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World of Warcraft For The Win
In a press release from their website, Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft has won. Or, more specifically, that the game "has surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China - just a month following the game's commercial launch on June 7, 2005. The critically acclaimed World of Warcraft has now achieved another significant milestone as the largest MMORPG in the world, with more than 3.5 million global customers." Relatedly, Gamespy's OnLife column this week centers around the WoW duping story that we touched on earlier. From the article: "Needless to say, many players are a bit incensed that Blizzard isn't taking this as seriously as they feel it should. Others, though, are convinced that there isn't any duping actually going on. It's an urban myth, they say, which gullible forumites are unwittingly perpetuating."
you act as if 15$ is a fortune. It isn't. It's going to the cinema twice. You complain about people doing *that*, too? I mean, you go enjoy your acting-less special-effect show. Meanwhile I'll pretent to be a hero in a fantasy world. If that makes me stupid, I don't know what it makes you.
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No power in the 'verse can stop me
1. Bandwidth, large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support, ongoing content development, etc, all cost money too. What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You don't even need Photoshop. You can do that with macros. I had to split them into four macros due to the 255 char limit, but try these out:
The end result? CmdrTaco is up to something! (Remember all real account names can't have mixed case - they're always with an initial capital and then all lowercase.)
Ironically enough, because that screenshot wasn't "faked" per se, and is really what the ingame interface would look like, comparing it with the "dupe proof" screen shot shows that the dupe screenshot was faked in Photoshop!
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The thing that makes me the most skeptical about these supposed duping exploits (which the developers have investigated and say are false) is that every single one of them has a line like this that is apparently crucial: "This only works early in the morning when the servers first load up, and the the instance server is still loading."
What does that mean? The servers run 24 hours a day. They don't "first load up" early in the morning. The only time a server consistantly shuts down is the Tuesday maintenance, and there is nowhere in North America where that ends "early in the morning."
Also, all of the other supposed evidence of a duping exploit is seemingly unrelated to this description of how the exploit is acheived, because the duping everyone else is complaining about apparently happens at all times of day while zoning level 30 characters rapidly in and out of Maraudon.
Just curious, was there another MMORPG with daily maintenance shutdowns, that ended early in the morning in North America?
My wife and I used to play WoW, but with RL, which includes children, we often dont get much uninterupted time to play. GW is a much better fit for people who get interupted a lot or can't play very often (like maybe 8 hours a month).