1. I received a “Resurrection Scroll” from my friend to reactivate my account for 10 free days since it’s expired for over 90 days. But before then, not wanting to waste time downloading and patching, I decided to go ahead and download the WoW client first. The free trial client is freely available, so I figure I would just download that.
2. After fidgeting with it to get best download speed possible, I left it running on my Vista box before I went to bed. I was going to do it while I was doing something else, but because of lack of a throttle system, it sucked up all my bandwidth so I couldn’t let it run while I was working.
3. The next morning I had to rush out the door so I didn’t check if it finished. I came home from work late that night, only to find that it had crashed and only downloaded 810 MB of the 3+ GB.
4. So I restarted it again before I went to bed, luckily, it picked up where it left off.
5. The next night it’s all done downloading, so I went ahead to install it. It’s a heavy process that took about 30 minutes, probably mostly I/O. It made my top of the line machine crawl but I sat through that while doing some casual browsing.
6. Now that I see the familiar login screen, I typed in my username and password (still not reactivated) to see if I can get any patches before I do so. To my disappointment, yes I had to patch, the client I downloaded was not the latest. I had to patch from 2.0 to 2.2.
7. Downloaded the patch through the P2P downloader as usual. I don’t remember how long it took. It’s around 500MB. I didn’t sit through it. So goes another night.
8. Next night, at least the patcher started automatically after the downloader, so 2.2 patch is all done. I logged in, and oh noes, another patch. Luckily it’s a small one, only 8 MB, I sat through that, applied. And then I got another small one. I logged in and no more patch. I got the “account not active” message. So that means I am all patched up!
9. So convinced that I can reactivate and get in game right away, I clicked the link in the reactivation invite. Great execution on the web part. No fuzz there, very easily, just a few clicks and my account is reactivated with 10 days free.
10. During the process, I was told I needed the Burning Crusade client in order to play BC. My heart sank. But I tried logging in anyway. I logged in, and of course, it said my account is flagged to be able to play BC but I don’t have the BC client. So I clicked the link on the reactivation page to get the BC client. Another 1 GB+ download.
11. After it’s downloaded (it’s the weekend, so I sat through it doing something else). I had to sit through another install process, which took around 30 minutes. Then, I logged in and OMG, a patch. I restarted the client and the downloader started. Luckily, it just wants the 2.0 to 2.2 patch that I had previously downloaded (and good thing I didn’t delete it). It quickly gone through verification and went ahead to apply. My guess is that the previous time, since I didn’t have the BC client, it skipped all the BC stuff so now it wants it again.
12. And then of course, I had to restart again, for it to apply the 2.2 to 2.2.2 patch for the BC portion.
13. I logged in, and confusingly, I had to click on “Suggest Realm” in order to get to my characters. I suggested the realm that I have characters on. I know I had characters on Hyjal, they should have a button that let me pick it. For a moment I thought my characters were wiped!

In any case, I am finally at the character selection screen, and we will see where BC takes me. I have learned a lot of “what not to do” in this process, hopefully I can apply them! Overall, it’s a lot of waiting and patching. I can’t imagine a not-very-motivated user doing this. In the end, the process wasn’t hard, it’s just very tedious and frustrating. And if I started my trial the moment I got my email, I would have wasted at least three nights on it. If the resurrection email contained a direct link to download the complete and latest BC client, all of this would have been avoided and I would only have had to sit through one download and one install.

Voting has begun! Please go to Studio Amicus’s website for all the links. Thanks to everyone who have given us feedback and helped in making the video!

We’ve learned a lot about machinima and how badly written software can really drive you nuts

Any new MMO, or any game, that comes out today, even with the same number of expansions and books, will not achieve the same effect. Fans of the universe soaked up as much lore as possible before WoW came out, creating an immense amount of buzz and hype even before the game’s release with viral promotion (more on that in Marketing). When the game was finally released, the world was ready for the fans to explore, with familiar landscapes, characters and events. This contributed even higher immediate immersion factor, in addition to the reasons stated in the accessibility portion of part I.

With the exception of well-established intellectual property such as The Lord of the Rings Online or Warhammer Online, this is a unique advantage that Blizzard has and not many others have.

Aside from the Warcraft brand itself, Blizzard is also a notable brand. Over the years, through the release of many quality games, it has built up its name to be a very competent developer of fun. Any releases of Blizzard are watched closely by the gaming community and press, generating instant hype whenever an update or an announcement is made.

Marketing
Viral marketing was a huge integral part of WoW’s successful launch. What is viral marketing? It is essentially word of mouth advertising. It’s no secret in the industry that launch number is a clear indication of how well a MMO will do in the long term. From all the subscriber number studies, the subscriber number usually plateaus in 30 to 90 days after launch and either maintains the number or decreases gradually. Expansion packs usually rejuvenate subscriber number but it goes through the same 30 to 90-day plateau and decline cycle. With the brand behind the game, the preorder and launch number were phenomenal, selling 240,000 copies in the first 24 hours, which sealed the success of viral marketing for WoW.

