This was a reader suggestion, and a good one: Zvonimir wants to know how many of us
WoW players use a Mac to play the game. Blizzard has steadfastly put out Mac and Windows versions of all their games ever since the original
Warcraft, but this is not at all the norm in the industry. There are only a few other major MMOs I can think of that even have official Mac versions (
EVE,
Warhammer,
City of Heroes, um...anything else?). Sure, we can always run some sort of virtualization (like Crossover Games, which
supports WoW on Linux) or Boot Camp, but that's just less awesome than running something in your regular OS.
Anyway, here's the question for today: what platform do you usually use to play
WoW?
Please no flaming in the comments. This is not a "which is better, Mac or Windows" poll. Inappropriate comments will be gladly deleted.
Tags: game-discussion, gamer-discussion, linux, mac, mac-os, os, platforms, windows, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-hot-topics, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Hardware
Nov 21st 2009 at 8:00AM 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 10)
Charles Nov 21st 2009 8:02AM
Since day one!
Steve Nov 22nd 2009 6:58AM
Mac user since Feb, 1984 :)
Ikarus Nov 23rd 2009 11:36AM
Same. I'd never switch to another computer. You've got to wonder how much providing a Mac version has added to Blizzards success with WoW. I just don't get why the other game studios don't do it.
Sigmanine Nov 23rd 2009 12:28PM
Have always played on a MacbookPro from 2007.
Eric!!! Nov 21st 2009 8:08AM
I used to play on a iMac 24". It looked really good on it to, but when it came to driver support for gaming mouses and keyboards. There were none. I use the WoW MMO gaming mouse, and steel series does not make any drivers for Mac, which isn't apple's fault, just steel series didn't make any. So you have to download ControllerMate, and program every 15 buttons on the mouse yourself. Also used the Zboard w/ WoW keyset, but no drivers for that either. So I switched to Windows and use a Lenovo y730 gaming edition laptop. Looks even better on it too!
Microtonal Nov 21st 2009 12:39PM
I used to play on my mini, but when Blizz bumped up the graphics for Wrath, they specifically indicated right on the box that it no longer supports the (non-upgradeable) graphics processor in the mini. My dad blew some excess credit card points on a Dell XPS laptop for me, which runs the game just fine but for some reason won't play nice with my Apple 23" cinema display. If I could have afforded a new Mac (this was before the last round of price cuts on the Mac Pro), I would have done that in a heartbeat.
I don't dislike PCs per se. Mostly, it's that I'm just not used to using Windows, since I've been a Mac user pretty much since they hit the market in '84. Vista, on the other hand, can go die in a fire. Worst. OS. Ever.
Dankie Nov 21st 2009 1:00PM
Funny, Microtonal has a very similar story to me. I played BC on a Mac mini (the ones with the non upgradable graphics cards, and a processor blizzard wouldn't throw any support for), I had a very hard time doing Hyjal on it, so I did my guild raids on a vista machine and my fun stuff on my mac (like kara or za runs).
When the wrath beta hit, I tried it with my mac mini. there were a lot of quests in Howling Fjord that just froze my mini : / . So I moved to playing the majority on my borrowed vista machine before finally getting my own XPS desktop a month after Ulduar came out. If I could have affording a mac, I would have bought it. But for the price, the XPS gave me what I wanted, somewhat, and I still managed to use my pheripherals. I got my 20" cinema display to work with it (I think that's more luck on the graphics cards having support than dell itself), and am running XP Pro. I tried it with vista for a few months, but my computer kept freezing randomly. XP has a bit more stability?
I am a former long-time Mac user (since about 87), and if I had a 33$/hr+ job - I for one would rewelcome my apple overlords... as it is, dell and microsoft have my money. : /
Tseran Nov 21st 2009 1:44PM
I started out playing on my old G4 1 Ghz, but after too many Zul'gurubs with the weather slowing my frame rate down to almost nil, I spent a little bit and built a Windows machine. That machine was okay, it didn't have slow down issues in zones, but I wasn't able to get things done with it, so my Mac still got a majority of the work. Constant problems with virus scanners and windows updates finally convinced me to dump it and go back to Mac. Have my 24" iMac rocking faster then the PC ever did with a second monitor on it, and use the old Mac for vent. I can have wowwiki up on one screen, WoW on the other, and nothing is slowed down. Dalaran doesn't even affect me. And accessories? Well, some people don't realize this, but Logitech G series keyboards DO have Mac drivers, but even before that, I bought Controller Mate for some other stuff and it works GREAT. So what if you have to configure it, you can have it do more then any other driver can, even entire key sequences should you choose.
As for the claims of instability on a Mac, never encountered them. The only times I ever had that was when I was running excessive beta software. I can also imagine the problem if you use a lot of cracked software, but overall, I have no stability issues.
