Hell Yeah, Friday Night!

Friday night in America - as I remember it and therefore we assume is fact - is a night for games. Entertainment in general, as some people prefer the non-combative plays and movies and concerts over competitive endeavors, but primarily games.

Every high school in America that has 11 healthy lads fields a football team and they take assault the turf to beat or be beaten by the opposing squad. Friday night is also a popular night for boxing matches, basketball games, and anything else competitive that can be done after a quick dinner and before a night hopping bars.

Friday night is celebratory. It's exercise and liberation and jubilation and competition and showboating and flirting and drinking and relaxation. It's an after-lunch game of hoops, an after-work game of darts, an after-dinner game of scrabble, an all-night wargamer session of Squad Leader or the Longest Day.

Online games have communities, and there are some people who vastly prefer to spend their Friday night online instead of on the town. Some guilds schedule their raids for Friday nights because they don't do things with friends IRL, at least they have no need to participate in the dating scene that usually accompanies these events, so they celebrate with a beer in cyberspace and relax with friends by raiding Icecrown.

So things can get a little messy on Friday nights in Warcraft. People can get a little emotional or odd and do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, unexplained and bizarre behavior. People who are mild-mannered might suddenly ninja something. A notorious skinflint might start handing out gold. Guilds can suddenly explode (this especially). Friday has some heightened expectations to it because, especially for the younger single folk, there is the feeling that if they weren't logged in then possibly there was something more significant waiting for them IRL they could have done that would lead them to find the person of the desirable sex that they could get addlepated with and wake up with on a confusing Saturday morning.

So if your raids fail on a Friday and your guild has a backlog of angst, you might be headed for a split. If your friends don't log on and you level/gear past them you might end up running with a different crowd. If there's no one on that you know at all and you're bored, you might end up rerolling completely to meet people and try something new.

But there's a hidden energy there, on Friday night. You want to win and earn an upgrade, a trophy, a title or mount, and ride slowly through Stormwind so everyone can see it.

And they'll say "Hey dude, very nice mount."

And you'll say "Yeah, pretty cool, ain't it?"

And maybe that cute elf in the corner will see you in your position of esteem and you can sneak over later and buy her an ale. It's Friday night, anything could happen.

Remembering my first time

Misleading title FTW! If I took a poll of WarCraft players and asked them if the character they play the most is the first character they played, I would guess that the result would be somewhere around 20%. The people on the forums are more devoted and exploratory than the common player and are more likely to be playing a 2nd or 3rd choice (or more). The ordinary player usually picks one character and runs with it, for better or worse.

My first character ever was a Tauren Warrior named Glue on Khadgar server. I got the game one weekend and started playing and didn't expect much. It turned out to be far more interesting than I expected, and the Barrens was a relaxing place to play and it made the whole game feel gigantic. I got him up to level 20, and then recruited a couple of RL friends to play the game and I re-rolled so we could all start together. We wanted to be able to group early on, so we limited our choices to Orcs and Trolls. One picked Orc Warrior, one picked Troll Hunter, and figuring that we might need a healer eventually, I picked a Troll Priest. This ended up being my first main, Kadoo.

Back in vanilla warriors were pretty durable, and could do some ok damage. Hunters were lol-easy to level (send out your pet, shoot the target once, wait, loot, repeat). Priests on the other hand - and holy priests especially, as I was specced - were the nexus point for everything that was difficult about leveling at the time. I wore cloth, so I took lots of damage. I could cast a shield on myself, but it only lasted for a few hits before it was broken down, and my DPS was a total joke. Using wands back then was almost impossible because they didn't autofire, you had to click on it each time you wanted it to cast. My offensive spells were limited and did terrible damage and ate up a lot of mana, so I was drinking after each pull. It took forever to level, and my friend the hunter was always complaining about how slow I was.

But the group situations almost made up for it. We found a couple to play with - another hunter and a mage - and the five of us did all of the 5-man dungeons together. I remember very clearly going into Blackrock Depths the first time as a level 48 priest (still lagging behind the DPSers in levels) and trying to heal our 5-man party through the mob pulls. Our warrior wasn't an expert (who was back then, really?) so occasionally the hunters would pull aggro and I would keep them alive until they could find the feign death buttons, and then the aggro would dump on to me. I was running everywhere, trying to fade and occasionally fear and toss heals and keep my ass alive on every pull. It was a nightmare, but it was fun at the same time. I died many many times and quickly memorized the ghost run from Thorium Point to Blackrock Mountain.

I might still be playing the character, but two things happened that shaped the way I play now. First, we had a bit of a zerg guild. We were inviting people left and right into the Orgrimmar Outcasts, and some of the people were really obnoxious. Eventually I got fed up with guild chat and started kicking people out. It was a real power-trippy moment, and I'm not proud of it, but when I logged in every day and these morons would beg me to heal them through things and then not be civil in guild chat, it eventually spilled over.

The second thing that happened was we had decided to pug with a couple of other guilds and go to Molten Core to clear some trash to farm materials for fire resist gear. I ended up being the only healer in a 40-man MC raid. If you've never played a healer before you don't understand that they tend to feel a little responsible for the health of the people they group with, and sometimes they even take it personally when someone dies. Well, I got to watch 40 health bars go from 100 to 0 and I spammed out as much healing as I could before the raid wiped. It was a horrible experience.

The realization set in that since I was an easy kill in PvP at the time, my only role was to heal other people while they did fun things and got the glory. Meanwhile the best I could hope for was to get better gear... to heal other people with... while they had even more fun. About a week later I deleted my priest and left the guild to play a mage. Some months later I asked a GM to undelete it, but I really didn't want to play it anymore. There was just no appreciation for healers, and they could barely even farm to get gold for repair bills because back then healing power was different than spell power and didn't help us kill things. It was awful. Anyone who says they long for the days of old vanilla WoW and the way things used to be: Shut the hell up. The game is much better now. I wouldn't wish the life of a vanilla WoW healer on anyone.

I still have that Troll Priest around somewhere, and he eventually made it to level 72, but he's associated with so much past pain that I never want to play him again. I might roll a priest again but I'll never go back to him. He represents the way the game used to be and the playstyle of vanilla WoW and I'm happy to put both him and it behind me.

Bon Appetit!

Here's where Julie & Julia and EG cross over - it's time to level my cooking skill on Diagnose.

There are three 'secondary' skills that every character can pursue in addition to their professions: First Aid, Fishing, and Cooking. My First Aid level is high enough to be making heavy netherweave bandages at this point, so there's no rush on that. I've been leveling it regularly as I went along because as a rogue the bandages come in pretty handy. I can't quite ambush and eviscerate mobs to death, so they get in a few shots on me and after a few mobs (or a bad pull) I tend to need a bandage.

I'm in no hurry to level fishing, but as it turns out, fishing is an excellent companion skill to cooking. You can level quite a long way from cooking the fish you catch and you can almost do without animal meat altogether. That brings up an interesting thought... I bet I could get away with role-playing a vegetarian character. I'll save that thought for later.

