Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

Two points of non-frivolity first:

First, I assisted in laying a brother to rest this morning. Though I have never done it before and hadn’t a clue of what was supposed to be done, it felt surprisingly natural.

Second, anyone who has had a Mormon upbringing has probably heard the discussion concerning the end of time how a sign of it is the increase of physical catastrophe. We also hear that the increase of physical catastrophe is clearly seen on the news. As a Mormon troublemaker, I have this to say: are there really more disasters today than before? Isn’t it conceivable that there is only a perceived increase, given the instant nature of contemporary news coverage? Surely disasters occurred at a comparable rates 3000 years ago, but only a few people, the people affected, had any clue of it. The rest of us lived in happy ignorance. Even around the turn of the century, if Katrina happened then, how long would it take residents of Utah to become aware of it?

Okay, back to business. The Reverend encouraged me to accept his trial offer for Guild Wars, a game similar to the game I ramble on about every weekend. Here are my initial observations: visually, the game is stunning, even on my [relatively] lackluster system. The shadows are realistic, and the water filter blows me away. In terms of realism, Guild Wars takes the cake, though World of Warcraft is intended to have a cartoonier feel despite the markedly serious content. The battle system is also impressive, but I really can’t describe it without showing you. Despite the strong points there are a handful of problems.

For example, every time your character leaves the city he enters an instance, or a personal copy of the environment. While I think it is fun to have the entire playground to myself, it kills an important aspect of MMORPGs, the aspect of playing alongside other players. The brief glimpse of the storyline I had also failed to impress me.

While I admit I haven’t experienced it fully (it may be better), the basic premise is that there are guilds, and they have wars. Oh yeah, there is a Charr invasion, as well. WoW does a good job with its storyline in that it doesn’t feature a universal storyline. While there is a back-story a player needs to be aware of, he is given freedom to create a storyline unique to himself. Really, in WoW, there isn’t one big story as much as there are several smaller ones, which may be quest-specific, area-specific, or even class-specific. It makes things far less linear, in my opinion.

Finally, the two greatest weaknesses are things I haven’t experienced, but have been relayed to me through the Mike can attest, level 60 in WoW gets pretty boring; the fun is in the leveling experience. It took me less than two days to reach 20 in WoW. As far as I can tell, the leveling system is the same in both games, so 20 will come very quickly.

Now two administrative notes: I am re-launching the Node central page soon. It will be base on Wordpress. The only problem is that we can’t think of a theme. We will also be advertising in Salt Lake, Boston, and Seattle. Also, Instead of Saturday Simplicity or Friday Frivolity, is there something I could call this that would work like, Weekend ___________? Oh, I am also looking for things to talk about to avoid turning my frivolous posts into discussions over MMORPGs.

I have been reading some commentary on the act of gold farming in World of Warcraft. For those unfamiliar, a gold farmer is a player who grinds, instances, and role-plays for the explicit purpose of acquiring in-game currency and items to sell in the real world for real-world currency. I remember I was once invited to join a party for the Scarlet Monastery late into the group’s progress because their rogue (the DPS unit) caused them to die. They said they had to kick out ‘another Chinese farmer.’ At first, I thought they were talking about a real rice farmer in China who somehow found time to play Warcraft. Later, the group told me what the situation really was: the player was looting gold and items while the rest of the group fought without DPS.

Anyway, this has become an increasingly common practice, despite the underhanded nature of it and the prohibition against in the game’s EULA. I have a couple of things to say:

The first is an economic analysis. Gold farming, according to many observers, is one of the primary causes of ‘mudflation,’ the change of value of in-game currency and rare items. Over at the Daedalus Project, there is a collection of user opinions of gold farming and its problems. For example, the following player relayed his view of the practice through his game experience:

I have found that they will try to drive you out of the area either directly or indirectly by training monsters on you, or flagging themselves and trying to get you to click on them.

Farmers have a profound downward effect on a server economy by vastly increasing the supply of certain ‘rare’ items. They also prevent regular players from farming their own items/materials. They make it much harder to play the market…anything you find, they have already found 10…

I will leave the second section (the one concerning the economy) for you to chew on while I address the first part. I have never had a negative experience interacting with players who I can clearly identify as farmers. The worst I story I can give is of a time I tried to quest with a player who has having extreme difficulty by himself, but he kept refusing to party. I can’t think of any other justification than the negative prospect of group looting to the player.

The next point to cover is a quasi-sociolinguistic one. Sociolinguists spend a considerable amount of time studying speech communities and the stigma that may be attached to their speech. We see the same thing in WoW. All in all, one player who can’t communicate in English in the game can’t be distinguished from another. One may be French, another may be Chinese, but all are classified as farmers. We have reached the point where all non-English speaking players are viewed as potential farmers, and have to go to great lengths to identify themselves otherwise. For example, a player joined my guild and greeted us by saying, “Hi, I’m German, my English is poor, but I’m not a farmer!” In the surveys I have participated in on the subject, nearly all tend to group all non-English speaking as Chinese, and thus famers.

Maybe I am more open-minded, but I do my best to fairly judge all players. Most of us are just there to have fun.

On a lighter note, Mike sent me a link discussing how both WoW factions will be able to use each other’s unique class with the two new races. For example, the Horde can now use a Paladin, so long as it is a Blood Elf, while the Alliance will now have a Shaman, but only the Draeni. I don’t think I can overstate how much I hate Shamans and don’t want them in the Alliance. Maybe I am not so open minded.