World of Warcraft has a winter celebration that affects both Alliance and Horde that involves the winter holidays. The Feast of Winter’s Veil involves a great deal of traditions taken from the Western celebration of the winter holidays and that primarily of Christmas. Such icons appear as the Abominable Greench – the Grinch of Dr. Seuss’s work added to the abominable snowman – Metzen the reindeer who is an echo of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer – and even Greatfather Winter – an analogue to Santa Claus.

The orcs in Orgirmmar set up a Yule tree covered with decorations, holly and mistletoe are handed out to revelers who then can use that to make their mount into a reindeer. Gimmick gifts abound that allow the production of snowmen companion pets and snowballs to throw at friends and enemies alike.

Link, via MMO Anthropology.

Jerks are ubiquitous in the video game community and PvP servers additionally self-select for their sort of behavior.

It’s impossible to have a community the size of World of Warcraft and not having at least one guild willing to ruin someone else’s day on any single shard that permits PvP. In this case, a Horde guild holding an in-game funeral learned the hard way that when you stand around in no armor, in a contested zone, a small band of people can totally bring ruin and sorrow onto you. And also, at the same time, many people condemned the actions of the attackers of taking advantage of the ritual.

In the end, Serenity Now got their "fifteen minutes of fame," but Fayejin — the dead PvP player memorialized in the "bombed" funeral — will be remembered for how her funeral led to a flashpoint in griefing and the MMO community.

Link, via MMO Anthropology.

Fiveshot is an avid poster to YouTube –visit his channel gregory06– and also a World of Warcraft player. Through his activity in MMO games — such as WoW, League of Legends, Modern Warfare 3, and others — he has made use of YouTube to deliver a cross-section of his experience and others.

The interview highlights the social aspects of MMO gaming but also reveals how YouTube changes or enhances that experience. He has gained quite a following and many of his videos reveal a great deal of comments. These are individuals who may play only one or two of the games that he takes footage from; but they’re all coming together on YouTube to comment.

Community-wise, games like WoW and such do not have a forum for video so YouTube becomes its proxy by allowing footage to be taken from these virtual worlds and transplanted here for commentary.

Through understanding how YouTube and MMO games interact in this fashion we can gain a better analysis of the emerging use of rich media by players to connect with the world beyond the internal cultures within the games themselves and their immediate community.

Link, via MMO Anthropology on YouTube.

The MMO game anthropologist strikes again as he visits the event that World of Warcraft is doing for the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) all two days of it. It’s one of the shortest world events in all Blizzard and comes and goes without notice by most.

It does have an achievement!

Don’t miss out, and while you’re at it, culture yourself.

So, someone decided to visit Azeroth and give a little bit of a dialogue about the Halloween event. It’s a little strange in there – but in some ways it could be seen as a proxy for real streets and real events.

Hey, virtual worlds have anthropologists too.

Kyt Dotson at SiliconANGLE believes this may be part of Blizzard’s long-term plan to combat gold farming, but not for long,

Players can only purchase virtual item vanity pets from Blizzard, sending the dollars into the MMO company’s coffers. This move may initially put a dent in the business operations of gold farmers; but after a while the market may become saturated after the hype wears off.

As for why they’re doing this? It’s not just about gold farmers and gold sellers,

Blizzard stands to make a lot of money from this venture.

As a corporation, Blizzard has a nose for where they can leverage the disposable income of their players and this one takes the reigns two-fold. Unlike other non-tradable virtual items, such as the $25 Celestial Steed (the first in-game vanity mount)–which netted the MMO giant almost $4.4 million in the first four hours—the Guardian Cub stands to net Blizzard not just players with enough disposable income for one for each character, but also players who buy extra to sell to those flush with in-game gold.

No kidding.

Link, via SiliconANGLE.

Is it just me, or is the Priest set looking really Warlocky to anyone else? Also, the Paladin set? Liquid creamy.

Aside from tearing the very ground asunder, Blizzard introduced two races: goblins and worgen.  Kit Dotson over at Green Dragon Inn has been wondering how well the wolfy-side-of-things has been working out for everyone playing the game.

I’ve mentioned before that Cataclysm represented Blizzard’s reintroduction of the narrative into gameplay and the worgen starting zone is no exception. In fact, compared to many others it’s literally inescapable until the entire story is told. Unlike starting as an undead, orc, human, everyone else you must play through an entire narrative before you can get into general population with everyone else on the server. The first time, this actually felt fun. It gave a sense of presence, of real ticking clock, a bond with all the other players that I saw playing worgen.

“Oh, hello there,” I’d say. “You too played through that almost thirty minutes of shifting quests before you could go somewhere and reach a capital city?”

Link, via Green Dragon Inn.

Kit Dotson over at the Green Dragon Inn decided to tackle the subject,

The current end-game instances are a little bit odd when it comes to normal mode. In fact, two of the instances we leveled through on our way from 80 to 85 get left in our dust: the Throne of Tides and Blackrock Caverns. The odd thing about these is that in all of my characters, I only went into the Caverns once—and weirdly, I haven’t seen either during day-to-day heroics while grinding to gear up for raiding. Now, I know the feeling alongside many other casual players who missed out on content because it was end-game raid content; but it’s something utterly different to miss content because I out leveled it while not looking.

However, we think there’s something to be said here as well.

Why does Blizzard level people out of these instances when they rise from 80 to 85. A lot of the content from the early levels does fall out of the LFG system; but we can say from experience that we do love the early game and wish that we could get back into those instances without much fuss.

Later on, we have to take teammates from our guild and cannot just use LFG.

It’s a little odd.

Still, if you have an opinion on instances themselves, head on over to Green Dragon Inn and have it out.

Link, via the Green Dragon Inn.