I haven't seen the inflation from farming on Alleria. There are enough money sinks in the game (hell, my repair bill last weekend was 8G on one run) that I think the cash flow evens out over time. In addition, the supply of inexpensive rare items is very nice. If anything, the prices of high-end, very good quality weapons and armor is cheaper when the farmers are active, and more expensive when they're not. Crafting materials, especially arcane crystals and arcanite bars, are cheaper. If anything, farmers are driving the prices down, not up.
Part of me thinks it's cheating, because I went through the work everyone else should too. I remember saving up for my elite mount on my warlock (It's cheaper, but it's not free). On the other hand, the classes and talent specs I've chosen are very...sub par...at farming. Very nice for other things, but not great farmers. That's part of the reason I'm levelling a hunter, they just blow through mobs like crazy.
Part of me would rather just buy 500G and send it to one of my new characters so I can level them up in all nice gear. I've played the game, I've got 2 characters at level 60 and a third at 48 (Druid, Warlock, Hunter, if you're curious, the first two are my 60's, and I levelled them both before they got talent respecs, so it was hard mode). I've played the content. A lot. I've also always thought there should be some "shortcut" mode to level up your second or third character, like having them never lose rest state or something.
Yup. Lots of multi-account cancellations. My friend cancelled 3 accounts, his friends cancelled multiple (3-5) accounts each. If a bunch of the people who are running 3-5 accounts cancel down to 1, that's a huge punch in the pocketbook I'd think.
FYI, the way SW:G works (I think) is that you can only have one character per server, which is why most players have multiple accounts.
I know some people who played, up until this week, SW:G. All are fairly hardcore MMORPG'ers who really liked the depth and breadth of character customization and crafting available in SW:G. With that gone, they've all cancelled their accounts, in the (probably vain) hopes that SOE will keep the old ruleset servers around and let n00bs play on the new ruleset.
How many cancellations have happened since the announcement?
Alternatively, how many would it take to change SOE's mind?
If you have a window title that even resembles one of the programs they have blacklisted, you can get banned... even if you weren't cheating.
Where did you get that? Not from TFA. The Community Reps have said that Warden is generally used as a trigger for intensive GM monitoring, not as an immediate ban. There is generally thought to be a person in the loop here.
I remember when slashdot actually had people who knew what a hash function was reading it.
Bliz's community managers have been cagey about this, but generally it's believed that they don't immediately ban based on Warden reports. Usually a GM will monitor for a pattern of behavior before issuing the ban.
In other words, the Warden system serves to figure out who to watch. If they had to have a person watch everyone for some mythical "pattern of behavior" the game's already high monthly fee would have to go up by a factor of 10 or so, making it somewhat untenable.
How about this solution: Instead of being concerned about Blizzard being able to find you are cheating, go play another game? Nobody is forcing anybody to play WoW.
Bullshit response. Just because the data's hashed doesn't mean it can't be reconstructed.
No, I think you've got the bullshit response.
The nature of hash functions, real hash functions, is the same as a one-way cipher. It takes an arbitrarily long string and turns it into an arbitrarily short string in a fashion that cannot be reconstructed. This is how passwords are stored securely. It's proven, documented, and usually open technology. There are flaws in some hashes (Schneier's writing on some right now actually on his blog), but generally most hashes are thought to be secure, and even the vunlerabilities he's concerned about are with respect to hash collisions, not reversability. Nobody sane questions tha hashes are irreversible.
If a plumber comes to your house to fix your toilet, is he allowed to unlock your filing cabinets, look through your financial documents, copy what he wants, and report that to his employer or the government?
If you for some stupid reason sign a document the plumber presents you with that says he is allowed to unlock your filing cabinets, look through your financial documents, copy what he wants, and report that to his employer or the government, then yes, he's allowed to do that.
It's very clear in the agreement. The agreement that you have to read (or at least scroll the bar all the way to the bottom of) every time there is a patch (every month or so) with only one section in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS that spells out exactly what this program is going to do.
Yeah, we interviewed the heck out of him. I set up a real life meeting before I recommended him in, my boss interviewed him for 2 hours. Standard stuff. It's just a foot in the door is all, another social networking thing.
I haven't purchased another game since. I reinstalled and played HalfLife 2 for awhile, but that's about it. I've only played WoW. I have two characters (level 50 druid, level 60 warlock) with more time/played than I'd care to admit. It's saved me a lot of money. I've been cooking more and therefore eating better (eating out takes more time than cooking a good meal typically does) and spending less. All in all, WoW is saving me a lot of money.
Will I switch games? Probably not. I've got a time investement in WoW. I've got a social investment in my guild. Heck, I found out a guildie was local to me and appropriate for a job and got him hired for our helpdesk because I knew he was a straightforward easy to work with person based on my WoW experiences with him.
Will I play a single player game again? I've got a PSP for when I'm on the road. So, not bloody likely. I'm looking forward to an expansion, the next patch, and getting my hunter leveled up on a PvP server.
I'm playing WoW right now on my PC while I read this on my Mac Mini.
Am I typical? Dunno, hit the reply button and tell me.
"Oh Noes! I have to take a certain talent tree to do PvP". Priests have to take the Shadow tree to PvP. Warriors have to take some combination of Arms/Fury to PvP. Paladins have to take not-Protection to PvP. Haven't studied rogues enough to know, but I"m sure they have to take whatever tree Improved Sap isn't in.
Priests who are shadow spec suck in PvE. Warriors who aren't defense spec suck in PvE. Paladins who are not protect-spec suck in PvE Rogues without Improved Sap suck in PvE.
Wow....Pretty much you can decide to optimize your character to be good at PvP or PvE in several different classes! Amazing! Matter of fact, I bet this applies to all classes except Druids, because ALL of their trees suck except their PvE tree, Restoration.
Or would you prefer that every single member of every class have the same abilities? No customization at all? Wait, that wouldn't be good. What you really want is a game where you could play against lots of other players and beat them every time while watching your favorite TV shows. Maybe not even playing, just having a huge macro to do it for you. May I suggest you track down the wonderful game called ProgressQuest? Fantastic interface, and I think you'll find it to your liking as far as the hands-off nature of managing the character and optimizing it to your playstyle.
I don't know ANY on my server. Demonology or MD/Ruin. or SM/Ruin. No "pure" destruction locks with 31 points in the tree. None.
