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Personally, I find the PS environment a mixed bag. Some deviate too far from retail while those that try to keep it close still mess up in some manner and are run by totally inflexible people unwilling to acknowledge their design mistakes.

"Look, maybe I didn't say every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah." Also, the developers of EverQuest have their own take on it: http://everquest.allakhazam.co... Check the prompt just before receiving a tattered cloth note.

MMO prices haven't gone up in two decades

1999: $9,89 (Source: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/history/patches-1999.html)
2010: $14,99 (Source: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/general.html)

Both of those numbers pretty much represent standard mmorpg pricing at their respective times. The Urban Consumer Price Index (CPI-U which was the first one I found figures for) gives inflation between 1999 and 2010 as 32%, so the price increase is not too different from average inflation.

They've never said 100 is the max level. That statement is GENERALLY attributed to the fake "expansion list" that people keep linking to. Here's the original source for that list:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=21;mid=119012268058738816

It's fake. The 1st expansion, Burning Crusade went live in January 2007 -- but Wrath of the Lich King was announced (INCLUDING zone information) in August of that year. By September, all of that info was everywhere, including approximate level of the zones, preliminary notes about possible raid zones, etc. Basically, the list used readily available data based on RPG sourcebook material, in-game quests, and instruction manuals for previous Warcraft games.

Further, even if the list was legitimate: It makes no sense why a multi-billion dollar company would continue to base its video game's success or failure on a sole wordpad document transformed into a PDF.

.then make excuses a mile a minute for EQ.

What excuses?

EQ1 was punishing, then got tedious, than got complex. All are valid definitions of 'hard' at least to some people.

As the guy said, for some raid bosses, if one person make a mistake, it will screw it up for everyone.

Same has always been true of EQ. Although, yeah, during the tedious period, most of the raiders just needed to wait until they were told to attack. Nowadays, its similiar to WoW in that players must be actively paying attention the whole fight, and anyone may be called upon to perform the 'correct' action at a given time.

So what are fights like in EQ? I am just curious how far it has come from the game I played many many years ago.

I'd say they aren't quite as scripted as WoW. But they are still as complex, usually involving several phases, and lots of attention paying...

Here is an "old raid" from gates of discord:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4479

Getting complete walkthrus of the new stuff is hard. But suffice it to say that its easily as complicated as what you've described.

For the record, I Played EQ1 until Dragons of Norrath, played WoW until fairly recently, and am now playing EQ2. I enjoyed WoW but found it easy by comparison to EQ1. The WoW raids are elaborate, but I don't find them difficult.

I think that is the key...the fights aren't just hard, they are actually interesting.

Yeah, I think EQ1 'evolved'. It started out hard by being painful. It evolved to being hard by being tedious. And from there it evolved to being hard by being elaborate. But it was always 'hard'. I find the EQ raids are still more trial and error; and have more room for ingenuity than WoW raids. WoW raids seem to be much more tightly scripted. EQ raids are scripted, but they have more dynamics to them, and you can figure it out and manipulate it your advantage. With WoW, its always felt that you either you do it exactly Blizzard's way or you don't do it.

Well, Raph Koster defines "fun" and "automatically" as the same thing, since in Star Wars Galaxies he designed in support for AFK macroing your way right up to the end "game".

In World of Warcraft, here is his head I got as a trophy.

Maybe I can sell it on the AH to McCainiacs and disappointed Hillary backers. Bwah!

(serious note: If he gets elected, I wonder if WoW will change that NPC name? It is rather bizarre to be told to go kill Barak then go around with his head as a trophy to be turned in for a bounty).

Searching on Google for red crystal[1] comes up with a World of Warcraft quest as the first result. The Red Cross is the second result found.

I just found that amusing. That and I think the "red crystal" symbol is both a horrible name and somewhat ugly. (It's essentially a red square tilted 45 degrees.)

[1] Originally I wrote "Googling for red crystal" but seeing as this is a story about a trademark dispute, I decided to be kind a respect Google's trademark.

