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Actually, Blow's been involved in the online gaming scene for over a decade.

Although WoW's success is certainly too complex of an issue to ascribe to one or two factors, replayability, and the entire "team" dynamic appear to be two of the most important. Leveling up comes far far after that.

Blow's first project is actually still alive over 10 years after its original release.

The positive moderation shows that most of us agree with this particular offense being a real offense and not an isolated case of annoying some random guy, though. :)
These guys are apparently having a contest to see who can spam links to their site the most(which is why he had a query string with his account id like a lot of spammers): http://www.wulfram.com/top_advertisers.php

http://www.wulfram.com?mkid=31257 - More surveillance? Isn't Big Brother watching us closely enough? I hope at least some European countries legislate against the storing of details like this.

http://www.wulfram.com?mkid=31257 - Sounds like this is going to start a wave of corporations bugging their laptops to ensure employees don't steal them and reconnect to the net! What fool didn't format the bloody thing anyway?

http://www.wulfram.com?mkid=31257 - The plot thickens! I wonder how deep this one will go, intervention to stop Google's world domination?

http://www.wulfram.com?mkid=31257 - There's some sense in what he's saying, it panders to the free market and isn't economically healthy for media corps on a long term basis.

Neither are FOSS, but they're both free...

Soldat - http://www.soldat.com/ , a fast-pasted 2D multiplayer shooter
Great graphics and gameplay for a free game, fast-paced fragging against tons of people online.

Wulfram2 - http://www.wulfram.com/ , a (now a little quiet...) 3d online tank combat game -
I used to love playing it when my dialup had low enough latency to actually play. The teamwork required to win, when there's people to play, is some of the most fun of any game, seeing as there's the battle on the ground, and essentially a giant chess game with the dropships above.

He/She is not 10. Not by a long shot...
Here's from the forum that he/she links to:
http://www.wulfram.com/uprof.php?mode=view&user=60 494
And after a little googling, http://woodysroom.com/nucleus/ can be found. The posts are rather thin, but would a 10 year old be getting up to ride a bus alone at 4AM? And then bitch about the student network running slow?
Now, this could just be a coincidence, but there are similar misspellings ("ALOT", together, in caps) between the posts here and the posts on the site. This guy is just a tool.

Now that's news!

A solid innovative product that people actually want to buy helps a company turn a profit!

Now if only the rest of the gaming industry (I'm talking to you, EA!) would catch up, we might be able to escape the FPS monotony we've fallen into.

It seems that the popularity of a game is solely determined by the level of hype surrounding it. Halo specifically comes to mind. I'll concede that it's a solid FPS, but the level of hype surrounding the launch of Halo 2 was obscene.

I'm sorry, but there are just so many things about the gaming industry that irritate me. The companies. Overinflated prices. Overinflated gamer egos. Lack of innovation. Hype. Obscene system requirements.....

Here's what I've been playing in the past year:
-More SNES/N64 games than you can shake a stick at. I'll probably buy a gamecube because Nintendo's games seem to have the greatest degree of innovation/replayability right now (and yet they're the least popular, go figure)
-Liero (hailing all the way from 1993)
-All of these downright bizarre arcade-style shooters that are strangely addictive
-Wulfram. One of the first good online games back from 2000. It's finally being actively developed once again...
-Darwinia. Another great non-photorealistic game. (Could be better to tell the truth, but a solid game nonetheless)
-Escape Velocity Series -- they've been around forever for the mac. A few have been ported to Windows. Go see what the PC world has been missing out on for over a decade!
-Freespace 2 -- One of the best space shooters ever made. Period. Made by a major studio, but enjoyed little commercial success. I can't even begin to fathom why....

Indie games are great. I love them because their communities are so small and tight-knit. One of my favorite Indie games would have to be Wulfram 2. The game is completely volenter driven. There are more than a few people who have stuck with the developer for as long as five years.

There are some problems with Indie games however, the biggest would have to be support. Alot of these games are struggling to stay alive, and to do so they need to either be pay to play, have a large number of donations, or just simply have a ton of advertisements.

There are plenty of original games out there. Most of them simply don't do well, and those which do are copied and cliched into oblivion. Take for example:

Uplink: Every Slashdotter's dream game. Very innovative idea, properly executed, as well.
Escape Velocity Series: While the series is not exactly new, it is still an excellent idea. Completely open-ended, and quite fun. Windows port coming soon.
Wulfram II: Multiplayer only. Free. Interesting combination of strategy and FPS. The graphics are a bit dated, although community-funded development work has begun on a new graphics engine. Addicting as hell.
Black and White: Never played, but very innovative from what I've heard.
The Longest Journey: While it's very similar to the LucasArts adventure games, this game plays like a novel. That being said, if all novels copied each other, we would have stopped writing them thousands of years ago. Recycled concept, AMAZING plot.
Planescape: Torment: At first glance, this appears to be nothing more than a hackneyed D&D game/Diablo clone. Upon playing it, you begin to unravel a superb plot. Very little hack and slash.
Dance Dance Revolution: Never played it, but it's popular as hell (you don't get much more original than THIS)
Morrowind and GTA were both somewhat revolutionary in that they were completely open-ended, and created two of the most original games in two of the most hackneyed generes.
Frozen Bubble/Snood/etc. More proof that such simplistic games can still become wildly popular. Revitalized a dying genere.

I'd like to reccomend another game very similar (yet superior) to bzflag. It is called Wulfram II. It follows the same concept of a tank game as bzflag does, execpt it involves teamwork, bases, and much more strategy. Unfortunately, it is only available for win32, although if you send the author enough money, he'll speed up his port to unix and osx. The game is free, although donations of as little as $4 per month are highly encouraged. All in all, i'd say this game is everything that bzflag is and more. It combines a little action, real-time strategy, teamwork, and more into one great game.

The graphics aren't GREAT, but they're still nice, and the game runs on most pcs, and the graphics are still signifigantly better than BZFlag. People with a voodoo2 or 3 can play using glide, which produces really nice graphics. Unfortunately a 3dfx driver update broke glide support for the game, and it can only be played wiht dated drivers (completely broken on voodoo4/5).

A last note is that the thing that sets this game apart from others is it's incredibly realistic physics and gravity, etc. I have never seen a game with more realistic physics, etc. The sequal being worked on by the underpaid independent developer (yes... one developer) will be even better with the addition of an advanced lighting engine. (by physics, i'm talking about how a pulse shell arcs, how tanks are dragged to the ground, etc.). These phyiscs also help combat lag, as the server uses a vector-based coordinate system, which greatly reduces bandwidth to help 56k users (such as myself).

Go out and pay it! http://www.wulfram.com