So right now I'm somewhere around 230 cooking I think, the most difficult recipe I can make is the Monster Omelet and that turns green at 262. After that I'll need new recipes to level from. If I don't level up my fishing, the easiest way to get from 262 to 300 is by cooking the Juicy Bear Burger (turns yellow at 285) and Smoked Desert Dumplings. So my to-do list looks like this:

• Head to Winterspring and farm giant eggs off the owlkin until my cooking hits 262
• Travel to Felwood to get the Bear Burger recipe and kill bears until my cooking gets to 285
• Travel all the way to Silithus to get the Dumpling recipe - quest reward - and then farm up the worms until I hit 300.

And that should catch me up to outland on all my skills - except fishing.

Level 2000 Altaholic

I've been playing World of Warcraft for a long time, and I do spend a lot of hours on it because I enjoy it as a pasttime. The reason I find it acceptable is because I play it in a way that lets me turn it off or look away whenever I want so that I can interact with the family. At one point when I was gaming I was heavily into raiding, and it took time away from the family and required my active concentration for too long. I refuse to play that way anymore. I am a casual, and I am happy.

Warcraft has its fast and furious parts, but when you're flushing out all the finer points of your character - fishing, cooking, lockpicking, exploring, grinding mobs for a mount, etc. - there are a lot of times when you're doing repetitive or mindless tasks. These things are optional for a character, truly. You don't need to level those professions to play the game and more than you need to play solitaire on your PC in order to complete your TPS reports.

Last night I leveled up my lockpicking to almost 300, and I got distracted from that and focused on watching Die Hard 3 and Auntie Mame. (Yeah, we have diverse tastes in movies.) I didn't get any levels on the rogue, but the character progressed, so I got a little buzz from feeling like I was building something. That's all I ask, really. Give me a way to relax and feel productive instead of destructive, and I'm a happy player.

And If you're like me, the game just doesn't grab you at 80 the way it does from 1 to 79. As you level up there are an insane amount of challenges in all directions, things to explore, and people to meet. When you hit level 80 though a majority of all the challenges are behind you, and only the heroic things are ahead of you. It doesn't take long to face them all either. Back in February when I stopped playing my druid we were clearing all of the available 25-man raid content in one night - the hardest challenges in the game.

So what do you do the other six days of the week? If you have other hobbies, go for it. If you're sorta tied to home and you don't have a lot of spending money, creating a alternative character in warcraft (an 'alt') and starting a new story can be fun. Well, the leveling suits me more than playing at 80 does. I've raided at 60, 70, and 80, and I can honestly say I've found my preferred style of play. I am an altaholic. I like creating new characters on different servers and making a new adventure out of it.

I may have done it a bit more than most people I guess. I have a total of 1,983 levels over 50 characters on 28 different realms. Most of the time I create a new character on a realm by itself, this makes it a little harder to carve out your own space, but it makes everything you have more rewarding because you know that you earned it and it wasn't gifted to you by one of your alts. Anyway, I'm closing in on a career achievement. At some point when I get Diagnose to L80 I will officially hit 2,000 total levels on my account. I'll probably celebrate by starting a new alt and watching a good movie with the family.

Level Name - Realm
80 Moonclover - Wyrmrest Accord
80 Archeologist - Wyrmrest Accord
80 Vaalin - Illidan
80 Susse - Cho'gall
80 Goatwaggle - Area 52
78 Aquaux - Cho'gall
72 Foff - Nesingwary
71 Wickerman - Exodar
70 Heedmartin - Wyrmrest Accord
70 Invulnerable - Moon Guard
68 Lorebreaker - Wyrmrest Accord
64 Taxidermist - Cairne
63 Diagnose - Wyrmrest Accord
63 Vanbracken - Area 52
62 Bonypony - Trollbane
61 Taxidermist - Moon Guard
61 Latte - Fenris
61 Florentine - Exodar
60 Teacher - Ysera
60 Kadoobound - Khadgar
50 Butler - Wyrmrest Accord
46 Evade - Hydraxis
43 Ax - Exodar
42 Owl - The Venture Co
33 Diagnose - Illidan
29 Deadhorse - Tanaris
29 Horde - Anvilmar
27 Feral - Shandris
27 Epicmount - Hydraxis
26 Calvïn - Gorgonnash
26 Deadhorse - Gnomeregan
25 Hammercraft - Gorgonnash
24 Hexaddict - Cairne
24 Aermoss - Blackhand
20 Zulysses - Wyrmrest Accord
19 Jadesparrow - Moon Guard
17 Heed - Undermine
17 Hogan - Terokkar
16 Vanbracken - Borean Tundra
14 Easygoing - Madoran
12 Rabies - Ghostlands
10 Bonypony - Tanaris
9 Hammercraft - Velen
5 Vandergelder - Whisperwind
3 Cleavage - Velen
2 Vanbracken - Hellscream
1 Macys - Illidan
1 Economics - Cho'gall
1 Paypal - Borean Tundra
1 Diagnose - Azjol-Nerub

Monday Memory: Populous

There wasn't anything like it. You weren't a soldier or a hero or an avatar, you were a god, an actual out-here-in-space making-miracles-with-my fingertips supreme being, creating fortune and disaster for the citizens of a small planet.

Populous put you in charge of a faith - the tiny citizens of your realm worshipped you - and they had compete faith in your random works of creation and destruction. You could flatten out the land so your people could build houses and procreate, and the more people that joined your cause the greater your powers would get.

At the height of power and in command of a large population you could summon floods and earthquakes to smite your enemies, demolish their cities with volcanoes, or submerge the land under their feet and drown them in the sea.

The people never gained much technology but they did have a couple of different unit types - soldiers and priests (who could convert the enemy into friendly units), so it had a very Old Testament feel to it. The only mode of transportation for these people was walking, and the gods were alive shaping the ground under their feet. But it was more of a Monty Python old testament than Charlton Heston, the graphics were somewhat comical and there was less violence than two colonies of ants fighting.

Each planet had a different scenario on it starting from the extremely simple to very hardcore, and after you conquer all the planets it would take you to a new solar system to conquer. If it were still playable on today's hardware it would be just as playable now as it was then, with the difficulty being somewhere around Lemmings - hard enough to challenge, too easy to be baffled for too long.

It was the first of the "god games" and in a lot of ways it was the best. It was fresh, it had an easy-to-understand icon-based interface, and plenty of puzzle packed into a few variables. If I still had a copy I'd probably play it every once in a while, it was fun.

A road twice traveled

World of Warcraft has been online for over five years now, and somewhere between 1 and 11 million people have spent crazy amounts of time pretending to be adventurers in a cartoon medieval world hacking monsters with swords, casting spells, raising the dead, and dancing on mailboxes. By now, every semi-serious player of the game has at least one character at level 80.

I've met a ton of people playing this game, and I'm always interested in hearing about their playstyle and what interests them the most. Some people are single-story driven, and they've only played one serious character the whole time, and that's enough for them. Some people play an endless string of different characters and level, group, and even raid with all of them. Some people have a "main," and then an alt or two to dabble around with.

