I've been contemplating how to deviate from the usual focus of PC, but I kind of threw up my hands and said to hell with it.
Prince Rogers Nelson is dead.
While I may have technically been born in the 60s, I am most definitely a child of the 80s.
And that means the soundtrack of my teenage years includes hair metal, heavy metal, prog rock*, new wave, and Prince. Not necessarily in that order.
Make no mistake about it, Prince was an arrogant bastard, but he was also a musical genius. Unlike Yngwie Malmsteen** who, in his arrogance claimed he was better than Bach, Prince was by far Bach's successor in terms of innovation and sound and musicality. Of the musicians who came out of the 80s, he was one of the top icons of the business. Prince changed the way how music meshed --funk and rock, R&B and pop-- and he did it in such a way that popular music was never the same afterward. Like Nirvana in 1991 and David Bowie in the late 60s, the music world changed when Prince burst onto the scene.
He was also the consummate professional in the same vein of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, never refusing to settle for "pretty good", and always trying to give the audience the best performance possible.
Prince's halftime show at the Super Bowl back in 2007 exemplified this, playing in a driving rainstorm:
Prince was also a very private man who was very protective of his music. Hence, while I'd love to have a Machinima available --set to Prince's music-- I couldn't find any that hadn't already been taken down.
Rest well, Prince. At least you made it past 1999, man.
*Rush. 'Nuff said.
**For the record, I do have his Trilogy album. He's good, but nowhere near as good as he thinks he is. Musicians need confidence to get out on stage and play, but Yngwie makes me roll my eyes.
That's a very very long time for "not much" in the context of new content for Azeroth, but we'll see how that pans out. In terms of context, they're going back to one of their favorite baddies --Gul'dan and the Burning Legion-- so in some respects it'll be a blast from the past.
But this is very much a WoW-at-a-crossroads release. Blizzard is no longer releasing sub numbers, so there won't be that metric to scale against, but they absolutely need a healthy WoW to keep other projects afloat. WoW's profits allow Blizzard the luxury of taking their time on projects to get them "just right" (the soon to be released Overwatch) or to kill a project when it simply isn't working out (Titan). Without those profits, it is likely that (for example) Heroes of the Storm would have ever seen the light of day, as it required a completely different mindset from Blizzard's development team.
Notice I didn't include Activision in this listing. Activision, well, likely has other plans for its Blizzard sibling, and those probably include maximum profit for minimum work. If Legion stalls out early like Warlords did, then that might be the last major expac for WoW; Activision will demand more Heroes of the Storm and less WoW from the Blizzard development team.
Here's to hoping that the MMO standard bearer doesn't fall victim to the bean counters and get put off to a steady state level of support.
The Vanilla WoW server Nostralius, a "private" WoW server that existed in a somewhat illegal manner outside of the WoW-verse, had to shut down the other day after a cease-and-desist letter came from Blizzard's lawyers.
Someone had managed to capture the final few minutes of Nostralius (Horde-side) and posted the video on YouTube:
Blizzard may not be under any obligation to provide any Vanilla (or BC or Wrath) servers for those fans, but there certainly is a demand for them.
After the emotional rollercoaster that was the Overwatch short film Alive, I figured you'd want something a bit happier and lighter in tone.
Sure, I could have gone completely off the rails and posted about the NCAA Men's Basketball National Title Game, but not everybody is a college basketball junkie like I am.
But I really like Sneaky Zebra's YouTube videos of cosplayers at Cons around the world, so I thought I'd give them a signal boost for their latest video, from WonderCon 2016:
And, for those more interested in MMO cosplay, their BlizzCon 2015 music video:
Sneaky Zebra also has a Patreon Page, so you can support their work.
Today's graphical correction has been brought to you by Overwatch.
Seems that Tracer, the Brit with the cockney accent who can teleport around the battlefield, has a very, um, un-Tracerlike victory pose:
From The Mary Sue.
Maybe Tracer would pose like that --in private-- but this pretty much goes against everything we have, both in-game and out-of-game, about Tracer so far.
Okay, not really, but typically during an MMO's nighttime I don't often look up. I'm more used to the focusing on the baddies on the ground, and besides, the sky at night in MMOs changes depending on what zone you're in.*
Some MMOs don't even bother changing the sky based on the time of day --I'm looking at you, SWTOR-- because the background scenery is only important enough for the imagery it presents to you as part of the story.
Lord of the Rings Online, on the other hand, is a bit different.
For starters, some baddies only come out at night, such as trolls, and any quest that involves getting rid of the trolls that roam the countryside in, say, the Trollshaws** close to Rivendell, means that you have to wait until the sun goes down before you can go troll hunting.
This is where LOTRO's sped up game time comes in handy, so you don't have to wait for the night time on whatever time the server is set for to actually go troll hunting. If you play only from 2 - 4 PM at your local time in a game that keeps a true 24 hour game clock (WoW, for instance), you'd never actually see the night sky unless you played on a server on another continent. LOTRO's in-game clock is so fast that an in-game "day" is slightly over 3 hours of real time.
Well, this is nice and all, but on one of those times when I was travelling through Evendim (swimming across Lake Nenuial because, you know, a F2P player doesn't have access to things such as boats that make such travel easier), I happened to look up at the night sky above me.
Ithil (aka "The Moon") is off screen above and slightly to the left.
I'm by no means an amateur astronomer, as what qualifies as a telescope in our house is an old Stevens 3" reflector that I received as a Christmas present back circa 1981***, but I know enough about the night sky that I picked out this immediately:
Apparently my toon has good eyes, as I can only see about 7 or so in real life.
The Pleiades. Right next to the tower at Tyl Ruinen.
Now, when Tolkien wrote the stories about Middle-earth, he grounded the tales by referencing real world items and putting his own spin on them. The Moon became "Ithil" in Sindarin (one of the Elvish languages), "elephant" became "oliphaunt", etc. The Pleiades became Remmirath (in Sindarin), or the Netted Stars.
I realize that MMO skies aren't going to be astronomically perfect --the developers have way too many other items to worry about to be concerned about getting the night sky in Northwest Middle-earth in the Autumn completely accurate****, but I still found it surprising that the devs took the time to get The Pleiades right.
I might have to go back and see if I can find Orion in the sky.
*Think of how cloudy with an eerie glow Icecrown Glacier is in Northrend, and you get the idea.
