In the process of this course, and from experience gained while playing Aion, I’ve found that much of the play in MMOGs could almost be considered multi-player if we were to place them on a console system pre-dating Xbox live and Playstation network.

Even from the early levels co-operative play is encouraged through many quests in order to make it easier for players to achieve the goal and survive through it’s entirity. This is of course most obvious through the guild system, which if caught onto early enough in the game can be of a huge help to the noobs and other low level players trying to complete the early quests, or negotiate the PvP zones.

On the other hand, I, like many other new player I encountered, did not manage to find my way into a legion until after the main low level quests. Initially this was a problem, repeatedly dying as I tried to time my runs with those around me, until I discovered the ability to make groups. It seems these impromptu groups, sometimes led by a higher level or more experienced avatar, and a common feature in many MMOGs, are genuine life savers for noobs in these runs; the collective play they demand ensures everyone makes it through to complete the quest.

For me these groups not only got me through the quest but also found me high level contacts and taught me skills I would need to play my class in the future. Did any one else find that as a guild free player these groups were around to help or is it a chance event?

Now that the class is over and the papers have been handed in I wondered how many people will continue to play games online. A large majority of the class had little experience with online universes. In my own investigation I looked at SL. SL became my main area of ethnographic study and as time went on I avoided it because it didn’t feel like entertainment anymore and instead it felt like real work. Before the class I had a WOW account and I will continue to play on it because I enjoy the game. What are other people still playing or letting go? And if you are letting go of a game, are you keeping in touch with people you met there?

A bunch of my friends began playing OGame about five years ago. I wanted to start playing, so I could be included in the fun. I became very competitive within the game and joined one of my friend’s alliances.  I played this game for about a year but got tiresome of it. I was trying to find a new game that I haven’t played before on a free MMOG websites, and stumbled upon OGame again. I went to try and log into my account but my account has been inactive for too long that it was deleted. I signed up for a new account. I talked to one of my friends and got him into it again as well.

I chose to be in the Andromeda Galaxy (server). Once a new member you are automatically assigned Homeworld as your planet’s name. I decided to change my planet’s name to JeezyLand. My coordinates for my planet are 1:394:4. The diameter of my planet is 12,800 km and I have used up 6/163 of the space on my planet already with mining facilities and solar energy buildings, etc. The temperature of my planet is about 62 – 102 degrees Celsius.

OGame is a MMORPG. All OGame universes consist of three classifications: galaxies, systems, and planet slots. All universes have 9 galaxies, each with 499 systems, which have 15 planet slots. Sending fleets between different galaxies takes the longest time, whereas sending a fleet within the same system takes the least time. Each player starts with one planet at a randomly assigned coordinate between slots 4 and 12, in a random system and galaxy. The first planet always consists of 163 fields, which determine how many building upgrades can be built on the planet, regardless of the slot in the player’s system. The player’s empire can consist of up to 9 planets in any unoccupied planet slot. All construction, research, and missions are performed and launched from a planet or moon. Development is done through using three resources:  metal, crystal, and deuterium, and also energy and dark matter. There are different ways to obtain these resources, including mining, trading, and raiding. Players are ranked according to their points, with one point awarded for every one thousand resource units invested in a construction, research, ships, or defense.

In the game there are facilities that assist in building your planet. Robotics Factories provide construction robots to aid in the construction of buildings. Each level increases speed of the upgrade of buildings. In the Shipyard creates all types of ships and defensive weapons. The Research Lab is required in order to conduct research into new technologies. The Alliance Depot supplies fuel to friendly fleets in orbit helping with defense. The Missile Silos are used to store missiles. The Nanite Factory is the ultimate Robotics technology. Each level cuts the construction time for buildings, ships, and defenses, and since I just began the game and do not have the right facilities or resources for this facility I am 3 weeks and 4 days away from building this factory. The last facility is the Terraformer, which increases the usable surface of planets.

One downfall I forgot about this game was how long the wait time is for building and retrieving resources. When I went to build a metal mine (used to extract metal ore, metal mines are of primary importance to all emerging and established empires), the wait time was 12 minutes. Once the metal mine was complete, I again, had to wait until I had enough metal ores (waiting for my hourly metal income) to proceed with improving my planet. I remember when I used to play this it was slow to begin with but once you created a fleet and build your planet the game begins to pick up. It also depends on what you are expanding will increase or decrease the wait time. Many of the preciously mentioned facilities and fleets can be very time consuming for them to build and implement. Waiting for your resources to build up to the necessary metal ores, can be accomplished faster if you want to use real currency to buy dark matter. Dark matter is the in-game currency used in OGame. You may use your credit card or pay pal to purchase the Dark Matter.

