noizbot

go front line assembly!
I don't know them but I like the band that they're probably named after ;)

Actually, yeah, this is much, much worse than before. You're going to have tons of people signing up in the LFG Tool in any random quest/instance, just to enable use of the LFG Channel, either to chat spam or to look for other things entirely, which is going to make the LFG Tool itself unusable.

Blizzard should either admit that they don't know what they're doing and ditch the LFG Tool entirely, or figure out how to make a decent system and leave the idiotic LFG channel in its grave. Instead we're going to get broken hybrid system. oh, fun.

Bad idea. A channel for LFG is an incredibly archaic idea and I celebrated its demise. You shouldn't have to spam a channel to get a group together, and shouldn't be forced to monitor spam to find a group.

The LFG Tool was still far from perfect. There's no legitimate reason to not let players pick more than three things, and there's no real reason to restrict players to only selecting from certain instances/zones/etc. Instead of correcting these issues Blizzard it seems Blizzard is creating a mess.

Oh well.. as long as you can be in the LFG Tool and NOT the channel it'll be okay for me. It's just sorta odd that Blizzard's usual elegance falters when it comes to a decent LFG mechanic.

I'd be all over HMDs+headtracking if they were unobtrusive and high resolution. I'm a bit of an oldschool cyberpunk nerd so even the bulky HMDs are pretty sexy to me, but in terms of aesthetics rather than in practice.

The real key will be retinal projections -- essentially they clip to the sides of your head and project variably focused images directly to your eyes. You can also vary the transparency of the image, so that you can see through the images or get overlays for augmented reality functions (like seeing information over people like in an MMO, or reviews/menus of restaurants, etc)

I've only played on PVP servers (since I started ~2 years ago) and I'm not a subscriber to the "red is dead" philosophy. I play on PVP servers because of the dynamic nature a PVP server can introduce into gameplay.

Yes, I've been ganked. Yes, it can become incredibly frustrating. However, tense cooperation5 sometimes results. Just recently, in Zangarmarsh, a combination of emotes resulted in a parternship with some opposing faction players -- they helped us take down a named mob, and then we helped them, being mindful of who got the first hit in each time.

I also like defending lowbies from gankers, or just enemies in general. This role (mercenary/bodyguard) doesn't exist on PVE servers, and I enjoy skulking around and jumping the horde that is jumping other alliance.

If you're able to tolerate the occasional ganking (which admittedly sometimes I can only barely tolerate) PVP servers elevate WoW from something that would be otherwise highly static and predictable.

My commandments are:
1) Protect any fellow faction member if they're under attack.
2) Don't start combat on any grey player -- I'll finish it though, if they are foolish enough to attack first.
3) Don't attack players while they are fighting mobs, unless that same player just did it to me.
4) Don't corpse camp.
5) Don't always do the predictable (ie: red is dead) -- I've saved tons of hordes from death against mobs. I've also been saved myself plenty of times. It makes the game more interesting for me when there is more than one course of action for any situation. Red is dead mentality is as boring as a PVE server would be.

@30: Er, that was an incredibly poorly conceived and written list of reasons why WoW will die. It was almost offical forums quality.

Sure, it's gotta end at some point, but there are still expansions coming out for UO and that was released back in 1997. 10 years! There are still people playing the MUDs I used to play back in 1993.

WoW has a -huge- playerbase. They'll probably have to start joining servers 4-5 years from now (there are currently about 220 servers in the US alone) but it's not going away for a very long time. Unless, of course, Blizzard just decides to stop providing the service on a whim.

Do you really think they will?

I'd only be annoyed if new Wii games -only- supported the GCN controller. I'd much rather use the classic controller with the Wii for new games. And yes, I have three GCN controllers.

To be completely honest, I hope Smash Bros supports the Remote+Nunchuk. One of the main reasons I bought the Wii is because of the Remote+Nunchuk setup. If Nintendo can't figure out how to use it in games like Smash Bros, that's a little disappointing.

Hehe... it remains mildly amusing for me to listen to dorks that play videogame calling other dorks playing video games retarded. Yes, because we all look so cool holding controllers. And for the "do all Europeans look the same" winner, well, that's in the USA section for what it's worth. Not that I can be too surprised with the type of posts that happen here, with articles such as this pandering to that sort of "people".

Anyway, the Wii is yet unproven, much in the same way the DS was unproven for almost a year. I'm preordering because I strongly believe that the system will be huge -- meaning a huge variety of content -- although the usual staple of Nintendo franchises would likely make it a must-buy for me, regardless. Zelda for the Wii all the way, and I even have -two- GCs.

Wow, that's actually quite amazing. There's only one thing I can imagine adding to that performance -- a row of people seated at a bottom corner, each person holding up a cardboard square with a number on it used to display score (and perhaps remaining ships). I also sort of wished they let it "play" to the last super speedy ship, but whatever. Very very cool :)

@14.

No, I totally agree with you. You can decide not to buy the GW expansion packs. I have the first release and Factions, but I doubt I'll be running out to pick up the 2nd one. That said I think that many serious GW players would expect to buy the expansions at some point though. That's all I'm saying.

I think a better MMO payment model is, assuming we can agree that micropayments aren't so hot, is if we paid for time, like with contractless cellphones. So we put $50 into our account, and we only get charged per hour (rounded up) for the time we play. It would only be like 5 cents an hour or something. It would work out such that someone playing a freaking ton would end up paying equivalent to the $15/mo that is the standard fee for MMORPGS today. Basically, developers would charge based on bandwidth plus a little extra for profit. I would definitely be at least interested in an MMORPG that used that model... there are a lot of MMORPGs I'd probably play if I just had to pay for the time that I actually spent in the game.