It takes about 3-6 months to level up to top level in WoW playing occasionally. I am very skeptical he "played for a year nonstop and then I hit the maximum level in WoW."
He goes on to say that "I was maniacal in chasing this goal and literally the next day I started a company, Glassdoor."
This are ridiculous statements for any WoW player. Leveling up is considered almost a "tutorial" to the "real" game that starts at top level, which is where everyone is at.
I can't see someone that was serious abot WoW making this statement, and it seems that he's either badly misquoted or he is not sincere.
So the day after achieving the highest score in WoW
So I suppose the initial sentence of "highest level" is not correct. I guess they are talking about "Server Rankings" - i.e. http://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us
Which is very hard (apparently) to accomplish and I think they get reset now and then. There are other key achievements in WoW such as being the first guild to kill a boss etc.
So I think he was actually ranked #1 in the server, that's what "highest score" refers and that can take months.
I don't know much about WoW but I have a friend who still brags about his #1 in a WoW server 5 years ago :), so it's a big deal.
> Which is very hard (apparently) to accomplish and I think they get reset now and then. There are other key achievements in WoW such as being the first guild to kill a boss etc.
These are the same thing. When a new raiding tier is released the rankings become relevant to that tier, so the first guild to kill the final boss on the hardest level of difficulty (currently Mythic) becomes the world first guild.
Agreed, this jumped out at me as well. Charitably, he was giving the reporter a dumbed-down explanation, because he didn't want to explain what it means to "have raids on farm."
Misquote is also certainly possible, but if he actually said and meant "max level" then this story is 100% made up for Nerd Cred.
Seriously though, at launch, leveling was 100x slower than it is now. Took me at least 6 months (I think... thereabouts) to get to 60, and I played avidly (although I also had a fulltime job).
Also, the author clearly didn't understand blizzard games, or how MMORPG gaming works in general... relevant quotes:
"In fact, Glassdoor wouldn't even be around if it weren't for StarCraft's older, sister game, World of Warcraft, he tells us." (seriously?)
My first level 60 (in classic) took me about 20 days played (call it 500 hours). Other people were reporting that 16-17 days was typical and 12 days was about how long a concerted leveling effort would take.
If he really took a year off to play WoW I'd expect that he'd hit max level in the first 3 months (at 6 hours/day). So I assume that they're talking about raid progression or perhaps the original PVP battleground ranks.
My inclination is to believe that the story got somewhat mangled by the journalist who wasn't very familiar with gaming or at least not Blizzard's games.
There's a big difference between what WoW was in the beginning (presumably when this guy played) and what it turned into over the following decade. I played 8-10 hours daily for the first 2 months after release and I only reached level 30 before realizing I needed to kill my sub (too much of a time sink).
Also, I find it doubtful that one would play WoW for a year with only one class. So it is likely he got max levels in many classes, then went raiding to get gear and stuff like that.
In vanilla wow some people hit the level cap (60) within 2 weeks
and ~200 hours played. However, for a normal player it was generally 1-2 months on a single character assuming they focused on leveling and significantly longer if they worked on trade skills etc.
I imagine it was to reach Rank 14 in PvP rather than to hit the level cap. Even at the very start of the game, it took only 11-15 days in-game time to reach level 60.
I agree that it's likely the PvP rank. I could definitely see that taking a year or longer. Although plain old level 60 is still plausible - while it only took 11-15 days to level 60 if you knew what you were doing, a lot of us took longer than that because we took a roundabout route, whether out of fun or ignorance -- or leveled multiple characters before picking one, or maximized our tradeskills while leveling as seemed logical initially, etc.
This is simply not true. Vanilla WoW leveling was extremely slow. My nelf hunter took almost a year to get to 60, and I was an avid player. There's other commenters here saying similar things, so it's not just my possibly-faulty memory.
I think you are coming from the perspective of someone who knows the game pretty well. To the uninitiated I could see it taking a year. I remember when I first started (when the cap was 60) and it seemed to take forever for me to get there. Mostly because I went to different areas and explored, didn't level the most efficient way etc.
perhaps that one year was to reach top raider kind of level. probably a lot easier to summarise as max level than them letting us know what dungeons and raids he spent his time in.
I think you're missing the point entirely.
His one year experience of playing WoW was a learning experience that ended up shifting his worldview enough that he was able to start Glassdoor. Whether or not he was a hardcore player is an entirely different matter, and frankly, quite irrelevant.
No, it's important as a source of credibility. Imagine an article about how a career in software inspired a CEO to start his company, and it quoted him as saying "I got tired of writing all those PHPs for Googer."
It's so far from what an actual domain expert would say that it's impossible to ignore.
I am not missing the point. It doesn't take one to be a hardcore player to level up to max level. I am simply skeptical that he did that in a year. Hardcore players do it in days.
Keep in mind this was in 2006, before the first expansion pack, when it was a more balanced game from level 1 to level 60. I started playing in 2005, and it took me the better part of a year to hit 60 with my main.
There are other factors to consider as well; as someone else said, it could be about server ranking. It could also be about "completing" the end game by defeating all of the instances and dominating the arenas on his server. Considering there is no way to truly "beat" WoW, as the end game changes with every new expansion, I'd say he set a goal for himself and accomplished that goal, and was ready to move on to the next (real world) challenge. I certainly grew bored with the game after spending my second year playing the same instances over and over.
