World+of+Warcraft

I think these were our Group Members: David Noonan, Matt Burroughs, Bobby Manesh, Will Gallagher, Zach Fritz

  
 * Similarities with Epic**
 *  · Epic is an MMO that takes place in a fantasy world, which is the same type of environment that WoW boasts.
 *  · In both games, there are copper, silver, and gold pieces, although they are pennies, ducats, and bezants in Epic and simply coins in WoW.
 *  · Both games have arenas where players can combat one another.
 *  · Both games have monsters and NPCs.
 * Epic Differences**
 *  · WoW is very level based, until you get to high levels, where items a large factor, while Epic is entirely item based.
 *  · Death in WoW is not a big deal, you run back to your corpse and rez. Worst case scenario is you need to rez at the graveyard and take a penalty for a few minutes. Death in Epic results in the need to create an entirely new character – characters in Epic do not recover from death.
 *  · In WoW, players complete quests to quickly gain experience and gold. In Epic, characters rarely, if ever, interact with NPCs other than shopkeepers.
 *  · In Epic, people do not venture far from major cities, while, in WoW, people can be found nearly anywhere in the game world, no matter the distance from a city.
 *  · Epic, possibly because of the nonviolent tendencies of New Earth, doesn’t allow players to kill one another (with the notable exception of the Executioner) outside of the arena. However, PvP is a major aspect of WoW, both inside and outside of arenas – in fact, players are forced to choose between two major opposing factions.
 *  · In Epic, groups of accomplished players are thrown parades and celebrations for their great deeds. In WoW, “great deeds” are accomplished all the time, so, unless it is a truly epic feat, players rarely notice the accomplishments of others. However, the game itself rewards players for these feats with achievements.
 *  · When a monster is defeated in WoW, it will respawn for the next player, group, or raiding party to come by and defeat it as well. In Epic, when a dragon is slain, that dragon, very much like players, will not be coming back.
 *  · Players in WoW have a very limited selection of races and classes when they create a character. In Epic, while generally players limit themselves to only a very few races and classes, they seem to have an enormous number of them. In fact, on page 18, the class list is described as going “on into the hundreds.” Presumably, people have similar options for race as well, but only humans and various types of elves seem to be chosen.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> · Everyone who plays Epic plays on the same server, while WoW players play across a large variety of servers.
 * The Ultimate Goals of WoW** - a WoW player might be considered to have one the game in one of three ways.
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Finish all PvE content and get the best gear for your character - Once you've gone into every dungeon, defeated every boss, and gotten everything you could possibly need to optimize your character, you might be considered to have won the game. Players who win the game this way usually try to win the game again through one of the other two methods, rather than sitting idle.
 * 2) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Become on of the best and PvP, and win during an arena season - Once you are so good at killing other players that you might be considered unbeatable, you might also be considered to have won the game. An example of this is the famous HarryP, who had a frost mage before WoW's first expansion came out and could simply one shot any other character, killing them instantly. Again, once a player has won in this manner, they usually move on to win again in another way.
 * 3) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Get all of the achievements - Once you have gotten every achievement in WoW, you have played too much. You have won, most likely in every possible way, as it would be hard to have played the game so much without optimizing your character and being good at PvP.


 * Player vs. Player Action and Griefing**

World of Warcraft handles Player vs. Player combat as a “technically” optional way. WoW has it’s servers divided into PvP and PvE realms. On PvE (Player vs. Enviroment) Players cannot engage in player vs. player combat unless they choose to “Flag” themselves by clicking a button. On PvP (Player vs. Player) realms, all players are automatically flagged based on which zone they are in. They implemented this to make certain zones “safe” zones where players could relax easier and so really low level people first getting into the game don’t quit the game immediately as their character gets killed repeatedly by a much higher level character (Griefed). In all cases of death, players have the option of reviving, but the cost of doing so is usually just time, usually in the form of running as a ghost from a nearby graveyard to the place you died.