Demo locks aren't locks. They're people who are pissed off at not having rolled a mage, and yet were too stupid to re-roll at a low level, and too stupid to READ THE CLASS DESCRIPTION and UNDERSTAND THE LIMITATIONS before rolling it in the first place. YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO WHEN YOU SIGNED UP YOU DIPSHIT.
Yes, I do read those boards. Usually the people who are critting harder than amage give up every bit of stam and int gear they have for +crit and +dmg. In other words, they're mages, but without any escape abilities because they've screwed themselves out of them. So they pull aggro off the warrior, and get killed because they don't have ice block. Excellent. Way to go, sounds very effective. Personally, I don't like the repair bills that much, but whatever floats your boat. My "escape" is the ability to dish it out AND take it, and if you want to give up all your stats to be able to kill stuff faster, you lose all rights to complain when you get stomped on. You chose poorly.
I never travel to XP zones to get shards. I get shards as I go. Only time I specifically go to collect shards is when I also need to farm cash. Start out with empty bags, end up with full ones and more money.
And if nobody wants to play the class anymore, that's fine by me. Just means more loot heading my way. I just hope they don't dumb the class down enough that you're happy with it. If they do, then it'll be just as easy to play as a rogue.
Well, congratulations. You obviously have waaay better gear than the average warlock. I can see your arguments must make sense from your perspective. The rest of us, however, barely have enough HP to survive the rogues opening and finishing attacks.
I do have really nice gear, thanks:). I've worked hard for it and had some good luck with rolls. Of course, I very rarely have to roll against another warlock, that might be part of the reason why. Other warlocks in my guild have more effective hit points than me, mostly because they spec to Soul Link, whereas I spec to MD/Ruin, gimping myself in PvP and PvE in order to do both somewhat effectively. It's a tradeoff, unlike what you want which is total uberness in all situations.
But even when I was in greens at level 30-55, I had more hit points than most warriors. Quit buying that +spirit gear and buy +int +stam stuff. Oh, and I've been to MC 4 times. I have 3 pieces of felheart. Why? Because I'm one of 5 warlocks, not one of 15 rogues.
Wow, that's just a super suggestion. Be 2vs1. That would solve any class issues just like that! Why didnt we think of that before?
The designers have repeatedly said the game is not balanced for 1v1 PvP. It's balanced for groups. Maybe you didn't think of it before because you don't read? Teamwork. It's a multiplayer game, right? Multi player...that means...more than one player! Maybe even more than one on my team!
Seriously, the mage has ice block, blink, frost nova and soon invisibility that can help them escape. What do we have? Fear? Don't get me started on the usefulness of fear after nerfings and trinkets. And don't tell me that I should get a certain profession (Engineering, Alchemy), spec into a certain tree (Demonology) or get better gear (Join a guild, do Molten Core for 3 months) just to be on par with other classes!
Ice block: Useless. "Yay! I'm a big noticeable target for 10 seconds!". You can't run, you can't hide, you can't bandage, you can't pop a potion, you just give people more time to see the mage with, what, 15 hit points hanging in the middle of an ice block. In PvE it's nice because it gives the warrior a chance to pull aggro back, just like Fade on a priest. Warlocks shouldn't pull aggro. If you are, you screwed up in a big way. But since you were talking about PvP escapes, ice block isn't even close. It makes an awesome sound, easy to know what happened and if you've got good speakers where. Maybe you should turn the TV down a bit so you can concentrate on the game?
Blink: Awesome. You're 10 feet away now. There are, what, 5 different root spells in the game? Blink's cooldown is how long? Long enough for you to be dead. GG.
Frost Nova: Yup. Freeze me. I'll just throw shadowbolts back at you. Frost nova against ranged classes is useless. Actually it's worse than that, if you use it to open up range you give them what they want. It's also got serious resists, and if you're going to bring up trinkets and nerfings for fear, bring them up for frost nova also, which is on a diminishing returns timer and can be escaped with trinkets, free action potions, and the little-known gnome racial.
Speaking of which, why is it that when fear gets mentioned by warlocks and priests it's all about Will of the Forsaken, PvP Trinkets, Fear Ward, and Blessing of Freedom, but when Frost Nova gets mentioned it's all bout how it's overpowered? Hmm...Escape Artist, PvP Trinkets, Druid Shapeshift, Free Action Potion...all of those things work against frost nova. Many of them work against fear. But Fear's the one with limitations, while frost nova is teh uber! Ask most mages and they'd rather have Fear. Why? Because it opens up range between them and their target, letting them cast big damage spells without interruption and without having to run to open distance.
Ooh...invisibility. Because there aren't any potions to see through that. Or buffs. Oh wait, the potions are there and ludicrously cheap,
Yeah, that was more of a running joke than anything else. Best way to deal with a shaman is with a melee pet (succubus, felhunter, or even voidwalker) with an appropriate totem killing macro. Basically it's just like Decursive, but using PetAttack() instead of casting cleanse or whatever. They generally have far fewer hit points than me, better armor (don't care, if I let them get in range I'm doomed anyway), and they tend to solo a LOT.
They tend to stack fire resist gear, which does them approximately no good against corruption, CoA, or shadowbolts.
The biggest problem with Shaman, and all classes that have dispel capability, is the disparity between the amount of mana it costs to buff/debuff and to dispell buff/debuff. For example, my armor spell (demon armor) costs 1350 mana, and can be dispelled for....80. Costs me about a quarter of a mana bar to cast DA, but can be dispelled for, what, mana regained in 6 second's rest? But that's not a shaman-specific problem, it's a caster problem in general. I think players should get a spell that increases the "sticky" of buffs/debuffs to make them harder and more time/mana consuming.
Rank 1 even. When you have 10 HP left and immolate's about to do it's last tick of damage to my target. Actually, I never use anything but Rank 1 of Drain Soul because the mana/damage is stupidly screwed up. Occasionally I'm down one shard on a combat. Very rarely though, usually only if I get a 2v1 combat and I have to use my healthstone.
Void sac? Maybe. Probably not. Usually I've got a succubus out for mez. Or a felhunter for +60 resists and anti-caster, depends on the balance of players on the other side.
