In the open Sunday thread a reader asked whether there was any connection between Tamarind founding a new guild for the blogging community and Gevlon founding a new ganking guild. Obviously the two guilds couldn't be any more different from each other, Single Abstract Noun is a social guild, while Gevlon posted extremely anti-social guild rules. But there is a common theme: Trying something different.
It is often said that World of Warcraft is a themepark MMORPG: Blizzard places a lot of content in the game, and provides you a lot of helpful clues on how to complete that content in the "correct" order. The obvious disadvantage of that model is that once you've done all the rides several times, you're getting bored. Running heroics is a classic example of that: The Dungeon Finder is a great tool to get people to use the heroic "rides". But now people have been doing that for several months, have been to every possible heroic many times, have collected all the rewards you could get from emblems of triumph plus some emblem of frost gear, and so the level 80 heroics are getting old. Some people just run one per day for the emblems of frost, others just abandonded them. Due to Blizzard being a bit too generous with the rewards for heroics, there is no interest in running raid dungeons like Naxxramas and Ulduar, which reduces the whole endgame to ToC and ICC, which is a bit thin. With Cataclysm still months away, people are getting bored. People simply reached the end of the themepark.
Now one possibility when reaching the end of the themepark is leaving it until more rides are installed. A lot of that will certainly happen over the summer, with people playing a lot less, or even cancelling their accounts until patch 4.0 and then Cataclysm. But other people realized a very simple truth:
World of Warcraft is not a themepark *or* a sandbox, it is both!
Except for the possibility to freely gank other players of the same faction, which as a form of human interaction is rather primitive anyway, World of Warcraft does not have any less sandbox possibilities than any other MMORPG that comes with a sandbox label. The fact that there are big neon signs pointing towards the themepark rides (and some of those neon signs haven't even been installed by Blizzard but been added by the player community in the form of addons and various guides on websites), doesn't mean that there isn't a whole virtual world out there in WoW. Yes, you *can* install an addon like Tourguide and play World of Warcraft completely on rails from level 1 to being fully equipped with epics at the level cap. But that doesn't mean you *have to*. People following the way of least resistance is a basic reality of humanity, and is not due to a lack of "sandbox features" of World of Warcraft.
Whether it is me fishing at level 7 in Northrend, or people engaging in roleplaying on a RP server, or Gevlon founding guilds with new rulesets like Undergeared or his new ganking guild, is all just part of the same phenomenon: People engaging in the huge possibilities of World of Warcraft *outside* the themepark. It is just silly to complain how boring the path of least resistance in World of Warcraft is, when you never even tried to step off that path. There is a whole virtual world out there, with near endless possibilities. You just need to go and look for them.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Open Sunday Thread
Are there any questions you have for me? Or do you have suggestions for subjects you want me to write about during the week?
Friday, March 5, 2010
Off the beaten path
Tobold the tauren shaman is up to level 10, and now has 64 gold. That involved fishing at level 7 in a level 72 zone, Dragonblight. Few people realize that outside instances you can reach any point in the game with any level of character, if you don't mind dying a lot. So now, back from my trip to Northrend, I'm again in a zone not adequate for my level, fishing in Cragpool Lake in Stonetalon Mountains to find the Weather-Beaten Journal needed to find fish pools from your mini-map. I'll need that for my planned excursion to Stranglethorn vale to participate in the fishing contest there with my low-level character.
All this obviously isn't leveling me up very fast. Gaining power for you character, in the form of levels and gear, is one of the prime motivators for playing MMORPGs. Thus people tend to choose the most efficient path to gain power. But consider this for a minute: By definition there is only one most efficient path. The further you stray from the path of optimum efficiency, the more options you have. And ultimately, especially if you are on your Xth alt, doing something very different can be more fun than doing something very efficient.
All this obviously isn't leveling me up very fast. Gaining power for you character, in the form of levels and gear, is one of the prime motivators for playing MMORPGs. Thus people tend to choose the most efficient path to gain power. But consider this for a minute: By definition there is only one most efficient path. The further you stray from the path of optimum efficiency, the more options you have. And ultimately, especially if you are on your Xth alt, doing something very different can be more fun than doing something very efficient.
