Project Lore

In the past few weeks here at Project Lore, we've had the pleasure of watching the crew battle their way through Naxxramas, until finally reaching the powerful "Kel' Thud." And while they've been busy up in the necropolis in the sky, I've also been busy leveling down below in Dragonblight. This zone has got to be one of my favorites in the game. The fantasy elements of WoW are a big draw for me, so a zone dedicated to the lore around dragons sucked me in. The valley wasteland known as the Great Dragonblight is a somewhat mysterious land littered with the corpses of all different kinds of dragons who have come for their final rest. But the Lich King and his Scourge legions have found use in the remaining skeletons, many which have been reanimated into undead frost wyrms such as the tragic Sindragosa and the very Sapphiron who now resides within Naxx. As for quests, the Dragonblight's offerings range from level 72 to 75 in the long grind to level 80, with a good few group quests, some giant elites to battle in the north and also several dailies. Both factions can pick up some sizable XP rewards (especially if you take advantage of rested XP when killing mobs) through questlines messing with the Scarlet Onslaught. Yes, the same baddies formerly in the Scarlet Crusade now have moved into Dragonblight in hopes of destroying the Lich King - and anyone else who stands in their way. I'm still trying to find a PUG to finish up Do Unto Others and the end of the Horde line. Another good line with some fun dragon lore lies in the Ruby Dragonshrine. And again both factions can partake, which is a plus in my book. But for me, the real fun came with visiting the holy Wyrmrest Temple, riding a dragon to the top and taking on missions from Alexstrasza, the queen of the dragons and guardian of all life on Azeroth. Plus, her character model looks really damn cool. She and Lord Afrasastrasz are involved with Horde, Alliance and neutral quests alike. And if you just can't get enough of her majesty, there's always the Defending Wyrmrest Temple daily that opens up after completing the Rifle the Bodies questline. You'll get to shoot down dragons while earning a little money, some xp and a bit of rep with the Wyrmrest Accord all at once. And as an added bonus, if you can manage to complete the quest in under two minutes, you'll earn the Rapid Defense achievement. That's my kind of quest. There's actually a ton more about Dragonblight that has really made me love this zone. I just have a couple more group quests to finish up before dinging 74 and moving on, probably to the dreaded Zul'Drak zone. I'm going to miss it. Has anyone else felt a kind of attachment to Dragonblight? How about any other zones? I'll admit it, I also still get nostalgic thinking about the many, many hours I've spent leveling in the Barrens.

