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Oh, but Blizzard's own forum moderators won't have THEIR names revealed, because they "cannot risk having their personal lives compromised by in-game issues".

Aren't they listed as staff somewhere on the site?

If a guy named Swordslasher is tagged as "Game Community Manager" and their corporate site lists "Jim Smith" as the Game Community Manager...

Oh, but Blizzard's own forum moderators won't have THEIR names revealed, because they "cannot risk having their personal lives compromised by in-game issues". But they have no problem selling out their own customers.

Wrong.

Yeah... and Facebook recently inked a big money deal with Activision-Blizzard, and now the latter has pushed out RealID into WoW, and they just announced that for SC2, and in a few months also for WoW, all forum posts in the official forums are going to have players' real names (first and last name) attached to them. That thread has over 35,000 posts in it already in it from irate WoW players, many of them (including myself) have already cancelled their accounts.

Oh, but Blizzard's own forum moderators won't have THEIR names revealed, because they "cannot risk having their personal lives compromised by in-game issues". But they have no problem selling out their own customers.

Its been a long time since I saw such a dickwad move by an MMO company. This rivals Star Wars Galaxies NGE in terms of betrayal of the player-base by Blizzard.

Blizzard has caved to plenty of warrants Here's an article from www.wow.com that explains at least 4 separate occasions that Blizzard has either volunteered legal information or bowed to warrants and supplied information to the authorities.

Saying that you can run WoW locally is like saying Ubisoft games don't have DRM because you can get on the Options screen without being connected to their servers. It's irrelevant.

The point is, the client is dependent on a server to play, and since Blizzard will sue competing servers, the client is dependent on their server.

The end result is the same as with DRM.

Patch 3.3 comes out Tuesday.

http://www.wow.com/2009/07/06/visually-impaired-players-the-unseen-inhabitants-of-azeroth/

The biggest problem for me personally is raiding. Picture this, if you will, we're mid-raid (10 is bad, 25 a nightmare) and someone dies. My raid leader pipes up: 'Combat rez on xxx now!' As the Druid, this means me and it's time to panic. Somewhere in the mass of moving targets, dead trash mobs and my valiant guild mates is a corpse. I've got to find and rez that corpse now and I have no idea where to find them. I usually yell for the raid leader to mark said fallen soul but it doesn't always happen. Welcome to my nightmare.

Guild Leveling, Mentoring, "Alternate XP"... have all been in EQ2 for a long time. WAR has guild levels, and I'm sure there are others that I don't know of.

I like WoW, I raided into the dust before WotLK. I am glad Blizzard is implementing these features, but the blogs and reporting I've seen on the new features make it seem like the WoW team is charting unknown territory, which is frankly untrue. I really don't see anything in the current announcements that aren't in some other MMO, with 2 exceptions: Cross-Server instancing (which is semi-present in other MMO's, namely DDO and GW, in that they really only have 1 server, and different in-town instances), and 'Phasing'.

Phasing is actually pretty awesome, and much needed in the MMO world. It really makes it seem as though your actions really are effecting the world, or, at the very least, it's not some static, unchanging landscape.

There are also indications that early design work included some of the islands in this area,

It's true that a couple of islands appear on the map near the vortex. I heard a rumor about them once indicating that they were at one point accessible to players. Swimming there wasn't possible due to the fatigue that resulted from the deep water. However, if you had a couple stacks of elixirs of water walking, you wouldn't be affected by the fatigue since you weren't swimming. According to the one player I knew who had claimed to have been there, it took about 45 minutes of wandering around with nothing but waves in sight. Once he got to the island, he looted a chest that contained a full tier set of paladin gear. 20 minutes later his account had received a 72 hour ban, and all his recent loot had been removed from his inventory. His theory was that the island was a place where GMs could perform in-game testing of items and whatnot. Obviously this is all unconfirmed at best. and I still have some serious doubts about the story, but anyway, that's the only thing I've ever heard about the islands.

And just so that this post isn't entirely off topic, here's a link to some of the current speculation on the lore which will be experienced with the expansion. As an added note, it's doubtful that this will be the final expansion of the game. Most are speculating that there will be a 5th chapter in which players will get to enter the emerald dream. Again, this is all just rumors and lies at this point.