Exile of the High Elves
7,300 years before Warcraft I
As the centuries passed, the night elves' new society grew strong and expanded throughout the budding forest that they came to call Ashenvale. Many of the creatures and species that were abundant before the Great Sundering, such as furbolgs and quilboars, reappeared and flourished in the land. Under the druids' benevolent leadership, the night elves enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace and tranquility under the stars.

However, many of the original Highborne survivors grew restless. Like Illidan before them, they fell victim to the withdrawal that came from the loss of their coveted magics. They were tempted to tap the energies of the Well of Eternity and exult in their magical practices. Dath'Remar, the brash, outspoken leader of the Highborne, began to mock the druids publicly, calling them cowards for refusing to wield the magic that he said was theirs by right. Malfurion and the druids dismissed Dath'Remar's arguments and warned the Highborne that any use of magic would be punishable by death. In an insolent and ill-fated attempt to convince the druids to rescind their law, Dath'Remar and his followers unleashed a terrible magical storm upon Ashenvale.

The druids could not bring themselves to put so many of their kin to death, so they decided to exile the reckless Highborne from their lands. Dath'Remar and his followers, glad to be rid of their conservative cousins at last, boarded a number of specially crafted ships and set sail upon the seas. Though none of them knew what awaited them beyond the waters of the raging Maelstrom, they were eager to establish their own homeland, where they could practice their coveted magics with impunity. The Highborne, or Quel'dorei, as Azshara had named them in ages past, would eventually set shore upon the eastern land men would call Lordaeron. They planned to build their own magical kingdom, Quel'Thalas, and reject the night elves' precepts of moon worship and nocturnal activity. Forever after, they would embrace the sun and be known only as the high elves.

The Sentinels and the Long Vigil
With the departure of their wayward cousins, the night elves turned their attention back to the safekeeping of their enchanted homeland. The druids, sensing that their time of hibernation was drawing near, prepared to sleep and leave their loved ones and families behind. Tyrande, who had become the High Priestess of Elune, asked her love, Malfurion, not to leave her for Ysera's Emerald Dream. But Malfurion, honor bound to enter the changing Dreamways, bid the priestess farewell and swore that they would never be apart so long as they held true to their love.

Left alone to protect Kalimdor from the dangers of the new world, Tyrande assembled a powerful fighting force from amongst her night elf sisters. The fearless, highly trained warrior women who pledged themselves to Kalimdor's defense became known as the Sentinels. Though they preferred to patrol the shadowy forests of Ashenvale on their own, they had many allies upon which they could call in times of urgency.

The demigod Cenarius remained nearby in the Moonglades of Mount Hyjal. His sons, known as the Keepers of the Grove, kept close watch on the night elves and regularly helped the Sentinels maintain peace in the land. Even Cenarius' shy daughters, the dryads, appeared in the open with increasing frequency.

The task of policing Ashenvale kept Tyrande busy, but without Malfurion at her side, she knew little joy. As the long centuries passed while the druids slept, her fears of a second demonic invasion grew. She could not shake the unnerving feeling that the Burning Legion might still be out there, beyond the Great Dark of the sky, plotting its revenge upon the night elves and the world of Azeroth.

In World of Warcraft, players are able to advance their wow characters by performing a number of "mini quests". Instead of performing repetative tasks (such as practicing spell casting, or killing the similarily leveled monsters), players interact with npcs (non player characters) in order to fulfil some story line or plot. Compared with other MMORPGs, World of Warcraft has made leveling easier (and more enjoyable?) through this quest based system.
I In addition to experience, upon completing a quest, the character will often receive some sort of reward.

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Everyone will look like a Greek god or goddess.

If you don't understand the gravitational pull of an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), I'm going to enlighten you with just a dozen words: you get to pick what you look like and what your talents are.