**I know, I know. Silly name. But Tolkien wrote it that way and put it on his maps.
***I still occasionally drool over a Celestron, Meade, or Orion telescope catalog, wishing I had the money and time to do some stargazing on a regular basis. I even considered trying to build my own telescope, but I realized after crunching some numbers that I'd be better off simply buying my own telescope than trying to make my own. And I think my wife would be very upset if I took years to finish another one of my "projects" around the house.
****Tolkien does reference Remmirath and Menelvagor (Orion) in Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
EtA: I just had to add the Airplane scene after the fact.
It's only natural that I, having come lately to Wildstar, am the last person on the planet to find out about its impending doom.
I'd just run smack into the attunement wall which requires you to run instances to progress further in the story, so I was wondering what to do about Wildstar when Syl posted this that referenced layoffs at Carbine.
Which is ironic, to say the least, because I think that in the end Wildstar got more right than not.
I know that when I initially checked out Wildstar I wasn't so sure about the sexy female designs/armor as well as the heavy dose of Texas in the attitude of the game, but I eventually came around.* The story sputtered at first, but eventually got going around L20 or so. It's unfortunate, however, that a significant part of the storyline doesn't end when attunement begins.
I don't mind raiding being behind an attunement wall, because that's part of Vanilla and BC that I wish was still around to an extent. But there's a caveat there: having a decent portion of the storyline behind that attunement wall leaves a lot of players hanging. SWTOR fixed that problem by two methods: a class storyline that ended in a solo mode, and an overarching storyline (in the expacs and KotFE) that had a solo mode, even for the group content. WoW fixed the problem by leaving as much of the story as possible outside of the raid content itself.**
While I do realize that Carbine's focus was old school hardcore raiding, I do think that the story and game would have been a big hit as a standalone game. Or as an MMO that embraced a newer design for endgame, aka not falling into the MMO trap of "the game begins at endgame".
There will always be one nagging thing at the back of my head regarding Wildstar: why didn't the Dominion simply use all of its available resources across many worlds to simply crush the Exiles? It's a bit different when you're trying to play whack-a-mole across a galaxy, but on one planet? It should have been clobbering time.
*Or got used to ignoring it. Your choice.
**It also create LFR, which has been either a boon or a bust depending on who you talk to.
I've been spending the past week re-acclimating myself to the old school MMO design of LOTRO.*
The concept of item wear during normal use --which typically only happens when you're killed in an MMO-- is still part of LOTRO. I'd made it to roughly about L24 or L25 before my Champion died the first time**, but I had to periodically stop and visit a vendor to repair my worn items.
The old style quest hub concept, which I detailed a few posts ago, was very much in evidence in the Lone Lands and the North Downs. You'd think you were finished with a quest hub, but once you turned everything in another set of 6-10 quests would suddenly pop into being.
I can't say I mind the old quest system so much, but it sure would have been nice if Tolkien had dreamed up a bit more variety in the enemies department. I'm getting tired of killing orcs, bears, wargs, boars, birds, and spiders wherever I go.***
This is the reason why bears are now on the Middle-earth endangered species list.
The thing that still surprises me, after all this time, is how faithful LOTRO is to the source material. Even the items that they made up for the MMO, such as the refuge of Esteldin, fit in so well that unless you're a Tolkien geek you'd never notice they were made up.
True story: I was goofing around in the North Downs, if you want to call goofing around slaughtering trolls en masse, when someone asked in World Chat just how much of LOTRO is made up****. The asker thought that Archet, Combe, and Staddle were made up (they weren't) and that Esteldin wasn't made up (it was). When someone mentioned that The Forsaken Inn, for example, was referenced in the novels but never fleshed out, the asker exclaimed that he thought that was another made up location.
***
Naturally, in MMO space you can't afford to have distances as far apart as they really were in Tolkien's Middle-earth.
For example, the distance from The Forsaken Inn to Weathertop was a couple of days of foot travel on a good road, and the distance from Buckleberry to Bree was much a good day's travel by pony, too.
Compressing Middle-earth does have one huge positive, however: that people can remain engaged with the MMO without extraordinary effort.
I know there are people out there who like to explore, and they would love the vastness of Middle-earth as Tolkien envisioned*****, but to be completely honest a real trip from Bree to, say, Weathertop would be 95% boredom coupled with 5% adventure. (Or sheer terror. Your choice.) Eriador in particular is so empty in stretches that it is simply impractical to expect it to hold a player's attention without gobs and gobs of additional "kill ten rats" type of quests. And really, there are far too many of those quests in LOTRO as it is, as that was the quest design structure of the time.
So while it does kind of irk me that some aspects of the game, such as political contact between The Shire and Ered Luin not exactly following the pattern of Hobbits not named Took or Brandybuck, I'm willing to ignore it in favor of playability. Besides, a lot of the political and racial tensions in Tolkien's works do find their way into LOTRO itself. The end of the Elven low level zones in Ered Luin, for example, is predicated upon the traditional misunderstandings between Elves and Dwarves, and the open refusal of the chief constable in Bree to work with the Rangers ends up hampering his ability to handle the brigand and orc incursions into Bree-land.
***
But there's one item that is definitely NOT in Tolkien's works that I'm glad that Turbine has taken: Tolkien's viewpoint toward women.
Yes, JRR Tolkien was a product of his times, and yes, he patterned the stories surrounding Middle-earth after the Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythic tales he so loved, but both The Hobbit and LotR are a primarily a sausage fest with the few women in the story reduced to a secondary or tertiary role.
As a guy, I never really noticed the lack of women in the novels. Even comparing it with other stories from the early 1920s up through the 1970s, such as Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, Howard's Conan stories, or Moorcock's Elric and other stories surrounding the Eternal Champion, the women in the novels are primarily there to be a) a love interest, b) a plot device to explain/move the story along, or c) for sexy fun times' type of window dressing.
The Peter Jackson adaptations of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, however, did make an attempt to address the lack of women in the stories by enhancing Arwen's role (by giving her the additional duties fulfilled by another minor character, Glorfindel), providing more screen time for Eowyn to be badass on the battlefield, and emphasizing Galadriel more. And, yes, creating the role of Tauriel for Thranduil's realm.
Still, LOTRO goes a step further by integrating women into all facets of life in Middle-earth. Women are guards, warriors, craftspeople, farmers, nobles, etc. And more than that, they are also important NPCs in each region.
