TLC puts the C in World of Warcraft

Mood: # I feel like dancing, dancing! #

Currently listening to: Spice Girls - 2 Become 1

*Plug: C.jpg has been fixed, with all photos sporting the amazing Javascript zooming goodness in working fashion now. Posts shown has been reduced to just 3 to express more minimalism.

The satire begins here:

World of Warcraft is currently the most popular MMORPG in our solar system. However, in neighbouring galaxies, this may not be the case. LIER Magazine posted a report that WoW had reached a playerbase of nearly 25 billion players at the start of 2007. Had this figure not been internationally based and actually taken from the Chinese Bureau of Statistics, then it would have meant that every person in China, yes, every mother, child, communist bastard and homeless bum was playing World of Warcraft. Thankfully, this isn't true and was only suggested for comedy purposes.

The advent of World of Warcraft quickly spawned a neologistic abbreviation to the geek community: WoW. People in real life would actually say, "Do you play WoW?" Lesserly-geeky beings would turn around and give these people weird looks because they are still uncorrupted by the mighty mind-controlling power of the Internet. Yet, as many still believe World of Warcraft is somewhat of an enigma to normal people, the conversation below proves otherwise. Surely, anyone who has touched video games will have heard of World of Warcraft. It's true. Blizzard Entertainment's marketing tactics are simply unmatched, utilizing their every penny. It was rumoured that Blizzard actually got a few hundred dollar bills changed into the US equivalent of the 1 cent coin, and printed the face of a Blood Elf onto the coin as an advertising strategy for the release of the WoW expansion, Bunny Crusade.

Ben says (10:22 PM):
u dun play wow do u?

Charles "La Linguiste" Wong says (10:22 PM):
no i
don't

Ben says (10:22 PM):
$$$

Charles "La Linguiste" Wong says (10:22 PM):
people who play wow give up more than just money
they have to sign a contract and Blizzard gains rights over their soul

Charles "La Linguiste" Wong says (10:23 PM):
i might start playing when i'm 40 though

Yes, this conversation really happened. Ben is by no means a geek, but he is indeed a very social human being. What is horrifying is that any person can simply add in "wow" as a Noun in their conversation and it will instantly register as being World of Warcraft. It isn't even case sensitive. What has become of our world?

Let us compare 2 Google image searches of "world of warcraft" and "wow", respectively:

Yes, this was what our search yielded. As stated before, although normal people (nongeeks) are already familiar with the World of Warcraft/WoW/wow/wOw/o_Oa relation, it would appear that Google is not. For many years, all geeks would stop all their system processes and pray towards Google, believing that Googs (the name we know him by in the ghetto) was an Internet deity of somesort or an all-knowing humanoid billionaire tyrant. We express our sincere condolences to any geeks whose reality has been shattered.

World of Warcrafting has become a new subculture. Back in high school, newly introduced friends would ask pathetically unoriginal questions like, "What kind of sports do you play?" and "What kind of allergies do you have?". But in this new age, people ask, "What server, what level, what race, what class, what guild, and what hours are you available for raiding?" Heck, nobody even goes "a/s/l" anymore. This is the era of World of Warcraft; a new world order has come to pass.

The age of WoW has also brought along a new facet of cybersex (yes, cybaring). World of Warcraft employs an interesting gear system which increasingly powerful sets of items for heroes to wear. They are classified as Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, Epic, Epic Tier 3, Epic: Limited Edition and so on. Items in World of Warcraft are said to be "bound". Players who are the first to pick up these items are stuck with them forever and they are also harder to remove from the hero's body. This poses a new challenge to cybar-savvy World of Warcrafters, in that they have to now wait twice as long for the other party to complete removing their armor for the virtual loving to begin.

The "binding" system has caused much controversy amongst players, due to the number of crappy/useless/racially offensive items that exist in World of Warcraft. An example cited by Noam Mayj (A Study of Gnome Mage Communities in World of Warcraft, 2006) was the inclusion of a weapon called the Yellow-braided Whip of Zen. A large % of the playerbase found this item to be inappropriately named, possibly suggesting that Blizzard had a slight bias for its Asian demographic. There were no complaints received from WoW China or WoW Asia servers. Of course, The Letter C could not just have this story end here. We decided to do some research of our own and were able to confirm that the naming of this item was indeed based on bias. It is no mistake that the weapon was a homage to the Asian community, since approximately 76% of all World of Warcraft players accessed the game from Internet cafes in China/Taiwan/Korea/Japan/Singapore/Malaysia/Hong Kong. Although this evidence was doctored for the sake of our satirical post, The Letter C is quite open and almost certain that it could be true.

Nobody is sure whether the items called Japanese Cup Noodles and Acne Remover were just old items that were never deleted from the database or some horribly sick and tasteless joke. Any hero that has the Acne Remover in their possession gains the "Acne" status permanently and this gives a -50 to physical appearance. Many players wrote complaints to Blizzard because their characters started becoming less attractive than themselves in real life.

Like most decent modern-day MMORPGs, World of Warcraft is "p2p", or pay-to-play. For the soft price of $20 AUD a month, an arm, and maybe a leg, you can start playing World of Warcraft. Blizzard has been kind enough to allow exceptions for the exchange of two legs if players do not wish to lose their arms as this will greatly hinder their World of Warcraft experience. There was an urban myth going around shortly before the start of 2007, that to play World of Warcraft one had to give up his/her soul. Unfortunately, there was another myth that anyone who starts playing WoW was put under a curse of silence by Blizzard, and would never be able to speak of the horrible ravishing of their inner being. Therefore, The Letter C crew are stuck in a conundrum, or paradox, or oxymoron (we know oxymoron is the wrong word). All we can conclude is that "World of Warcraft" and "life" should never occur in the same sentence, in the same way that nobody should ever put "XBox" and "good" in the same sentence, or we will surely give them a beatdown.