Applied Semiotics

Well, some biggish news, at least in Warcraft terms. I switched realms from the venerable Greymane to the new frontier of Baelgun - another Pacific time server. I was originally playing on Greymane because my friend Mike from work has a 60 Undead warlock on there names Smelvin. Mike has been an amazingly cool mentor for me with the whole thing - staking me 65 silver out of the gate and just generally giving me advice. The WoW universe is amazingly complicated... with its own language, styles, factions, an economies. This kind of steep learning curve creates a barrier to entry, and Mike has helped me get over this barrier. It strikes me that this barrier is added value for the players, as hard as Blizzard works to increase their subscription base, the players don't want just anyone on WoW. It's not a console game. Most players only want people that get it on the service - as "bad" players, the obnoxious and the incompetent are actually dangerous to the welfare of their characters.

And in a world where network effects and urbanization continually crowd the popular, the feeling of having a wall between you and everyone else, them, the other, it is both comforting and creates a sense of belonging. As any coolhunter will tell you, popularity is lethal to the cultural currency of any trend, and Wow's complexity and continual upgrade path creates a sort of moving cultural storm front, a sweet spot where there are enough players to have strong social effects and still have a feeling of closeness and belonging. There are also real technical issues.

At the end of the day, logging onto Greymane during prime time (after dinner... when people used to watch TV) was sometimes taking thirty minutes. Some people were reporting waits as long as 45 minutes to an hour. There were a couple of things shocking to me about this. Apparently I was willing to wait even 10 minutes to get on -I'd just read a book. I cannot think of any other online activity where I would wait one minute, much less 10. Google measures their response time in tenths of a second, because users can perceive those microdelays. The user might not say, "this was 2 tenths of a second faster." They'll just say "this was better." I think its a testimony to the power of the WoW experience that people will actually sit there and wait in an age of always on instant access.

They aren't going to wait forever, though. Blizzard knows this. So they offered 4 very crowded servers free character transfers to brand-new, empty worlds. It was like some strange colonization project. Despite the friends I had on Greymane, and the real friend I had there with Mike, 30 minutes just wasn't cutting it for me. I have been working till 6pm at the office, and then logging on for an hour or so while traffic dies down. I can get in an hour of WoW and spend a whole 30-45 minutes LESS in the car on my way home. 20 minutes is a measureable fraction of my play time, as I'm not a teenage thats going to spend the next 5 hours on there.

So I said goodbye to everyone and took the transfer. I chunked through the process on the blizzard website, then received a TERRIFYING message that it might be five days before I was able to access Suriqa. Yikes. But in actuality, everything was moved in about 10 minutes.

I logged into Baelgun, and was immeditate bombarded by messages to come to Ogrimmar, the capital city of both the Orcs and the Horde. I hopped a bat from The Crossroads and headed town to the post office... sort of the main hangout in the city. The place was almost empty, there were only 5 people in the whole city. It had a strange neutron bomb feeling of abandonment.

The last couple of days have been great, however. TONS of monsters, since I'm not competing with so many other players for kills. I got into a great new guild right off the bat, and two of my very good friends from Greymane transferred - Resident and her brother Omegastar. Awesome stuff.

I'm up to level 25. Great new battle bow and an upgrade to razor arrows. Once i crack 26 I can use my new sword and cloak for huge DPS.

I am such a fucking dork