Rufus on WoW LJ had something happen last weekend that I'd be happens to a lot of us players: He was introduced to someone who he had nothing in common with... except that they played World of Warcraft. It happens a few different ways -- sometimes, it's like what happened to Rufus, in that you share a mutual friend who knows you both play WoW. Sometimes, it's just someone (or you) overhearing something about WoW and realizing that you've found a fellow player. And sometimes it's just your guildies -- out of game, you have almost nothing at all in common, but the game has brought you together.
In my experience, it's usually just as awkward as Rufus makes it out to be -- especially when you're brought together by someone else, they have no idea that there are different factions and realms and that there are probably a good nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand people you haven't ever met in game. There are some things that we have in common, obviously -- everyone has died to the Defias pillagers at some point, and almost everyone knows how tough it was getting past Moroes that first time. Sometimes, people can actually come together on these things -- I had a good old friend whose husband and I bonded a little for no other reason than that we both played Shamans.
But usually, especially if introductions are made by a third party, it's just awkward. Have you been in this situation? Did you come away as awkwardly as Rufus did or did you make a new friend thanks to your time in Azeroth?
Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.
WoW Insider's Zach Yonzon posted an intriguing Breakfast Topic yesterday: Who's your favorite playing partner? Readers seemed to enjoy chiming in with a tip of a hat to their own partners in crime. Suspecting that perhaps WoW Insider readers are a particularly chatty and friendly bunch, we wondered what we'd find if we logged in over the lunch hour to chat with random players going about their city business.
So we logged into Khaz Modan, a PvE realm, where we were lucky enough to run into three friendly players who each have their own ways of sharing World of Warcraft (and no, it's not just about progression with a guild of folks you've met in game!). We dodged the gold-sellers in Stormwind's main square to bring you their stories.
I got a call from my mom on Friday night that she was having an emergency and needed me to call.It turns out the emergency was that she bought World of Warcraft and needed some instruction on how to play.Since I was at work, I told her to get started by reading up a bit on the WoW Rookie until I could spend a little more time with her.I was excited and somewhat terrified. I really hope she likes it and doesn't get too frustrated the first week.
My mom isn't what you would call a gamer.I'm not going to tell you how old she is, but she could tell you where she was when Kennedy was assassinated.She's a master Euchre player and a wiz at Scrabble.Her video gaming experience is limited to Bejeweled and online versions of card games.She used to love me watch play Tetris, but would respond like the controller was made of lava when I tried to hand it to her.I invited her to join Dungeons and Dragons sessions, but she always declined.
I moved 2,000 miles from my native Michigan for graduate school about five years ago.Since then my interactions with my mom have been limited to phone conversations and the occasional short visit.I'm really glad to get to share this time with her.
For people who don't play the World of Warcraft or similar games, or do not spend much time on the internet at all, it's difficult to grasp the idea of bonds and friendships formed over the web. How can you be friends with someone you've never seen before? I can understand the inability to grasp such a thing, it's rarely easy to comprehend what you haven't seen or experienced yourself. To those who haven't had powerful friendships over the internet, it makes no sense how you can grow so close to someone you can't see, you can't touch.
Even through the supposed anonymity of the internet, the greatest of friendships can be formed. Bonds so powerful that you never want to let them go, and may change your life forever, for the better. Despite the distance, despite the inability to touch and feel, you can grow as close as family to these supposed anonymous people. These individuals are more than just "internet people." They're people. In the World of Warcraft, a video game, I have found people that have truly changed me. I would not be the person I am today without them.
I've been playing WoW since launch day, and the community I've been a part of in the game has been a constant for all of these years. People have come and people have gone, but for the most part, I've played the World of Warcraft with the same names, the same faces, the same people. I'm 21 now, and I started gaming with this crew when I was 17. I can safely say I've essentially grown up with these people. We reminisce on the old days, and we realize that we've all changed quite a bit since the beginning. We've matured together, we've grown up together. People who have never had this experience, as I said before, don't understand how you can form such bonds over the internet. Some of the greatest friendships I've ever had, and ever will have, have been on the internet. Some people you will never forget, no matter where you met them. This is something I've had to think about quite a bit the last few days.
