superstition
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Etsy doesn't want you selling spells
Etsy's online shop is mostly known for its handmade crafts, but it has also developed a reputation among the supernatural crowd as an easy place to find spells, potions and other mysterious goods. Well, those merchants will have to find another place to hawk their wares. Etsy has quietly updated its guidelines to ban all "metaphysical" services that promise a tangible outcome, like revenge or weight loss. The company isn't wasting much time cleaning house, either, as it's kicking out many of these vendors with little to no warning.
Wings Over Atreia: Drop -n- shop
Hot topic! Hot topic! Fresh outta the community oven! In a much-hyped announcement a while back, NCsoft proclaimed that drop rates in Aion were being significantly increased in the 2.1 patch. The company even employed a certain wide-eyed Shugo named Victor to outline his experiments and prove that drops now rained from the skies. For a while, there was much rejoicing in the lands of Atreia. *cue Monty Python soundtrack* Oh, there were some naysayers who cried that an end to the economy as we knew it was at hand (not totally incorrect), but for the most part, Elyos and Asmodians alike flocked back to Aion with the promise of more wealth and gold loot. I even found that my bags could not hold everything that dropped during Taloc's Hollow runs, forcing me to to delete items in order to pick more up. Alas -- that was then, and this is now. The pendulum has quietly swung back the other way to the what-exactly-does-a-loot-drop-look-like side. From personal experience, I can attest that getting drops now is about like pulling Stormwing's teeth... with only your bare hands and maybe some dental floss. The change is obvious, so why all the hush-hush? Currently it feels like a classic bait and switch: Market an enticing feature loudly to get players then remove it with equal secrecy and stealth. And to top that off, there are murmurs that the devs plan to implement changes that put a halt to the popular selling of loot rights. Aw, don't kick us while we are down! Make sure you aren't on cool-down and zone past the cut to explore this bane of many a Daeva's life (drop rates) as well as the practice of selling loot rights within Aion.
Wings Over Atreia: Hit or myth?
You know they are out there. You hear them -- sometimes whispered in reverence, sometimes shouted by a particularly spazzy groupmate. Whether treated as ancient wisdom or snickered at, they cannot be avoided. But how much do you believe in them? Superstitions. Superstitions (myths, legends, folklore) are not by definition bad or even incorrect. In fact, superstitions are another way for a community to bond; shared beliefs go a long way towards creating a cohesive group. Every culture has superstitions, and gaming -- a unique culture, but a culture nonetheless -- is no different. And each game has its own unique collection of folklore. Whether they consist of avoiding specific loot, crafting with a full DP bar, or something almost whimsical (such as turning around in a full circle before my second attempt at Miragent's leggings), Aion is full of little snippets specific to the world of Atreia. What superstitions are prevalent in Aion today and just how much truth do they hold? Knock on wood and cross over the break to check it out.
The Daily Grind: Very superstitious?
Yesterday we had a look at an academic claim that MMO players are unwittingly using the scientific method. By carrying out experiments and recording results, they test out hypotheses about how the virtual world works. But there's another kind of behavior we encounter all too often in MMOs: superstition. Some players will swear blind that certain actions and events are causally linked, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.Superstition takes many forms. There are some Giant Monster events in City of Heroes that are spawnable, and many more that arent. The developers have explained, long ago, which are which. Yet you will still find players claiming that some strange voodoo routine - run here, run there, clear these mobs out - causes a given event to spawn. We've seen it claimed that some costumes cause lag, and that there are special ways to increase the odds of a 'treat' when clicking on doors during Halloween. Then there are the personal superstitions, which we don't even try to justify: always carrying a Luck Charm salvage 'for luck', for example, or a Rabbit's Foot in World of Warcraft.Are you MMO-superstitious? Do you have personal rituals or habits that don't make rational sense, but you do them anyway? What's the most out-there MMO superstition you've heard of?
