Back in the early days of MMORPGs—and those days it was 2004—the MMOs started to realize that people wanted more to do than just new content involving episodes and new villains and higher level caps. Instead, MMO companies discovered that people wanted to experience in-game what happened to them outside in the global culture. So City of Heroes added the Winter Event.

With that winter event came some unexpected bugs…currently best described in the most recent MMO Anthropology article,

By far the most amusing phenomena that rose out of the original 2004 Winter Event in City of Heroes happened to be the city-region bosses the Winter Lords. These were gigantic snowmen appearing about ten stories tall, textured as if made entirely out of snow, with icicle noses. They were leveled appropriately to the given zone they happened to be in meaning that beginning zones saw weak versions and expert zones saw extremely strong versions.

Each Winter Lord boss-spawn would take numerous heroes minutes of fighting in order to bring one down. However, it was quickly discovered that even high level heroes could take down a weak Winter Lord and receive a notable amount of experience points (experience is a metric for increasing the capabilities and advancement of characters standard to MMOs) this high amount of experience also translated to other heroes in their team. This activity is better known in the MMO community as “power leveling.”

While we’ve seen multiple other MMOs run with New Years and Christmas-themed events such as World of Warcraft and Winter’s Veil, these introductions into seasonal events are never-ending and will be staying with us for years to come.

The Winter “Level” Lord, however, has come and gone.

We fully expect new bugs and more community-based exploits to take advantage of interesting elements added by seasonal events in games; although, if they arrive in Star Wars: The Old Republic we might be seeing even more bans coming down on the heads of customers.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

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 Darkmoon Faire had some upgrades come World of Warcraft patch 4.3 and now it has its own island. With the advent of the Hour of Twilight patch, you can now visit the Faire out in their strange recesses–but you can’t fly there–and there’s a great deal of weird things going on.

Get tokens, get shot out of a cannon, have your fortune read.

A lot of things for any anthropologist to get up to.

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.