Franksnbeans Nov 21st 2009 5:30PM
There are third party mac drivers for these products. I can't remember it off the top of my head not at home - but I am using the Zboard Merc on my wow MAC at home with no problems. Try googling or perhaps another reader knows the name
vexis58 Nov 21st 2009 9:47PM
I originally played WoW on a 12" powerbook in 2005. A couple of years after, the graphics card fried while I was playing WoW. The stupid thing always overheated, I often removed the battery to reduce the temperature, kept it on a cooling pad with fans running AND used a 3rd-party program to allow the internal fans to run faster (because the default Mac software limits the fan speed to keep it quiet) and it still got hot enough to burn me after hardly even an hour of play despite these measures.
I replaced it with an iMac, best Mac I could buy without splurging three grand on one of those tower machines, and it fell to a nearly identical fate as the first one last year. I had tried everything I could, all of the advice posted on the official WoW Mac forums, but nothing helped. I kept getting more and more graphical glitches until one day it just died.
My fiance built me a gaming PC after my iMac died, and I've been using it ever since. Runs WoW like a dream, never have to worry about it overheating like my macs did. I've used macs for my entire life, and I really love the OS, but this experience has convinced me to be a PC user.
Liz Nov 21st 2009 8:10AM
I'm furiously refreshing the page to catch deleted comments... :p
Ozmodius Nov 21st 2009 8:12AM
I always game on my home built PC.
I use a Mac in my graphic arts classes and can't really see the benefit. The "stability" thing is a myth: I can't tell you how many times that thing has locked up on me (the only reason "spinning beach-ball of death" isn't common vernacular like "blue screen of death" is because not enough people use Macs).
Supposedly these crashes have been due to a lack of RAM... too bad I can't add some to it like I did with my PC.
Tek Nov 21st 2009 9:13AM
I believe RAM is upgradeable on every Mac besides the AIR.
Given, they don't exactly make it easy to get into some of their products, so I understand you entirely.
ELECTRO hyena Nov 21st 2009 9:13AM
Sucks that you had that problem - I've never seen it. And the machines are actually fairly upgradeable, I added ram to mine with no problem. :]
Eddison Nov 21st 2009 9:49AM
You can upgrade RAM on a Mac. You just put some in (a bit scary on the lappy as it involves undoing screws, but you can). I'm pretty sure that the reason your Macs die on you has to do with the fact that they are School Computers (and therefore probably old and the cheapest Macs you can get) - pretty much all School Computers, Windows or Mac, are bottom of the line (and also are bogged down with whatever viruses, Trojans, and "net monitoring/security update" things your school puts on it). It takes over five minutes to log into the computers at my school (which are Windows XP) - and it's not the computer's fault, it's the nanny programs.
Reps Nov 21st 2009 11:32AM
I wanted to add more RAM to my PC, but sadly PCs don't support RAM =(
But seriously, I used to play on my 24" iMac and I loved it. Sure it had a fairly crappy graphics card, but the OS was SOOOO stable. It also seemed much more streamlined than any Windows OS I've used. That is not to say Windows is a bad OS. Microsoft has made leaps and bounds making Windows more user-friendly. Apple has been working on Mac OSX since 2000. Microsoft has been building off Vista since 2006, which is the closest thing I can think of to the OS 9 to OSX transition.
That said, Macs are terribly overpriced, and have extremely limited driver support. I wanted to buy a Razer mouse for my iMac, but only one was supported and I hated it. On top of that, I couldn't buy the top-end graphics card I wanted, the Core2 Quad CPU I wanted, or upgrade any of those in the future. If I wanted a computer to game on, and didn't want to have to buy an entirely new computer in 4 years when my HDD, GPU and CPU are outdated, I would have to go with a PC.
Coldbear Nov 21st 2009 11:36AM
downrated for no good reason
outlier Nov 21st 2009 11:42AM
Why was this downrated?
"I always game on my home built PC.
I use a Mac in my graphic arts classes and can't really see the benefit. The "stability" thing is a myth: I can't tell you how many times that thing has locked up on me (the only reason "spinning beach-ball of death" isn't common vernacular like "blue screen of death" is because not enough people use Macs).
Supposedly these crashes have been due to a lack of RAM... too bad I can't add some to it like I did with my PC"
Do the people who up and down rate work for dell or some other company that rather have us buy things some of us are perfectly capable of creating ourselves?
Reps Nov 21st 2009 11:54AM
It was downrated because he was talking about how his computer freezes up a lot, claiming that all Macs do this, and that his RAM isn't upgradeable.
Both statements are false, so the comment was downrated.
Izzy Nov 21st 2009 12:23PM
I would say pound for pound that the Mac is not "terribly overpriced." TUAW did an analysis blog and found that the Mac tax is only about 10%. I mostly agree with that based on the component cost. And upgrading almost anything but the motherboard is a breeze. I replaced the power supply in an iMac in about 20 minutes and upgraded the RAM in my MacMini in about 30 minutes (WoW does not play well on my Mini, mhz is too low). Of course RAM took about 2 minutes to replace in my Homebrew PC.