I will be the first person to admit that I am a server locust. I enjoy leveling new characters without help on different servers. I have 5 L80's I could be playing and raiding with at this point, but none of them interest me as much as starting a new story, and I don't mind if the other characters change, so I have no regrets moving from community to community.

Lately I've been playing Alliance characters instead of Horde for two reasons - I've played the Alliance side less so it's more interesting, and the Alliance players seem to be much nicer right now. That changes somewhat, before the Burning Crusade expansion the Horde had more mature players, but the addition of the Blood Elves brought with it an influx of immature players. Most people expect that to shift back in the other direction for Cataclysm when the Alliance get Worgen (werewolves) and the Horde gets Goblins as playable races.

So I'm happy playing solo, and using the game's grouping features to find group situations for me. It creates a set of expectations that I can live by, and minimizes the amount of interaction required with other players. Sometimes it's nice to chat with people, but when extended grouping situations require extended conversation, it gets kinda boring. I like watching them though and seeing what they do. That's made my latest class choice very interesting - I'm playing a rogue.

Rogues aren't the king of the hill in either PvE or PvP settings right now, but they allow a person to bypass a lot of barriers because of their ability to stealth. I can eavesdrop on conversations, sneak into enemy territory, and complete a lot of group quests alone because I can get in and out of trouble areas quickly. I like being a sneaky little thief, and choosing when and how people see me.

Some people just can't stand leveling characters though, and I feel bad for them because the nature of the game dictates that you can never grow too much stronger than anyone else, so there's a limited amount of things you can do at 80. Mind you there's still a lot, but if you play with a min/max attitude and absolutely must be the best, at some point there's not much left you can do to improve yourself. They get frustrated at the slowing pace of progress, yet they are bored to tears with leveling new characters. If that's the case maybe MMOs aren't for them - at least until the games start allowing players to create persistent items in the world, and then they can tap into that empire-building spirit.

Meanwhile, I'll be in the shadows watching.

Class Personality

There are ten classes in World of Warcraft, each with its own unique abilities and characteristics. There are exceptions to every rule, but here are the stereotypical personalities for each.

Warrior - When he's playing he's playing, when he's not he's not. He has a space carved out to play in the study/basement, and there shall be no interruptions. He'll tank your heroics as long as the beer holds out, and he's three deep into a 12-pack of Budweiser. Eventually he stops talking on vent, and if you keep him on past 2am he may forget he loaned you that gold.

Priest - Her fingernails are all bit down and when it's not raid time she's logged in on an alt no one knows about because she's tired of being begged to heal everything. Gets tired easily, and more pissy as the night goes on. Has quit the guild and rejoined several times.

Mage - Doesn't see why this game is so hard, just point and click and blow things up. Has tons of gold, and dies at least 20 times a raid. One day he will suddenly disappear. You suspect he just got bored and quit, but there's also the nagging suspicion that maybe the Feds caught up with him.

Hunter - He's not your ordinary huntard, he's been playing the class since launch and has the spell gear to prove it. Better pull fast, or his pet will show you how it's done -when it gets back from pulling trash from the other side of the instance.

Shaman - Loves the shaman class, and hopes one day to be able to use 99% of the class abilities in a raid situation instead of spamming (x). He follows all the upcoming changes in beta, and complains often about the endless string of class nerfs.

Rogue - The kid is always on vent, usually scamming something, and can talk endlessly about gear and specs and drops and unlike people who say they can watch TV and listen to music and do their homework while they raid, he actually can. It must be the drugs.

Warlock - No one knows his first name. He said it once on vent but you couldn't tell what he was saying through the accent. His DPS is excellent even though he lags horribly, and tends to hang out in a private channel with the priest.

Druid - The druid is insane, as all druids are. Enjoy this one while its here, and make sure you're always recruiting a replacement because this one is about to explode in a burst of drama.

Paladin - Is the best player in the guild, just ask him. He's better than you at your class, but why bother? Paladins are the only class worth playing, because they remind him of himself. He's also better than you at life, which he can attribute to clean living and daily doses of Rush Limbaugh.

Death Knight - Lazy friend of the GM who continually looks for shortcuts and hates "finding out" that he needs to show up for raids, do daily quests, or pretty much anything other than grief lowbies.

There ya go, the 10 personalities of warcraft.

You are the community you build

While sipping the morning coffee and checking over what nonsense fills the general forums today I ran across a post from an ex-guildmate who was bemoaning how expensive it is to transfer multiple characters from one realm to another.

It's true, at $25 per character if you have a full stable of valuable toons it can cost you up to $250 to move them all from one realm to another. It's a ridiculous cost for someone to pay for changing the play conditions of a video game, really. But many people will pay - and have paid - the fee for transferring characters to another realm to play with their friends or to escape a realm with playing conditions they found unpleasant.

But this one caught my eye, because the complaint was made by someone who I remember very well. Back in February of 2009 he and his group of friends decided that they needed more sovereignty and dropped the drama bomb on our guild, quitting right after we had downed Sarth +3 drakes.

If you're not familiar with the Sartharion fight it is an epic battle with a dragon inside the Obsidian Sanctum. Sartharion has three drakes assisting him, Tenebron, Shadron, and Vesperon. The "easy" way to beat him is to run around the outer ring and encounter each of the drakes and kill them one at a time and then fight Sartharion. The harder modes are leaving one or more of the drakes alive when you encounter Sartharion, and then they come and join the fight at different intervals. The hardest mode is Sarth +3 - killing Sartharion with all three drakes still alive.

It's the hardest boss encounter I've ever been a part of, and it was a wicked achievement. Whenever I'm playing on my druid and someone says something about my gear or questions whether I know what I'm doing I flash my Twilight Vanquisher title and they shut up. Even with the gear improvements it's still a hard encounter, and people have pretty much stopped trying it because the rewards aren't that great anymore. So if you've got it, you've got it, and I've had mine since February.

So the goal of our guild was to get three drakes, the hardest possible 25-man boss kill at the time. We were all motivated in spite of our differences by this achievement, and it held us together. When we were finally able to pull off a victory (far ahead of most other guilds) there was great jubilation. For about 15 minutes. Then immediately thereafter, this ex-guildmate started whining about gear drops and guild priorities and expressed his displeasure about everything. Basically, he wanted to loot three sets of gear instead of just one, and the guild wanted to shard the gear for enchants.

I got tired of the nonsense and stopped logging in. It didn't take long before he summoned the courage to grab as many friends as he could, and quit the guild. It basically cut the guild in half.

We didn't have any other goals, our guild dwindled. They had a goal however, in forming their new guild "Core," and that was to be the ruthless best. They succeeded. They were at the very peak of progression, top of the realm. At this point, all options were open to them, and with the influence they had as a guild that can clear any content for anyone they could set an example for others to follow.

So nine months later when they say the server is terrible and they can't stand playing there, it tells me quite clearly how much they've changed over time - not at all. The server has become a reflection of their attitude; rude, selfish, and insincere. And I am very happy that it is prohibitively expensive for them to leave the hell they built for themselves.

