An online community is still a community

I've been meaning to put this up for a while now, but keep not getting around to it. I realize the topic of this post may initially look a bit dorky, just bear with me, it's really not. Yes it involves Warcraft (David, I can already hear your eyes glazing over), but just ignore the game jargon and it's a really great story.

This story was posted in the Warcraft Europe forums a while ago and it's about this guy that comes across a newbie asking for help:

So off i went, with a lvl 34 Human Warrior, and helped this fella out with a few of his red quests.. We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn't a very old player, as he kept on having to go "becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall" he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying "coooooooooool!!", and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.

A few weeks pass, they stay in touch now and then, but then he sees the kid again, this time getting cyber-bullied in-game.

Anyway, a few hours later, i get a message from this kid "i got kicked from my guild :(" i tried to cheer him up, but it wasn't happening.. And to be honest i couldnt be arsed trying, and i was tired and logged off.

So yesterday ... i see this kid sitting next to the mailbox, no guild tag, people bouncing around him having fun.. And theres him, all alone, no-one paying attention to a "noob".. Now i know human race facial expressions never change, but as far as avatars go, this one looked really depressed.

So i message him asking if hes cool, and he tells me hes thinking about quitting, becuase he gets bullied alot at school, and his ex guild mates all said really horrible things to him, and that he knew some of the kids in reality, becuase they go to his school, and are beggining to bully him in school about how he plays WoW etc. We all remember how it was.. I remember i used to get bullied in school for not having any toys, or having an old version of a toy.. Imagine it now, you get bullied about it at home AND school too.

So he decides to do a really nice thing

So what did i do? I took the kid shopping is what i did... Bought him his epic (ground) mount, a load of nice armour off AH, which i made sure was well colour co-ordinated AND gave him very nice stats for his level. Bought him 2 very nice rare axes (fotgotten the name) and got a guild mate to put +15 agility on each one.

I also bought him a host of accessories, fun stuff, like a mana wyrm, somedeviate delights, an Orb of deception.. yunno.. all the "coooooool" stuff.

OK I realize that may have gotten a little thick for anyone that doesn't play the game. He later says that he spent about 1600 gold on this little shopping trip. Just to put that in perspective, if you added all the gold up on all my characters across all the servers I've played on, you'd have about that much. This was months of work that this guy spent on the kid.

Then (and this is my favorite part), he gets a thank you letter. Not from the kid, but from the kid's father:

I want to thank you for helping my son in this game, he's been so excited for days about the new things you bought him, hes also been having a tough time in school latley, and we agreed we would get him this game as an escape, although latley its turned into nothing more than another source of bullying and abuse.

Thanks to you the little chaps smiling again.

Once again, lots of thanks!"

So yeah, maybe people think playing the game is a bit dorky, but this is the sort of story that restores my faith in the humanity of dorks.

I just realized that it's a very fitting coincidence it's currently Children's Week, when players can take an (in-game) orphan around, show him different parts of the world, and buy him treats and candy.

A couple of gaming notes

I'm not trying to move in on Billy's turf, but there are a couple of gaming related notes I thought I would share.

First, Blizzard has announced Starcraft II. If you haven't played the original Starcraft and it's expansion Brood War yet, you really are missing out. Starcraft really is one of the juggernauts of gaming history. Not only does it have really great RTS gameplay, but it has an entertaining plot and characters. The multiplayer action is supposed to be real good as well, but I've never used that.

As part of the announcement, Blizzard has released several movies for Starcraft II. There is a cinematic movie and a gameplay movie. The cinematic is just visually very impressive; there were times when I honestly was unable to tell if it was animation or live-action. It doesn't have a lot of content, though. The gameplay movie shows off the new game engine, and some of the units that will be in the game. Again, it just looks stunning (get the 500 MB high-res movie) and they seem to be putting a lot of effort into balancing the units very well.

All the movies are distributed through BitTorrent through a small BT client dedicated to downloading just that file. Blizzard also distributes it's World of Warcraft patches the same way. This, combined with their the Easter eggs they like to include and their new in-game anti-spam feature, has led me to believe that Blizzard Gets It^TM. If there is a better way of distributing multi-hundred-megabyte files to thousands of people across the Internet, I don't know it.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, Blizzard also released patch 2.1.0. They actually made a cinematic movie to advertise a game patch, which I find stunning. (To be fair, the patch included quite a bit of new content along with the usual fixes.) Making these things can't be cheap, and that they will go to that extent shows, I think, just how big a deal WOW is.

Oh, for those that care, Starcraft II and WOW are available for both the PC and the Mac.

Game designers having fun

I play a lot of computer games (too many?). One thing I like to see in a game is a sign that the game designers enjoyed themselves when making it. Jokes, meta-comments, amusing little subtleties all contribute to the atmosphere of a game. They probably also contribute to the quality. I figure a team that's comfortable enough and creative enough to put little tidbits like that into a game is in a situation where they will design a better product.

For example, Might and Magic VI has a setting typical of fantasy games. Throughout the game, however, the player explores ancient ruins and environments that show highly advanced technology. One temple requires the player to collect words of power from long-dead inhabitants of the temple: the captain, first mate, navigator, communicator, engineer, and doctor. It turns out these are all the names of Star Trek characters spelled backwards. In another part of the game, the player meets a character shunned by the rest of her village because her cat smells very bad.

Right now, I'm playing World of Warcraft (yes, I'm an unimaginably huge geek). A few Sundays ago, on Easter, I kept running across brightly colored objects. What they are should be pretty obvious: