Thursday 5 May 2011

Guild Elitists in World of Warcraft


Most adults can, within a few moments of talking to another person, establish whether or not there is mutual harmony on the horizon if they were to become friends. Friendship can, in some social cases in this day and age, be acquired by the click of a face book page, or the happy sitting together in a railway train carriage.

To have to apply through a complicated on-line 'question and answer' document is uncomfortable, intrusive, and missing the whole point of become a friend. Guilds, in the on-line MMORPG, rather rely on everyone in the guild being 'nice' or 'grown up' to each other. Not everyone can spare the time to turn an on-line game into some kind of macho high pressure sporting fixture and so for many of us, guilds are about a bunch of friends hacking at monsters as and when they all get on line together. But if you are the only one on line, you are expected to be able to look after yourself for a few hours should the need arise.

In this current season, being a member of a guild enables you to draw on 'perks' simply not available to solo players. Perks such as extra hit shore, faster cool downs, improved benefits, stronger equipment all allow the guild based player to level up faster, earn more gold quicker, and achieve success where teams are needed to defeat some of the quest challenges.

It is a two-way street, the guild benefits financially and socially from having an active membership, and the members benefit from having a powerful guild supporting them.
I understand a great many players are still young enough to have not worked out the social niceties of making friends with real adults in the real world, and the behaviour of a good many guild players leaves you with the belief that they are looking forward to their thirteenth birthday, or have discovered the word 'anal' or are so dim they cannot function unless someone is holding their hand.

An abundance of these players can bring a guild down with petty innuendo, lies, thefts, mistrust and a general childishness of silly arguments over the guild public channel. We say, 'We can do without the drama queens', and understand that all guilds will have some childish players, or even children, but a good many grown up children to balance the ratio and to keep the guild in good trim.



To have to apply by a complicated on line document, giving age, location, times of play, interests, gender, server likes and dislikes strikes me too much of applying for a job, not a social agreement to work together. I was looking for a group of like minded people to share 'guild perks' with while I help earn that guild more perks, and for me, it needs to be a fun thing, a warm social interchange, where I can be allowed to play as I wish to, but join in with group activities from time to time.

The need to fill out a long form turns me off and makes me cold to that group. If they have lost the ability to communicate as adults with other adults and use that 'built-in' ability to assess another player, then maybe that is not a group for me. They can keep their silly forms and childish approach to game playing. I'm going to play alongside other intelligent, articulate, grown up children.

Wednesday 4 May 2011

World of Warcraft needs a Dragon

It is good that some entities, like Blizzard, the Company that owns World of Warcraft, considers it important to raise money for relief aid to Japan. For any reason you care to choose, helping others is always good. Though sometimes, a little incentive is needed to get their customers to part with their hard earned cash so that it can be forwarded to the Japan Relief Fund.

Sadly, if a scheme is only half baked, then a full loaf is never returned, and by that I mean, Blizzard, for example, could have gained terrific leverage on the inherent need for many of their gamers to own something worthwhile.

Blizzard are giving a small pet away as a way of saying 'thank you' for making a donation. Sadly, most players have more pets than they can use in any given session, with so many pets given away as incentives, a pet shortage in World of Warcraft is something there is not.
I applaud their desire to help Japan, but I feel they could have raised tons of cash instead of the great dollop they have. And they had the mechanism at their disposal, in plain sight and not being used effectively.

Now the players can fly just about anywhere on almost any mount, the race is on to get bigger, harder to get, more colourful mounts, so gigantic dragons, breathing blue flames, and whose frame is all bones is the most wanted flying mount.

If Blizzard had released a huge colourful very fast flying mount, something unique, and made it account bound, and charged the player something easy to obtain, like twenty Euros or twenty Dollars, then I bet I would have purchased it for my characters. I bet a lot of people would have bought it. Once one player has it, others demand to know how they can get one and do not want to be left out.

Imagine a couple million players each pumping twenty dollars into the system, Blizzard could have made a significant donation to the Japan Relief Fund.