An Avid Gamer Goes Mac and Doesn’t Go Back

Being an avid gamer since very young, I’ve always resorted to playing games on a PC, because PC master race, right? But since my choice of game was always World of Warcraft, and with the disappointment called Warlords of Draenor on the way, I dropped gaming for good. For a little while at least. So I had no reason to use my PC anymore, as I was only going to do some work-related stuff, and I already had a Mac Pro for it, so I sold my PC thinking I’d never need it again.

Now to be fair, the main reason I bought the Mac Pro was curiosity, and the fact that I’ve never owned an Apple product before tempted me to try it and see what all the hype is about. Apple products are expensive, yes, more than anything else out there on the market, and the Mac Pro specifically is extremely expensive, but it was well worth the money, in my opinion.

A monster 3.7 GHz processor on a portable machine is not something to overlook, it also had desktop graphics, which is only the case with the Mac Pro, and no other Mac. The NVIDIA GT 750M can still support most of today’s games, and the 8 GB of RAM is more than sufficient for gaming, which wasn’t really the reason why I bought my Mac Pro at the time.

Anyway, being the geek that I am, and with Blizzard announcing Legion, it didn’t take me much convincing to get back to World of Warcraft. However, since I sold my gaming PC, I was a little skeptic about Mac gaming at first. And boy was I wrong – it was all I had hoped for. The game ran smoothly, giving me a consistent 120 FPS and never once did it heat up.

Fast forward to me being a happy nerd 2 months into the expansion enjoying my time, Blizzard introduced patch 7.1. Now I’m all up for balance and performance patches, as long as they improve the game, but this patch in particular messed up the loading screens. It made them annoyingly long, and sometimes a restart was required.

At first, I thought my Mac Pro was at fault, so I contacted an Apple Mac repairs service and thought my Mac contracted some sort of a virus, since Apple malware has been more and more common as of late. Asking for help from the professionals was the only thing that came to my mind, and I believe it was the right thing to do as I did not want to risk messing up things even more. And after having the Apple Mac repairs company come to my home, inspect and do a couple of updates and repair on my Mac Pro, the problem remained. The laptop performed better overall, except for the loading screen issue.

After doing some further research online on some World of Warcraft forums, I found that it wasn’t a Mac-related issue – people who had PCs were also experiencing the same problem, and it was indeed an issue with Blizzard’s patch. There still isn’t a hotfix for it, which is kind of frustrating, but hey, at least Legion is a cool expansion, and I sure as hell won’t let one loading screen issue stop me from playing.