Monday Memory: Unreal Tournament

It's not an ancient memory, but it's a strong one. When it comes to the realm of first person shooters (FPS) there was nothing that could touch it at the time. Unreal Tournament was launched at the end of the Quake/Half-Life era and appealed to the e-sport combat crowd. It was a straight-up competitive shooter, and didn't require a big backstory: You played the role of a gladiator competing for glory in an arena, and your weapons were guns of all types.

The game had three things going for it. First, it was fast. As soon as you wanted to shoot, you shot. As soon as you saw the enemy, you could shoot. When you wanted to move, you moved. When you clicked to jump, you jumped. It rewarded skill and rapid response to events, competitive matches in confined spaces could be blindingly fast. You were limited only by the latency of your connection.

There were a number of "common" maps that shipped with the game and could be played in solo mode, with different maps supporting different game types - capture the flag, zone control, last man standing, etc. The most famous map in UT was "Face" - two towers on either end of an asteroid floating in space that faced each other. Anyone who played on a public server for any length of time memorized all of the spawn points for the map, and probably took their turn being a jerk and zooming in on the spawn points with a sniper rifle waiting for a "headshot."

The second great thing about UT was aside from different types of guns and rocket launchers you were also armed with a translocater that could teleport you short distances. You shot it once and a disc flew out, you click the alternate firing button and you teleported yourself to where the disc went. If someone happened to be standing where the disc landed they were turned into meaty giblets. This created the word "gibbed" or "insta-gib." It was also possible to climb extra high by shooting the translocater up in the air, teleporting, and shooting it again before you fell to shoot it even higher. Some practice was required with use because you kept your deceleration when you teleported, and you could end up splatting youself after too much time spent teleporting in mid-air.

Third, and the best part of the game, was playing custom maps. Anyone who owned a copy of the game also owned all the tools required to make their own custom maps, and if you ran a server you could upload them for everyone to share and compete on. Some of the maps were giant bedrooms that mouse-size combatants ran around in, endless mazes of space tubes, and dark cities at night with dozens of good spots to make a sniper nest and wait for targets to show themselves.

It could be frustrating sometimes, but once you got good at the game and you were winning more than you were gibbed, it was a great stress reliever. You got to recognize people who were good or fun to team with, and people formed clans to group with, but each game was a fresh reset, and a rampage to bloody victory. Some people played it with serious obsession and even got Unreal tattoos and shared pics on the net. I felt bad for them when UT2 was released and proved to be a horrible failure, and the franchise was nearly killed.

Machinima

Miyamoto Musashi was a 16th century Japanese swordsman who was famous for two things - being able to kick anyone's ass at any time with a sword (or scabbard, stick, pole, etc.), and writing the Book of Five Rings. The Book of Five Rings is Musashi's way of conveying his philosophy of swordfighting, and each rings builds on the one before it - discipline, technique, timing, style, and spirit.

The fifth ring of his book is kind of taken on faith. It's more or less interpreted as "once you get really good at something, there are times when everything you do is completely automatic and you sort of watch yourself go through the motions." Musashi uses the terms available to him to describe it, and the chapter is filled with good and evil, but I'm not going to argue with a guy who can kill an entire army naked with only a frozen fish.

There's a level of mastery to every art. When you get incredibly good at something to the point where it happens at the point of decision and requires no further effort, you have mastered it. You might not be the best, but you can perform your practice without question or effort, and that is mastery. Yes, there can be more than one master. It's fun to watch them compete.

I happen to be a master at leveling Horde alts. I know where every quest is, I know what the rewards are, what the best zones are for different levels, what quests are possible to solo at different levels with different classes, and how long all of the stages take. There are a lot of players who complain about slogging through the 'early levels' of a new character, but I find it effortless. I don't even bother to think about what my character is doing until level 20.

Combat rotations can be the same way. Players will practice their ideal rotations against target dummies in major cities, lining up their abilities for easy access with the right keybinds, and measuring when abilities can be fired off based on their haste value. They chart their optimal DPS (damage per second) and practice it. After enough raids it becomes an unconscious cycle. You hear people saying "raids are so boring, I just hit 1, 2, 3, 2, 3," etc.

There are PvP masters also. The arena system in warcraft is a broken, imbalanced ponzi scheme, but at the highest end it does occasionally allow for the very best PvPers to compete against each other. Every player who competes at that highest level knows all of the abilities of their class and how best to use them, and all of the abilities of their opponent and how best to counter them. After thousands of battles the strongest strategies emerge until very little is left aside from the RNG (random number generator) that doles out damage values and decides critical hits.

And after mastery, art is born. Art celebrates things that are; and things really aren't proven to exist until they are known quantities, and measured, tested, refined, and mastered. There is an art in everything that has mastery, and there is a potential for celebration for anything done with excellence. Not everything that is mastered is recognized long enough to be celebrated in art, and when it is it is celebrated with the same media - paint and clay, pencil and stone. But the latest generation of video games has found its own media to celebrate its mastery with.

Machinima is the use of graphics engines used by the games themselves to create movies that celebrate these games. The most simple machinima are the fraps movies of people actually playing the game and recording the action, usually with their favorite song pasted in the background. These are the "lol look at me pwn nubs in ab on my leet rouge lol" movies, mostly. Occasionally there will be a demonstration, or more commonly a boss fight showing a strategy on how to defeat it, but the majority of all the fraps films are lame variations of "I did this thing, here watch."

But machinima has evolved rapidly. Almost as soon as the games were in their hands, people with spare time have wanted to take the pieces apart and make them do things they weren't intended to. The series Red vs. Blue, constructed using Halo had an original run of 100 episodes beginning in 2003, and ran for four years. Episodes were constructed around simple comedic themes and used characters from the game to complete the theater. World of Warcraft has a number of regular machinima artists who contribute works to the public domain for enjoyment, and mix game animation with a number of different sources.

Anyway, Friday's deep thought is this - once upon a time we all played Pac Man and Space Invaders, and we may have even been the best at these games that anyone had ever seen. We could play them with one hand, unconsciously, at a level of mastery so proficient that we were almost felt like we were floating outside our own bodies, watching ourselves play the game. No one plays Pac Man anymore, but that doesn't mean it didn't have its own celebratory art at the time, and even its own breakfast cereal.

Warcraft's time is now, and before you forget that feeling of knowing exactly how to execute your warlock's spell rotation on a Patchwerk fight, or how to level 11-25 in the Barrens, or forget where all of the essential vendors are in the Undercity, celebrate your mastery. Relax for a second in your drive towards epic renown, and enjoy a good piece of Warcraft machinima, while your craft is still relevant.

• The Craft of War: BLIND

WarChan

The World of Warcraft forums are a beast. It's been said by many players that the ultimate endgame for WoW isn't the raid content, but the forums themselves. There are some players who claim to continue their subscription to the game solely to participate on the forums, and barely log into the game to play at all.

