Posts with tag newspaper

UK paper The Guardian has a look at what life is like at a Chinese goldselling company. It's interesting, but we've basically seen it before -- the small room of young people working almost 24/7 to make and deliver gold in-game, the concerns about worker livelihood and the supposedly large amounts of money going through these businesses (there's one figure quoted of £700m, which is about $980 million, but that's an estimate -- no one really knows how much these companies are making).

But what's really interesting about this piece is that it seems to treat goldselling as more of an "opportunity" than anything else. The people running the companies are making money, the employees are getting a roof over their head and a steady paycheck, and even the guy making the film talks about how governments should start taking a cut of this industry. Nowhere is it actually mentioned that Blizzard considers these companies to be against the terms of service, or that many times the gold obtained by these companies isn't earned through simple grinding, but by hacking, keylogging, and exploiting. Even if (emphasis on the if) these companies are making millions of dollars a year, they're stealing accounts and cheating in-game to do it.

Rowenna Davis also did interviews with both the gold farmer and a player in the UK buying money from him (bannz0red?), but again, there's no insight at all from the player whose account was hacked and bank was looted, or the player who is able to earn as much gold as they need and have a life outside the game (there are plenty of those to go around). Would have been nice to see the issue from players who aren't actually breaking the game's terms of service.

Thanks, Bryn!

WoW's lead producer J. Allen Brack (who we spoke with back at BlizzCon) is making the rounds -- he was on the radio this morning at Dallas' Live 105.3 (thanks to everyone who sent that in), and earlier, he spoke with the Detroit Free Press about how WoW became so incredibly popular and what Blizzard is doing with the game's second expansion. There are even a few spoilers in there, about how phasing is used in the game, and a few different situations that haven't yet been covered later on in Northrend.

Brack also confirms that Blizzard ripped off Xbox Live's achievements system, which we all knew, but that's what makes it so much fun. He says that achievements will likely be included in the Armory eventually, but all we get is a chuckle and a "stay tuned." And finally, he says Blizzard was amazed by how well players took to vehicle play in the game -- while that was only planned for a few places, when they saw how much players loved it, they really took off with it. The bombing runs, he says, were one of the most popular things in Burning Crusade, so they went for that feel again in quite a few places inside Wrath of the Lich King.

Nice interview -- good to see how excited Blizzard is to get this content out to players. The Free Press also has a review of the expansion (glowing, naturally), and a quick story about how people are taking off work in Michigan just to play it. And of course, all of it just leads to one conclusion: we can't wait.

A boy skipped his senior prom because he was busy playing WoW. A woman divorced her husband because he was more interested in WoW than in her. We've heard these kinds of stories many times before; the media runs them all the time. And while it's frustrating that the games we play are often seen only in that light by the public at large, there's no denying that some people have a problem with unhealthy addiction to WoW and games like it.

The student newspaper of Northeastern University ran yet another piece lamenting the negative effects of World of Warcraft on some people. At this point, all these addiction articles are becoming white noise to me, but this one had a couple notable contributions to the discussion.

An expert was quoted within, saying that video game addiction is mostly a problem for young males of high school or college age. Imagine that! Also, the article featured a not-new quote from Liz Woolley (founder of On-Line Gamers Anonymous and the mother of that boy who committed suicide while playing EverQuest way back when); she said that MMO developers know that players can become addicted, and that those devs are therefore "no better than drug pushers." I think that's a bit harsh, but it's understandable that she'd come to that, given what she's gone through.