Posts with tag army

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Ahh, the life of an Iraqi farmer. According to WoW player FallenWolf, currently deployed in Iraq with the U.S. Army (FSC, 7th Engineer Battalion), farming is about all most U.S. military WoW players there can reliably expect to accomplish. Desert sand and insta-cast DoTs have not proven to be particularly compatible for this former (and soon-to-be returning) raiding warlock. We visited with FallenWolf about how he's managed to adapt to being halfway across the world from his guild and his wife (a frequent WoW partner), plus how he copes with an awkward schedule and ugly latency.

Joe Martin at bit-tech.net picked up an article on Gizmodo talking about the coming invasion of Army Artificial Intelligences masquerading as real players in World of Warcraft. According to Dr. John Parmentola, the plan is to test the AI's ability to be a "fake" human by letting it interact with real humans in a virtual world.

My first reaction was, "Whoah, cool. All your base are belong to us." But after a moment's thought, this might not actually be such a great idea. Given the communication skills of some players (especially in the battlegrounds), I'm not seeing this as a litmus test of what in-game speech can pass for spoken by real people. While I'm pretty sure the AI won't communicate like a roleplayer, the AI could probably get by with a series of "lol" and "kek" typed out in rapid succession.

This isn't the first time we've heard about the military using WoW (or WoW-like systems) for training purposes, which is the nominal purpose of this new AI research. Maybe it won't be too long before we're logging in to have a Gnome Rogue named Joshua quietly whisper us, "Shall we play a game?"

Realm population problems don't affect me too much, thankfully -- my server has neither too many people nor too few, and the faction balance tilts in my favor. But some people complain that their servers are ghost worlds, with not much at the auction house and not many to group for quests and dungeons. The "Recommended" tag Blizzard is using to help out low-population realms sometimes just doesn't do the trick: people play there for a while, see that no one is home, then decide to go somewhere else.

So, while some people say the only way is to combine two low-pop realms into one, Drysc says that such mergers can only be a last resort:

There are a couple issues with merging realms though that we would need to take into heavy consideration if one were to be considered. As many of the lower population realms are PvP, faction balance has to be taken into careful consideration. Would a merge worsen, improve, or leave any faction balance unchanged? Would a merge move the population up too high, queuing or leading to queues for the realm after that point? Do we have realms of the same time zone and type that would merge well under these conditions? There also many logistical issues with merges which ultimately effect the end user, such as conflicting character and guild names. So, in the end, a merge would only be considered if all other possible options have been completely exhausted.

We're not just throwing recommended tags up on realms, and calling it a day. The recommended tag has done a lot of good for a lot of realms, but if we're seeing that they're no longer helping reach the type of population numbers we would like to see, then we would investigate alternate means. That's sort of where we're at now.

So, what is there to do besides merge realms? Drysc calls that the "million dollar question," which I figure means that Blizzard doesn't know for sure, though at least a couple ideas come to my mind: They could have some kind of incentive to players who join low-population realms (that's what the Army is doing, I hear), or perhaps all but force new players to start out there unless they have a referral from another player. Of course any solution to this problem is going to create still more problems of another sort. What do you think would work best?