Since made an MMO and slapped the final fantasy label on it. That how they get away with such shoddy customer service.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=29;mid=1196749616251566928;num=16;page=1

Accounts are being stolen. Square-Enix won't assist with any retrieval, because "well what if you sold the account?" Terms of service say you can't sell the account. SE's ownership verification requires the billing info and password which the thief just changed, even though yes the phone rep can see that those were JUST changed and yes the card number I gave was the one paying for the last 5 years.

Takes a credit card company's fraud investigation to move them. They basically choose between saying the account isn't mine and giving back all those months/years of fees or giving me back my now totally stripped account, all because I'd never heard of "noscrip" for a browser I don't use.

No
account
recover
options
at
all

A rusted informational site gets hacked and a hidden iframe element with malicious code injected, and they won't even roll the character back which they CAN physically do they have before.

I find it amusing how the news of this exploit targeting WoW and FFXI users is over a week old now but /. won't give it a mention because the links all contain references to FFXI the black sheep of MMORPG's and/or alla the black sheep of rating systems. Good priorities...

It is!
http://wow.allakhazam.com/mediabox/MassSuicide.jpg

http://www.mycharacterspace.com/ http://www.gamerpics.com/ http://www.warcraftsocial.com/ and there are plenty of sites that can gather your character info as well. http://wow.allakhazam.com/ http://www.thottbot.com/ http://ctprofiles.net/ http://www.wowguru.com/db/profiles/ http://www.wowrankings.com/ theres more out there.

1. Stops popups automaticallyusing Fx 2.0/XP Pro SP2 - that's not the case, not all popups at least. Try http://wow.allakhazam.com/ for examples (and that's not the only site)

No, clearly it's made of wootz ore!

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/images/items/wootz.jpg

Slate is running article lamenting the fact that, despite World of Warcraft's popularity, it is a deeply flawed game.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the game is deeply flawed... but there are certainly better MMORPGs out there. Why, then, is this game doing so well? I think it has to do with a few things - timing, name recognition, and balance. WoW came out and was relatively unchallenged... The only other major MMO at the time (that I can think of, I'm sure there were others) was Final Fantasy XI, which was suffering a bit from Real-Money Trade and people getting tired of the amount of grinding required to actually get anywhere. Grinding has been slightly alleviated, but it doesn't matter, because WoW has developed a huge playerbase and its growth doesn't seem to be slowing down. So while I might feel that FFXI is a superior game, my claim doesn't matter too much when you look at the number of subscribers - FFXI's highest was roughly around 650,000 (it has now retreated back down to around 500,000), where WoW is 7.5 million and still growing.

Another thing that WoW has going for it is its name. WarCraft is disputably one of the most praised RTS series ever. I know when I heard about World of Warcraft, I was psyched, because I loved the previous WarCraft games.

WoW seems to have found that sweet spot where it's easy enough for casual gamers to keep playing, but it has enough content to keep hardcore players addicted. And the formula works - with my work and my classes keeping me busy,leaving only a few hours here and there to play, WoW doesn't leave me completely and utterly frustrated like FFXI does.

So what if WoW is flawed? Apparently 7.5 million people don't mind it too much.

Apologies to the hooked:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=23669

My casters are female, because honestly, men should not wear dresses. Robes. Whatever. Judge for yourself: Armor Sets. Play around with that page for a bit. Try viewing one of the caster sets with both male and female models. Sorry, the men look gay as hell. A male should not wear the Devout Skirt.

Conversely, my other characters are all males: warrior, paladin, rogue, etc. Either way I don't think it reflects on me as a person. Gender plays no meaningful role in game mechanics. All it does is change how your character looks. I don't have any deep psychological reason for playing female casters and male everything else. I just think men look stupid in dresses.

What server you play on? I got an epic'd out Rogue on Whisperwind named Raymer. I just got him this on Monday, YAY EPEEN! :P Had a white damage crit for 1100!

The ultrasafe transporter is in good condition but if you think it will never fail? Better don't wear that red shirt when using it !

This was posted on Wikipedia quite sometime ago as a rumor. I use them for a lot of my information (old and new).

In addition to Thottbot (quests) and Allakhazam (pricing and searching), a lot of the WoW Wikis out there provide for me a lot of my World of Warcraft information.

It seems they're introducing more "middle styled" races that are akin to the otherside. Perhaps they're planning to allow draenei to be warlock and blood elves to be palladins? This is all speculation but I know that I, for one, am very much looking forward to this expansion.

The Breakdown In Communications quest in EQ Gates Of Discord was and remains the best quest ever.

It is certainly the most convoluted, complicated, frustrating and nearly impossible quest ever to be introduced within a game. It consists of 14 subquests in all of the zones of an EQ expansion with complicated and difficult requirements just to even enter each zone - some zones can be entered with group work, some require extreme raiding (54 person raids). Once you get into each of these zones, you generally need to obtain multiple items and flags through excessive grouping and raiding efforts (raids needing anywhere from 18 to 54 people).

This quest is so complicated it's difficult to pin an actual amount of time required to complete it, but I would say it would require a typical (if you can call those who complete it typical) player a year or two of *daily* grouping and raiding to complete.

If you want to read up on it, read about it here:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?ques t=2781

For an alternative writeup see:
http://robbiem01.tripod.com/everquest/Breakdown.ht ml

Aid Grimmel was probably my favorite. Had to spend AA's to unlock all your tradeskills, then get them all past 220 and complete a series of 7 quests to get this Signet of Might... a very long and involved quest but well thought out.

EQ was my baby for about 4 years as well. Till my wife got pregnant then I knew I had to give it up.

Aid Grimmel was probably my favorite. Had to spend AA's to unlock all your tradeskills, then get them all past 220 and complete a series of 7 quests to get this Signet of Might... a very long and involved quest but well thought out.

EQ was my baby for about 4 years as well. Till my wife got pregnant then I knew I had to give it up.

As a 4-year EQ player that was a story and quest nut, I found most of the "talk, kill, loot, give" quests to be downright boring. O_o

There's one quest though that stands out. It's an epic-length quest to return a legendary dragon's spirit to rest named The Spirit of Garzicor. Even with my feverish playing (over 110hr/wk) it took me over six months to complete and required large amounts of assistance, including a raid at the end. Of course this quest at the time wasn't well charted, which made it more fun for the questing players but quite a bit more challenging.

In the end though, looking back on four years of EQ and the timesink questing process made me pretty depressed. I realized that I had sunk more of my time into EQ quests than pretty much any other hobby in my life in a mere matter of 4 years. That's part of the MMO experience though - time == reward! Quests just make that time less mundane. :)

I was one of the lucky thousand or so attendees there. It was pretty exhilerating seeing the future plans for this game. I uploaded all my pictures in a zipped file to my FileFront account:
http://files.filefront.com/Fan_Festival_Pictureszi p/;4887263;;/fileinfo.html

You can also browse some pictures uploaded to my xs.to account:
http://xs.to/albums/114206161816073712224927.html

Finally, I have a commentary I was updating semi-live on Allakhazam:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1141871674105963075;num=524;page=1

Turn off your /shout chat filters in Lower Jeuno. At least on Ifrit, there's a ton of racism. It's getting a little out of hand. Everyone loves to blame these guys for wrecking the economy and what not, but really, it's still not that hard to get gil, just the uber items like a KClub or Speed Belt or Thief's Knife. It's certainly got my server's community up in arms, there's a thread over on the Allakhazam server boards that might be of some interest.

That being said, most of the people posting on that thread are incompetent fools.

With the way they treat most of their customers, $E should be greatfull they post any profit at all.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid =1135050905173279504

People have been threatened with bannings for using the email commenst and suggestions form to complain about a patch that didn't work. And fanboy idiots at the above link are claiming that calling the companies number which the company has listed as its contact for complaints is "harrasing" and "threatening" behavior.

