July 23, 2007

Busy work

I play World of Warcraft (W0W). It has largely taken the place of TV for me. That is to say instead of plopping down on the couch. I'll log in and visit the people online. It's more social and with all the bad shows on TV (American Idol, Survivor, that housewives show, etc.) I am not missing much.

Some people I work with have been getting together recently. So I have been meeting up with them on a different server then my usual haunt. Blizzard, the company behind warcraft has 210 different servers (realms) with identical worlds. They would put up a new server when the others got full. With 8 million accounts you could see why they would need multiple worlds.

It is a Sword and Sorcery setting and you design a character to play or portray. You start out doing tasks and gaining abilities and learning about the history past and current, along the way. Warcraft has a fairly deep storyline that goes back various incarnations of the game. You do not need to know the 'Lore' to play but I find it does add to the Entertainment.

Anyways, my new character is a rogue, they sneak around, pick-pockets, open locks and do a bunch of sneaky attacks that build up. I am on a Player versus Player server (PVP). Which means you can find yourself under attack by players of another faction. In WoW there are two factions. The evil, imperialistic Alliance, and the noble, accepting yet rough Hord.

Recently I have been upgrading gear as I have outgrown my old set. So I have my character travel to various points in the world and gather items then find someone with the skills to make the leather armor and daggers. As you gather up various stuff you can put it up for sale in a server wide auction house. The build in economy means you buy, sell and trade for items that you cannot or willnot get.

It can be quite a bit of busywork. Or you can ignore most of that and just plod along. In the course of 30min you can log on, do some stuff, laugh with some people and log off. I find it much more satisfying then sitting alone on the couch trying to find something worth watching on the Tube.

1 comment:

Tina said...

I'm not a big fan of PvP. People are just too mean and it takes away my enjoyment of the game.

Plus, I get freaked out enough just by guards for the opposite side that can come & kill me - and they are actually pretty easy to avoid unless you're distracted (by, oh, critters trying to kill you).

I'll stick to the nice, safe role-play servers where I'm only PvP if I choose to fight the other side.