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World of Warcraft For The Win
In a press release from their website, Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft has won. Or, more specifically, that the game "has surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China - just a month following the game's commercial launch on June 7, 2005. The critically acclaimed World of Warcraft has now achieved another significant milestone as the largest MMORPG in the world, with more than 3.5 million global customers." Relatedly, Gamespy's OnLife column this week centers around the WoW duping story that we touched on earlier. From the article: "Needless to say, many players are a bit incensed that Blizzard isn't taking this as seriously as they feel it should. Others, though, are convinced that there isn't any duping actually going on. It's an urban myth, they say, which gullible forumites are unwittingly perpetuating."
It costs ~0.055USD an hour to play. (http://www.blizzard.com/press/chinapatch.shtml)
From blizzard:
"Only players who have purchased an authorized CD key will be able to activate their accounts and enter the game. Each CD key costs 30 Yuan/RMB and can be purchased with a World of Warcraft Points Card. Point Cards also cost 30 Yuan/RMB and can be used at a rate of 9 points per hour (0.45 Yuan/hour) to play World of Warcraft."
Yeah, it's killing Rockstar. And are you aware of how many MMPORGs crash and burn, and how much more they cost to make compared to a regular game?
There's a large gaming market of people like me - people who want to game ~5-10 hrs/week, which isn't enough time to become expert at a game, and who want to have fun without treating a game like a job. I have a job - that's what I'm escaping with the game. I also don't want to subscribe to a damned game.
Put that together and single player games have a lot of life left in them.
That's an interesting point about the artifacts in the screenshot. At first I thought you might be mistaken and that they might just be normal artifacts of the way WoW renders the auction frame so I went into the game and did a screenshot of an auction frame. The artifacts do not show up there: the background texture is continous between auction items and not tiled the way it appears in the screenshot nor does it change abruptly after the last item.
This screenshot does in fact appear to be a hoax.
Actually, for many of these Chinese, playing WoW is their job. Read up on any WoW forums about the "sweatshops". Excerpt:
In the average sweatshop you have 1 person manning 2 or 3 computers. The first 1 or 2 computers is a charecter being ran by simple macros(and looting programs) requiring minimal player interaction, farming scarlet monestary for example. The final one is usually a level 60 rogue farming difficult mobs, such as the elites in tyr's hand. ( If you go to tyr's hand on any server you will find about 5 to 10 rogues farming 24/7, all chinese)
The biggest issue with the chinese farmer sweatshops where players get payed 37 cents an hour to farm gold, is that there are always employees that speak english near by. These employees who have a degree in english have 3 main functions.
1.) Sell items to players in IF/ORG trade.
2.) Assist other employees with player interaction.
3.) Respond to GM tells.
It's amply clear you have NO idea how World of Warcraft works, or indeed most other MMORPGs. So I'll cover WoW since it's the one relivant to this /. article and the one I'm playing right now:
No matter how much money you spend on your character, you will never be uber. Period. There are monsters, lots of them, that you will not be able to kill by yourself. Doesn't matter how much of anything you bought, you can have the best equipmetn in the game, you still will die to them in less than 5 seconds. There are monsters that require 40 people to kill, not only that, they require those 40 people to be a cross section of different classes, and to be well coordinated. If you fail to properly execute your strategy, you die.
Now speaking of buying of items, you cannot buy the best items in the game, for any amount of money. Many items in the game, including all the most powerful, bind to your charater when picked up. That means you can never give them to someone else. So you actually have to go out and do the necessary steps to get the item.
And there are no scrool of instant death, or anything like that. No matter how powerful you get, other players will always be a challenge for you. Even low level ones. I've seen a mob of level 10-20 players whack a level 60 player. He killed quite a few of them, but they won in the end. No such thing as irresitable superiority.
Speaking of death, it's no big deal. They don't kill you and you're done, they kill you and you are able to come back after a bit, and keep playing. You don't lose your character or anything.
They are fun, a lot of fun, and though cheating happens some times, generally those that do get their asses banned.