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Comment by sklivvz1971 | Hacker News Reader

sklivvz1971

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.

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Later on the article it reads

  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.

http://i.imgur.com/rFDX0O9.jpg

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?)

"achieving the highest score in WoW"

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).

I played 6 months just after launch, and got to level 40. I was playing 8h per day.

this is one of my first characters in WoW

First Seen Dec 01, 05 (from Warcraft Realms info)

https://i.imgur.com/rNbHQmW.jpg

So, yes, it can take a while to level

Not any more though, you can easily go from 0-100 in a single digit number of days now.

The article references 2006 - that was Vanilla time.

Badly misquoted, probably.

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.

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 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.

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.

or to do the PvP etc. The ranks back then had decay on honor, so it was crazy to try keep on top of it.

Not to mention the dungeons took 3-4h to do at 60, and then the once a week raids which took 4h+ each to do.

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.

http://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-did-it-take-to-get-a-lev...

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.

Well the Warcraft Franchise is older IIRC

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