
In 2021, Blizzard Entertainment celebrates the 17th anniversary of the World of Warcraft. WoW has been amongst one of the most recognized video game franchises in history and remains one of the top-grossing MMORPGs today. You are probably living in a cave or on an uninhabited island if you haven’t heard about it yet.
1. It Takes Long to Get to the Top Level
That old meme about the 80th level came from the community of WoW players to tag something as tough and cool or someone as a highly skillful person. Actually, reaching new levels in WoW used to take tens of hours even for the most aggressive and skilled level-hitters. Fortunately, the Shadowlands leveling system simplified the process a bit. Still, the fact that it takes 80 or more hours to reach level 120 is mindblowing. Besides, you have to spend around 10 hours to reach the level needed to enter the Shadowlands, level 50. WoW is an extremely long-playing experience, especially for those who don’t know the lore yet.
2. It’s Made of 5.5M of Code Lines
The guys from Blizzard seem to be extreme workaholics as they wrote over 5.5 million lines of code in C/C++ and Lua, which are popular game development tongues, but still highly time-taking instruments. The entire code will take over 100,000 pages of plain text, which is almost 80 times more than Lev Tolstoy’s 1861 “War and Peace.” It took him 6 years to write those 1273 pages without a computer! Blizzard’s coders made their 5.5M lines in 5 years. This included the development of 70K+ spells, 40K+ NPCs, and over 1.5M unique in-game assets.
3. Your Character Can Tell Who You Are in Real Life
Based on the 2011 Research by the University of Iowa and Palo Alto Research Center, the choice of the role you make in WoW can usually predict your real-life personality type. The data was gathered from 1,040 players and revealed that people who play Tanks are usually better at handling stress than Ranged DPS players, who tend to be significantly more anxious. The study also revealed that introverts are more likely to have vanity pets and avoid group activities of dungeon raids. There are also signs that more mature players do more questing and crafting, while immature and hostile players prefer PvP and raids much more. Finally, male players play female characters much more often than female play male characters.
4. Tough Raiders Can be More Employable
The 2017 study by the Missouri University of Science and Technology, revealed that mentioning positive experience in WoW raids can give you a plus at your job interview. Being good at WoW raids can mean that you have some useful Big-Five traits that may lead you to better efficiency at work. The study of 288 players showed that conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and agreeableness are the traits that WoW raiders usually have at a higher level than others.
5. WoW Struggled Its Own Pandemic
Like we struggle against coronavirus, the players of this game have overcome a so-called Corrupted Blood Pandemic in 2005. There was an update that allowed the boss Hakkar to gradually weaken his opponents. The update had a bug that turned this Hakkar’s skill into a contagious plague spread by pets. As a result, thousands of pets were infected and killed many players with their new passive skills. Blizzard even attempted to set a quarantine to prevent the spread of the “virus,” but they didn’t succeed and reset the servers to fix the issue. Epidemiologists Ran Balicer, Eric Lofgren, and Nina Fefferman researched the response of the players to understand how people could behave during a real-world pandemic. Most of their conclusions appeared to be true!
6. WoW Can Boost Cognitive Function in the Elderly
In 2012 Computers in Human Behavior published research that proved a relation between playing WoW and an improvement in cognitive function in the elderly. There were two groups. One played the game 14 hours for 2 weeks, while the other didn’t. All the players between 60-77 y.o. scored higher in their tests by the end of the experiment.
7. Celebrities Love WoW
Similar to Fortnite that is gaining more and more popularity amongst stars, many top celebrities also play WoW. Amongst them are Henry Cavill, Vin Diesel, Mila Kunis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cameron Diaz, Jessica Simpson, Robin Wiliams, Ben Affleck, Macaulay Culkin, Kanye West, and probably many more celebs who don’t disclose their gaming preferences!
8. Azeroth is Very Small
Although Azeroth seems quite big when you play the game, it’s actually only 80 square miles. Towns that cover such a small area usually have from 10,000 to 20,000 citizens, while Azeroth is a place where millions of players ramble every day. Just imagine how crowded a real-world town with all those people on the streets could be!
9. WoW Has The Largest Wiki Ever
Similar to the immense code size, the franchise also has the largest game Wiki in history. It takes over 100,000 pages, which is just impossible for someone to read on purpose. The game has so many secrets, spells, characters, easter eggs, and other exciting stuff that contributors keep adding more and more information to the guide daily.
10. The Game is Run by Immense Servers
While the hardware requirements for the average player who wants to play with top settings are relatively low, the server-side hardware requirements are shocking. Here are the hardware specs that we found for the 2009 WoW server:
- 75,000 cores;
- 112 Tb of RAM;
- 13250 server blades;
- 1.2 Petabytes of HDD storage.
That’s Just WoW!
Now playing this title will be much more exciting for you with all these facts in your head. The thing is huge, and completing every new addon is always worth the hours it takes due to the inexhaustible talent of the developers. WoW will remain a largely followed franchise for years upfront and entering it today, 17 years after the release, isn’t late at all.