Posts with tag community

While I'm loathe to promote the tired idea of WoW gamers being lonely, misanthropic geeks without the ability to connect normally with normal people ... this video is kind of hilarious.

Essentially, two contestants on this speed dating show were failing to achieve chemistry when they discovered a mutual love of WoW! With this common ground firmly in place, the two spontaneously had a successful conversation about characters, raiding, and the game in general.

While I'm not ready to say this video proves how awesome WoW performs as a social dating tool, it's still kind of cute to see two reality show peeps suddenly start chatting about raids. I wasn't entirely shocked to see the chap's a WoW player, though -- that hair is straight out of the sin'dorei catalog.

[Thanks to many, many for the tip!]

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Despite some players' objections that the Dungeon and Raid Finder tools have made dungeon- and raid-running too impersonal, Blizzard has responded that it has a commitment to keeping a sense of community. Nethaera took to the official boards to discuss the tough job of balancing the sense of community against meeting the needs of the community while making sure players feel connected to people around them.

Nethaera echoes a very important point, one that just doesn't get enough play in the MMO genre and its contenders -- people play whatever MMO their friends are playing. People go where the people are. The ingenious part is that while players are deriding the Dungeon and Raid Finder tools for destroying community and tearing people apart, the new Real ID instancing is making grouping and playing with new people I had never imagined I would play with a possibility. New communities are being formed. Just because the community doesn't look or feel like it did seven years ago does not mean that a sense of community is gone. It's just in different places.

Hit the jump for Nethaera's full post. Sound off in the comments about how you think Blizzard should go about fostering its community.

WoW players today tend to consider the deterioration of the in-game community in terms of relatively recent influences like the Dungeon Finder and then the Raid Finder. We sometimes forget that design tweaks and new systems have been chipping away at the paradigm of Azeroth as a place to forge ongoing personal relationships for years now. Take a gander at the beginning of this analysis I wrote on the death of the Azerothian salesman all the way back in the hyper-modern era of The Burning Crusade circa 2007:

Forget the endless debate over hardcore versus casual -- there's another moniker that we here at Insider Trader hold dear: salesman. What's that? You don't know any salesmen in WoW these days? You're not alone. Times have changed since craftspeople toiled to build reputations as the go-to traders on their servers ... when Ironforge was the hub of civilization, where a few elite enchanters held court over the entire server with coveted formulae from such exotic locales as Stratholme and Scholomance.

It's a brave new world in today's Outland. Most enchanters don't enchant for the general public at all, unless you provide mats and a tip. And in any profession, with so many other players on the servers who have the same patterns (even rare patterns are generally available from more than one player) and so many easy ways to make money (hello, daily quests!), there's little reason to hang around town to build a regular clientele. Components provided or created by other professions are readily available on the Auction House -- there's no need to seek out and nurture relationships with another player from a complementary profession.

Have the conveniences Blizzard has developed for today's crafters meant the death of the salesman?

Most WoW players would agree that convenience and self-service is the way of today's game. But for one stubborn tradesman on Sentinels (US), life as an Azerothian salesman is anything but obsolete. Daen, a dedicated craftsman and proprietor of Daen's Crafting Emporium, single-handedly maintains what may be one of World of Warcraft's last remaining bastions of personal craftsmanship and trade skill service -- with a twist. This proprietor not only aims to provide personal service, but he does it at no charge, with the insistence that customers devote sweat equity to their mutual creations as well.

It's rare to see the mainstream media cover anything related to World of Warcraft with a generally approving tone, but no less prestigious an outlet than The New York Times reported on this year's BlizzCon quite favorably indeed. Seth Schiesel, in covering the convention, bypasses the media's usual narrative and notes that the big draw of an event like BlizzCon isn't what you'd expect. It's not the StarCraft 2 tournament with the big purse, the company's annual announcements, or even the closing concert. It's simply the chance to meet and enjoy your fellow gamers, whether you're a developer or a player.

