kek
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Local news on WoW lingo
This is pretty silly, but we do have to give them credit: Bay Area NBC may have done a report on how incomprehensible our game's jargon is, but at least it's not a report about how WoW breaks up marriages or ruins the lives of children. But yeah, portraying WoW players as aliens with a foreign language all their own is a little far out -- the game's got jargon just like everything else, and what they don't do in this report, unfortunately, is show the etymology of all of these words ("QQ" means to cry because it looks like eyes crying, and "kek," as you know if you've ever been Alliance facing the Horde, is what "lol" translates into from Orcish). Not to mention that it's too bad she comes so close to the "I'm a girl, I don't get videogames" stereotype -- maybe if she sat down in the starting area for 20 minutes she'd know a little bit more about how it all works.But maybe we're asking too much. Let's not forget that this is the media showing World of Warcraft played by a normal dude with a reporter girlfriend and a nice apartment. Sure, they're didn't spell "pwnz0r" quite right, and the guy isn't exactly "top 10 out of 12 million" -- he does have Ashes of Al'ar, but his guild is actually number 11 on the Greymane server -- but at least they're telling the story instead of trying to write it for us.
Why the language barrier might be a good idea after all
It seems to come up quite often. Someone wants the language barrier bought down. Even if it requires questing or skilling up, they want to be able to talk to the other faction. It would even make lore sense, since at the least, Undead and Blood Elves should probably know common, and Thalassian is probably close enough to Darnassian that someone who knows one language should probably be able to get the gist of the other. That said, Blizzard's held pretty fast to the principle of squelching cross-factional communication. The only way you can make yourself known to the other side is with the default emotes, or sometimes with a bit of creative typing that can only convey crude messages. Honestly, at one point I was pretty gung-ho on removing the language barrier. As an RPer, a big part of the fun for me is being able to talk, act out scenes, say stuff in character, and all that. It was sort of annoying sometimes that I could be in an epic struggle with, say, a guild of Undead assassins, but any actual communication we made, be it OOC arranging of the storyline and in-game events or IC trash talk, would have to all be on message boards and email. It loses some of the spontaneity of in-game interaction. That said, lately I think I've decided that I'm fine with the current of level of cross-faction communication. Talking to the other side would cause more trouble than it would be worth.