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a troll
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the third in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.Trolls are based on the "wild savages" you've seen in the movies or on TV, from King Kong to Discovery channel. If you've seen people hunting with spears, walking around in the forest without many clothes on, or dancing around in costumes and face paint in some kind of ritual you've never heard of, you've seen the apparent inspiration for trolls in World of Warcraft. The culture of Warcraft trolls are a mishmash of all the different myths and rumors that have grown up about some of the earth's indigenous peoples that live outside modern society: Strange voodoo beliefs and rituals? Check. Bloodthirsty headhunters with a taste for cannibalism? Check. Witch doctors, shrunken heads, human sacrifice, and rampant superstition? Check on all counts.It's important to note here that troll culture is based on the myths about some indigenous people, not on their reality. Cannibalism, for instance, has been rare among human societies, nearly always viewed as anathema, but among the trolls of Azeroth, it appears to be the rule rather than the exception. Unbiased study of the world's primal religions has shown them to be far more sophisticated than early (and prejudiced) Western explorers ever imagined. Don't listen to the Jamaican accent trolls have in the game and assume that trolls are based on real life Jamaicans. There is nowhere near the correlation here that we might find with the dwarves and the Scots, or even the draenei and the eastern Europeans that they sound like. Indeed, one could argue that the choice of a Jamaican accent to represent the trolls and their culture reveals a great deal of ignorance we Americans have regarding Caribbean islanders -- but that's a discussion I'll not go into today.Suffice it to say that as a member of the Darkspear tribe, the only tribe of trolls to join the Horde, your character living in a time of great change for your people. Your tribe is the first to embrace the more modern values promoted by Thrall, to take up the spiritual practices of shamanism, and to integrate itself with other races. Although the Darkspears have officially given up human sacrifice, cannibalism, and now tell you to "stay away from the voodoo," these practices are all elements of religion and superstition that your character would have grown up with, and may find it hard to let go of completely.
Wii Warm Up: Tendencies
The sporting world is notorious for superstitious tendencies and odd behavior. Players always have the same meal preceding a game; they won't cut their hair until they lose; they'll wear the same jock str ... egh, never mind. The point is, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, people still continue to engage in silly habits for luck and good fortune.As a gamer, do you have any particular habits before tournaments? Barring competitive play, are there any strange habits you have while gaming in general? Some of us here tend to spin the Wiimote around our fingers when we perform something of note, and others blow on the DVD before insertion into the Wii, harkening back to the NES days. Man, we're weird.
Superstitions in WoW
The Daedelus project recently posted an article dealing with MMORPGs and the superstitions we build as we play the games. Seeing as how we as people love to finding meaning in seemingly random events, World of Warcraft has its fair share of superstitious players. I might even go so far as to say we all are superstitious about some things within the game. Despite the prevalence of superstitions in game, we always seem to see others' quirks as crazier than our own. Now we're not talking about religion or spirituality here, we are talking about how players create meaning where there is none. Here are just a few examples that Daedelus brought up: The spawn dance There are many players out there that subscribe to the particular belief *cough* Maelis *cough* that a special dance will help mobs spawn faster. I have never myself attempted to use a spawn dance, but I have found that I tend to run in a clockwise direction when I am farming because somehow the mobs seem to spawn faster. Or perhaps it's just because I can't turn left.
Do you practice MMO superstition?
TerraNova examined superstitions and their impact on the MMOG space. They identified Star Wars Galaxies, in its original incarnation, as a great example of creating superstition in a community. When players were trying to become Jedi, every so often a system message would pop up telling them they were closer to the truth, without telling them what they had done to get closer. Players came up with all sorts of explanations and theories of what they had done to get closer to the truth. Turned out that they had done basic grinding, there was nothing mystical, just basic game mechanics at work -- it got people talking though.Superstitions are the belief that some mystical force, depending on actions, is creating consequences or rewards. Even gamers, who know that games are nothing but programs can be prone to superstition -- although the tech staunch rational gamer will justify their superstition by calling it a "bug" or something else dismissive that they figured out. Seem to get the "phat lootz" when you're wearing a random piece of armor? That's superstition. Does your guild send a certain class into the instance to make the loot tables go in their favor? Superstition. Players can't justify their actions because they didn't program the game, but they rationally swear it must be true, even though, in the end, it's just electronic superstition.TerraNova comes out saying that superstition is good for an MMO. It gives the game a higher existence than the fully-programmed and hyper-mathematical world it really is. What superstitions do you adhere to or have you seen?(Side note: The image is James C. Christensen's Superstition, which incorporates 72 superstitions.)
