It seems now-a-days that the language online changes just about as fast as the seasons here in Canada.  Starting with ‘lol’ (laugh out loud), internet lingo started to go mainstream some wheres in the late 90’s.  No one knows where it started, perhaps when email became popular with the young people at the time (my generation).

Arguably, this type of language is referred to as ‘l33t sp3ak’ (leet speak aka elite speak), this insinuated that only the masters of the internet could type this language, and it really is only written, its spoken counterpart is english.  However I believe there are two separate things going on here, l337 5p34k 15 wr1773n |1k3 7h15 (leet speak is written like this), but internet lingo is something else, its when something needs to be written in abbreviation, a set of letters that expresses an action or a set of words.

So for example, this is what I know of online jibber-jabber:

• lol - laugh out loud, sometimes expressed as lawl, lulz.
• lmao - laugh my ass off, used when something is more funny then a lol reaction.
• rofl - roll over from laughter, used when something is really funny.
• omg - oh my god, sometimes omfg (the f is for ‘fucking’).
• hawt - hot
• wtf - what the fuck, the 5-w rule applies here (what, when, where, why, how), fuck can be interchanged with ’s’ for shit.
• brb and bbl - be right back and be back later.
• ttyl - talk to ya later.
• ttfn - ta ta for now, uncommonly used.
• QQ - expressed as an action, QQ or qq is the online symbol for tears, refers to crying or complaining, ie. Stop QQing, you’re annoying me.
• nerf - refers to lowering somethings difficulty.  This term is probably referenced from Nerf toys, since Nerf guns don’t injure anyone, ie. my fireball got hit by the nerf bat.
• pwned - aka owned, this was a result of a spelling error in a scripted starcraft map, when a player was eliminated, a message would come up saying ‘Player 3 was pwned’, this is now a commonly used gaming term for losing.
• LFG and LFM - looking for group and looking for more, when in a game and your trying to build a group (if that game supports grouping), you would use these terms in conjunction of why you want to build such a group.
• WTS and WTB - want to sell and want to buy, self explainable, if there is a trade/currency system in a game, use these terms to buy/sell items in game.
• OP - overpowered or original poster, this term is rarely used in the first meaning, the term ‘nerf’ is used more.  Mostly common in forums.
• stfu - shut the fuck up.
• Leeroy - refers to Leeroy Jenkins, commonly used when someone pulls something stupid, like pulling too many monsters.
• Mobs - monsters
• Spec - mostly a WoW term that refers to what someone has chosen for character talents or abilities.

Anyways, that’s most of what I know of, there are probably more that I can’t remember, but you see my point, I don’t consider anything in this list as ‘l33t speak’.  If you need any help with online talk, visit Urban Dictionary.

Hi everyone, just writing to let you all know, that beyond my or even my employers control, I’m now without a job.

While this has no real baring on trying to continue to update my “blog”, I will say that I’m hastily attempting to change gears. If anyone knows of a IT-related job in the HRM area, drop me a line at: mikemunro@eastlink.ca

Thanks and take care.

Welcome to a new addition of Mac Talk.  Something interesting has happened recently, some rumor mill created a little gem that stated Steve Jobs died of <insert condition here>.  As a result, Apple’s stock took a dip and consequently sent the press and media into a WTF mode.  Holy crap, yea I know he saved Apple’s bacon, but the man is just an icon now, I highly doubt Apple will change its course when Steve (inevitably) passes away or retires.  What’s funny is, the SEC is looking into where the rumor came from and is executing some kind of justice for tampering with the divine.

You know what would be hilarious, if in Steve’s will he put Bill Gates down as the inheritor of Apple Inc, just to mess with everyone.  Here Bill, when I die, you can have Apple.  That would be frigging awesome, then Bill Gates can just bury Microsoft and Balmer, Apple becomes the #1 computer company, lol I like making unrealistic scenarios, sorry, but its possible!  (Original idea from Jen)

There have been a lot of rumors floating around (aside from Steve passing away) about new notebooks from Apple.  They’ve created a lot of hype and that’s a good thing, Apple’s notebooks have always been one of their best products, while we knew we’d get notebook updates soon anyways, the thing they are touting in this update has been a ‘buttonless touchpad’, that’s right, no mouse-type button next to the touchpad.  Instead, they are thinking either the pad will recognize double/single/right clicks by touch inputs or that the touchpad itself depresses to give a sort of click.  Sounds cool, can’t wait to see it in action.

