World of Warcraft in Germany

As in the USA and in many other countries the MMORPG World of Warcraft is very popular. A lot of people play it here and, in fact, not only children at all. As a matter of fact, the oldest guy I know from playing WoW is about 60 and there are more around 40 or 50 as I am.

My mainchar the dwarven hunter "Drahtbart"

A school shooting and a lot of dumb talk
Although WoW has a lot of fans here, people who don't play know not very much or even nothing about the game, however, at the moment it is talked about it a lot especially in the media. That comes from computer games actually being in the discussion because some ego shooters had been involved in the school shooting of Winnenden near Stuttgart in March.

A 17 yo boy took one of his father's guns, an automatic, and quite a bit of ammo, went to his former school and shot about 15 persons and himself. Police found out by examinating his computer that he had been playing Counterstrike or something like that the night before. So besides a lot of whining about private gun ownership there is a lot of gossip about computer games by know.

A very common word since has been „Killerspiel“ (pronuounced like „killer shpeel“ which means „killer game“. Even people who might never been nearer than 10 feet to a computer, let go knowing anything about fantasy, dwarves, orcs and stuff in the meantime are very sure that also World of Warcraft is a „Killerspiel“. That might come from WoW being the only computer game they ever heard of.

The funniest thing is, even serious media too spread a lot of bullshit about World of Warcraft and other games. Recently a young boy, still a minor, spread a home-made video clip via youtube in which he pointed out lots of seriously false informations in a couple of TV programs which dealt with the subject computer games.  

My Lvl 19 battleground twink "Ummumessan" with König Magni Bronzebart which is the German name of King Magni Bronzebeard

But it is always the same: If something goes terrible wrong people like to easily find a scapegoat to blame for. It's much more comfortable to find an easy-to-understand-explanation than digging out the real background. And politicians like them to do so because they are afraid of people asking for the real reasons: I dare to more than doubt that a healthy young buy goes out to kill 15 people and himself just because he played computer games and a gun and ammo were at his hand.  

   
The European WoW-Servers
But back to the subject: We here in Germany play World of Warcraft on the European server farm. There are servers for a couple of european languages like English, Spanish, French and German. People from countries which's languages are not support can at least play on English servers as long as they understand a bit English. WoW is localized to the supported languages, so there arent only German servers but a German version of the program too with German manual, quest instructions and even the names of places and persons translated into German.

Another Twink of mine: Lvl 66 Dwarven rogue "Rautgundis" 

The language isn't a problem at all. The program itself is language independent and set up for a certain language by installing the corresponding language package which you can download from the WoW-Website of Blizzard Europe. There is also only one sort of accounts and gamecards for the whole of Europe. So you can play WoW in a different language too: If I would like to play it in English I just woul have to install the English language package and log into an English Server although I bought my program and gamecard in Germany.

Guilds and Raids
Like all over the world, people in Germany play World of Warcraft together. You are invited into groups frequently and there are lots of guilds too as well as regular groups who quest and go to instances together. Some use TeamSpeak but a lot of people seams to be a bit mic-shy. You often hear subterfuges if you aks one to come onto TS: „It dont works on my puter“, „My headset is broken“ and so on. I myself dont like questing together without TS beause it's much exhausting to explain things via keyboard chat.

We also have a couple of famous guilds here in Germany like Nihilum, Death & Taxes and so on. World of Warcraft is also becoming an important ESport here, a national championship is set up already. Last not least there is a bunch of magazines dealing with World of Warcraft too, so that you always can learn the newest facts about the game as you can do as well from the lots of German WoW-Websites too.