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?

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

Monster Hunter has a lots of impressive animals, beast and dragon. Some of them are small and animal-like but most of the are dragon type monster. Obviously, they have high attack and high defense and some of them can fly. The goal of hunters is to kill the monster and collect monster material to craft a better armor and weapon for next challenge. There are difference damage effect, for example: If hunter focus to hit on the dragon’s head, the horn/eyes/nose would be highly damaged and would drop rare item.

There are about 10 species of monster and  over 100 difference monster . The 10 species are:

-Herbivore, Lynian, Neopteron, Pelagus, Piscine, Carapaceon, Bird Wyvern, Beast Wyvern, Wyvern and Elder Dragon.

In the following, I will show the 5 strongest monsters under the categories of the first 5 species .

1. Herbivore – Popo

The Popo is the largest and the strongest herbivore found living in the Snowy Mountains. Hunters often hunt for their meat and tongue to make foods and potions. Although they look big and tough but they are docile and will run for life when one of their member under attack by hunters or when a Wyvern enters their inhabit area.

2. Lynian – King Shakalaka

The King Shakalaka are normal Shakalaka thatwear mask, club and has fire on the top of the mask. They are the leader of the Shakalaka and inhabit in the area Forest and Hills, they may look cute but in fact- they are tough. King Shakalaka is consider to be a semi-boss in game, they are strong and can do a large sum of damage to hunters. It is more difficult to fight them in group because the normal Shakalaka would cause distraction while the King Shakalaka will throw fire ball to hunters. King Shakalaka ‘s mask can use to craft ” Armor Sphere, Hard Armor Sphere and Royal Armor Sphere”.

3. Neopteron – Queen Vespoid

Vespoid is the strongest in the Neopteron, although they are they strongest in the Neopteron species but they are weak and nobody. However, they are hard to aim and would cause paralyze to hunter and their body parts are useful in making paralyze trap.

4. Pelagus – Golden Rajan

Golden Rajang is a minotaur-like beast with two large horns on its head, they are strong and can release electric in their body system. Unlike normal Rajang, Golden Rajang are rarely see in wild due to their lonesome style. The most notable ability is to shoot electric beam from its mouth and many hunters hate to encounter Golden Rajang due to their power, speed and aggression.

5. Piscine – Red Lavasioth

Red Lavasioth is large Piscine Wyvern , living in the volcano and  lava area and resistance of fire attack. They have hard rock scales to protect them, which means they have high defense power. They can swim in lava and would give a sudden attack, they throw fireballs and meteors, they can also jump and slam themselves on the ground to attack hunters. They also do “Sliding U turn” attack with their tails to stun hunters, they are tough and hard to kill but the Lavasioth scales, teeth and fins can be use to craft  Red Lavasioth armor which called the “Red-Volganos armor” and “Lava-long Sword”. These armor gives hunter a high defense and flame resistance, the Lava-long Sword consists high fire element attack. The are one of the hunter’s favorite.

The pictures shows “Red-Volganos Armor” and “Lava-Long sword”.

P.S the remaining 5 species will be show and discuss in “Beast-Dragon-Monster part 2″

S0, it has been 2.5 months since we started this class. I’ve been working on my game, asking questions about pets. I’m asking WoW players about pet collection in 3 categories: hunter pets, mounts and vanity pets. My goal is to understand why we collect pets. Is it for achievements? Or is it because they just look so damn kool? My results so far have not exactly cleared that up.

Some players say they collect hunter pets based on their function (some pets are tanks, some deal good damage and some do both). Others claim they keep only one or two hunter pets, saying they do the job.

Regarding mounts, some players are collecting them for the achievements “Mountain o’ Mounts”. Others collect based on the looks or speed of a mount. Rare mounts seem to be a huge goal among players. That goes for hunter pets as well (e.g. spirit beasts).

As for vanity pets, most people are collecting them based on the achievements (“shop smart, shop petsmart”, “plethora of pets” etc). However, I am finding a fair amount of people who collect them based on looks and cuteness (even Nardi commented on how cute the pets in WoW can be in this weeks readings).

So, I still have a ways to go. I need to find out why people generally collect these pets  (I know I collect them for a combo (looks and achievements).

Photo above shows a variety of  vanity pets players can collect (with worgs and spiders thrown in). From masterofwarcraft.net

For more on hunter pets, visit http://wow-petopia.com/

For more on vanity pets, visit http://www.warcraftpets.com/

For more on mounts, visit http://www.warcraftmounts.com/

Well, good luck on your projects! I’m headed to bed!

Monster Hunter Frontier is an online MMORPG on the PC  with a great amount of new weapons, quests, armor, and monsters. The purpose of the game is to gang up (MAX 4 Players in one gang) and fight against giant monsters, kill them, peel their skins, take their parts and craft own armors and weapons.

Monster in this game is definitely the  boss, you can find may kinds of creatures.  There are 10 categorizes of creatures appear in this game, you will find creatures from Herbivore to Hugh Dragon.

Quests is available in the quests board in the village (only one village in game).  There are approximately 100 – 150 quests in total, the difficulty of the quests can be identified by Hunter star, the more hunter star the quests required, the harder and tougher the monster in the quests.

Weapons and Armors customization is critical, players can upgrade  weapons from bottom to top or craft deadly weapons with rare raw materials. Players can get raw materials from all the monster, the harder the monsters, the better the loots.

Usually 1 full set of armor (Head – Body – Arms – Legs) required about 10 piece of raw materials from the monster while each loot only give player 2 -3 raw materials. It is because the dragon in this game is extremely  tough to kill and  many players were gang up to fight big monsters several times to get suitable loots.

Weapons selection, creation and customization is one of the popular features in game, the are 13 types of weapons available, each has its advantages and disadvantage and are required to collect raw materials from dragon to craft.  Players can choose from sword and shield, hammer, lance, arrow, crossbow, cannon………..etc.

This game is tough, the only way a players can learn is from trial and error in their huntings. Monster Hunter is designed to be played with other people. Finding friends to play the game with offsets the intimidating difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to swap items.  Large numbers of quests, weapons and armors customization made the game incredibly durable which made this game a best seller in Asia.

A Day on Atys
After an hour of downloading the game, I was finally able to enter the world. Unfortunately, my extremely old laptop could not handle the graphics and so I was forced to put everything on low quality. Then we were talking! I had to get used to the navigator in the top right off my screen to figure out where I needed to go. I chose to be a magician I love my magicians. I always pick sorcs or wizards or magicians or mages So, I chose a wizard girl (Matis?).   I got a few quests done and this really iritating guy was crying and when I went to help him I got ambushed but they were pansies and I wooped them:) I saw some kool animals that looked kind of like pigs and deer. I wanted one But I can’t have them as pets! Only kill them or use them as mounts.  There’s tree roots in the sky which is really interesting! I love it. Over all an interesting experience.

Greetings fellow WoW players. Are you in need of pets? You know, those cute little companions that follow you around but don’t help you in battle? Well, I can help you get them! Valkrye sells certified, health check, non-puppy milled pets for a decent price! You can find my pets in the auction house on the Twisted Nether realm. Enjoy and happy shopping!