My main interest in virtual worlds remains the way in which they serve as an accidental laboratory for studying historical change in societies over time, and in particular, the evolution of emergent, accidental or unpredictable structures and practices.
So there's this thing called "The Burning Crusade" that I've heard about. Maybe you have too? Let's make this an open thread of sorts for collecting and commenting on reports of transformation or novelty in the social structures within World of Warcraft. I have a few initial thoughts below the fold.
1. As always, anybody who has been in a beta test (or just is a perceptive guesser) could make an economic killing if they prepared properly. For example, for the first five days or so of the expansion going live, anybody who stockpiled runecloth and brought a character within nothing but stacks of runecloth in his bags to Falcon Watch or the Temple of Tehlamut could probably sell those stacks directly to characters trying to skill up their first aid at the trainer for premium prices of five or six times the pre-expansion norms on the Auction House.
2. There are also new markets. A few of the extremely powerful bind-on-equip green items I've gotten can be equipped by level 57 characters. I would think that these would now command premium prices on the Auction House once things settle down in a bit as they will allow a level 57 character to dominate the pre-Outland quests and so on that they must complete. Any portal mage could probably open portals 24/7 to the capital cities back in Azeroth and make huge amounts of money.
3. This connects to one of the most crucial changes. All of the pre-existing content of the game for levels 1-57 remains important, as of course does the new content of the starting areas. There will be substantial cohorts of Blood Elves and Draenei (the race whose spelling may be the most non-intuitive word ever to be typed into chat boxes frequently: it's the new "rouge", without a doubt) who will still need and experience this content. But unless I'm missing something, all of the level 58-60 content laboriously created by Blizzard for the original game has become instantly irrelevant. I don't think there will be anyone in Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, UBRS and so on, unless it's massively geared-up level 68+ characters doing it for shits and giggles in bizarre combinations, much the way that players have been experimenting with killing Onyxia with the smallest possible number of uber-geared characters. If you had to be level 60 to get to Outland, then I think the existing endgame instances would still have some play in them, at least the 5 and 10-person ones. But with level 58+ eligible to go, those are now pretty much going to be empty until a huge mob of Blood Elves and Draenei are doing them at level 56-57.
4) This isn't just because Outland is new, it's also because the paradigm for playing in Outland (so far) strikes me as an unvoiced confession of the design mistakes made in instances like Scholomance and Lower Blackrock Spire. I may change my tune later on, but Hellfire Citadel as an instance is fun, intense and short, plus players who really do want to have a lengthy, unpleasant experience playing an instance will have the opportunity to customize the difficulty level of the instance.
5) So far the only really new practice I've seen isn't exactly new, but with the intensity of players pouring into Outland in a single wave, tagging mobs for quest credit is once again a competitive art form that has spawned an interesting moral discourse in its wake about what's fair and unfair. That's already ebbing a bit as the next wave of quests starts to disperse players at the leading edge of the mass population of levellers.
So, TN readers: your own observations and discoveries so far?
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