And I was threatened with an account banning for posting my discontent. I laughed as I cancelled my account.

It just seems $quare-Enix doesn't want to deal with the customers at all..They don't want you calling them, they don't want you emailing them..They want you dealing with Sony just long enough for sony to tell you they can't do anything. Sony handles all US support under contract from SE - something many players have been contacting SE to complain about, as sony doesn't provide that support that they are supposed to -.- Japanese player who get to deal with japanese Square-Enix staffed support get good results, which leads many players to say SE has a bias to jP players. The truth is its not because they are japanese - it is because they don't deal with sony!

1UP.com interviewer: So it's mostly Square's show, then...[nervous laughter all around]...It's not to knock Sony's involvement -- we just found it interesting that either you have Square Enix running things, or even odder is you have two halves of Sony administering two different online games, since Sony Online has Everquest Online Adventures. Is it unusual at all for you to be working with a company that's sort of a competitor?

Yasu Kurosawa: Actually, Sony Online Entertainment is a good partner of ours. The handle the U.S. side as far as game masters and the call center, so we work together. They're highly professional on that end.

If you read up on what the patches $E has been making really do, its not hard to see FFXI going the way of SWG

In light of their very large mistakes, they should set their sight a little lower, like beating the crap out of $quare-nix's Final Fantasy XI Online instead.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=29;mid =1134736401209988735;num=0;page=1

Players of the Massivly Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game "Final Fantasy XI Online" are mad. So mad that some are ready to march to virtual war against the games development team. Plans are in motion to cause servers to crash (specific details with held by request).

While pretending to repair a problem in which one player could use a monster to kill another player in this non Player Vs Player (PvP) game, the developers decided to work the changes to instead prevent players from being able to play without relying on 5 to 17 other players to so much as spit. And players can still kill players in this non PvP game.

Before:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1131046103173984825;num=1157;page=1

After:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1131046103173984825;num=1157;page=23

Whats midly amusing is the players themselve suggested the change, along with heaps of other possable ways to fix the problem, and the developers chose the one method that would cause the maximum amount of frustration.

Players of the Massivly Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game "Final Fantasy XI Online" are mad. So mad that some are ready to march to virtual war against the games development team. Plans are in motion to cause servers to crash (specific details with held by request).

While pretending to repair a problem in which one player could use a monster to kill another player in this non Player Vs Player (PvP) game, the developers decided to work the changes to instead prevent players from being able to play without relying on 5 to 17 other players to so much as spit. And players can still kill players in this non PvP game.

Before:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1131046103173984825;num=1157;page=1

After:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1131046103173984825;num=1157;page=23

Whats midly amusing is the players themselve suggested the change, along with heaps of other possable ways to fix the problem, and the developers chose the one method that would cause the maximum amount of frustration.

Does Blizzard ever plan on adding some sort of on site Item Database like Thottbot/Allakhazam/WarCry

Thottbot would be one of the largest WoW third party sites out there, but being owned by a disreputable company like IGE can't be good for the community. Even endorsing one of the third party sites that isn't run by pedophiles might be a step forward. :)

Everquest emulation is such a stunning achievement in reverse engineering. I used to run an EQEmu server a couple years ago and being a GM on a server was the most empowering feeling I've ever felt in my life. Not many can say they've killed Kerafyrm one-on-one with pure melee and no GM invincibility!

To this day I owe my sanity to Everquest emulation because it effectively killed my Everquest addiction. Playing as a GM ruined my want to ever want to go back to measly old dictated EQ servers. :)

More servers will follow. Go to hell SOE. We're going to keep playing.

The ideal 3D resolution seems to be 512x512 at 800x600 2D resolution. I think the textures were designed at that resolution, because the geometry and textures seem to line up very well at those settings. I've got a 22" monitor that I usually run at 1600x1200 and I can tell you that FFXI does look best at 512x512. I've played it at 2048x1536... not a happy experience for the eyes.