In both PvP and PvE servers, players have the option of going into special objective based “battleground” zones. In these zones, all players are flagged and games of capture the flag, king of the hill, and killing VIP targets, are played. In battlegrounds, players are resurrected at special graveyards in 30 second waves. In all but practice duels, arenas (discussed later), and very rare mini-zones (not discussed as they are used for less than estimated 0.1% of all WoW play), all PvP action happens cross-faction, with no inter-faction player killing. In other words, Alliance players can only attack Horde players and not other Alliance players. Same goes for Horde; they can kill Alliance, but not other Horde.

Arenas are where player arranged teams of 2, 3, or 5 players from the same faction and same server are pitted against other equal size teams in duels to the death. Unlike most PvP in WoW, while arena fighting, players will be pitted against not only cross faction opponents, but same faction opponents. Arenas also have a rating system that at higher ratings becomes near zero-sum. Your arena team should usually be matched only against similar rated teams. Along with making the matches slightly more balanced, high rating in arenas also allow for purchase of powerful rewards and end of season rewards such as player titles and among none but the highest rated, a special flying mount that goes faster than most other flying mounts.

In every game that has more than one player, it seems there will always be greifing. Some griefing in WoW is penalizable, while other forms are not, and Blizzard has repeatedly revised what is and isn’t penalizable. On PvP servers, the most common and minor form of griefing (debatable if it should be considered griefing) is just as simple as killing an unsuspecting player, when they don’t have a chance to fight back. What really erks people though and is clearly griefing, is not killing a player once, but corpse camping. Corpse camping is when a player kills another player in non-battleground zones, and then waits for them to respawn and kills them again, and then repeating this process for many minutes or hours at a time. Usually this is unpunished by Blizzard, due to the fact that you have to opt in to a PvP server and you can usually leave the area where the player is camping you, even if it takes some time.

Notable exceptions to regular corpse camping, where Blizzard has issued 3 day bans for the perpetrators do exist. In extreme, multi-day camping, or in cases where players are camped in such a way that they cannot leave the zone, even after much effort, Blizzard has issued temporary account suspensions (usually in the form of a 3 day ban).

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">World of Warcraft is a shining example of commercial, societal, and technical success. It is the game industry standard for MMO’s, currently boasting over 12 million subscribers, with players and guilds ranging from anal retentive hardcore ([|Elitist Jerks], [|Death and Taxes], [|Nihilum]) to the most casual ‘once-a-week’ users with guilds that exist solely as a social construct. You can find a multitude of advertisements for WoW in most forms of media, most notably on television which most people consider an extremely laid back media. This is impressive because WoW started as just another dogmatically skewed “nerd activity” that most people in society didn’t understand or respect. [|WoW commercials] ======

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> But slowly over the course of its 5 year life, WoW infiltrated popular culture as an acceptable thing to spend your time on. This happened for many reasons: it was easy to pick up, it was something different and interesting, its rich content kept people coming back, etc. But what it boils down to in the end is that it became normal because everyone else was doing it. I would call that success. I experienced this personally in high school. A single friend of mine bought the game after it was released. He told me about it, I was intrigued, and got it for Christmas. I played it, liked it, and told more friends about it. Over the next year, it spread virally through my group of friends until at least half of them were playing WoW. What’s interesting to me is that if you gathered my friends, you’d have difficulty determining which of them did and did not play WoW. This is because even the ones that didn’t play were still exposed to it, they still sat at the lunch table where it was discussed on a daily basis, and they too slowly learned all about it. This functions as a micro-example of what happened to the rest of general society, where today most people, whether they’ve personally played it or not, recognize what “WoW” is through sheer, unprovoked exposure. That’s success. ======

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> The most interesting juxtaposition of trends is the decline of the dedicated WoW players vs. the rampant growth of casual players. Most old WoW veterans would call the game a failure, as it has continually been watered down to the point where anyone can achieve anything. Oppositely, casual players would argue that the game is an amazing success because its simple nature allows a much broader range of people to experience it and see all the content within the game while still maintaining a full time life outside of the game. ======