I’ve avoided talking about the iPhone here for some time, because honestly I wanted to say something decent about it.  Sure its a great little device and all, and it was almost the perfect logical step for Apple to take in their road to digital glory.  After all, the handheld market remained largely conquered by RIM and its Blackberry, which Apple has already taken a significant portion of.  As always, following in Apple’s footsteps are some competing devices like the Google Android and Samsungs Instinct.  But the problem is not the devices, its the carriers.

Wireless carriers are far from fair it seems, like fat kids at easter they try to get all the chocolate eggs they can.  They are one of the few industries that the government has to frequently step in and say: “that’s not fair to consumers”, since wireless (voice/data) is one of those things that hasn’t been fully tapped into yet and its easy for them to make their own rates and fees.  In fact the entire system of using minutes and regulating MB’s downloaded penalizes the consumer, in Canada anyways we don’t have caps or filtering on our broadband internet, so why should it be so on wireless devices?  At least with Rogers, they think the word ‘unlimited’ is a sin and therefore none of their plans allow you to go over a max of 1GB of data, that particular plan is a lot of money and if you do go over, you get dinged big time by overcharges.

They also go on to charge you for optional extra’s, like caller ID, voice mail or call display.  I’m sorry, but this isn’t like buying a car where I can buy extra things to make it look different from other models on the road, I think those things should be standard.  Make it a flat rate, unlimited voice/data for $60 then charge me a bit extra for a long distance package and that’s it.

In the end, if Apple had the ability, it should have looked into making its own wireless network, instead of signing on to various carriers that just wanted to charge up the ass.  Paying for the device to begin with is costly enough, I don’t need to fork up $100 per month for a basic service with caps.  In today’s financial crisis, I think it will become increasingly difficult for people to live within their means, it will be harder for companies to maintain pay raises and therefore it floats down to the employee to cut down on his/her costs.

I myself would get an iPhone if I could afford it, but I can’t justify the cost, since I carry around a cell phone and a notebook anyways, that’s all the communication I need, more then enough really.

I’m still looking into buying a new computer, still sitting pretty with this EFIX thing that you can plug into generic hardware to boot Mac OS X, but I have to wait for three things mostly: first is what will be Apple’s offerings over the next 6 months when it comes to iMacs; are they going to give them full processors and/or become cheaper?  Second, will this EFIX thing run into trouble, legal or hardware/software issues?  Thirdly is about money, no funds right now to get a computer, so I have to either wait for a raise (or a different job even) or decide if I want to sell my PowerMac G5, which I don’t really want to, but I could part with it.

That’s all I have, remember, don’t be a Mac elitist, just be a Mac user.

The video game industry has somewhat always been a fan of war.  It started out as a crop of strategy games that told the story of mythical or futuristic wars.  I’m of course talking about Warcraft, Starcraft and Command and Conquer.  At this time First Person Shooter (FPS) makers were fully into aliens and one-man wrecking balls such as Duke Nukem and that guy in the Doom series, we also had some Aliens vs. Predator games floating around too.  Then a game called Counterstrike (CS) came out.

CS was arguably the first game that really featured “real world” weapons; hand guns, shotguns, rifles, sub-machine guns and so on.  Forget the fact that CS was based on Half-Life, another futuristic shooter of make-believe, the plain and simple fact that CS was: two teams, one Terrorist and the other Counter-Terrorist, set in a closed battlefield, with some objective, but most of the time just kill the other team.

CS was horribly repetitive, if one sat there for at least an hour or so playing, you’d see the same version of ‘Dust’ (a game map) like 5 times.  You knew all the angles and the hiding places, but for some reason you just wanted to keep going, because each time you played a map, it would be different somehow.

Strangely, there was an odd following for CS, the unwashed masses of those people who were fans of guns but never really owned any themselves played CS.  This made it a giant “I’m better then you” type of atmosphere.  In fact, there were some people so addicted to CS, it made someone with a WoW addiction akin to a woman with a minor chocolate fixation.  To this day (with Counterstrike Source (aka CS 2)), many people still play it, to no great end what-so-ever.

So, once CS was out and about, the FPS industry turned around and created a sub genre of more life-like war simulators, spanning from settings like World War II, Vietnam and the Middle East.  You know which ones I’m talking about; Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942 and Call of Duty.  These games were largely different from the usual FPS where the biggest guns usually wins (Unreal Tournament, Quake, Doom, maybe even Halo), each had their adaptation and brought a new genre to online multiplayer.