I think Schiesel nails it here:

... the most powerful and important games are the persistent online dimensions like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. That is because they're not really about the games; they are about the relationships players form within them.

I'm surprised but gratified to see a reporter in a major media outlet who really gets it. Of note is also a comment by Rob Pardo (Blizzard's executive vice president for game design), who observes that Blizzard could easily fill larger venues than the Anaheim Convention Center (my suggestion: rent Wyoming) but prefers to keep the con local for the benefit of Blizzard employees who want to come.

I think it's safe to say that gamers are still working toward mainstream acceptance (possibly because people often don't consider things like Angry Birds and Farmville to be "true" gaming), and it's really nice not to see the usual caricature of the angry, antisocial nerd rearing its head.

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

All we need to introduce the topic of this week's 15 Minutes of Fame is a simple realm name: Moon Guard. Aha! I see some of you out there have been paying attention ... That's right, Moon Guard's the realm with the reputation for, shall we say, a somewhat more exotic (or was that erotic?) playstyle. Ready to go behind the scenes with a leading realm figure who'll give us the inside scoop on what really goes down on Moon Guard?

Well, hang on there, Hoss -- because this ain't yo' mama's Moon Guard (or even your creepy Uncle Harold's). This is a decidedly more respectable Moon Guard. This is a Moon Guard that helps out new players with free care packages, no strings attached. This is a Moon Guard that's building an entire YouTube channel to spotlight interesting realm personalities. This is a Moon Guard whose players josh around with an in-character advice column run by a goblin. This is a Moon Guard boasting a recent player-run roleplaying event that virtually exploded onto the forum scene.

Meet Venita, who's spurred on a huge part of this renaissance of community spirit with a wildly popular care package program for realm newbies plus an upcoming community spotlight program making its debut next month on YouTube.

Recently, Blizzard disabled the WoWArmory Facebook application, signaling that the time of the modern WoW Armory is over and we will soon live in an age when new Blizzard APIs will transform our out-of-game experience. And change it, they will. These forthcoming APIs will change the way you interact with WoW outside of the game in ways you cannot even think up yet. How do I know this? That's the power of information facilitation, and some inventive hypotheticals will show you what Blizzard's APIs will do for you in the near future.

Over the past few months, Blizzard has been preparing to roll out a new set of APIs that will take internal information from the Armory, the new community site, and more, parse it into easily manageable data streams, and make those streams available to application developers. With these new streams of information, savvy developers can craft web applications, smartphone apps, social media plugins, and anything else under the sun to provide you with new and dynamic WoW experiences on the internet. I know that sounds horribly cliché, but hear me out -- this stuff is pretty cool, and the back end could bring about a new standard for information availability and MMOs.

I'm not a developer. In fact, a lot of us in the community are not developers. Writing this story felt like an exercise in obscurity because, frankly, all this back end information isn't in my wheelhouse. As I dug deeper and began to realize the potential of the systems being set up, I fell in love with the idea that Blizzard is opening up easy access to so much information. I thought it would be a good idea to illustrate for those of us who have no idea what APIs are capable of, to break through the programmer/developer talk and discuss what these APIs mean for us, at the end of the day.

Yes, that says March and not May. We'll be announcing April's winner soon, but first let's (finally) congratulate Spectacular Death for being March's Guild of the Month. They won a $100 gift code from SwagDog (which they have already received and spent). Gimmlette, their guild leader, tells us about Spectacular Death in her own words:

Our guild portrait [above] says it all. People are wearing a wide variety of tabards which represent all the events we've participated in; achievements we've helped each other with; factions we're exalted with. We've gone everywhere and done most everything. We have every race and class.

Blizzard previously announced that certain APIs were going to become available for applications and players to access from the community website. We've finally got a preview of the information feeds that tap into character data in the near future. These feeds can be used in applications, websites, and more for user-created, World of Warcraft ... well ... anything.

