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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.
Props to my dead homies!
4:30 p.m. The subway train draws to a halt. There is no station in sight.
Anxious glances dart around about the passengers as they realize each others
presence for the first time. At the end of the train, a young lady in a green
pants suit stands up in the middle of the car and starts to unbutton her jacket,
which she takes off and drops to the dirty floor. She also takes off her shoes,
her pants, her blouse, and the rest of her undergarments dropping them into a
neat little pile. This leaves her totally naked. She then moves her hands
across her thighs and begins to fiddle around between her legs. Eventually she
grabs hold of something cold and metallic and very slowly she starts to unzip
her body; working in a straight line up the stomach, between the breasts, up the
neck, taking it up right through the center of her face to her forehead. Her
fingers probe up and down the resulting slit; finally coming to rest on both
sides of her navel. She pauses for a moment, before carefully working her flesh
apart. Slipping her right hand into the open gash, she pushes up between her
throat, latching on to some buried solid at the top of her spine. With a great
deal of effort she loosens and pulls out a thin shimmering golden rod. Her
fingers release their grip and her crumpled body neatly sliced slithers down the
liquid surface of the rod to the floor. SPLAT! The rod remains hovering just
above the ground. A flagpole without a flag.
The other passengers have been totally silent, but at the sound of the body
dropping onto the floor a large middle-aged lady stands up and shouts "STOP THIS
, ITS DISGUSTING!" The golden rod disappeared The green pants suit was left on a
hanger, with a dry cleaning ticket pinned on the left arm. On the ticket was
written:
Name _______________
Address ____________
I had links and everything. And it was better written. I'm going to go cry now...
It wasn't a proud moment, but it happened.
Remarkably, we stayed togeather for a long time afterward. I was very lucky. : )
Why don't you get out the tinfoil hat already. If Blizzard wanted to steal information from you, they'd probably go about it by taking advantage of one of the numerous software holes in Windows.
Blizzard doesn't really care who you are. Of course, they care about when you log on, and what type of character you play, and all that jazz. This allows them to do a number of things to enhance the game playing experience. Think about it...
They know when you log on. This lets them map out peak times of connectivity, so you don't have to play with massive amounts of lag. The Battle.Net servers have been somewhat laggy recently, but it's not bad for something that is provided for free. They also would like to know what times are the peaks of activity because they probably bill those ad companies for time, and base the price off of the load on the server.
Blizzard wants to make sure that you own the game that you're playing. Why is this such a problem? If I wrote some software, and sold it, I would probably want to implement a relatively easy but effective way of ensuring that the product isn't being stolen. As it is, since I own my copy of Diablo II, I don't have to worry whether I can play on Battle.Net or not.
Lastly, Blizzard wants to enhance the game itself. This is based, in part, by it's knowledge of what you play, what you use, etc. Balance is a key part of the game... getting it to the point where the game is a challenge to get to the point of greatness, but once greatness is achieved, the sense of accomplishment is high. Having a level 50 sorcerous, for instance, is a rather enjoyable thing... even if you do die frequently enough in nightmare and hell difficulties. From what I know, the last update that Blizzard made to Diablo II basically changed the entire game. There's always new things being added, there's always security problems being fixed, and there are always new avenues for creating characters being made.
Tell me, then, why should Blizzard be denied the rights to control their own software?
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.