Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard's World of Warcraft Beta Goes Live
craenor writes "Perhaps the most anticipated entry into the increasingly crowded PC MMORPG market, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, has just reached the live Beta stage, for those select players lucky enough to be picked. In a distinct change from the existing trend in Beta tests, they are not going to require NDAs for participating players, and everyone will have read access to the official Beta forums while testing takes place." The WoW site includes a basic game FAQ for beginners, and BitTorrent is now live as Blizzard's Beta distribution method of choice, as the mentioned earlier on Slashdot Games.
Do you purposely leave out the other 50% of the argument and mislead people, or are you just ignorant?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Yeah, when your prime concern is preventing piracy, turning over key check methods to another party is a fantastic idea!
Aside from MMOGs, which include additional content and constant patching, name a game that charges for online play?
Are the whores at Atari gracious for providing for online play for UT2k4? How about EA with MOHAA?
Providing a free online gaming environment isn't some generous move on behalf of the developers and producers, it's a lynchpin for selling their games.
And speaking of Blizzard titles that are bad, just about everything since Warcraft 2 and Diablo has been uninspired tripe. Starcraft is Warcraft with a space theme, and requires about as much of a tactical mindset as walking and breathing at the same time do. Diablo 2 was years late and still came with one of the most wretched skill systems I've ever seen. The 1.10 patch has improved it drastically, but synergies still feel like a cheap fix for a fundamentally FUBARed skill tree. Nevermind the fact that Diablo 2 is (literally) nothing but a skinner box. Click the button, stuff pops out.
And then there's Warcraft 3, a game with brilliant art but gameplay so antithetical to an actual game, it's a wonder people actually consider it RTS.
Don't get me wrong, I respect Blizzard for their willingness to put out a sufficiently polished release. I don't think we'll ever see a buggy piece of shit (like EA's constant stream of shovelware) from Blizzard, but they certainly aren't beyond reproach, and definitely don't deserve the pedastal so many gamers place them on.
Blizzard hinged their business model on something they could not control. They saw it slipping from their grap and were not smart (or decent) enough to solve the problem technically or in a business fashion.
So they used the courts, and, shotgun style, went after a group that had nothing to do with the problem.
Bnetd did not pirate games. They did nothing illegal, but provided a tool that others could use - both for legal and illegal uses. Blizzard attacked them and shut them down not because a court said they could, but because the promise of massive legal fees prevented them from defending themselves at the time.
Blizzard's created a situation where their revenue was easy to circumvent, and then chose to go after a third party, not the lawbreakers, when they started to understand how dumb their business model was.