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==Incongruities with actual World of Warcraft play==
Because the in-game portions of the episode were filmed with Blizzard's assistance, the characters are able to push the operational limits of the game by performing the forbidden actions listed below. However, the entire premise of the episode centers around a violation of the game's limits, so this is most likely due not to the inattentiveness of the writers but due to the nature of the plot.


{| class="wikitable"
!Category !! Goofs
|-
| Cartman
|
* While fighting the Renegade, Cartman uses Mocking Blow. This special attack meant to draw a hostile NPC's attention has little effect on a human controlled enemy.
|-
| Stan
|
* Stan's character is wearing a Frostwolf Battle Tabard, an item available to buy only for Horde players.
|-
| Kenny
|
* The skills Kenny is instructed to use in the game suggest he is a Hunter, a class not allowed by his obvious Human race. He may actually be a Rogue or a Warrior instead.
|-
| Randy
|
* As with Kenny, Randy cannot be a Human Hunter either, his shield suggests that he is a Warrior.
|-
| Others
|
* The Renegade seems to be a Mage, but wears a Plate helm. Mages are restricted to cloth armor.
* Butters states that only four races are available. This is only true if one ignores the Horde, as the rest of the episode seems to do.
* There is no spell that summons four Scorpids, as the Renegade does.
|-
| Misc
|
* The known character names (bigboNed3 for Cartman and Luvs2SPWGE for Stan) would not be allowable to capitalization, numbers in the name and appropriateness issues.
* The episode appears to ignore the concept of Soulbound items, both with Randy handing the Sword of A Thousand Truths to Stan and Cartman instructing Stan to give his cloak to Kenny. Most high powered items in the game become Soulbound either when equipped or picked up and cannot be traded.
* In the game, thrown away items (such as The Sword of a Thousand Truths at the end) disappear rather than remain.
* Cartman's plan to level up is flawed. Boars, like all other creatures, have a fighting difficulty and experience point award relative to their level vs. the player's level. At some point, the boars would become "trivial" to the boys' characters and grant no experience at all.
* The boys' characters seem to wear armor of a level too high to allow them to be able to go up 30-50 levels more.
* It is impossible for characters to attack other characters except in certain special locations and circumstances (and even duels do not kill a character, but leave them with one hit point). This is a deliberate incongruity.
* In the real game, the maximum level pending the next expansion is 60. At this level, the Renegade could have easily been taken care of by the Admins or the several other Level 60s on most servers. This is most likely also a deliberate incongruity.
* There are over 100 separate servers for World of Warcraft with limited interaction between them. One Renegade could at best inconvenience only one server.
* Crushing an enemy's head into a bloody pulp as depicted in the final fight is impossible in the game.
* Contrary to implications in the episode, character death is at best a minor inconvenience in World of Warcraft, overcome with time, effort and/or in-game money. One implication of this is that the boys accomplished nothing and the Renegade would be back at full strength less than five minutes after the end of the episode.
|}


==Trivia== ==Trivia==

Revision as of 17:34, 7 October 2006

Template:Infobox South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" is episode 1008 (#147) of Comedy Central's South Park and aired on October 4, 2006 at 10 PM EST. The episode is a parody of the popularity of the MMORPG video game, World of Warcraft, or rather, gamers themselves, and was announced by Comedy Central on September 30, 2006. It was campaigned as the first episode of season 10, even though season 10 officially began in March.

The episode uses machinima with the help of Blizzard Entertainment, the company that created the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises. This is the first time South Park has ever used this genre of animation.

Plot

Template:Spoilers Someone keeps logging onto the World of Warcraft game and killing the South Park characters' in-game avatars, despite the game's rule that a character must accept a duel before fighting. This leads to everybody becoming incredibly frustrated with the game, and wanting to quit the game altogether. Cartman, along with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, gathers the other boys of South Park to combine into a team to defeat this mysterious menace. However, the renegade player nevertheless destroys them all. The makers of the game become concerned that this griefer's mindless destruction will eventually cause people to simply stop playing, effectively destroying the game's membership.