"doesn't make us overpowered in any way"? BS. Not having shards would change the dynamics of the class considerably. You'd actually be able to nuke-to-kill instead of DoT-to-kill if you want to shard something. Totally different battle style. Think about how you end a fight when you don't need a shard from it (shadowbolt or shadowburn). Think about how you end it when you do need a shard (renew immolate at 50% health, maybe shadowbolt or searing pain, wait for 10% or less health and drain soul). It would completely change how the game is played by warlocks, and we'd basically become crit whores with DD spells. If you wanted to be a crit whore with massive direct damage, there's this class called "Mage" you should investigate.
There's a reason why a lot of people don't play warlocks anymore...because they can't read a class description? Or because they ain't all that bright? Oooh, wait, I know, it's because they'd rather roll a weaksauce easy mode shaman or rogue. Love how that works in endgame, my guild had a wait list of 5-10 rogues to get into MC, and was taking trusted non-guild warlocks. I have 3 pieces of Felheart. I know rogues that can't get any of their non-epic class set because they lose rolls to other rogues, while I watch as warlock class bits get DE'd because all the warlocks already have them or better.
If you want to have a spot in any end-game PvE you choose to do, roll a warlock, priest, or druid. If you want to have to wait around spamming Ironforge LFG chat with "60 ROGUE LFG ANYTHING" for hours on end, be my guest. I've seen rogues macro that, and I've gone to shorter instances (Dire Maul North) completed them and come back to Ironforge to see the same rogues spamming the same things. They just never get picked up. Ever.
Getting and keeping a full inventory of shards is easy. Incredibly, ludicrously easy. Stupidly easy. The only time I run low is when lag gets bad and I can't time my casting right.
The secret is to keep a huge buffer on hand for when you can't collect or don't have time to. I typically keep 32 shards on hand at all times, and try to carry 48 if I'm going into Molten Core or somewhere else that I won't have a lot of opportunities to collect shards. That way if you miss a few, it's no big deal.
Every single thing the poster asked for was "more power". Either through an escape spell or getting rid of shard requirements. Don't dumb down the class to cater to idiots.
OK, let's examine other escape mechanisms from that perspective:
Ice Block: Hmm...Yeah, pretty much the same. Polymorph: Hmm...yeah, pretty much the same. Power Word:Shield....Yeah, pretty the same.
It's NO DIFFERENT. NONE.
Working Escape Mechanisms: Pally Shield + Hearth, Rogue Vanish+Stealth, and Druid Travel Form. That's it. And these are all generally considered pretty lame.
Besides, it's called World of WARcraft, not World of RUN AWAY craft.
*sigh* I have a level 60 warlock with, well, entirely too many days/played at 60. You're an idiot.
For the uninitiated, there are a bunch of warlocks on the forums that think all warlocks should be buffed to the point of uberness. We are currently very balanced, and deadly in the right hands. We can be killed by rogues. We can kill just about anyone else with varying degrees of difficulty. Rogues can be killed by, well, just about anyone they don't get the drop on, including warlocks. Rogues can kill anyone except shaman (nobody kills shaman, they're a trifle imbalanced) and plate wearing classes. Player skill is more important in PvP than player class. Your refusal to acknowledge that you may need to learn to play your class a bit more is just tiring, and really makes us all look like whiners.
Soul Shards: Please go read the class description. You should have known what you were getting into when you signed up. Your lack of ability to RTFM is not my (or Blizzard's) problem.
Escape Spell: You have more hit points than any given mage or priest COMBINED, unless you have really exceptionally bad gear. I routinely have almost 5K, unbuffed, with my PvE gear on. My PvP gear has more stamina on it. Here's your escape spell to keep from getting ganked by rogues: Team up with a rogue. Be bait. You're supposed to be rogue bait, just as priests and mages are rogue bait. Teamwork. Remember, this is a MULTIPLAYER game, not a big, long, solo event. Keep a succubus out, or sacrifice your precious voidwalker, and then deal with the rogue. Then, at some point, explain to me how ice block saves a mage from a rogue. Or an 8 second easily dispellable polymorph that fully heals it's target helps a mage with a rogue. 8 seconds won't open ANY distance for the mage, rogues have that Dash ability to close the distance back up again, and that's about all polymorph lasts in PvP. Or tell why a priest should go ANYWHERE alone. This is a MULTIPLAYER game. Make some friends.
End game pets: Yeah, they suck. Sorry, no arguments here.
Enslave Demon: About right for the abilities gained. There are ways to mitigate the danger and prevent the diminishing returns. If you haven't found them yet, maybe you should roll a mage? I mean, you get to take a world demon and make it your pet for usually about 5 minutes. Compare to priest mind control, which only works for 30 seconds and can be used in the same circumstances. Enslave is a great spell, and the only thing that keeps it from being too powerful is that there aren't that many world demons, and that many world demons are immune to enslave.
Voidwalker: If you're counting on him for DPS, you're doing it wrong. You have more than one pet. Many warlocks forget that. Evil looking chick with a tail, that ring any bells for you? That's your balanced DPS/survivability pet. Maybe you've not done that quest?
Invisibility: Eh, let 'em have it. I can see 'em anyway. If it'll give them a false sense of security and make me more wanted (because my Detect Greater Invisibility spell will actually do something), I'm all in favor of it. Mages are pretty easy meat.
If you're going to complain about something, complain about end-game caster itemization (caster items don't increase DPS nearly as much as melee items), or that the Warlock PvP trinket doesn't do anything we can't already do with a felhunter, or that the Warlock PvP set is the same as the Priest set.
Quit dragging out these pointless "Warlocks Suck" arguments, come up with some new ones. These are old, tired, disproven, and just highlight your stupidity.
Q I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?
THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor -- both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.
Q Both sides should be properly taught?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about.
Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?
THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.
So basically he's saying it is and should be a local decision, and if asked to make it what he'd do. It's purely hypothetical, a person expressing an opinion. Whether you feel it's a right or wrong opinion, it's an opinion that can be expressed. Even though he's the President, he carefully set his answer as a personal opinion, not a policy opinion, and nearly expressed gratitude to not be in the position to have to make that decision. I hate to defend the guy, but the press is blowing this thing out like crazy.