Being poor in a mature economy
The two alts I made last year are twinked to the max: Heirloom items, the best gear and consumable money can buy, and in some extreme cases I even had expensive enchantments on very low level gear. There is a certain fun to be had when playing a completely overpowered low level character. But for Tobold the tauren shaman, my new alt in the <Single Abstract Noun> blogging community guild, I wanted to try something different. I could have transferred heirloom items and gold from a different server, or taken some gold from the guild bank, but instead I decided to try how I could do without outside help, just a poor low level character on his own, armed with nothing but the economic knowledge gained in years of playing World of Warcraft.
Now Argent Dawn (EU) is an old server, with a very mature economy. For example I checked the auction house for low level green items, and found somebody selling level 7 green maces for 27 gold apiece. And he had 8 of them for sale, which given that this mace is a drop and not crafted made me wonder how he got those. Meanwhile my shaman was counting the copper pieces to pay for his training, so there was obviously a huge gap between his wealth and the wealth of the average player.
Now while that is obviously bad when you want to *buy* something from the auction house, you can use that huge gap to your advantage when *selling* to the auction house. You just need to find something which you can farm at low level, and which is in demand by people who have lots of gold. So once I reached level 5, and saved up the about 2 silver I needed for training professions and buying tools, I went to Orgrimmar and learned mining and skinning. Now skinning is not necessarily the most profitable gathering skill, so herbalism would have been an alternative. But herb prices only take off at slightly higher levels, the Peacebloom and Silverleaf you can gather at level 5 don't sell for much. And having both mining and herbalism isn't optimal, because you can have your mini map radar search set to only either the one or the other.
So I spent a rather fun evening traveling through Durotar and mining copper. Part of the fun was that this isn't all that safe at level 5, with monsters in that zone up to level 10. But I didn't want to just stay in the safest part, because there I would have been limited by the respawn rate of the copper nodes, and going to places that aren't safe is a lot more exciting. At the end of the evening I was level 7, and had put several stacks of copper on the auction house, plus rough stone, light leather, and some other stuff I found on mobs. On pricing I saw that stacks of copper went as high as 8 gold, but there was some copper sold for much lower, and I decided that for the start selling my copper fast was more important than selling is high. I turned part of the copper ore into copper bars, and undercut the cheapest offer by 5 silver per unit. This morning I had 10 copper pieces in my purse and 10 gold pieces in my mailbox, so I kind of skipped the silver pieces phase of the economy. :)
Now my training cost problem is definitively solved, but even 10 gold isn't all that much when you actually want to buy something from the auction house. I did find a level 7 mace and a level 7 shield that were reasonable priced, and this evening I'll look for the NPC vendor selling level 5 (?) leather armor in Razor Hill. I also visited the weapon masters to learn all weapon types a shaman can handle (the Lunar Festival helps to teleport to other cities), bought some 10-slot bags, and some low level consumables like healing potions. So I'm down to 4 gold, but that is still plenty, and I'm much better equipped.
So where do I go from here? I will continue this evening to mine more copper, wait for the prices to go up a bit during the weekend, and make some more gold that way. But a bit further on I would rather drop mining, and learn leatherworking instead, to make my own armor. That might be less profitable than mining, but I didn't do much leatherworking with previous characters, so I think that could be more fun. Which means I need another source of income, and I have an idea I'll try out this weekend: Fishing.
Once upon a time, years ago, I joined a freshly opened server and made a human priest there. That turned out to be not a brilliant idea, because I already had an undead priest, who grew to become my "raiding main", and so I abandoned the human priest at level 60, where he still is. But at the time I was facing a similar problem, the priest having no money at all when I made him, only that he was playing in a fresh economy. Everybody was low level, and there was nobody paying several gold pieces for a stack of copper ore. So at the time I came up with a different get-rich-quick scheme: At level 10 you can get your fishing skill high enough to successfully catch fish in much higher level zones, e.g. the level 40ish Stranglethorn. Stranglethorn has a long coast, and while some of that coast is populated by 40ish mobs which kill a level 10 character very quickly, other stretches of the coast are empty. With some careful searching of the coast you can find pools of wreckage, from which you can fish crates containing items that are designed for level 40ish characters: Trade materials like silk cloth, and even the occasional green item. Now in a mature economy a level 40ish green item is worth several gold, and so are the trade mats. So the plan for this weekend is to level up to 10, get my fishing skill to the max for that level, swim from Durotar to Ratchet, take the boat to Stranglethorn, and start fishing there.