Recently, I have been playing Call of Duty 4 (CoD) in my spare time.  I started with the single player aspect of the game and played through a Tom Clancy type scenario; Russians are pissed off, some Arab state gets a hold of a nuke and its up to the United Kingdom and the United States to save the western world.  Not exactly original, but it made for great game-play.

What I really bought the game for tho, was its online multiplayer, using Xbox live.  Normally I loath Xbox live, especially after playing a bit of Halo online, having a 9 year old yelling at everyone and calling people gay, cockbite, fucktard and other obscenities, I was almost ready to cancel my subscription.  I found CoD a bit more tame, as if more mature people played that game and it was too difficult for the average 9-15 year old gamer.

The game play in CoD resembled CS quite a bit, you had two teams, faced off against each other and the end result was just to get more kills then the other team, or accomplish the objective (if you choose that game type).  I usually played team death match (get your team to 750 points by killing the other team) and domination (capture and defend flags to gain points).  The incentive to keep playing was you gained experience after every round, eventually you gain rank which gives you access to new or different weapons.

I find the game still carries that feel of repetitiveness that was present in CS, but with the huge leap in graphics, depth of weapons and ranking system, I considered it a huge improvement and it took my mind off how many times I played a particular map.

I also liked how the game rewarded you for getting many kills in a row.  Getting 3 kills earned your team a UAV (Unmaned Ariel Vehicle) to provide surveillance on the other team, to tell you their location, 5 kills granted you an air strike, after you set your location for the bombing, 3 fighters zoom by and large explosions are heard all around.  Seven kills got you a helicopter, that stayed in the combat for a certain length of time or got shot down, the helicopter will shoot at enemy locations and is particularly devastating.

Alas, I’m getting tired of CoD and even my Xbox in general.  I’ve played through a number of games and if I wanted to veg on the couch in front of the TV, I’m more tempted to watch my one channel, Global… and the 5 other french channels I have access to. Yay!

Until next time, pistol whipping is always better then shooting your target at close range, its just proven economics… and it makes your ‘epeen’ bigger.

So I had this great plan to talk about cars in the post, but thats gonna have to happen a bit later after this little bombshell. Apparently, those idiots on the IOC (International Olympic Committee) have trademarked a ‘line’ from the Canadian National Anthem, the line in question is “with glowing hearts”. Here is the original article.

Can I get a WTF?!  This is an outrage, are they just unhappy that Canada has an awesome anthem or is this some kind of money grab in front of the Olympics set to be held in Vancouver?  Whatever it is, its bullshit, here IOC, trademark this: *flips IOC the bird*.

Enough outrage for today.  As I was saying, I want to discuss cars.  I currently drive a 2004 Mazda 3, great little car, has not steered me wrong yet.  Its pretty clear that whoever was running Mazda’s design department had a clear fixation on Batmobiles!  This is evident by their prototype race car, the Mazda Furai:

That’s one sweet looking car!  Something I’ll never own I’m sure.  Despite the fact that I like Mazda for my everyday car, I wouldn’t get their RX-8, their top of the line consumer coupe.  I just don’t think it looks right, in the end I’d probably buy a lower end Porsche for about the same money.  My dream car is different however, I know my all-time favorite car changes just about every month, but for right now, if I had the cash, I would buy an Audi R8.  Its reasonably priced (for a super car), has some balls, looks great and is designed properly.

Yea I know it didn’t beat the Porsche, but I don’t care, still an awesome car!  Anyways, thats all I have for you for right now, I’m working on another game review for yea, so you’ll just have to wait.  Cheers!

I take it most of you saw the new Microsoft commercials.  Most of the comments I’ve read so far on the ads were something to the tune of “Bleh” “Microsoft sucks” “worest ad ever” “WTF“, I generally disagree with these statements.  Now I’m not a huge Microsoft fan, I like their Xbox and that’s about it, but I do like Jerry Seinfeld and his type of humor.  The commercials gave you a general “WTF, did that just happen?” reaction, it didn’t need to be informative, it just needed to get people talking and to show everyone that Microsoft is not just huge company filled with people with poor hygiene.  Unfortunately, Microsoft shied away from the negative reviews they were getting from their new ads, so instead of taking the same idea and giving it more direction, they decided to take the ‘PC’ character from the Mac ads and well, just watch:

Obviously their point is that many different people use Windows, thats just fantastic.  Has anyone ever meet a Microsoft fanboy?  I have and while Apple hasn’t labeled them very correctly in their video’s, MS fanboy’s are hardcore, if it wasn’t developed by Microsoft or for a Windows machine, it doesn’t exist to them, so for example: iis > apache, access > mysql and MS-DOS > bash shell.  They refuse that anything else could work better and they get real defensive when shown otherwise.