Second, on the general topic of Intelligent Design:
If you were a professor of a "design for gods" class, and you tasked your students with developing an ecosphere specifically designed to support an intelligent animal, how would you rate the student who created the Earth and humans? Let's see: prone to infections via viruses and bacteria, bipedal for reduced stability and running speed, high possibility for very fair skin that burns on exposure to UV radiation AND an atmosphere which allows plenty of UV through, various allergic reactions and mutations. Oh, and the kicker, just to make sure the student had no chance of passing: Let's run all the nasty excretory organs which produce plentiful toxic flora right in parallel with the reproductive organs! Yeah, that won't screw anything up.
There are people that complain about how Microsoft produces shoddy products that are frequently overrun by viruses and security problems, and yet believe we are perfectly and wonderfully made.
Microcenter also has about the best return policy in the business. On most things they don't charge a restock fee. If you give them enough personal info (address + phone) they can re-create your reciept if you lose it. They have good prices on parts. They always have the cable I'm looking for, usually in the length I need, including weirdo SCSI and fibre cables.
Their Apple people generally have more product knowledge than the Apple employees at CompUSA, and just slightly less than the ones at the Apple store.
No commercial interest in them, just want to give a good company a little rep bonus.
You're overlooking the real value here, which was pretty much all accomplished before the aircraft left the ground. The materials science and engineering done to create an aircraft for this mission is the practical purpose. The actual flight was just to show that (1) it all worked, and (2) to provide the sponsors with incentive to foot the bill.
Keep in mind that the aircraft was yet another fine product of Scaled Composites, makers of SpaceShip 1, Voyager, and a host of other projects found on their website. They're pretty much the leading edge of aerospace engineering, and projects like this help advance the state of the art with private funding. In other words, if you want privately funded research in this field, you're going to need to get really smart, frugal, practical companies backed by people with lots of money in order to get oustanding results.
As opposed to good old NASA, flying (err...not flying?) a 25 year old space shuttle on 35 year old design, and spending who-knows-how-much-now on the ISS, where there's no science, but lots of "hey, we're stuck up here and there's not enough food" happening. Maybe it's time for more private funding for this kind of thing? It seems to be getting good results.
But the underlying question is, why are Americans apathetic about politics?
Because we have no control over anything. Your vote does not count, not because the person you voted for may or may not get elected, but because no matter who gets elected, within a month of being elected they become the same corrupt piece of politician that you voted for them to NOT be.
Consider, for a moment, the "Conservative" and "Small Government" Republicans. Voting for the biggest (1.4 trillion dollar and rising) entitlement program ever, the Medicare Prescription Drug act, aka Viagra for Seniors. Which is basically a huge spending program to benefit pharmaceutical companies and extend government power. Voting for and signing budgets to create ever larget budget deficits and more debt. Growing government at a pace unprecedented since FDR. They'll talk a good game on Social Security reform, but it will NEVER happen because it reduces the amount of money they have to play with. They'll talk about simplifying the tax code, but that would give up the legislative line-item veto on your household budget, so that will NEVER happen.
It doesn't matter who is in what office. A politician's vote is decided by two things: what will expand their power more and who has the most money in their checking account. The broadcast flag is STRICTLY a means for politicians to line their pockets at the expense of something a very small but ineptly vocal majority will not like.
Not all Americans are apathetic because we are lazy. Some of us are apathetic because we know, no matter what actions we take or money we donate, the results will not change.
IGE is helping people circumvent a contract they agreed to. The contract specifically states that stuff (goods and currency) in-game cannot be sold for real currency.
Legal? Probably. After all, IGE didn't agree to the contract, they're acting as a middle man.
Ethical? Not in my beliefs. Helping someone break a contract they agreed to is not ethical, and is no more ethical than providing an alibi for someone who is cheating on a spouse. Assisting someone in breaking a lawful and binding agreement is not ethical.
Why is this on Slashdot? Well, they're using a game plugin to create a website that catalogs game objects (quests, NPC's and objects). They are likely using that same data to find good things to sell and good worlds to sell them on, and they'll know exactly what they need to do to get the items. Essentially, they're using me to collect data, spyware style. Of course, I use the collected data to find the same things on my own, but if there are other sites I can use the collected data from that are not involved in destroying the economy on my server (and there are) I'll swtich.
I'm uninstalling the plugin when I get home and switching to a cleaner one that doesn't have this...taint...associated with it.
I've been playing for about a month now. I play on what's probably a medum high-pop server, but I've not seen a queue, even logging on at 7PM CT. If you don't pick one of the insanely high pop servers, you're probably not going to see problems.
The biggest problems I've had: 1. The auction house is very slow. The city the auction house is in is very slow. Some of the surrounding countryside around the city with the auction house is very slow. I had instant-cast spells take 8 seconds. If you roll a dwarf or gnome, get to level 5 and head to Stormwind to get away from the auction house. You can do all of the human quests for level 5-15 and it'll go a lot more smoothly. You can always return and mop up the lower level quests (if you want the positive faction reputation points) when they get the auction house fixed, which they're working on.
2. The login servers, the servers that handle auth and character selection for startup, they suck. They're plagued with outages. Daily outages. Fortunately, they're usually resolved within a half hour or so. And, if you're already in-game, you don't even notice the login server outages. You need the login server to be up for about 30 seconds per day, so the odds are in your favor.
The good news?
If you pick a server with a medium to medium-high pop, you'll have very very few problems (you'll have more luck finding people to group with on servers with more people, but too many people on the server and you'll have queueing to get in). There is a site (www.wowcensus.com or something) that will feed you population statistics. Keep in mind those are voluntary reports, and may or may not be accurate. A better idea is to visit the forums at worlofwarcraft.com and see what realms get the most complaints:).
Also, the higher your level, the more time you'll spend in less-populated areas. My lvl 36 warlock spends a lot of time out in the boonies running down quests, and I have no performance issues at all until I return to a big city to sell stuff. My level 11 priest is in one of the lowbie areas, and it's not bad, but it will occasionally act funny (3 second lag on body looting, for example). My theory is a lot of people are playing one character up to level 15 or so, deciding they don't like that class/race/faction, and are picking up new characters. Nothing wrong with that, I did it myself. But, that keeps a higher-than-normal pop in the newbie and lowbie areas.
Finally, the game is a LOT of fun. Seriously. Very well thought out quests, neat items, I haven't had to farm monsters to get levels (almost all of my levelling has been from quests). Find a good guild on a good world and you'll have support structures to help you (higher level guildies pass down loot they can't use to lower level members, and you'll be expected to be generous when you get there).
