Hugh "Nomad" Hancock

"To this day, I'm still playing with people I met while pugging 5-mans in BC."

Me too. One of them's sitting next to me right now. We met when she was a Fury Warrior and I was a Prot Warrior regularly pugging on the same server.

We spent a lot of time talking, fell in love and have been living together for nearly two years now.

Don't see that happening with the Dungeon Finder any time soon.

It's one line of code, also. As "black magic" goes, it's pretty simple.

This.

I find it very interesting that most of the comments saying "HHoR is easy, just use CC" go on to talk about how simple it is on their guild runs or regular groups, or say it's just like a BC dungeon.

Yes. HHoR is a flashback to BC dungeons. Do you remember how fast you got kicked from a group if you were a hunter who couldn't trap or a mage who forgot to re-sheep in BC? Now, when was the last time you got booted from a random Dungeon Finder run because you got your CC wrong?

The skillset just ain't there any more, because outside HHoR, it's not required.

Genuinely courageous investigative journalism from a games blog? Bloody well done, guys. Massive respect.

Good article! Stretches are really good things to do in WoW downtime too - reduces the soreness, back pain, eyestrain, RSI and so on after a long raiding session no end.

It's particularly good if you're familiar with Pilates, yoga, Tai Chi or something else that specifically addresses the muscles that get strained in one way or another working with a computer. I've recently (on advice from my trainer) been trying to do at least one Pilates stretch after every wing of Naxx, and that seems to be working out really well.

Seconded. Making money doing what The Guild do - money that's needed in order to, you know, actually live whilst putting insane amounts of time into it - is really hard. Really, really hard. They deserve congratulations for finding a way to do so.

If you'd like The Guild to continue, then they need to find a way to make a living. Making nasty little jabs at them for doing so is Not Cool.

Yep, they were the ones that immediately sprang to mind, particularly "The Art Of Persuasion" (which I still think shouldn't have been let through QA and into the game at all).

I definitely have noticed this - I've never had an "Oh, god, I've killed 500 mobs and my quest item hasn't dropped" moment in WoTLK. Well done to the devs!

Well said.

Many of the most popular characters ever - including Bella from Twilight - have elements of the Mary-Sue, precisely because people read to escape, as you say. As a scriptwriter, one of my big tasks at the moment is unlearning some of my internal editing and actually learning to put those elements back *into* a character.

(Sherlock Holmes is *so* a Mary-Sue character.)

Aha. Should have checked WarcraftMovies before I spoke.

This is not in-game - it's rendered using Lightwave and Messiah Studio (which is a lovely character animation tool, by the way). I agree - after Blink and this, it's going to be hard for Machinima work to get over the new bar, although some of the improvements we're hoping to make to the Model Viewer might help!

(BTW - technically this isn't Machinima, it's conventional 3D animation. Not that that really matters - what matters is that it's darn cool!)