Rift Beta

I managed to sneak into the 3rd Beta event for Rift. Sadly my wife, who I always duo with in games, didn’t get accepted. Still, below is my take on the Rift Beta.

Between me and my wife we quickly filled up all six character slots.

What I Liked:

The first thing you’re going to notice is going to be the graphics. If you have a rig capable of running this bad boy with all the bells and whistles it’s a truly beautiful game. Far better than the now aging Age of Conan, and almost into the realm of single player RPG graphics ala Dragon Age on PC (I hear on consoles it wasn’t as nice looking). Screen shots don’t do it justice either. Until you see the plane of fire open up with tentacles of flame the sear into the ground, slowly spreading and charring everything in it’s path while it spews forth fire monsters, well you can’t really appreciate the beauty of it.

The classes are amazing. You have four archetypes to choose from, but this isn’t one of those shitty games where you start out as a generic mage and have to work your way to level 10 in order to finally not suck. No, once you’ve logged in as either a Warrior, Mage, Cleric or Rogue you’ll be given a quest to go collect your first soul. Souls are the classes, as you’re taking the souls of fallen warriors to fuel your own power. Anyway, you can then choose one of six classes from inside your archetype. That’s a total of 24 classes, but seeing as how you will be getting other souls, for a total of three at a time, you have a near limitless number of classes to choose from. Want to be a dual wielding melee warrior with a pet and the ability to creates spears of fire, stone or wind to hurl at your enemies as you close the gap, only to ignite your swords with fire as you tear through the enemy, perhaps using your pet for added dps or to keep another enemy busy? Well, you can do that. I haven’t been this excited about class selection since Vanguard, which had the classes right but not much else.

Looting. There’s not much you can do to make looting better, but Trion has managed to improve this very basic interaction. How so? Well imagine you’ve just gone to a lowbie area, or maybe you grabbed far to many mobs and just barely managed to take them all out. You loot your first body and you will get all of the loot from all of YOUR KILLS within a certain radius. This is called AOE looting and it is a simple change, but MUCH appreciated. This can also be turned off, for those who want an old school, slowly picking through the bodies of the fallen approach. +Rep for giving us choices!

Crafting is another thing I really enjoyed. Sure it may be very similar to games you’ve already played, but again Rift just does it a little better. Imagine you get to your first town and decide you want a profession. Perhaps you decide, being a mage, to go tailor. A couple of silver later and you’re a tailor. The first thing you’ll notice is that all of the things you can make are green, useful, and probably better than what you are wearing. This seemed to be true throughout my leveling experience in Rift, and it’s a welcome change. Add to that the fact that you can create shoulders VERY early on, and I am in love. Of course, Trion wouldn’t stop there, you see they also gave you the ability to break down armor you’ve made or gotten from quests. This isn’t like disenchanting either, that is a separate profession. Lets say you break down a low level robe. You might come away with some gray frayed twine and a couple of burlap cloth. In some cases I managed to get back all of the cloth I had used to create an item. Of course sometimes you don’t get any back. This ability to reuse items, to grind for skill ups, then tear those works down and use the pieces to get even more skill ups, has me revving my engine for more Rift.

The combat is one of the most important aspect of most games, and as long as you like the traditional 1,2,3 MMO style combat you’re going to love Rift’s system. It doesn’t stray far from tradition, and others have put it down for that. To them I say that this game is a lot like Super Meat Boy. The controls may be the same old tired run and jump we’ve seen in every platformer ever, but by perfecting them and taking it to that ‘sweet spot’ both Team Meat and Trion have managed to make it feel fresh and fun again. The spell effect are stunningly gorgeous, the attack animations are fluid and devestating, and the pacing is right on the money. It’s not as fast as WoW’s combat, and not quite as slow as Warhammers, but it manages to make me feel like a badass each and every fight. Will that wear off? Perhaps on my fifth alt, but that happens with every game.

You start off looking cool. In many games you’ll start off looking either horrendous or somewhat ok, but you quickly progress to looking like a clown for the rest of your leveling experience. In Rift I found that no matter what piece of armor I got it may look different, but it still matched the overall scheme. This allowed my character to get even cooler looking, while never looking like a complete tool. It’s not as drastic as Warhammer’s ‘new look every 10 levels’, and it’s better off for it.