As an added incentive, I can join the Stranglethorn fishing contest on Sunday afternoon. No, there is no chance to win that one at level 10, unless I'm the only participant. But throughout the duration of the contest I can fish the Tastyfish (spelling?) for the contest, and then sell them for 20 silver apiece to the goblin NPC organizing the event in Booty Bay. That's 4 gold for a stack of fish, not bad for a level 10 character.
In summary, being poor in a mature economy is an opportunity. Some work, some creativity, and one can earn several gold pieces per hour even at very low levels. And as prices for training or white gear from NPC vendors are fixed and designed to be paid with the few coppers you can make from looting low level monsters, having a handful of gold pieces is already more than sufficient to pay for everything you really need at those low levels. You just need to not waste too much of your wealth on overpriced twink items on the auction house, because there you are competing directly with players who have thousands of gold.
Now Argent Dawn (EU) is an old server, with a very mature economy. For example I checked the auction house for low level green items, and found somebody selling level 7 green maces for 27 gold apiece. And he had 8 of them for sale, which given that this mace is a drop and not crafted made me wonder how he got those. Meanwhile my shaman was counting the copper pieces to pay for his training, so there was obviously a huge gap between his wealth and the wealth of the average player.
Now while that is obviously bad when you want to *buy* something from the auction house, you can use that huge gap to your advantage when *selling* to the auction house. You just need to find something which you can farm at low level, and which is in demand by people who have lots of gold. So once I reached level 5, and saved up the about 2 silver I needed for training professions and buying tools, I went to Orgrimmar and learned mining and skinning. Now skinning is not necessarily the most profitable gathering skill, so herbalism would have been an alternative. But herb prices only take off at slightly higher levels, the Peacebloom and Silverleaf you can gather at level 5 don't sell for much. And having both mining and herbalism isn't optimal, because you can have your mini map radar search set to only either the one or the other.
So I spent a rather fun evening traveling through Durotar and mining copper. Part of the fun was that this isn't all that safe at level 5, with monsters in that zone up to level 10. But I didn't want to just stay in the safest part, because there I would have been limited by the respawn rate of the copper nodes, and going to places that aren't safe is a lot more exciting. At the end of the evening I was level 7, and had put several stacks of copper on the auction house, plus rough stone, light leather, and some other stuff I found on mobs. On pricing I saw that stacks of copper went as high as 8 gold, but there was some copper sold for much lower, and I decided that for the start selling my copper fast was more important than selling is high. I turned part of the copper ore into copper bars, and undercut the cheapest offer by 5 silver per unit. This morning I had 10 copper pieces in my purse and 10 gold pieces in my mailbox, so I kind of skipped the silver pieces phase of the economy. :)
Now my training cost problem is definitively solved, but even 10 gold isn't all that much when you actually want to buy something from the auction house. I did find a level 7 mace and a level 7 shield that were reasonable priced, and this evening I'll look for the NPC vendor selling level 5 (?) leather armor in Razor Hill. I also visited the weapon masters to learn all weapon types a shaman can handle (the Lunar Festival helps to teleport to other cities), bought some 10-slot bags, and some low level consumables like healing potions. So I'm down to 4 gold, but that is still plenty, and I'm much better equipped.
So where do I go from here? I will continue this evening to mine more copper, wait for the prices to go up a bit during the weekend, and make some more gold that way. But a bit further on I would rather drop mining, and learn leatherworking instead, to make my own armor. That might be less profitable than mining, but I didn't do much leatherworking with previous characters, so I think that could be more fun. Which means I need another source of income, and I have an idea I'll try out this weekend: Fishing.
Once upon a time, years ago, I joined a freshly opened server and made a human priest there. That turned out to be not a brilliant idea, because I already had an undead priest, who grew to become my "raiding main", and so I abandoned the human priest at level 60, where he still is. But at the time I was facing a similar problem, the priest having no money at all when I made him, only that he was playing in a fresh economy. Everybody was low level, and there was nobody paying several gold pieces for a stack of copper ore. So at the time I came up with a different get-rich-quick scheme: At level 10 you can get your fishing skill high enough to successfully catch fish in much higher level zones, e.g. the level 40ish Stranglethorn. Stranglethorn has a long coast, and while some of that coast is populated by 40ish mobs which kill a level 10 character very quickly, other stretches of the coast are empty. With some careful searching of the coast you can find pools of wreckage, from which you can fish crates containing items that are designed for level 40ish characters: Trade materials like silk cloth, and even the occasional green item. Now in a mature economy a level 40ish green item is worth several gold, and so are the trade mats. So the plan for this weekend is to level up to 10, get my fishing skill to the max for that level, swim from Durotar to Ratchet, take the boat to Stranglethorn, and start fishing there.
