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Two Player Comic: Tingle's Secret Profession
comic
posted by: Aaron Stanton
date posted: 01:58 PM Tue Feb 21st, 2006
last revision: 01:58 PM Tue Feb 21st, 2006



Click here to read this week\'s twoplayer game comic.

I\'ve never been much of a World of Warcraft fan. Not that I don\'t understand the appeal, and not that I have anything specifically against WOW, but I\'ve just never gotten into it.

That\'s not always been the case with massively multiplayer titles. I bought a copy of Ultima Online before I had a computer with fast enough specifications to run the game. It took at least a year from my initial purchase to subscribe to an internet connection that was fast enough to support taking the game online.

I was in love with the idea of playing with thousands of people at once. Ultima Online turned out to be flawed. As the first of its kind, it got the unlucky task of discovering glitches, some of which were simply too well embedded in the infrastructure of the game to be addressed with patches and updates as time went by.

World of Warcraft is the current day perfection of the genre, and somehow I\'ve never been able to rekindle my love of the MMORPG. My interest peeked and waned too early in life.

However, I was reading this morning about the The Imperial Order on the Detheroc WOW server. Apparently this group has managed to attain key items used to unlock the server\'s extra content for everyone. But are they doing it?

No. Instead The Imperial Order is demanding 5,000 in gold ransom for unlocking the content. Not being either a WOW player or a player on the Detheroc servers, it\'s easy for me to sit back and chuckle. Personally, I love this move. I think it\'s the most interesting thing to come out of World of Warcraft since the plague tore up things a few months back.

Having a world operated by its players - thousands of them - means oddities will arise, including human interactions that simply stall the system. The interesting thing will be to see how long this goes on.

I can\'t help but wonder if someone will finally just pay the $5000. Will Blizzard interfere? A part of me, deep down in my soul, sincerely hopes not. This is the crop that\'s grown by having humans interact; I say we see it out until it ends on its own. Either the server will atrophy, or money will be paid, or the three ghosts of Christmas will show up and thaw a heart. Who knows.

In a way though, it sort of rekindles my love of online games. It truly highlights what separates the genre.

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