That said, have I had problems? Yeah, I was trying to play on a Saturday evening and it took about 30 minutes to log in. Given that I've played nearly every day for a little over a month, I'd say that's a pretty decent rate of failure. I had one time I was on and got a broadcast message that the server was going to be rebooted in 20 minutes. I finished up what I was doing in about 10 minutes, logged out, played with the dog for a half hour, and logged back in. Honestly, I'd rather have them reboot the server periodically than ignore problems. So my failure/outage rate with the game has probably been about 3 to 5%. If your PS2 had a, say, 1 in 25 chance that a game you put into it would require you to clean the lens of the DVD player, would you still play? Most likely. It's not a matter of 4 out of 5, it's more on the scale of 1 in 25 or so.
Oh, and my warlock has a pointy hat. How cool is that? Blizzard gets bonus cool points for pointy hats. Now I just want a high-level crafting skill that lets me create self-propelled luggage with the attitude of a badly raised pit bull.
Blizzard could do better. But they're doing pretty good overall. Good enough that when someone on the boards says "I've had enough of the outages and queues, I'm cancelling my account" most of the replies are "Bummer for you. Hey can I have your stuff?"
Slashdot Mirror
Backpack in winter, when I want to have my hands in nice toasty gloves.
0 991005000
Summertime, though, I prefer the briefcase. I think it looks better.
http://www.fender.com/products/search.php?partno=
The Fender Tweed briefcase. With a nice, hand-made padded case for my laptop, made out of crushed red velvet.
I haven't seen the inflation from farming on Alleria. There are enough money sinks in the game (hell, my repair bill last weekend was 8G on one run) that I think the cash flow evens out over time. In addition, the supply of inexpensive rare items is very nice. If anything, the prices of high-end, very good quality weapons and armor is cheaper when the farmers are active, and more expensive when they're not. Crafting materials, especially arcane crystals and arcanite bars, are cheaper. If anything, farmers are driving the prices down, not up.
Part of me thinks it's cheating, because I went through the work everyone else should too. I remember saving up for my elite mount on my warlock (It's cheaper, but it's not free). On the other hand, the classes and talent specs I've chosen are very...sub par...at farming. Very nice for other things, but not great farmers. That's part of the reason I'm levelling a hunter, they just blow through mobs like crazy.
Part of me would rather just buy 500G and send it to one of my new characters so I can level them up in all nice gear. I've played the game, I've got 2 characters at level 60 and a third at 48 (Druid, Warlock, Hunter, if you're curious, the first two are my 60's, and I levelled them both before they got talent respecs, so it was hard mode). I've played the content. A lot. I've also always thought there should be some "shortcut" mode to level up your second or third character, like having them never lose rest state or something.
Yup. Lots of multi-account cancellations. My friend cancelled 3 accounts, his friends cancelled multiple (3-5) accounts each. If a bunch of the people who are running 3-5 accounts cancel down to 1, that's a huge punch in the pocketbook I'd think.
FYI, the way SW:G works (I think) is that you can only have one character per server, which is why most players have multiple accounts.
I know some people who played, up until this week, SW:G. All are fairly hardcore MMORPG'ers who really liked the depth and breadth of character customization and crafting available in SW:G. With that gone, they've all cancelled their accounts, in the (probably vain) hopes that SOE will keep the old ruleset servers around and let n00bs play on the new ruleset.
How many cancellations have happened since the announcement?
Alternatively, how many would it take to change SOE's mind?
Where did you get that? Not from TFA. The Community Reps have said that Warden is generally used as a trigger for intensive GM monitoring, not as an immediate ban. There is generally thought to be a person in the loop here.
I remember when slashdot actually had people who knew what a hash function was reading it.
Bliz's community managers have been cagey about this, but generally it's believed that they don't immediately ban based on Warden reports. Usually a GM will monitor for a pattern of behavior before issuing the ban.
In other words, the Warden system serves to figure out who to watch. If they had to have a person watch everyone for some mythical "pattern of behavior" the game's already high monthly fee would have to go up by a factor of 10 or so, making it somewhat untenable.
How about this solution: Instead of being concerned about Blizzard being able to find you are cheating, go play another game? Nobody is forcing anybody to play WoW.
No, I think you've got the bullshit response.
The nature of hash functions, real hash functions, is the same as a one-way cipher. It takes an arbitrarily long string and turns it into an arbitrarily short string in a fashion that cannot be reconstructed. This is how passwords are stored securely. It's proven, documented, and usually open technology. There are flaws in some hashes (Schneier's writing on some right now actually on his blog), but generally most hashes are thought to be secure, and even the vunlerabilities he's concerned about are with respect to hash collisions, not reversability. Nobody sane questions tha hashes are irreversible.
For more information, please read what a hash function is before posting.
If you for some stupid reason sign a document the plumber presents you with that says he is allowed to unlock your filing cabinets, look through your financial documents, copy what he wants, and report that to his employer or the government, then yes, he's allowed to do that.
It's very clear in the agreement. The agreement that you have to read (or at least scroll the bar all the way to the bottom of) every time there is a patch (every month or so) with only one section in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS that spells out exactly what this program is going to do.
Yeah, we interviewed the heck out of him. I set up a real life meeting before I recommended him in, my boss interviewed him for 2 hours. Standard stuff. It's just a foot in the door is all, another social networking thing.
I got WoW last November.
/played than I'd care to admit. It's saved me a lot of money. I've been cooking more and therefore eating better (eating out takes more time than cooking a good meal typically does) and spending less. All in all, WoW is saving me a lot of money.
I haven't purchased another game since. I reinstalled and played HalfLife 2 for awhile, but that's about it. I've only played WoW. I have two characters (level 50 druid, level 60 warlock) with more time
Will I switch games? Probably not. I've got a time investement in WoW. I've got a social investment in my guild. Heck, I found out a guildie was local to me and appropriate for a job and got him hired for our helpdesk because I knew he was a straightforward easy to work with person based on my WoW experiences with him.
Will I play a single player game again? I've got a PSP for when I'm on the road. So, not bloody likely. I'm looking forward to an expansion, the next patch, and getting my hunter leveled up on a PvP server.
I'm playing WoW right now on my PC while I read this on my Mac Mini.
