WoW Factor is Eliot Lefebvre’s column on an MMO you’ve probably never heard of: World of Warcraft. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
wow factor
WoW Factor: The mulligan problem in World of Warcraft’s narrative
In World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Illidan Stormrage gets killed. This isn't actually a surprising end for the character. Illidan as a person...
WoW Factor: Blizzard started listening to World of Warcraft players for a reason its leadership doesn’t want to say
I have a few different conflicting thoughts when it comes to the most recent interview with World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas, or...
WoW Factor: MMORPG raiding is not special
You all remember The Incredibles, right? I know that these days the hot take is to try to spin the film as some sort...
WoW Factor: Is The War Within going to be ready for its launch?
The surprise announcement of the date for World of Warcraft: The War Within prompted what I'm sure is a lovely reader with a large...
WoW Factor: The streak The War Within needs to break for World of Warcraft
On November 13th, 2008, World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released to an eager population. The prior expansion, The...
WoW Factor: Story Difficulty is a bad idea and a good idea all rolled into one
Back during Wrath of the Lich King, I remember people asking for a story difficulty for raids in World of Warcraft because if the...
WoW Factor: Guessing at World of Warcraft’s The War Within’s release date using math
Oh yeah. It's time. I actually have some thoughts to share about World of Warcraft's current Remix leveling event, which are complicated and multilayered...
WoW Factor: How World of Warcraft makes you cheer for removing features
Yesterday, MOP's Justin wrote a column about The Elder Scrolls Online that detailed its key virtues. It's a good column, and one of the...
WoW Factor: There’s probably never going to be a World of Warcraft ‘Classic Plus’
As I always do when discussing World of Warcraft (and anything else, really), I am putting my cards on the table here: I am...
WoW Factor: Exit BlizzCon, for good this time?
Back in 2021, we learned that there was not going to be a BlizzCon 2022. This did not surprise me, and I penned a...
WoW Factor: The strange excitement split for World of Warcraft’s The War Within
There's an interesting aspect I've observed about World of Warcraft as we slowly creep toward the release of The War Within. No one who...
WoW Factor: What’s a Mists of Pandaria remix and why is World of Warcraft doing it?
In hindsight, I feel like I was gentler toward Season of Mastery than I should have been. World of Warcraft has turned everything into...
WoW Factor: Blizzard didn’t reveal World of Warcraft sub numbers – it drew a Mystery Line
It will not surprise anyone reading this to learn that there are things which upset me. This is just part of being a human...
WoW Factor: World of Warcraft’s Plunderstorm is neither greedy nor good
It would be an exaggeration of the highest order to say that no one was even a little interested when World of Warcraft unveiled...
WoW Factor: Steve Danuser was not really the problem with World of Warcraft
So I don't want to sit here and say "oh, things were going so great" before the news that Steve Danuser had actually left...
WoW Factor: What World of Warcraft needs to accomplish in 2024
On October 12th, 2023, the YouTuber SuperEyepatchWolf put out a video running just over one hour nine minutes titled "The Simpsons Is Good Again."...
WoW Factor: Evaluating World of Warcraft’s 2023 progress and performance
So 2023 is not completely in the rear view yet, but at least in terms of major developments for World of Warcraft we can...
WoW Factor: The real reason World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm world revamp was awful
'Tis the season for all of us, once again, to talk about the deeply unpleasant and disappointing expansion that was World of Warcraft: Cataclysm,...
WoW Factor: The content issues World of Warcraft must address in The War Within
Last week, I talked about the story issues that World of Warcraft really needs to address in some form as we move forward into...
WoW Factor: The story issues World of Warcraft must address going into The War Within
It's telling that we're now very much in the back nine for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, and the general consensus has not shifted much...