Who is the hero whose quick actions saved Trestlebridge from attack by orcs? Aggy Digweed.
Who is the hero who stormed the Red Maid's territory in the Lone Lands to stop the nightmares of Hana the Young? Her sister, Elsa the Bold.
But the best part? Some of the enemy NPCs and bosses are women, too.
Not my video, but Andraste's ability to hang out
in the Barrow Downs alone merits my respect.
***
Perhaps because of the old school feel of LOTRO, I've got a fondness for the game. I can go back in time and relive the design that was current when I started playing WoW, without having to worry about any story continuity issues that Cataclysm inflicted on Azeroth.
But more than that, I can enjoy the Middle-earth that I used to read****** come to life in an MMO, without it looking too hokey or snarky concerning the events in LOTR. Bree itself fascinates me in a way that I never expected, since it was just a metaphorical bump on the road in the novels, but seeing it truly come to life like this gives you a much greater appreciation of Tolkien's vision.
Besides, they've got a good band that plays on Friday afternoons on the Gladden server.
*The mini-reds have informed me that I've been playing LOTRO waaaay too much. Go figure.
**As is usually the case, I tried taking on more and more enemies at once until it finally caught up with me.
***And the Dead. You'd think I dropped in on The Walking Dead: The MMO from all the wights I've been killing.
****Yes, I know how silly it is to be arguing such a thing in a fictional world. At the same time, staying true to the source material is always important for immersion.
*****The late Karen Wynn Fonstad's work, The Atlas of Middle-earth Revised Edition (Amazon and B&N), is well worth the price for people who love maps and created fictional worlds. While she references Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth series, she doesn't allow it to overwhelm the original material from the primary sources (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales).
******And play in, courtesy of Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP). It was a competitor to D&D back in the 80s and 90s, and I loved the skill based system. Their sourcebooks had a default setting of the mid-Third Age, about 1500 years before the events in LOTR, so there was still a Dunedain kingdom in the North and a Dwarf kingdom in Moria. And those sourcebooks were fantastically written and detailed. Even though I haven't played the game since the early 90s, I still have all of my sourcebooks; they're that good.
I was goofing off on Dromund Kaas last night, figuring I'd go do a daily or two, when I got in line to take out a 2+ toon in the Temple.
Another toon in front of me asked me and the player behind me to join up as a group, and I figured why not. It saves on waiting around for additional spawns, and you can burn down the boss more quickly.
But. (You know this was coming, right?)
Once the boss dropped, another toon who'd just run into the room ninja-ed it first.
Ahead of about 5 people/groups.
"Did he just do that?"
"What a dick!"
"Fucker!"
"Come back here, asshole!"
I shook my head. I bit back my "Well, that's someone embracing the Sith Code for you" rejoinder, because I shouldn't have been surprised at all.
***
I've not seen much ninja-ing of stuff since the height of Cataclysm, but it does still exist.
There was the one time I was on my Trooper and I joined an ops group to take down the World Boss on Tatooine. We were waiting for the last couple of stragglers to join us at the location when a lone Imperial ran up and summoned the World Boss, blocking us from taking credit for it.*
Then there was the 1/2 hour I'd spent grinding my way through mobs in the Field of the Dead on Age of Conan, sneaking around and attempting to reach a boss at the far end of a long flight of steps, when a high level toon rode up and dispatched the boss just as I was fighting off the last mob or two.
And I'd really rather not talk about the times I'd been ganked or ninja-ed while leveling Q back in the day, particularly in the Arathi Highlands. At 3 AM server time.**
***
What drives someone to take someone else's hard work and capitalize on it for their personal gain?
It's not like MMOs have a lock on this sort of bad behavior. If you work at a company of any real size, you know of at least a few people who attempt to sabotage or (at least) take credit for other people's work on a regular basis. And some corporations seem to actively encourage this sort of behavior, too, given how they handle annual performance reviews.***
Is it the nature of the MMO reward system that encourages Machiavellian behavior, or is it the other way around?
I suspect that a lot of this is absorbed by people while growing up, believing that this is how they ought to act to get ahead in life. From my own experience, I had a grandmother who used to say things like "If you've got someone who looks like they might run you over to get ahead, go and get them first! Get them before they get you!" And this in spite of the fact that she always considered herself a proper God-fearing woman.
However, a certain percentage of people get their amusement out of the pain of others. These are the people who give YouTube comments a bad name, or those who dox people they don't like (or espouse views they don't like). When confronted, you often get a defensive "hey, lighten up!" or a "it's just goofing around", or even the occasional "hey, they deserve it for [insert whatever pissed them off here]!"
Whatever the reason, there's a subset of MMO players that enjoy ninja-ing, and while they tend to gravitate toward certain games, no MMO has a monopoly on this behavior. This leads me to think that the Machiavellian tendencies were always there in people, but the online and anonymous nature of MMOs encourage ninjaing. The reward system doesn't shape behavior to the extent that some could argue, because by and large ninja behavior is the outlier, If the reward system were causing the behavior, I'd expect it to be condoned in blogger press as an acceptable method of playing the game. (It isn't.)
***
After the 2+ boss was ninjaed, our group switched world instances and found one empty of any sort of line. We dispatched the boss quickly, and that was that.
Well, kinda.
One of the group members dropped, but the other player and I teamed up to finish the other Dromund Kaas Heroics in short order. We chatted throughout the short adventure, and ended up friending each other. In a bizarre sort of way, were it not for that ninja, I'd have not made another acquaintance in SWTOR.
I'd just rather not have a ninja as the catalyst for that.
*He died almost instantly, but it was such a dick move that he should be grateful that his PvP flag wasn't set to "on."
**Which you'd THINK would be the safest time of day to be out in a PvP world. But nooo.....
***The worst types are those that grade on a strict bell curve, with only the highest rated people getting the raises. That means getting that highest rating, whether by backstabbing or working 90 hours a week (and I've seen both in action), makes it open season on everybody who is a good employee. Other people deliberately move to bad teams so that they can be the top banana of a bad group without having to put much effort into it. And still others will lie and cheat and steal in order to get ahead.
I've been making time this week to do some low level questing in LOTRO with the mini-Reds. Considering that I only leveled up to around L16 or so the last time I played before ceding the game to them, I figured it wouldn't take too long to go past that.
