Posts with tag wow-community

Blizzard only wishes they'd made art like Blizzard student art contest winner Peter K. Lee -- no, seriously. "The carousel," writes a stunned-sounding Eric Browning, WoW's lead prop artist. "Holy crap. It was the exact right mix of 'WTF' and 'Why didn't we think of that?' Stylistically he nailed it, so it wasn't just a goofball idea that we loved (it was); it also fit almost perfectly into the game. Literally. It's now in the game. It has its OWN THEME SONG! That's how awesome it is, and I'm not even sure if our sound department made music or that it's just so excellent that it makes music on its own."

"And I challenge anyone to look at those carved wooden mounts and not," he continued, "in some dark and quiet place in their brains whisper, 'I want that. I want it to be my friend and go on adventures with me. So baaaad.'"

Like fellow contest winner Jessica Dinh, Lee's top-notch work in the art contest earned him a 2012 summer internship at Blizzard. We checked in with him to find out what it was like to work with a team he both admired and had managed to astound.

Do you blog about World of Warcraft? Are you excited about the Feast of Winter Veil? Do you like giving and receiving virtual gifts? If so, get on down to Blog Azeroth's Furtive Father Winter forum post and sign up for their 4th annual gift exchange. You just need to provide your name (doesn't have to be your real one), your blog URL, and your email address in order to participate.

How it works:

• Participant information is accepted until Saturday, December 15.
• On Dec. 16, we find out who our gift recipients are via email.
• Deliver your gift via email between Dec. 20 and Dec. 31.
• Publish the gift you receive on your blog, crediting the gift-giver.

The "gift" is a blog post with inspiring content for your recipient, which could include "prose, poetry, music, graphic art, screenshots" or anything else that you think your recipient would like to receive. You'll of course have to read your recipient's blog, twitter feed, etc. in order to get to know him or her enough to create a good gift.

Redcow is organizing the event as usual, and it looks like it will be a festively good time. I'm going to be a Furtive Father Winter on my website. Will you be joining me?

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Break time? Tilt the screen away from your boss's line of fire, fire up a fresh playlist with your earbuds, and pull up some WoW Insider. (Much healthier than something out of the vending machine, am I right?) How about a behind-the-scenes interview? Who would you like to read more about? Tell us!

Who's doing something useful for other players or playing the game in a way that makes you say, "Wow, that sounds cool!"? Let us know what they're up to.

• Send us your nominations! While an interview with 15 Minutes of Fame isn't exactly designed to be an achievement award for good behavior or service to the gaming community, we'd love to talk with anyone out there who's doing good stuff. (Examples: A guild for players with social anxiety, the quadriplegic player compiling resources for other disabled players, the raider who plays "guide dog" to a blind guildmate.) Know anyone out there who's doing it right?
• Send us your requests! Who's the Mr. Nice Guy behind that warrior on your realm that everyone seems to know and like? Who's the gnome behind the WoW-themed crochet patterns you download as quickly as can post them? Who's the savvy player behind your favorite resource site? We'll find out.

Tip me at lisa@wowinsider.com or @lisapoisso on Twitter.

Azeroth's Most Wanted List We're betting you know where the interesting folks are hiding. Check out our Most Wanted List after the break.

Sometimes we're so busy geeking out over the ways Blizzard inspires us with World of Warcraft that we forget that behind the curtain, the folks at Blizzard are busy geeking out over the people and things that inspire them. So when we learned that Blizzard had commissioned fantasy art legend Michael Whelan to create a painting of Deathwing for Blizzard's headquarters, we knew we had to bring you the inside story of how this singular vision of the iconic dragon came to fruition.

The most honored artist in science fiction, Whelan has created book and album covers for authors and musicians like Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, the Jacksons and Meat Loaf. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009, the first living artist to join such luminaries as H.G. Wells, Steven Spielberg, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

While Whelan actually executed the commission for Blizzard early last year, his enthusiasm for the project remains undimmed. The world-renowned painter of imaginative realism chatted with us about his rueful discovery of Deathwing's unique draconic qualities, his admiration for Blizzard's art team, and the special project he's working on now in memory of "Dragonriders of Pern" author Anne McCaffrey.