As an added incentive, I can join the Stranglethorn fishing contest on Sunday afternoon. No, there is no chance to win that one at level 10, unless I'm the only participant. But throughout the duration of the contest I can fish the Tastyfish (spelling?) for the contest, and then sell them for 20 silver apiece to the goblin NPC organizing the event in Booty Bay. That's 4 gold for a stack of fish, not bad for a level 10 character.
In summary, being poor in a mature economy is an opportunity. Some work, some creativity, and one can earn several gold pieces per hour even at very low levels. And as prices for training or white gear from NPC vendors are fixed and designed to be paid with the few coppers you can make from looting low level monsters, having a handful of gold pieces is already more than sufficient to pay for everything you really need at those low levels. You just need to not waste too much of your wealth on overpriced twink items on the auction house, because there you are competing directly with players who have thousands of gold.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
The garden gnome painting club
Imagine you are the president of your local garden gnome painting club. The club meets regularly for sessions where the members sit together and paint garden gnomes. Every year there is a charity event, with the painted garden gnomes being sold for charity after an exposition. Now your garden gnome painting club has lost some members who quit the hobby or moved away, and you are interviewing potential new candidates. What do you look for?
Given the club's activities, it is obvious that what you'll be looking for is people who are nice and friendly, and get along well with the others during the regular painting sessions. Being dedicated and turning up regularly is certainly a plus. But how skilled the candidate is at actually painting garden gnomes is only of secondary importance. The club is there to do things together, to share a hobby, not really to overcome some specific challenge.
Now lets move to another example: This time you are the coach of a high-class soccer club, like Manchester United, looking for players you could buy from another club. What would you be looking for in that case? Obviously the selection criteria a very different. The soccer club needs to win games, and can only put 11 players on the turf. Thus soccer skill is of utmost importance. A minimum of teamwork is required, but you'd rather take a prima donna playing great soccer than a nice guy with mediocre skills.
And now to move from those examples to the world of MMORPG: Is a MMORPG guild more like a garden gnome painting club, or is it more like a soccer club?
The first guild I was in for a prolonged time was in Everquest. In Everquest it took 2,000 hours to reach the level cap, and most of the players I was guilded with didn't count on ever arriving there. Thus there was no raiding at all for us, just playing together (soloing was hard in EQ), chatting, having fun. It was definitely a garden gnome painting club. During my years in World of Warcraft I was for a time member of a hardcore raiding guild (I got up to Nefarian in BWL with them), and that was more like a soccer club. They didn't invite me into the guild because I'm such a nice person, but because they needed a holy priest, and had in a test raid seen that I was performing my job well. When I took a break from WoW, I was immediately kicked from the guild.
Where MMORPGs have a problem is that you can't be a member of both the garden gnome paining club *and* the soccer club. Guilds often try to be both, and then frictions arrive between the two parts, leading to guild drama. As the examples showed, already the hiring requirements are very different, and while there is a certain overlap in activities (run heroics to have fun vs. run heroics to gear up), the ultimate purpose is a very different one, and at some point the needs of the two sides diverge. You can work around that limitation by having a main in a raiding guild, and an alt in a social guild, but even that is often frowned upon by the raiding guild.
What would be a lot better is if your social network had a different structure from your "professional" association in the MMORPG. Instead of having guilds, a game would have one social network structure for people to hang out with together, and a goal-oriented structure for people to raid together. Those wouldn't even need the same tools, the raiding structure might have tools like a raid calendar or DKP system that would be useless for the social network structure. Instead of having to switch to an alt in a different guild to hang out with your friends, you could be a member of both simultaneously. The big advantage would be that your network of friends would remain unchanged even if you decided for some reason to quit your raid structure to join a different one more appropriate to your dedication and skill.
In short, I think that guilds are trying to combine two functions that aren't always all that compatible with each other, and we would be better served if these two functions were split up into two independant structures.
Given the club's activities, it is obvious that what you'll be looking for is people who are nice and friendly, and get along well with the others during the regular painting sessions. Being dedicated and turning up regularly is certainly a plus. But how skilled the candidate is at actually painting garden gnomes is only of secondary importance. The club is there to do things together, to share a hobby, not really to overcome some specific challenge.
