One of the things I spend waaaay too much time on is World of Warcraft. Over 9 million people pay to slay pixels now, all over the "tubes" the Internet is made of. WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that has exploded since its launch two years ago. People from all over the planet connect to game servers using everything from dial-up to broadband (although I dare say I wouldn't want to actually try much beyond fishing over a dial-up connection... yes, you can fish in this game). This game is real-time. Of course, those of us with a fast pipe and a 4 ms ping time to the server have rather an advantage over those who are trying to play with a 2000 ms ping time and who are dropping packets left and right. That's just the nature of online gaming though. If you want to know more about the actual game, check out Blizzard's website.
One of the things that arose out of WoW is entire communities of people that call each other friends and meet nightly... all without ever having set eyes on each other in real life. People join guilds in-game. Most guilds have (back to the Internet again) their own website set up somewhere. My primary character is Jamoyah, a level 67 human paladin, who belongs to the guild "Apotheosis" on the Windrunner US server. Apo has its own website and forums here. We've even got a wiki set up, which lets us whip up pages to do just about anything we want. Another thing Apotheosis has is its own Ventrilo server. We may not have met each other in person, but we've certainly heard each other's voices. Ventrilo is a program that allows you to have voice communication with other people, all using your computers rather than your phones. Its main target is the online gaming community. (TeamSpeak is another popular voice program for gaming.) Both these programs are similar to Skype.
One of the great things about WoW is that the game interface is customizable. Don't like the default UI? Download UI modifiers (mods) or make your own. WoW supports user-created mods using the LUA scripting language. There are even websites out there (such as curse-gaming.com and ctmod.net) who specialize in hosting mods other people have written.
Even that isn't the end of it. Want other people to be able to check out all about your character with a click of a button, without even having to log into the game world? Easy. That's what sites like CTprofiles and RPGO are for.
So, some examples. Here's Jamoyah's CTprofile and RPGO link (admittedly out of date, but I've had other things to worry about besides updating profiles.) I also have a level 64 night elf hunter named Starstalker who you can see here (and yes, that's him in the pic up above).
Yes, she's standing on a table. At least her horse isn't standing on the table too. These pics had the game user interface hidden. So, since I mentioned customizing the interface, I figure I might as well put some pictures of that too.
So the above pic is the default UI. Here's roughly what I'm using these days (my actual UI is a little different, but I don't have a screenshot handy for it. Maybe if I find time I'll take another screenie and add it. 10 points to anyone geeky enough to identify the encounter in the below screenshot.
4 comments:
level 67? impressive. how many hours since 60 has that been? i read that a guy made it to 70 in about a day. crazy!
left the game a year ago. ceck out character status without logging onto the game...how about bidding at the auction just like on ebay?
Ah the memories of raids lol. A guy I still keep in touch with came back to WoW for the expansion and leveled a Blood Elf pally to 70 in 2 weeks...scary...
impressive. all i've got to say is that i've lost a handful of friends to this game.. proceed with caution
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