Warcraft Diary 4: pimp my steed

I've been known to spend way too long playing videogames. I've also been known to spend waay too long on e-bay and the like buying rubbish.

Its pleasing (and also disturbing) to know I can satisy both urges at once.

Yeah: I've started using the Auction house in Warcraft. Money's fairly important in WOW, for the simple reason that as of level 40 , and again at level 60, you're able to buy a mount.Basically a large fast animal that carries you around on its back. Theres a certain amount of prestige in being able to summon your faithful four-legged friend and shoot off into the distance ,while you're poor friends are stuck slogging away on foot.They look pretty cool as well, it's about the equivalent of having a gold-plated beemer while you mates all get the bus.

The problem , however, is that an lvl40 mount costs 80-100 gold, a level 60 costs 900-1000g .Now to put that in perspective , as of level 32 the most money I've had at any one time was.....4 gold.

So the only real way to make the money (bar buying it from illegal chinese "gold farming" companies - yeah seriously - theres companies where a few guys in hong kong or wherever are paid a few pence a day to constantly kill creatures and sell the skins/goodies they get for gold , which inturn the company sells on the net for real money! crazy but true), the only real way is to sell everything in the auction house , with a low starting bid and a high(ish) buyout, keeping an eye on other sellers and trying to undercut them if you can ...it all makes the most vicious ,unbalanced player vs player fights look like a toddlers picnic by comparison.

And then there are the people who take it further, there are Del-boy trotters out there that made there money by just waiting and buying underpriced goods and selling them at a profit without the nasty buisness of killing things to get them, it's almost a game in itself...

Warcraft Diary 3:Territorial Pissings

So , In the month I've been avoiding posting here ,I've been playing "World of Warcraft".

If you've been reading the previous entries you'll be pleased to know that I've gone from being a newbie with all the attacking power of a kitten with athsma and the usefulness of a chocolate teapot, to a vaguely powerful killing machine also capable of healing even the most mortally wounded of team mates,and with the ability to turn into a lion type thing (handy for running away from things )a cheetah (for running away only faster)and a bear type thing (runs away slower but you can take more hits before you die.I've joined a guild (which is like a big team or clan) compulsive treehuggers! I've also spent a lot of time grouped up with other players, and this is where things get interesting..

This is where there things differ wildly from "standalone" gaming , or even online shooters and the like , where there's not very much interaction with other players (other than , well shooting them)
The server I play on , Frostwhisper, has anything from 300- 1000+ players on at any one time .I've been lucky on that most of the people I dealt with have been decent and patient and above all mature.).Also they all tend to speak English for the most part,even though its not their first tongue in a lot of cases.

That's right , the majority of Frostwhisper's players seem to come from Sweden/Norway/Denmark and the Netherlands.Originally Blizzard , the games makers had three groups of games servers , one set for French speaking servers, one for German, and one for English.The rule being that if you didn't speak French or German , then you went to the English speaking servers ,officially used English on the main channels and then unnofficially spoke whatever language you wanted privately.This sounds harsh , but the game itself is almost totally in English (or French/German depending where you bought it)so if you don't speak the language you probably wont be able to play anyway.
Whats happened however is that some servers have become "unnoficial server of country X" .Examples:, the "Warsong" server is almost totally full of Russian players, or "Agamaggan" is highly populated with Spanish players,"Crushridge" for the Italians .Also ,probably because they had no real way of policing it , the powers that be at blizzard europe have now removed the "english only in main channels" rule.Because they're in the majority,the non english speakers revert to their own langage and apparantly harrass anyone who doesnt speak it.

Are they right to do this? Possibly , but its a bit of a kick in the face if you spent time building up a character on say Agamaggan, only for it to be "invaded" by spanish players , and then to be told "this is Spanish server ,no english", whenever you tried to talk in the main channels , or constantly kicked from groups because you were english speaking.You know the way we get "invaded" by spanish students in the summer? Well this is kind of the electronic version of that , except now instead of just filling the bus or roving in packs in town , they're everywhere!*

Both English and non english speakers are pissed off because of this , and looking at the official game forums there's been some fairly vicious and to be honest racist arguments from both sides .The spanish/russians etc want the servers marked as "official" national severs,so that new players can pick (or avoid) them depending on nationality .The English speaking players want once off transfers to new friendlier servers.So far there's been a few server transfers , but nothing major so , we'll have to see how things go
Strangly though ,as I hinted above this problem doesnt seem to happen with the Dutch and Scandinavians no matter how many of them there are:
Example, a user on the WOW boards posted
"Sabur Level 34 Undead Rogue
Realm: Deathwing
_______________________
Agamaggan - High Spanish Alliance population, Moderate Spanish Horde population. Mostly young kids who refuse to party with anyone other than a spanish person and wont speak a word of english. They're so ignorant.

Deathwing - Horde English (I think) or its quite mixed actually.

Soviet Warsong, Where the language speaks you!

Stormscale - High Swedish population on both horde and alliance, few russian. Great server though, the swedes always speak English, because they rule and are my 2nd favourite nationality next to my own!"

...so maybe there's hope for an electronic "Unified Europe" after all

*I've nothing really against spanish students,other than travelling in packs of about three hundred blocking the pavement ,and talking constantly at kango-hammer levels of loudness.But in fairness Irish students are exactly the same, and at least the spanish don't puke up on the pavements so much.Ahh sure were all God's children ..etc etc.