WoW Insider: Your artwork is such a part of the fantasy world that we need to go back a bit to get the full perspective of what you've done here, the long view you bring to an upstart like Deathwing.

Michael Whelan: It's been a little ways ... (laughs) I've been working at this for what, 35 years?

We have a Pern fan on staff who's curious about how you reconcile the stylistic differences between the art for Pern and art like what you've just done with Deathwing for Blizzard. Now that you're focusing more on fine art than illustration, was it odd to switch back to working on a commission with someone else's vision?

Yeah, it's really hard. Try as I might, there's always a period of adjustment between working on a commission piece and doing something for the gallery, where I'm just trying to satisfy my own aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. It's funny; it can take me days, even, to switch gears and go from one mindset to the other.

It's only been a couple of weeks since we reported on the crowdsourcing effort to fund the autism research of well-known Restokin blogger and Blizzard MVP poster Lissanna, aka Dr. Elisabeth Whyte of the Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience at Penn State. So far, supporters have boosted Dr. Whyte to just over a quarter of her funding goal for the project, which focuses on how children and adolescents with autism understand language and process information from faces (such as recognizing people or understanding emotional expressions). Her goal: designing a video game to help kids with autism improve these skills.

How does an MMO-playing grad student transform from anonymous gamer to well-known WoW blogger, Blizzard forum MVP, and Ph.D.-level researcher bringing gamification to the treatment of autism? If you follow the example of this lady: with ease.

WoW Insider: One-fourth of your funding already under your belt -- congratulations! Our readers already know that WoW can be beneficial to kids with autism, so it's exciting to hear about a gamification project designed to help kids with autism.

Lissanna: Many kids and adults with autism seem to enjoy playing video games. We have some evidence that using fun activities can motivate learning. Our goal is to develop and test the efficacy of an educational game that impacts face processing abilities and social skills. With much of the research focused on important early intervention work, there is a huge gap in the services that individuals with autism can receive when they are older. We think that a sophisticated game can fill the need for social skills services targeting older individuals to help with tasks like preparing them for jobs or developing friendships with their peers.

More than a few readers have wondered if the Drama Mamas ever make up reader letters in order to make a point. Let me be perfectly clear: We do not. The letters you see here represent genuine emails received from readers, usually within the past month or two, sent directly to the Drama Mamas.

This fact leads directly to another rather incredulous question: "Can there really be that many people out there having trouble with this particular issue?" Almost without fail, the answer is yes. In the case of this week's topic -- the social implications of being a transgender player in an online environment -- there are enough players struggling that even though we addressed the issue just two years ago, players continue to write in.

Here to answer two recent letters about coping with transgender issues is guest Drama Mama Rachel Gold, who you may have met just a few days ago in an interview here at WoW Insider. Rachel is the author of Being Emily, a young adult novel about a teen struggling to work her way through the implications of becoming a young woman after being born in the body of a male.

First, our reader letters:

Hey , I've been a role player since wow began , along the way I've met up and became good friends with a lot of people but over the few years I've been having gender reassignment therapy and now surgery, I've not been able to vent and Skype with my guild for ages and now I can't raid , I'm now asking for help with my drama. -- Melissa

"Look! Look! Someone wrote something and actually mentioned World of Warcraft!" That used to be A Thing, a Really Big Thing. After eight years and millions and millions of players, though, it's much less of A Thing. Everybody knows WoW. In fact, the last time a group tried to make a big deal out of the fact that someone played WoW, the outcome didn't turn out in their favor.

So WoW has evolved from A Weird Thing to An Everybody Thing, sort of like the latest hot TV show or book. It's something people talk about over coffee. And that's why author Rachel Gold chose to have the teenage protagonists of her young adult novel Being Emily play WoW -- that, and the opportunity WoW provides to try on different gender roles by playing characters of the opposite sex. You see, Being Emily is the first YA novel to tell the story of a transsexual girl from her perspective.

"I've been playing WoW since its first weekend, and although I'm not transsexual myself, I know that a lot of my trans friends who game found relief in the ability to play a character that matched the gender they know themselves to be, regardless of what body they were born into," Gold observes. "I included that feature of gaming in the novel by having the main character and her girlfriend both play WoW (casually, since they're in high school)."