Keep in mind the author's research into video games in general was probably only skin deep. Statements like saying World of Warcraft is older than Starcraft indicate that they probably paraphrased a lot of the vidya discussion.
I think the "confusion" stems from the fact that this article is basically at the same level of quality as any other by Business Insider, i.e. void of content and filled with the traditional hype/BS on "how to be a phenomenal founder", "what entrepreneurs do during their 60hr work day", "how to learn to code", "how to build a startup without learning to code", etc...
Generally, there's a good chance that most of these kinds of "Wtf?" logic errors are on the part of the journalist, not the person being interviewed. In the U.S, journalists don't send drafts over for comments, and rarely change published material, so there's little opportunity to get misleading stuff corrected.
At 22, I went to work at Microsoft. When I tell young people that today, they look as if they are embarrassed for me. And I have to tell them, 'No, no — it was like getting hired at Google back then, or Facebook. This was 1993.
You would be surprised at the number of Millennials and Digital Natives who only ever heard of Microsoft's fumbles in the past 20 years. For me (born in 1977) it was Apple who was the red-headed stepchild of the computer world when I was growing up; if you had a Mac in the 90s you were a know-nothing "luser" with a toy computer. Every generation has its heroes and villains, and for the current teen-to-twenties hipster crowd, Apple is king and Microsoft is lame. And I suppose GNU/Linux is that weirdly interesting know-it-all uncle your parents don't want you hanging out with.
I know it's glib, but young people. People that got into technology from mid 2000s and beyond just see Microsoft as a big fumbling giant.
I think the Zune and the botched attempt into the smartphone market are what come to mind when they think of things Microsoft Works on. Either that, or it's the image of the giant enterprise company that only innovates in the way it bundles licenses to the markets it has monopolies on.
I know it's unfair and judgemental, but it's even the way I unintentionally react when I hear about friends working there. I just envision mass paralysis around innovating on the products that make money, and no real weight given to new projects because the cash cows need to be tended to.
God, when I think back at Microsoft I could only think at Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2. God how often did I played the Age of Empires 1 Trial that were part of Windows 98..
Source: I'm majoring in CS in university right now, and most of my colleagues hold startups/Facebook/Google in high prestige, while older companies such as Amazon and Microsoft are often seen as second tier.
Amazon was founded in 1994, Google in 1998. Do those four years really make the difference? I believe the reason for Google being hold in high prestige must lie somewhere else than being a 'young' company.
I think Amazon and Microsoft are also known as being bureaucratic-heavy companies, another big factor against being a good place to work as a software engineer (at least this is the impression we have been given).
You're right, it's about more abstract prestige. I'm also a current CS student, and among my peers working for Google is "cooler" than working for Twitter, even though the latter is much younger.
Of course it meant StarCraft II. Just the sentence before he says he is currently playing StarCraft with his sons, so it's unlikely to be the original.
This is a nice PR piece for a company that looks like its innovating in a business space where a lot of dollars change hands. I'm not going to pile on with the worrying over WoW details. I thought the reporter did a good job. Well done.
Having said that, from a startup business analysis point of view, is it just me or is everybody and their brother trying to get into the technology jobs sector? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room for innovation and somebody is going to make a killing here. Godspeed, guys. But geesh. With so many players and so many moving pieces, sure looks like a tough row to hoe.
I would guess that it was "max progression" rather than max level. So, maxing out your gear, completing all the available raid tiers or hitting top rank in PVP.
In Vanilla it took like at least 9 days or so of /played (so 9x 24 hours of actual played time) to reach the cap. I remember it took 12 days on one of my characters.
I started WoW in december 2005, and hit 60 in februari.
Also, when you reach max level, doesn't mean you finished the game. There is tons of instances to do, special loot to earn, and other stuff; even in 2006.
The full year/full time was possibly to complete Naxxramas? I assume with his money he was playing with similarly dedicated people. My guild did Molten Core but we never even set foot in Naxx. I assume that's where the full-timers were, getting Tier 1.
When he was playing, it was a lot harder to level. That being said, I doubt the reporter got it quite right, or simplified it intentionally, wistfully thinking non-nerds would be reading the article.
On top of that in vanilla WoW people actually went through all the content in the game. People would complete most of the quests, go through the dungeons in your areas multiple times to get armor sets, and do PvP (open world and battlegrounds). It might take an hour or two to get together a group to do some of the less popular dungeons and Battlegrounds queue times could easily take upwards of 40 minutes. Open world PvP and ganking would almost always take a couple of hours as you had to sometimes infiltrate enemy territory to claim your victims.
Nowadays WoW feels more like a virtual lobby system for the dungeon finder/PvP queue rather than an actual MMORPG. No one really bothers to play the game as you would expect a traditional RPG to be played.
>Nowadays WoW feels more like a virtual lobby system for the dungeon finder/PvP queue rather than an actual MMORPG. No one really bothers to play the game as you would expect a traditional RPG to be played.
Thanks, I will use this description in the future. It definitely describes how I feel about most of MMORPGs I checked out lately.
He goes on to say that "I was maniacal in chasing this goal and literally the next day I started a company, Glassdoor."
This are ridiculous statements for any WoW player. Leveling up is considered almost a "tutorial" to the "real" game that starts at top level, which is where everyone is at.
I can't see someone that was serious abot WoW making this statement, and it seems that he's either badly misquoted or he is not sincere.