People that aren't interested in lore.

[Kurenio]

Why do you play wow at all then? I mean why play a game and your not interested in the story of it? I'm not talking about RPing an all that stuff, but ya.

[Litlemouse]

Well, there is a whole different part of the game (gear, arenas, blahblahblah) that some people enjoy and would prefer not to bother with lore. While many things in WoW are connected to lore it's not necessary to know lore to play, and some people would rather fight and do whatever instead of looking up lore.

I myself love lore, but I have a friend that just isn't interested. WoW is so much more than just lore, if you look at it.

[Nili]

I play WoW and I don't study or immerse myself in the lore. Sure, I follow little details of the story, but I play for the mechanics and for the designs and the social aspect. Don't knock people who don't play for the lore, there's plenty of other reasons to play World Of Warcraft other than some story lines.

[Kurenio]

Well really it's games in general. Like I've never played a game I didn't like the story of. It seemed completely pointless to me even with the social aspects of it.

[Nili]

If I studied the lore I'd be come obsessive and my brain would explode from information overload, so I just avoid it all together.
I don't wanna be one of those girls that I talk to who talks about the story all the time. Meh, I get the basics of it, I don't see any reason to follow it any deeper. I play the game to play a game, not read a story at the same time.
EDIT
It's not pointless to me, just feels like here you're trying to brush us non-lore-followers off as part of that pointlessness..

[Lotusii]

I have never ever cared about the lore of any MMORPG I have ever played. I only care about the social and game play aspects of it. I do care about stories, but only if it is for a console game. Even then, if the game play is good enough I can still play it even with a bad story. I won't consider the game as fun as if the story was good, but I'll still have fun with it. On the other hand, i the story is amazing and the game play is awful I won't bother with the game and just watch a play through if I ever get curious about how the story turned out.

When it comes to WoW specifically it falls under the "It's an MMO" category for me and they retcon so much stuff and tweak the lore to suit them as they please so it seems even more like a waste of time to me. It's not as important to me as the story of a console game where things can't be changed unless they make a new game.

[Worba]

Why do you play wow at all then? I mean why play a game and your not interested in the story of it? I'm not talking about RPing an all that stuff, but ya.

Pretty simple really - you are free to imagine your own lore if you choose. Is that a Big Deal?

[peanutbuttercup]

I play for social reasons and because I like the thrill of taking out big monsters and collecting loot and gold. I don't care to pvp or rp. And I rarely read quest text and can't remember the names of most of the major characters because that's not something I'm interested in.

It's a game, so as long as you get enjoyment out of it that's what counts.

[AdamSavage]

I don't dislike the lore in wow, but at the same time if I actually read all the lore in the quests It would take me 3x longer to lvl. I just read what I need to do and where. Some of the cuts scenes are neat the first time around, however beyond that I get bored of it quickly. I think the whole quest line where you go back and forth from zone to zone to get that 365 cloak at the end, was excessive in the lore. It was to much drama for me personally.

[Sukurachi]

I don't know if I count as "not interested in lore"... but I rarely go look up the events that lead up to quests or whatnot. I have maybe visited WoWiki a dozen times total?

But on the other hand, I am a ferocious quest text reader.
I immerse myself 100% into the story of what I am doing (sometimes, to my own emotional detriment).

So, that's "immediate" lore (ie: what I learn from the quest I am presently doing), but less interested in "past" lore (what events in a fictional, non-playable past, or in a previous incarnation of the game).

The ONE single time I can say that I actively sought out Warcraft lore was when I did Caverns of Time and was curious about what happened to that human woman... and boy did I regret it. I cried the rest of that day.

[Kalliope]

I like this distinction between immediate lore and past lore - I'm with Sukurachi on this.

And I looked up what happened to Taretha too; that was just awful. -_-

[Shade]

I've never really focused on the lore aside from what I read in game while I play. This is my first MMO, ever, and I first started to play just because I got a new Mac and my brother screamed at me to play.

I got hooked into it more because of the aspect of playing with others even while they are not with you-my best friend, really my only close friend-lives three states away from me. I talk to her all the time, visit her for a few weeks during the summer, and we write stories online together in the evening. But, I talked her into getting WoW on her computer, and we've had so much fun playing in game. Back when were where in high school and college, we'd spend our time hanging out doing a bunch of things, but one of those big aspects was playing video games together. Playing WoW together gives us some of that hanging out time that we wouldn't get otherwise with her being so far away.