There are those who will dispute this, but once upon a time the forums were dominated with strategies and talk about play and mechanics. This period didn't last long however, so most people don't remember it, and by the time the first good drama bombs started showing up ("so-and-so disbanded the guild and handed out all the elementium to random people in Orgrimmar") the standard helpful chat was forgotten. Everything was originally in one place, so the RP posts overlapped with the Elitist Jerks and the Mankrik's wife hunters and I-can't-connecteds, and it was a rapidly expanding mash of nonsense.

The forums were rebuilt almost right away and a separate home was given for any subject with a significant following. Each class and realm has its own forum, there are forums for customer service issues, technical support, role playing, guild management, and just about any core section of the game worth considering. Each section has a set of familiar faces and sub-community and they analyze issues and digest content and events in their own way.

The hub of all the forums - the beating heart of the state of the game - is the General Forums. On any given day a quick breeze through the posts will give you a sense of the issues that concern players, and also a sense of entitlement they feel at having paid their precious fifteen dollars that month to have their every whim catered to. Topics that are not related to the game are moved to the dreaded Off Topic forum (abandon all hope ye who enter here), and items that are outright stupid and offensive are deleted.

The social networking segment of WoW players - those who treat WoW like a 3D chat client - are heavy influencers of the General Forums, and they often fail to take into account how insignificant or inappropriate their issues are before they post them. For example, with millions of players in North America enjoying the game, do we really care if one person has quit the game because they aren't entertained anymore? It's a phenomenon you just don't see anywhere else, people who get so tied into the happenings of the community that they assume the community will miss them if they leave. Sorry pal, even if you're a one-in-a-million player, there are 11 more out there just like you, grinding rep and farming badges.

So for nagrand cherries and giggles, I decided to do an analysis of what everyone was talking about in December, 2009 on the General Forums. I copied out the subject line of every topic and made a word cloud giving us a visual representation of the concerns of the month.


I also have some quick statistics for you about the common users on the forums. These names can be found everywhere in December, though you might not recognize them.

CHATTERBOXES: Most common thread starters
31 Wildberry
28 Zhaan
27 Ineedflesh
24 Hingarn
23 Zahrkon
22 Iegend
20 Eltrollo
19 Boffo
19 Toroh
18 Battousaix
18 Furtastic
17 Lògosh
17 Maeltum
17 Slipenslide
16 Coldbear
15 Auralise
15 Glatorian
15 Googlehex
15 Shamantankz

THREADKILLERS: Most often having the last word in a thread
51 Sternbridge
48 Fanahlia
39 Margamanthak
36 Tacotaker
34 Blodøks
31 Fivestyle
31 Kalganized
30 Murianna
29 Sohuggable
27 Aetarian
27 Kinkarcana
26 Crepe
26 Kaioon
26 Scatmàn
25 Yeria

Bag of Sticks

I wrote this a while back, while playing my female orc shaman. Even though I was a caster and a hybrid class, it felt silly at the start of battlegrounds to not have any buffs for anyone around me. It gave me an edgy feeling, and eventually I spit out a poem about it. I got some nice feedback from other shamans about it, I hope you enjoy it.

Bag of Sticks

Waiting for war in wintergrasp
A mage of pedigree select
Cast a spell of arcane might
And granted me intellect

A priest in robes of whitest silk
(a very righteous looking dude)
Raised his staff and shouted out
And I was blessed with fortitude

My mind was filled with extra thoughts
My body was bursting with life
I'd never felt so strong and sure -
But still more allies arrived

Two paladins on their chargers rode
Rallying us for the fight
Cheered out fearsome battle cries
And blessed us with wisdom and might

From the shadows to my left
A beast of cunning and guile
Transformed into a tall, wise druid
And Marked me with the Wild

More mages gestured and muttered words
And conjured a feast for us all
And warlocks gave us each healthstones
And anchored souls, should they fall

A rogue whispered "I've got your back"
And twirled daggers in his palms
"Relax friend, I'll clear the road,"
A death knight said with icy calm.

A row of hunters checked their guns,
ammunition, arrows and quivers
And their beasts let out hungry growls
That gave me frightened shivers

A warrior strode out to the front
His face was full of scars
His muscles thick, his armor clawed
From the fight of a hundred wars

"The enemy approaches!" he shouted out
"Prepare to match their rage!"
And a dozen more with axes and shields
Charged out onto the stage

The warrior smiled at his fortified crew
And when he saw me, his smile died
He walked close and grunted through his bulk
"Exactly what help do you provide?"

Surrounded by these adventurers
With their formidable spells and tricks
How was I to match their might
With a simple bag of sticks?

"Nothing." I said honestly
"There is nothing I can give,
But if you trust in my abilities
Then those who would die will live."

The warrior leered and banged his axe
And growled to the other men
"You wear a robe, and provide no buffs
Tell me, what good are ye then?"

Put on the spot and doubted thus
I was about to try and explain
When beyond the walls there came a sound
Like a steam tank gone insane

A crashing sound, deafening
The front gate splintered forth
And into the courtyard spilled the enemy
Bearing spell and sword and torch

"To war!" we shouted and rallied forward
Driving the enemy back
The mages summoned storms of ice
And the hunters launched their attack

The warriors charged and cleaved their axes
Cutting the enemy down
The healers closed their bloody wounds
And shielded them from harm

From off to one side a warlock cast
A spell of certain doom
Towards a hero fighting in our ranks
Who was destined for a tomb

Pulling a totem from my bag
I stamped it in the ground
The warlock's spell was pulled into it
And it disappeared without a sound

Just then a rogue appeared from out of sight
Behind our wisest caster
Raised his dagger to end his sagely life -
But my hex was slightly faster

Two more totems I pulled from my bag
And planted them in the path
My allies were graced with renewed energy
And an inherent sense of wrath

I spied a rogue suffering
From a deadly poison shot
I cleansed the ailment from his body
And healed him on the spot

Three of the enemy broke through our ranks
And charged towards our back
I stamped a totem in the ground
And entangled them in their tracks

Just then I felt a stunning blow
That sent me to one knee
A paladin struck me twice again
And I was dead before I could plea

But to a shaman, death is temporary
And I called on an ankh of power
To restore my life and give me strength
So that we could yet win the hour

The paladin charged on towards the healers
And prepared to kill the lot
But lightning arced out from my fingers
And fried him on the spot

I sat with a drink to quickly recover
Next to the paladin, his hair fried crispy-curly
And the warrior spied me sitting down
And yelled "make yourself useful girlie!"

Chagrined, I rose to my feet
And chanted a mystic call
That infused a bloodfury in my allies
And empowered one and all

I planted another totem into the ground
And the ground itself came alive
A monster of rock charged into the enemy
And scattered them like bees from a hive

We pushed them back and cut them down
And it was clear the day was ours,
We lost only the gate and very few men
And defended all our towers

The celebration was bright and merry
And rewards were spread around,
The dead were carried away and buried
And debris cleared from the ground

I had collected my totems and cleaned them all
And bound them with a leather strand
When the warrior approached with a pair of flagons
And thrust one into my hand

"There's more to you than meets the eye"
He said with a nod and a wink
"And the next time I head into battle,
I'll be looking for a shaman I think."

It was generous praise and I accepted it
And courtseyed deep and quick,
"I won't have any buffs for you -
But I'll bring my bag of sticks."

