When I looked up and realized the amount of time I'd spent I found it ironic that I began that warlock homework shortly after pausing from my new read, Castronova's latest and weirdest text, Exodus to the Virtual World. Whatever he's drinking, I want some, no I want a lot. Yes, there are many, many, moments when playing WoW or engaging in WoW-related obsessions such as theorycrafting, when I am hugely struck by the parallel between my situation and that of the Star Trek crew in the episode, The Game. In both cases, the game pulls people away from their real life duties and obligations. For Castronova, this is an emergent revolutionary evolutionary change in popular culture that will have economic and social ramifications. Well, lol, maybe for the middle class. Maybe instead of the Ktarians taking over it will be the poor, the underemployed, able to finally stage their revolution. ROFL. Or more insidiously, and more closely aligned to the Star Trek story, it will be the evil multinational Big Corporations. [Although, imho, they pretty much have control right now thanks to the Bush family.]
So here I sit, with my notes on enchants and gear I should get in order to be a more efficient and effective DPS'er in raids, having absorbed my last performance in Gruul's Lair as laid out in WoWWebStats, where I was able to compare myself with three other warlocks in the group. I am Hellgrima; I blotted out the other names just in case someone finds this and gets hinkty about it. This is on one boss fight, and I don't recall if this is the first wipe or the final successful fight, but I offer it mainly to show the level of detail one can obsess about if one so chooses.
So...you can see that I'm the laggard here. My DPS is considerably lower than the othr two locks'. My shadow bolts don't hit as hard, although I clearly do better with the Corruption spell, and Immolate. The other two are using Drain Life a lot, which is a very low level DPS spell, as you can see, but which is likely to proc the Shadow Bolt instant-cast spell, which lets them fire off MORE shadow bolts than they could with regular casting time. Anyhow...you can see where one can start to obsess.
That led me to the Warlocks' Den to look at gear enchants. I mean, I've got great gear so it must be the needed extra enchants. ANd so we go, on and on, perfecting our characters. LOL. This isn't even play time ingame; this is hobbyist homework. So, one thing that Castronova's book, so far (I haven't finished it), hasn't accounted for is the out-of-world time, energy, production, and exchange that supports the inworld play. MOst of that is knowledge creation and exchange, reputation management or 'vetting' of proposed knowledge, production of software applets that enhance play or support analyses of play, and portal creation and maintenance that supports community engagement about play but outside of it. THis is, imho, the most interesting and powerful element of the VW (virtual world) phenomenon.
...more to come...
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