Doing my first quest on WoW

Finally found Stormwind, traveling on foot took forever!!!

Stormwind City!

Ironforge- When I ended up in Ironforge, I was pretty blown away. Didn’t expect to see this.

All pictures cal also be found at http://dailybooth.com/anth3745blogpics/11378677.

To complete my “day in the life of my avatar” blog, I want to explain my last day in my virtual world before my subscription expired. This last day of being in World of Warcraft is representative of daily life events because it is a representation of what I had achieved that far. I did not become an expert in World of Warcraft as I only reached level 30 (maximum level is 80 I believe), but I did enjoy playing and exploring in a fantasy world and leveling due to personal achievements.

Once logged into my account on World of Warcraft, I rez into focus. I am a female night elf hunter. Before even moving anywhere I attend to housekeeping activities which I do every time I log on to WoW. The first thing I do is check my item bags.

As seen in the screenshot above, I check all of my items to see what I had last had to see what I can sell.  I never discovered how to use the auctioneer to sell items (nor did I want to figure it out, like many other confusing things in this game), I always sold items the first thing to vendors to cash in my rewards to obtaining certain items. Each of the bags I had for items were organized into categories. The categories helped me when in battle so I knew exactly where to find a potion or a healing power to access it quicker, as battling is all about efficiency, for me anyway. One bag held potions or bandages that would heal my character in battles or after a battle. One bag held quest items. Quest items are items which are used to fulfill quests, which can be found, taken from dead enemies, or given to my character by computer characters whom a character accepts quests from.

The screenshot above shows the computer character Feero Ironhand who wishes to reward me for protecting him as he delivers supplies to another computer player. More on quests will appear later on in this post. The other two bags hold random items found during battles and other miscellaneous items that may help my character in battle. The final bag is for pet food. Hunters in World of Warcraft have pets which act as tanks in battles. Just as your own health points decrease when attacked, so do a hunters pet health points. For some reason I do not have a screen shot of my pet, but it is a cat, a snow leopard. I make sure that my pet’s health is up to par and then I continue on with my day.

The list of objectives seen in the above screen shot to the right hand side is the list of quests I have logged into doing at the moment. Since WoW is a very large world, quests can be done just about anywhere. Some involve your character travelling across the whole countryside to complete, which is why my character has many built up, as I had not explored the entire world of Aseroth at this point (and probably never will).

In order to complete my research for our final project, I often teamed up with other players who were doing similar quests. We would help each other out by levelling or helping kill an enemy. This is when I got most of my research for our final project, while enjoying the game-play of WoW.

The above screen shot is the map of the current location my character is in. Yellow question marks and the numbered locations show where my character can accept quests, and where I can complete quests. The more quests your character completes, the more experience points your character receives, therefore it is important to do as many quests as possible to level up and become stronger. On a normal day such as this one, I checked my map to see which accepted quests were closest to me to complete.

There are many different ways to travel around the world of Azeroth. Currently, as seen in the first screen shot, my character is on a mount which is a sabre tooth tiger. It was my first and only mount, and was much faster at travelling around the vast amount of landscape that I had discovered to that date. Other ways of travel are by boat, and by hyppogryph.

The above screen shot is my character riding the hyppogryph to the next destination. The next destination is a small town called Astranaar. In Astranaar I was just selling items to vendors when, I was attacked and killed. Since I still consider myself a n00b (all I know is how to quest and level, power gamer much?) I’m not actually sure how this villain killed me, but he did, which created awesome opportunity for screen shots.

These two screen shots depict what my character looks like dead. The first one is what my character looks like dead before it’s spirit is released, and the second one is what the world looks like once a character is a spirit or a ghost. Once a character releases its spirit, it’s starting point is at the nearest graveyard. In order to resurrect your character, you must find your character’s body as a spirit and then once in a range of your body, you can resurrect yourself with a little bit of damage done to your health. Since it was my final day playing the game, I thought it was a foreshadowing of my character once I stopped playing. Instead of leaving my character for dead, the last screen shot I took was of my body resurrected, yet invisible to enemies with the last player to kill me in the background. A little sinister, but a great shot.