Setting up MIP mapping at above-normal settings (like 4 or 5) in the registry and forcing anisotropic filtering in your display driver both help it look better. Also, sitting more than a foot away from your monitor helps immensely.

For more details... check out my old Allakhazam post on all the registry settings. AFAIK, I am the only one to have ever gone into that much detail.

I like how telling me to stop complaining is "+1 insightful."

Blizzard's game, to this point, has had *nothing* designed specifically to appeal to hard-core players, so why did that change with the honor system? That's *exactly* my point! If Blizzard changes their focus on the game, so that they are spending more time making hard-core players happy at the expense of casual players, then why should casual players keep playing?

The vast majority of the 1.4 patch was issues related to the honor system. Meanwhile, I keep finding quests that don't even *work!* If nothing else, Blizzard should be fixing the bugs before adding in new features, regardless of whether they want to cater to hard-core players or casual players.

It didn't take long for the FFXI community to blame it on the Chinese (despite the fact that the article says that US, Japanese, and European law enforcement were contacted, not Chinese).

Of course, the FFXI community is insanely racist against Chinese for some reason. They seem to view them as a plague on the game.

check out http://wow.allakhazam.com/ they have a history of WoW auctions, dynamically updated. Granted it isnt "in game" so it does give a leg up to those that want to do the research, but there are sources available.

Remember all those people bitching about people selling items online? Remember how the companies that make the game explicitly say they aren't real?

That's why they aren't real. Because the game companies don't want to be liable if they accidently delete your character. Or if they ban a player for no reason. Or if a player gets hacked and has virtual property destroyed.

So... they aren't considered real, and it's not considered a real crime. Even by the companies themselves. If you lose something in game, the game company won't do anything, and so the police can't really do anything, either.

But we can tolerate Curt Schilling too cause he's been a big Everquest fan.

Mentioned here.

Everquest interview

And FFXI is far more polished.

Let's pretend that's true. FFXI is almost three years old at this point. This May, in two months, FFXI will have its third birthday. Here, take a look at this post. That lists all the things that FFXI has changed since launch. It's had almost three years to polish. WoW has had almost four months.

I somehow expect that a three year old WoW will be far more polished than FFXI will be when it reachs the three year mark in May.

But, hey, if you enjoy killing crabs for hours on end, enjoy you FFXI. I won't stop you. But I won't even pretend to understand why you'd like FFXI better than WoW.

You don't remember the WEEK LONG outage FFXI had?

Ok, I actually looked at the article you linked to, and it looks like subscribers to a particular ISP had problems connecting to FFXI because the ISP closed off port 25. Hardly Square-Enix's fault.

That's why I linked to the benchmark.

Well, I guess that's just your problem, as I don't have any problems, nor does anybody else I know. Most people I know have remarked that the benchmark ran far worse than the actual game.

You can't, without completeing a quest at level 30. You can solo to level 10, before having to group. Hmm...

I know a RDM who soloed to 30. I know a DRG/WHM who got from 49 to 50 just yesterday in East Altepa. I myself soloed WHM up to 13, and they're one of the most party-dependant jobs in the game. Sorry, you're just wrong.

I'll clarify. The quests are all insanely boring to do, the best example is the required Utsusemi quest if you want to play as a Ninja.

The job you're referring to is done to increase fame in Norg. If you don't want to increase fame that way, do different quests. Most people do that one because you can buy huge amounts of Yagudo Necklaces from the Auction House, courtesy of newbies that don't need them.

Crystals suck.

Well, whatever floats your boat. I don't understand why needing a catalyst is so awful, it's just another crafting ingredient -- and crystals are only a notable expense at low levels, they're dirt-cheap compared to the ingredients for high level synths.

Crafting = farming. BCNM = forced grouping, and impossible if you don't play one of the Sacred Five Classes.

