declines to the point where I need a week’s practice to get back to speed. And there’s a strange realisation: for the first time in my gaming life, I’ve put down a game that I may be unable to pick up again. In ten years, even if servers that support Warcraft III are still running, there won’t be the people around to populate the game the same way it is now. We’ve all done this many times in our lives, but never consciously before for me. I didn’t leave school thinking “Crikey, I’ll never play playground football again.” This is also coming at a time where retrogaming has blossomed like never before, I’ve got used to the idea that anything I play I can play forever, and now – literally now, as it only hit me writing this article – I’m suddenly realising that I probably can’t. Maybe other people have seen this before when dropping Everquest or Ultima Online, but it’s a new feeling to me.
Warcraft III served me very well in those first hectic two years in Newcastle. I played it when my office was one corner of an unpainted living room, I played it when I moved upstairs to my finished office, I stopped playing it there and installed a living room PC as soon I found it was interfering with work. I played it in the gaps between decorating rooms, and played as often as possible to avoid stripping the paint from, sanding and varnishing the banister rail. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but I’ve stopped playing it at the point when the house is all just about done now. Anyway, 1000 hours. The informal Rodent value-for-money formula is that a game’s superb value if it offers an hour of play per quid. Cost of entertainment: I owe Blizzard about a grand then.
Here’s some interesting (to me) math on the Random Idiot Problem: matchmaking with a random team regularly throws up some halfwit who clearly can’t play the game (utter lack of team attitude is the usual cause, see above). Since I’m not a tool (allegedly), that reduces the chance of one of my team being a tool to 1 in 3, while the other team has four “Could be a nob” slots. If we say prat-chance-per-slot is 10%, then the chance of all of my team not being dumb is .9^3 i.e. 73% instead of .9^4 i.e. 65%. The worrying thing for my ego is that if I work out the possible outcomes, this implies that I have dork bonus in 8% more games than my opponents. And my win percentage averages about 58%. So perhaps, really, I’m just average at this bloody game. October, 2005.
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