In this day in age, its hard to have a right-wing attitude to just about anything, you will always be pictured as a self centered individual.  Its always best to have a positive approach to any solution whether or not it goes against your preference.

On a different topic, I take back what I said about Warhammer Online in regard to it being bloated by top-of-the-line graphics, the game is very well done in that respect, apparently it can run on as low as an ATI x800.  In looking into the game so far, it seems that they have taken almost everything that Blizzard did wrong (see my review regarding PvP) and did it right, then made other aspects of the game a tiny bit better.  Overall, its a solid game that a few of my co-workers and friends have picked up and enjoyed.  However, I will not be playing simply because they have overlooked a Mac port for the game and unless someone buys me a $1000 computer, I won’t be playing any time soon.

Speaking of computers and gaming and Mac, a company called EFIX is now making these USB devices, that you can plug into a generic computer (specific hardware required) and boot Mac OS X.  Thats pretty freggin sweet!  Depending on what Apple does in the next couple months, I’ll either be buying into this solution or Apple’s next best offer.

If your thinking that my only interests are video games and computers, you’d be wrong.  I’m also a big music fan, I may not like all the genre’s, but I’ll talk mostly about Metal.  The most recent albums I’ve listened to have been ‘Twilight of the Thunder God’ by Amon Amarth and ‘Death Magnetic’ by Metallica.  I’m loving the Amon Amarth album, they continue to do what they are good at, Viking Death Metal!  Metallica on the other hand… they should just stick to making rock ballads, they buried Hatfields’ voice a bit I find, however in general they have a few songs that sound pretty good, but they may have lost their play style that they had back in ‘Justice for all’ or ‘Kill’em all’.  I dunno, but its going to take some more listening.

Anyways, time to go back to work and to watching Buffy, yea I’m a Joss Whedon fan, get over it.

Hey everyone, I had to take a small break from writing, especially after that massive review I just did.  It was mostly at the back of my mind a couple months ago when I began to write it, I then spent a couple days finishing it up.  Since posting it, I’ve felt anti-motivated to write a new post.

Well here I am, working on something new.  I’ve recently came across a video game review site I’ve found entertaining; its called Zero Punctuation.  Like its title says, he essentially does a full game review in what seems to be one breath, but its awesome, cause he has an accent and he’s brutally honest about the games he reviews, something that’s semi-refreshing between the pile of video review sites that are bland and manufactured.

I’ve been working hard these past couple weeks, my company has had a lot going on, especially on the weekends and I’ve felt that some of my free time has been pillaged.  However, I find it a nice change to be busy again, to always have places to be, but I like having time to myself, to sit in front of something and let my mind phase out.

Speaking of phasing out, anyone play BioShock?  Of course you might have, its a first person shooter, but with a twist!  They bring back a good theme for FPS by making them scare the fuck out of you, while that’s great and all, you soon figure out you can just “zerg” your way out of almost every encounter.  This is one of those video games that promotes the action of try, try and try again and it doesn’t punish you much when you die.  This is probably why the game gets beaten so quickly and it gets boring after you get over the scare factor.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

I wanna take a paragraph and talk about US elections.  I realize its been smashed into our faces quite a bit lately, but I just want to share my view on it.  With this election, I’ve noticed there has been an usual amount of hype.  While I’m 90% an internet man, most of the information you can find centers around bashing the republicans and its easy to understand why, they repeatedly lie and create a ton of negative hype.  Personally I’m rooting for Obama, as is everyone with half a brain is, but he won’t win and I’ll tell ya why.  Every major stake holder in US oil, banking and the other parts of the economy will vote McCain, simply because war is profitable for them and McCain will keep America at war.  In fact, they have gone through excessive steps to make sure more people vote McCain and Obama supporters are buried.  An example of this, is banks foreclosing thousands of homes in the middle states, what does this do?  Well if you don’t have a place to live in the US, you are not considered a voting US citizen.  Lets face it, the Republicans do not ever play fair, this is why they will win because to them, they have to win.

Anyways, that was a large paragraph about politics.  This weekend I’m sitting, half doing work and half watching Angel, I hope everyone else is having a relaxing weekend also.

Forewarning, this is a Game review three and a half years in the making.  Its also a massive block of text, when it comes to typing, people who know me on select forums know that I’m capable of typing a lot!