First, you're not making any sense there. Crafting is combining items and selling the results, farming is killing huge amounts of common monsters and selling what they drop. Second, just about any BCNM is possible with any combination if you actually take the time to think about a strategy; there are constantly threads on the Allakhazam message boards about how people accomplished BCNMs without the "standard" party. Beastmasters in particular seem to take pride in doing them with a group of nothing but BSTs. There are also some BCNMs that beastmasters and summoners have been able to do solo, despite being designed for parties.

A lot of your complaints seem to stem from the fact that partying is much more profitable than going solo in FFXI. Yes, that's true. It's a MMORPG, the point is to play with other people. There are options for soloing if you want, but I hardly think the game can be faulted for encouraging people to play together.

Camping = competeing with real-money sellers.

Dude, you're not making your point by linking to an article about how they're banning real-money sellers.

All in all, it's just a GIANT FUCKING WASTE OF TIME.

Isn't that all any game is? If you're not having fun, fine, go play something else, but don't pretend that World of Warcraft is somehow educational.

Pressing "Attack" repeatedly isn't difficulty. It's just boring.

Did you actually play the game, or are you just copying what people have told you? You only have to press "Attack" once to lock on to a target and attack it. And that's really all you have to do for low-level, cookie-cutter melee damage jobs. Try playing a ninja tank, white mage, beastmaster, or bard, and telling me those aren't difficult.

FFXI's end-game stuff sucks too.

Other than Dynamis and HNMs, there's also Promyvion (accessible at mid-game, but still gives benefits to end-game players), nation missions, and the Zilart & Promathia missions. Some people also like to master a particular craft and dominate the economy in that area. Or, since you're not locked into a particular job as you are with some games, you can level up another job, with all of the best equipment you can buy, thanks to having a hig

Please bug Square to release actual subscription statistics. No facts to use, I have to use informal polls instead, which suggest that FFXI is losing NA players but making up with them with EU players. As for the screwed up update thing, I'll just point you to any FFXI forum. Here, I'll even give you some starters.

All 65+ Bard united against SE, NOW!!! - Bard complains about SEVERE nerf to his job
The Food Nerf and what to do about it. - Food, one of the only ways around the insane equipment requirements, has been badly nerfed.
Nerfed Logging and minning - two ways many players used to earn money and gain items for crafting has been made basically useless.
SE DIDNT FIX ANYTHING - crash bug "fixed" (but not too well)
Rampant Inflation!? - response to SE's attempt to reduce inflation...

Oh, and then there's Further Details on Current Known Issues (Dec. 12) detailing how the update would require you to completely reinstall the PS2 version of the game.

Those facts suffice?

Please bug Square to release actual subscription statistics. No facts to use, I have to use informal polls instead, which suggest that FFXI is losing NA players but making up with them with EU players. As for the screwed up update thing, I'll just point you to any FFXI forum. Here, I'll even give you some starters.

All 65+ Bard united against SE, NOW!!! - Bard complains about SEVERE nerf to his job
The Food Nerf and what to do about it. - Food, one of the only ways around the insane equipment requirements, has been badly nerfed.
Nerfed Logging and minning - two ways many players used to earn money and gain items for crafting has been made basically useless.
SE DIDNT FIX ANYTHING - crash bug "fixed" (but not too well)
Rampant Inflation!? - response to SE's attempt to reduce inflation...

Oh, and then there's Further Details on Current Known Issues (Dec. 12) detailing how the update would require you to completely reinstall the PS2 version of the game.

Those facts suffice?

Please bug Square to release actual subscription statistics. No facts to use, I have to use informal polls instead, which suggest that FFXI is losing NA players but making up with them with EU players. As for the screwed up update thing, I'll just point you to any FFXI forum. Here, I'll even give you some starters.

All 65+ Bard united against SE, NOW!!! - Bard complains about SEVERE nerf to his job
The Food Nerf and what to do about it. - Food, one of the only ways around the insane equipment requirements, has been badly nerfed.
Nerfed Logging and minning - two ways many players used to earn money and gain items for crafting has been made basically useless.
SE DIDNT FIX ANYTHING - crash bug "fixed" (but not too well)
Rampant Inflation!? - response to SE's attempt to reduce inflation...