Since Being Emily arrived in bookstores at the end of June, it's hit #2 on Amazon.com's Hot New Releases in Teen Fiction & Literature. Gold talks with us about why the book resonates with teens and how WoW is helping open doors for people searching for new identities and places to be accepted for themselves.

What WoW player wouldn't want to intern for three months inside the hallowed halls of Blizzard Entertainment? Surely, it's a dream scenario for 3D game artists trying to wedge a foot in the door of this incredibly competitive field. For three lucky art students, the scenario became a reality this summer via Blizzard's first student art contest.

To be clear, this is no mere fan art contest. The student art contest was put together by Blizzard's University Relations department, challenging aspiring professionals to come up with 3D artwork that fit into the Warcraft universe while being "wholly new and unlike anything the art team had seen before." The three artists who best met that challenge would earn a three-month mentorship at Blizzard by a member of the WoW art team, a one-year subscription to WoW, and of course, some delicious WoW memorabilia and goodies.

Top dog for the 2012 contest: Laguna College of Art and Design student Jessica Dinh. "Jessica set up her scene and composed it in a way that immediately captured the viewer," says Wendy Vetter, WoW's lead dungeon artist and Jessica's internship mentor. "It was colorful, whimsical, almost like an intro to a fairytale. I was struck by the amount of detail she put into the piece, right down to the cow's head peering at the viewer in the corner."

Jessica tells us what it was like working on World of Warcraft as an artist inside Blizzard, and she rounds up what she learned there with five tips for artists trying to break into the field.

Playing on a PvP realm spins World of Warcraft in an entirely different direction. In this Azeroth, there's no such thing as "wait until I'm ready." Every single moment is rife with danger, even when you're merely trying to remain unnoticed long enough to race through a few dailies. Every player is ripe for the picking, whether you're fully healed and bristling with cooldowns or half-buried beneath an accidental overpull. Protest all you like -- if this isn't your cup of tea, you don't belong on a PvP realm.

Danger is palpable. At any given moment, someone's likely to be lurking in the shadows with the specific intent of blocking your progress. If you're an Alliance player on Maelstrom (US), that somebody is likely to be a member of Horde Strike Force.

"One of the first things you need to learn on a PvP realm is to expect the unexpected," explains Horde Strike Force GM Gug. "One of the second things you need to learn is to accept the fact that sometimes you're going to get attacked and killed by somebody or somebodies much more powerful or skilled than you are. The sooner you can absorb and roll with this, the faster you'll progress in level."

"PvP leveling is not for the faint of heart," he continues. "You've got to be tough and able to react positively to negative situations. 'OK, I died but I can rez and go quest somewhere else for awhile' is a good code to live by while leveling. Don't get stuck in a rut; there are a lot of quest options out there. All this being said, the game doesn't get any more fun or alive and breathing than on a PvP realm. Once you go PvP, you never truly go back."

You might imagine that an Olympic gold medalist and world record holder would take a competitive approach to gaming -- and in the case of hurdler Aries Merritt, you'd be absolutely right. Aries comes in over the haste cap both on the track and in Azeroth. Want to see how a true competitor tackles a game like World of Warcraft? Take a look at this guy's beastly activity feed: progression raiding, rep grinds, quest lines, rated battlegrounds, arena PvP, holiday events, maxed-out professions, pet battles, multiple characters at the level cap with more not far behind, farming, fishing -- even finding lore objects.

This guy takes his DPS parses as seriously as he takes his world records. He dashes it all off in a good-natured, down-to-earth manner that makes talking shop about shadow priests feel as natural as ticking down the to-do list of a phone interview. Aries lets us look into the life of an Olympian with a glimpse of how his competitive spirit propels his gaming hobby, including how he maintains his world-class winning edge and how he got through a potentially devastating injury with career-saving advice from a guildmate.

WoW Insider: One look at your character profile online, Aries, and it's obvious that you're really into WoW!

Aries Merritt: Actually, I have three 90s. My lock is 90, and my mage. My priest is my main, who's 90. And I have my 87 paladin I'm working on probably next, and then my druid. I'm probably going to try to get everything up to 90 eventually, but I'm kind of slowing it down a little bit (laughs) because I'm starting back training.