In late October of 2004 I downloaded the open bata of a game called World of Warcraft (aka WoW), the most highly anticipated game possibly ever.  I myself had never played a Massively Multiplayer Online (or MMO) game before and I had only heard stories about a game called “Everquest”.  WoW fell into the category of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) which is right up my alley, I was really getting into high fantasy, I loved the Warcraft series mostly and the idea of playing online with thousands of other people was enticing.

I’m giving you another forewarning, this is part review and part reflective of my evening life for the past few years.  I’m going to state for the record that I never considered myself addicted to WoW, some people after they have had supper sit down to watch TV, read a book or play on xbox live, for me however I logged on with a group of people and slayed monsters beyond your imagination, but we’ll get to all that in a minute.

So I first played this game in open bata, Blizzard opened some of its servers to the public to stress test them, see how many players they could load up.  On this server I rolled a human paladin, a warrior of the light.  Starting off in Northshire Abby, I was surrounded with a lot of other humans of various classes.  They were mostly off killing nearby wolves and kobolds, however I was more interested in the lore, I was at an awe of how big the world was to me.  I wanted to explore, so I ran out of the starting area and made my way down the road, towards Goldshire, a town I remember from Warcraft I, I also knew near by the city of Stormwind also still stood.  I was very flimsy with the controls of my character, so I had a hard time trying to figure out where I was going.  Before the bata was over, I had also rolled a gnome mage.

It took about a week or so for the game to hit store shelves, even then I waited 2 weeks after to pick up my copy.  My friends and I had agreed to start on the server: Lightnings Blade, which would end up being my server of choice for almost the entirety of my WoW career.  The first character I rolled: A human mage named Mathius.  Being a mage was relaxing and quite frankly easy.  You sat back and nuked your target from afar, occasionally you had to sit down and drink water, but through my experience a mage is by far the easiest class to level.

Regardless of the games popularity, I took my time leveling, enjoying the content, seeing new lands and conquering dungeons with friends.  In the early days, I played with Graham, Andrew, Chris and maybe some others.  At around level 20, we made our first guild, Pillar of Autumn, we quested together mostly.  Also at around level 20, I encountered my first horde player, I didn’t really know it at first but some high levels came by and killed him/her right before me, the idea of Player vs. Player (PvP) was new to me, all I knew was if they are yellow or red, they were horde and would try to kill ya.

Eventually each of us were around level 40 and getting the mount was apparently the thing to do, I didn’t follow, I figured I had it easy being a mage already, I had teleports to most of the cities by this point and I had blink (a mage spell, teleports the caster 20 yards in the direction you are pointing), so I could keep up to mounted players.  I did eventually buy a mount, at level 47 I believe.  At level 50ish, the guild decided we didn’t have enough players to play through some of the tougher 5-man instances (an instance is a dungeon where only your party is allowed to play, so no one else can come into your instance), at the time I believe it was Blackrock Depths.  We decided to break up the guild and try to become part of a larger community.

Graham and I joined a guild called “The Order of Jaden”(aka TOoJ), it was a popular mid-level guild that was being run by a couple from Washington, their names were Jaidyn and Bustah.  We considered them great players and we leveled up with them all the way to level 60 (which was the level cap at the time).  At level 60 we worked on gearing ourselves in the 10 and 15-man dungeons and PvPing at places like Tarren Mill.  Then the dynamics of the game drastically changed.

The Molten Core was WoW’s first real raiding dungeon.  The server began to assemble large raiding guilds to conquer the content, on the alliance side was Ethereal Titans, Pius Presidium, Demonhunters and Phoenix Legion, on the horde side I was only aware of two: Timeless and Entropy.  It became clear that if you wanted to be apart of end-game raiding, you would need to be assimilated into ‘end-game’ guilds such as this.  Andrew (aka Valkur) had already joined Pius Presidium and it seemed like a logical step to try and follow.

The first raid I participated in was with Phoenix Legion, it was in Molten Core and we were desperately trying to learn how to kill the trash (a term used to describe monsters in a raid dungeon that have a rare chance to drop loot; also trash provides a meaningful resistance to get to a boss), we eventually gave up and that was my first taste of raiding.  Graham and I decided not to leave TOoJ, but we found it hard to try and raid with the larger guilds, since they would want to take their own members before allowing outsiders.

Eventually, we got our chance.  Pius Presidium had broken up a couple times and had renamed itself Atra Incedio and then eventually called itself Seditio.  At this point we got our shot and we cleared the Molten Core from top to bottom and it was amazing, the full 4 hours it took to clear it was stunning.  The last boss, Ragnaros (below), was massive!  I had never seen such a monstrosity of flame ever, knowing full well that one hit from him would doom little ol’ me.