The quests, while not as cinematic as WoW’s new lowbie experience, are contained. You’ll get four or five quests for an area and you’ll clean that area out before heading back and moving on to the next. If you’re the type of person who reads through new quests the first time, you’ll also be treated to a very interesting, tightly woven story that gives a good reason to be doing what you’re doing, at least in the lower levels. If you fear that this means you won’t be exploring or seeing anything new, then you haven’t experienced the Rifts.

Rifts are basically Warhammer’s Public Quests, but done right. Instead of a long, slow fight in a static location that yields a set reward which, after receiving you never go back to, in Rift you’ll open your map to see where you’re going and see a rift off in the distance. As you close Rifts you get ‘currency’ to buy good equipment and buff items, so you’ll drop what you’re doing and haul ass right through whatever’s in your way to reach the rift in time. This means you’ll actually be exploring areas of the map that may or may not have quests associated with them. Rifts are pretty fast events, ranging from three to six stages from what I saw. You’ll quickly burn through them and it didn’t seem to take many people to utterly decimate the rifts when they appeared, giving me hope for early level rifts late in the games life cycle once most people have reached level cap.

That’s it for this post as it’s getting kind of long. There are plenty more things I loved about Rift, but next post will concentrate on the things I didn’t like, or am worried about.

Goblins–Best Race, Worst Starting Area?

Cool Goblin’s don’t look at explosions.

I’ve had a chance to play through the goblin starting area three times now and my opinion of it has changed quite a bit. At first I thought that the zone was interesting but nothing special. By the third playthrough I realized it might be one of the worst starting zones in World of Warcraft, which is pretty sad seeing as how it’s one of the newest.

Bet let’s talk about the Goblin race in general first. Before Cataclysm dropped I was pretty sad that the Horde was getting shafted with Goblins, while the Alliance got a werewolf race. What? How does that seem fair? Especially after the Horde got shafted with Blood Elves and the Alliance got good natured demons in Burning Crusade!

Fortunately, after playing through the starting areas with both the Worgen and the Goblins, I’ve realized that the Horde actually made out better race wise than the Alliance. First of all they didn’t take the opportunity to change the human model for the Worgen. I understand not changing the normal human models because some people would get upset, but why reuse the same terrible models for the Worgen human form? Still, I guess you can just stay in Worgen form all the time and look feral and awesome. Unless you’re playing a female Worgen. As my wife pointed out, the male Worgen get glowing eyes, wolf like manes, and just look really feral. The female Worgen look more like a good natured Anubis, with big eyes and more curves than fur. It’s like they were trying to make them attractive instead of feral, so I guess score one for the furry lovers out there.

The Goblins on the other hand aren’t the terrible Goblin model we’ve seen since the launch of Vanilla. I was really worried before Cataclysm launched that it would be the same model. Thankfully it’s a beautiful redo that brings a short race to the Horde without getting cute. The only downside for the race that I’ve found, other than the starting zone which we will get to, is that after looking at the beautiful textures of the Goblin skins, when I look at any of my other characters I cringe. They look God awful comparatively, and it’s about time Blizzard added some new, high res skins for every race and gives us one free redo, while leaving the old skins for those who actually like them, or have really poor machines. I don’t want an EQII styles “replace or not” scheme, just add some new good skins.

The Starting Zone

Let’s get into the worst aspect of the Goblin race, their terrible starting area and lore. Is it unique? Absolutely. Is it beautiful? Very, especially the island you go to after you leave the starting city. So what’s the problem? Well the first problem is that I have absolutely no investment in the Goblins yet. When I play through the new Troll starting area, or the Forsaken areas, I can see the amazing changes they’ve made to the lore, and feel like a badass when Sylvanas calls me her personal murder machine. With the Goblins you get none of that, even when *SPOILER HERE! IF YOU HAVEN’T BEAT THE GOBLIN STARTING AREA YOU SHOULD GO TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH* your capital city is destroyed by Deathwing I felt nothing for the millions of Goblins murdered or anything else that happened, if Undercity had been wiped out I would have been jumping up and down screaming.

Another problem is that, while you are supposed to be this important Goblin in your society, enough to rival the big cheese and about to become a friggin Trade Prince you’re entire time spent in the city is either doing meaningless events like picking up your friends or serving drinks at a party, instead of making you feel like a hero like the other starting areas. Sure they try and rectify this in the second island, but with all of these people who used to be your servants moments ago rising to a position of authority it just feels like your failing miserably the entire time. I never felt like I was a rising star, more like I’d just gone supernova and it was time to end it all.

