A Whole New World (of Warcraft) #13: Beyond Pornshire

After shipping players off to a new continent and even an entirely different planet over the last couple of years, Blizzard has gone full steam ahead with the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, which brings the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game back to its roots. And then it takes those roots, grinds them up, and serves players an entirely fresh experience in the world of Azeroth. Join GameSpy columnist and WoW-head Leif Johnson as he travels through this whole new world (of Warcraft), exploring new zones, beating new dungeons, and enjoying what may turn out to be the happy medium to unite diehards and casual gamers alike.



Making Love, Not Warcraft

I suspect that the village of Goldshire on the U.S.-based Moon Guard server will maintain its raunchy reputation down to the very death of World of Warcraft. Headline-grabbing raiding guilds have come and gone, entire cities such as Shattrath and Dalaran have boomed and fallen, but through it all the hamlet's Lion's Pride Inn has oozed with pixelated sexual depravity unmatched since the heyday of Second Life. Known as "Pornshire" to the locals, this infamous little cluster of buildings defines Moon Guard for many of the game's players, and it colors their perception of role-playing servers in general. That's unfortunate, really, since one of the game's most unique and vibrant server experiences lies in the sprawling world beyond.


The blame lies with a dubious practice known as "erotic role-play" (or ERP, to use the server's parlance), which, at its most innocent, amounts to writing out sexual fantasies in private messages between players. In Moon Guard's Goldshire, however, it's not uncommon to see scores of players complementing this activity with rather creative uses of WoW's myriad avatar animations. To take but one popular example, some players have their female avatars stand directly in front of a male avatar, whereupon they commence alternating between the "kneel" and "sit" emotes. And if you can imagine this gem of a macro in your head, you can probably understand that it just goes downhill from there. Any further elaboration would require that I submit this column to Hustler, not GameSpy.

Needless to say, this is all easy fodder for parents wishing to complain that they should have forced little Jimmy to play football instead of letting him play MMOs. And, perhaps, not without reason. Last year, Moon Guard's Lion's Pride Inn made headlines after a concerned parent found his 15-year-old son participating in the bawdy festivities. "As a paying customer for six years now," he wrote in the official forums, "I just wanted to voice my extreme displeasure regarding this disgusting server. IMO, it should be shut down." Blizzard acknowledged his complaints and promised to start watching Goldshire more closely, but even the shortest visit these days reveals that this tactic never had the intended impact. And even though such activity can sometimes be found on other servers, none come close to matching Moon Guard for sheer orgiastic popularity. It's like comparing Vegas to Elko.


Yet far from being shut down, Moon Guard maintains its status as one of the game's largest servers, and World of Warcraft is perhaps the better for it. It should go without saying, but the 24-hour shenanigans at the Lion's Pride Inn are but a very small part of an otherwise massive and lively server. And, if what you see in chat is any indication, most of the low-level alts are tourists from other servers. I should know; after tiring of the fast-paced high-end raiding scene and the pettiness I encountered on player-versus-player servers, I transferred my mage to Moon Guard in May of 2009 in the hopes of finding that magical "something different" that could revive my flagging interest in the game. At the time, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know when it was safe to speak out-of-character, and I usually clammed up when someone tried to speak to me in-character (admittedly, I still do, and I tend to give neutral answers that could be interpreted as being in-character or not). In fact, my most vivid memory of those few weeks is a paranoid suspicion that every passing player would crucify me with a grueling quiz to justify my "Loremaster" title.

Yet, what I actually found was a server full of constant surprises for a person used to normal and PvP realms -- so much so, that I often feel like I'm playing a different game when I go back to other servers. Even in the darkest hours of the night, it's fairly common to encounter a group of players acting out a lore-based scene in some remote village that's all but forgotten on other servers. Distant cities such as Darnassus and Silvermoon (that exist as mere ghost towns on other realms) bustle with players, many of whom do their auction house work in those cities just because they appreciate the look of the places. An entire esoteric protocol exists for chatting in- or out-of-character, and some guild applications require outlandish feats such as keeping a level 1 alt alive across several threatening zones. And my personal favorite: Craftable items that went obsolete years ago on normal servers often sell for ridiculous prices on Moon Guard, since players like to use them for costumes or novelty items.


T.J. Luckman, who runs a 10-man raiding guild called Theoretical Novelty on the Alliance side, believes that this extensive interaction with other players is one of the main attractions of the crowded server. "Unlike other servers, people can easily create communities here that have nothing to do with raiding or dungeons," he says, noting that these communities and activities fill the gaps that arise when friends quit playing or the content starts getting old. Best of all, he says, participation is optional. "One of the things I've always liked about Moon Guard is that people can role-play as much as they want to, or as much as they don't want to. If you don't feel like it, no one's going to force you."