As time went on, Blizzard introduced the next raid instance called Blackwing Lair (BWL).  Near the end of learning (learning to kill a raid instance can take months for a guild) this instance, Seditio ended up breaking apart, unable to keep up with the other top guilds at the time.

Andrew and I ended up joining another high end guild, one that was very much regarded as the best alliance guild on the server, Lost Chapter.  This guild was the remnants of Demonhunters, who had broken into 2 guilds, the guild we joined obviously the more successful.  Blizzard at this time had already introduced the next raid instance and LC was progressing rapidly through it.  This instance was called Ahn’Qiraj (AQ) and it had 2 components: a 20 man instance called the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj and then a 40 man version called the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj.

Like all of Blizzards instances, they were all dipped very deeply in lore, much of it was documented in the History of Warcraft.  After AQ, a major raid instance was introduced that had a direct story line from recent Warcraft games.  In fact it was considered that this instance was the first to move the story line forward a bit.  It was called: The Dread Citadel - Naxxramas.  It was the forward capital of the Undead Scourge, with an undead army ready to wipe out the world.  At its head, was the Lich Kel’Thuzad (below), the final boss to Naxxramas.  LC would falter right before the end of this instance, as Blizzard placed the date for WoW’s first expansion too soon.

The Burning Crusade(TBC) launched in January of 2007.  The game level cap was raised to level 70, a new extra-planar continent was introduced called Outland, which had much previous lore already.  In the end, you were to face Illidan Stormrage, a broken half demon, half Night Elf Demonhunter (contradiction?) who is bent on controlling all of Outland since he was unable to stop the Paladin turned Death Knight Arthas from reaching his destiny, to become the Lich King.  Now Illidan sits atop the Black Temple, waiting to die.

Also a huge feature of TBC was the Caverns of Time, a place in Azeroth that sits in a time rift between important events of Azeroths past.  You get to explore areas such as the Black Morass, where the Guardian Medivh first opens the Dark Portal and then theres the raid dungeon; The Battle of Mount Hyjal, one of the greatest battles in all of Warcraft history, you must seek to defend the World Tree from Archimond, a great demon seeking to destroy the world.

I played Mathius as my main character throughout the game.  I would have to say I enjoyed playing the game and I can’t think of one detrimental outcome from playing it.  I had a few alternate characters (aka alts) as well, I had a level 70 human warrior, 50 human paladin, 42 undead rogue, 36 night elf druid and a level 22 draenei shaman.  I stayed with my mage simply because I enjoyed playing a mage, it wasn’t necessarily easy, but even as different specs (fire, frost or arcane) you had different ways and different play styles as to how you delivered damage.  A second to the mage class would probably be the druid, while I didn’t play one much, they were a true multi-class, in one spec you could both handle tanking like a warrior or DPS (damage per second) like a rogue, in another spec you could be a well respected backup healer and even in another spec you could be a caster DPS almost like a mage!

Some of the complaints about WoW gameplay stem from its PvP environment, most if not all of the gripes people had were that a certain class was overpowered against another, however I think some of the strategy involved with PvP is to have another class looking out for your class.  For instance if you are a warrior, and warriors are vulnerable to other casters, it would be wise to travel around with a class that is very good being an anti-caster, or having what is called a ‘pocket healer’, essentially a healer that will run around with you and heal you.

Player vs. Environment (PvE) wise that game is extraordinary but challenging all at the same time.  Early on it was required one had to farm (a term used to describe collecting materials so one could make beneficial consumables for raiding content) quiet a bit in order to raid, however in the expansion, Blizzard seemed to make this chore easier on players.  The introduction of daily quests and the factions you could gain by doing them were well done, not only could you make 300 gold in an hour or so, but you could gain considerable reputation with that faction while you were doing it.

Gear in WoW usually reflected what you wanted to be doing with your character, for instance if your characters talents were built for raiding instances, then your gear would reflect that, the better gear you had, the more viable you were in the raid instance, and thus the better your raid group would do.  Gear was also rated very well and consistent through most of the game.  My only complaint was the distribution of ‘welfare epics’, these are items which are easily attainable that made a character look better then he/she is, as in it doesn’t take much skill to obtain those items, in the end player skill dictates how equipped your character is going to be in end game, your either good enough to get into an end game guild or your not.

