I consider myself somewhat up-to-date on the video gaming circuit, so whenever I miss something big, it normally comes around for me fairly quickly. I have missed “World of Warcraft,” which (for those of you who don’t know) is a gigantic, online role-playing game in a style somewhat like Lord of the Rings where thousands of players create characters, then attempt to make them stronger and better equipped. This is done by other players in groups that may be as small as 3 or as huge as 50, as temporary as a single night or as permanent as years, and going on quests which may range from item recovery to enemy-slaying.
I’ve always known it was popular. When the Chinese government decided to put a legal limit on how much one could play the damned thing per day, I came to understand it was something more. It’s a living creature, spawning an entire subculture. Don’t believe me? Tell me if you can understand this:
“Oh no! I raid-wiped by drawing aggro from the MT with DOTs. Everyone was yelling ‘L2P, nub!’ I think I’m going to have to PUG it out at meeting stones for awhile, which sucks, because the drop-rate on that raid was massive.”
It didn’t make any sense, did it? I know what you’re thinking (Corelyn): “Who cares? It’s all stupid gamer crap.” Well, yes and no. Recently I had a several-hour-long conversation with my good friend Brendan, who went into detail explaining what that one little blurb meant.
You must be curious. Let me break it down for you. When I’m done, you may see that you are transported into an entirely new, incredibly complex, realm of human interaction.
Let’s start easy, with “Raid-Wipe.” These are very bad. As you recall, WoW (acronym for World of Warcraft) is about teamwork, so most people are completing objectives and moving through the game in teams. These teams have many names, depending on their size and permanence (“guild” is a common term for a long-standing organization), but regardless of this, any expedition to complete an objective as a group is called a “raid.” Therefore, a “raid wipe” is when every single member of the expedition dies. Death, of course, happens frequently in WoW, and the result is that you are rendered a ghost and required to track down your corpse to re-inhabit it. Everyone dying is not the end of the world, but it’s a huge nuisance, and it can cost you dearly.
“Drawing Aggro.” Ah, here’s a fun one. There are hundreds of computer-controlled enemies in WoW, some of them gigantic and terrifying, some of them meek and/or hilarious. Killing them, and then “looting” their remains, is one of the main ways to gain experience, gold and equipment (don’t worry, they’re all hideous monsters). Now different kinds of baddies behave uniquely; some are designed to attack you on-site, others will leave you alone until you hit them. In either case, when a computer-controlled creature feels threatened and decides they’re going to attack you, they focus their energy on you, and it is said that you have “aggro-ed” them. They’re pissed off, they’re coming at you.
But here’s the thing: everyone in WoW can only target one opponent at a time, because the game is turn-based (in other words, during any fight, there is a time you are allowed to attack, and a time you must receive an attack). So if you are in a group of three people, and all of you are taking shots at an A.I. adversary, that adversary must pick one of you to hit each turn. Some spells may do damage in an area that affects all of you, and they may target each of you one at a time if they choose, but at the end of the day, the game forces you to aim your sights at one thing at a time.
So, in that same situation, three humans are attacking one computer, and most likely the A.I. is going to decide which of you is the most dangerous, or which one is annoying it the most, and focus itself on them. WoW players know this, and they plan their attacks very carefully, deciding beforehand who is going to receive the brunt of the attacks. To “draw aggro,” therefore, is to hit the opponent with enough ferocity that you make it change its mind and turn its attacks on you. Normally, this is a very bad thing to do, because, as I mentioned before, guilds pick the person who aggros very carefully, and if you draw the fire away from him or her, the tactics of the battle fall apart.
“MT.” This means “main tank.” We’ve talked about this guy before, this is whatever player in your party is going to take the brunt of the damage from an enemy (normally computer-controlled). It’s useful to think of the members of a raid as a football team; each of them picks their position carefully and develops their character with their role in mind. In any role-playing game, you receive points for playing well which can be distributed to your attack, defense, luck, charm, or any other attributes, but the amount of these points you may receive is incredibly finite. You have to budget.
Here’s where MTs come in. Eschewing almost anything else, they pile their level-up points into anything defensive. They have a huge amount of life, lots of defense, strong armor, etc. The trade-off is, the strength of their attacks is incredibly low. But that’s okay, there are other players designed to do the attacking, and more still who are working to heal the MT as he takes damage. The teamwork on display here is extremely intricate.
