Today, I discovered that World of Warcraft is allowing players to change their characters' names, for a price.

WoW, like other MMOs, has player-built communities that often function in various ways based on the reputations of players. Players proudly display guild names in their custom-made signatures. Players are accepted or rejected by in-game communities at times because of their past behavior or guilds. Through the months or years on a server, players come to know one another through grouping up, fighting side by side in battlegrounds, being in the same guild, or just seeing each other around in the game. Players may develop a reputation for their skillz in PvP, or they may be known as a leet tank. Likewise, they may be ostracized or harassed because of their behavior towards other players. "Ninja'ing" an item or using guilds for loot is somewhat controlled by the community.

WoW has added a new dimension to the reputation system by allowing players to look one another up on wowarmory.com, which lists a player's gear, PvP teams, and their stats. The character information also lists their guild. The official WoW forums do not allow players to alter or customize their avatars, which are links to their armory site. Additionally, a players guild is attached to their name on the forum, so that all that she says is somewhat reflected on her guild.

Of course, players can always change guilds or be kicked from guilds. But their reputation has been fairly stable on the macro level of the server (or the larger WoW community via the forums). Players have been able to transfer to new servers via the paid character transfer system for some time, but the costs (monetary and social) were too steep for many.

Now with the ability of a name change, how will the communities be effected? I am not sure if there will be any history/tracking ability offered by WoW to see how a character's name has changed. If there is not, it may be interesting to see how communities adjust to players being able to start with a "clean slate," or the inability of communities to track or, sometimes, protect themselves against characters who are traded or sold.

Tags: reputation, wow

About two summers ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI. It led to a transition from looking at fandoms to gaming communities. I can post more about this transition later, but for now I'd like to make a quick post about some current events in the WoW community.

I had only briefly heard about this before today, but apparently there are rumors of an upcoming game from Blizzard. Today, the WoW messageboards have been a flurry of activity, speculating about what the new game could be. Since it is almost 3 pm in Korea right now, the conference is ongoing and the WoW community and IGN have begun giving minute-by-minute updates about what is going on. The speculation is still running high, and people's excitement is growing with each small announcement (which hasn't produced any new information as of this post).

Within 30 minutes, the messageboard thread has grown from 11 pages to 59, and IGN is still updating every minute or two. The WoW community just discovered that www.starcraft2.com links people to the www.worldofwarcraft.com site, and they are pointing out the dates between Blizzard's releases

It is extremely excited to watch this flurry of activity unfold in these communities :)

Edit: but with statements like "there has been no IGN update for 5 minutes, that means there is something huge going on" how can you not get excited with them!?

Edit2: and the five minute delay was followed with an update that it is Starcraft 2, so the people are going wild lol. People are utilizing the trade channels (which are the only common channel to all major cities) the share their excitement in-game

Hi everybody

I know I haven't posted here in forever, and I'm sorry for that. Things got hectic and the few mentions of FFXI on here foreshadowed my spiral into gaming communities :)

I have been watching this LJ and tried to stay on top of keeping spam comments away. I was happy to see that some of the LJ posts continue to be an interesting part of ongoing dialogues within fansubbing communities.

In the future I'm going to try to be posting more!

About a month ago, I posted about the Naruto IRC fansub channel, #db. It was one of my first nights there and I was both amused and surprised at how strict the channel was. I've been watching the channel almost every night for the past month, now, and figured it was time to say a little bit more about it.

After watching the channel for awhile, it is obvious that the strict rules are there to make the channel run more smoothly. Many people come into the channel to lurk and download the newest episode. They don't read the rules and use triggers that consume a lot of bandwidth for the group (such as @find). Many "noobs" also ask questions which are answered by Dattebayo's website, such as "where do I find Naruto" or "is the latest episode out." With over 1000 users present on release nights, the channel would quickly degenerate into chaos or "spam." Therefore, the ops have clearly posted all of the information on their website and kick anybody who fails to visit the site and ask those questions.

Also, from watching the channel, I have seen how quickly and how easily a conversation on any topic can turn into an annoying flame war. This is why topics are often banned shortly after they are brought up.

Combine the flame conversations with the normal complaints on release night that the episode hasn't been released, or that they aren't getting their episode fast enough (seemingly unaware that there are a thousand other people trying to get it as well)... and the channel easily becomes frustrating for many.

Of course, the ops still have their fun. When the first ep of the filler arc (135) was due to come out, the ops teased the room that they weren't subbing it because it was filler, therefore stupid. It caused a lot of distress to new users within the channel, which was fairly amusing for the regulars to watch. They knew the ops were just teasing but enjoyed watching the noobs get flustered, upset, and then extremely delighted when the episode was indeed released.