Am I typical? Dunno, hit the reply button and tell me.
^^^ What he said. Double.
"Oh Noes! I have to take a certain talent tree to do PvP".
Priests have to take the Shadow tree to PvP.
Warriors have to take some combination of Arms/Fury to PvP.
Paladins have to take not-Protection to PvP.
Haven't studied rogues enough to know, but I"m sure they have to take whatever tree Improved Sap isn't in.
Priests who are shadow spec suck in PvE.
Warriors who aren't defense spec suck in PvE.
Paladins who are not protect-spec suck in PvE
Rogues without Improved Sap suck in PvE.
Wow....Pretty much you can decide to optimize your character to be good at PvP or PvE in several different classes! Amazing! Matter of fact, I bet this applies to all classes except Druids, because ALL of their trees suck except their PvE tree, Restoration.
Or would you prefer that every single member of every class have the same abilities? No customization at all? Wait, that wouldn't be good. What you really want is a game where you could play against lots of other players and beat them every time while watching your favorite TV shows. Maybe not even playing, just having a huge macro to do it for you. May I suggest you track down the wonderful game called ProgressQuest? Fantastic interface, and I think you'll find it to your liking as far as the hands-off nature of managing the character and optimizing it to your playstyle.
90% of warlocks are destruction locks?
I don't know ANY on my server. Demonology or MD/Ruin. or SM/Ruin. No "pure" destruction locks with 31 points in the tree. None.
Demo locks aren't locks. They're people who are pissed off at not having rolled a mage, and yet were too stupid to re-roll at a low level, and too stupid to READ THE CLASS DESCRIPTION and UNDERSTAND THE LIMITATIONS before rolling it in the first place. YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO WHEN YOU SIGNED UP YOU DIPSHIT.
Yes, I do read those boards. Usually the people who are critting harder than amage give up every bit of stam and int gear they have for +crit and +dmg. In other words, they're mages, but without any escape abilities because they've screwed themselves out of them. So they pull aggro off the warrior, and get killed because they don't have ice block. Excellent. Way to go, sounds very effective. Personally, I don't like the repair bills that much, but whatever floats your boat. My "escape" is the ability to dish it out AND take it, and if you want to give up all your stats to be able to kill stuff faster, you lose all rights to complain when you get stomped on. You chose poorly.
I never travel to XP zones to get shards. I get shards as I go. Only time I specifically go to collect shards is when I also need to farm cash. Start out with empty bags, end up with full ones and more money.
And if nobody wants to play the class anymore, that's fine by me. Just means more loot heading my way. I just hope they don't dumb the class down enough that you're happy with it. If they do, then it'll be just as easy to play as a rogue.
Well, congratulations. You obviously have waaay better gear than the average warlock. I can see your arguments must make sense from your perspective. The rest of us, however, barely have enough HP to survive the rogues opening and finishing attacks.
:). I've worked hard for it and had some good luck with rolls. Of course, I very rarely have to roll against another warlock, that might be part of the reason why. Other warlocks in my guild have more effective hit points than me, mostly because they spec to Soul Link, whereas I spec to MD/Ruin, gimping myself in PvP and PvE in order to do both somewhat effectively. It's a tradeoff, unlike what you want which is total uberness in all situations.
I do have really nice gear, thanks
But even when I was in greens at level 30-55, I had more hit points than most warriors. Quit buying that +spirit gear and buy +int +stam stuff. Oh, and I've been to MC 4 times. I have 3 pieces of felheart. Why? Because I'm one of 5 warlocks, not one of 15 rogues.
Wow, that's just a super suggestion. Be 2vs1. That would solve any class issues just like that! Why didnt we think of that before?
The designers have repeatedly said the game is not balanced for 1v1 PvP. It's balanced for groups. Maybe you didn't think of it before because you don't read? Teamwork. It's a multiplayer game, right? Multi player...that means...more than one player! Maybe even more than one on my team!
Seriously, the mage has ice block, blink, frost nova and soon invisibility that can help them escape. What do we have? Fear? Don't get me started on the usefulness of fear after nerfings and trinkets. And don't tell me that I should get a certain profession (Engineering, Alchemy), spec into a certain tree (Demonology) or get better gear (Join a guild, do Molten Core for 3 months) just to be on par with other classes!
Ice block: Useless. "Yay! I'm a big noticeable target for 10 seconds!". You can't run, you can't hide, you can't bandage, you can't pop a potion, you just give people more time to see the mage with, what, 15 hit points hanging in the middle of an ice block. In PvE it's nice because it gives the warrior a chance to pull aggro back, just like Fade on a priest. Warlocks shouldn't pull aggro. If you are, you screwed up in a big way. But since you were talking about PvP escapes, ice block isn't even close. It makes an awesome sound, easy to know what happened and if you've got good speakers where. Maybe you should turn the TV down a bit so you can concentrate on the game?
Blink: Awesome. You're 10 feet away now. There are, what, 5 different root spells in the game? Blink's cooldown is how long? Long enough for you to be dead. GG.
Frost Nova: Yup. Freeze me. I'll just throw shadowbolts back at you. Frost nova against ranged classes is useless. Actually it's worse than that, if you use it to open up range you give them what they want. It's also got serious resists, and if you're going to bring up trinkets and nerfings for fear, bring them up for frost nova also, which is on a diminishing returns timer and can be escaped with trinkets, free action potions, and the little-known gnome racial.
Speaking of which, why is it that when fear gets mentioned by warlocks and priests it's all about Will of the Forsaken, PvP Trinkets, Fear Ward, and Blessing of Freedom, but when Frost Nova gets mentioned it's all bout how it's overpowered? Hmm...Escape Artist, PvP Trinkets, Druid Shapeshift, Free Action Potion...all of those things work against frost nova. Many of them work against fear. But Fear's the one with limitations, while frost nova is teh uber! Ask most mages and they'd rather have Fear. Why? Because it opens up range between them and their target, letting them cast big damage spells without interruption and without having to run to open distance.
Ooh...invisibility. Because there aren't any potions to see through that. Or buffs. Oh wait, the potions are there and ludicrously cheap,
Yeah, that was more of a running joke than anything else. Best way to deal with a shaman is with a melee pet (succubus, felhunter, or even voidwalker) with an appropriate totem killing macro. Basically it's just like Decursive, but using PetAttack() instead of casting cleanse or whatever. They generally have far fewer hit points than me, better armor (don't care, if I let them get in range I'm doomed anyway), and they tend to solo a LOT.