I've met some really cool people playing World of Warcraft.With the exception of a small handful of my RL friends, most of them are just friendly voices on Ventrilo. I had the opportunity to hang out with a guildie last spring.It was an awesome time.
We had been running lowbies on a new server.We had a Warrior, a Rogue, a Warlock and a Shaman that we were leveling together.All but the Warlock player live in Las Vegas.decided to spend part of his spring break with us.I went to pick him up at the airport holding a sign with his character name on it- probably not the strangest thing you'll ever see at McCarranInternationalAirport. With the exception of a couple dinners out, we spent the entire weekend playing WoW.No casinos, no strip, no shows, no clubs- just WoW.I wouldn't have had it any other way.
All the World's a Stage is a column for cooperative minds, playing with roles every Sunday evening.
Roleplaying a new character can be hard, even for advanced roleplayers. Usually you only begin with the fragment of a character, some vague idea of what you want your character to be like. Even if you have a pretty clear idea of your character already in mind, you may discover that actually playing that role in communication with others causes issues to come up that you never could have thought of all on your own.
Thankfully, roleplaying is a cooperative activity. Unlike PvE and PvP, there is no "versus" in RP. Even if two characters are bitter nemeses, still their characters must cooperate with one another to share an interesting story. Otherwise, they will find themselves "god-modding," or roleplaying in such a way that they don't give one another any room to improvise. (Two god-modders may fight something like this, using custom emotes: "Darkmystery stabs Elfman and cuts out his heart," followed by, "Elfman dodges Darkmystery's sword and then rips his head off," and so on.) These people aren't really roleplaying in the same way that two people shouting at each other in different languages are not really communicating. Roleplaying's very nature requires that each person work together with every other person, or else it isn't really roleplaying at all.
Though the rare "god-modder" can attract a lot of attention, in fact most roleplayers are quite eager to cooperate and assist one another as much as possible. For every one drama queen or king who simply must be the center of attention at all times, there are 5 roleplayers standing in the background listening quietly, wishing that someone else would talk, and 15 more who went off to roleplay their own stories instead. Most roleplayers reach out to each other for support, suggestions, background story ideas, and are more than willing to lend a helping hand in these areas to anyone who asks. Such mutual reciprocity forms the foundation of what roleplaying is all about.
With Patch 2.3 coming next week, a number of players are going to turn back to some of the old alts they've always wanted to play, and level them up now faster than ever before. If a group of friends had decided to start over from scratch, then all is well and good, but for many players who already have character spread out at different level ranges, friends used to spending a lot of time together may suddenly find themselves with a large level gap in the alts they're most interested in.
Especially considering the new and improved dungeon loot, many players will wish their friends could join them. Of course, their friends could just bring over their level 70s and rush them through, but for a certain kind of player, this is less interesting because it takes away all the real challenge and teamwork of the instance. They may be able to find PUGs at that level, but it likely won't be the same.
Douglas at the Elitist Jerks forums has been having this problem for a long time now. He and his friends very much want to play together, but have never been able to make their schedules work out. Before long, their characters inevitably level at different speeds and can no longer level up together. He says he longs for a "mentoring system" like City of Heroes has, where players of different levels can become one another's "sidekicks" and go to dungeons together as if they were at the same level. At first glance it seems like WoW could implement such a system too, to make something like a temporary downgrade or upgrade in ability power and gear quality so that friends could fight together across the level gap. But further discussion reveals some serious problems.
The pulling one is an especially good tip-- decide at the beginning of the run who's going to pull, and then only have that person pull. Can't tell you how many times, someone decided to just pull with an instant spell because they felt like it, and not realizing that another pull was already incoming. And I think the "not wear thy gear in vain" tip is an interesting one, too-- you should putting gems and enchantments on your gear already, just to make your character the best it can be. Seeing it as a way of benefiting the group is a new way of looking at it, but it's true as well.