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As you may have noticed this week, the guys are running lowbie Horde characters - quite a departure from the Alliance toons they usually run. Watching them run RFC as Horde is a real treat because, from my perspective, it shows that WoW is a fun game for both 'sides'. But as you and I are both aware, there is a dark side to WoW, a dark side far more angry and divisive than anything in Sunwell or Icecrown, and for some, it begins the first second they create a toon. It may not have been talked about before as candidly as I am about to and I think this week is the perfect time to discuss it and how it relates to this life lesson. As you know, there are two main 'sides' or factions in World of Warcraft: The Horde and the Alliance. These two side are pitted against each other by the forces of fate seemingly set in motion to create conflict and instability throughout the entire WoW universe. And it is in this illusion of opposition that cultivates perspectives which foster in some an unusual hatred of the 'opposing' faction. I have know some Alliance players who unilaterally vilify the Horde as all being monsters bent on destroying all that is sacred to the World of Azeroth, somehow believing that it is their duty to eradicate all Horde on sight. I also know some people who play Horde who believe that the Alliance is filled with do-gooders, pompous elitists, essentially zealots, bent on purging thought any means all those unlike themselves. These perspectives are from RL people who actually see other RL people who play opposing factions as enemies based solely on a story told to them, a story which basically says those not like you are the enemy. All of this stems from basic misunderstandings and cultural stories based on inference and conjecture rather than direct experience and personal evaluation which unfortunately escalated into open conflict. Being primarily an Alliance player, I know the lore and stories I have been told about the Alliance and their heroic efforts. I have been ingrained with stories of the Horde as the 'evil' ones and that it is 'my duty' to destroy the Horde whenever possible. But over time, I have met several Horde players in game that were kind and generous to me even when I was on a PVP server that made me reconsider all of those stories I was told about the 'evils' of the Horde. While I have never played a Horde character for any substantial length of time, I can appreciate some of the stories of a few of the Horde races. From watching the opening cinematics of each of the Horde races and playing a Horde toon up a few levels, most of them seems to be races of people thrown into conflict and doing their best to survive the circumstances thrust upon them. Paramount to their struggle is trying to change the perception by the Alliance, somewhat based on purely visual cues or the manipulation by others upon them, that they are essentially monsters while in truth they are just a race of peoples doing their best to survive. It also seems to me that the Alliance may be misunderstood by the Horde as well. The Horde may not understand how deeply the Alliance was affected by the events of the past perpetrated by an essentially mind-controlled group of peoples manipulated to do the bidding of another. Maybe the Horde's main struggle against the Alliance is to get the Alliance to understand that those horrible events of the past were not their true intention and that they just wish to live their life. While I know I will never play a Horde toon again, I can see why some are drawn to those races. I can appreciate why someone would choose to have their character's backstory be that of the Orcs or Tauren or any of the other Horde races. All of this points to a greater concern within the World at large, the RL world that we all venture into from time to time, usually on Tuesday mornings. If everything is, as I believe it is, a microcosm and macrocosm to everything else, than this game of WoW shows how some - only some - use inaccurate stories, limited perspectives and general omission of facts to create divisions and conflicts between peoples. The only way these falsehoods can be lifted is through direct experience and personal evaluation based upon internal criteria rather than external dogma or consensus. There are many people on this planet, many people, with many perspectives and beliefs and interests that it's a wonder small groups of us can agree on anything. Some would say that there are more than two factions in RL while I would say that there are none. It depends on your perspective. Do you choose to see disharmony or potential? Do you choose to see adversaries or opportunities? What do you choose to see? So here's the challenge to you, to put this life lesson into action, and it will only take one hour. Would you be willing to run a toon on a different faction up to level 10? Would you be willing to do that? And if you do, let me know what you think. It's only one hour, but that hour may change your perspective of your entire world. At least , that's my perspective.

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Also didn't expect a nose ring.

When I introduced my girlfriend to the classes of WoW, I had two guesses in the back of my mind, a druid or a hunter.  This may seem stereotypical of me (sorry to the bra burners out there, but it seems that many women like playing a nurturing role even in their high fantasy), but my assumption was based on my girlfriend. Although, the statistics did play a part.  I have known a few locks played by women, but the whole aligning with dark magic and demons just doesn't fit her. Despite the high probability of Lesley selecting a hunter, I honestly thought she would go with a druid.  This guess was based more on the knowing her part and less on the numbers and graphs I love so much.  She is a rather earthy person, doing her best to be one of Al Gore's minions, giving to Goodwill, hiking around the planet and things of that nature.  The keyword there is nature, she loves it.  Perhaps it was the "primal connection to the beasts of Azeroth" that drew her to the fold of ranged DPSers.  Now that I have dwelt on this further, I should have had a Shaman in the running. Race selection was a little less straight forward.  At first she was leaning towards rolling a Tauren rather than the short and stocky Dwarves.  Apparently the switch was influenced by me a bit.  My description of the Alliance versus the Horde possibly labeled one side as the "bad" guys and the other as "good" guys, although that was not my intent by any means.  In lieu of describing the factions at all, I should have just pointed her to Blizzard's description on Horde versus Alliance and the races.  That would have rendered any subconscious feelings I have about the "misunderstood" Horde moot. A little personal history, I wanted to roll Horde from the start, but all of my friends went Alliance...After being forced into my faction choice, I was then forced into my racial selection by my ex-girlfriend.  I had basically no choice when I entered WoW. T_T.  Lesley's perception of the Horde may have been swayed a bit, but I had little to do with her selection of a stocky female as her avatar! I am a bit baffled as to why she settled on a Dwarf, or even the Tauren for that matter.  She has had little experience with high fantasy (or, and possibly more accurately, never really cared for it) as evidenced by not knowing what an Orc (or Ork) was.  In conjunction with that, aside from viewing SolidSamm in action, Lesley knows nothing about Warcraft either. Despite my best efforts, there is a slim chance that I ruled out her playing a human.  When we first started discussing the whole prospect weeks ago, I mentioned how unimaginative selecting a Human as a race was to me.  Who knows if she took it to heart, or even remembered it though.  Night Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves may have been all that was open to her.  Draenei you say?  Space goats may have gotten ruled out for being such an oddity until Ms. iTZKooPA becomes more familiar with the universe and its lore.  Perhaps as an alt if we get that far. For reasons unknown to me, it ended up being a stout, female Dwarf hunter.  I highly doubt she looked over and analyzed the racial traits and figured that a Dwarven Hunter would get a small bonus.  I would love to be surprised by such a fact though! The whole process took more than an hour to complete, and at that point we packed it in and called it a night.  Lilyterran, the fierce dwarven hunter with generations of training, has yet to encounter a single quest, or even load the opening cinematic.  Now to walk the fine line of helping while not hand-holding...A battle for another day. Oh, and I forgot to sign her up via Recruit-a-Friend.  What an idiot I am!  Think Blizzard will let me beg my way into it?  And thanks for the tips, keep em coming!

