WoW – World of Warcraft
WoW – World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004. It’s one of the most popular mmorpg-game with more than 11.5 million (December 2008) monthly subscriptions.
Wordlist:
Account – every WoW player must own an account. All their characters are stored on this account and some players have multiple accounts as well as multiple characters on those accounts.
The Burning Crusade / TBC – The first expansion pack available for WoW. It raised the maximum level from 60 to 70 and introduced new playing areas.
Ding – reaching a new level. Many games allow the gamer to gain experience for their in game character as they complete certain tasks. Gain enough experience and you will be rewarded by an increase in level. This means the character is now considered more powerful and have access to new parts of the game.
Epic flying mount – Burning Crusade introduced flying mounts to WoW. In WoW the gamer can ride around on an animal called a mount. This lets the gamer travel around the game areas faster. Flying mounts allowed the gamer to travel very fast in certain areas and were very desirable to have. These mounts also required a substantial investment of time from the gamer to attain.
Farm – when a player is doing a repetition of the same task over and over again. This task usually results in the player earning either significant amount of in game currency or experience or similar. Gamers can spend hours farming to earn in game currency.
Grind – Grinding is a term used by gamers when they are describing the journey of gaining higher levels for their character. Some parts of the journey from level 1-max level can be considered incredibly boring for the gamer and sarcastic terms such as “enjoy the grind” are common when veteran WoW players are talking to new players.
Guild – players in many games like to group together in organised groups, in WoW’s case these are called guilds. They are typically a group of people who arrange to work together in the game to complete and compete in parts of the game that is designed for such a purpose.
Guildies – slang term for a guild member
Heroics – an instance that has been made harder for the gamer and gives more rewards.
Instances – an area for up to 40 gamers in WoW to battle together for the common purpose of killing one or more an extra difficult Boss characters.
Level 60 – The maximum level when WoW was initially released. It took approximately 130 hours of actual playing time to reach this level for a gamer before the game was modified. Current max level is 80.
Patches
2.1, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2 – these are references to patches. A patch is an update the programmers of WoW implement into the game to fix problems.
Raid – a group of players enter an instance together to Raid it. This is termed Raiding and usually means the group of players is working together to defeat a main Boss character. The best rewards for WoW players has typically come from doing Raids and is one of the main focus’s for WoW players, if not the main focus. These events can last many hours to complete correctly and in WoW the rewards are not always guaranteed to be received. Guilds will schedule regular times for all members to meet to start a raid. Gamers will often begin to revolve the rest of their life around these scheduled meetings.
Server – an entire world of WoW will be held on a computer system called a server. When a gamer plays WoW their computer connects with this server. So every player in a particular version of WoW will be connecting to the same server. Not every player in WoW is playing on the exact same virtual world. There are many versions of
WoW replicated on many different servers and one gamer cannot play their character on more than one server at a time.
Tank or MT– a character that will take the attention of the difficult Boss characters in instances.
Wraith of the Litche King / WotLK – WoW’s second expansion that was released in 2008. This expansion raised the maximum level from 70 to 80 and added even more areas and content to the game.
