For my ethnography I will be looking at the community of players in the online game World of Warcraft. I have been playing WoW for about six years now, and I feel like it is an appropriate discourse community to write my ethnography on. The community of players adheres to Swale's six characteristics of a discourse community, making it perfect to write an ethnography on. There are many channels of communication in the World of Warcraft, but the main is the open chat channel included in the game. Here you can join different channels of players and communicate openly with them in a setting very similar to a chat room. You can join different channels depending on what you are attempting to accomplish as well, such as the trade channels, the local channels, and battleground channels. Each of these channels serve a different purpose, as indicated by the name of the channel. Some channels are used for asking other players for help, some are used to sell items, and some are used to find members of a group doing the same quests or missions as you. These channels can also be used to communicate with specific groups of people in the World of Warcraft. These people could be members of your guild, friends from the real world, or friends you have met and compiled in your list of friends. There is a very complex lexis of terms and abbreviations used. There is also a large online community of people posting on forum style websites and databases based on World of Warcraft. There is even a WoWwiki that includes thousands of subpages on everything from quests to items, all created by contributors who play World of Warcraft. These different channels of communication have developed from very small groups to massive communities with their own lexes. Terms like raid, flight master, port, and a vast list of abbreviations to understand, come together to create what almost seems like a foreign language at first, but after a short time playing, one can develop a knowledge of these terms and gain respect in the community. There is a very easy way to tell who has been playing for a long time, or the so called "old-timers". Characters that have achieved the highest level, and earned the best gear are recognized as the players with expertise and skill in the game. Newer players, commonly referred to as noobs, are characters that have not reached the level cap and are still awaiting the acquisition of powerful gear. People often complain that some players inside the World of Warcraft are too serious and will yell at you if you make a mistake, but I have found that this can be easily remedied with a simple /ignore (the command to ignore a player from your chat window). This function makes playing more enjoyable for those who don't want to deal with veterans who are extremely critical. I believe looking at the different types of language used in this very modern form of communication and mass gathering will be very useful in understanding discourse communities.