Kilaban

I can certainly share with my nongamer wife, who nods and smiles in much the same way as when our 4 year old is sharing his daily exploits with her :)

There's a couple of gamer folk at work, but they are also more of the "shoot you in the face" variety. At least in my circle of work friends the MMO lingo immediately generates shouts of "NERDS!"

There is no way I'd share MMO talk with my superiors at work. Gaming in general and specifically "those type of games" still, at least to the ones I know, has the stereotypical loser-in-the-basement Dungeons & Dragons stigma to the older generation, unfortunately.

Heavy instancing removes the "MM" from the MMORPG, especially in the general world. Guild Wars felt more like Diablo because of this.

LOTRO uses a fair amount of instancing, but only in the newbie experience and in some quests and dungeons. The public areas still have that free-for-all feeling, which I like very much.

The problem with video games is that they're such an easy target. They're also misunderstood by most politician-age people, so therefore even more of a target.

Between the ESRB ratings and INVOLVED PARENTS (key words here), what more do we need?

Adding character slots is something that just has to be done. Two extra classes and no extra slots means that alts have to be deleted. They won't do that.

Maybe the lifetime subscribers and/or Founders will get something special too.

I'm really looking forward to Moria, I just hope it isn't a required PvP area. The raid along with faction control and counter attack stuff I hope is segregated from the storyline areas.

Then again, player driven content is often the best... we'll see.