Tal's+MMORPG

The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that I will be researching is the World of Warcraft (WOW). The World of Warcraft is a subscription-based game and costs about $15.00 a month to play. I will be playing the game for free from a 10-day trial that my partner Kerry sent me. Before I began to play though, I found an infographic off of the website Digg about the game that contains some very interesting facts. The sheer size of the fan-base of this game is unbelievable as well as the huge layout of the game.

One of the very first things that you have to do in the game is choose what realm you want to be in. The realm is the location in the virtual world and each realm is typically one server. For faster game play, you want to choose a location that is closest to you (between the 3 locations of United States, Oceanic, and Latin America).

There are 4 different types of realms to choose from, each one differing in the style of game play. The "Normal" realm is PvE (Player vs Environment) and is a style that focuses more on interacting with the environment and the other characters more and less on actual battling (players can still battle if both agree). The PvP (Player vs Player) realm has more to do with battling with the other characters and land is divided between the Alliance faction and the Horde faction. The RP (Roleplaying) realm focuses more on actual role playing and developing a back story with the characters. Roleplaying PVP is a mix between role playing and battling. I chose normal because I thought that it would be a much easier style to play around with as a beginner to the game.

Here is the screenshot of me creating my avatar. There are two different factions: the Alliance and the Horde. There are 10 races within the game (5 for each faction) and then classes within those races.

My avatar - named TeeMackin faction: Alliance race: Night Elf (look at screen shot for qualities of Night Elf) class: Rogue (look at screen shot for qualities of Rogue)



Upon entering the Darrowmere realm, I saw a large group of characters congregating and socializing. I would like to note that I had not looked at any tutorial online about the game or find any information about the controls. I was wandering around the realm without a clue of the game or how to level up. I was thinking I had to ask others in the game about what to do but I didn't even know how to chat with them. Eventually, after pressing some buttons on the keyboard, I found out that the "Enter" key was the control for public chatting (in contrast to the private chat option) and I began to ask questions about what I need to be doing as a new player. One of the players said that I should go to one of the "quest givers" to receive a quest. A quest in the game is a mission basically and after completing it you receive experience points and items. The accumulation of experience points is what allows your character to level up.



This is the screen shot of me receiving my first quest from the quest giver Conservator Ilthalain. My objective was to kill 4 Nightsabers and 4 Thistle Boars. The quest took me a while because one, I did not know how to use my weapons and two, I did not know where to find Nightsabers or Thistile Boars or even what they looked like. Eventually I figured it out and completed the quest which allowed me to level up.



This is another quest that I had completed for which I had to give 10 sacs of webwood venom to the quest giver shown above. As the picture shows, I received 368 experience points as well as a reward (thistlewood dagger).



The economic system based in the game is made up of numerous items such as bug eyes, weaponry, food....There are many vendors throughout the game that you sell the items to, or buy items from using copper, silver, and gold coins. The bottom right corner of the picture above shows my character's backpack and the items inside.