When you gaze into the algorithm

Moon Guard
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… the algorithm also gazes into you.

So I’ve been digging playing WoW. As someone who studied anthropology the differences in the culture between PvE and RPG servers is really fascinating and the differences between PvE and PvP culture is beyond fascinating. As an artist, exploring the art form of machinima in World of Warcraft on an RP server is so very very fulfilling because I’m a polymath so I get to employ a lot my talents all together in a single art project. Photography and cinematography, illustration, music, writing, acting, I can do them all and love doing them all. All the things I would need to do if I wanted to create an original animated series and the World of Warcraft game engine does all the heavy lifting of animating it. Because as a polymath, I can animate but I really don’t like doing it. I can do it and I know if I keep doing it I’ll get better at it and eventually I’ll get to be good enough to hate doing it because I just don’t have enough of a love for doing it to make it worthwhile to get better at doing it .

Animators are wizards to me because they just had that arcane love of animating. They wanted to get better and better and better at it until they reached their pinnacle of talent as an animator. But they probably looked at one of the things I love doing, maybe music, maybe writing, maybe acting, and they knew they could learn to do it good enough to hate doing it. All the power to you wizards of animation you earned your love of doing it.

So yeah, using the game engine to do all the heavy lifting in that realm. The Pook is a fan of that. I’m absolutely loving this. Thank you Blizzard for this place where I can explore this uniquely modern art form.

Anyway. When I started uploading machinimas to the YouTubes I started getting hit with lots of World of Warcraft videos in my feed. This was awesome. I got to learn things about WoW. Today I learned that in the early game auction houses were disconnected from each other which created different local economic zones.

How freaking cool would that be on an RP server. We’d be handed a whole bunch of economic information about the world to put into our toons. But man, in a game where gold is gear and gear is god wouldn’t that be annoying as all heckity. I 100% understand the reasons the Blizzard Wizard patched that out. Overall that would make the most sense, but man, does the roleplayer in me ever wonder how that would play out for the in game economy. I bet there would be economic majors just loving how regional economic zones meshed with their love of role playing.

Then it got me thinking. What other anti-player but rp-friendly features the Blizzard Wizard has taken from us with different patches because they were an annoyance to the non-rp player base?

What did we once have that the Blizzard Wizard took from us?

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Two things, I recall reading something somewhere (or maybe I made it up in a dream) that Blizz had an economist that consulted on AH and gold matters…

Second, I remember a popular youtube commentator/personality joined the lowest populated classic server and found a player whom he interviewed on stream about the server quality of life. The player was in the most advanced server guild, and he talked about how the low population meant low server wide resources. The AH was not players first stop for materials and they relied more on each other. It sounded like they were less “wasteful” of materials and drops in case a guildmate/friend needed something. It’s kind of a warm and fuzzy sentiment but sounds like horrible long term game experience to me, a non-rp’er.

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It, sadly, was not cool. Having separate server AH economies meant that if you wanted to get gear for RP, it was astronomically more expensive because of being on an RP server. No one I was aware of then incorporated AH prices/economy in their RP (probably because we were all too busy being mad at how we had to pay so much more for things that “looked cool”). It was actually kind of refreshing to see the RP server gear AH tax gone when I came back from my long departure from the game.

ETA: It also meant that if the RP gear you wanted was from high end content that it was either not available for purchase or it was incredibly incredibly expensive the rare times it was listed.

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For a brief time, flying mounts in Orgrimmar were not allowed below the elevation of the mesa where the flight master is located. Weather it was a bug or working as intended I do not know, but I thought it was a cool detail that brought a little bit of world character to the game. It would make sense in a city located in canyons that flying mounts/creatures are relegated to the higher places and not allowed to jam up the streets below.

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