Sand Castles and Silicon Catapults

People like to blow things up. It's an easily demonstrable power in a video game, to shoot something, to smash it, crash it, burn it up, and knock it down. "Better games" usually refer to games that have a wider variation of cool effects associated with newer, better ways to blow things up. We've been following this pattern forever, with new games exercising more minute control over a more beautifully rendered character that essentially just blows stuff up.

It's not the only way to make a better game, and everyone knows it. World of Warcraft was in decline pre-Wrath when they instituted the Achievement system, which tracks player accomplishments and statistics and allows people to record their progress towards goals if varying difficulty. This marks the first time outside your acquired gear and gold that Warcraft includes content that tracks player progression. It gives every player a little sense of achievement, which helps to blur the difference between 'good days' when significant things happen and the 'ordinary days' when you're just messing around until your raid lockout expires.

Achievements extend into every aspect of the game, guaranteeing that if you have no raid content to do that day and there is some other part of the game you like, you can attempt to increase your accomplishment in that area and earn achievement points. The points aren't actually used for anything, they have no exchange rate and are not a form of currency (yet), but they allow people to see at a glance what they've done and what they haven't, and either remind them that there are things yet to be accomplished or allow them to reminisce about all the great things they've done and how much fun they were to do.

It's a good step in the right direction, because it's building something, even if it's only a list of numbers and accomplishments. But in the playerbase there is an enormous desire to create even more. Player housing has been a feature that has been talked about since the beginning of WoW, and Blizzard themselves have discussed their desire to include it at some point:

Another small but potentially profound concept for "WoW" is player-generated housing. Gamers don't have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of "Animal Crossing," the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. "I think housing can take 'World of Warcraft' to the next level," [Jeff] Kaplan said. "I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to 'World of Warcraft' we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It's something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game." But it's not coming, he said, until it's a "Blizzard-quality feature."

Blizzard occasionally brings up the feature as part of a whole package of things that they think could be introduced at some point, but nothing serious has ever been proposed. Blizzard knows that they have a limited amount of resources with which to create content, they know where the demand is to maintain their subscription rates, and things that are less about 'blowing stuff up' end up on the back burner. We still don't know if there will be a dance studio in Wrath either, for example.

Most people agree that a player housing solution for Warcraft would probably be guild housing, and having it instanced and accessible through a portal that everyone shares in major cities would limit the interactive footprint. Some players are not interested in this feature at all and are actually hostile about it, preferring that time be spent on additional raid content instead, but there is a good portion of the playerbase that would like to do player housing - or guild housing - or something, anything that allows you to create cool things instead of destroying them.

How awesome would it be to be able to create custom weapon designs and recipes? It could be implemented through epic questlines and require enormous time investments to accomplish (to limit the amount of player data created), and the personal reward for being able to create content for the game would for many people surpass all the joy obtained from conquering raid content. Some people would be thrilled beyond belief to just be able to manufacture dyes to change the color of their armor. These are not enormous changes, but to see how much reward they would provide people really demonstrates how locked down the World of Warcraft is.

Left to their own devices, everyone eventually ends up at level 80, in the highest tier gear set available, with the best weapons to use, and everyone looks the same because of it. You are the greatest warlock in all of Azeroth! ... and you look exactly like the other half-million L80 warlocks in Azeroth.

One feature that was introduced into City of Heroes recently has enormous potential for the MMO community, and rewards the creative urges of the community. The Architect edition of CoH allows players to build their own scenarios - full dungeon instances with custom mobs, dialogues, events, the whole shebang - and save them for other people to try. If you've ever paged through the fan art section of the Warcraft website you know that people in the community are incredibly creative and passionate about the game and will invest lots of time creating works to share with everyone.

Imagine unleashing this tool - the ability to build your own instances - on the public. People who are crazy about Scarlet Monestary could build their own Scarlet outposts with new bosses and dialogues. People who always wanted a murloc instance could build their own. People who said that Blizzard should include content that was skipped over in the storylines can write it out themselves, complete with dialogue, conflicts, spells, events, and scenery. If this function were made possible the results would be tremendous. It would change the game forever in a way that would immortalize it - people could play their own custom instances inside the game if they ever grew tired of the content Blizzard provided for them. People would play this content long after Blizzard grew tired of doing it themselves, the same way that some people played custom Warcraft 3 maps more than they played the provided game scenarios.

There are a lot of people who play WoW because they played Warcraft 3. For a lot of them WoW is their first and only MMO (I toyed around with CoH and Champions, and I tried Conan for a day, but WoW is really my only MMO so far). One of the best parts of Warcraft 3 was the tools it shipped with that allowed you to build your own scenarios and share them online through Battlenet. And they weren't just maps, they were fully functional scenarios. Anything and everything that Blizzard themselves used in their scenarios was handed over to the public to access if they wanted. Sure most people just created simple tower defense maps or custom terrain maps, but if they really wanted you could pause the game and zoom in on pieces and have a cut scene with dialogue, etc. There was no cap on the creativity. It was encouraged, and it flourished.

That creativity hasn't yet been enabled for World of Warcraft. I can understand why Blizzard is hesitant to enable it, because of the overhead of housing all of the created content and/or the danger of enabling it through filesharing, but if they ate the cost and provided hosting for the developed content, it would send the replay value of the game through the roof. There's even a way to include a gateway to the content in the game that doesn't conflict with the state of the world - through the Caverns of Time, where all parallel worlds are possible.

Content is King they say, and any new MMO that tries to unseat Warcraft knows that one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in competing with WoW is that there is already a huge stack of content in-game ready for players to experience. Creating the same amount of competing content in a new MMO is an expense that most new games don't even try to undertake, they release jsut as much content as they figure they need, then work hard to create more content to entertain people while the first batch is being played. But the success of the City of Heroes Architect model shows that this gap can be rapidly closed by the players themselves, and a good rating and reward system for quality content keeps it fresh and entertaining.

This is the model for future MMO's, I'm almost certain of it - because it rewards the people who want to build just as much as they destroy, and it reduces the expense of adding new content to an established universe. Blizzard has the beans to make it happen, but it remains to be seen if they have the guts. I'd like to see them return to their player-contributed roots and enable this feature for World of Warcraft.

Monday Memory: Adventure

Back in 1980 when Atari was the king of the video game hill I got the Adventure game as a holiday gift and sunk dozens of hours into it. It was a completely different game than all the others I played, where the goal was seemingly to just stay alive as long as possible. In Adventure I was pretty much safe except for the three dragons running around, and I just discovered the world and solved puzzles.

The hardest puzzle of course was the dark maze. The maze had walls like a normal maze, but the maze walls and the background were the same color so you had to memorize where all the turns were to get from one side to the other. It was a huge pain in the butt, and of course the game was designed so that you couldn't win without traversing it several times.

There were also keys and a sword, and you could 'carry' an item by holding down the joystick button and running over it. You could slay the dragons by stabbing them in the stomach with the sword without being eaten first. The keys opened different barriers, and it had a little fox-and-chicken logic that required you to do some things in a certain order. To make things just a little more chaotic, a bat would fly randomly through the world and occasionally steal what you were carrying or drop off a dragon in your neighborhood.

