My Leveling Flowchart

Hey guys! You know what's fun? Leveling! And you know what's even more fun? Leveling on a PvP server as an under represented minority!

I kid, nice being on a server with an 80/20 ratio. To all of my ally buddies, I'm a care bear, I'll even give you a hand if needed :)

But in all seriousness, this has been my experience on every PvP server; some people just need to grow up. That's why I switched to PvE.

Auction House Fun Part 1

One thing I've had a lot of fun with is the Auction House. A lot of people that have played WoW before in this class all seem to have specific goals - a few want to get to 80, a few want to explore the entire world - I want to make a ton of gold with the Auction House. I originally set the goal of 1,000 gold for when I sat down to write this article a few weeks ago with about 150 in the bank, as of now I have 1100 gold, and have given around 150 to classmates for new skills and mounts. I think something like 2500 is a reasonable goal by the end of the quarter.

I've been trying to approach it with a more scientific, critical eye, bent towards making a profit and making as much as possible. At level five I picked up two gathering professions - Skinning and Herbalism, and from then fastidiously skinned as much as I could and ran out of my way to grab a few more Peaceblooom. Friends were giving me a hard time at the beginning - why do you keep running away? You're always the last person to arrive someplace. What are you doing? That's stupid, it's a waste of time - They've gone strangely quiet now.

The beginning trick is to not fall prey to the 'well gee if I get and I'll be able to make LOADS of money, right? Wrong. Unless you're incredibly hardcore, and love griding more than classwork or going outside, you'll never catch up to the 14 year olds and the foreign stationed military people. They have lots of free time. The absolute WORST combination of this fallacy is tailoring and enchanting, because at least with the average gather and production combo there's cloth piles to fall back on; not so much if the person is disenchanting everything they make to level their enchanting. The exception to this rule are engineers, engineers will never make money; and they know that. They just want to make robot butlers and motorcycles, because it's fun.

The golden combination is skinning and either herbalism or mining. Both herbalism and mining is ill advised because they require a 'tracker' of sorts; while the tracker is running everything that falls under the category of it - be it mining or herbalism - shows up as little yellow dots on the mini map. Only one tracker can be activated at a time though, which is why the skinning / herbalism or mining combination is recommended. Hunters will have a hard time with that however, since the tracker takes the place of their normal tracking abilities. While it is very doable to constantly switch between the options, it gets tedious.

These are just beginning steps. I'll have more soon.

My experience with World of Warcraft

I started playing World of Warcraft in the early Beta days. I remember when instead of riding Kodos, Tauren instead got 'Plains Running' and would get on all fours and run. Blink was a talent point, and Arcane Explosion wasn't an instant cast. Hunters were the worst class in the game, and out of combat rezzing was a viable raiding option. Needless to say, the game has changed a lot in the three years I stopped playing.

My brother and I shared an account, partially because we had delusions of being a hard core raider and two people playing the same character would be more efficient, partially because we had one computer in the house for four people and our parents were less than sympathetic if they wanted to check their email and we wouldn't get off 'because we're about to take down Majordomo and I get dibs on the Eye if it drops!' We mostly played as a priest, but also had a hunter and mage alts that were 60 as well as loads of 20-40 alts of pretty much every class.

We both thoroughly enjoyed PvP, we didn't play on a PvP server because how hard it was to level, but the battlegrounds were always a source of great fun. In the old days of the ranking system, we got to level 9 out of 14. I don't really know what the equivalent would be anymore.

Eventually we both lost interest, him first then me. Real life friends quit shortly after going to college as did I, as new experiences that college offered overrode retreading the same old three year old content. He eventually got pneumonia and had a month where he was stuck at home and got Burning Crusade as something to do, but I never really played it. The only thing I really miss about the game is PvP, I really like multiplayer games and the experience WoW offered in its battlegrounds is radically different from a game of Counterstrike or Halo, where having a hair-trigger reflex is not as important as understanding your class, and your enemies.

So far, my second romp with World of Warcraft issimilar to the days when I used to play. There are still radical changes, such as mounts at 20 and 40 and they don't cost 45g or 900g anymore, drastic improvements to the UI and talent trees again getting restructured, but at the heart, the game is still the same. Barrens chat is still silly, Channel 2 is still useless and filled with arguments about religion and Chuck Norris jokes. If anything, the game seems easier. Maps show where quests are, there's the 'buddy leveling' system, players get mounts earlier and cheaper. I'm not complaining, it does apply more to the 'casual MMO' player, but the older, more 'hardcore' version I started with compared to the modern WoW makes everything feel less like an accomplishment. Granted, an 'accomplishment' in an MMO is really nothing to brag about, I can't put in on as resume and it's not a story worth telling my grandkids. I guess it's just another does of the 'heroin content' that keeps games like this going.

Not all is bad though, I've done the majority of the leveling with other people I know and see on a daily basis. It's also quite interesting observing people with limited or no experience with the game. Playing through a different perspective, less like a gamer and more as an observer / scientist / artist has offered a new perspective but does not completely freshen the game for me. I am still enjoying the experience, I'm just not as seriously invested in it like previous times.

ICAM 120 Week 2 Reading

I found the reading by Baudrillard interesting, though doubtlessly dense and a little hard to follow, since he leaps from subject to subject in each paragraph like a kid who forgot their Ritalin. He does have quite a few interesting ideas; the one I specifically like best is the discussion of simulation. He talks a great deal about people who pretend to be sick and are actually sick, and who so firmly believe themselves to be sick that they show symptoms that even a doctor can see. This obviously applies to in class in reguards to the time we will be spending in Second Life and World of Warcraft.

MMOs and other virtual realities are only as real as people want them to be; limited technology at this time does not allow for a Neuromancer or Snow Crash - like reality that allow people to fully taste, touch, smell, hear, and see their environments. Relatively speaking, sound and visuals are relatively well on their way, but technologies allowing full immersion are a long ways off. Until the day a device is invented that can take care of a person's basic biological needs such as food, sleep, waste disposal, hygiene, and maybe even sleep, everyone, even the most hard core raider, must take a break.

While many can and do make lives for themselves online, with friends they talk to and 'see' daily, guild roles and organization that are like part time jobs, and even online weddings, divorces, births, and funerals, all of them must eventually log off for their real job or to give in to their biological needs. That is not necessarily a bad thing, however. There is a point where everyone should just step back from the computer, play with their cat, and go outside and remember what a real time tree looks like.

There is also a degree of suspension of belief, no matter how a person tries, there will always be a part of them that knows they are not a half ton eight foot tall hoofed being, famous throughout the land as being a slayer of elves and rider of dragons. This is a little different from the example of a person who thinks themselves sick; there is no way, not in the near future at least, of a hard core MMO player tricking themselves into thinking they are a fantastical creature.