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Now with presents actually under the Winter Veil Trees in Ironforge and Orgrimmar, all of us in Azeroth have a bunch of ways to show off our holiday cheer. Blizzard has put in a lot of great ways for players to interact with each other - we can sprinkle handfuls of snowflakes on people, kiss under the mistletoe, have snowball fights, play with our new racecars, build a snowman, bake cookies for our friends, or do all of the above and show off our new Merrymaker titles. I've always been a proponent of using the in game mechanics as a jumping off point for having fun with other players, which is why what happened a few days ago in Dalaran really amused me. A couple of days back I was hoping for a heroic group to form or I don't know what else, but I was wandering around Dalaran as usual. I saw a horde character named Byerly walking around, and I mean press the slash button on your keypad walking, on his reindeer mount. It was interesting to me, and the walk/run toggle button is one of my favorites for horsing around during downtime. Anyway, I hopped on my mount and used some fresh holly to transform it into a reindeer and joined him in his slow march around the main portion of Dalaran. More players were intrigued and joined in on their reindeer, and eventually we had a mixture of about ten horde and alliance marching around Dalaran at a slow pace spreading holiday cheer... or at least having a good time. It was hilarious watching the slow line of riders. I got a couple of screen shots but only the above one turned out any good. It was nice to see that some horde can have fun with the alliance at least during the holiday season. Have you guys seen any interesting ways that players have been celebrating the holidays? Or what about gifts, did you get anything good this year?

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World of Warcraft may have over 11 million players, but that doesn't mean it is easy to get together. One of the most annoying things about World of Warcraft is the amount of realms the game has, causing the 11 million plus players to be fragmented all over the place. Unless you specifically rolled on the same server as a friend, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to play together, without making another character.  I understand why they do this, but I guess I want a little Eve Online in my WoW.

I have been talking about the game while walking down the street only to be interrupted by “are you talking about WoW?!” Being the brazen nerd that I am, I opening admit my affection for the game to the complete stranger and ask them what server they are one. The response always ends up being anything but Magtheridon. However, this weekend, I got to spend some time with a Mag player, and two other players from my Battlegroup. The horde player, I knew by reputation before meeting him in person. The other two are friends from back home, who are both Alliance, rolled in my Battlegroup by sheer chance. This is something that I have never come across before.

Needless to say, shenanigans ensued. We quickly plotted a coup against a 5-man instancing group of the horde. The idea was to get a bunch of rogues, druids, shadowmelders and anyone willing to blow an invisibility potion to group up outside a level 80 instance. Our double agent hordie would then summon his group and BAM, we'd all pop into action, laying waste to players several levels higher than us, while having a good laugh.

With the other members of the LAN on a different server, they weren't too interested, and the plot never materialized. My hordie friend did manage to train some guards on me after I applied a Deadly Poison to him by accident though.  Thanks for that.  However, we did play hours upon hours of Left 4 Dead. That is a Co-op LAN game to die for (excuse the horrible pun).

While I am sad the weekend is now over, I finally managed to catch up on my sleep from the hardcore gaming sessions, hence the coherent article. Anyone else have some good LAN stories or carebear soliloquies?

This weekend made me realize something, I guess not all horde are bad...