This is getting a bit long, and I have many other complaints, but the biggest one is the simplest one. Your faction leader is a tool. The entire Goblin starting area pushing you to hate him and feel like he’s a tool, a chump, a piece of stinkin offal that you need to scrape from the boot of your society. Then *SPOILER AGAIN* Thrall just comes up and appoints him, not you who rivaled him and helped Thrall not be tortured to death, to leader of the Bildgewater Cartel Goblins. I have sometimes not cared much about my faction leader, such as the Night Elf chick who is meaningless past her involvment with the Stormrage brothers, and sometimes I have loves my faction leaders and thought of them as total badasses, such as Thrall or Sylvanas. Never have I thought of my faction leader as a pussy who by all rights should be dead under my boot if not for the intervention of Thrall. What happens later when they use him in lore like they did with Sylvanas and the Halls of Reflection, or Thrall and Wrynn destroying stuff in the Undercity? I’ll just remember what an asshat he was and that I should be in charge.

I’ll talk more about Cataclysm’s Faction Leader Fail later. Have a merry Christmas if you do that thing, or a happy whatever if you don’t.

Lowbie vs. Main–The Cataclysm Experience

That’s my hunter in the front there, looking cooler than any level 40 has a right to.

To be fair I haven’t made it out of Vashj’ir or whatever the level 80-82 underwater area is called, so keep that in mind as we move forward. So far I’ve enjoyed Vashj’ir except for a few serious problems. The main one is that the respawn timer for several mob types seems broken. Mobs will respawn as you kill them, and while that’s not exactly a problem, when you combine it with the fact that you’ll probably pull more mobs than usual due to mobs not only being on your plane, but above and below you as well. To limit this I try to ‘walk’ on the sea floor as much as possible, and it helps to a limited extent.

Another problem with Vashj’ir isn’t so much with the zone, but with the number of people playing in it. The mobs respawn crazy fast so that’s not a problem, but when you swim up to an area that is supposed to be swarming with the mobs you need, and all you see is thirty players AOEing like mad in hopes of tagging one of the mobs when it spawns, it gets annoying fast. Compared to the lower level quests Vashj’ir also seems a little lacking in story. There are hundreds of quests it seems, but only a few that continue the main story. Sure most of the random side quests tie into the main story somehow, but until I got to the Battlemaiden quests I wasn’t really enjoying the story at all.

That leads me into what I think of the lowbie zones I’ve done. The first thing I want to comment on is the amazing storyline that runs you through zones at the perfect pace, revealing story bits along the way. One thing I wish the developers had included would be some of the path quests. Quests that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but had little self contained stories that you would only find if you went off the main quest path and just went exploring.

Some people have expressed concern that the lowbie levels are too linear, and that it doesn’t feel as social as an MMO should. The first thing I have to say is that, unless you are playing specifically with friends, most people level solo in WoW, and have for most of it’s existence. If I’m going to be leveling mostly solo anyway, why not give me a really great single player type story? Should I just go play a single player game then? No, because I can enjoy this single player story in a duo with my wife, or if I want to do a dungeon I can gather some friends, or use the LFD tool. Besides, if you are not enjoying the single player story style of Cataclysm, you might as well cancel your pre-order for The Old Republic, because that game looks to be even more story oriented.

One of the great things about the new lowbie experience is that you don’t really have to look like a total idiot until you get to Northrend anymore. It used to be that you had mismatched gear from level 5 to level 68, when you get Northrend and got the muted brown gear that matched. Now though, if you rely completely on quest gear, you can look pretty cool as you level up. Every ten or twenty levels your quest gear will change it’s look, and you’ll be slightly mismatched for a few levels until you get the rest of your gear. Overall it’s nice to look cool early on, something I really missed from Warhammer Online.

The major drawback to the new low level experience is the old high level experience. Sure, Northrend isn’t bad really, and it’s got a few REALLY cool questlines, but in between awesome old world content and good Northrend content is the dreaded eight to ten levels of shitty Outland content. When it first came out the quests weren’t terrible, though most didn’t like Hellfire from the start, but they weren’t great either. Now, after WotLK and Cataclysm, I am seriously dreading going to Outland. It sits there, taunting me, letting me know that I may be having fun now, but the Dark Portal awaits. I don’t even care that the storyline isn’t going to flow naturally, just that there really isn’t much of a story at all in Outland. There are one or two quests per zone that might be considered part of an overall story, but until you get into raid quests it really doesn’t come together.

All in all I’m excited to tank my first Cataclysm instance still, but that’s on the back burner while I level up my Undead Hunter and my Goblin Warrior. I’m really excited for the Warrior too, as I’d love to compare his tanking ability at 85 to my Druid and Paladin when I finally get them those five levels.

The next post won’t be Cataclysm or WoW related, but until then enjoy whatever you are playing!

I’m Back! WoW is Too, and so are the tools.

Well, I’m finally back! National Novel Writing Month was fun, and it took up most of my free time. While I didn’t quite hit 50,000 words, I did manage to get over 44k and for the first time ever finish a story I started! Go me!

On to World of Warcraft and Cataclysm. Some of the talk around this is really starting to piss me off. Since December 1st I’ve been playing pretty heavily with the post shattering world of Azeroth and I have a few opinions on the new game, the new expansion and some of the reactions to those.

The first issue I’ve come across is people saying that Cataclysm “isn’t for them”. They’re assuming it’s built for new players, but poorly. Why? Well, as Pete over at Dragonchasers says:

First of all, I just mentioned the lore and the narrative. Well guess what? Those will mean *nothing* to someone brand new to WoW.

In his opinion (from what I gather from his blog posts) the biggest part of this changing the world is the lore, and it’s true that if it’s built specifically for the new player all this changed lore and the issues that the Horde and Alliance are facing now will mean very little to a new player. They won’t understand what it means to have Thrall gone, or why Vol’jin was kicked out of Orgrimmar or why that is important.

So why are people assuming it’s for the noobs? Take this quote from Spinks over at Spinksville:

I took Spinks to have a look at the new Eastern Plaguelands, now greener, less plaguey, and with less Scourge. And it wasn’t very long before I decided to leave it and just level a new alt to check out the new low level stuff. Why? It wasn’t there for level 80s. It isn’t just that the quests were trivial (they may be trivial at level also) but the NPCs’ timeline wasn’t in check with mine.

To that I say: Of course it’s not! Quest levels in World of Warcraft ARE the timeline. If you could accept a level 80 quest at level 1 and have someone run you through it the timeline would be screwed as well. Only a fresh character will have the appropriate timeline at the moment. Does that mean that Cataclysm is more for noobs and alts? NO! Just that THE EXPANSION HAS NOT COME OUT YET! Seriously people, this is the pre-patch. When the level 80-85 experience launches with Cataclysm you will get your correct timeline, your quest givers commenting on your Kingslayer title and everything else you want.

In short: People are judging the expansion before it’s launched based on a few bits Blizzard threw us early. This is of course the best way to review a product. Does this mean people don’t have some valid points? Of course not, but we’ll get into those later.

What I like about the Shattering:

I rolled one of each race to see the new opening “scenes” and was floored by some of the immediate changes. SPOILERS FROM THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF SOME RACES AHEAD – The ‘death’ of King Magni Bronzebeard and the takeover of Ironforge by his daughter and her Dark Iron baby nearly made me fall out of my seat! I never thought that would come back to haunt the Dwarves. Also the Forsaken having a way to create new Forsaken for the first time is an amazing change for their lore. Oh, and the new Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream, dueling and killing Cairne Bloodhoof is just crazy. SPOILERS END.

I played through the first 35 levels of the Forsaken area, Brill, Silverpine, Hillsbrad, Arathi Highlands and Hinterlands. The first thing I want to say is that if you haven’t gone through those areas, then go to the small camp on the border of Hillsbrad Foothills, coming from Silverpine, and do the quest called “Welcome to the Machine”. Make sure to read ALL of the quest text. DO IT NOW. Did you do it? I can wait.

Ok, that is possibly the best quest I have been on in any MMO. Other than that the storyline that you move through for levels 1-20 of the Forsaken areas is like going through a really good single player game. Is the gameplay still the same? Yes. If you have an issue with that, go play something else. You don’t play Super Mario Bros. and bitch about how you just jump on things or throw fireballs. Simply put if the gameplay is boring to you, try another MMO, a single player game or wait for WoW 2 and hope. It’s just how the game does and always will play. I understand being bored of a game after over one thousand hours played, but honestly that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with you having put in over one THOUSAND hours into the same damn game. I’m not sure there has ever been a game that has soaked up THAT much game time, and much more, from people.

 

What I don’t like about the Shattering:

Having to wait for Cataclysm to launch to run from 80 to 85, or make a Goblin, is torturous after seeing the Shattering and how great that is. It’s only a few hours away as I write this, but I’m far too tired to stay up. I’ll be seeing it tomorrow at about noon, so hopefully the servers will be up by then.

Not all of the zones were drastically redone layout wise. All of the quests seem (so far) to be much more streamlined, lore appropriate and FUN. Sadly though, some of the zones are MOSTLY the same, like Arathi Highlands. It’s ALMOST the same, but there are a few nice changes to it.

Also I didn’t get killed by Deathwing. I was really hoping he would get around more and most people would get killed DAILY. It’s such an awesome idea to have the big bad flying around and killing everything that could eventually oppose him. Also I guess I should add that I’m upset I can’t join forces with Deathwing to destroy the Horde and Alliance, and rule under him for all eternity. *cough*

That’s all I’ve got for now. What do you like/dislike about The Shattering? I’ll see you all in Cataclysm.

World of Warcraft Patch 4.0.1: Polish Remover

No matter what you think of World of Warcraft it is hard to deny that it is possibly the MOST polished MMO on the market for over 5 years. Sure there have always been bugs in WoW, but if you sit down and play for 5 hours you may run into one, MAYBE two small bugs. This lack of bugs has been one of the driving reasons for not just World of Warcrafts success, but also Blizzard’s. 

Enter patch 4.0.1. From the moment I installed it the glitches have been everywhere. From the retardedly annoying “permanently swimming” bug that makes my character swim through the air if he drops off his mount before hitting the ground, to the game/event crashing bug where when you mouse cursor over the Headless Horseman’s pumpkin in the SM Graveyard. Until we realized it didn’t effect my wife and she was made the designated head clicker, we were spending 20 minutes of crashing and reloading, me and everyone else in the group, before it let us fight him.

It’s not just that either, there seem to be glitches and bugs all over since the patch. Another fun one is the “you are not in a guild” message me and my  guildies receive. Mobs evading and resetting randomly more than usual, and Icecrown being in MORE buggy that it always was. There was a point where I had to walk backwards in Icecrown for an entire day of questing, because if I faced forward everything went black and the game went to 1 fps. Guildies have been talking about many of these problems more and more, and sure, for someone who has played WoW for five years or so, these are just annoying, not game breaking (except the Icecrown problems maybe), but for any new players looking to start will they see what used to be the most polished MMO on the market? Or will these bugs make it feel like they are playing a game that has never been beta tested?

Sure, maybe I am being a bit hard on Blizzard, as this was a huge patch. But with Cataclysm around the corner, and how much THAT is going to change the game, it really makes me wonder if that huge “patch” is going to be as thoroughly tested as 4.o.1. Let’s hope this patch was as buggy as it is simply because they are putting so much into Cataclysm.

Ugly? Yeah Probably.

I read MMO Gamer Chicks recent post about her characters and how they all have certain things in common (Adventure Historian made a post on the topic as well!) . It got me thinking and I decided that I would do my own write up with my characters, and man are they ugly.

1. They are all male.

Oh I’ve tried a few females here and there, mostly alts, but I just can’t get into them. I think it’s partly because, while I hardly roleplay in games, I am a roleplayer at heart and I just can’t put myself into the shoes of a female avatar. I know the general excuse guys make, that extreme macho B.S. of “I’d rather look at a girls butt” but I think that’s all to try and clear up any worry of them being “gay” for playing a female toon. Sure, women look MUCH better than men, usually in video games too, and it’s fine to say that you like the aesthetic of a woman toon over that of a man. But when you use the “If I’ve got to stare at a butt” argument it just makes me wonder why you find one or the other sexually arousing. I think MMOGamerChick has it right when she says “I’ll admit the smooth curves of a female avatar are easier on the eyes when you’re staring at a game interface for extended periods of time.” It’s not sexual, or not supposed to be, it’s just fact for some. How did I make this such a long paragraph? Why am I still typing? Oh God this needs to stop.

2. They’re mostly ugly.

Some games require that I play a human, and in those games I generally make myself gruff and “woodsy”. The type of person you probably wouldn’t sit next to on the bus, but choose to stand instead. Others let me pick darker or just strange races, such as giant cow people. The really nice character creation lets me make whatever I want, such as Star Trek Online, and anyone who has seen my character on STO knows that it’s not pretty.

I think the main reason I tend to pick “ugly” races is that I LIVE in this world. I WORK in go to school in this world. I’ve SEEN humans, and they are boring to look at. Give me the option to play something vastly different than the usual and I’m going to jump at the chance.

Another reason may be that I don’t want to blend in with everyone else. Sure in real life I want to remain as anonymous as anyone else, but in game I want people to stop and say “Woah! Let me get a screenshot of this guy!”

The final reason is that it’s harder to come up with stories for strange species, and I really enjoy doing that.

3. They are tending toward the same name.

In this I am the exact opposite of MMOGamerChick in that, while her characters used to be named the same things and are moving apart, mine used to have unique names, each and everyone one of them contemplated on more than their appearance. Now though they all tend to have Amun or Toth in the name, such as Amuntoth, Amunkodo, Connor Toth, etc. I always try and work it in and make it fit lore-wise, at least a little, but I’m trying to make it easier for people to track me from the blog into the game and say high.

After the break will be pictures from some of my characters, so if that doesn’t interest you then no need to wait on the loading. If it does, click away!

Cash Shop AND Subscription?

While writing my review of Champions Online levels 1-5 I started thinking about the idea of subscription games that have a cash shop. Most of us don’t like the idea of a cash shop, but that comes down to two things. The first is that we aren’t used to it and that makes it bad. The second is that we have been burned in the past. Almost every cash shop until recently has helped to destroy games.

I think it’s something we could get used to, having a cash shop that we dump $15 a month into instead of paying a subscription, though I would argue that most of us would rather just pay the subscription, especially if it is a quality game. That right there is another problem when it comes to convincing players a cash shop is ok. Most games with a cash shop were terrible, second rate things that players too broke to pay a subscription fee were stuck with.

That all changed with games like Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited (admittedly a subscription game when it launched), Allods Online (Cash Shop mushroom stamped it’s players), and…well that’s it as far as I can recall. So am I OK with DDO and Allods Online? Absolutely, now that Allods has dropped the prices on some of their store items. If I get a game for free, I realize that the developer needs to make money, or they are going to go out of business. With that in mind I have no problem with them having a cash shop, though I would always rather have a subscription only game. If Allods was subscription it would be much more popular in the U.S. I believe.

What really has me wondering about all this is a small game that you may have heard of. It sold a couple of copies and people seem to think it’s ok. The game I am thinking of is called Guild Wars, a free to play MMO of a unique kind. You pay for the game and expansion packs, but you never pay a cent otherwise. You don’t pay a subscription, and they don’t have a cash shop. If Guild Wars can sustain itself on box sales only, like every other video game since the dawn of time, what makes MMO’s require a subscription at all?

But then that isn’t completely fair. MMO’s are constantly updating and there is free content being added all the time. That takes time, effort and work. Who am I to begrudge a company to charge a subscription fee, or a cash shop, to help pay for some of those costs. But what about when they try BOTH?

Both of Cryptic’s recent games, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, use the subscription model AND contain a Cash Shop. The cash shop doesn’t contain any game changing items and it more for looks. Like Everquest II’s mini-expansions these stores may also contain quest lines/new areas I would imagine. It’s arguable that you don’t need ANY of the items in the cash shop and so, if you don’t like it, you aren’t being affected at all.

The problem with that assumption is that work has gone into these things, whether it is a new island with quests or a new non-combat pet. That is work that probably would have been done anyway, and it would have been added as a patch to the subscription game, like most games do. When you add a cash shop on top of that you are in effect stealing that content, content that should have been added with a subscription, and forcing the player to pay twice for it.

Is this just massive greed? Do games really cost so much that we NEED to have both for the game to continue operating? I find that difficult to swallow with Guild Wars chugging along just fine. If you are in the industry and you know how this works let me know, because I’m interested to find out if it really is just greed, or if it is poor planning and budgeting on the part of the developers.

I’ll leave you with a though. World of Warcraft has at least 2 million U.S. players. At 14.95 a month that is over 29 million dollars every month JUST from U.S. customers. If Activision (not Blizzard, this all started with crazy ass Activision) can’t keep WoW afloat with 29 million dollars a month coming in, to the point where they feel the need to sell stuff to their players in a cash shop, then someone needs to shut down that entire operation for gross misconduct and apparent burning of money.