Wednesday, December 07, 2005

WoW Essays

This looks pretty interesting. I found it on Boing Boing this morning. Since I'm feeling lazy, I'll just post their description.
An undergraduate ethnography class at San Antonio's Trinity University was assigned term papers that required students to observe and analyze interactions in World of Warcraft, a wildly popular massively multiplayer online role playing game. All the term papers are online on the class blog, and the cover an impressive variety of subjects, from sexism to customer service, the prisoners' dilemma, gratification in joining guilds, colonialism, and many others. Regrettably, these are only available as PDFs and not as html on the site, but they're still well worth a look.
http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html

Sunday, December 04, 2005

In Other News

To counter my very pissed off post from Friday, here's a more positive update.

Morcarli's hit level 37 now. Only 3 to go before I get my first mount! His blacksmithing has hit about 211, thanks in part to a very generous level 60 character. I was one piece of Iron Ore short of hitting 200, and she kindly gave me three pieces and a piece of Jade. That meant I could hit 200, learn a host of new recipies and use some of the metal I'd been carrying around for ages.

Oh, and I finally got Consecration.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Just What I Needed

Not.

Truthseeker and I agreed today that if we were both online together tonight, we'd team up to deal with Stranglethorn. I'd spent some time there yesterday with another character from the guild, but had to leave pretty abruptly. When I logged on this evening, I noticed he was online again, so I sent him a message apologizing. I also noticed he wasn't in Stranglethorn, so didn't bother asking if he wanted to team up again.

So Morcarli and Truthseeker are running around together, killing basilisk, trying to gather some crystals for a quest. As often happens at peak times, chat messages are scrolling past along with the usual "You receive [Crappy Loot]". I vaguely noticed a LookingForGroup message asking about some quests we weren't doing, but didn't pay any attention since nothing was Blue (party), Purple (whisper) or Green (guild).

Then a very confusing guild message flashes past. Something about "not just for guildies, come on". The next thing I know, Truthseeker and Morcarli specifically, (and the rest of the guild generally) are getting abused for being unfriendly by the guy I'd run around with yesterday. Apparently because we weren't watching where every other guild member was (because we were busing killing stuff without dying) and didn't instantly invite this guy into our group, we were terrible people. I replied that we didn't know he was in the area, and it wasn't like he asked if he could join our group.

Things got worse from there.

He kept ranting about how we were being rude because we'd joined up without him. I explained that we'd arranged it earlier in the day, but apparently that was just another example of the "clique nature" of the guild, were some are invited into groups and others are excluded. He then brings up how yesterday he was "abruptly left" yesterday as another example.

By this point I'm getting a bit annoyed (as is Truthseeker and I'm guessing everyone else in the guild). So I asked him to explain how he thought the guild was unfriendly when I'd given him a blue item a few days earlier. Which he carefully ignored.

I asked him a few times if he wanted to join up with us, but all he seemed able to do was tell us how he'd been better treated by strangers then by his guild mates, and about how he thought maybe he should just quit the guild all together.

By this point, Truthseeker had to go and the "incident" had pretty much ruined any desire I had to play anymore. Since I couldn't quite let it go (because it really did seem like a personal attack again me - I'd been the guy who'd left him yesterday, I was the party leader, and I was the one who'd given away a valuable item to someone I didn't know), I tried to explain once more that since most of us know each other in the real world, we're going to arrange things outside of the game. And that not everyone is always looking for a group - personally, I like to spend most of my time running around by myself. But by this point he'd finally logged off.

Well Spamela, if you can't understand that other people aren't watching your every move just incase they can party up with you, and if you can't be bothered to invite others into a group but expect to be invited yourself, and you think that we're being unfriendly when you're the one abusing us, you probably should leave the guild.

Oh, and can I have the 5 gold I would have got at the Auction House for my glove please?

EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the chat.