But imagination made the game great. I was a knight on an adventure, I had a sword, and woe be any seahorse-looking dragons who crossed my path. It was also the first video game I played that had an 'easter egg' in it. There was a one-pixel dot hidden in the dark maze that you could pick up and carry through and otherwise impervious glowing wall to a special screen that had a tribute to the author. This was a pretty hard easter egg to discover, and I've always been proud of finding it on my own.

Doesn't one of those M's stand for Medieval?

MMORPG's have so far been pretty much 'find a good sword and go kill dragons with it' games with very little to differentiate each other, and I'm trying to figure out how the gears in this market move.

If you take a look at people who play MMOs - and this group of people is growing larger every day thanks to exposure and access growth - they don't all share the same characteristics. Some are techies, who want to play anything or do anything they could otherwise do, on their computers. Some are fantasy fans who will love their genre regardless of the medium it is presented to them on. Some are Petri dishes for social viruses - the social networking jitterbugs - who treat the new MMOs like a 3D chat client.

Only one of these three groups is going to stick to the fantasy genre, hell or high water, and that's the fantasy fan. The techies and the networkers probably don't care what the genre is, and don't care much about the storyline and backstory for something like World of Warcraft. My son for example likes to bring up all sorts of "what ifs" for WoW, like "Dad, they should give more paladins to the Horde, like undead." This results in me explaining to him why they can't, because for lore (and logic) reasons it wouldn't make sense for an undead player to be using spells and abilities that damage undead. He starts to listen, then his focus blurs, he fumbles with his headphones, and by the time I'm explaining how the Lich King is a combination of Arthas and Gul'dan, he's back plinking away in battlegrounds spamming chains of ice on his blood elf death knight.

It feels like the social networkers don't really care. They just want to dive into the big pool, and make their investment somewhere where they can talk to everyone and play with everyone and have a good time with little effort. So they're playing WoW because at 11 million accounts it's the big kahuna of MMOs. Combine that with the cartoony graphics that support lower-end systems, the easy to use button-griven interface, and the simple gameplay mechanics, and they can treat the game as almost a secondary concern to meeting people and forming guilds and hanging out.

The tech crowd - the 'I want to play a competitive video game' crowd of which I am a member, wants to play a game that has good balance, has endless replayability, has progression, and is complex enough that we can't see all of the game permutations at once. We don't necessarily care about the Lore, and we aren't necessarily there to form guilds and groups, we just want to find the cutting edge of this game so we can hit it, maximize our ability, and crush it under our feet. This gets harder when the mechanics shift subtly between patches and added content renders previous gains obsolete. We understand we're on a treadmill and we're both satisfied with the puzzles of added content and dissatisfied by the moving target. We want to both play it endlessly and jump off the treadmill at the same time.

So that's the three-headed dragon of WoW at the moment. The one head that seems vital to the others is the fantasy fan. Aside from Lord of the Rings, there isn't any better established set of fantasy lore at this point than WarCraft.

That may sound blasphemous, but there are thousands of websites dedicated to this game, dozens of databases and reference sites (that are actively used on a daily basis by millions of players), it has a huge fan following, and unlike some fantasy worlds it is a living universe. There are no more Tolkien books to be read, but Cataclysm is coming and Deathwing will be back soon, and it's going to change the world our little characters run around in. It's fascinating for us because even if we don't really have an effect on the path the storyline will take it does feel like we are a part of the story. It's fantasy pulp fiction, and we're chumming around with the main characters of the story while not having any real responsibilty, and freedom to do pretty much anything except change the world.

So how does the fantasy fan keep their interest? Back 4-5 years ago when an aspect of the game would change people were up in arms and screamed about how it was "lore-breaking" because they felt that the story was being compromised in favor of gameplay. Some parts of the game have very little to do with the entire story arc, and are frowned on for being shortcuts to answer a contradiction in lore. Some things in the past - the introduction of blood elf paladins, for example - were met with huge disapproval. In the end the fantasy fans swallowed the bitter pill of acceptance and these changes boosted the appeal for the networking and tech crowds and the game continued to grow.

Growth means money, and no video game has ever made as much money as World of Warcraft. Everybody knows at this point that if there's a decision to be made in the game it's going to be balanced out with revenues, and the fantasy fans can hold their nose when Mr.T hands out mohawk grenades and try their best to ignore how a good fantasy story is turning into a generic hack and slash arcade game. The fantasy crowd dwindles, but I don't think that Blizzard is wrong to disrespect them. Fantasy as a genre is past the bulge. It was rabid during WoW's launch and the release of the Lord of the Rings movies, but the common consciousness is saturated with fantasy shtick. People still want this vehicle, they want this ride, they just want a different flavor of it. Make it space. Make it future-Earth. Make it a western, a superhero drama, a modern warfare game, anything other than what WoW has become, the AoL of MMOs.

This is the first MMO for a lot of people. When their second MMO is released, how will they recognize it? What will they be looking for? Fortunately for WoW it sits on top of a stable tripod of support, which remains strong even as termites of discontent nibble away at its wooden legs. As long as the story isn't completely bad, the fantasy fans will continue to follow it. As long as it remains competitive and fairly balanced, the tech gamers will still grind away on it. As long as it remains fairly affordable and accessible, the networkers will still build their guilds and chat with it.

So that's the analysis of what WoW is, and why it works. What could be a 'wow-killer' that would replace it? For all three main groups, the answer is clear: Something bigger.

Fantasy fans (and I'm very sorry, but the sword and dragon is dead, replace it with phasers and klingons or six-shooters and bank robbers) need a big story to interact with, with enormous depth and creativity and thousands of bit characters who have important quests that revolve around it to keep you involved. The story needs to be huge and arcing, and have lots of important consequences for every aspect of the world. We need lots of different groups to meet, changing conditions based on our actions, and progression of content and events as time goes on.

Tech gamers need a balanced player-versus-player system that has huge character diversity but no specific roles, just strengths. The dedicated 'healer' and 'tank' mechanics are outdated. Everyone needs to be somewhat equal in terms of roles for PvP and PvE to be enjoyable, but the abilities need to be diverse enough to keep interest. Space marines with powered armor that can be upgraded, weapons and gear modules with different effects - all the same diversity of WoW and more, without 'tanks' and 'medics.'

The networkers need something that they can ease into quickly. The interface needs to be easy to use, there needs to be fun early on, and the ability to get into group situations needs to be simple and fast. Also the names and lore should be secondary to the graphical ability to intuitively figure out how to use items and solve problems, because lots of people want to skip the reading and get to the part where they blow things up.

So my prediction? A sci-fi MMO with a big backstory, and the ability to evaluate and reward player-made instanced content. The fantasy fans will explore it. Guns are the equalizer for PvP, and the gamers will dig it. The networkers will play it if you lure them in with easy play and free trials, and stay if the interface is clean and friendly.

