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The game is set up so that you can get to level 80 fairly quickly... the amount of experience required to go from level 1-70 has been reduced significantly since the game came online, and the 70-80 grind can be done in a weekend if you're serious about it (and have no life). Most people who play the game fairly regularly have at least one level 80 character, many have multiple level 80 characters.

The reason he's saying that this appears to be a pretty bad player is because his equipment is sub-par in some cases, and because the way he's spent his skill points is a bit questionable... while it'd be perfectly effective for casual play, for the more hardcore raiding type players, the ones who get together in groups of 25 people to go kill gods and such, he would not be effective enough to be desireable.

Also, he lacks some things that you would expect on a better player... players who have more experience and better equipment usually make money faster in game, and he lacks some of the achievements and talents you would expect of somebody who has money in game. (notice that there's an option for him to have two different talent specializations, but one of them is greyed out.) By contrast, look at this one.... that's my death knight, who I've been really really half-assed about playing. I took 4 months off WoW in the fall (as in, didn't log in at all), and my hunter is actually my main character and the one that I go more "hardcore" with... though even that character is being supplanted by a priest that I've been playing, as I'm finding that I enjoy healing much more... but if you compare his against the gear on my death knight, you'll notice that some items have significantly higher "item level", and that everywhere I can put a gem I have... likewise, everything that can be enchanted is enchanted (those green things like "Rune of the Fallen Crusader" on the axe). And my gear on that DK is less than standard... item level 232 is the highest I have, and there's stuff with level 264 available now. The tradeskills are all maxed out, I have dual talent specialization, and I have epic flying. All on a character that I really don't care about playing that much. (and who hasn't actually gone into a dungeon or raid in almost 5 months)

There's an element of elitism among people who look at his gear and his talent spec and say that he's obviously a bad player... it's entirely possible that he makes it work and is a really good player. But it's more likely that he doesn't really understand his class or how to maximize his equipment and talent spec for the role he wants to play in the game.

Your right, my mistake. Some reason I thought the achievement system started back in 2007. It basically got me back into the game and I just can't live without it now;) Haha, look at his guild, either this is an alt or a friend of his.

http://tw.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=Wrathbringer&cn=Kuonet&gn=%E7%A5%9E%E6%A8%A3

That guy is very close too, but looks like he missed the Mask's from Hallows Eve. Have to wait a year for that one or find someone to buy them off of. (Can't remember if they are nodrop) God, Needy looks like a monster to get though.

According to http://tw.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=Wrathbringer&cn=%E5%B0%8F%E7%81%B0&gn=%E7%A5%9E%E6%A8%A3 , he still has one world event to attend. He also has not reached the top of the ladder for 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 matches.

However, he did finish 165 out of 164 player versus player matches. I am not sure how that works.

Also, why are we presuming this person is a he?

If he doesn't have all the best gear then I wouldn't say he has beaten it yet. But that is quite an achievement what he has done.

Here's his gear and stats and achievements and PvP and all that. I wish I knew his /played though.

I'm sorry, but no. My main just passed the 9400 gold threshold today, and will probably pass 10,000 in the next week or so. The secret to my success? Daily quests, and a little bit of auctioning. Epic flying is a sizable chunk of gold, but it's not particularly difficult in the post-BC world, and even before I had it I was making due quite nicely with a 60% flying speed mount (including the World Explorer achievement). Crazily enough, I did all this entirely solo, without playing through even a single Outland or Northrend dungeon.

Bad analogy time. Paying someone else to play WoW for you is akin to paying someone else to play your half of a game of chess, knowing that they'll just be running a copy of Deep Blue and moving the pieces like a good little monkey. Then, at the very end, they give your chess game back to you, just in time for you to make the actual winning checkmate in person. Chess is a mental battle of tactics and wills; if you pay someone else to play chess for you, you can't honestly call yourself a chess player. WoW is similarly a mental battle, but this time focused on patience and mastery of patterns, and pitted against the game's developers rather than a single opponent. The epic flying, the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, and all the other myriad status symbols are the developers' way of saying "congratulations, you win", meant to give you the same spark of victory that chess gives you when you call checkmate after a grueling session. To call checkmate against an opponent you didn't beat, or to buy epic flying with gold you didn't earn, is straight up dishonesty — borne from impatience and an unearned sense of entitlement.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=Nordrassil&n=nekidexplorr

level 14 through exploration- NO gear

(ok, 6 quests completed,before I decided to make it completely masochistic)

... not even enchanted, slacker alert! :)
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Chromaggus&n=Zmdrtaco

Seems real to me. Here is his guild.

http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Aegwynn&n=We+Are+Prepared&p=1

A whole lot of level 61 shaman, just as indicated in the story.

And here, I believe, is a link to his guild.

lol - 7 of the 11 logololz are blood elves at http://www.wowarmory.com/search.xml?searchQuery=legololz&searchType=characters

If this proposed archive does contain information about individual players, it could turn into an interesting little case study on privacy and modern technology. Many of the newer threats to privacy are about technology that can retain and search little details of your life online: the details individually may be public, but when they're all available at once they may start to feel like a breach of privacy. An MMO is a microcosm where the technology is already sufficiently advanced for this.

This can happen with the WoW Armory, where anyone with Web access can pull up game data on any World of Warcraft character. From this, others can infer things like how much time you've spent playing lately. A player might wind up embarrassed over a WoW addiction ("Level 70 already?!"), or be bugged to play more by less casual-playing friends who want a high-level buddy to go raiding with. (I have experienced the latter and I believe there was a "Penny Arcade" strip about it once.) What's interesting is that your character level is not secret information—it's publicly visible every time you log on—but the dynamics of privacy do shift when it's a "matter of record" for anyone to look up on a website, rather than observed only by others on the same server when you're actually logged in and playing.

Strangely enough, in my unmodified install of Opera's current stable version, an svg example renders just as well as the WoW Armory in it's full XMLy glory ("Mask as Fx", checked the source to make sure there was no XHTML ;)). Having said that, I'd like you to have sexual intercourse somewhere else (i.e. "fuck off").

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Arygos&n=Crimsonja
Level faster newb!

Very true, and here is a link to the most likely gold farmer, I mean character, based on names in the screen shot.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Zxtreme