You’re now getting a picture of how a group of WoW players might take on a boss who is dramatically stronger than them: their MT attacks directly, drawing the enemy’s attention to him/herself and keeping it there, while the rest of the team wears away at the boss and heals their tank. But they have to be careful: attack too hard, the boss will decide you’re his biggest threat and turn on you. Your team isn’t ready for that, and after the baddie invariably wipes you out, that’s one less attacker they can count on while the MT continues to take a beating. Depending on the battle, one player dying might make the whole operation fall down like a house of cards.
So there you have it: the MT is a damage sponge, a red cape designed to keep the metaphorical bull pissed off and looking at him/her while the rest of the team finishes it off.
“DOT.” Pretty straightforward, this is a spell whose effect sinks in over time, hence “Damage Over Time.” They’re nasty things, very effective when employed by a player who favors magical abilities over blunt weapons and more physical combat. It’s like poisoning your enemy, and in fact many DOTs are poisonous in name or nature. The satisfying thing about them is that you only have to cast them once, and then they continue to chip away a set amount of damage for a set amount of time. It’s easy to accidentally draw aggro from an MT with these things, because if you lose track of how many you’ve got active, the cumulative damage from them and a physical attack may be too much, and the boss will be compelled to turn on you.
“L2P.” It means “learn to play.” Very serious insult, typically reserved for people who really blow an operation. Make no mistake, World of Warcraft is a very simple interface: you click something if you want to attack it, and press a few buttons to move around. Aside from inventory management, that’s about it for buttons. When someone yells “L2P,” they don’t mean “go check the owner’s manual,” they’re telling you to learn the strategies employed by seasoned WoW players. As I’ve mentioned many times, this game is about teamwork, and the strategies employed by these teams have taken years to be formulated. Someone who doesn’t play their role sticks out like a sore thumb.
“PUG.” An acronym which stands for “pick up ground raids.” In other words, you have to join a raid largely populated by total strangers. This may not seem like a big deal, but communities are tight-knit in WoW, and jumping into a new one is literally as difficult as stepping into a foreign social circle in real-life, if not more so. These groups exist with purpose, they have a way of going about things, and new members rarely grasp this. Most WoW players have to PUG it out from time to time, but it’s not the ideal way to play.
“Meeting Stone.” One name for general population areas where players meet each other, deal with A.I. controlled merchants and vendors, and assemble for quests. These are relative safe-zones (excluding servers where gamers may attack each other at will), where one is physically barred from combat. These can be anything from town centers to geographic landmarks that the game designers designate.
“Drop Rate.” You’re not going to believe this one. “Drop rate” refers to the statistical odds that, in a given place, if you kill an enemy, they drop something. These rates are item specific: there are gold drop rates, essence drop rates, gear drop rates, and so on. But how does anyone know a drop rate to a number as specific as, say “1.5 percent,” you ask?
Well, there are numerous websites who keep track. As gamers kill enemies and loot the remains, they report back on the number of times they got a certain thing, and this is compiled against the number of enemies killed total, and a drop rate is created. One such website is “Wowhead.com.”
Drop rates lead to a phenomenon called “farming,” which generally is finding an area with a rich supply of disposable A.I. enemies and killing (literally) hundreds of them, if not thousands, and looting the results. Now of course, such tiny enemies will only produce a few pieces of gold (which are used to buy things from vendors), but if you kill enough of them, that adds up.
Chinese “gold farmers” are notorious in the WoW universe, as they are employed by real-world companies and assigned exhaustive shifts of 12 hours or more a day, just farming. Why? Check eBay, things acquired in WoW have legitimate dollar value in the real-world. Extremely powerful characters can sell for hundreds of actual dollars, as can incredibly rare items. So if a Chinese company wants to make some money, they employ a workforce of gold farmers to accrue a wealth of online gold, buy up valuable items from vendors, and sell them for actual money to WoW players. I think you can begin to see why the government over there is imposing such strict regulations.
And so we arrive at our translation. Let’s see the sentence one more time:
“Oh no! I raid-wiped by drawing aggro from the MT with DOTs. Everyone was yelling ‘L2P, nub!’ I think I’m going to have to PUG it out at meeting stones for awhile, which sucks, because the drop-rate on that raid was massive.”
Which translates to…
“Oh no! I got my entire team killed by drawing enemy attacks onto myself instead of the guy we had assigned to take such beatings, and I did so by using too many spells whose damages accumulates over time. People were yelling that I needed to learn to play the game correctly, and now I’ll have to go join some other group comprised of people I don’t know. It’s too bad, too, because we were in an extremely lucrative area.”
Whew.
Exhausted yet?
Very interesting. And I thought plane-crash litigation was complicated . . .