If everyone followed these tips all the time (and even the best tanks I know sometimes forget to wait for mana), we'd all have better groups, whether they be PuGs, good friends, or raids.
Recently, I wrote a piece called "All guilds are is dust in the wind," and our reader Rihlsul has written a "rebuttal" to it, entitled "5 tips for a long lived guild," for which I am surprisingly quite thankful. Personally I don't see it as a rebuttal at all; rather it complements my overall point, which perhaps I did not express as clearly as possible before. Some people heard me flippantly dismissing guilds as pointless and suggesting that we should hop from one to the other selfishly any time we felt the inclination. To the contrary, my post (as well as my reference to mandala art) has to do with unrealistic expectations, and dealing with the sadness that comes along when your guild hopes don't work out.
The majority of my time in World of Warcraft so far has been in two guilds. Both meant a lot to me, and both broke up because we didn't follow Rihlsul's 4th tip, that as a guild you really need to be doing things together, and that means having common goals in the game. In both cases, different members of the guild changed their minds as to what they wanted to do -- which is perfectly natural, since they gained levels, the expansion came out, and new activities opened up. These were small guilds anyway, and they no longer felt like thriving communities. At first, it seemed as if each guild was a failure.
Playing with friends is probably the most fun you can have in WoW-- while it's fun to solo, a good group is where it's at, and there's no better group then playing with people you know. Unfortunately, because even people who have a lot in common hardly ever level at the same rate, level differences grow quicker than expected, and pretty soon it's just not possible to play with friends without someone wasting their time.
Until friendship shows up anyway. Lev over at WoW Ladies writes about an interesting duo she made with another player-- after joining up for a quest in Winterspring, they've rolled 10 levels together, and even played on their alts. And the weirdest thing is, she's 22 and he's 14, so you don't think they'd have a lot in common, but she says they play together great (she has a younger brother, and she compares their relationship to that). In the comments, someone about her age confesses to being grouping buddies with an 80-year-old person, and someone else tells a story of leveling up 40 levels with someone they met in game.
Makes me kind of jealous, actually-- I've played a long time with the same people at 60 (and now 70), but leveling, I was never at the right rhythm to really grow with anyone else, either in common or otherwise. On my very first character, I played a night elf hunter (duh), and got some help from a night elf priest on how to start playing the game. I still have that guy on my friends list on that realm, and still see him play online, but he outstripped me in terms of levels a long, long time ago (he's 70, and my hunter is stuck in the late 50s). Now, it'd be nice to somehow technically be always able to play with friends (you could have instances that averaged your levels, or just play with premades, which is what I think Guild Wars does), but I think that's just one of the drawbacks of having a leveling system-- unless you only play those characters together, someone will always fall ahead or drop back.
Fubar is one of those addons that I didn't know I needed until I tried it out. It lets you display information in a bar at the top and/or bottom of the screen -- all the numbers and meters that you want to always have handy, without having to click on anything or hover your mouse for tooltips. Fubar itself provides a framework for the Fubar modules (downloaded seperately) to display this information for you -- anything from your durability to your current experience (with rest) to the time of day (both in your time zone and on your server).
I personally find one of its most useful features to be that it can show you how many of your guild mates and friends are online at any given moment, then let you hover your mouse over the number to see a tooltip list, with clickable names for whispers or invitations, just like a regular IM program.
To be honest, I actually tried out its competitor, Titan Panel, long before I had heard of Fubar, and then switched to Fubar because it feels more flexible and lighter on my system. Fubar is made with Ace, which usually helps addons feel smoother somehow; the difference between Fubar and Titan is what made me go looking for other Ace addons. Also, the other thing I love about it... is that it's called "Fubar!" and most of its companion module addons end in "fu", as in "QuestsFu" and "MoneyFu!" I just love my addons with a extra helping of humor sauce.