What’s more? During this initial 90-day window, various other viral factors contributed to the explosion:

• A less than smooth open beta period due to extreme high numbers of players
• A close to disastrous launch due to again, incredible success
• Not enough boxes made due to unforeseen success, creating hype and more press
• Vivendi Universal and/or Blizzard pulling boxes off the shelf due to extreme high numbers and wanted to control the growth of subscriber numbers until they can stabilize the game, creating further craze over the box shortage
• Boxes of WoW started to show up on eBay, selling for more than what the box was retailed for, more people sweeping up boxes in stores, causing further shortage
• In box guest keys

All of the above generated a great deal of press and community buzz, created the ultimate self-propelling marketing vehicle. These individual events might have happened to other MMOs, but not all of them at once, and none of them have the pre-existing fan base as WoW. These factors, only combined together, created this avalanche of public buzz, propelling the name WoW to household level to even non-gamers.

In addition to viral marketing, VU/Blizzard have also done a fantastic job with traditional marketing, regular boasts of subscriber numbers with press releases, promotions, advertisements, tie-ins with other products, merchandizes, etc. With high number of subscribers, the company can afford more advertising and marketing, creating yet another snowball effect.

Community
Needless to say, with the combined might of pre-existing fans and new comers of the game, WoW has created one of the largest virtual communities on earth. Plenty of players work tirelessly to participate and improve the community out of sheer passion for the game and universe. Like I mentioned in the previous entry, all it takes is a very small percentage of players in a community to produce enough effort to power the community. Numerous websites have sprung up to support the game one way or another.

Moreover, Blizzard has a fantastic web and community team. The community website has latest up-to-date contents, with good and in-depth enough information for the casual players to get started. Before the release of each patch, a long series of updates and teasers are released, feeding the hype machine. In addition, there are useful tools such as the talent planner, realm status page or PvP ranking charts. These features all help the website become an important web destination for the players. Overall, World of Warcraft’s web presence has a very polished feel to it, featuring small details such as the crying orc when you try to cancel your subscription, same cannot be said for many other MMOs’ websites.

Many other features also encourage community participation, such as regular creative contests, fan arts and fictions. It’s clear that Blizzard has the right amount of focus placed on its web and community team. Brilliant contests such as the pumpkin crafting contest further help WoW become a household name. Imagine visiting a friend and seeing a WoW pumpkin during Halloween, what would the topic of conversation be?

Summary
In the end, the brand, the marketing and the community, all worked together, feeding each other and created a monstrous level of awareness of the game. Nonetheless, I think it all started with the brand (Warcraft and Blizzard). The other two simply capitalized on it.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of the series. In the next installment, I will play designer and dive deeper into the game design a little bit, trying to understand the reason behind the “stickiness” of the subscribers.

The beginning quests, while mundane, are simple enough for players to follow. Granted, it’s not an elaborate tutorial like some other games’, where it holds your hands through different concepts and mechanics (sometimes painfully long if the game is complex enough), but it provides you with enough details that you should not have any trouble getting started. In addition, the context sensitive tips system often gives crucial hints as to what the player can do. In the end, players might stumble a little but will still be having fun figuring it out. After all, discovery is part of the fun.

Accessibility is not just in the beginning levels. There are no overly complicated concepts in the game. To some, the game might actually seem rather shallow. But that is also what makes WoW so accessible that it pumped millions of new players into the genre. These MMO newbies are not put off by complicated character building and advancement system, for fear of making the wrong choices. But rather, players can focus on just completing quests and advancing through the various storylines. Further, the more advanced concepts such as Talents and Crafting are hidden from the beginning players until they have at least played for a few hours. Finally, talent and crafting choices can be unlearned at any time, further removing the chance of players being discouraged later by making bad choices.

The leveling pace is brisk, “dings” are often up until at least mid to late game (at which point you have already been hooked). The sense of achievement is continuously reinforced by level advancements, quest rewards, and experience points. Further, money is easy to come by if you picked the gathering professions, since higher level players are eager to purchase raw materials for crafting. This again, makes it easy to feel progress and achievements in the game. This is a driving reason for people to stay around as they don’t feel “stuck”.

Usability
It’s clear that Blizzard has invested significant time into fine tuning their user interface system. It’s whimsical yet clean. All crucial elements are easily accessible with just the out of the box interface. It has further improved since launch, incorporating elements from user contributed addons. Ah, the addons. This is one of WoW’s greatest achievements. The user interface system is extremely open. Players who are familiar with the Lua scripting language and XML can utilize the ever expanding library of exposed functions to create addons for the interface. It is possible to completely alter every single element of the interface.

