Players on the World of Warcraft forums were debating what the best titles for individual classes or players to have were, as a proxy for prestige and proof of competence. For those that don’t play, World of Warcraft awards you titles such as Deathlord or Kingslayer for accomplishing certain feats in the game. For players…
Content shock, a topic we’ve discussed many times on this blog, is the state where marketers and publishers create more content than any human could possibly consume. We’ve reached content shock already, and the artificial intelligence revolution has barely begun. Warcraft’s Content Shock In the video game World of Warcraft, we’ve had a bit of…
If you’ve played any modern, non-casual games recently, from Halo to Warcraft to Mortal Kombat, you’ve likely seen cutscenes, short videos that help advance the story. Here’s an example of a cutscene from the end of Act I in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor: These cutscenes provide bridges in the story, taking you from…
World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor, introduced an entirely new game-within-a-game called Garrisons. Ostensibly a response to players’ requests for housing for their characters in-game, garrisons changes the Warcraft experience considerably. Now, your character can act as a commander or general to non-player characters called followers, as well as build an entire town.…
A simple infographic illustrates the data quality issue: As always, all things Warcraft are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment. Feel free to share, Warcraft fans.
In World of Warcraft, your characters have special abilities that are used with a mandatory wait between uses, called a cooldown. Some abilities have longer cooldowns than others, meaning that you have to wait longer in between uses, but the tradeoff for a longer cooldown is often a more powerful ability. For example, paladins (like…
A lot of people have wondered and speculated about how to achieve more economic equality, about how to level the playing field so that the 1% don’t continue to dominate the economy. While this is not a comprehensive solution, Blizzard Entertainment may have given us part of the solution. For those who don’t play World…
I started playing Guild Wars 2 last week, and one of the most significant changes as a Warcraft player (and no, I haven’t given up on Warcraft, it’s just that the content for Patch 5.3 ran out REALLY fast) is that GW2 permits you to spend real world currency for in-game currency. You go to…
I finally got to and through the first wing of Throne of Thunder on my Worgen hunter recently, the newest raid in World of Warcraft. One of the most challenging parts of this particular set of raids is that the responsibility for the health of your character and her continued survival isn’t left solely to…
Over the weekend, I finally got around to leveling my frost mage again in World of Warcraft. She’s by far my oldest character, the one I’ve played (and in frost spec) since I first started playing World of Warcraft in 2007. One of the challenges over the years of playing frost is that playing the…