Oh, and then there's Further Details on Current Known Issues (Dec. 12) detailing how the update would require you to completely reinstall the PS2 version of the game.

Those facts suffice?

Please bug Square to release actual subscription statistics. No facts to use, I have to use informal polls instead, which suggest that FFXI is losing NA players but making up with them with EU players. As for the screwed up update thing, I'll just point you to any FFXI forum. Here, I'll even give you some starters.

All 65+ Bard united against SE, NOW!!! - Bard complains about SEVERE nerf to his job
The Food Nerf and what to do about it. - Food, one of the only ways around the insane equipment requirements, has been badly nerfed.
Nerfed Logging and minning - two ways many players used to earn money and gain items for crafting has been made basically useless.
SE DIDNT FIX ANYTHING - crash bug "fixed" (but not too well)
Rampant Inflation!? - response to SE's attempt to reduce inflation...

Oh, and then there's Further Details on Current Known Issues (Dec. 12) detailing how the update would require you to completely reinstall the PS2 version of the game.

Those facts suffice?

Please bug Square to release actual subscription statistics. No facts to use, I have to use informal polls instead, which suggest that FFXI is losing NA players but making up with them with EU players. As for the screwed up update thing, I'll just point you to any FFXI forum. Here, I'll even give you some starters.

All 65+ Bard united against SE, NOW!!! - Bard complains about SEVERE nerf to his job
The Food Nerf and what to do about it. - Food, one of the only ways around the insane equipment requirements, has been badly nerfed.
Nerfed Logging and minning - two ways many players used to earn money and gain items for crafting has been made basically useless.
SE DIDNT FIX ANYTHING - crash bug "fixed" (but not too well)
Rampant Inflation!? - response to SE's attempt to reduce inflation...

Oh, and then there's Further Details on Current Known Issues (Dec. 12) detailing how the update would require you to completely reinstall the PS2 version of the game.

Those facts suffice?

Interesting note, Blizzard removed timing features from the language to prevent automated tasks. CosmoUI had one feature as a work around, but asked to remove it.

Stops that auto farming sitting in a field, like the fishing bots did. I wish I knew how the fishing bots worked, as you had to click a moving icon.

There are also 2 other UI Mods that are popular CTMod and Gypsy Mod

The XML language has made it easy for people to upload thier characters to websites like Allakhazam and Thottbot. Very nice gaming resources for WOW.

Reminds me of the days Tribes scripting took off, made many people into full time programers. Glad to see it in newer games, actually promoted by the game developers.

Good job Blizzard.

If you are looking for information on World of Warcraft, we have pretty much everything about the game listed in great detail -- quests, items, mobs, spells, skills, talents, maps, etc.

http://wow.allakhazam.com

--Allakhazam

Coming Soon! Our EQ2 site should be up before the game launches.

In the meantime, feel free to chat on our EQ2 Forum.

Too late.

This would be great for a subnotebook PC, like the Toshiba Libretto.

It's good progress, but still not what I ideally want: a device that is completely a standard PC, but in the form factor of a Gameboy Advance SP! The GBA SP is an ideal design: it is small, and has a flip-up screen that is sturdy and locks into a convenient position. If small buttons were used to form a fully-functional keyboard, as on the BlackBerry, and a small touchpad nearby for the mouse, this would be wonderful to have! The PC would have decent 3D graphics for games compatibility, a micro hard drive similar to the iPod, and of course Wi-Fi and GPRS wireless data support.

Does any company want to merge this pocketful of present-day devices into a future dream machine that could do it all?

Obviously, GL has been crafting to build up his Chef skills!

There is a Yahoo! Group, the Allakhazam forum, SWG Warcry, the Stratics SWG board, and even the Lucasforums boards, among quite a few others. If you're thinking of learning more about the game, don't let Sony stiff-arm you, visit one of the other forums and start reading.