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Some rather creative folks have started using teleport hacks to beam sacrificial level 1 gnomes to great heights and crater on impact to form words. It’s a new form of spamvertizing (gnomevertising?) that seems to go beyond the private message spam that many WoW players are accustomed to seeing.

I’m not sure if I should be annoyed or intrigued. I mean, the creativity of it is just so humorous, yet, I can’t help but dislike any kind of advertising spam

[via Raph Koster]

Over on Wired, Clive Thompson explores the ever-increasing phenomenon of voice chat in on-line games. After all, for games that don’t have it built in, such as WoW, it’s almost necessary to use it when joining a guild.

Yet, somehow it changes how people act or speak. An interesting commentary on the state of gaming. Me, I think it’s a great thing to have, but then again, I don’t have a squeaky 11-year-old voice …

Yes, you, too can download and enjoy them. 100 games for free, legally.

Now, I’ve played many of these before, unfortunately a lot of them I can’t play on my wonderful little Macbook without booting into Windows.

Some are Flash-based, some are Java-based, so YMMV when it comes to playing these.

What’s even better is checking out the growing comments section that adds probably another hundred more.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft. It’s a fun game, really. I played a character all the way to the current max level of 60 and joined a guild that does regular end-game raids. This is the story of the last few months of that life.

These are 40-person dungeon crawls over the so-called most difficult stuff the game devs throw down. Basically it’s a bunch of really nerdy guys sitting at 40 computers in 40 different places beating up extremely large bosses. Over and over and over again. Why over and over again? Well, the challenge isn’t over-coming the obstacle of the boss. No. After we’d mastered the technique neccessary to do so with ease, the whole idea is to garner the Phat Loots!! from the boss.

See, each of these bosses drops 2-3 fairly rare game items every time it’s defeated. However, since there’s 40 people of different class types, it doesn’t distribute out very quickly. And it’s not as if each of those 40 people are always there, nor is it the case that only 1 item is sufficient. No, no. These items are part of a set! So, over and over we must travel into the depths of these dungeons to fight evil and all that crap. I haven’t reached the “goal” of getting all of my set pieces. Oh, I should also mention, there’s, so far, 3 different sets, now, for every one of the 8 classes. Complicated loot distribution rules become normal to understand. After awhile it all becomes a blur of colours and button pushing and (at least!) laughing at jokes on the voice comm.

Oh, yes, I wore a headset to play. After all, it’s really hard to button mash and type to 40 people. Communication is key, people. Uber-nerd-dom… very uber-nerd. Anyway …

So, now I’m left with some cool UBER PHAT LOOTS, but not ‘all of it’ for my game character. I’ve grown weary of the same thing over and over again and trying to find creative ways to make in-game money to pay for item repairs and consumable items and all that. I’ve grown tired of the bickering of people who don’t get to go, who don’t get the item they want, fuck, just the general bickering of socially mal-adjusted teenagers and emo-20-somethings. I mean, get a life! I decided when the heat was on at work that maybe, just maybe I didn’t want to go home to a 4-hour raid every night just to have the chance at that new fucking dagger or helmet. No, I had enough stress at work, why would I want to add to it? So, I just stopped playing. Then I went on vacation. I didn’t play then either.

Then a month or so ago, one of my friends that I had made during this time while playing, who also was feeling rather disillusioned with the whole raiding thing, decided to start a new character on another server, from scratch. You know, to relive the old days, pre-raid. It’s fun. Doing the standard RPG questing. Wander around, do this, do that, kill a rat, kill a dog. Whatever. Collect 10 of these things, find my lost slipper. Silly, pointless, yet fun things. Great! Something new to do. Not the same endless boss fight.

And here we are today. I loved playing WoW, but I think it’s time to hang up my daggers and take my own advice and, “get a life”, again. I’m just not even seeing the point in playing this new character that is quite fun, but in the end, where’s it going? Heading in the same direction, I think. More raids, more loots, more crap like that. And who wants to pay $15/month to just … be mindless. I gave up cable television years ago for that very same reason. So, I decided it was time to take action.

Today, I cancelled my World of Warcraft account.

Now, since it’s not a full-on notice from Blizzard, I’ll caveat this that it could still be rumour. I mean, after all, the “everything Blizzard will be MMO” notice was shot down (although, who knows, press spin is a funny thing). Via Kotaku, Australian Vivendi office tipped atomicmpc.com.au that starting today you can pay a $25 fee to transfer a character between your own accounts or to another realm.

ch-ch-check-it-out.

UPDATE: confirmed!

I’ve never uncovered this little tid-bit myself, especially since I don’t use in-game music, but check out this video from WoW. Creepy.

[WoW Insider]