World of Warcraft: Encyclopedia - World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft (commonly abbreviated as WoW) is a race/class-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the 4th game in the Warcraft series, excluding expansion packs and the cancelled Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans. The Warcraft games are set in the eponymous Warcraft Universe, a fantasy setting introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. World of Warcraft is set four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. As of December 2005, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular MMORPGs in the world, with more than five million active subscriptions. This level of popularity eventually led major MMORPG developers such as Sony Online Entertainment to re-think the way they are making games, even changing the gameplay of their past successful titles.

World of Warcraft - Virtual community

World of Warcraft - Community

In addition to playing the game itself and conversing on discussion forums provided by Blizzard, World of Warcraft players often participate in the World of Warcraft virtual community in creative ways, including fan artwork, comic strip style storytelling or even recording songs devoted to deleted NPCs such as Captain Placeholder.

Another popular phenomenon in the community is a video starring a player named Leeroy Jenkins, intended to provide publicity for Leeroy's guild. Leeroy's popularity is even present in other games, such as Guild Wars, where an NPC named Kilroy Stonekin rushes into battle, disrupting a perfectly good plan, while yelling his name in a direct reference, and in Adventure Quest, where a direct tribute to Leeroy Jenkins is replayed by players in the Vamprook Spyre. Also, there is a similarly reckless Arachnos Soldier NPC in the game City of Villains by the name of "Jenkins". In an amazing sign of the prevalence of the Jenkins joke, he was even part of a clue on the November 16th, 2005 episode of the TV game show College Jeopardy!.

On some servers and to a lesser extent, YTMND, this has become a popular meme. There are various other memes, including "Face Melting", a reference to a very long thread on the priest forums on the World of Warcraft website which consisted of players saying "You will melt faces as a Shadow Priest in PvP" in different ways. These memes gain notoriety through postings on the World of Warcraft Forums.

World of Warcraft - Problems

As World of Warcraft is a constant work in progress, there are a number of issues affecting it.

• Population: Some World of Warcraft players created characters on servers with medium to low populations. Certain low population servers are experiencing a vast number of players leaving the servers, making it harder for people to find groups, and affecting the in-game economy. Blizzard has taken certain measures to alleviate this problem by allowing character transfers on certain servers, but it is still something of a problem. The opposite of this is also true; some servers are too overpopulated and are hard to play on because of server load and long queues to log in.
• Lopsided Horde to Alliance ratio: Many of the servers are becoming outnumbered on one faction side or the other. This affects PvP and the quality of gameplay for some players. This issue will possibly be addressed in the expansion, where it has been announced that the Blood Elves will be a new playable race for the Horde. This will provide the Horde with a so-called "pretty race", which is one of the reasons previously a player might choose the Alliance over the Horde races.
• Unbalanced classes: Many people tend to believe that certain classes or races are over or underpowered. Blizzard periodically releases patches which, along with adding features or fixing bugs, also attempt to balance gameplay by updating the class skill trees and spells. This balancing action is sometimes called 'buffing' or 'nerfing,' depending on whether the change strengthened or weakened the class.
• Long time online required at high level: High-level dungeons can take many hours of party finding, strategy discussion, and battles. The Molten Core (a commonly run, high-level instance usually referred to as 'MC') can usually take as long as six hours to complete. However, Blizzard has made it that the instance does not have to be done in one, large chunk. Everytime the group of players kills a boss, their progress is saved and stored for one week. This meaning that none of the bosses will spawn again until after that time period is up and the entire instance resets itself. Blizzard is also implementing this process into future high-end instances as well.
• As with other online games, server and network stability is critical (World of Warcraft is not playable offline). Due to failures in these, there have been times when the game has been unplayable by a large number of players. For example, in September 2005, Blizzard gave all European players two free days of play as compensation for repeated network failures. The issues were suspected to be Blizzard's upstream Internet service provider [1].
• Focus on PvP (Player versus Player) combat. Issues with balance in the game have put off many players, especially with the game's focus on PvP combat for developing content.

