Eckyman.com

I just read they are basically getting rid of threat mechanics by buffing tanks threat output through the roof!!

Learning optimal rotations just became pointless, as did learning any tanking tricks outside of your classes skill bar, as did several threat reduction abilities, as did any need to play DPS tactically – just keep on spamming those buttons and posting recount stats!

In Kara, one of the things I enjoyed the MOST about tanking was the constant fight against the rising DPS and aggro of the damage players. Half the game to me was more about fighting players DPS gains than tanking mobs. Once you know an instance and patrols/boss fights, the challenge is purely in holding threat from other players.

…and now that’s gone.

All that is left is to soak up boss hits and position the boss when something on the floor is on fire. Big fecking whoop! If I hadn’t already quit, I’d be clicking my way to the cancel subscription page and copy/pasting this rant into the reasons box!

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You know we don’t like DRM. You especially know we don’t like the “constant internet connection required  for OFFLINE play” DRM.

If you claim to be surprised at customer reaction I’m calling BS. If you are serious, I’d strongly suggest poking your head out of your office for one second and, oh I don’t know.. paying attention to customer reaction to EVERY game that has been released with internet connection DRM. How you can be a VP of a gaming company and claim to be surprised at this is beyond me, it really is.

Personally I couldn’t give a damn as I’m always connected to the net. That doesn’t mean I can’t see the problem. I have plenty of friends who have no need for a PC internet connection. They get what little they use of the internet from mobile devices and avoid paying an additional line rental here in the UK for a land line.

All these people are now barred from playing. In an attempt to combat piracy, you lock legit paying players out of your game and chances are they wont be back to buy anything else you try and sell them. In addition, all these DRM games get cracked eventually anyway so pirates get to play without DRM but paying customers have to jump through a few hoops to play the game they legally bought.

At this point you are better off either buying legit, then downloading a cracked copy to play (but unfortunately this sends a pro-DRM msg – More pirates = More need for piracy protection), or simply voting with your wallet and not buying/supporting these DRM games.

Tycho calls it what it is and I agree with him…

Who is being cheated? This is the part of the movie where, in a series of retrospective realizations cut with you looking at your own face in the rearview mirror, you come bit by bit to the heart of it. The person you are cheating is Blizzard, Blizzard in the aggregate, with your attempts to interfere with their digital marketplace. You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream.

There, now don’t you feel better?

I’m glad I don’t play Warcraft any more.

I’ve seen Blizzard do some questionable things over the years but this just takes the biscuit.

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name

Yeah, has to be about the worst thing they could have done. As I write this, the forum thread has hit 953 pages. And it was at 942 when I started typing this post. Looks like I’m not the only one to think so.

Looking at it from Blizz’s point of view, it seems they have done this in an attempt to combat the trolls and spammers infesting the official forums. If people are forced to post under their real first/last name I guess the thinking is, they are less likely to post some racial insult or something. OK, I see the thinking, however…

Firstly, and I know this from experience, with 11 million subscribers, the portion of the playerbase that I’d describe as being “tossers” is very high. If I were still playing the game lets say, and I crush one of these “tossers” online a few times as he tries to gank me while on a mining run, or I post something reasonable on the forums but one of these nutjobs takes offense to it… under the old system the worst they could do is get my in-game name and harass me there. Under this new system players are not many steps away from having a little too much info.

Lets take a second and look to some other games for an example of the “internet tosser” in gaming. These are all examples from this year alone.

In January GamePolitics reported on a 16 year old teenager cutting his 46 year old father over a disagreement over tactics used during a game of FIFA on the PS3. When the father responded by turning off the TV/Console, the teenager went to the kitchen for a clean knife and stabbed his father in the neck.

An article posted in March details how a 17 year old Counter Strike player was stabbed in the head with a 12 inch knife in an internet cafe after being found to use ‘wall-hack’ cheats.

In June GamePolitics also reported on another Counter Strike related attack. Several months after being knifed in-game the 20 year old gamer tracked down his online enemy, who it turned out only lived a few miles away, then stabbed him in the chest to pay him back.

These are not isolated incidents either, I can sit and pull link after link up all day long on this subject.

Now, some may take these links as proof that video games cause violence, but because I’m not naive I see it for what it really means. Nutters are everywhere and need very little reason to set them off. If those guys played darts there is every chance that a loss or a disagreement over darts would set them off and cause the exact same reaction. Nutbags are everywhere.

As children we are taught not to talk to strangers, not to give personal info out to random people. We were taught caution, and for good reason. Then along comes a bunch of idiots like Facebook, Blizzard, etc, who think that those lessons of caution should be thrown to the wind and anyone who doesn’t has something to hide. The idiocy of it is jaw dropping. Even more so in a game like Warcraft which has spawned more nerd-rage outbursts than 90% of games that have ever existed.. or will ever exist. Give these mouthbreathers a first/last name combo and some of them are going to take it too far, I guarantee it.

Ironic that an attempt to unify an online community will essentially rend it in two. I never posted on the official boards (I don’t have the patience to wade through the rantings of semi-literate teenagers quite frankly), and were I still playing I know I wouldn’t even dream of going near the official boards ever again.