Overall I enjoyed playing World of Warcraft. I don’t think I would have ever played it if I hadn’t of taken this course. But now when I hear people talking about WoW or other online massively multi player games, I can chime in with my own experience, and prove that it is not just geeks who play these games. Or am I now a geek?

Further to our discussion on gendered environments, here is a link to a piece of machinima made for the sole purpose it seems to pay tribute to the sublime nature of the environments in EVE. I have to admit, they do appeal to me. Although I am a guy so that’s probably not very surprising.

Hope I haven’t pass the deadline for blogs yet……

I don’t know, coming to the last days of this term, I really don’t feel like playing anymore Runescape than I have to for the personal essay. I still play games, and I find that I have been playing more iPhone games more than any of my other platform games. PC games are fun, but they are way too time consuming. Wii is great, but playing alone is a bummer. NDS is good too, but, not much good games lately. MMOG is too money consuming for me. But iPhone games are great, lots of them are “free”, and I can practically pause anytime. I don’t have to worry about it being in the way of things. I can play within my breaks, I can play when I am waiting for stuff to happen, heck, I can even play it in the can if I really want to.

There are MMOG iphone games, and more lately than ever. Although I am not too into those games, it does comes to mind that is the iOS platform conquering casual game industry, and creating new gamers that didn’t exist before. Lately, I have been into the game Real Racing by Gameloft. The control and the physics of game is great. And compare to lots of racing games on various platforms, this one definitely have its advantage. You do feel like you are steering something afterall.

If there are still people active on this blog, what do you guys think about iOS games? And what are the types of games that you enjoy playing on it?

I have just started playing an IPhone game Dungeon Hunter 2 religiously. The main reason I like this game so much is it support coop game play.

It is exclusively on iPhone. Since most of the assignments are done, and my exams will not be here in awhile, I have been playing this game a bit too much. Although this is indeed a great game, I believe the developer Gameloft had released the game too early, since they game still full of bugs. Some of the side quests are inaccessible. And for me, what makes me available now for blog posting is the fact that my main quest at temple of winds got stuck. Whenever I enter the map for the temple, it booted me out of the game. I am extremely frustrated.

Anyways, I played as a mage in this game. Here is a screen shot of a mage.

Obviously, I looked much better in game, since I got better gear on than this thing they showed here.

For those of you that own a iOS device should definitely give this game a try, and hope that you have better luck then me. From the forums, it seems, I have to wait for the next patch for my game problems to be resolved.

I found this site early on in the semester, and I feel it should be shared.

It is regularly updated, and includes descriptions, screen shots, reviews, videos, etc, etc, on most games they have listed. Its pretty much guaranteed that they have a game that will appeal to everyone.

Not only that, but the site links you to articles and news, events, and even beta key give-aways. It really has everything you need to get into gaming. There is even a forum.

I personally had thought that MMO genres were rather limited. Mostly Sci-fi/Fantasy, and that I might prefer a game that was zombie-apocalypse based (The walking dead, anyone?) and I never thought I’d find one. Amazingly, through this site, I found 3! So really, it seems you can find any kind of MMO here.

A great deal of humor on the internet in general is based on the existence of memes. That is the creation of individual instances of humorous images videos or statements which become pervasive throughout the internet and soon mold and change incorporating multiple memes or spawning variations of themselves. While this humor is largely contained to the internet it occasionally spills over into the mainstream as has happened with lolcats, pictures of cats with captions. Memes are often found in humor online, an example of this can be found in the infamous Barrens chat on World of Warcraft where many conversations have devolved into Chuck Norris jokes, an example of a text based meme that has spilled into the mainstream. Other examples of memes include Courage Wolf:

Once a meme becomes established it begins to cross over into other memes and spawn variations of themselves, for example courage wolf is itself a variation of advice dog:

And then of course they begin to intersect:

Memes are used not only as a source of humor but as a kind of measure of acceptance, if you get the jokes in the meme and are able to contribute to it then you are clearly involved in the community.

Yslandia! The highly anticipated US Version MMO for the iPhone platform is coming soon!

Description
“Darkness’s rebellion rumbles on Yslandia, forever disturbing the balance of the Elements. And thus the rhythm of the drums gives way to the whistling of the blade.” Malaïm belief – Book 4, Humiliation 5

Dive into the heart of the Yslandia universe, an MMORPG with innovative game play, finely detailed graphics, and an addictive soundtrack! Wage battles in real time in a conflict where 6 races are vying for the possession of a group of magnificent islands, each with its own unique characteristics.