And people still get kicked from the room for interesting reasons, such as capitalizing an op's name. The regulars in the room are used to these things, find them amusing, and promptly re-enter the room if they are one of the people kicked. While it was surprising at first, it is pretty fun to watch.

The channel is actually locked on non-release days now, though. Meaning you have to have a "key" to get entrance. This has cut down the number of users within the channel on non-release days from about 500-700 to about 50. The number of people on release days has also dropped, from about 1300-1500 to around 750. Despite the drop in the number of people within the channel, the chaos of release nights has remained relatively the same.

I guess that's about it. I wanted to do a follow-up on #db. I was fairly amused, if surprised, by the channel my first night there. But I don't think I did a very good job of explaining why the rules were necessary for the room.
And thanks to all of the ops who have explained things to me both within the channel and in the comments here (=

I've been playing Final Fantasy 11 a lot lately, working on leveling my character. To level I have to kill creatures, the higher their difficulty, the more points I get towards my next level. Of course, I die a lot, and lose points when I die. So it's a very slow process. I was invited to a linkshell though, which was pretty exciting. With a linkshell, each person is given a pearl, and so long as you have the pearl equipped, you can talk with other people on the linkshell, regardless of their location.

I've also been chatting with other users a lot. One guy, a whitemage, has starting putting on plays within the game with his friend. They stand in front of the Auction House, the most populated place, and use emotes and dialogue to act out short skits. Users watching them will clap, cheer, laugh, and grin using emotes. Following their skit, they ask for donations because the one user, vash, is "dying of lung cancer." It seems it's been working pretty well for them; they've been earning more doing that than they have been selling items or killing creatures. It's too bad I can't figure out how to capture video within the game

Two updates in one week, I'm too generous (=

Found this incredibly interesting, and amusing, article written by a fan about "Why Organized Religion is Exactly like Fanfic."

I recently started playing Final Fantasy XI, a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG - I think I got all the words in the correct order). It's my first RPG ever, so I've never played the Final Fantasy games or anything online like it. I also haven't ever watched anybody play. So it was quite an experience to be starting as a complete "n00b." It was quite humbling to enter a game and only know how to run around. Random clicking taught me how to talk to the computer characters, but they weren't quite helpful. And I wasn't about to go through a tutorial on the game. I started playing Nintendo at 3, I don't need tutorials (= Of course, running around completely lost wouldn't exactly support that statement, but that's okay. I've now been perusing the game for about a week, have learned to talk, to private message other players, to follow them around, level up, and fish. Most of the things I have learned so far have been through other players. The party that "adopted" me were quite shocked to find someone with no experience with RPGs at all and have been amused to discover all the things I don't understand/know how to do.

It has been an interesting, and fun, learning experience though. I think, when we're embedded within a subculture, we take for granted how even the tiniest skills must be acquired at some point. I'm learning that a lot with the fans - it took me a few months to get a grasp on their language, rules, hierarchy, etc.. and now I sometimes forget that most people don't know these things.

I'm still glad I learned to fish though (=

I attended an anime convention, Fanime, in San Francisco last weekend. While I have attended two smaller cons last fall and this past spring, Fanime was my first semi-large anime convention. I would estimate there were 5000 people there. This is, of course, very small in comparison to some of the other anime conventions in the United States (e.g. Anime Expo gets 25000+ people each year) and tiny in comparison to some of the convetions in Japan. However, it was small enough to be friendly and personal yet large enough to have a variety of panels, competitions, activities, and dealers. So it was a very nice mix.

One of the things we saw while at Fanime were some English doujinshi, or fan/amateur-made comics. From my experience in the Gundam Wing fandom, American fans still call their American/English-produced comics doujinshi. These comics are very popular in Japan, and are growing within the United States as anime gains popularity. It is still extremely difficult to find fans who produce English doujinshi, however. Most fans still purhcase their DJs from Japan, through ebay or online stores. Many dealers at conventions also carry doujinshi. We found a few dealer booths at Fanime that carried DJs for various series, although most of these were slash - or the pairing of characters of the same sex from the series. E.g. Kakashi/Iruka, two senseis on Naruto.

My first experience with an English doujinshi was from a Gundam Wing fan. She was both an author and an artist of fanworks, and she began creating Ether after several years of writing/drawing in the Gundam Wing fandom. Ether featured the character Trowa, and it was slash, pairing Trowa with a couple of different characters. The doujinshi was never completed, as the creator left the fandom.