They tend to stack fire resist gear, which does them approximately no good against corruption, CoA, or shadowbolts.
The biggest problem with Shaman, and all classes that have dispel capability, is the disparity between the amount of mana it costs to buff/debuff and to dispell buff/debuff. For example, my armor spell (demon armor) costs 1350 mana, and can be dispelled for....80. Costs me about a quarter of a mana bar to cast DA, but can be dispelled for, what, mana regained in 6 second's rest? But that's not a shaman-specific problem, it's a caster problem in general. I think players should get a spell that increases the "sticky" of buffs/debuffs to make them harder and more time/mana consuming.
I use drain soul in PvP.
Rank 1 even. When you have 10 HP left and immolate's about to do it's last tick of damage to my target. Actually, I never use anything but Rank 1 of Drain Soul because the mana/damage is stupidly screwed up. Occasionally I'm down one shard on a combat. Very rarely though, usually only if I get a 2v1 combat and I have to use my healthstone.
Void sac? Maybe. Probably not. Usually I've got a succubus out for mez. Or a felhunter for +60 resists and anti-caster, depends on the balance of players on the other side.
"doesn't make us overpowered in any way"? BS. Not having shards would change the dynamics of the class considerably. You'd actually be able to nuke-to-kill instead of DoT-to-kill if you want to shard something. Totally different battle style. Think about how you end a fight when you don't need a shard from it (shadowbolt or shadowburn). Think about how you end it when you do need a shard (renew immolate at 50% health, maybe shadowbolt or searing pain, wait for 10% or less health and drain soul). It would completely change how the game is played by warlocks, and we'd basically become crit whores with DD spells. If you wanted to be a crit whore with massive direct damage, there's this class called "Mage" you should investigate.
There's a reason why a lot of people don't play warlocks anymore...because they can't read a class description? Or because they ain't all that bright? Oooh, wait, I know, it's because they'd rather roll a weaksauce easy mode shaman or rogue. Love how that works in endgame, my guild had a wait list of 5-10 rogues to get into MC, and was taking trusted non-guild warlocks. I have 3 pieces of Felheart. I know rogues that can't get any of their non-epic class set because they lose rolls to other rogues, while I watch as warlock class bits get DE'd because all the warlocks already have them or better.
If you want to have a spot in any end-game PvE you choose to do, roll a warlock, priest, or druid. If you want to have to wait around spamming Ironforge LFG chat with "60 ROGUE LFG ANYTHING" for hours on end, be my guest. I've seen rogues macro that, and I've gone to shorter instances (Dire Maul North) completed them and come back to Ironforge to see the same rogues spamming the same things. They just never get picked up. Ever.
Getting and keeping a full inventory of shards is easy. Incredibly, ludicrously easy. Stupidly easy. The only time I run low is when lag gets bad and I can't time my casting right.
The secret is to keep a huge buffer on hand for when you can't collect or don't have time to. I typically keep 32 shards on hand at all times, and try to carry 48 if I'm going into Molten Core or somewhere else that I won't have a lot of opportunities to collect shards. That way if you miss a few, it's no big deal.
Every single thing the poster asked for was "more power". Either through an escape spell or getting rid of shard requirements. Don't dumb down the class to cater to idiots.
OK, let's examine other escape mechanisms from that perspective:
Ice Block: Hmm...Yeah, pretty much the same.
Polymorph: Hmm...yeah, pretty much the same.
Power Word:Shield....Yeah, pretty the same.
It's NO DIFFERENT. NONE.
Working Escape Mechanisms: Pally Shield + Hearth, Rogue Vanish+Stealth, and Druid Travel Form. That's it. And these are all generally considered pretty lame.
Besides, it's called World of WARcraft, not World of RUN AWAY craft.
*sigh* /played at 60. You're an idiot.
I have a level 60 warlock with, well, entirely too many days
For the uninitiated, there are a bunch of warlocks on the forums that think all warlocks should be buffed to the point of uberness. We are currently very balanced, and deadly in the right hands. We can be killed by rogues. We can kill just about anyone else with varying degrees of difficulty. Rogues can be killed by, well, just about anyone they don't get the drop on, including warlocks. Rogues can kill anyone except shaman (nobody kills shaman, they're a trifle imbalanced) and plate wearing classes. Player skill is more important in PvP than player class. Your refusal to acknowledge that you may need to learn to play your class a bit more is just tiring, and really makes us all look like whiners.
Soul Shards: Please go read the class description. You should have known what you were getting into when you signed up. Your lack of ability to RTFM is not my (or Blizzard's) problem.
Escape Spell: You have more hit points than any given mage or priest COMBINED, unless you have really exceptionally bad gear. I routinely have almost 5K, unbuffed, with my PvE gear on. My PvP gear has more stamina on it. Here's your escape spell to keep from getting ganked by rogues: Team up with a rogue. Be bait. You're supposed to be rogue bait, just as priests and mages are rogue bait. Teamwork. Remember, this is a MULTIPLAYER game, not a big, long, solo event. Keep a succubus out, or sacrifice your precious voidwalker, and then deal with the rogue. Then, at some point, explain to me how ice block saves a mage from a rogue. Or an 8 second easily dispellable polymorph that fully heals it's target helps a mage with a rogue. 8 seconds won't open ANY distance for the mage, rogues have that Dash ability to close the distance back up again, and that's about all polymorph lasts in PvP. Or tell why a priest should go ANYWHERE alone. This is a MULTIPLAYER game. Make some friends.
End game pets: Yeah, they suck. Sorry, no arguments here.
Enslave Demon: About right for the abilities gained. There are ways to mitigate the danger and prevent the diminishing returns. If you haven't found them yet, maybe you should roll a mage? I mean, you get to take a world demon and make it your pet for usually about 5 minutes. Compare to priest mind control, which only works for 30 seconds and can be used in the same circumstances. Enslave is a great spell, and the only thing that keeps it from being too powerful is that there aren't that many world demons, and that many world demons are immune to enslave.
