World of Warcraft Memoirs: Part I - The Circling Fervor

I vividly remember the day when I first played the final release of WoW (I played open beta version before that). It was a cloudy day on February 11th, 2005 and it took me several hours from the moment when our postman handed me the cardboard-wrapped package to the point where it was installed and ready to play - and even then there was a problem of picking the right server - which as Slovenian community mutually agreed - became Daggerspine. But as soon as I was in, I succumbed to the frenzy of building up my character and exploring all the exciting new places, meeting some people who became good friends along the way.

I played the game with a great passion, treating every matter as a real problem, putting a lot of effort into resolving them in my own quirky ways, each time adding my own absolute-freedom -for-all viewpoint. And since World of Warcratf was much like Wild West in those early days (compared to what it is now), I had a lot of work to do and plenty of open prairies to ride across. I think I even considered myself to be a self-appointed sheriff sometimes...

In this particular case I took it upon myself to bring forth an issue of "circling" - which is essentially in-game running in a circle. The post was published in two parts on daggerspine-eu.com forum, our unofficial realm forum created by player Nithos because there were no realm forums back then (like they are now). As I said, wild wild West.
What follows is a copy of the actual post which will hopefully give any reader a better notion of my mental state at that time:

Circlers of the world, unite!
[Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 8:45 AM]

Just as I predicted that the issue of circling will sooner or later have to be resolved one way or the other. As you've probably seen my humble self circle in just about every corner of Azeroth (the IF bridge in the morning for example) and made your own conclusion about my actions (probably not in my favor) and moved forward, nobody really figured out the reason. Well, it supposed to be a passive protest against the view of most people and a demonstration of the circling issue.

As most of you still have no clue what I'm talking about, go to our newly acquired realm Haumarush and observe the most intriguing phenomenon - circling! Yes, it is true! Circling has now become a major issue, just as I hoped but had no means for warning available. Now, people on the server are occupying bandwidth, server response time, and most of all - preventing players from joining the game. Sounds familiar? Yes, it is just like AV. No third party software, no hacks - just pure game.

Now, to the real questions about circling: what can be done about it and should we do anything at all? Will this kind of behavior change your attitude towards loop-making? My eyes hurt so I'll stop at this point and continue in the afternoon.. :F

(and btw Drazzel and your other alts /main - your actions are pathetic, hypocritical, misleading, describable only as egoistic and from my point of view you are superfluous to this game)

At this point it was 9 in the morning and I went to bed, clearly upset about a Forte player named Drazzel - I always had disputes with these large guilds, seeing them mostly as oppressive arrogant cheaters, the cancer of realm's community which needed to be supervised since they always got some special treatment. It was all a part of my zealous sheriff mentality - I was sent to this wretched place to enforce law and order, tirelessly reporting all suspicious behavior to Game Masters. I was even prepared to report my own friends if I had a suspicion that they were cheating in some way, such was my mindless fundamentalist zeal.

Now comes part two after waking up and reading some initial responses to my first post (which also explains this post's ending, too bad it all vanished into the Internet abyss):

[Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 5:23 PM]

Oh dear, I was really wasted this morning
[You can skip to the short summary in the end]


Now, what I wanted to say (as you high IQ persons already figured) was that "circling" or better said in-game continuous moving in circles, caused by holding at least two movement keys continuously opens some "new issues".

At this point I'd like to point out that a person can hold the keys (if fanatical enough; or while reading a book for example) or have those specific movement keys weighted. The point is that there is just no way of telling which method is used.

That's why the only way to resolve this issue when people start using "circling" massively - which brings consequences like server queues - is (for Blizzard and their lazy GMs) to decide whether circling should be allowed at all.

And if the decision would be that it's not legal, they would be walking on thin ice when defining what exactly this circling is. It could -imo- lead to measures that would limit "the freedom of movement" in the game or at least spoil a part of its fun. How severe this limitation would be cannot be predicted since Blizzard hasn't even discussed the topic yet. It could for example lead even to silly clicking of some [cancel] button every 30min - like it's done now when being inactive for half an hour.

But there is another path choose - if it stays legal, circling people will eventually reach a critical limit that will cause half of IF to circle and the other half to walk among them, wondering what the hell happened to this game. Solutions here are numerous - like setting a higher cap for server player limit.

But eventually, since we are dealing with executing real hardware commands here and whether it is legal or not , there will be more and more ways to escape the circling or to better it, perhaps even do something else instead of simply going in circles. See where I'm going? To the point where some intelligence will be playing WoW when you're off and it wont be a Chinese person that you hire for 25 cents per hour. No, it will be the rise of machines! Or robots if you like - it's like Real botting :> But that's many years ahead - perhaps a debate for WoW4: The Elven Supremacy And until then our main goal is to resolve the circling.



OK, you impatient reader... the short summary:

1.moving in circles while holding movement keys (call it keyboard jam, weighting keys with a rock or 2h mace, it's all same) can in time have devastating effect on WoW gameplay.

2. to prevent it, the solution must be made:
a) it's legal and will be taken care of with some new "game features" like popping of dialogue buttons periodically.
b) it's illegal and a way to nail you will be found, but also new methods of escaping the nailing will evolve, (c) in distant future employing mechanical creatures.

3. the AI will rule the world and human vs machine war in 22nd century will be our doom Watch all those silly sf movies if you don't believe me.

4. If you're reading this to get some serious info, forget points 2.c and 3, as they are irrelevant for us.



And a big LOL to masturbating - perhaps we should start a petition for a new /masturbate emote?

*Zealoth masturbates furiously