Ravven at MBAzeroth has a post up about being "solo by nature." She says she leveled to 60 without putting together even one PUG, and except for her guild, she doesn't really chat with anyone else, and definitely hasn't made any friends that she regularly groups with ingame.
My first reaction was that WoW is a social game, and so of course I figured I must have made some friends along the way to 60. But when I think back on it, the only people I really talk to in game or know in any way are my own guildies. I did PUGs pretty often (because I love running instances), but beyond "thanks for the run" I never really had any extra relationship with those people. Even the folks I added to my friends list never seemed to come across my radar again.
Ravven wonders if she's the only one so shy (is shy the word?) while playing what's really a social game, and she wonders what to do about it. I know of noone better to ask than you, dear readers, so what do you think? Do you play the game as if it's a solo RPG, or have you made real ingame friends that you've grouped with regularly? And while I (and Ravven) consider being a guild a different relationship dynamic, is it? What does it take to make friends in game, or should you even bother at all?
Just like you probably are, I'm currently sitting around not playing the game. My realm (T-horn represent!) is in the list of servers Blizzard pulled offline last night and won't put back up until late tonight.
And the complaints on this, as you can imagine, are many and varied. My guild was especially distraught, as we were all excited to run AQ20 this evening. Nimrodel of Earthen Ring isn't really happy that the advance notice Blizz gave was easy to miss. A few of the servers, including Laughing Skull, already had an upgrade-- why are they going through this again? And I can't think of another "upgrade" that caused all of us to lose our friends list. Sure, it's not the end of the world, but it is a little inconvenient at least. And we don't even have the new hunter talents to console us-- although Neth seems very happy to sell books to bored players. Maybe this is all a grand scheme...
There is a silver lining to all this. Drysc has acknowledged that Blizzard will be "providing compensation" for those realms currently undergoing the 36 hour upgrades, although he won't say how much until the maintenance is over (presumably because it may go on even longer than planned). That's nice, but I won't lie-- I'd rather be in AQ. Meanwhile, feel free to come join me in a few spirited rounds of iSketch! Look, I drew a Tauren!
My mom certainly doesn't play any videogames at all, but apparently Malevivs from Eonar showed the game to his mother and got her hooked on it. And apparently other players have had the same experience. Wives, in-laws, kids-- seems like anyone who sees someone playing this game has to pick it up, try it themselves, and be amazed. WoW isn't just addictive-- apparently it's contagious, too.
Or maybe not. Personally, I haven't had any luck at all recruiting anyone to play the game with me. I haven't lived at home for a while, so the closest thing I have to an onlooker is my roommate, and he hasn't shown the slightest interest in it. Even a good friend of mine who really loves videogames (we play Mario Kart DS over the net all the time) hasn't given in, especially after hearing about my many nights spent slaving away to hit 60 more than once..
So is it me, or my family and friends? Have you recruited a family or friend to play just by showing them the game? Then again, I'm not sure I'd want my mom to play at all-- not just because it would be really embarassing to be ganked by her, but c'mon, man-- she's my mom! She doesn't own n00bs, she bakes them cookies!
Rufus on WoW LJ had something happen last weekend that I'd be happens to a lot of us players: He was introduced to someone who he had nothing in common with... except that they played World of Warcraft. It happens a few different ways -- sometimes, it's like what happened to Rufus, in that you share a mutual friend who knows you both play WoW. Sometimes, it's just someone (or you) overhearing something about WoW and realizing that you've found a fellow player. And sometimes it's just your guildies -- out of game, you have almost nothing at all in common, but the game has brought you together.
I got a call from my mom on Friday night that she was having an emergency and needed me to call.
Reader Poga dropped us a line to this article he wrote for his guild about 
Recently, I wrote a piece called "
Playing with friends is probably the most fun you can have in WoW-- while 
Ravven at MBAzeroth has 
Just like you probably are, I'm currently sitting around not playing the game. My realm (
My mom certainly doesn't play any videogames at all, but apparently Malevivs from Eonar 
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