This is the best upcoming game out there at the moment - Star Wars, The Old Republic - and it remains to be seen whether it will have all the satisfaction that comes with endless questing, crafting, and balanced PvP. But it has a nice trailer, which the WarCraft games have always had too. It's close. Is it close enough to pull one of the pillars out from under WoW?

Illin and Illidan

I took the plunge and left Illidan. I'm now playing a young rogue named Diagnose (I hope to pair him with "the Patient" title in about a month or so) on the RP realm Wyrmrest Accord. I have several characters on the Horde side of that realm from the free transfers off Moon Guard a few months back, so I scrounged up enough tokens and badges to get him a couple of heirloom weapons and mailed them cross-faction.

Happy little rogue, level 11. And I'm sick as a dog, so today's entry ends here and I'm headed back to bed.

Gold and Silence

One of the first things people ask when they start playing is "how can I get gold?" The best first answer is not from a pay site. I will say here and now, if what you really want out of the game is to be swimming in gold because that's what you've chosen as your measure of success, roll on a high-population realm.

It's almost impossible to be poor on a realm like Illidan. Yesterday while I was waiting for the LFD queue to pop I rode around Durotar and mined a stack of copper ore. When I got to the AH to price it the lowest buyout for a full stack was 12g. This is insane in my opinion so I listed mine at 8g buyout (which still felt outrageously high). My auction sold in five minutes.

Everything sells on Illidan. Engineering items. Bone chips. Elegant feathers. "Of the Whale" gear. Everything. The only items that seem to be dropping in value are the bind on equip blues, which are less valuable due to the proliferation of heirloom items and random dungeon reward blues. The LFD blues are especially good and have no level requirement. Some slots are more common than others - gloves, especially - but there are still some slots left that can't be filled with heirlooms or LFD blues, and the BoEs have kept their high value.

But truly, everything sells on a high pop server. Unlike medium pop, if you craft something halfway decent on a high pop server it actually sells. There are enough people just leveling characters that they buy your useful items, and usually at a decent price. Unfortunately, the raw materials used to craft an item always sell more than the created item itself. The only exception to this is very high-end items that involve rare recipes or crafting cooldowns, and they will often sell for more than the price of the raw materials.

But not everyone lives on a realm like Illidan where the streets of Orgrimmar are paved with gold. On a medium pop server you will still have a decent economy, but the market for crafted goods drops off. In this case the best scenario is to take gathering professions only while leveling, and don't drop one of them for a crafting profession until you have your epic flight. Players are smart, and it doesn't take long for a level 80 to powerlevel a gathering profession, so there won't be any monopolies or niches that you have for yourself. You'll need to walk your new character to Ironforge or Thunder Bluff and check the auction house for yourself and look at the prices for herbs and ore before you choose.

Don't bother checking the price of leather, just take it as your second profession and consider it a bonus because mining and herbalism don't really mix as gathering professions. Some people will say that it's very feasible if you get a gathering add-on that shows you where all the resource spawn points are for both mining and herbalism, but for most of us we only have one resource radar active at a time and we 'gather as we go' instead of doing deliberate farming runs. Except maybe if we're looking for titanium in Wintergrasp.

The other option to skinning as a secondary profession is to level enchanting. In classic WoW enchanting was akin to taking a vow of poverty because it required you to shred all of your green and blue drops, it leveled slowly, and it was very hard to sell your wares. These days with people of all levels running random dungeons through RFD all hours of the day the price of enchanting materials has dropped through the floor making it extremely easy to level. With the addition of scrolls from Inscription it has become easy to sell your wares through the auction house. It's not as profitable as just skinning and selling the leather, but it's far cheaper than it used to be.

If I had to recommend professions right now, I would choose herbalism and enchanting (which I will probably do with my next alt) because the herbs sell very well and at high levels you are still going to find value in your enchants as people continually upgrade their gear. There is still money to be made in the mining-jewelcrafting market also, but the profit margin is narrowing and the buy-in cost is higher. Pick flowers, enchant items, and take the sure path to profits - and enjoy the added bonus of having fresh enchants on all of your gear while you level.

On a low-pop server the economics are different. Basically, you can't ever count on someone being available to buy any of your goods at all, no matter how valuable they are. With the new LFD tool I am sorely tempted to reroll on the lowest population server in the game just to enjoy the silence. Believe it or not, there are some servers out there where people don't spam in the trade channel all day and where you never hear a peep in the Barrens. The price you pay for that silence though is a lack of gold, because there isn't anyone to do any business with.

In this case the herbalism-enchanting combination doesn't work as well (although it is still viable). What you will rely on more is being able to get some return value from your crafted goods. For a low pop server I would recommend mining and blacksmithing. For one thing, it is easier to get a hold of ore because the nodes are farmed less. Secondly, a large part of the items you craft are either plate armor or weapons, and they vendor for a fairly high price. Even though the economy is terrible you should end up with enough gold to pay for your repairs and skills - which can be a real issue sometimes on a low pop server. The changes in leveling speed have made it easy for people to skip through the 30's and 40's so fast that their income doesn't keep up, and you end up choosing not to learn Eye of Kilrogg or Feint or Wingclip because you just don't have the funds at the time.

But the macroeconomic choice is the primary one - you need to choose between a super-healthy economy of a high-pop server, or the silence and pleasure of a low-pop community. I'm leaning toward low-pop because I know I can make it, and I'm tired of the trolls.

How to Leave a WarCraft Guild

For anyone who was googling for the command to leave a guild and accidentally ended up here, it's as simple as typing /gquit. If it were possible, after this weekend I would have earned this achievement:



Unless you play this game with a bunch of people in real life, any time you guild you are aligning yourself with the goals and ideals of people who you know nothing about. Kids are such strange little aliens that the minute they find someone with some similar interests they go crazy over it and dive right in. For us adults, it's not that easy.

The older you get, the more you know about who you are and the less likely you are to want to compromise that for other people. It gets harder to find guilds, and once in a guild, especially hard to tolerate people indefinitely, especially if you devote a lot of hours to the game.

The most recent guild I was in was almost perfect. I like to play casually and occasionally group for things like heroics or (rarely) raids and RP things. Mostly, the game gives me exactly what I need which is a few hours of relaxation. When I add in things that someone else needs to do in-game, it draws away from the relaxation. I'm a great raid healer and not bad as a caster DPS, but the time involved - the uninterrupted time - is a detriment from relaxation because it comes at the expense of time I spend with my wife and kids.

This guild didn't raid, and we occasionally grouped for a heroic or some battlegrounds, but that was it. That was the fun part. The less than fun parts - the couple I knew best pretty much stopped playing, and the GM hadn't logged in for six days. Add to it that I didn't have bank access and it started to become an impediment to my playstyle instead of an addition. I made a few rumblings, people chatted about possibly doing something, and finally last night I yanked my characters out of the guild. There was no drama because no one was logged in (like usual).

So for now the LFG tool is my guild leader. It finds me groups, it doesn't restrict my access, it doesn't log in drunk or break promises, it is always fair with participation and loot rolls, and it's on 24 hours a day. Perfect. That's one guild that I might never quit.