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But at the end of the day, success in a market driven industry is defined by profit, and Blizzard, the creators of WoW, are absurdly rich. Creating a game that could sufficiently motivate people to continually pay a month fee simply in order to keep playing the game, for a span of years, is mind blowing. Let’s say your average player ends up playing WoW for a year, a modest assumption. Let’s also say that your average player started playing after the first expansion, another modest assumption. That totals to paying $30 for the original WoW at the time, another $40 for the first expansion, and another $180 in subscription fees for that year. If you walked up to the average person and asked if they were willing to pay over 200 dollars for a single video game, the answer would most likely be a resounding “hell no!”. But the answer was yes for WoW. That, in my mind, whether you love or hate the game, is undeniable proof of the success of WoW. ====== <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
 * Distinction and Innovations**

In World of Warcraft you play as a sapient fantasy creature hailing from the Warcraft fictional universe. Among these creatures we can count humans, bull people, trolls, dwarves, and more. Then a player picks a class. Like how in real life someone might be a construction worker, a WoW character might be a Warrior or a Paladin. Despite whatever the player chooses, from this point on they play as a mobile loading bar and number transmission device. The player is given an ever-growing array of actions they can take when they encounter an enemy, and upon pressing a button this action begins. A loading bar appears, the player character goes into an animation, and when the bar is full the player transmits damage numbers to the enemy. The enemy transmits damage numbers back to the player and it is implied that the enemy has his own loading bar. Whoever dies first loses. This gameplay shows itself in both PvE and PvP formats. This gameplay style has been directly ripped and slightly modified by a large number of MMOs. Lineage II for example uses an almost identical system for everything, except all of their actions are instant and you get far fewer of them. WoW's real innovation is not in its design. Games before it had skill buttons, such as Ultima Online and in fact in May 2002 (Wikipedia.com) Final Fantasy XI came out and that MMO had a built in macro interface so you could construct your own buttons. This feature was added into WoW after its launch in 2004. The thing that WoW really innovated was having tons and tons of actions to use. In Final Fantasy a warrior could expect to have between 15 and 30 buttons to preform a specific action once every 5 to 15 seconds. WoW gives you at least 1 button for 80 levels. On top of that it brought in highly competitive PvP that kept people coming back from to the table. WoW is very powerfully emulated by Warhammer Online, which is more or less EA's answer to WoW. While it could easily be argued that, as a game, Warhammer Online is superior it can not be argued that it has more content or personality. Being one of the first to the table has served WoW well and when people play similar games it makes them long for their old stomping grounds. On top of that, why would I want to to get to high level in an almost identical game? WoW's innovations, in my mind, were shockingly few. What sets it apart is its history, its girth, the amount of time that has been spent honing it. The established community and the resulting depth given its old age simply makes it better than any MMO that wants to challenge it, at least so far.

WoW players have created an entire subculture to go along with their passions. Fanart litters the internet like rain over the world. WoW strategy guides and forums pop up suddenly like weeds on google searches and in game screenshots of WoW can appear in the most bizarre image searches. Stories of raids are written like novels and fanfiction comes under the scrutiny of a massive unfeeling horde of people. WoW is big, and its impact is felt intrinsically on the web. ** The fanart comes in all forms, from children's refrigerator drawings to adult material. It dots Deviant Art with an intense degree of variety. Some have the quality of a true artist behind them and others are quick sketches by bored kids in class. Yet the community is united by this content and by creating it you guarantee there is someone who might actually look at it and care enough to comment. Perhaps the most widely known WoW player content is that of guilds. The bands of people who come together to play as a consistent team garnish themselves with this title. Guilds will often post their hijinks and Ventrillo conversations into YouTube videos for fun and posterity. This has led to internet phenomenons like “Leeroy Jenkins,” the endearing tale of a man who had become fed up with complicated plans and sacrificed his time and effort in a wonderful expression of freedom and joy. He rushed headlong into an encounter, screwing his team with little care because it was fun. Videos like this bring a human element to WoW. Guilds can be found deeply entrenched in every player created aspect of the game. The wars between guilds, the misadventures of guilds, and the rules of guild society create a second game on top of the first. There is no rule that you must be in a guild but it is known that being in one is a massive boon, and yet we know that guilds demand tribute and time. Being in a guild can become almost like a second job, and in a way these people depend on you to further their experience. Yet you are not a Blizzard employee, you are not a WoW programmer, you are just some person playing some game. Despite this, your participation is integral to someone else' playing experience. People themselves are content for WoW.
 * Player Created Content