taxidermy
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Buying your way through raid content
There's a new game in town, and Artirius of the Aerie Peak server has noticed it, and admittedly, so have I. With attunements gone, it is now possible for any level 70 to go in and see tier 5 and 6 content whenever they want. Of course, they don't generally have a prayer of actually downing bosses unless they have 20-24 well geared people to help them out. That's where gold comes in. With a few thousand gold, you can buy your way into a tier 6 group that doesn't need the tier 6 armor and go along for the ride. A few hours later, you come out on the other end with Illidan dead and a few shiny new drops, even if you've never set foot in Karazhan. It's not just people trying to buy these slots in the trade channel either. As Artirius observes, many raid groups are actively soliciting for buyers for their raid slots. On my own server, one Horde group is trading tier 6 runs for large quantities of certain herbs, promising that all but a few select drops will go to the people who buy their slots with stacks of Netherbloom and Ghost Mushrooms. So what's causing this?
Taxidermists and their creations in the World of Warcraft
The author of "Warcraft and Other Hooha" read on the Lord of the Rings Online's site that there are taxidermists in game who will mount and show off your kills, and wondered why the same thing wasn't going on in Azeroth. It seems silly at first, but there's actually a lot of precedent -- they collected all the current taxidermy in Warcraft, and the case is pretty convincing. Clearly someone is stuffing and mounting animals in Azeroth.Of course, as in LotRO, this is a feature that would go hand-in-hand with player housing, so we shouldn't expect to see one until we've gotten the other (and odds are that we won't see player housing anytime soon, though guild housing is another story). Not everybody would want dead animals adorning their walls (Druids probably wouldn't appreciate having that bear around), but what better way is there for you to show off what you've taken down out in the wild?[Via Mania]
Robot taxidermy provokes thoughts, awwws
Artist France Cadet has created what was clearly meant to be a thought-provoking treatise on animal rights, the changing relationships of humans and animals, our ethical concerns on hunting, and an ever-morphing perception of what it means to be human... but it also comes off as looking really, really cool. Using the better half of the Aibo-wannabe I-Cybie robo-dog, Cadet reprograms the half-bots -- called "Hunting Trophies" -- to detect movement and react angrily when a viewer approaches. There are 11 different species in the collection, including a robot impala, lion, zebra, and warthog. Guess what? Despite those lofty philosophical goals, each one is more adorable than the next. Want.[Via PROTEIN OS]
Stuffing more stuff into your LoTRo player housing. Literally.
One of the things I love the most about writing for Massively and WoW Insider is that I get incredible exposure to what is going on in the MMO world and the ideas that come from the brilliance of the people who make these games we love so much. Some ideas are "me too" ideas that hopscotch from one game to another to another. I think it's safe to say that player housing is one of those. Lots of games have had it, Lord of the Rings recently introduced it, and I think there's a chance World of Warcraft may follow suit in the not-so-distant future to some extent. The problem with player housing -- from my experience -- is that you never have enough "stuff" to fill your home. I remember a few Everquest 2 homes I toured that were 98% candles, and others that resembled rat mazes of bookshelves simply because there was nothing more interesting to do with the virtual real estate.Turbine sure came up with a winner of an idea though... a taxidermist! Lotrolife.com has published a great article about the taxidermy vendor in Bree near the Vault-Keeper. The premise is simple. Animals now have a chance of dropping a rare undamaged hide when you kill them. If you get one of these hides, you can take it to the taxidermy vendor and get it stuffed into an item you can display in your home! In my opinion, this idea has limitless potential for future development. The undamaged skins are rare drops now, but what about rare creatures? Will they (or should they) always drop a skin? Wouldn't it be cool to have a trophy in your virtual living room of an especially difficult or rare encounter? In my opinion this is a brilliant way to allow players to decorate their homes without needing to pick up a tradeskill or spend a ton of money on player-crafted items.
Text-o-possum: low tech, bad art
From the amazing "artist" who created the Compubeaver (a case mod involving a dead beaver meant as social commentary), comes this latest thought-provoking piece: the Text-o-possum. Delivered as a conceptual composition, the taxidermized opossum is supposed to represent our "disconnect from nature." Undoubtedly thrilling stuff if you just got out of art school, but seriously, this is just one of those laser keyboards wedged under the leg of a dead animal. We get the impression that, Damien Hirst excepted, no one's very interested.[Via Wired]