World of Warcraft - Advantages

• Since the game is based on a community of players with the ability to interact in many ways, the gaming experience is always evolving and new. Players can experience the questing content alone, with friends, or with a gaming guild. In addition to playing the "actual" game, players can interact socially, explore the various landscapes, or participate in the game's virtual economy.
• Classes are generally balanced, though specialization in some of the talent trees is generally not practical. In recent patches Blizzard has revamped certain classes to make them more viable and playable such as Hunters and Druids which were revamped in patches 1.7 and 1.8 respectively. Lately, significant changes to the Paladin have been made in patch 1.9.
• The epic nature of some instanced dungeons provide a more content rich and interesting experience for those who wish to immerse themselves in the world for the amount of time required to complete such instances. Rewards for completing such challenges are in the form of better character equipment which makes for a better experience when attempting other quest or PvP content.
• With the financial resources and investment Blizzard has in making their customers happy, they appear to address issues quickly and effectively when compared to other online games. Other popular online games such as Diablo 2, and Counter-Strike often lack the dedicated support, server resources, and consistent additions of new content seen in WoW.

World of Warcraft - Deviance from the MMORPG archetype

Blizzard has used World of Warcraft to make some changes to the typical MMORPG in response to the common complaints received from players about other games in this genre. In particular the game play has been changed to make it more even and fair for both hardcore and casual players. For example, players gain similar experience overall from completing quests as by only killing monsters ("grinding"). Many players find grinding uninteresting and opt instead to continue to do quests.

The other system used by Blizzard to help the casual player is the "rested state". While in rested state, a character will earn twice as much experience as would normally be gained from killing monsters, but will gain the standard amount of experience from completing quests and exploring. This feature allows someone who has been away from the game for a period of time to double their leveling capability until they leave the rested state, providing a "catch up" incentive upon returning to the game. However, in order to prevent players exploiting this by leaving one character logged off in an inn while playing another, the maximum amount of rest a character can accumulate is capped at 1.5 levels worth; the quantity of experience this represents varies depending on the character's level. Players can increase the rate at which their characters gain rest by a factor of four by returning to an inn or capital city to log off. Rest increases whether or not a character is logged in, but slowly enough (10 days to reach a fully-rested state in an inn) that it is most easily noticed when a character is first logged in after not having been played for several hours or days.

World of Warcraft - General information

World of Warcraft - Launch and sales

The game was simultaneously released on both Windows and Macintosh computer systems in North America, Australia and New Zealand on November 23, 2004. Blizzard released two versions of the game upon its launch. One was the regular CD edition, and the other was the limited Collector's Edition. The collector's box contained the following items:

• The entire game on both one DVD and four CDs.
• A One-month subscription to the game.
• A guest pass to the game providing ten days of access.
• A Behind the Scenes DVD.
• A Collector's Edition Soundtrack.
• A Collector's Edition manual.
• The Art of World of Warcraft (Hardcover book).
• A cloth map of Azeroth.
• An exclusive in-game pet chosen from a Zergling, a Panda, and a Mini Diablo.

The game sold more than 240,000 copies in its first 24 hours on the market, more than any other PC game in history. Though not officially released in South Korea until January 18, 2005, it had been found on store shelves since November 2004. The game was released in Europe on February 11, 2005 with English, French and German language versions. On March 2, 2005, 100,000 testers signed up for China's WoW beta test within the first hour. The game was released in China on June 6, 2005. The game won high praise at E³ in 2003, including Gamer's Pulse's Best of Show award. World of Warcraft was declared by many in the computer gaming industry, including GameSpot and GameSpy, as 2004's game of the year. And, as with any game, it has its own terminology.