Not a programmer? No problem, a wise man (I believe Will Wright) once said, it only takes 1% of the players to create enough contents for the rest of the community. There are plenty of user contributed addons that range anywhere from changing your mouseover tooltip to elaborate interface customization suites that provide their own graphical interface to allow you to create your very own interface (with custom art too). It is literally impossible to not like the interface because you will almost always be able to find an addon that does what you are looking for. Even the addon system is accessible to novice programmers. If you are not ready to dive into writing full-blown addons, try your hands in writing simple macros first via the in game interface. There are also thousands of ready made macros posted on forums and websites. Players can simply copy and paste these in game easily.

Under the hood, since the interface needs access to a lot of the communication information between the client and the server, these information are exposed via Lua as well. The end result is the creation of a lot of data mining addons, from exporting your character profile, to centralized automatic census data gathering. World of Warcraft truly deserves the title of most usable game ever created with such open interface scripting system. This elaborate user interface customization system has spawned numerous number of websites dedicated to them, be it listing, distributing, data display or collection. All of these websites further help market and push World of Warcraft to unprecedented level of success.

We have only scratched the surface of WoW’s formula of success. Stay tuned for next installment!

* From Blizzard’s press release: World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

In a small hut somewhere outside the city of Borealis, two young men huddled around a small laptop computer. One Atrox and one appeared to be Opifex. Tangled wires and junk equipment suffocated their personal space in this abandoned computer shop. The air was stale, only lightly decorated by the scant scent of silicon from the circuit boards. The room was dark except the dim emotionless light emitting from the laptop screen. Scrolling text danced along the walls of the shop, showing their artificial beauty and disappeared into thin air.

Pacing back and forth, Rasque broke the silence, “Dude, how much longer?”

“Just a minute,” said Defunct, his eyes never left the screen while his fingers frantically typed.

“Geez, hurry up already. You know, I am really sticking my neck out for you to get you access to this network.”

“Yeah whatever man, I paid you good money.” Defunct’s eyes still glued to monitor.

Rasque did not say a word, but grinned with his sparkling white teeth. Defunct inserted a small test tube into the side of the laptop, then resumed typing.

>>> Searching Omni-RK personnel records…
>>> DNA match found.
>>> Displaying personnel record…

An Opifex male’s picture and his information filled the screen. In the picture, he dressed casually and carried a rifle. He looked to be in his late thirties.

“Got it.” Defunct cracked a barely noticeable smile. He skimmed through the data on the screen and continued typing.

>>> Searching for spouse records…
>>> Access denied, higher security clearance required.
>>> Re-scanning Omni-RK security clearance…
>>> Invalid certificate, intruder alert.

The nanosecond that text appeared on screen, Rasque exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! We gotta jet now! Omni-Pol will be here any second!”

“Damn it all to hell!” Defunct slammed his fist on the wooden crate underneath the laptop. Teeth clenched, he said, “Gimme another minute or two!”

Bushes started to rustle outside. Not a second too soon loud knocks descended upon the fragile wood door, accompanied by a loud male voice, “Open the door, now!”

“Dude! We don’t have a minute or two!”

“I don’t care! You’ll be busted too if this laptop is confiscated. So do whatever you can to slow them down.” Defunct continued typing.

Rasque spitted, “Fine fine fine! You’re lucky I’m not charging extra.” With a few simple hand gestures, he fired up several nano programs in his NCU and darted out the shop through a wooden window close by.

The sun was shinning brightly outside. Rasque had to squint his eyes for a brief second to adjust to the light. He ran past the Omni-Pol officers, so fast that they didn’t notice. Now on their back, Rasque shouted, “Hey you Omni scum! Want a piece of me?” Hands gestured, nanobots activated, streams of signals transmitted to the Omni-Pol officers’ NCU via Rasque fingertips. Instantly, a white glow appeared around the officers. They were immediately immobilized but started to open fire. Rasque darted back into the bushes with nano-enhanced speed and ran.

Dashing back to the shop, Rasque said, “Alright dude, you got 52 seconds to…” Rasque didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. A loud crack formed on the door. A raging Enforcer scowled as he chopped down the door bit by bit.

“Oh man! I didn’t see him! Now I really have to go!” Rasque yanked the laptop from Defunct’s hand, Rasque mumbled, “God I hate this.” Within seconds, Rasque transformed into a cloud of nanobots and disappeared into thin air.

Left in the shop alone, Defunct hopped behind one of the crates and buried himself in webs of computer cables. He made a mental note of the spot when he first stepped in the room, precisely for this kind of situation. Without even the slightest breath, he waited. A tick later, the enforcer came raging in with eyes glowing red and beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. Six other Omni-Pol officers came rushing in after him. They surveyed the whole shop meticulously, but every time they came close to where Defunct was hiding, they quickly moved on to another area.