Added Sept 1st:

If I had to pick two things that I could complain about in WoW, it would be reputations and character depth.  Factions (and reputations to get factions) I felt Blizzard had done completely wrong, from the get go.  Then when they started to build on it, it just made it look more and more like a mistake.  In my honest opinion, factions should have been much less forgiving and dynamic, what do I mean by this?  Well I think it should be just as easy to gain reputation as it is to lose it, with every faction in the game.  The way it stands right now is the system is very liner, you can only gain positive reputation for 80% of the factions available to you.  What it comes down to is that goodly characters stay on the ‘good’ side and ‘evil’ characters stay on the horde side, this plays into my second point, characters needed more depth.  The way Blizzard could of got this, is by putting in an alignment system (a la D&D), this way your character is not bound to a faction, for example if I roll a human paladin and he (or me) becomes disgusted with Stormwinds affairs concerning the Defias brotherhood, if his alignment slips and becomes evil, maybe through a long quest line he can gain faction with the Forsaken, thusly joining the horde.  If they wanted to take another step forward, then you would also loose your paladin-ship, making you (gasp! enter) a Death Knight.

That last paragraph reminded me of something else.  Why the hell is there warlock humans?  How can an undead choose to become a priest?  Why did they give paladins to the Blood Elves?  I know Blizzard was trying to balance things, but no matter what side you choose(obligatory good or evil), you have access to every class, I think this was also done wrong, this is how it should have been:

Horde:

• Caster/ranged: warlocks, hunters, druids
• Healers: shamans, druids, death knights
• Melee DPS: rogues, death knights, druids
• Tanks: warriors, druids, death knights

Alliance:

• Caster/ranged: mages, hunters, druids
• Healers: paladins, priests, druids
• Melee DPS: rogues, paladins, druids
• Tanks: warriors, druids, paladins

See, this set up would have worked perfectly, and hero classes will still have other options, like the archmage, archbishop, warlord, assassin, etc.

Some players also complained about the apparent art style of WoW, saying it was too “cartoony”, the shades and colours used were too bright and not realistic (or dark) enough.  Most trees and buildings were very rounded, in truth this was more of a system requirements choice, Blizzard has always strived to get their games to run on ‘below average’ computer systems.  If you notice that in the game industry, the next latest and greatest game will most obviously require the latest and greatest video card, memory and processor to run smoothly.  Not when it comes to Blizzard games, when it came to WoW, they realized the way to get into the market was by volume, more people would be encouraged to buy if it already fit in their system requirements.  The truth of it is, when you do turn up the graphics on WoW, it actually does look pretty stunning. New games like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan will surly fail simply because they’ve tried to use cutting edge graphics, only the hardcore gamers will go pay $300 or so for the best graphics card just to play that game.

More kudos go to Blizzard of course for offering a native Mac port on the same day of the PC release.  While Blizzard has done this for every one of their games, doing it with WoW and keeping up with concurrent updates is amazing and sets an example for other game companies that they can do the same.  Alas, it has not, none of the new MMO’s are Mac compatible and thus will fail to drag over yet another part of the WoW community, the Mac users.  Don’t scoff at that, if you think about how many Mac gamers are probably out there, all of them are probably playing WoW or did at one point and none of them are going to want to switch platforms just for another MMO.  Out of the 10 million WoW subscribers, I would hazard a guess that roughly 10-15% of them are Mac users.

This summer I quit WoW for 2 simple reasons: the future content of the game, while new and cool, was not interesting enough for me.  The next expansion is called ‘Wrath of the Lich King’(below), really awesome lore aside, its look and feel seem to be a repeat of the last expansion, The Burning Crusade.  Yes I realize its an expansion to the original game, but from my point of view, it will be another 10 levels, get rid of all your epic gear you farmed for, get to level 80, do some factions, kill more dungeons, more bosses, etc… Its a repeat in that form.  The second reason is I don’t want to pay for it anymore, I want to put money towards other things.

I do remember my original expectations for WoW, I remember that I thought there was going to be more open field combat, very akin to the Warcraft strategy games, on any given day you would be told to go to a town in a contested area and defend the town, perhaps even take over the opposing town.  That contested areas really meant just that, that you could destroy the other town if your force was greater.  They started to introduce it and apparently its progressing with destructible buildings and siege weapons in the next x-pac, but PvP seems forced in WoW, that you have to enter another set zone, an arena or a battle ground that stays the same whether you win or lose.  I never disliked or wanted to change how raiding was in WoW, but I do think PvP could have been better done.