As is common with the launch of a MMORPG, World of Warcraft had its share of problems at first. Partly because of the huge number of people who bought the game, along with server instability, Blizzard chose to stop selling copies of the game some time after the launch. Sales were limited accordingly until more servers, called worlds, or realms, could be assembled. Due to the massive initial sales, there were also periods where players had to wait in queues before playing, as some realms were at their maximum player limit. When more servers were added, these queues became less common and sales of the game resumed. Still, in certain high population areas (like Ironforge or Orgrimmar), players continue to experience game performance delays. This is typically caused by poor hardware and/or extra programs running in the background such as spyware/adware.

As of December 2005, World of Warcraft has more than 5,000,000 players worldwide, making it the most popular MMORPG in the world. Over 1 million of these players live in the US. 1.5 million of these are from the Chinese launch on July 7, 2005. These numbers exclude all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Blizzard also stated that at any given time at least 500,000 subscribers are online. Due to World of Warcraft's high sales it has been described as a "runaway success" with "overwhelming popularity", which other games, like The Matrix Online, blame for their lackluster sales. ^[2]

On August 3, 2005, China implemented legislation which forbids minors from playing games in which players kill each other. The impact of this on Blizzard's revenue is still to be determined.

World of Warcraft won critical acclaim in 2004 and achieved many awards as a result of this, some which can be found at the official World of Warcraft list of awards.

World of Warcraft - System requirements

World of Warcraft runs natively on both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. Boxed copies of the game use a hybrid CD to install the game, eliminating the need for separate Mac and Windows retail products.

The following requirements are as stated on the official World of Warcraft website, but generally players believe that these specifications are too low for the game to be played enjoyably.

• General requirements:
  • 6 GB or more of available hard drive space.
  • 56k or higher modem with an Internet connection.

• Mac OS X:
  • 933 MHz or higher G4 or G5 processor.
  • 512 MB RAM or higher; DDR RAM recommended.
  • ATI or Nvidia video hardware with 32 MB VRAM or more.
  • Mac OS X v10.3.5 or newer (see note below).

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP:
  • 800 MHz or higher CPU.
  • 256 MB RAM or more (512 MB recommended, 1 GB for comfortable play).
  • 32 MB 3D graphics card with hardware transform and lighting, such as GeForce 2 or better.
  • DirectX 9.0c.

World of Warcraft allows all users to play together, regardless of their operating system.

As of July 2005, Blizzard has no immediate plans to release a Linux version, but there is an online petition aimed at convincing Blizzard to release a true Linux port. However, support for World of Warcraft is present in Windows API implementations Wine and Cedega, allowing the game to be played on Linux. FreeBSD users have also been successful in using Wine to run the game.

Furthermore, they have not yet considered making it possible to play WOW as single player/Offline, that is: you play alone against the computer controling NPCs. This is discouraging for those who are not on an unlimited internet usage plan.

Note: In the patch notes for version 1.9.0, Blizzard announced that the operating system requirement for Mac OS X will increase from 10.3.5 to 10.3.9 in a future (beyond 1.9.0) patch or expansion. This is being done to help support upcoming x86-based Macs. The upgrade from 10.3.5 to 10.3.9 is a free download from Apple.

World of Warcraft - Modifications

Modifying the user interface (UI) of a game is nothing new, but Blizzard has included exceptional support for modifications. At a simple level it allows full control over the content of toolbars and hot keys, as well as macros to automate sets of operations and the ability to script much more elaborate tools.

The range of modifications that are available can be anything from ways to control Winamp in-game, to adding extra rows of button bars for spells, skills and more. There are also various cosmetic mods, including one that reproduces the infamous 'Leeroy Jenkins' sound [3].

All addons are created using the Lua programming language and XML, and images used for any modification are created using the .TGA (Targa) and .BLP image formats. Blizzard has released a User Interface Customization tool which they call "Cui" [4]..