“So much for gridding here so quickly,” said one of the officers, looked to be in his mid twenties.

Now calmed, the enforcer said, “No worries, they will try again and next time they won’t be so lucky.” Wiping the sweat from his forehead, the enforcer turned his back, and the rest of the crew followed.

Defunct waited a few more to ensure they were indeed gone. He came out from behind the crate, hand holding a small slip of print out.

“Omni-Prime security clearance 8A.” He crumbled the paper in his hand. “You betcha I’ll get it.” He took a deep breath and walked outside. Staring at the blue sun, Amicus, he whispered, “Wait for me, mother.”

###

(End Part 1)

Here’s my contribution to the RP thread:

A Meta-Physical Calling
Late at night, Votary was laying in bed in his modest apartment at the westest side of West Athen. He picked the most remote apartment he could find so when night falls it would be quiet.

He was just pondering about himself, and his progress as a meta-physicist. Ever since his awakening to become a meta-physcist from his mining days, he has worked hard and long to become the best that he could be. He found ways to augment his abilities to be on par with his nanomage, solitus and opifex meta-physicist friends. He trained hard and spent long hours reading ancient meta-physical texts. He knew he was one of the best meta-physcists at his point in the path.

This night, he was pondering even more. His path might soon come to an end. Soon he will be able to summon the mightiest demon that a meta-physicst has ever summoned on the planet of Rubi-Ka. He already possessed the most devastating nano programs a meta-physicst could have and could execute them with ease. He was frustrated. He was also scared. What if that was it for his metaphysical stuides? After his mining accident and the awakening, he has been very clear in what he wanted to do with his Atrox life. But then recently, he was not so sure anymore.

He slowly drifted into sleep. Between the half awake and half asleep state, where you couldn’t tell whether something was real or something was in your dream, he heard a voice. A voice inside his skull. His tatoo on his temples started to itch, then burn. He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying but one word.

“Shadows…”

He struggled to get up, but he couldn’t. His arms and legs seem to weigh a thousand men. He could not open his eyes. He could not turn his head. He could not even wiggle his fingers or toes. He was stuck at the limbo between the real world and the dream world.

The voice kept whipsering and mumbling inside his skull. “Shadows” was all he could understand. Then the voice became two, and the two voices became four. Not even a tick after, thousands and millions of voices were mumbling “shadows” in his head. He wanted to scream, but he could not. He wanted to open his mouth to gasp for air. He could not. He was overwhelmed with terror. What was happening to him? He did not know.

Instead, he remembered his studies. He focused. He channeled his emotions. He refocused them. He manipulated the nanobots in his body with pure willpower. He activated them without even a single movement with his hands. He was no longer scared. Instead, he was then angered. He was angry at the voices. He was angry at whatever was doing this to him. His anger then turned into rage. From rage they turned into wrath. His emotions kept elevating. They fought with the voices, which made them even louder. They thundered Votary’s skull. He felt his temples were about to burst wide open. Beads of sweat ran down from his forehead. Veins were showing up all over his muscular body. Veins that were black and purple.

Suddenly, the voices stopped. Or did they all become one? He heard one voice, and one voice only. Was it a male voice, or a female voice? Or was it two voices? One male and one female, overlapping each other.

“On the second Sunday of June, the month of the balanced, you must show the same prowess you have demonstrated to me, to all others. Join your fellow pilgrims of the path, and a new path shall be shown in front of you.”

The moment the voice stopped, he opened his eyes. He could move again. Everything was normal then, just the same as every night at West Athen. He did not move even though he could, for a good half an hour after that ordeal. What was it? Who was it? He did not know. Though he did not question. He knew what he had to do. He no longer was frustrated. He no longer was scared. He had a mission and he planned to fulfill it.

He got out of bed, grunted at the now soaked bedsheets. He gazed at the three moons and prayed. He pondered what is in front of him. Emotions of frustration and terror are now filled with excitement. He could not wait.

To pay homage to Earth I used one of the oldest Earth languages to name our suns—Latin.

For the yellow sun

animus
For its energetic color, I chose “animus.” It means courage, vivacity, bravery, will, spirit, soul. Regardless of factions or guilds, these elements can be found and should be cherished and praised. This word has also evolved into the English language and can be used to mean a feeling of ill will or animosity. This is an excellent contrast for our planet’s struggle. Amidst all bravery and courage, we have plenty of animosity. Even if one day our struggle ends, we will still have our sun to remind us of the Notum War.

For the blue sun

amicus
For its serene and peaceful color, I chose “amicus.” It is a Latin word that means friend, comrade or harmony between parties. With all the struggle happening on our planet (signified by Animus), what really matters? Your friends and comrade. The true ones will be there for you when you need them. When you are away from them, you can gaze into Amicus and not feel alone.

The contest’s also been immortalized in a guide on AO Stratic! The runner ups can be found in this post.