I'd forgotten that the initial leveling process for LOTRO is a bit like the pre-Cataclysm WoW system as you tend to get shuttled around quite a bit in the low level zones. For example, if you start as an Elf (as I did), one of the quests takes you up to Duillond to try to convince the brother of a quest giver to forsake Middle-earth and take a ship to the West.* That brother then sends you out to find the remains of a sword used by a Dunedain compatriot long ago, and then once secured you're sent all the way back to the initial quest giver. That quest giver then sends you up farther north to yet another hub. The back and forth in the middle, while important to the quest line, is a bit tedious to a brand new toon who has to hoof it back and forth.**
That's me, a glorified messenger boy. (No, I haven't created any female toons yet.)
By the time Cataclysm was released and SWTOR dropped, the leveling experience had been tweaked to minimize back and forth movement throughout a zone: you collect your quests, do them, and then once you turn them in you're sent to the next quest hub. The back and forth of the previous example would have been eliminated, either by a form of phasing that would cause the two brothers to be together at Duillond (Wildstar or post-Cata WoW), or a Story Zone instance (SWTOR).
The quirks of questing aside, LOTRO still holds up well. World Chat was lively yet thankfully free from the sewer level of filth and trolling found in WoW's Trade Chat. My oldest was a bit annoyed at people feeding a few trolls, but to be honest those trolls were pretty mellow compared to those I've seen on most other MMOs.
Another part of the game that let you know you were in LOTRO was the competition for resources in the low level zones. While there are still instances of people ninja looting, I found people being respectful of others when they were fighting the baddies next to a quest object they were looking for. I suspect that the (relatively) quick respawn times helped alleviate that issue***, but still that speaks to the average LOTRO player that they weren't acting like jerks simply because they could.
***
These low level experiences, grouping up with the mini-Reds who were excited to share their favorite MMO with me, have been fantastic. Unlike the times when we play SWTOR, you can tell that while they like that game, they really love this one.
I can't say there have been memorable "can you believe we did THAT?" moments, but just having them there, doing their thing, or tagging along and healing while I putzed along, was great.
I wonder if this is what it is like for family who use MMOs to keep in touch across the country; these are the same tools that people use for guilds, but when family is involved the feeling is quite different. Even though they're upstairs and I'm downstairs.
*One nice part of LOTRO is that they remain consistent with the world of LoTR itself. While a reader of The Silmarillion would almost expect them to say "The Undying Lands", the quest giver here says "The West" instead, which is how the Undying Lands were presented in LoTR.
**Yes, LOTRO has Stable Masters who operate like a taxi or a flightpath, but you still have to reach places in LOTRO on foot to unlock those Stable Master points, particularly on the within-zone Stable Master locations. Unless you knew they were there as I did, a new player could just as easily have missed them and ran all the way across Ered Luin to complete this questline.
***Thankfully, they weren't as quick as found in Age of Conan, where a player would never be able to clear an immediate area of enemies before they started respawning. You have no idea how annoying that is, knowing that you'll never be able to clear things out enough to take on a boss without having to worry about a bunch of regular enemies jumping you from behind. And in Age of Conan, two mobs can take out one toon at level without blinking.
I spent part of last night watching a documentary by the PBS show Frontline. If you've never watched a Frontline documentary, they're very much worth the time.* This particular time, however, the Frontline documentary was on daily fantasy sports. Called The Fantasy Sports Gamble, it talks about the explosion of daily fantasy sports into the popular consciousness, whether daily fantasy sports such as Draft Kings and Fanduel are gambling or "games of skill", and how "normal" online gambling subverts US law to cater to US players.
While I'm not exactly planning on playing any of those games**, I did note one almost throwaway comment toward the end of the episode. One of the people promoting a lesser known daily fantasy sports site was emphasizing the growth aspect of some of the "lesser" sports in the US, such as cricket and eSports.
That got me to wondering just how we truly know that eSports are legit.
My quick conclusion is we don't.
Unlike, say, other sports or "sporting activities", such as football (both varieties), basketball, auto racing, and even extreme sports, there's a physical gamespace that people have to compete in. While the space could be tampered with, that tampering affects all competitors equally. But with eSports, the gamespace is virtual, and controlled by a central system. That central system becomes more of a black box, where you have to assume everything is equal for both sides***.
But what if it isn't?
And, more importantly, how can you tell if it isn't?
You have to assume that the code compilation for eSport games didn't include any tweaks to the code designed to adversely favor a specific build at a specific time, but with growing amounts of money involved, you can bet that organized crime is trying to find a way to game the system in their favor.
I'm not talking about players being paid to throw matches, as can be found in this article from Den of Geek, but the employees at the company from being paid by organized crime to make very small code tweaks that will favor one style of play over another. Between two evenly matched teams, just a small tweak of a cooldown or a very slight manipulation of a crit size would be enough to influence the game. Or, to put it another way, if there was a code tweak in a Mario Kart Tourney that someone playing Rosalina would have a larger than normal chance of getting a lightning bolt or a Bullet Bill. It may not ensure victory, but it would certainly tilt the game in favor of someone who plays Rosalina.
And what organized crime would want is not exactly a sure thing, as that would cause speculation, but a decent chance at a sure thing.
***
If you follow auto racing, some leagues enforce more standards than others. Formula One racing is at the "let 'em play" end of the spectrum, while NASCAR is at the "rules lawyer" end. But that "rules lawyer" end of the spectrum means that NASCAR spends a lot of time measuring and testing the cars and other equipment of their participants to ensure there's no funny business going on.
The reason why I bring this up is obvious: without extensive testing, that black box is more mysterious than ever.
It's not as if gamblers will not stop sniffing around what they feel is a sure thing. The sheer chutzpah of some gambling sites to sponsor soccer teams (such as Stoke City having Bet365 as their primary sponsor the past few years) shows that other places around the world have a different view towards gambling than the US'. But still, as eSports will become more popular and more money flows in their direction, there will be more attempts to manipulate the system for profit.
It goes with the territory, I suppose, just as long as eSports doesn't have their own version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
"Yeah, I'm gonna play some 2x2s tonight. Wanna come?" From the movie Eight Men Out. From moviefone.com
*You can watch Frontline shows online for free, and they're definitely worth it. One of the best ones from last year, League of Denial, talks about the concussion epidemic in the NFL, and inspired the Will Smith film Concussion.