Some programs that operate stand-alone, independent of World of Warcraft may be considered exploits, especially if they automate operation beyond that made available using the built-in macro functionality, or pass information in or out of the game. Use of these is against the Terms of Service agreed to when playing the game, and as such, may lead to possible suspension or closure of accounts. Blizzard has stated on the official forums that any modification that uses the Lua programming language will not be considered an exploit, though Blizzard reserves the right to change information available via the Lua language if the modification changes the nature of encounters in the game.

World of Warcraft - Exploits

As with all massively multiplayer online games, World of Warcraft has had its share of players who exploit the world of Azeroth. Such abuse ranges from gold farming to selling accounts on eBay. One common exploit was the use of leet (an example is '|-|()\/\/ |2 U?', read as 'how are you?') to communicate between the Horde and the Alliance, since symbols and numbers were left unmodified in otherwise scrambled communications. This has since been stopped by modifying the linguistics engine to remove punctuation and numbers from the text.

World of Warcraft - Known types

• Speed Hacking/Teleporting/subterrain travel – Since character position in World of Warcraft is determined by the client side, it is possible for players to send out artificial positional data and be instantly transported to any part of the world (even underground) or used to speed up traveling speed by increasing positional deltas.
• Botting – A player who runs a third party program to control their character. The bot will kill monsters, loot gold, mine ore, collect herbs or gain levels automatically without the player having to be in front of the computer.
• Game Mechanics Exploits – There are also other exploits involving the physics of the game, sometimes in conjunction with items. This includes using wall-walking to get into unfinished areas or abilities like the Sentry Totem to make one's character unattackable by other players. These exploits are usually not discovered right away and are allowed to be used (though typically thought of as unfair) until stated otherwise by Blizzard.
• Data Mining – This is typically most common around the time that a patch is released on the public test realm. Players will try to access files not yet in game and then host them on websites to expose content not yet released (usually new zones, items, and graphics).

World of Warcraft - Legality

The World of Warcraft End User License Agreement specifically forbids this kind of activity. Blizzard takes action against anyone who exploits the game by temporarily and permanently suspending accounts. So far, Blizzard has banned well over 25,000 players from the game. Blizzard makes heavy use of a system known as The Warden on the Windows version of the game in order to detect third-party programs, such as botting software. There has been some controversy as to the legality of The Warden, since it allegedly uses techniques similar to spyware in order to analyse other running software on the players' PCs, as well as the file system.[5] However, software such as anti-virus software loosely falls into this definition as well. Debates regarding the game's EULA as well as the rights of the players continue.

World of Warcraft - Defenses against banning

Although Blizzard continues to ban players when they are detected as cheating, many players have found ways to escape detection. In particular, Blizzard relies heavily on a technology known as Warden which can detect some botting and cheating programs. However, such anti-cheat software can only follow a set of rules, so there follows a cat and mouse game as the game developers and cheat programmers attempt to circumvent each other. In November 2005, it was proven that the XCP rootkit secretly included with Sony music CDs in the US for the purposes of copy prevention could be used to disguise cheat programs from The Warden. In November 2005, Blizzard introduced patch version 1.8.3 which added the Blizzard Launcher application. The Launcher was designed to report cheats that would be considered a bannable offense to the user so they may avoid starting the game (and Warden) before removing them.

World of Warcraft - Expansion Pack

On October 28, 2005 Blizzard revealed that the first expansion pack will be called World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. It will include an increased level cap of 70, a new crafting profession, and two new races, one of which being the Blood Elves for the Horde. The expansion will also feature Outland as a new playable zone, as well as a new flying mount, usable only in Outland, for high-level players. Some of the expansion's features will be available to all players, though the most significant additions – visiting Outland, creating characters of the two new races, and so on – will require the Burning Crusade to be installed.

See also

• BlizzCon
• Corrupted Blood
• Leeroy Jenkins, a popular WoW meme
• List of Warcraft characters
• Locations in the Warcraft Universe
• Pop culture references in World of Warcraft
• World of Warcraft: The Board Game
• World of Warcraft terminology
• World of Warcraft version history
• .BLP and .MPQ file formats

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "World of Warcraft", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki