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

Zoram'gar Outpost, Ashenvale, Western Continent of Kalimdor, Greymane

I completed the long "Warsong Reports" run yesterday - a kind of "jog and sneak" west from Splintertree Post to the western shore of Ashenvale, and area rich with Naga, Hydra, and other nautically themed monstrosities. It has made me wonder what it would taste like to roast and eat a crab the size of a prize Rottweiler. On the long road westward I avoided getting killed by the elvish patrols at Astranaar and picked up a friend - a level 20 Tauren Druid whose name eludes me at the moment.
Which brings me to the idea of style - this guy, much like Omega and Resident, was fun. He was in it to explore, have a good time, and meet people that liked to play in a fun way. There is a definate strain of compulsion on WoW, people that take the game *way* too seriously. After all, short of deletion by yourself or Blizzard, there is no such thing as a total-loss consequence in WoW. Things are going to go wrong. You might misjudge the people you are playing with. But ultimately, much as in life, you keep your friendships with the "good guys" and minimize your involvement with the douchebags, peckerwoods, and assorted asshats that the world seems to produce is such splendid profusion and variety - the whole burgeoning assholery of Life.

Which finally loops me back to my Ragefire Canyon run. RFC, which sounds like Kentucky Fried Chicken, is an instance - a special location within the WoW geography. Unlike the commons, which is randomly repopulated with wandering monsters and open to the entire human-backed population of the real, instances are uniquely instantiated for individuals or specially constituted raiding parties. So, if I entered ragefire canyon alone, and then Ed and Wade formed a party and entered after me, we wouldn't run into each other inside the dungeon. I would be in there alone, and Ed and Wade would be inside their own copy, or instance, of the dungeon. Back outside, we would return to the commonality of Azeroth.

Once your raiding party is formed, you have to stick together - or they whole thing starts over. If you are running the instance at the appropriate level, you'll need to work together, each player's skills covering for the weaknesses of the the others. Over time, a sophisticated group of best practices has evolved, and you will hear the calls for these different roles go out over the common chat channels - "LF2M for RFC, need tank and healer." Or, translated into natural language, "Looking for two more players for our party to run Ragefire Canyon, we need a tank and a healer." A healer is obviously the team medic - priests are best, something akin to a cleric from the old AD&D days. But priests suck at combat. Shamans can also heal, and all classes have a limited ability to heal after combat with food and first aid. Having a potent and gameplay competent healer is one of the surest predictors of success for a raid. Much like the tank (which I'll elaborate on in the next paragraph), they need to cultivate good, real-time situational awareness, and there are aftermarket tools that can help them do just that.

Tanks are well armored fighters with the ability to absorb high levels of damage. One of the biggest jobs of a team healer is to keep healing and buffing the tank (buffing is casting beneficial magic on a player - increasing their armor, increasing their attack power, etc.). The most important thing that the tank does, however, is "drawing aggro." The concept of aggro is an important one in the game, and understanding and managing aggro is maybe one of the most prized qualities of a Warcraft colleague. Tanks use taunts (a kind of spell) and flashy high damage, high-threat attacks to keep themselves as the focus of monster aggression. Since they are highly armored and can take the heat, this is a comfortable place for them in the gameplay economy. But, has ranged deathdealers like Hunters and Mages pour on the firepower, monsters will want to rush out to attack their greatest threat, namely lightly armored Hunters and fun-sized mages with their chewy caramel centers. Thus, Tanks must ALSO maintain a very high degree of situational awarness, continually throwing fouls and drawing in monsterly ire.

This to me is one of the great lessons of Warcraft, this idea that the whole world behaves according to the logic of Sesame Street "Cooperation!" That the universe is a perfectly interlocking web of complimentary talents. And this is of course the great myth of a differentiated service economy, a perfect little place for everyone - some of us warm and nuturing clerics, some of us hearty, selfless warriors, some of us cool-headed archers, winging in long distance aid just in the nick of time, and all of us showered with gold and goodies. In warcraft, nobody has to work as a stockboy at WalMart.


This has wound up being more low-level than I wanted, but the point I am trying to move here is that the people you play with are very very important.

Crud, running out of time. I'll finish this tomorrow.

Labels: warcraft