**Full disclosure: I have played Fantasy Football in "leagues" when I was in college and upwards of 10 years ago, but I've not played in years. I no longer even fill out a bracket for the Men's and Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament, because I tend to be lousy at picking who will win.
***Not counting individual build and toon differences; there's a reason why Blizz and other PvP-centric companies are constantly tweaking class and racial abilities to prevent the "new hotness" from cleaning up on the Arena or Battleground for too long.
According to this gameinformer post, Activision's weaker results in the previous quarter have resulted in some layoffs and reorganizaton.
My previous speculations that Activision Blizzard is going to focus more on mobile and eSports games seems to be coming true, but at the cost of Skylanders and Guitar Hero.
Whether or not Skylanders is superior to the competition, Disney has heavy hitters and name brands in its' Disney Infinity line*, and LEGO has both name brands** and... well... LEGO it it's LEGO Dimenions line. This is one of those times where Activision is going to take a hit.
This makes me wonder whether Skylanders might have done better if it had a tie-in with other Activision Blizzard properties, such as characters from WoW or Diablo. Of course, those characters alone would push Skylanders away from its current family friendly space, but it might have also brought in more profits.
Will this impact Blizzard's end of things? That is uncertain, but given the downturn of Activision Blizzard's profits, there will be likely greater outside push for improving next quarter's --and next year's-- numbers. Overwatch and WoW are going to be in the crosshairs as investors will demand to see improvements to A-B's bottom line, and if they don't get it, I'd expect for Activision Blizzard to start hearing calls for more reorganization and spinning off properties that are work intensive yet not as profitable as they could be. With a lack of subscriber numbers to go by --Activision Blizzard no longer publishes those, remember-- that might include WoW.
Not that Legion didn't have enough pressure on its release.
*Disney has pulled out the stops for Disney Infinity, with Star Wars, Marvel, Disney classic movies, and others.
**Not counting LEGO specific lines (like NinjaGo), there's DC Universe, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, and The Simpsons. At least; I'm sure I missed a few non-LEGO properties here and there.
Sure, I've played a bit of SWTOR and Jade Empire, but I've been both busy with work and making the first of what is sure to be many university visits.*
Our first campus visit was similar only in the sense that it
was ON a university campus. The temps were below freezing,
and it was only an hour or two after sunrise. I also managed to
embarrass myself by missing a step and falling down.
The oldest mini-Red was mortified. (from alamy.com.)
I did ask about internet connectivity --because it's important to be able to access your online gaming school work-- and it seems that for universities with lots of older dormitories, wifi has been a godsend. Not so sure about speeds, given than you've got potentially the entire student body using the same pipe at the same time, but at least there is internet.
***
There is a gaming angle to this, as on the ride back home the mini-Reds pestered me to create a character on their new LOTRO server, just so that we could hang out.
So I did.
Not surprisingly, I created another Elf Champion with the exact same name as my old main on LOTRO, because I can still do a Paladin-esque melee figher. Alas, the graphics for the buttons on the UI are still red and green and are as hard to read as ever.
It's kind of like this, only a lot fewer attacks (obviously), as I've only an L3 toon:
From lotro.com forums. A whole lot of red and green.
If you're red/green colorblind, this can be really bad.
Or, if you're just like me and have a hard time reading all the details, it can drive you nuts.
Still, the scenery is as beautiful as ever. Alas that the toon graphics don't match the scenery quite as well.
But for sheer immersion, LOTRO is hard to beat.
Now, to actually find the time to, you know, play the game. But with the mini-Reds around, I get the feeling time will magically appear...
*Where did the time go? Oh, right. Anyway, two years for mini-Red #1, then we go right into two years for mini-Red #2, and #3 is right after that. Six years of the college application process. Oh yay.
Origin has had another of those classic free games available that fell under the "yeah, I've kind of wanted to check this out" header: Jade Empire.
From origin.com. And yes, the freebie is Special Edition.
Thankfully, this 2005 release will run on modern widescreen monitors --even though the cutscenes are all 480i-- so it doesn't seem too out of date.
Yes, the old Bioware engine is a bit ancient compared to today's software, but the story is all there. And yes, it is a really good story.
(Well, duh. It's Bioware, right?)
After having played MMOs for so long, reacquainting myself with the "Save" feature was a bit of a shock. As well as dying on the second or third fight.*
Unlike its Bioware predecessors, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Jade Empire is made for the console controller first and the keyboard second. It has that Neverwinter design of using keys to move around and the mouse buttons to shoot, and after a couple of days my knuckles have begun aching. I think I'm going to have to break down and get a replacement XBox 360 wireless controller unit for the main PC, as the old one simply stopped working about 3-4 months ago.
Aside from those quirks, Jade Empire is shaping up to be a satisfying RPG.
I do wonder how Jade Empire would look if it were updated graphically to match the modern designs, however.
***
The reason why I bring up Jade Empire is that it's another property that makes me wonder how it'd work as an open world MMO.
Of the current AAA designs, the only one that has an explicit Wuxia connection of any sort is WoW's Pandaria expansion. I don't count Final Fantasy XIV, which is high fantasy (mixed with some steampunk), and I never played the Age of Conan expansion into Khitan. Other JRPG-influenced MMOs, such as Aion, don't cross into Wuxia territory.
There are some martial arts MMOs out there, such as Swordman and Age of Wushu, but neither command the level of interest that even SWTOR or LOTRO have. There was also 9Dragons, but it is shutting down in February 2016.
Still, it seems very odd that a genre that people are very familiar with, courtesy of Asian martial arts movies, the occasional breakout film**, and the numerous martial arts fighting video games, is underrepresented in MMO space.
***
One last non-related note:
Apparently Splatoon's Squid Sisters, Callie and Marie, have been branching out beyond providing the "news" when you login to Splatoon. To wit: they held their own Vocaloid concert recently, and there is a YouTube video of the event.
No, really. Apparently these Vocaloid concerts are a thing in Japan.
*I also reacquainted myself with some more esoteric language in my vocabulary.
**Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or even the Kung Fu Panda trilogy.
I've learned to not become that emotionally invested in RPG characters the hard way.
You know, by having your heart (metaphorically) ripped out and stomped on by events beyond your control.
My old WoW Mage, Nevelanthana, got her name from a D&D character I played in my current D&D 3.0 campaign. She was a bookish type, a scholar who didn't suffer fools, and for a while our only spellcaster. But she'd met her end when a group of harpies ambushed our group, mind controlled another player, and he attacked Neve. The player proceeded to roll three 20's in a row, resulting in instant death by decapitation.*
After finally getting a Wizard for our campaign, she was effectively one-shot.
