Posts with tag obama

A new report on MMO gold farming claims that there are about 400,000 working in China on gold farming and trading, and that there could be as many as 500,000 to even a full million. Of course there's no way to tell exactly how many people are employed in the business (and the number almost certainly doesn't stay constant for long), but according to interviews and surveys done of business there, that's the number they've come up with. They also claim a $10 billion a year turnover, however, and that number seems way high, though remember that they're talking about all MMOs, not just World of Warcraft. The report has some other interesting information about how China does gold farming: there are a number of brokerages staffed by English speakers in the larger cities that handle the actual transaction, and then the farms themselves are usually outside the cities, where cheaper labor is available. Typical pay in the farms is about $140 a month plus food and board, working in about ten hour shifts, while pay is higher in the city-based brokerages. Most employees are younger guys, who play while drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and lots of their ingame tasks are automated with custom-made and adapted software.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

I have mostly steered clear of politics in this column. Very early on, in the second or third column I wrote for WoW Insider, I made an offhand joke about the current administration that set off a firestorm of argument in the comments section. It really had nothing to do with the column at all, so I found the situation extremely unproductive. I decided I'd never do that again.

But I was there in D.C. last Tuesday and I wanted to share some of my observations about how to handle a transfer of power. It's a situation that can come up from time to time in a guild when a long-time leader has to step down for personal reasons -- or in democratic guilds when a leader is voted out. Let's talk about how Bush and Obama handled everything and what we can learn from their example.

Believe it or not, there are things out there that are more important than a computer game. Occasionally you need to turn off WoW and go do something like eat, bathe, sleep, engage in some form of non-finger exercise, etc...

One of the problems with a MMORPG like WoW is that some people often get consumed in the dynamic social and entertainment parts of the game, leaving off activities and events happening in the real world. This is problematic for a number of reasons, and is something that everyone who plays this game a lot should guard against happening to them.

And with that in mind, today I heartily recommend that you take a respite from our Azerothian domain and head over to the television to watch some of the presidential inauguration. No matter if you're a democrat or a republican or a whig, watching the historic swearing in of America's first African American commander-in-chief is something that you'll want to be able to tell your children and grandchildren about. The last thing you'll want to say was "I was playing WoW with all those cool 3.0.8 changes."

No matter what your political persuasion is, we can all find the above animation funny. President Bush had a shoe thrown at him last week, and this week we've seen the incident take on a World of Warcraft spin.

The person throwing the shoe is playing an Elemental Shaman. He or she really needs to clean up their UI: as you can see in the above picture, it's not very good. Way too many buttons spaced out at odd intervals.

While we were originally under the impression that the shoe throwing incident took place in Iraq, it appears via the mini-map that it actually took place in Thousand Needles. Perhaps if the President ate some Tracker Snacks he'd have avoided the incident all together, as "Ghostrunner" (aka "Greg Highway") say the buff will include reporter tracking in patch 3.0.8.

And just to be completely bipartisan, after the break is a screenshot of President Elect Obama's WoW screen after he earned the "President of the United States" achievement.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

I've had a political dream for a while now that I think all of us WoW players can agree on: someday, I hope, we will have a President in the White House that plays videogames. We're not quite there yet, but we're closer -- apparently, Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild. This is a guy who knows all about the communities that these MMOs create, and just how awesome it is to run through Karazhan, or grind PvP for a Merciless Gladiator weapon... and he's been selected by the incoming President of the United States to run the FCC. That's beautiful.

Too many government officials (both Democrat and Republican, this isn't partisan at all) suffer from the "series of tubes" mentality -- they are being asked to regulate and coordinate things that they don't understand at all. But getting guys like Kevin Werbach in there, no matter what your political affiliation, is a great step forward for all of us gamers -- we'll have people behind the regulatory wheel who know how important and wonderful virtual worlds like Azeroth can be.

Waltermonkey on Livejournal actually uncovered the guy's Armory profile (and has some great insight), and yes, though I'm sure some of the comments below will be about how you'd never be able to run a transition team AND get to level 80 at the same time, Werbach's been playing recently -- while he's still only level 70, he's actually got the Jenkins title. We've got a Resto Shaman helping run the FCC -- how awesome is that?

Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 blog (humor about the upcoming US elections) has a... well, OK, it's not all that funny, but it's a post offering the three major candidates (Obama, Clinton, and McCain) tips in their strategies to appeal to World of Warcraft players. That's right, we vote, too!

Unfortunately, it would probably have been a lot better if they'd gotten someone who actually plays WoW to write it -- there are some OK references in there, but nothing really insightful into the world of Azeroth (and a few just don't make any sense). And none of the candidates are portrayed as Horde (Barack's an NE Druid, Hillary looks like a Dwarf Female Paladin, and Johnny Mac is a Gnome caster of some kind), especially since being Horde has already been proven to be politically popular. Throw in the fact that they missed out on four classes (what am I supposed to know as a Shaman?), and this turns out to be a pretty poor attempt by Comedy Central for a little Warcraft humor. Too bad.

[Via Massively]