That's the real beauty of it. The first thing you do in the MMORPG World of Warcraft is design your own body and decide what your strengths will be. You pick your race. What could be more seductive than that, the ability to turn in all of the cards you were dealt at birth and draw new ones from a face-up deck? If you have friends who've gotten sucked into the WoW black hole and you don't understand why they never talk to you any more, this is it. I remember being a chubby teenager with bad skin and astigmatism and pants that didn't fit quite right. What would I have given to be reborn as a strapping warrior with rippling pecs and armor of hammered silver?
On that kid's screen now is a dozen noble warriors of exotic races, brandishing elaborate weapons and charging a gigantic demon across a fire-scarred mountaintop. The dwarf next to him is controlled by an accountant planted at his own computer in Cleveland, two babies sleeping in the next room and his pregnant wife on the sofa. The robed priest in the back casting healing spells is actually a 250-lb. ex-gangster, playing from the computer lab of a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania. The elf on his left, sprinting and drawing his mighty magical bow, is the digital body of a wheelchair-bound 12 year-old girl in Miami.

It's not just for fantasy geeks, of course. Even The Sims lets you pick a version of yourself with low body fat and cool hair. And this idea is what's going to push the expansion of MMORPG technology in the way that porn pushed the expansion of the internet, the desperate-but-untapped desire to interact with others without the bothersome interference of genetic flaws and poor diet and exercise habits.

But it's not just the physical image that changes. In that world, I am a dragon slayer. There, my reptutation and history are just as awe-inspiring as my look. Even now, much of the satisfaction for WoW gamers is in the very real sense of accomplishment they get, a person glowing with a burst of golden light when they gain a level in experience and strength. How can the real world compete with that? Wouldn't those long Calculus lectures have been easier to sit through if, every time you learned something important, gold light shot out from your body?

In the future, long after World of Warcraft has gone the way of ARPANET, everyone will have a virtual-world twin. An upgraded, digital representative of yourself which I'll henceforth refer to as Awesome You . And you'll see a time in your life when more people know Awesome You than know the real you.

Some people live like that already.

All will play in the same virtual world.

Gamers rejoiced back in April when it was announced that Blizzard, Square/Enix and Sony were merging their virtual worlds so that online characters from one game could stride seamlessly into another. It made perfect business sense and I was the first to say I wasn't at all surprised by the news. I had been predicting it for months. The fact that it turned out to be an April Fool's joke and entirely false only proves my point. Ahem.

As this kind of community gaming becomes the nation's pasttime, convenience will demand that some day each person's online identity be able to move from one realm to the next, from the suburbs of the next Sims Online game to WoW's Spiderskull Mountain. And with that convergence of virtual worlds we'll have the first real, primitive incarnation of something not unlike the matrix, or what old science fiction authors called the metaverse. A simulated, virtual world.

You won't have to be into fantasy to participate. You can spend your gaming time in a virtual suburb and build a virtual family and enjoy growing a virtual garden, while your best friend goes off to fight the Orcs of Thunderclaw Valley. Your cousin can go re-fight World War 2 every day. It will still be mainly a game at this stage of its evolution, but as the experience is tailored to every single taste (all under one virtual roof) more and more people will participate. And once everybody's there, why not do all of your chatting and text messaging there? Half of the WoW experience seems to be just a beautifully-rendered and animated chat interface anyway.

The first steps will likely come with the next game consoles, expanding the pool of gamers beyond those with pimped-out gaming PC's. The Playstation 3 will have at least one huge MMORPG on it ( Final Fantasy VII ). The XBox 360 should have World of Warcraft . And then if you get the console users hooked, and if the the console makers succeed in their plan to get a box in every single house in the civilized world, and then if they expand the interface so you can use your cell phone to check in on your game... You get the idea.
You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.

Wie Hoglund durch Reverse-Engineering herausgefunden hat, l?uft dieser W?chter alle 15 Sekunden. Er liest zun?chst die Fenstertitel aller laufenden Anwendungen aus, schickt sie durch eine Hash-Funktion und vergleicht das Ergebnis mit einer Liste von Hashes unerwünschter Programme. Sodann schaut das Programm in den Adressraum jedes im System laufenden Prozesses und bildet aus bestimmten Adressbereichen ebenfalls Hash-Werte, die es mit schwarzen Listen vergleicht. Entdeckt es Verd?chtiges, so wird der Account des Spielers gesperrt.