One thing that’s being thought of about towns and quest lines, is that when a set of quests gets completed, they stay completed.  Currently, if someone in the town ‘hired’ my character to rid them of a Knoll problem they are having, I’ll go do the quest and kill a bunch of Knolls, but as I turn around and head back to the town, the Knolls return for someone else who needs the quest (also called respawn).  To my character, it doesn’t really seem like I accomplished much (other then the game telling me that the quest is completed).  So the ideas that are coming up in future MMO’s, is that a town could have a continuing story line, depending on what has already occurred.  So for instance, to start the town hires a bunch of adventures to deal with a Knoll problem (big enough that it would take hours and quite a number of us to take them down), once the Knolls are dead and trade routes are open, perhaps a suspicious band of travelers enter the town and start performing dark arts and summon a demon or something into the town, so then adventures currently there, have to deal with it.  Perhaps events occur over days or weeks, in the case of a castle defending itself from an orc siege.  This would have been a cool idea in WoW, but would require lengthy writing of lore and ever-changing quest hubs (a term for a town that holds many quests).

In conclusion, I could write another 10 pages about my experience with WoW, but I think in general you have gotten what the game is about and how you play it.  Do I recommend you go home tonight and install it?  Well I’m not gonna say, it comes down to if you like the genre, your tired of your TV provider and at least some of your friends are also playing.  I do know I wouldn’t play the game without friends/coworkers who also play, its really no fun when you can’t share your online experiences with real life people.

To end, here is the Wrath of the Lich King cinematic trailer:

I just had one of those long and fun weekends.  It was long in the sense that my friday night consisted of sitting at my desk, at work, playing Diablo 2, waiting for problems to arise.  My company was taking part in an event in Dallas throughout the weekend and Friday/Saturday I had to stay on to help with any support issues.

The Saturday night I attended a grand party at a friends house.  It was a house warming party of about 10 people total at different times.  I had a really good time, a lot of booze was consumed, we played a couple drinking games such as battle box and pyramid (if you don’t know the games, I’m not explaining them, both involve decks of cards and have an end objective of getting everyone fully trashed).  I also tried a caesar for the second time of my life, the first one I had was way too spicy, burned me tongue!  The one I had last night was a lot more manageable and I enjoyed it.

Sunday consisted of an all-day session of D&D.  We finished up the dungeon we were on and headed back to the last town we visited.  I play an ‘evil chaotic’ warlock (4th edition), he just hit level 3.  While the rest of the party is either lawful/good or unaligned, I took a small opportunity to display my characters mindset to adventuring.  That is, while lawful/good characters are set on helping the helpless and just doing good deeds, I was looking for opportunities to cause destruction and chaos… but I kept to myself while in town because of the prospect of loot.

However, we were sent on a mission to another adjacent town some days away (by foot), along the way we came across a tipped over caravan and its dead occupants.  My character would already have known that the caravan had been ransacked, that’s when the knolls and their pack of wolves attacked.  I watched for awhile (hidden from view), looking on to see if the pack of animals had a chance of killing my party (obviously without my help).  From my point of view, if the knolls won, I could easily convince them not to kill me and promise them untold riches if they would follow my lead, I may have had to buy them off with my companions weapons, which were worth while.  To that end, I could have made off with my companions profit from the quests we just did and the items they all were carrying, also I would have had a band of knolls to ‘command’ and use to my whims, until they died… or until I got bored.

Alas, I didn’t just sit back the entire time, it was looking like my companions were going to win, so in the end I decided to help out, if only to make the encounter end quicker… Unfortunately my character passed out from too many wounds from my efforts to help out.  Next time, when there’s no obviously huge profit to be had, I’ll snooze by the tree and let them deal with it.

While I’m loving the new 4th edition D&D rules, the group I’m with (no offense) is forgetting some of the implications of our characters, why we choose to be adventuring (other then finding profits), we need to play more on our characters attributes rather then the numbers on our sheets and dice rolls we make.  Me playing the card of being chaotic/evil will twist the tables once in awhile to make it look like we’re not just hoping from battle to battle, without doing some decent story building.  Plus, playing an evil character in a ‘goodly’ group is loads of fun, even if the DM decides to separate you from the group so you don’t end up killing other players.  Just keep in mind:

1. profit is everything
2. don’t get involved unless your in danger or meets the first objective
3. be good at playing both sides
4. cause mayhem even if your group is trying to prevent it
5. lie, lie and lie some more
6. kill a bunny with your bare hands and make it into a stew if the need arises
7. backstab if only just for fun and especially if it meets the first objective

There’s your guide to being evil, until next time, don’t follow that advice in real life, role playing is there for a reason.