The Funeral of WoW Gold

The moment MTV News revealed Microsoft was working on a Mii-like system called Avatars, accusations of copying Nintendo started flying.
That reaction only intensified when the rumors became fact at this year’s E3. Microsoft expected this reaction. At least, that’s what they told me while showing the “New Xbox Experience,” a complete dashboard revamp coming later this year.
“I remember the CES right after the Wii launched and all the [gaming] editors were asking, ‘When are you guys going to do your version of the Miis?,” Xbox director of marketing Albert Penello told MTV Multiplayer in a hotel suite interview two weeks ago. “I remember going, ‘You guys are going to slaughter us in the press if we ever do it.’ [laughs]”
Penello believes there’s enough distance from the announcement that people are looking at Avatars differently now. He even brought up Miis.
“For obvious reasons, it’s certainly hard to avoid the comparison with the Mii,” he admitted. “You know, it’s a tough one, because it’s sort of like giving them maybe a little bit more credit for [it]…it’s not like Nintendo created the concept for having a virtual character.”
“Really, if you think about your gamerscore, your gamertag, your achievements and your identity online, that’s been a principal for us in the beginning,” continued Penello. “Nowadays, this is the kind of stuff people do, and a lot of people want to compare it to the Miis but the team, if you talk to Mark [Whitten, XBL general manager], he’ll say his inspiration came more from ['World of] WarCraft’ and seeing how dedicated people get to their characters.”
The main difference between Miis and Avatars is the range of customization. Nintendo has not released new options for Miis since they launched alongside Wii in November 2006. Avatars are the opposite approach. Microsoft wants players to create a very specific version of themselves, and plans to work with publishers on delivering a constant supply of new content.
“When you have a connected community of 12 million people,” explained Xbox senior strategist Rob Gruhl, “it’s not enough to create an avatar that just kind of looks like you but otherwise looks very generic. You can have an avatar that really communicates your identity in a rich way. When we did our avatar system, we built it as a platform that can handle hundreds of items of clothing and is customizable and is expandable, so that every individual is going to look very different.”
They have a point. The Avatar version of me — they wouldn’t let me take a picture of it — looks much more like me than the Mii version. And one of the areas Nintendo has capitalized on Miis is by incorporating them into most of their first-party releases. What we haven’t seen too much of, however, is Miis present in third-party games. It’s happened occassionally, but third-party Mii support is typically an exception, not the rule.
“What we do is we try and build things,” said Penello. “That’s one of the fundamentals of what Live is — building something at the system level that the developers can incorporate. There’s a bunch of things we’re doing around avatars to make it easy for developers to actually use the avatar that we’ve got right here or to get the data around this avatar and incorporate it into their own game.”
Gruhl went on to explain the two ways a developer could incorporate an Avatar. One, they could literally drag the Avatar into their game and make it an in-game representation of a character. The other way is to simply pull the Avatar’s specific data and allow that to be represented on the screen. You don’t have control over the Avatar; it’s just there.
But I wondered if that meant a violent, mature-rated game like “Gears of War” would never see Avatar integration. Gruhl said it’s possible with a little creativity.
“One area you might see it in a game like that is before the game starts,” suggested Gurhl. “Who are the top five people? I think for a game like ‘Gears of War,’ where it’s not as much of a match of the avatar to an in-game character, you might see developers using the avatar to represent the player behind the character. So if you’re in a scenario where you’re trying to pick which game mode you want, maybe the important thing is to see [who] the other players are and talk to them.”
But with all this talk of customization, gamers might assume and even worry that publishers will jump on this customization feature as an opportunity to introduce more items that they will charge people for. Ultimately, Penello said, what happens with the additional items for the Avatars is up to each publisher. He does think there will be free items, but said it’s not something Microsoft can dictate.
“My hope is that it’s fairly balanced,” he said. “I certainly do not want to see this become: It’s a hundred points for blond hair. [laughs] A lot of that is going to be up to the publishers and sort of how they do it. I think the potential is certainly there. I’m sure it’s going to feel a lot like how the themes and gamer pics feel.”
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How to safeguard your investment portfolio

It goes without saying that these are times of great economic uncertainty. But just when I thought I had adequately factored in the upheaval in the money markets, something happens to throw the whole thing into flux again.
Next week, the new talents and class changes will go live on all realms in World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) , as has been widely anticipated. But included with this patch is the new Inscription profession, which will therefore be available to level up to a skill of 375, before Wrath of the Lich King goes live! Since the raw material for inscription will be herbs (to make inks for scrolls), this will send the price of herbs through the roof. Cash-rich, level 70 players typically have at least one crafting profession already maxed-out at 375 and they will be highly unlikely to drop this because of the exciting new recipes that will soon be available for skills above 375. This means that any 70s wanting to take up inscription will be dropping their gathering profession, and that means they will be buying all their herbs on the auction house.
I had plans in place to drop mining for herbalism and level it to 375 before the expansion in November so that I could make a killing selling herbs to impatient noobs. But now I need to get to
375 in less than a week! If I wait until the expansion, the first rush will already be over and prices will stabilise as everyone gets bored with their Death Knights and runs them round Elwyn Forest picking peacebloom. But if I spend my limited play time picking low level herbs in Arathi and Stranglethorn Vale, I can’t finish levelling my character. I’m stuck at level 65 at the moment and I’ll need to be at least 68 to be on that first wave of pilgrims heading to Northrend in six weeks.
It is for this reason that I shall be appealing to the Chancellor for an emergency cash injection of 50 billion or so. This will allow me to hire a team of bots to pick herbs for me, with enough left over to pay myself a modest City bonus.

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‘World of Warcraft’ competitors are involved in more than child’s play, researchers find

There is more to online role-playing games than pretending to be an elf or an orc and slaying dragons, according to new research from experts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who found that the adventures unfolding in virtual worlds sharpen scientific thinking skills.
UW researchers examined a sample of postings in the online forums of “World of Warcraft,”( Buy wow gold )　 the most popular massively multiplayer online game, to see what the players were talking about.
They discovered that the game encouraged scientific thinking, including using systems and models for understanding situations and using math and testing to investigate problems.
“I do think games in particular lend themselves to sophisticated reasoning because they are interactive,” said Constance Steinkuehler, lead researcher and an assistant professor at UW’s curriculum and instruction department.
“This is not specific to one environment or one specific kind of game,” she said. “People’s play spaces are becoming a spot for intellectual work.”
The findings, published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology, found that 86% of Warcraft players joining in the online forum discussion shared knowledge to solve problems, and 58% used systematic and evaluative processes.
Problem-solving efforts ranged from strategies for difficult “boss” monsters that require dozens of players to defeat, to how to design characters for maximum efficiency, whether it was for combat or support roles.
The study also found that 10% built specific models to explain a scenario or challenge, while 25% of those commenting in the “World of Warcraft” forums built on someone else’s previous argument; and 25% also rebutted early arguments.
That’s no surprise to Jamal Currie of Milwaukee, who plays for a large union of players that is slashing and blasting its way through the most brutal dungeon in the game called “
Black Temple,” which requires 25 players cooperating in concert.
“I get a lot of information on how to play the character and what gear to grab from forums as well as other Web sites,” said Currie, who has been playing the game for about a year.
Currie, who plays a druid in “World of Warcraft,”（U need wow gold ? ） finds himself asked to play several roles, including healing other characters, attacking the target or keeping the enemy trained on him while his teammates do the majority of damage.
For the best results, each role requires a different character configuration that players call a “spec,” in which points are spent among skill trees to enhance various abilities. As the druid class leader for his group of players, Currie needs to stay on top of all of the best techniques and character designs so he can best advise his subordinates.
“You fill in a lot no matter what your main spec is, but you can, of course, spec to anything and play that role pretty well,” said Currie, 37. “I play a healer most of the time but for ‘vacation’ I spec feral cat for high” damage.
The “World of Warcraft” ( Buy wow gold ) forums are filled with information players can mine to find the most useful character designs as well as share the benefits of their own experiments.
As an officer in his online player association — which is commonly called a guild — Currie is privy to the strategy sessions as the rest of the guild’s leadership draws up war plans for that evening’s encounters.
“Everybody has been told maybe the night before or in the week to go to YouTube and watch some of these fights, try and find their class-specific role in the fight and study up on it so we have that much of an advantage,” said Currie, a professional videographer and artist.
Still, guilds are rarely victorious on their first attempts on difficult “end game” bosses.
When figuring out a new boss monster, after a few failed attempts “there is generally some inane chatter, but then it calms down, there is some silence, and then the officers in officer chat start talking about repositioning people within groups.”
Steinkuehler, a gaming academic and experienced player, decided to investigate the “World of Warcraft” forums after discovering a few years ago that the teenage boys in her player association were building mathematical models to find the best ways to defeat bosses in the game “Lineage 2.”
In that game, these players built Excel spreadsheets and input the data they’d gathered about how each boss behaved, including how and when it attacked and what kinds of attacks affected it.
Then they proposed theories about how the boss worked and predicted how to beat it. After initial failures, these players would collect more information, debate how to improve on their strategy, agree on changes and try again.
Steinkuehler says these techniques for uncovering the hidden rules controlling these virtual worlds are the scientific method in action.
“At the time, I was flabbergasted,” Steinkuehler said. “They were building simple mathematical models. I said, ‘Guys, do you realize you are doing science? When I talked to them, they said, ‘no, I am just trying to cheat the game.’ ”
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The 10 million World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold )players around the world will tell you they have no room in their lives for another game.
But that hasn’t stopped competitors trying to capture a slice of the burgeoning massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) market.
After Age of Conan’s failure to attract big subscriber numbers earlier this year, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning last month got off to a much more promising start.
“In just one week we have half a million people playing WAR online, and the ranks of Order and Destruction are growing at a record-breaking pace for a new MMORPG,” says Mark Jacobs, co-founder and general manager of developer Mythic Entertainment.
“We spent years working to provide players with the most stable, epic and polished online world we could but it is the players that have truly brought Age of Reckoning to life.”
Associate producer Josh Drescher says Mythic’s experience with online games such as Dark Age of Camelot was crucial.
“We understood well in advance just how critical stability was to a launch,” MrDrescher says. “If your players can’t log in on day one, you’ve dropped the ball.”
Based on the popular fantasy universe created by the Games Workshop, Warhammer Online has player-versus-player combat on a grand scale.
It borrows many World of Warcraft （ Currency wow gold ） conventions but MrDrescher describes it as a game that’s “competitive and social”, with players having a “measurable impact” on the world.
“You get together with your friends and play. Half of you are on one side, co-operating, the other half are on the other side, competing against you.”
Players invade enemy lands, besiege fortresses and sack sprawling cities for the glory of their realm using deadly weapons and magic.
World of Warcraft “widows” know the demands of some MMOs but MrDrescher says in Warhammer “you can have fun and accomplish things in 30 minutes or less anywhere in the game”.
“If you have a job or a family or friends, you don’t need to abandon them for a video game.”
Mythic has implemented features to encourage social play, including “public quests” in which nearby players share the spoils. Grinding away at complete quests alone will not get you far but there are thankfully no queues.
“Nothing ruins the sense that you’re an epic hero quite like having to wait in a line to fight the dragon,” he says.
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The class gathers in the dry and windswept wasteland known as the Barrens. A level 15 Tauren Druid, their professor, leads his students -a collection of elves, gnomes and shamans- on a quest to hunt down the dreaded hyena-men called Gnolls.Yes, this is a real class. It takes place on the planet Azeroth in the World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) . The name of the course is Video Games, Communication and Culture. Taught by Professor Christopher Paul, the class explores how video games shape individual interactions and social practices. One of the course requirements mandates students meet online to play the videogame World of Warcraft for two hours every week. World of Warcraft, or WoW, is the world’s most popular and largest multiplayer online game, which can support millions of players across multiple servers simultaneously. More than 10.9 million players subscribe to WoW each month. The fourth edition of the game has 70 levels and multiple universes. A copy of the game was the only required “text” for this course.”You wouldn’t teach a class on film without watching movies, and you couldn’t teach a class on literature without giving students books to read,” Paul said. “We’re playing the game to get an anchored insight into the world of video games.”Paul chose to teach the class due to personal and professional attraction. “It is something I was interested in and something I think is very relevant to our current age,” he said. Students enrolled in the class for various reasons. “It fulfilled a requirement for my major, and the title was interesting,” said Rita Morales, a senior communication major. “Even though I always thought online games were sort of nerdy, it sounded like a fun class.” Senior literature major Cody Shepherd saw videogame studies as an extension of his work in creative writing.”I am definitely going to use what I learn in this class in the future,” he said. “I might do a graduate studies program in this area.”Early in the course students read several articles that covered the history of video games and addressed why this aspect of modern culture should be more closely examined.This year, Paul will attend the Association of Internet Researchers conference in
Denmark, where he plans to present an academic research paper on World of Warcraft. ( Buy wow gold ) His work examines the psychological model behind videogames.”Due to the cultural signifiers associated with video games, sometimes this class is expected to be easy,” he said.But Paul stressed the challenging nature of the class.”I think it’s just as rigorous, if not more rigorous than any other class at this level,” he noted. In addition to playing World of Warcraft, Paul requires students to complete regular readings and take exams. Paul also recommends his students play WoW outside of the scheduled class meeting times. If addiction arises as an issue for a student, he said, “This class offers a channel in which they can speak about it.” “It is addicting in the same way any interest is addicting,” Shepherd said. Shepherd explained that due to the complex nature of the game, players often have to devote multiple hours to progress. The longest consecutive time he has spent playing WoW was 18 hours.For some students who did not hold prior interest in world of warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) , the class granted them new insights into the past and present world of gaming. “I really liked learning about the history of video games,” Morales said. “I had no idea it went back so far.” As someone who did not identify herself as a gamer, she noted the class provides insight into a completely different culture.For the next six weeks, Morales and her fellow classmates will explore that culture, both here and on Azeroth.
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