I love a good story-but no, I've not gotten into the lore of WoW, and considering how in depth it is, I honestly don't think I ever will. Yes I know the current lore, but WOTLK is about as far back as I go, and even then it is mostly the surface lore that I know, what I see while I quest and such.

My most favorite thing to do in game is hunt pets (yay pokemon syndrome!), so I don't always read the text quest while I am leveling up. And honestly, I go through a novel a day normally when it comes to reading. While I enjoy what I read, I read SO much that I don't always recall the finer details of the game's lore-and that's fine by me. I don't have to know all the lore to enjoy what I do in game.

[Andine]

I think it's mainly the younger players, if not much younger, just even slightly. Those young enough to grow up on video games. Because they played games since their youngest years, they picked up more "powergamerish" behaviours. You know how kids play games - they play to win, or to murder as much as possible, and skip all cutscenes and never read quests. People who grew up on that, I find it, rarely tend to care for video game's story. "Lol, story is for books and movies and I h8 books", to put it in their terms.

I happened to be still in the age range that grew up mainly on movies. As such, I still enjoy games mainly because of their story, especially loving the more cinematic games.
(I mean, look at WoW devs - they're mostly from the generation that still read some books once in a while - and original WoW quests were full of text)

[Cerele]

i play it for the plot.... err wait wrong thing
i play wow because of the unique taming system... well thats atleast why i got into it. the only lore i really enjoyed was the old werewolf lore... i dont like the worgen much at all.

[Ijomi]

If you have rolled on a roleplay server, then I'd expect some care about lore. It's Warcraft, not Warriors, or Dragon Age, or Harry Potter, or any anime. I don't expect to see/hear cheesy French/Japanese/Russian etc. accents and names anywhere on a roleplay server, unless Blizzard themselves put it in Azeroth. German used to be in that list until Schnottz.

If you've rolled on any other server type? As you like it. On any other server, whether or not you like the story seems a bit moot. On any other server, it IS just a game/social engine.

[Morven]

Or rather, it doesn't have to be more than that, though some players like me do like the lore (most of the time) and think of our characters in the context of lore.

[Rikaku]

Some people just aren't interested in lore, they can still enjoy an MMORPG. The concept of enjoying a storyline = enjoying a game is mostly limited to console games (with the exclusion of fighting games cause really, why have stories in those? Just let me punch the dude! XD).

In MMORPGs, there's several factors that make people interested in it. The social aspect, the choice to be as unsocial as you want... I mean really, I know lots of people who've played WoW and never read an actual quest lore; they just complete the quests.

Personally, Ive only read a few of the Warcraft books (I started reading War of the Ancients, but havent finished. Ive finished Day of the Dragon and Night of the Dragon though), and admittedly I didn't start playing WoW for the lore. I played it because my friends were. It was after I bumped into WoWWiki after my friend told me some of the lore here and there that I really began to read it. I would spend hours on WoWWiki reading up on WoW lore.

I'm one of those people, once I start reading a Wiki page, I start link-jumping from page to page and end up wasting hours XD

[Worba]

I don't have a problem with people using foreign names or "accents" in their gaming - if you think about it blood elves were completely inspired by anime, so it's only natural some players would "walk it back to the source"; similarly draenei use RL Russian accents, so why not give a draenei a Russian name if that floats your boat?

Etc etc.

The only time I could see an issue is if A) someone invents their own lore B) on an RP server and C) insists on "sharing" it with complete strangers. Otherwise, it's just a personal choice.

[Aeladrine]

I've read a few of the books because I was curious (War of the Ancients, it's not very good.), but I'll be honest-- I don't read quest text or look up lore much anymore. I used to, mostly just because I wanted to know the story and know what happens.

The main reason I don't care about lore anymore is really quite simple: I'd rather be reading other things. I read Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman like they were cheap romance novels. I read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series like they were Harry Potter.

Why should I bother with lore which is, to be frank, quite mediocre compared to what I read on a regular basis?

[Silivren]

I personally LOVE the lore.. I love it and will spend time browsing through wowpedia or wowwiki just because I do respect that other people dont enjoy it as much HOWEVER as mentioned before if you plan to roll on a RP server then YES you need to know the lore.. You really do because if your going to try to rp that you are the Lich Kings stepdaughter who also happes to be a dwarf but is the secret lovechild of Thrall and Jaina and your planning on retaking your stepfathers throne from Bolvar(Yes I've seen it done) then its a good sign you really need to read lore..