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As we all wait for Wrath of the Lich King, I've been doing a lot of achievement grinding. It gives me something to do other than leveling alts, and I finally got my Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement the other day. In order to complete it, I ended up having to do a few raid quests along with some rarely done quests in Silithus. I also had to nearly complete the Raene's Cleansing quest line in Ashenvale, which provided me with the awesome Rod of Transformation to turn me into a furblog. Luckily, I was able to stop at the final step and keep the rod, allowing me to transform into a furblog whenever I please. While grinding out the quests for this achievement, I've of course run accross a few low level horde who I would sometimes leave alone, but sometimes I would just have to one shot them. There's just something fun about running by, tossing an Earth Shock and maybe a Stormstrike, killing a player without breaking stride. If they're in my way again, they'll probably be scared that I might do it again. Hopefully that stops them from stealing my quest objectives. Now, Bastosa has wondered about the joy of ganking, and doesn't see the fun in killing low level members of the enemy faction, but I do. Part of it is revenge. I can't count the number of times I've been killed by horde because I was not on an even playing field with them. Either I'm half dead from killing mobs or 10 levels lower than the enemy, and I find myself dead. Of course, I won't waste my time camping some level 30 undead warlock, but if I happen to see one, I will usually kill them. If I happen to see them again, I may kill them again. If you're on a PvP server, that's what you can expect. I'm not out to ruin anybody's night, but to give you the experience of a PvP server. I dealt with it, so you can deal with it. While I won't just camp anybody unless they've done something to deserve it, such as corpse camping me, I can think of a few easy solutions. Here are a few of the things I like to do if I get camped. Get your friends. Especially during early WotLK leveling, lots of your friends will likely be in the area and willing to help. While you're at it, group up and blast through some quests together. A group is much less likely to get ganked than a lonely player. Go somewhere else. You can usually find another place to level. There are a lot of areas and subzones and more quests than you'd ever need to level. Move on to the next area and come back later. Log on an alt (or a main). Grab your other characters and get some work done on them. Or, if you're leveling an alt, take your main and do some dailies. Maybe play the Auction House game for a while. You probably won't get killed in the AH unless there's some sort of plague going around. Take a break. Make a sandwich, grab a drink, or get some errands done. While you're out getting things done, your campers are waiting for you to come back with no idea that you've logged out, balanced your checkbook, and beaten Little Big Planet. What are all of your strategies for avoiding gankers? Are you looking forward to ganking in Northrend? How often do you kill the lowbies that happen to be in your way?

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How many times have you found out that someone you know plays World of Warcraft? You are enjoy their company and don't really have any connections to your current server, other than your high level character. So, wondering if a transfer is possible, you ask the standard questions: "Horde or Alliance?" and "PvE or PvP?" One of those questions can now be eliminated, as Blizzard has the following update on the main World of Warcraft site:

Providing a smooth and enjoyable experience for all players is always a priority for us, and we are continually re-evaluating our policies and programs to do so. As the state of the game has matured substantially since the inception of Paid Character Transfers, we will now be allowing PvE-to-PvP transfers on a full-time basis to provide players with more mobility and freedom to easily play with their friends.

This is exciting news, though some are sure to be upset that it is possible to level on a carebear server and transfer to a PvP server, avoiding the constant ganking while leveling, then being able to gank once said leveling is complete. Personally, I am happy that more friends will be able to play together without investing the rather large time investment to level one more character. How do you guys feel?

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So I play an Alliance toon on Frostmane. I also play several other toons on a few servers, all Alliance. I enjoy playing humans for the most part, probably as an extension of familiar escapism, being as I am currently a human in RL. lol. But I don't hate on those who choose to play the Horde. I may hate on the Horde, and at most opportunities on the PvP servers, I will choose my battles with them wisely, but I really don't hate the RL person who plays it. I figure that's their choice. Like they say, don't hate the player, hate the game. The Horde races, and my perception of the lore of the Horde, never really appealed to me. I dabbled playing an undead lock for a few levels and a BE Pali but it just didn't feel right to me. It's just not my thing. So I ask you, all of you Horde players, why? Why do you play a Horde character? What is the allure of being an Orc or Troll or Blood Elf? Okay maybe a Blood Elf for the /dance... seriously... the BE dudes dance like Napoleon Dynamite and the Female BE dance like Britney Spears her video Toxic video - very funny. I'm seriously not h8in here. I just want to know your thoughts: what are your reasons for playing Horde? I'm just curious. Thanks

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