tortilla riot

Have to wonder why they didn't "discover" this with internal play testing, or in the beta. It's so obvious even in tier2 with 2 raid groups.

Which is why I don't play the game anymore, why bother paying for them to discover their game is broken and wait for it to be fixed 6 months later. Minor issues are fine but huge gaping problems (like the ghost town main cities) are just a deterrent.

Bloodbath on its own does it. Blocking google adverts for a free service via AdBlock seems like such an idiotic approach to a free service. Along the lines of taking vegetables from a farmstore by the side of the road and not leaving any money.

Popups and huge flash ads I understand...google ads I don't, they're non intrusive.

You kept engineering for the Shrink Ray, the parachute cloak, the world enlarger, the repair bot that everyone relied on before TBC, the portal to Gadgetzan (for those AQ40 raids), the helicopter mount in TBC (probably the coolest mount in the game apart from the TK one).

The amount of money you get from engineering doesn't really make it one for gold producing but is by far the best use of the game engine is basically fun.

I played the beta and quite enjoyed it. However it completely lacked anything relating to a story, decent AI (it had possibly the worst mob AI I've seen in a game - it made the standard MMO mob behaviour of running after you for 100 yards look intelligent).

It had some nice music, fairly nice graphics although lacking in variety, and a decent aiming system. It did stink of an amateur bedroom production though and I'm surprised it made it out.

And wasn't it free to play to level 10 already?

If this is vaporware/snake oil I'm intrigued how they convinced the content providers:

Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ, Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters

I'd believe the inforworld performances tests if I thought the journalist had a clue what he was testing, instead of mindless running a performance application.

He tested SQL Server on XP and it was quicker. And MAPI with outlook. A more meaningful test would be how people actually use the computer, not a contrived test. Startup time, startup time of applications, hibernate time, lock time, transcoding. How about testing it on a domain? File copy times on a network? IO operations in general, audio operations. Load the PCs up with all the bloated applications you can find (Adobe Acrobat, Quicktime, Realplayer, Office to think of just 4). I'd say those are the speed issues most people actually care about. When I'm developing locally with SQL Server I don't care if the query comes back 1/10th of a second slower.

I really can't stand Blizzard's approach to its gaming base. The general philosophy is "keep them subscribing" through long winded grind rather than the WAR approach of just have fun (which is the mantra of all other online PC games or console games). I hope WAR succeeds just to give some competition in a stagnant MMO genre. No other PC game genre has so much money poured at every month.

And about the WoW patch - I queued for 1 hour to get on Thursday, then received world server down on two servers (game card is due to expire in November I might add). The pitch forks would come out if that was Conan or WAR. People just need to give other MMOs some patience and stop expecting version 3.0 games when they arrive. Take a look at Paladins in WoW right now, and the forever "class XXX is overpowered" problem the game has, it's not perfect it just has a very very strong game engine that is hard to beat.

I've been using the trial and I'll be subscribing. Whether or not WoW is 'better' than it doesn't matter to me, it's a new game while WoW isn't, so it has new content, new things to discover and learn. I love the dark graphics, easy scenarios and really nice tome/questing. The animations and tiny buff icons let it down a bit but the rest makes up for that.

I don't agree about the UI. The tome of knowledge is excellent, and actually makes everything in the game so much more together. Plus no more running around finding where you're meant to go in a badly worded quest, as they're on the map.

I can't say much about crafting, I'm only trying scavenging. I would add though that public quests, open groups and scenarios makes the game far more accessible than Wow ever was/is. But there's a lot less chatting going on, making me think the primary reason a lot of people are playing WoW is for an online-social experience (3D IRC almost).

You can't polish a (crysis) turd. Maybe just make it slide a bit better