While I couldn't control that game**, I allowed Neve to live on as a Sindorei Mage in WoW.
While not exactly how I imagined her, this old screenshot
of Nevelanthana does picture her in her element:
a professor's living quarters, books and scrolls included.
She got to max level in the Cataclysm expansion as a Frost Mage, and in my own mind I envisioned her as the younger sister to Quintalan, my first character I leveled with back in Wrath.
As this was an MMO, Neve died numerous times while leveling, and with MMOs you just learn to accept character death as part of the game. Sure, games such as Baldur's Gate or Jade Empire have a "you die the game is over" situation, but there's always the save file to recover from. The game is just that, a game and not a novel, and I've learned through countless slogs that you can't become that emotionally invested in your main character.
So I was shocked when I found myself becoming invested in the latest SWTOR expansion, Knights of the Fallen Empire.
I'm not going to reveal any spoilers, and there are a few surprises in the main storyline, but for me, seeing this for the first time in a cutscene got me surprisingly emotional:
Chewie, we're home.
My comment above pretty much sums it up: We're home.
The starship provided a true first home to you, and reaching the end of the first wave of KotFE Chapters and getting your starship back was such an incredible feeling. You may have lost everything else, but getting back your old starship gives you a grounding that you never knew you needed.
I don't know where the supporting cast found it, and right now I don't care. My starship is back, and I can breathe once more.
Who knew that I could learn to love again?
*I still can't believe he rolled like that, but what really got my goat was that he then proceeded to giggle insanely, while the rest of us were just stunned. This particular player doesn't play in our game group anymore, and I can't say I'm sorry to see him go. To this day, I still think he was just looking to sow chaos and to want to "do" as many female NPCs as he could find.
**This being D&D, after a few years of her being a ghost and doing whatever it is that ghosts do, she was recently given a new lease on life by the rest of the party, who had to travel into (effectively) the Underworld to barter with a Priest of the Dead to bring her back.
EtA: Edited the second last line to avoid saying "again" at the end of two sentences in a row. Things like that irk me.
Last evening, I finally decided to take my Inquisitor into the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion for SWTOR.
For just an hour or two, you know.
High Justice Vaylin from the Knights of the Fallen Empire.
Free hint: do NOT mess with her. (From swtornetwork.com.)
After playing for what seemed just a little bit of time, I looked up and realized it was 5 AM.
Um, oops.
And the worst part? I wasn't even tired.
***
The expac itself? Good. Really really good.
They cover the "how on earth you end up in 5 years in the future" fairly well, and that led to a classic Star Wars-esque getaway. Even then, the first several chapters felt like they flew by.
I'm not going to review the expac, because I don't want to keep saying "I can't talk about this because of spoilers!" But I will say that the pacing is great, and the gameplay + story sucks you right in.
As I've remarked before, I've a great tendency to play light side characters. However, due to the events in the first chapter, I've got more balanced in my outlook. Even so, I expect that over time I'll likely skew light side anyway, but the events in that first chapter were too fresh in my mind for me to not go dark on a couple of occasions.
It was kind of odd, however, seeing companions from other classes showing up in my Inquisitor's story. Yes, I'm fully aware how the story works in KotFE, but there's a huge difference between knowing that it happens and actually seeing it happen.
I'd read this warning several times over the past few months, and hesitated. I'm glad I went back and tinkered around a bit, but I shouldn't have been so worried. (From pixelkaffe.com.)
Until I played SWTOR, my experience with Bioware has been limited to Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Neverwinter Nights. There's plenty of story in those D&D games, but not unlike an MMO the mechanics can drag out the story somewhat. With the KotFE expansion, however, the story moves at what I like to say "the speed of plot", disengaging from the game mechanics and instead emphasizing the story itself. That doesn't mean that the story supplants game mechanics entirely, since you still need to fight, choose your companions, and make decisions, but Bioware really decided to de-emphasize the standard MMO mechanics to tell the story the way that they felt it should be played.
I still love the original game for SWTOR, especially the class stories, but I find myself really falling in love with this expac.
Oh, and for those people who whined that "there's nothing to do" after they blow through the first six chapters or so, go chill somewhere. Yeah, I get that you want the story to keep going, but it's not like you don't have instances to run, ops to run, dailies to do, and all sorts of other things to tinker with once you've caught up to where the story is current.
Me, I'm happy that the expac turned out better than I hoped it would.
Maybe I ought to try the Dragon's Age games after all. Or Mass Effect.
I'm sitting at my work laptop*, listening to the Star Wars d20 group that my oldest is DM for*, while they contemplate their latest mercenary conquest.
Yes, a gaming group of about 8-10 teenagers is overwhelming the size of our kitchen table, playing pencil and paper RPGs. They are playing as (effectively) mercs in a Star Wars campaign set in The Old Republic (SWTOR Era).
It's been a long time since I gamed in a teenage group, and hoo boy, are they boisterous.
I may a be an old fuddy duddy compared to that bunch, but I'm glad they're having a blast.
*Mainly because I died in Wildstar, and I have to wait a while to be able to rez in place. And I really really REALLY don't want to have to walk all the way back to take on Vorion the Corruptor.
...just a good legal team and a willingness to smack the patent troll around.
Word came out late yesterday that a patent troll company, RecogniCorp LLC, lost in it's attempt to sue Nintendo for how the data for their Mii's are stored.
The judge threw the patent itself out, saying that the patent the company tried to sue Nintendo over --a patent on how police sketch artist data is stored-- an attempt to monopolize mathematical operations.
Why do I call this company a patent troll? Well, for starters, the company Virtual Gaming Technologies was founded in September 2015, and practically the first thing the company did was to file lawsuits in patent litigation friendly East Texas.
I'm all for a patent holder to defend their rights to their patents, but come on. It's not like fantasy sports haven't been using this tech for a while, and the fact that the company was created expressly for the purpose of suing the big names in the video game industry implies that they really haven't much of a leg to stand on.
To that end, I'll let John Oliver do the talking on my opinion of these patent trolls:
As I've gotten older and begun turning more into Greybeard than Redbeard, I've found that I've had a harder time reading the red link text on a black background. Therefore, I'm making some tweaks to the blog layout.