In the Naruto fandom, I have seen some fans creating comic-strip or short doujinshi (5 pages or less), posting on them on DeviantArt as works of fan art. Usually these are comedies and/or slash.
Some examples are here and here.

Fans have often put thought or speech bubbles into their art, and this may be an transitional step between fan art with thought/speech bubbles and complete doujinshis. I haven't put a lot of thought into this though, so it's just throwing the thought around.

At Fanime, we saw quite a few works of English doujinshi. One producer, blacksheep, even has a monthly magazine/comic that they produce.

Tonight, I found a link to an English doujinshi on an LJ commnunity for Naruto. It is 31 pages in the making so far, is a slash DJ for Kakashi/Sasuke. It includes aspects of both the Naruto manga, such as their clothes and Sasuke's scratched forehead protector. It also hypothesizes what Sasuke will be like when he appears in Part 2 of the manga, even though the doujinshi itself has nothing to do with the storyline of the series. It's what fans call a "crack" work - something that makes no sense in relation to the series.

Additionally, each page of this doujinshi was hosted at photobucket, an image-storing site that fans often use when sharing icons/signatures, or other images that they may use on a messageboard. Most fans do not want to register a domain just to have a place to store a few images online so they can embed the image in a signature, so they use photobucket.com as their storage site.

What I found particularly interesting about this doujinshi is that although it includes a lot of aspects of Japanese manga - the sweatdrops, the shocked facial expressions of characters, the inverted colors of Sasuke's flashbacks, etc - it reads left to right, rather than right to left as Japanese doujinshi/manga do. A couple of the fans I've shared this with also commented on how hard it is to get accustomed to reading something based on Naruto, but reading it as you would an English book.

I think it will be interesting to see how the English doujinshi market will expand as anime gains popularity.

I found this link today on mediaminer.org for posters of fanart.

This is the first time I've ever seen posters being made of fanart, but it likely isn't that new. Fans often sell or commission cels. I found many places where people sell their cels in the Gundam Wing fandom. I'd never seen posters/calendars, though. And I'd never seen it on a general site such as mediaminer.org. Mediaminer.org is a lot like fanfiction.net - a general archival site where fans post works of fanfiction or fan art on any series. Every site that I saw cels or art prints was an individual selling their works. Deviantart, for example, allows its users to sell their art as prints in an individual "store" attached to their gallery. Mediaminer.org likely offers its users the option of making their art into a poster, although it doesn't appear that the money goes to the individual artist. Instead, it says "All proceeds will help to support the site for artists and authors of all ages and abilities." My guess is "site" means the general mediaminer site, although I could be mistaken.

I found it interesting, though. Typically I've only see fans selling their works at conventions or as cels.

I first heard about yousendit.com through my friend Wes, when we were talking about the exchange of AMVs. Fans typically use MSN Messenger or another chat program to share AMVs with their friends, but what do fans do when the download is slow, disconnects, is too large for a chat program, or if they don't really know the person well enough to exchange IM screennames?

Fans have solved the problem by using yousendit.com - a site which temporarily storing files up to 1 GB in size. The storage lasts for 7 days or for a limited number of downloads (I'm unsure about the actual number). Once uploaded, a link is provided to download the file. This link can be emailed or just posted on a messageboard or chatroom for others to access. Because it isn't a direct exchange, there is a time lag for uploading the whole file and then downloading it. However, because it is a direct link to the site, it is typically as fast, if not faster, than exchanging the file through an IM program.

File transfers to yousendit.com are not limited to AMVs. Fans have begun using the program to exchange manga chapters (usually in bulk zip files), episodes, and even the Naruto movie. This is particularly true the night an episode is released fansubbed and fans are having difficulty finding a high-speed connection through BT or another P2P program. Once one fan has the file in full, he/she can upload it to yousendit and distribute it to friends or people in a chatroom or messageboard. It is a popular alternative to IM exchange because it allows for files as large as 1 GB, whereas IM programs have limits on size (usually 100mb)

The site seems to be a step away from the intimacy of IM file-transferring. Because all that is needed to download the file is a link, there is no need for an exchange of email addresses or IM names. Yet it isn't as removed as P2P programs such as Kazaa or BT, where the person is unsure who they are downloading from. Oftentimes, one fan will upload a file to yousendit.com and then post the link on a forum or chatroom so that others can also download it. As one fan said, "but I thought to upload this AMV only for a friend would be a waste.^^;;"