In der im Internet geführten Diskussion sagen die einen, es handelt sich dabei eindeutig um Spyware, denn es geh?rt sich für eine Software einfach nicht, in andere Prozesse hineinzusehen, nicht in die Fenstertitel und schon gar nicht in den Adressraum. Die anderen argumentieren, dass die Software ja nichts ausspioniert. Sie l?uft nur Client-seitig und sendet keine der untersuchten Daten im Klartext an den Server. Es ist nicht einmal erwiesen, dass Hash-Werte übermittelt werden.

You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.

Let's take this a little bit further. You earn gold in World of Warcraft, gold with which you can buy these in-game objects. If this game gold is truly valuable to my life, if it lets me get more value out of the pasttime I already pay real-world money for, what's to stop me from paying real money for game money? Nothing. Go to Ebay and do a search for World of Warcraft Gold and let your jaw drop open.

Here we have game currency being traded for real currency, and at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar.

If we go further still, we can imagine a person winning rare weapons and selling them on auction sites or directly to other players they meet. We can imagine somebody working full-time to gather in-game gold by slaying gold-shitting squirrels (or whatever you do to get gold in the game) and then exchanging it for real dollars to pay the real rent with. Sure, it may be decades before you see this kind of-

Oh, wait. There are people doing that right now.

And if you're chuckling and shaking your head at the glazed-eyed geeks who can't tell the difference between game money and real money, let me ask you something: when Square bought Enix for $727 million two years ago, do you think they they actually stacked crate after crate of cash on a flatbed truck and then drove the $727 million over to their offices?

No. That money only existed as numbers in a computer. In fact, not even 10% of the money in the American economy exists as physical, printed currency. All of the rest exists on servers and hard drives and in the imaginations of the people. It has value for the exact same reason Wow Gold has value: because people think it has value.

I'm guessing that if you started this article thinking it was a joke, this is the point when you sobered up and realized that, as author H.G. Wells predicted, "the future will accost us with boob-slapping ferocity."

The study of consumer behavior examines all aspects of consumers' feelings, thoughts, and reasons for making particular decisions in purchasing products or services or subscribing to ideas, and also how consumers use and dispose of products. Influences on a consumer's beliefs or practices may be influenced by family and friends, religious beliefs, cultural attitudes, by social expectations, by professional standards, by advertising appeals, or by any combination of these factors. While some of these influences are felt in the conscious mind of a consumer (all my friends are wearing a certain kind of boots this fall, so I've decided to buy a pair just like them), an even greater factor may be unconscious beliefs or associations (the smell of this fabric softener reminds me of my mother's laundry day when I was a child, so I'll pick it over the other that doesn't carry personal associations).

The most obvious application for knowledge of consumer behavior is obviously marketing strategy—understanding that a growing number of consumers are on low-carbohydrate diets, for instance, has led to an ever-increasing number of products that are labeled as “Low Carb.?But the study of consumer behavior also has repercussions for public policy (allowing government agencies to make regulations to protect consumers), social marketing (promoting ideas that encourage people to act in their own best interest, such as wearing seatbelts or adopting safe-sex practices), and consumer education (teaching practices that make us smarter shoppers, such as buying in bulk to save money or avoiding produce that has been treated with dangerous pesticides).

Marketers may examine consumer behavior using either primary or secondary research. Primary research is that which is done specifically for a particular product or service, examining attitudes among consumers who make use of it. Secondary research was done by another party or for another purpose, such as census data. While secondary research has many fruitful applications, its uses may be far more limited than primary research, which can be designed address any issue of interest to the marketer.

Primary research is usually conducted by asking consumers to answer survey questions, either by mail, internet, telephone, or in person. Mail surveys are useful because they are inexpensive and may ask as many questions as desired, but the return rate is usually quite low, and, as the respondents are self-selected, the results may be unreliable (people who fill out a survey that comes in the mail with a detergent sample, for instance, may already be loyal to that brand, which isn't helpful in understanding how to recruit new consumers). Telephone surveys may reach a somewhat broader audience, but they are more expensive to conduct and are limited by the participants' patience—most people are unwilling to devote more than five minutes to answering a surveyor's questions over the phone. Internet surveys can be cheap to set up, but exposure to aggressive internet advertising has made many consumers resistant to surveying by this method, and, as with telephone surveys, those who will participate may grow frustrated if the survey isn't brief. Questioning consumers in person, by setting up a booth or desk in a shopping area, can be an effective way of reaching a target group, but face-to-face interviews are particularly prone to unintentional bias. The unconscious behavior or facial expressions of an interlocutor may cause the consumer to answer questions in the way he or she believes is desired.