Nothing really drastic (yet), but if you check out the site over the next few weeks and see things a bit different, no it's not your browser going haywire.
You know, I wonder just how many of the people of the so-called Alliance to Preserve the Expanded Universe actually intersect in a Venn Diagram of GamerGate people....
Hmm.... Maybe "love" is not a strong enough word; more like "addicted to Mario Kart 8".
Some people, when they get off work, will come home and have a drink. Others will turn on the news. Still others will watch a game*, catch up on social media, or curl up in a corner and take a nap.
My wife comes home and plays Mario Kart for stress relief.
This is actually fairly close to the setup that I use when playing as Rosalina. From gameasylum.com.
I now have a hard time remembering when she hadn't played Mario Kart online, and when I was ever concerned about how well she'd handle it. Those days are long past; she now has gotten to the point that she recognizes different online players by their names, and surely with a name like "Mom" she's recognizable too.
Due to her love of Mario Kart, I've often wondered whether she'd go for any other online games --yes, MMOs too-- but I'm realistic in that Mario Kart is pretty easy to handle. I think that some games, such as the LEGO games, she'd find interesting, but I've yet to discover a video game she loves as much as Mario Kart.
The reason why I bring this up is because I've been tossing around this idea in my head about gamers, and whether they fall into one of two major groups: those who tend to play a few games all the time, and those who like to try out lots of different games. The border area between the two groups is a bit hazy, but the overall grouping is what I'm looking at. I'll break the two groups down, so you get a feel for where I'm coming from.
***
The Tried and True
When I think of the gamer who sticks to a few games, I think of my dad. Okay, he's not a gamer, but if you get him interested in playing something, he'll pull out the chessboard.
And that's pretty much it.
We've tried to interest him in different games, even simpler strategy games than chess**, but he always returns to the chessboard.
Play chess in the morning, defeat an alien invasion force in the evening. From the movie Independence Day.
My wife is cut from a similar mold: she plays Mario Kart 8, she plays Settlers of Catan and a few other board games, and that's about it. We get new games every so often, but the learning process with her can be pretty painful; she frequently gets frustrated by my and our friends' explanations on how to play a new game, and she'll just say "let's just play it and we'll figure it out!" And you can imagine just how THAT ends up...
The youngest mini-Red seems to have a knack to explain new games to her mom, but even then my wife prefers to stick to a few regular games without much deviation.
***
On the other side of the aisle are those that play a lot of different games.
Like the mini-Reds.
They play a lot --and I do mean a lot-- of games. While they don't have the money or resources to amass thousands of games like some collectors do***, they do play a lot of a different variety of games. From Star Wars d20 to Pathfinder to Savage Worlds to Magic: The Gathering to LEGO The Hobbit to LOTRO to Hyrule Warriors, they do get around.
There, but for the love of God (and a lack of money), go I. From a pic of Game Haus Cafe.
They've got a bit of me in them, as I would prefer to try a lot more games than I currently can play. I do have a few stalwarts, but if I'd my choice I'd like to play more games out of my collection.
But a multi-thousand collector of games? No, not me. I may collect games, but not anything close to that many. I'll occasionally get a "we should prune these games" request from my wife, but once I move some titles around to make them fit.... Well... It works out.
***
If there's one true weakness I have, it's for a well written splatbook.
What's a splatbook? It's an RPG book that's not really part of the core ruleset. You'll find them as extras or additions to the current rules, setting books, or extra gear/equipment/races/vehicles/mounts for a game.
For the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars ruleset. Rules, gear, specializations, and starships for those who want to channel their inner Han Solo. From fantasyflightgames.com.
Remember Baldur's Gate? Yep, the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms lives on in D&D 5th Edition. From enworld.org.
Some are even books about how to play a particular RPG, basically taking the core rules and breaking them down into bite sized chunks.
Yes, Pathfinder has so many splatbooks that they created one so that you can figure out how to play the character you want to play. From paizo.com.
I've been known to collect adventure modules, which are premade adventures that you can either run as-is or drop into an ongoing campaign. For the GM who is busy in real life, modules are a godsend.
Ah, my old friend. In my first time playing this module, our party died due to a massive avalanche. Really brilliant, I know. From Wikipedia.
Still, my love of splatbooks probably stems from my love of add-ons to SF&F series/universes. Items such as the Atlas of Middle-earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad, or the Star Trek Technical Manual (original series) brought these settings to life in a way that I hadn't considered before. You can find manuals on how to speak Quenya or Sindarin (two Elvish languages that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth), a "Haynes Guide" to the Millenium Falcon, or an Atlas of Pern.
This was what my copy looked like. From memory-beta.wikia.com.
A lot of these books grew out of fans' desire for them, and publishers and other assorted third parties were more than happy to satisfy the demand. Today, this sort of book seems quaint, but I still love it.
***
Still, I find that I do have some things in common with my brethren who love to play only a few games. We both play games, and we enjoy what we're doing. I may never quite understand why they need to stick with only a few games year in and year out, but I can appreciate the fact that they do love playing games.
Even if it means I know that a blue shell is headed in my direction.
*Particularly during college basketball season; there's always a game on that's interesting.
**We've tried Risk, Rail Baron, Facts in Five, Waterworks, etc. but to no avail. And no, I'm not trying Diplomacy on him; I would kind of like to remain on speaking terms with him.
***Don't believe me? Check out some of the comments on this list from BoardGameGeek.
The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, and I am still alive.
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised about that.
But for a change, there were no political "discussions" during the family get togethers*, so there was little chance that the gathering was going to turn into a shouting match. Not zero, mind you, but a lot less than the average Thanksgiving holiday.
Since my spouse works in retail, she had a very very busy Thanksgiving weekend. And as a consequence, I did as well; I shuttled her back and forth from her employer, so she didn't have to try to find a parking spot or worry about falling asleep driving to or from work.
However, this being our household, there were MMO related activities as well.
***
The Mini-Reds began their server transfer after one last concert in Bree, where the band and others gathered agreed to transfer over to the Gladden server. If the Mini-Reds ever thought that their attendance at the concerts went unnoticed, they were hailed by people when they made it over to Gladden.
My son had a silly grin on his face when he related the story to me, and I couldn't help but smile in return.
Things like this little acknowledgment show some of the best that MMOs have to offer.