Cartman devises an idea — the four boys will spend all their time playing the game, not going on quests, but killing millions of low level boars in order to safely level up (grinding), preventing them from running into their foe; though boars raise their power level slowly, they begin to get stronger by playing constantly (approximately 20 hours per day, for seven weeks). In the process, they become grossly overweight, acne-ridden, and begin to use large amounts of Internet slang ("uber" and "pwned"). They become so lazy that Cartman speaks to his mother through an intercom, ordering Hot Pockets and a bedpan to pass diarrhea while they continuously play in his basement. The boys' characters grow so quickly that the Blizzard executives take notice, marvelling that "they must have no lives." Determined to help them slay the enemy (who is portrayed as simply being another fat, pimply geek who wears a wrist brace and eats junk food), Blizzard decides to give the four boys the "Sword of a Thousand Truths" — a weapon that was considered so powerful that it was removed from the game, though a prophecy (from a guy in accounting) says it will one day be used. However, the boys, not privy to the plan, engage the enemy early, at a level where the executives predict a 90% chance of failure.

The executives show up at Stan's house, but he is at Cartman's, fighting the enemy with the others. Randy, who is a "noob", and also obsessed with Warcraft, takes the Sword (which is stored on a flash drive) and is determined to sign onto the game to get it to Stan (the Blizzard execs don't have WoW accounts - they sanctimoniously tell Randy that they "have lives"). After running around town, trying to find a suitable computer, they finally find one at a Best Buy, and Randy manages to get the Sword to Stan before being killed (in the game), and Stan then uses it to horribly weaken the foe so the others can kill him: Kenny shoots the renegade in the chest with an arrow, then Kyle casts a fire spell on the renegade, knocking him down. With the words, "Looks like you're about to get pwned," Cartman crushes the griefer's head in a bloody explosion. Stan's character holds Randy's dying character for a moment before he passes on, and the other Warcraft players rejoice. Stan asks what they'll do now that the game is done. Cartman responds that they will now "play the game," apparently ignoring the fact that in training to kill the griefer, they've been doing this for the past several weeks. Cartman then continues to direct the others in continuing the game.

Kenny's 'death'

Kenny's World of Warcraft character dies after being killed by the renegade character several times like everyone else (though he died first). He doesn't die in real life. But, Kyle and Stan say the lines, "Oh my god, you killed Kenny", and "You Bastards!"



Trivia

  • The sword used to defeat the ganker is graphically identical to the epic sword The Hungering Cold, although it doesn't work like the one in this episode.
  • Throughout the episode, references made to locations and player activities in World of Warcraft are accurate to their in-game counterparts, including the "plains of Elwynn Forest near Westfall", the Arathi Highlands, the starting quests for human characters and the presence of large numbers of boars near starting zones. Cartman correctly references an actual map from the game to plan the attack on the ganker, and the final battle takes place in the area of Goldshire. This can be explained both by quotes from the press release stating that a large number of the South Park Studios team plays the game, and the collaborative effort between South Park and Blizzard to provide the in-game rendered portions of the episode.
  • The bass guitar that Token used in the episode Christian Rock Hard can be seen sitting in his room while playing the game.
  • Live to Win, the title track from KISS vocalist Paul Stanley's upcoming solo album, made its world debut in the episode, during the sequence where the boys are accumulating experience for their characters.
  • In addition, actual World of Warcraft music is played throughout the episode.
  • When the boys are training for the final battle, they are seen drinking Rockstar and Red Bull while eating Hot Pockets and Cup Ramen. Their nerd opponent also drinks Rockstar, and eats Chips-a-Ho! brand cookies.
  • The fictional Sword of a Thousand Truths is stored on a 1 gigabyte USB flash drive and does 120.0 DPS, has a mana burn proc, and has a +80 Stamina enchant. Such a weapon would be incredibly powerful and unbalanced, as the Blizzard employees suggest. Imbalanced weapons and armor do in fact exist within the game that are unattainable by players.
  • When Randy, Stan's father, needs to get to a computer to give Stan the Sword, he carjacks a person in a manner similar to the way in which the protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto series of games carry out the maneuver.
  • This episode contained an unusually high number of direct brand-name references, most of which were decidedly NOT presented in a derrogatory light. This has led some fans to conclude that, combined with the very premise of this episode, this episode had lent itself very heavily to product placement.
  • At one point during the final battle, the renegade player has a souvenir "Pirates of the Caribbean" cup.

References

  1. South Park: make love, not Warcraft (update 1)

External links


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