Any attempt to survey consumers, though, must deal with the issue of bias. The simple wording of a question can predispose consumers to respond in a certain way. For instance, asking “Do you like Coke better than Pepsi??is likely to produce a higher number of Coke loyalists than simply asking “What's your favorite soft drink??Any human involvement in the survey, whether by phone or in person, just adds an additional potential for biased results.

Another way of examining consumer attitudes is through assembling six to 12 consumers in a focus group. Focus groups may work in a less structured way, getting participants to begin a conversation about a class or group of products or services rather than asking pointed questions. This can help avoid bias from those conducting the research and allow consumers to express attitudes that might never have been discovered in a more structured survey, but, as in any group interaction, dominant personalities may influence how others express their ideas. Focus groups are also expensive to conduct and unreliable in making generalizations about wider populations unless many groups are assembled.

Direct observation of consumer behavior in a shopping environment can be a useful tool, allowing us to gauge, for instance, if consumers approaching a display of food products really do go to look at the “Low Carb?packaging first. In some occasions, researchers will examine subjects' physiological responses to advertising. Does a commercial for a cake frosting make the subject salivate? Does a man's heart rate increase when he sees beautiful women in a beer commercial? Again, these methods may be quite expensive and time-consuming, and a great many consumers must be examined for the results to be statistically significant.

No one method of conducting primary research is perfect or necessarily more advantageous generally than others. In selecting methodology, marketers must consider what kind of information is most important to gather and select the most appropriate method.

A Familiar World

World of Warcraft draws heavily upon the lore of the Warcraft universe. Long-time fans of the Warcraft games are finally able to step into the world from a player's perspective, and experience the universe firsthand. People, places, and units from the strategy games are finally brought to life in World of Warcraft.

You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain. Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their race's capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of Go'Shek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

World of Warcraft draws heavily upon the lore of the Warcraft universe. Long-time fans of the Warcraft games are finally able to step into the world from a player's perspective, and experience the universe firsthand. People, places, and units from the strategy games are finally brought to life in World of Warcraft.

You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain. Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their race's capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of Go'Shek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

World of Warcraft presents many different monsters to challenge you in battle. These creatures roam the countryside and populate vast dungeons and aboveground locations. There are wandering beasts, such as wolves, spiders, scorpions (called scorpids in this world), six-legged crocodiles called crocolisks, crabs, vultures, hyenas, big cats, bears, and more. More sinister enemies also block your travels. Humanoid foes of every kind, such as pirates, bandits, cultists, and soldiers from the opposing faction, join more unnatural monsters like undead, oozes, gryphons, and elementals, in providing conflict and danger on your journeys.

You'll also see some familiar monstrous creatures, such as ogres, gnolls, centaurs, satyrs, murlocs, wildkin, and others, that are inspired by the hostile creeps of Warcraft III. And you'll encounter more spectacular enemies like demons, infernals, dragonspawn, and mighty dragons stalking the dungeons and high-level areas of the world.

The territories and terrain you will be able to explore are vast and varied. In addition to borrowing from some of the most storied locations in Warcraft history, the game also shows off many different kinds of environments, such as the lush forests in Ashenvale and Feralas, the snowy mountains in Dun Morogh, the savannah of the Barrens, the plains of Mulgore, and the deserts of Tanaris. Swamps in Un'Goro Crater, jungles in Stranglethorn Vale, farmland in Elwynn Forest, and even deforested hills in Stonetalon Mountains are some more of the many environmental regions you can explore. Terrain that has been vastly altered by magic and the ravages of war also appear in the game. The razed city of Dalaran, encased in a protective magic shell, is a painful reminder of the devastation of the Reign of Chaos, while the infested Eastern and Western Plaguelands are filled with diseased animals and plantlife, courtesy of the Scourge's plague.

This long list of fascinating terrain doesn't even include the underground environments and dungeons of the world. There are dungeons available for all ranges of mid- to high-level players, and offer many rich quests, rewards, and enemies to encounter in the depths below ground.