Within the game you can change the production of the resources by changing the production percentage of each resource. This allows you to redirect energy to a specific resource. You need energy to build resources. Insufficient energy will slow down the time it takes to build a resource. Thus, you must continuously keep track of your energy and possibly build more solar plant if needed and if you have the correct amount of your resources to build it as well.

In the 24 hours that I have played this game I have leveled up to level 5. I have become addicted again. It is a fun game to escape reality.  I feel I can build my planet and be the best in the galaxy. Eventually I will want to steal from other players, to expand my planet into hopefully more than one. Even though the wait is very slow, it gives me time to do other real life tasks throughout my day without feeling that I am missing in-game play. This game is more about keeping up with the game rather then sitting on your computer hours on end, which I do enjoy. It is a game where I make the time when I want to make the time.

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.

After hours of downloading and waiting, I finally got to register and create my avatar from the options that I was provided with…gender, race, type, hair style, skin colour, piercings, type of face. Then finally, giving my avatar a name -Evelynna – human rogue.

I tried to make my avatar look as close to me as I possibly could because it is essentially me in the virtual world. When in ‘in world’ and interacting with other players, I don’t try to be someone else. It’s tough to do in the long run…your true personality always comes through somehow.

After I clicked on ‘enter world’, my screen went black. After a few seconds I arrive in world…There were trees around me, green lush grass everywhere, infected wolfs walking around and players slaying them. I didn’t do much; I mostly walked around, explored the area, and watched other players do their quests or raids.

I figured out how manoeuvre my avatar around the world, how to jump, move forward, move backward move the camera to a different angle using the mouse or the keys. I also figured how to chat, how to send whispers although on the trial version I can only send whispers to players who have me on their friend’s list, I was kind of disappointed, I was also not able to yell on trial version. I guess they would have restrictions on trial versions. But I was fooling around with some of the other things you can do like wave, act shy, blow a kiss, salute, dance, etc which I thought was kind of neat. I tried them all and I’m pretty sure everyone around me thought I was crazy.

Trying to ask a question is difficult, because you can be standing there for hours yelling your question out but no one will stop to answer. Some players simply walk away when you ask them for help or they’d just laugh at you and run away.

The world of warcraft has accumulated a ridiculous player population exceeding that of a number of small countries. This is a result of the general accessibility offered both by the mechanics of the game as well as the player community. Due to this, a large number of people who would not normally play mmorpgs have become heavily involved in the world of Azeoroth. This provides an interesting contrast in the community of WoW in comparison to other mmorpgs that are played less by the “non-geek” population.
The huge number of people who play WoW has resulted in a decrease in the stereotype applied to players. Unlike other games a person who plays WoW is not automatically classified as a nerd or rather it would be better to say they are classified as less of a nerd. This is interesting when compared to people who play other games such as EVE online or Star wars galaxies who are immediately assumed to be huge nerds.

The vast majority of games that incorporate an online element also support the development of thriving online communities both online and offline. While this is true for most genres one example that has a striking lack of online community is the genre of first person shooters. One of the most popular series within this genre is the call of duty games. While a huge number of people play this game there is relatively little social activity within and outside the game world. I believe this is a result of a lack of a social place within the game such as a city or town square where players can gather. When a gamer is playing a first person shooter they are almost always actively playing the game so as well as a lack of a social space these games often lack a sufficient amount of downtime in order to facilitate the level of social interaction observed in online games of other genres.
In addition to a lack of social space these games also limit the interactions between to players. While game modes within first person shooters often require some form of coordination and teamwork at the casual level of gaming the communication present within the game is usually extremely limited.

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?

As part of my contribution to our group project, I had decided to look into Lord of the Rings Online. I knew several people that played the game already and all spoke highly of it so it had been on my radar for some time. This course and its recent change from a subscription model to free-to-play with micro-transactions provided the impetus for me to finally get around to checking the game out. Sadly, it wasn’t until after a 7 hour download time. 10 gigabytes of data takes a long time to download.

Setup was uneventful and within minutes of install I was in the game and creating a new character. Each character class and race has a little in game video to provide you with some information on their strengths and weaknesses although it was a little disappointing to see just how low resolution these videos were. In the end I wound up with a Human Guardian; a basic tank style warrior who focuses on defensive abilities.