***
I advanced a bit further into Wildstar, and continue to be impressed with the game and the stories. I've found that I can put the Texas aspect of the game almost completely in the rear view mirror, but there are times when I just wish that the game would tone it down a bit.
And as far as SWTOR is concerned, I've decided I'm going to make the jump into the coffee expac over the upcoming Christmas holidays. I'll have some time off, so if I do something stupid and stay up until 4 AM playing the game I won't pay the price at work the next day.
Until then, however, I'm going to noodle around Wildstar when I can, and I think I'm going to see if I can push a bit farther into the slog that mid-50s Age of Conan is right now. I've not really touched the game much over the past few months, and I have that old itch that needs scratching.
I've found myself strangely reluctant to make that leap and take a character into the new SWTOR expac.
Whenever I get on the servers, I putter around with checking out the companion stories I never completed, goof off in the fleet, and buzz around Taris and Hoth.
I can't really explain it, since there's no good reason why I couldn't take my Inquisitor into Knights of the Fallen Empire; she'd completed all of the questlines up through Shadow of Revan, and I wasn't doing much of anything with her.*
The auto-leveling that goes on now in the low level zones means that while I can go there, I can't just zoom on by like before. And yes, I do approve of the auto-leveling for low level zones, but I will have to pay more attention when clowning around in Tatooine, for example.
It could be my concern that keeps me from reading novels these days: I won't know when to quit. I have that problem when reading a good book; I'll be reading in the evening, and I'll finally start to get tired, look around and.... It's 4:30 AM.
Whoops.
I could see myself doing that with Knights (and Dragon Age, if I'm being honest). After all, I did it with regular class stories in SWTOR, the WoW leveling experiece, and in other games (such as Age of Conan or Star Trek Online). Hell, I've done it with Civ IV, and that doesn't exactly have an externally defined story at all.
My problem is that I'm no longer a spring chicken, and being up most of the night, consumed in a book or game, will take a much harder toll on me now.
***
While I dither about SWTOR, I've continued to play Wildstar.
I've finally grown to a kind of mental truce about the post-apocalyptic cartoon sexy style that is the toon character design. Part of that is because the questlines and the overarching story don't make a mention of the semi-skimpy nature of the toon and clothing designs, and part of it is because I've actually grown fond of the absolutely goofy design. Right now, my Stalker's headgear makes him look like The Tick's weird younger brother, and so I have this running commentary in my head when he's jumping around: "SPOOOOOON!!!!!"
As far as the World Story goes, hmm..... I'm up past the third World Story part, and I will freely admit that I wasn't expecting Wildstar's world story to move in the direction it did. It now seems more conventional than at first glance**, but right now it wouldn't shock me if the story took another sharp turn towards the unknown. I do like what I see so far, and I'm still hooked, but I'm still on the fence as far as the story goes.***
***
And to nobody's surprise, I've not progressed much at all in NaNoWriMo, and the youngest Mini-Red has already far outstripped my word output.
One of these years I'm going to get into a situation where I can take a couple of days off in early/mid November and spend it just writing.
Okay, who am I kidding? That's not gonna happen.
*I don't even do anything with housing with her, because a) I haven't bothered getting a place on Dromund Kaas and b) I tend to be a lousy decorator. I know beauty when I see it, but actually creating a beautiful environment? Well, I don't have that touch.
**If you play WoW, think of some of the things associated with Twilight's Hammer and a lot of the Old Gods type of stuff and you've got the idea.
***See? I could talk about something like this without spoilers!
I've caught up a bit on the news out of BlizzCon, and it seems that Blizz has made a couple of announcements:
Legion, the new WoW expac, will drop in "Summer 2016". The placeholder is "on or before September 21, 2016".*
Activision Blizzard will no longer release subscriber numbers as part of financial quarterly statements.**
The former isn't exactly a surprise to me. For all their talk about speeding up releases, Blizzard remains incapable of pushing the release cycle beyond the (roughly) 2 year mark. And this was even when Blizz decided to not wait until BlizzCon and release the name of the new expac at Gamescom. Blizz also stopped major content patches for Warlords significantly earlier than in prior expacs, with the unspoken promise of a quicker release cycle for the next expac.
As for the latter, I'm not surprised. At all.
WoW's subscriber numbers were stable from June 2015 (5.6 million) to September 2015 (5.5 million), but Blizzard's announcement of Legion came in August. Speculation ran rampant on various message boards that Blizz was going to release significantly earlier than they had in previous expacs --maybe even as soon as BlizzCon itself-- and I'm sure that kept people subscribed through the latest quarterly ending.
But with Legion's release sometime in Summer (people will hope for June, but will likely see an August or September release), you can expect subs to plummet.
The subscriber number problem has become an albatross for Activision Blizzard, so they are now attempting to jettison it entirely.*** The thing is, Activision Blizzard loved to trumpet their WoW subscriber numbers when it was a positive, so its absence will be interpreted by analysts as a potentially major problem facing the studio. The corporate finance people can talk all they want about better metrics for the health of the game, but they set the standard for years by talking about subscriber numbers, and you can't simply sweep that under the rug.
That said, a reduction in subscriber numbers is going to have an impact on development of the game. WoW has long been a cash cow for Blizzard, and a reduction in that cash flow means that they've got tighter financial constraints on future projects.
***
What does this mean long term?
Blizzard is likely to depend more on Overwatch, Hearthstone, and HotS to provide income where WoW is no longer able to. I believe it a very shrewd business decision that Activision Blizzard is opening it's own television/movie studio, and its first project is the wildly popular Skylanders property. Not WoW, not StarCraft, not Diablo, but Skylanders.
That's where the money is these days, and Activision Blizzard is chasing that money.****
Oh, and one more thing: without subscriber numbers, Blizzard is now free to experiment with F2P models in WoW. Sure, they've always said they'll never go F2P, but with the cash shop and the WoW Token they've currently sidled up right to that F2P line. If Bobby Kotick says "go F2P since I can't justify the staff for WoW", WoW will go F2P.
*There's a very interesting discussion on this over at Blizzard Watch as the Breakfast Topic.
**Word of this came out a few days before BlizzCon itself. Here's the eurogamer.net article on this.
***I'm deliberately saying Activision Blizzard versus Blizzard, because this is more a corporate business decision, not one made in the development house itself.
****Money is in mobile games too, and the purchase of King Digital is expected to bolster that area.