Now lets move to another example: This time you are the coach of a high-class soccer club, like Manchester United, looking for players you could buy from another club. What would you be looking for in that case? Obviously the selection criteria a very different. The soccer club needs to win games, and can only put 11 players on the turf. Thus soccer skill is of utmost importance. A minimum of teamwork is required, but you'd rather take a prima donna playing great soccer than a nice guy with mediocre skills.
And now to move from those examples to the world of MMORPG: Is a MMORPG guild more like a garden gnome painting club, or is it more like a soccer club?
The first guild I was in for a prolonged time was in Everquest. In Everquest it took 2,000 hours to reach the level cap, and most of the players I was guilded with didn't count on ever arriving there. Thus there was no raiding at all for us, just playing together (soloing was hard in EQ), chatting, having fun. It was definitely a garden gnome painting club. During my years in World of Warcraft I was for a time member of a hardcore raiding guild (I got up to Nefarian in BWL with them), and that was more like a soccer club. They didn't invite me into the guild because I'm such a nice person, but because they needed a holy priest, and had in a test raid seen that I was performing my job well. When I took a break from WoW, I was immediately kicked from the guild.
Where MMORPGs have a problem is that you can't be a member of both the garden gnome paining club *and* the soccer club. Guilds often try to be both, and then frictions arrive between the two parts, leading to guild drama. As the examples showed, already the hiring requirements are very different, and while there is a certain overlap in activities (run heroics to have fun vs. run heroics to gear up), the ultimate purpose is a very different one, and at some point the needs of the two sides diverge. You can work around that limitation by having a main in a raiding guild, and an alt in a social guild, but even that is often frowned upon by the raiding guild.
What would be a lot better is if your social network had a different structure from your "professional" association in the MMORPG. Instead of having guilds, a game would have one social network structure for people to hang out with together, and a goal-oriented structure for people to raid together. Those wouldn't even need the same tools, the raiding structure might have tools like a raid calendar or DKP system that would be useless for the social network structure. Instead of having to switch to an alt in a different guild to hang out with your friends, you could be a member of both simultaneously. The big advantage would be that your network of friends would remain unchanged even if you decided for some reason to quit your raid structure to join a different one more appropriate to your dedication and skill.
In short, I think that guilds are trying to combine two functions that aren't always all that compatible with each other, and we would be better served if these two functions were split up into two independant structures.
Voting with your wallet
In the past weeks I only made some passing remarks on two stories which caused a much bigger uproar on other gaming sites: The Allods item shop, and the new Ubisoft DRM. There was loud complaining about Allods making items for cash "necessary" to play, and them being too expensive. And even louder complaining that Ubisoft DRM was robbing the players of fundamental rights, by requiring them to be always online to play. This week two things happened: Allods lowered its prices by a factor of 3, and the Ubisoft games with the new DRM came out. And suddenly all is sunshine again. Reviews are friendly, and apparently the Ubisoft games are selling like hotcakes. Even people previously complaining loudly about Ubisoft are buying their games, and I'm guessing they are buying Allods items too.
As a form of protest that isn't very effective.
Now you might say that the protest against Allods Online was successful in bringing down prices. To that I have to respond that many of the protesters arguments were not just about cost per month, but about the changes to gameplay which basically require bought items to play, and the generally negative impact of a cash shop on game design. Nothing changed for that. And I'm not sure whether gPotato didn't plan all this exactly as it went: Present a cash shop 10 times more expensive than the Russian version, "listen" to the inevitable protests, and then "lower" the prices to just 3 times the Russian prices. Oldest trick in the book.
Game sites complaining about something a game company does is only of secondary concern to that company. I doubt Activision is having sleepless nights over the protests against the higher price of Modern Warfare 2, not after they sold nearly 5 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours. What price do you think the next surefire hit game of Activision will have? And the same will be true for Ubisoft: They'll look at the sales numbers for Assassins Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5, and decide that all is good, and that customers don't really mind the new online DRM. The next Ubisoft game will have the same form of DRM.
The only effective form of protest is voting with your wallet. That is somewhat easier in MMORPGs, because you can send a message by unsubscribing, which was pretty effective for AoC and WAR. In Allods Online you could protest by playing the game for free and never buying anything, quitting once that strategy doesn't work any more. But for single-player games, once you bought the box, the game company will count that sale as a vote for whatever change they made, be that a price increase or added DRM. I think the player base is about to send a loud and clear message to Ubisoft that after all the requirement to be always online isn't too restrictive as a DRM method.