I’m not new to this style of game, so it took only a few moments to familiarize myself with the controls and I was soon off exploring the starting area. The first thing that got me was the number of people around and the weird disconnect with the lack of sound. This was the oddest thing I ran into. Seeing so many people, but not being able to hear any of them makes the game world feel dead. The chat box was full of people asking questions and chatting, but text doesn’t replace sound for drawing you into the game.

After a few hours the main experience I took away is that no matter what game you are playing, the tutorial quests are always boring. “Go kill 30 spiders for me!” is not my idea of good quest design, especially when it is repeated ad nauseum with varying creatures replacing the spiders. I had to get out of that area and find something more interesting to do! It was time to graduate from the starter area.

The capstone quest was more entertaining as plot related quests tend to be, but what was really interesting was what happened as soon as I re-entered the world. Two people were just finishing a fight so I stopped to watch. Soon enough it ended and the two players went their separate ways, one off into the distance and the other straight to me to challenge me to a fight! My opponent was the same level so I was feeling moderately confident that I could beat him. I accepted his challenge. It was going quite well until he healed himself, something I had yet to figure out how to do as I hadn’t found need of it yet. I lost, but my opponent congratulated me on a good fight and went off in search of more people to fight. It was an odd experience.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next couple hours as I found myself performing more menial tasks and killing X numbers of Y enemies for people I didn’t care about. At one point I found myself wandering in a forest and stumbled upon a bandit camp that would have been beyond what I could handle alone. A passing Hunter offered to join me. He was considerably above my level, so he ended up killing most of the enemies while I did what I could to help out. With the area cleared, we headed back to the nearest village when he stopped me and made an offer of gear to help me out. Free stuff is free stuff, so I took him up on his offer. He had stuff that was of no use to him, but was still considerably above the level of equipment I had at the time, even if the pants looked kinda fuzzy and were bright neon orange. After passing me this bounty of goods, he parted with an offer to look him up when I leveled up some more when I could finally start running skirmishes, which were instanced combat zones.

After his departure I looked at the clock and realized just how long I had played and decided it was time to quit for the day. It was moderately fun while it lasted, but I really couldn’t see myself paying monthly for such an experience and didn’t touch the game again until a month later when I had to get down to the business of finding people who were willing to be interviewed for the group project.

I had thrown myself into the game, but unlike the kings of man, I was not tempted by thoughts of power and riches. Turbine’s one game client to rule them all just didn’t have the same magical pull to keep me interested past that first day.

When I log in to EVE Online at the beginning of a long and potentially gruelling session I try to learn something new that I didn’t know about the game already. Since I know very little, finding such things is not normally a hard endeavour and more often than not, they are very obvious to even slightly seasoned players. Today I logged in and learned that each station has its own separate storage. Therefore you cannot access items stored in any given space station from another station. Lame. I then link up with my corp-mates who are online and we decide what we want to do today. We decide to go into a few low sec areas and see if we can stir up some trouble…..just for the heck of it. Actually just for the potentially massive amounts of minable materials available in the various asteroid belts in these low sec systems. There is significant risk involved with this mission but we are a mining corporation; what else would we risk getting blown out of the sky for?

Keep in mind I am a noob when it comes to EVE. In fact, EVE is my first MMO experience altogether. Most of what I did this day was a result of my far more experienced corp-mates telling me what to do. As such when all five of us decided to enter the first system they asked that I stay behind and jump in last to avoid getting pwned by the lurking gang of NPC pirates we knew was just on the other side of the stargate. To all of our surprise, when the stronger players jumped in there were no pirates to be found. I joined them and we made a beeline for the asteroid belts. There were no pirates there either. Strange. We mined the belts until we could carry no more, dropped off our load and then repeated. Many times. Each time we found no pirates. It was incredibly tedious. The other players made comments about how some pirates were so high level-wise that they could wipe out are entire flotilla without thinking. We saw none.

We came to one of the last systems we were going to raid. In the first asteroid belt we found our first NPC pirates. One of the strongest of us, lets call him MinerFreddy, destroyed them easily. I never saw any actual combat. However, in the next belt we found a lurking PvPer who had a massive ship and an obviously large amount of firepower. He destroyed three of us including MinerFreddy within the space of five seconds. Surprisingly, I managed to warp out and seek refuge in the system’s station. We reconvened after the PvPer had left which took a great deal of travel time. Actually, this entire day I have described to you so far was easily composed of at least 75% travel time. EVE is HUGE. Getting from place to place takes planning and patience.

Fortunately, my task in my group was to explore grinding/playbour in EVE. I picked the right game. I know have a wealth of data on pretty much nothing but player thoughts, feelings and examples of grinding.