The Team iDemise Leveling Guide

MMOs take up an increasingly large percentage of PC games sold. That people are often willing to pay ten or fifteen dollars a month to continue playing them can be further attributed to their recurring entertainment value. However, not all aspects of MMOs are appreciated. Leveling a character has been a central goal of roleplaying games since the beginning days of Dungeons and Dragons, but early MMOs struggled with putting enough content into their games to make them worthwhile of a monthly subscription fee. Therefore, companies would purposefully make various levels take longer by forcing players to grind, or kill hundreds and thousands of enemies for experience. All of this presented MMO gamers with a very monotonous situation, one that has only recently begun to be remedied.

World of WarCraft made a huge push to remind gamers of the old days of gaming, which meant focusing gameplay on questing instead of grinding. By writing and coding in thousands of interesting quests into the game, Blizzard made WoW the most popular MMO of all time, shattering previous records many times over. Questing really increased the game's accessibility while still giving the hardcore crowd difficult dungeons, proving that MMOs are a genre suited for gamers of all demographics. However, questing has presented gamers with a new set of problems. Which quests can be completed easily, and what level should a character attempt them at? Are the rewards worth the difficulty and time associated with a particular quest? To help players with these problems, the leveling guide was born.

Of course, guides have been popular for video games for years, and leveling guides are merely the newest incarnation of them for MMOs. Other guides for MMOs include PvP and class guides, each one taking on a particular spin around various issues, all designed to make the player more effective in the game in this vibrant, dynamic world. Inside World of WarCraft, players can create characters from a variety of races, but they'll be automatically associated with one of two main factions depending on their race. The Horde and the Alliance are two factions which have existed in some form or another through much of WarCraft lore, but the Alliance has gotten several leveling guides over the years while the Horde has been stuck with only a single leveling guide. The Team iDemise leveling guide combines great strategies with a special in game technology to give players the most integrated guide yet.

The Team iDemise guide uses a fantastic program called MapMod 2 to fully integrate the guide into World of WarCraft itself. This means that objectives are displayed on screen inside the game, so players won't have to minimize regularly or print the guide out. Not only that, but the guide completely removes the risk of ambiguity in its directions. Players are shown exactly where to go and what objectives to complete, so they won't have to deal with ambiguous directions. Instead of merely reading the guide, they are shown where to go. It's the next best thing to having a player alongside you guiding your character.

It's easy to install and completely legitimate, unlike a lot of other third party programs. Players won't just have a written guide to go off of – they'll get an in-game guide which also compensates for any mistakes players might make. A written guide can't offer the same amount of help because it doesn't take into account the margin for human error. With a written guide, players are liable to get turned around and find themselves in the wrong location or killing the wrong enemy. MapMod 2 prevents this from ever becoming a reality.

The Team iDemise guide is updated regularly to reflect the in-game changes that occur with each patch, and it was also changed to reflect all of the new content in The Burning Crusade. When the next expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, is released later in 2008, the gamers at Team iDemise will get back to work to update their guide for that content as well. This way, players will know that they're getting the most up-to-date information available. Since the guide is available as an in-game technology, players will never face confusion when content is updated. For a written guide, they might see a quest that they've already done and believe it to be a solo quest, when in reality it's actually a group quest. The Team iDemise guide makes sure that players will never mistakenly take the wrong quest by putting the updated guide right into the game.

Speaking of credentials however, the gamers at Team iDemise are world renowned as being one of the top professional teams for both Counter-strike and Quake. Some players might question the relevance of hardcore shooter gamers in the world of MMOs, but the gamers at Team iDemise have proven their skills time and again in World of WarCraft. Every member of the WoW part of Team iDemise has broken a previous record for leveling characters, and their fast FPS skills translate well into the world of Azeroth and Outland. Players can rest well assured that the Team iDemise guide was written by some of the top WoW players

While Team iDemise might have created one of the most integrated WoW leveling guides ever, a new guide has been written which completely redefines the expectations befitting a leveling guide for World of WarCraft. Glutony, a level 70 dwarf hunter, has smashed the most recent leveling record of 149 hours, and he has written all of the steps down into a comprehensive and complete 600-plus page guide. While he might not have MapMod 2 technology to provide integration into the game, but its comprehensive content is unparalled by either the Team iDemise guide or Brian Kopp's guide, the original Alliance guide. The latter also includes a written guide, but it only contains a little over a “mere” 100 pages.

Glutony left no area of the game unturned in his comprehensive guide, and players will gain a level of knowledge about the game that they simply cannot with the others. Beyond his written guide, Glutony also recorded every single minute of his journey to level 70, and the many hours of video are available (along with the written guide) at www.wowaddicts.com. Eventually, he plans on releasing an entire library of guides to help WoW players with many aspects of the game, but for now, players can access the Alliance guide at www.wowaddicts.com. If players are unsure of which guide to pick, they can access a video trailer and the first twenty levels of the written guide at Glutony's site, but WoW players should find that this newest guide offers the most entertaining leveling experience out of any of the three popular guides.