As a form of protest that isn't very effective.
Now you might say that the protest against Allods Online was successful in bringing down prices. To that I have to respond that many of the protesters arguments were not just about cost per month, but about the changes to gameplay which basically require bought items to play, and the generally negative impact of a cash shop on game design. Nothing changed for that. And I'm not sure whether gPotato didn't plan all this exactly as it went: Present a cash shop 10 times more expensive than the Russian version, "listen" to the inevitable protests, and then "lower" the prices to just 3 times the Russian prices. Oldest trick in the book.
Game sites complaining about something a game company does is only of secondary concern to that company. I doubt Activision is having sleepless nights over the protests against the higher price of Modern Warfare 2, not after they sold nearly 5 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours. What price do you think the next surefire hit game of Activision will have? And the same will be true for Ubisoft: They'll look at the sales numbers for Assassins Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5, and decide that all is good, and that customers don't really mind the new online DRM. The next Ubisoft game will have the same form of DRM.
The only effective form of protest is voting with your wallet. That is somewhat easier in MMORPGs, because you can send a message by unsubscribing, which was pretty effective for AoC and WAR. In Allods Online you could protest by playing the game for free and never buying anything, quitting once that strategy doesn't work any more. But for single-player games, once you bought the box, the game company will count that sale as a vote for whatever change they made, be that a price increase or added DRM. I think the player base is about to send a loud and clear message to Ubisoft that after all the requirement to be always online isn't too restrictive as a DRM method.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A guild for the blogging community
Tamarind from Righteous Orbs founded a World of Warcraft guild for the blogging community, called Single Abstract Noun on the EU RP server Argent Dawn, Horde side. There is also a US chapter. I joined the Euro side with a Tauren shaman, now level 4, and owning 67 copper pieces. My plan for world domination currently involves getting to level 5, learning skinning and mining, and making some money that way.
I'm not quite sure why the guild is called Single Abstract Noun, but my clever guess would be that the single abstract noun in question is "guild". Tamarind had some problems with his previous guild, to who he hadn't advertised the fact that he was blogging, and then was "found out" when blogging about some guild drama. Been there, done that, but reached an understanding with my guild that I would refrain to name them or to rant too obviously about them. Bringing a blog to a forum fight is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, the other parties involved are likely to complain about that not being fair. Given that a blog usually has more readers and links to it than a guild website, a blogger who wanted to could name and shame his guild in a way that a Google search on the guild name would turn up his complaint about that guild as the first hit. World of Matticus discusses the problem.
Single Abstract Noun is not only for bloggers, but also for those otherwise engaged in the blogging community, e.g. frequent commenters. The guild is a social one, with very loose rules, and as many bloggers already have characters and guilds on other servers, you can expect to see a lot of "alts". But hey, hardcore raiding isn't all World of Warcraft is about. The role of MMORPGs as virtual worlds in which to meet and socialize has been neglected a bit in the past years, but I think the idea is coming back. Yesterday's post on World of Farmcraft might have been an extrapolation too far, but MMORPGs getting more features of social networks is pretty much certain for the not-so-far future.
I'm not quite sure why the guild is called Single Abstract Noun, but my clever guess would be that the single abstract noun in question is "guild". Tamarind had some problems with his previous guild, to who he hadn't advertised the fact that he was blogging, and then was "found out" when blogging about some guild drama. Been there, done that, but reached an understanding with my guild that I would refrain to name them or to rant too obviously about them. Bringing a blog to a forum fight is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, the other parties involved are likely to complain about that not being fair. Given that a blog usually has more readers and links to it than a guild website, a blogger who wanted to could name and shame his guild in a way that a Google search on the guild name would turn up his complaint about that guild as the first hit. World of Matticus discusses the problem.
Single Abstract Noun is not only for bloggers, but also for those otherwise engaged in the blogging community, e.g. frequent commenters. The guild is a social one, with very loose rules, and as many bloggers already have characters and guilds on other servers, you can expect to see a lot of "alts". But hey, hardcore raiding isn't all World of Warcraft is about. The role of MMORPGs as virtual worlds in which to meet and socialize has been neglected a bit in the past years, but I think the idea is coming back. Yesterday's post on World of Farmcraft might have been an extrapolation too far, but MMORPGs getting more features of social networks is pretty much certain for the not-so-far future.
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