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

Splintertree Post, Ashenvale, Western Continent of Kalimdor, Realm of Greymane

Yes, my life has come to this.

In an effort to discover what it is like to blog on a regular basis, just chunk messy, uncrafted prose right into an entry field on a web page, I have started a warcraft blog.

It started as many things have started in my life, as kind of participatory social experiment, anthropologist permanently in the field. The arrogance of this is, of course, that I am somehow detached from the idea of a massively parallel online role playing game. And that is just bullshit. I am a 36 year old man, but I some part of me is also permanently stuck in 18 year old Dungeons and Dragons mode.

What started as a sneek-and-peek is compulsion for me now - both as a twitchy teenager with an active social life and as a 36 year old who makes his living understanding the forces and movements of interactive consumer trends.

So, this is bullshit. Like most things where I am trying to cover for shame or nervousness I am intellectualizing this thing. And its crap because Warcraft is somehow an enactment of all those endless monster and orc killing sessions that unfolded in my mind during Ms. Slepski's Spanish class. The game is just fucking awesome.

The art direction is amazing. Everything is so beautifully rendered, from the paperdoll goodies to the ecosystems of the forests, beaches, and high plains. The game play is masterwork. And the social aspect - this is where my social scientist & critic antennae get vibrating. There are people in there, whole economies of friendship and war. There is real money and real man-hours loose inside that pocket world. That's what I want to understand.

My character is Suriqa, currently a level 22 female troll hunter. Hunters are awesome - sort of a Ranger of the North kind of character. Amazing damage per second with their bows, and the ability to tame beasts for use as a pet and companion -good for older losers like me who don't start the game with a built-in peer group of bloodthirsty teenage boys.

I was finishing up silverwing raid quest (with a real moron shaman that didn't seem to understand the idea of buffing and healing the DPS dude). I was headed back to splintertree to cash in the quest. For the neophyte at home, in Wow questgivers give various errands for the player to run, incentivized by a rewards of cash, experience points, and quest gear, like armor or weapons. Wow has a very deep quasi-free market structure, actions are always given a market incentive to entice players into taking part in the group narrative of the game - it is a fantasy world run by the Republicans. Which is great when your healthcare is provided by wandering bipedal buffalo who can heal you by driving enchanted tiki torches into the ground and lighting setting their enchanted, healing citronella candles alight.

I was back inside the gates of Splintertree, a military outpost that protects Orcish (Horde really) logging operations inside the contested forests of Ashenvale. These sort of realpolitik overnarratives are pretty common inside the geopolitics of the world. As I loped my tollish way towards the Inn, I was bushwhacked by a level 60 Night Elf druid in stealth stalking cat form. I was dead instantly.

I had to wander back from the graveyard as a ghost - reuniting with the shattered mortal coil of my character would bring me back to life. It usually take anywhere from 2-10 minutes of dumb ghostrunning to do this, a real pain in the ass.

Then I was killed again, by the same Night elf alliance bushwhacking son of a bitch.

This is not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part of the story is when I get on the general Splintertree chat channel (good old channel /1) and say "High level night elf druid in stealthed cat form, inside Splintertree wall."

A player, lets call them Moonlynx, whispered me to say, "Don't worry, we are on our way." What was on the way was a 5 man posse of level 60 Alliance hunters. They had been hunting this guy for hours, killing him repeatedly until he so bored that he eventually logged off. Apparently he had been harassing Splinter for 2 days, and this self organized irregular militia had had enough.

Moonlynx healed me up, and also became a friend, someone I can turn to for in-game advice.

I'll backtrack a little tomorrow, and talk about my first two instances (dungeons), and how different they were socially. Short version - Ragefire Canyon sucked, Wailing Caverns was awesome.

/SG

Labels: warcraft