Posts with tag escapist

This story is really only tangentially related to our game, but we'll mention it anyway: a London teacher has been accused of sending sexually-related text messages to a 14-year-old student that she contacted while they were playing World of Warcraft together. Apparently the woman met up with the student in Azeroth, and then was able to somehow get his phone number from him. Later, the boy's father discovered explicit text messages from her on his son's phone, and she now faces jailtime as a result.

Of course, this says nothing at all about World of Warcraft -- there are man, many ways of communication on the Internet, and the game happens to be just one of them (and shame on the Escapist for even suggesting this is an argument against games in education -- the fault here lies with the teacher, not the game). You should be cautious about who your children are corresponding with no matter where they are or what they're doing, and in fact, this boy's father was.

Escapist Magazine (who have really been hitting it on all cylinders lately-- hard to believe they're the same folks who did the subtle PDF/graphic hybrid a year or so ago) have released an issue called "Raid" this week, looking at MMOs in general, and WoW in particular.

Of interest: their features is an article called "World of Germcraft," about the Corrupted Blood plague that spread through Azeroth, and how scientists used it to study real outbreak patterns (we've also covered this here before). "The Angel in the Guild" is an interesting article about a young woman who finds herself dealing with her guildies' real life problems, and "The Good Ending" is Sean Sands' story of leaving Azeroth with a bang.

All excellent reads-- I've always liked the Escapist's professional and insightful tone (if a little haughty-- it's like the Granta of online videogame media), and reading about World of Warcraft there is just icing on the cake.

[ via incgamers ]

This week's issue of the Escapist has an excellent article by Greg Tito discussing the difficulties of being a mod writer in World of Warcraft. And we're not just talking about learning LUA or fixing bugs after Blizzard has released a major patch, but about the community itself. You've all read the official forums, so you know the community isn't always friendly. And when a mod you've written goes from being something you coded for yourself (and uploaded on a whim) to something used by thousands of people (each of them asking -- or demanding -- different bug fixes and improvements), I'd say things stop being fun. Mod-writer Gello explains some of the stress of the situation when he tried to help his users out by writing a German localization:

I had spent a couple very intense months working on the localization of Recap. It got so I could understand combat logs in German.... It was just causing way too much stress and time for something I would never see or use.

And when French players began requesting a French localization of mage water-summoning mod WaterBoy, Gello refused, suggesting that native speakers could make a localization themselves. And then, as Gello says, the flames began:

When I stood by my position (probably not in the nicest terms), they continued in earnest. I got an email with an attachment I thought was safe and apparently it wasn't.... I basically abandoned the email address, formatted my pc, ditched the mod and didn't look back.

Really, people: go give your favorite mod writer a hug. It can be an immense amount of work to maintain a good mod and most of it is thankless.

This article from The Escapist tackles the topic of boredom in video games, and having recently spent the time to grind to honored standing with the Timbermaw faction, I can certainly understand what they're talking about.  At some point in World of Warcraft it's all about the grind - whether you're grinding for faction standing, grinding for honor in PvP, grinding for gold, or grinding for gear in dungeons.  And when the demands of the games are no longer fun for players?  Some just leave, but others bypass the rules and purchase characters or gold - allowing others to do the less interesting parts for them.  From the article: "It's fair to say that many players using these services find the time commitments required of them to be distasteful - in a word, these games are boring."

This week's Escapist has several excellent pieces on roleplaying and WoW. Mark Wallace's "In Celebration of the Inner Rogue" looks at the connection between player and avatar -- when you play, do you think of your character as "you" or "him"? If the answer's "her", then Chris Dahlen's "I Enjoy Playing a Girl" might be up your street. Tying in with our discussion of female avatars, it's one gender-bender's story of girl power.

More on the RP side, John Tynes' "The Contrarian: Masks in the Woods" focuses on RP guilds in WoW, amongst other things. Finally, Will Hindmarch's "Roleplayer in Azeroth" talks about WoW from a D&Der's perspective -- why it's not an RPG, and yet at the same time fulfils the same "escapism amongst friends" role as tabletop D&D.

Roleplaying and gaming have a rich history together, and WoW provides a detailed framework for RP. These articles only serve to highlight the depth of role-playing one can achieve ingame. It's a shame, then, that Blizzard have so few RP servers, and that RP isn't enforced on these servers. I remember MUDs where if you spoke OOC in general chat then you were instantly kicked; is a crackdown needed, or will player policing eventually weed out the non-RP players?

Issue 28 of The Escapist has two pieces that look at the good deeds players do, and both are interesting to read. Mark Wallace's "One Night in Arathi" is a tale of cross-faction co-operation, and John Walker's "Sick of Healing" talks about the problems healers can face as a support class.

I've encountered cross-faction friendliness a number of times, occasionally instigating it. My PvE server characters shy away from unnecessary combat, and although my PvP toons are much more battle-hungry, some bad ganking experiences make me steer clear of any rogue Alliance players. Sure, it's the carebear way to play, but one of the great things about WoW is that you can have moments like Mark Wallace's Arathi adventure as well as some terrific in-the-field PvP.

As for the healing, I wholeheartedly agree that healers tend to get a raw deal. One slip up--one!--and it can all be over in a heartbeat, with the healer getting the blame for everything. Fortunately, the death penalty in WoW isn't as severe as in some other games--John Walker's article talks about City of Heroes, which uses an "XP debt" system to make death a real pain. I enjoy playing a healer most of the time, but John is spot on about many players' attitudes to us.

No prizes for guessing which game the title of this post refers to; this is WoW Insider, after all. Online magazine The Escapist has a piece up charting the tremendous effect World of Warcraft has had on massively multiplayer gaming, and how WoW has changed the MMO landscape forever.

WoW has realised many visions as well as plotting its own course in the MMO space, but will it stand up to the onslaught of competing titles that think they now have what it takes to hit the mainstream? We hope it will; the Burning Crusade expansion is a good start, and we can't wait to see what other cool stuff Blizzard has in store this year!

[via Joystiq]