Create one or more characters from a large selection and embark on an exhilarating adventure!
Through hundreds of quests, discover a rich universe populated by colorful characters and unusual creatures. Explore, fight, trade and collect rare items for the glory of your clan!

Advance on your own or with a team and lead epic battles and duels in real time.
Control the advancement of your character and learn to master spells and new fighting techniques.

Invite your friends to be part of your guild, control their characters when they’re offline and exchange knowledge and items with them.

Proud adventurers, become a legend through the OpenFeint worldwide rankings!

Yslandia and its many challenges steadfastly await you!

Features:

YSLANDIA’S VAST UNIVERSE
Roam Yslandia through hours of game play: many islands to explore with more than 200 entertaining and unusual quests, dynamic dungeons, 18 distinct classes to try, and loads of creatures to discover.

QUALITY GRAPHICS AND INTERFACES
Plunge into a graphic ambiance worthy of the greatest 2D MMORPGs, with finely detailed graphics and a revolutionary control interface with the first dynamic D-Pad.

CHOICE OF GAME MODE
Take part in duels, arena combat, battles, and trials, and explore Yslandia in PVP or PVE, alone or as a team.
Find all of Yslandia’s features in the complete ingame manual translated into 5 languages!

A RICH AND DYNAMIC COMMUNITY
Take part in the first mobile multilingual MMPORG!
Enjoy ingame public or private chat, a list of your friends, and your inbox.
Collect, sell and trade items with no limitations!
Discover an innovative system for managing guilds (teaching spells / controlling offline friends)
Share your experience on OpenFeint

COMING SOON:
Fight for the glory of your faction with a system for controlling territories.
Participate in events and competitions organized in real time.
Discover new islands with new quests, characters and monsters.
Enjoy new spells, items and weapons.

Note: Yslandia requires an internet connection. The game will be selling for $4.99

Source

This shows the popularity of MMOs in the mainstream and also the popularity of Apple Iphone but that’s besides the point. I cannot wait to get my hands on this new game. I am already very tired of playing civilization on my Iphone although if you haven’t tried it it’s definitely a good buy.

This is a blog reply to Shimmer’s blog on pets entitled Project Update.

Although I consider myself to have limited knowledge on pets, as I have only been playing World of Warcraft since the beginning of our group projects, after playing a month with my warrior character in World of Warcraft, I specifically created a new character, a hunter, just so I could have a pet. I wanted to know what the difference was about having one, and in real life, I never had that family pet so it was interesting to know what it was like having my own (the only difference is that I could revive my pet in WoW if it died, so I guess the hyperflexivity of having a virtual pet was even more fascinating).

To answer some of your [Shimmer] questions as a fellow ethnographer, exploring virtual worlds, as I stated earlier, I was more inclined to change my role in WoW simply because I wanted to have a pet of my own. Choosing to be a hunter to be able to have pets was not only because I thought they looked cute as they ran by with their hunters as they passed my warrior player, but as I started playing with my hunter I realized what an asset it was to have your own personal tank.

For me World of Warcraft is as much fun to play the game as exploring the roles you can take that you may not be able to in real life. As stated earlier, I make reference to having no pets growing up, and having a pet on WoW (as cheezy as this is going to sound) fulfilled that childhood dream a bit. I also noticed that this was more of a reality when I chose cats as my main choice of pet, seeing how many different kinds I could collect including Moonstalkers and Snow Leopards (see pictures below). Cats were my favourite animal as a child so it was interesting to be able to step into the role of being a cat “owner”. It was also fun conversing with other hunters about their pet, especially if it was a cat. If not a great conversation starter, but also a good way to start battles to see who’s pet was the best.

So I guess for me it was a mixture of wanting to gain experience points to satisfy my need of playing the game, as well as the desire to have a cute friend who ran by my side and helped me kill monsters.

I think the best thing about having a virtual pet, specifically a cat, is for those real-world allergies that aren’t applicable in virtual space.

Snow Leopard

Moonstalker

These images were taken from:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Snow_Leopard

http://www.wowwiki.com/Moonstalker