Blizzard's opening up of these information feeds is pretty cool, and you will likely see some ambitious applications of this data being used in the near future. One of the illuminating aspects of this preview is that after finding the right way to do it, the devs are thinking about opening up quest ID information so that you can see what quests characters have or have not completed. There are tons of applications of that data out there and I'm sure the community is really excited to make use of this API information. Check out the full preview after the jump.

Congratulations to The Earthbound, February's WoW Insider Guild of the Month! Here is an excerpt from the winning entry from Genk, the guild founder:

When someone joins The Earthbound (US-Dragonmaw), they're welcomed with a cry of "blu nu!" For those who were invited by friends to the guild, this is the point where they find out that we're not like other guilds.

More details about The Earthbound, in Genk's words, are after the break.

From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

Who's really behind that stoic DPSer in your raid group? He never talks much, but he never misses a raid -- or an opportunity to snag that mob that's decided to nibble on you while you're tank healing. What about that banker you always run into in Darnassus -- and why Darnassus, anyway? And what about that level 40something night elf you keep seeing all over the place ... yet who always manages to still be 40something? Who are all these people?

With more than 12 million WoW players worldwide, you can bet that logging in means rubbing elbows with people who live and play in very different circumstances from your own. From X to Y, from X to Y, only WoW Insider's 15 Minutes of Fame brings you a complete sampler of the personalities and passions behind the avatars that shared your screen in 2010. Click into our gallery below for a fresh look at the players we profiled over the past year.

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"I never thought of playing WoW like that!" -- and neither did we, until we talked with these players, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Aron "Nog" Eisenberg to an Olympic medalist and a quadriplegic raider. Know someone else we should feature? Email lisa@wow.com.

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This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

When I first started playing WoW, I read every quest. I was a newbie who didn't know where anything was and didn't even know of the existence of addons to help me in my questing. So I often searched the quest text for clues about where to find mobs and items. As my game savvy increased, I read the quests less and less, until finally I didn't read them at all but rather clicked on my map to see where I needed to go and what I needed to kill.

Now, I find myself slowing down again. The lore is interesting to me, and more and more, I realize how expansive the world is and how fun it is to participate in that world. I am not an RPer by any account, but I find myself wanting WoW to be a world and not just a game.

Out of a desire to understand and enjoy the lore, some players have read Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, The Shattering, and other WoW / Warcraft-related books. Other players have absolutely no desire to know the lore and view WoW as a game that they enjoy playing -- not a live-action fantasy novel.

Are you the sort of player who loves the lore? Or do you just play for the game action?

The Alliance has vanquished their Horde foes in the first (incredibly unofficial) PvP battle of Cataclysm, the Darkmoon Faire: Your Fortune Awaits community unlockable "contest." As a result of their stunning victory, the Alliance won ... nothing. Don't spend it all in one place, guys!

An hour or two after the Alliance reached 100 percent, the Horde too reached their 100 percent goal. With both factions at 100 percent, the final community video, "Reforging of the World," was unlocked (above). It's a look at some of the zones changed in the shattering, along with some videos of the new post-level-80 zones unlocked in Cataclysm.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Now, a wave of identical blue posts has hit every section of the WoW forums with the following message:

Bashiok -- Forums Going Read-Only

This Wednesday, November 17 these forums will be put into a read-only state. At that time we'll be inviting all posters to fully migrate to the new World of Warcraft community site and forums.

http://www.battle.net/wow

These forums will remain read-only until the end of the month, after which they and all of their posts will be removed ... forever! If you have any posts, information, stickies, etc. that you'd like to keep you'll want to have finished saving it before then.

We've all enjoyed the past few years on these forums, and look forward to creating many more with you on the new community site. See you there!

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So that's it! We won't be able to post in the official forums anymore after Wednesday, Nov. 17, and we have until the end of November to save anything on the official forums we want to keep or remember!