Top 5 Warcraft News Stories (or Why I Play WoW)

Now that I’ve reached level 70 with Erisian, my Troll Rogue on the Lothar server, I’ve realized that having a gold guide handy, especially as an enchanter/herbalist, would have come in quite useful. Let me explain…

I realize that opening sentence makes almost no sense to anyone who hasn’t played Warcraft, but to those who’ve gotten somewhere in their forties or fifties and are wondering why they’re facing exponentially increasing costs for their profession choices, I feel your pain. I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed up my first character.

I’m still wandering around on my original mount, for crying out loud, while I watch other players flying overhead in gyrocopters and on the backs of netherwing drakes. Oh, I’m jealous, yes. On the other hand I can enchant things. On the other, other hand I can only get the materials to enchant things by destroying uncommon, rare, and epic items that other players take to the auction house and sell off for gold. And with prices for the training to ride a flying mount running at 800 gold for the first level and 5000 gold for the next, I’ll be lucky if I get a flying mount within the next year – hence the various gold guides become to look mighty tempting.

Nor did I powerlevel. I’ve seen the guides, ways to get from level 1 to level 70 in two weeks, both for horde and for alliance characters, and have considered buying them. I possibly would too, if I had the time in which to devote two weeks purely to Warcraft, but I’m all too aware of the syndrome Jason Lubyk outlined in The Online Addicts Safe Playing Guide last year.

I did, however, play enough to begin to see through the knee-jerk reporting and odd, erroneous details that seem to pop up ever couple of months in the mainstream news, and I’d like to share some of the more interesting bits that have caught my attention since I began playing ‘WoW’. All of these articles caught my eye because I found them fascinating, and span the life of the game since it’s inception.

So here we go, counting down the top five World of Warcraft news stories:

5. Warcraft Prostitution: (Not to be confused with Whorecraft the porn). In April of 2007 a woman posted on Craigslist looking for 5000 gold to buy an epic mount (it appears I’m not the only one out there with gold issues) in return for a night of sex. Here’s a link to a blog piece about that, with screenshots of the Craigslist ad and follow-up response.

4. Warcraft Terrorist Training Camps:

When I first heard about it, I thought this was an Onion headline. Wired reported that the US intelligence community is developing software to detect extremists set on infiltrating World of Warcraft. To up the surrealist quotient a bit, it was reported in Australia that terrorists are being trained in games using weapons that are identical to real world armaments. Now I don’t know much about the Engineering profession, but I don’t remember roadside bombs being part of their repertoire.

3. How Two People Run 40+ Characters at Once:

I’d heard about people running a few characters at once, mostly for the purposes of farming multiple sites for black lotus or mining rare ores, but this takes the cake. “Gameslah and his girlfriend each control twenty-three PCs while raiding, using programmable keyboards and KVM switches.” The article shows photos of the set-up, complete with all the boxes of WoW that ‘Gameslah’ appears to have purchased.

2. Biological Warfare in Warcraft:
According to a report on NPR, epidemiologists are using information gleaned from biological warfare events on Warcraft to gain insight into what one MeFite called the ‘stupid factor’. I’d originally heard about this long before I ever joined the game, but it remains one of the more entertaining bits of lore in WoW’s history.

1. Warcraft Ron Paul Rally on Whisperwind:
I actually attended this, more out of curiosity rather than a show of solidarity. The server load was obvious, and it caused issues with people attempting to play the game, rather than make a political statement. As GamePolitics noted, players “seemed surprised that it was taking place, despite the advance publicity.” What advanced publicity there had been was chiefly Wired’s write-up of the event, and, as they predicted, many of the ‘Paultards’ were in fact snowballed, dueled, and generally insulted along the way. Still, I believe this is the first time a politician has inspired a political rally in an online MMO, and Ron Paul’s supporters certainly made their presence felt to all those players who were unable to log in or who’s computers crashed during the event.

Here’s actual footage from the event, thanks to Youtube:

And last but not least, I’d like to point out this piece, a news article that seemed more designed to reinforce people’s fears about technology than to contribute to a meaningful discourse…

- Alan Sipress, Washington Post Staff Writer, June 2, 2007

Not only is what this reporter claims impossible to do (one cannot steal artifacts from another player in gameplay) it’s surprisingly out of place in the rest of the article, which seems to infer that the internet is some lawless landscape in desperate need of government interference. One would almost assume that an agenda was being pushed…

I personally have never
witnessed mass outbreaks of disease or terrorist training camps, and I don’t believe it’s possible for people to be mugged in Warcraft (believe me, I’ve tried).
Nor have I traded gold for sex, or run multiple characters simultaneously. But in a virtual space with over ten million
active players, I suppose anything is possible. And in part, that’s why I’m still on board – Warcraft does do what it
promises, and it is much more engaging than a virtual world based solely around crafting and interaction, such as Second Life.

I was given World of Warcraft and a two month gamecard as a gift. With the amount of time I spend working on and around computers doing audio editing, blogging, and writing, it was fairly easy to play a little bit every day while I waited on files to compress, or video to render, and I quickly toyed with a number of classes and races. (It does fascinate me just how affected by race and class WoW is, but honestly that’s a subject for another paper entirely.)

In any event, eventually I settled on my blue-skinned, dagger-wielding rogue named Erisian, and off I went spreading chaos and discord along the way. Having invested so much time into her now, I feel like it would be a waste to go back and start a new one up from scratch, but the upshot of what I’ve learned is, as I said at the beginning of this article, Enchanting within Warcraft is a gold suck, and the few flowers I’ve picked along the way do little to off-set the cost of purchasing materials.

For the most part I played by myself rather than in groups, but I’ve been a part of the same guild from the start. Perhaps most importantly, it is the group dynamic and the social aspects of Warcraft that most intrigue me. Virtual spaces like WoW are the next iteration of the web, a web 3.0 beta of sorts, and honestly I get more enjoyment out of keeping in touch with friends around the country through WoW than simply talking on the phone. I’m positive that soon these virtual worlds will cease being viewed simply as a gaming space and become a cultural phenomena – playing World of Warcraft provides a way to see the possibilities of such environments, in a much more dynamic way than through Second Life, even without the real world currency.

Since I’m totally geeking out hardcore on this article, I might as well go all the way. Here’s the photo album of Erisian, from the early levels to where she’s at today. Enjoy.

Erisian Photo Album