I've always imagined the content manager of Wowhead as WoW's version of Star Trek's Majel Barrett, the iconic voice of the stream of data we can't help but consult like an oracle. Like Barrett, she sometimes appears in character, here in the game or there among the community blogosphere, but Perculia's primarily known for her steady grip on the fire hose of data represented by the Wowhead database.

No mere data junkie, Perculia brings a trained art historian's sensibilities to curating the game she loves. Ironically, when Blizzard commemorated her devotion to WoW's data earlier this year by naming an item after her, it was a guildmate who discovered its existence and tweeted the link -- yes, a Wowhead link -- to her.

WoW Insider: Perculia's Peculiar Signet -- congratulations! Tell us how Twitter managed to uncover this news before you did!

Perculia: Thanks! I had just finished posting a daily blog to Wowhead News and was settling down to write about new archaeology changes when one of my friends and guildmates, Esoth, sent me a tweet with the Wowhead link. Half-expecting it to be a broken page that required coding, I was pleasantly surprised to see my name on it! To the best of my knowledge, the item had a different name when we first datamined it, which explains why I didn't notice it at first.

I was super-excited and humbled when I clicked on the link; the following outpouring of congratulations on Twitter was similarly heartwarming. It's a fan's dream come true, one of those things everyone secretly thinks about but it's too abstract to think about practically shooting for. It's a lovely cycle where I was recognized for my contributions to the community, and my work in turn was shaped by my pre-Wowhead experiences in Azeroth.

If anything's got the power to pull a dyed-in-the-wool WoW player away from Azeroth for an extended period of time, it's a good read. Is there anything more tantalizing than cocooning with a good book you've just discovered? I've recently discovered GoodReads, my daughter's into the lowbie version at EpicReads, and we've made our city library and local Half-Price Books our home away from home. And when we're not reading, we're writing. When the sixth-graders had to turn in their first big compositions for the year, my little bookworm's study mate managed two pages on a funny time her foot got stuck in her shoe; my daughter demonstrated her speculative bent by cranking out 2,000 words on "The End of Humankind." Reading and writing, we just can't quit you.

Like a good meal and a bottle of wine, good books are best when shared, so I thought you all might like to meet two published authors from WoW Insider's own staff of bloggers. Matt Rossi's collections are the kind of anthologies you find yourself still flipping through at 2 a.m. -- "Ooh, what's this one about? Just one more essay before I turn out the light..." Scott Andrews' guide to leading an MMO guild offers the same straight talk and smart strategies as his Officers' Quarters column here at WI.

We peeked beyond the pages of WoW Insider to discover the speculative worlds crafted by Scott and Matt. They told us how they got published, what they're writing now -- and an extra bonus, what's feeding their imaginations in their personal reading piles.

Every now and again, a double facepalm moment occurs among potential news tipsters deep in the bosom of the WoW player community. "Say what?! 15 Minutes of Fame hasn't featured this guy yet?!?" It happens. There are only 52 weeks in a year, after all (even if weeks like this one manage to include a few extra minutes of fame).

So let's get cracking. You know that cliché about people who "toil quietly behind the scenes"? This interview is with that guy. Meet the unassuming Erorus, the man behind The Undermine Journal, Realm Pop, and a handful of other hard-working WoW resource sites.

WoW Insider: We WoW players are in your debt, Erorus! One look at your centralized project website, everynothing.net, and it's obvious that you're a very busy guy.

Erorus: EveryNothing.net was supposed to be a list of all the things I'm working on, both inside and outside of WoW, but I don't keep it as updated as I should. Most projects end up being something I spin up in a week or two and let run, the only projects I really kept up with over time were Quick Armory back in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King days, and The Undermine Journal since the auction house came to the armory back in early Wrath of the Lich King.

My currently supported projects are:

• The Undermine Journal Auction house pricing history and event notification system
• Realm Pop Realm census and population statistics
• Phenix Armory A spiritual successor to the now-defunct Quick Armory; look-ups for characters focusing on achievement, companion and recipe collection
• Goblinventory A small addon and website to help you view and share all the items in your bags and banks
• Transmog Fashion A tumblelog that displays random transmogged characters