Voidwalker: If you're counting on him for DPS, you're doing it wrong. You have more than one pet. Many warlocks forget that. Evil looking chick with a tail, that ring any bells for you? That's your balanced DPS/survivability pet. Maybe you've not done that quest?
Invisibility: Eh, let 'em have it. I can see 'em anyway. If it'll give them a false sense of security and make me more wanted (because my Detect Greater Invisibility spell will actually do something), I'm all in favor of it. Mages are pretty easy meat.
If you're going to complain about something, complain about end-game caster itemization (caster items don't increase DPS nearly as much as melee items), or that the Warlock PvP trinket doesn't do anything we can't already do with a felhunter, or that the Warlock PvP set is the same as the Priest set.
Quit dragging out these pointless "Warlocks Suck" arguments, come up with some new ones. These are old, tired, disproven, and just highlight your stupidity.
Found here
So basically he's saying it is and should be a local decision, and if asked to make it what he'd do. It's purely hypothetical, a person expressing an opinion. Whether you feel it's a right or wrong opinion, it's an opinion that can be expressed. Even though he's the President, he carefully set his answer as a personal opinion, not a policy opinion, and nearly expressed gratitude to not be in the position to have to make that decision. I hate to defend the guy, but the press is blowing this thing out like crazy.
Second, on the general topic of Intelligent Design:
If you were a professor of a "design for gods" class, and you tasked your students with developing an ecosphere specifically designed to support an intelligent animal, how would you rate the student who created the Earth and humans? Let's see: prone to infections via viruses and bacteria, bipedal for reduced stability and running speed, high possibility for very fair skin that burns on exposure to UV radiation AND an atmosphere which allows plenty of UV through, various allergic reactions and mutations. Oh, and the kicker, just to make sure the student had no chance of passing: Let's run all the nasty excretory organs which produce plentiful toxic flora right in parallel with the reproductive organs! Yeah, that won't screw anything up.
There are people that complain about how Microsoft produces shoddy products that are frequently overrun by viruses and security problems, and yet believe we are perfectly and wonderfully made.
Agreed.
Microcenter also has about the best return policy in the business. On most things they don't charge a restock fee. If you give them enough personal info (address + phone) they can re-create your reciept if you lose it. They have good prices on parts. They always have the cable I'm looking for, usually in the length I need, including weirdo SCSI and fibre cables.
Their Apple people generally have more product knowledge than the Apple employees at CompUSA, and just slightly less than the ones at the Apple store.
No commercial interest in them, just want to give a good company a little rep bonus.
You're overlooking the real value here, which was pretty much all accomplished before the aircraft left the ground. The materials science and engineering done to create an aircraft for this mission is the practical purpose. The actual flight was just to show that (1) it all worked, and (2) to provide the sponsors with incentive to foot the bill.
Keep in mind that the aircraft was yet another fine product of Scaled Composites, makers of SpaceShip 1, Voyager, and a host of other projects found on their website. They're pretty much the leading edge of aerospace engineering, and projects like this help advance the state of the art with private funding. In other words, if you want privately funded research in this field, you're going to need to get really smart, frugal, practical companies backed by people with lots of money in order to get oustanding results.
As opposed to good old NASA, flying (err...not flying?) a 25 year old space shuttle on 35 year old design, and spending who-knows-how-much-now on the ISS, where there's no science, but lots of "hey, we're stuck up here and there's not enough food" happening. Maybe it's time for more private funding for this kind of thing? It seems to be getting good results.
But the underlying question is, why are Americans apathetic about politics?
Because we have no control over anything. Your vote does not count, not because the person you voted for may or may not get elected, but because no matter who gets elected, within a month of being elected they become the same corrupt piece of politician that you voted for them to NOT be.
Consider, for a moment, the "Conservative" and "Small Government" Republicans. Voting for the biggest (1.4 trillion dollar and rising) entitlement program ever, the Medicare Prescription Drug act, aka Viagra for Seniors. Which is basically a huge spending program to benefit pharmaceutical companies and extend government power. Voting for and signing budgets to create ever larget budget deficits and more debt. Growing government at a pace unprecedented since FDR. They'll talk a good game on Social Security reform, but it will NEVER happen because it reduces the amount of money they have to play with. They'll talk about simplifying the tax code, but that would give up the legislative line-item veto on your household budget, so that will NEVER happen.
It doesn't matter who is in what office. A politician's vote is decided by two things: what will expand their power more and who has the most money in their checking account. The broadcast flag is STRICTLY a means for politicians to line their pockets at the expense of something a very small but ineptly vocal majority will not like.
Not all Americans are apathetic because we are lazy. Some of us are apathetic because we know, no matter what actions we take or money we donate, the results will not change.
But, I'm not bitter or anything.
Or it'll just offshore all the development and deployment and leave sales operations here in the states. Great! More offshoring! Way to go Congress!
IGE is helping people circumvent a contract they agreed to. The contract specifically states that stuff (goods and currency) in-game cannot be sold for real currency.
Legal? Probably. After all, IGE didn't agree to the contract, they're acting as a middle man.
Ethical? Not in my beliefs. Helping someone break a contract they agreed to is not ethical, and is no more ethical than providing an alibi for someone who is cheating on a spouse. Assisting someone in breaking a lawful and binding agreement is not ethical.
Why is this on Slashdot? Well, they're using a game plugin to create a website that catalogs game objects (quests, NPC's and objects). They are likely using that same data to find good things to sell and good worlds to sell them on, and they'll know exactly what they need to do to get the items. Essentially, they're using me to collect data, spyware style. Of course, I use the collected data to find the same things on my own, but if there are other sites I can use the collected data from that are not involved in destroying the economy on my server (and there are) I'll swtich.
I'm uninstalling the plugin when I get home and switching to a cleaner one that doesn't have this...taint...associated with it.
I've been playing for about a month now. I play on what's probably a medum high-pop server, but I've not seen a queue, even logging on at 7PM CT. If you don't pick one of the insanely high pop servers, you're probably not going to see problems.
:).
The biggest problems I've had:
1. The auction house is very slow. The city the auction house is in is very slow. Some of the surrounding countryside around the city with the auction house is very slow. I had instant-cast spells take 8 seconds. If you roll a dwarf or gnome, get to level 5 and head to Stormwind to get away from the auction house. You can do all of the human quests for level 5-15 and it'll go a lot more smoothly. You can always return and mop up the lower level quests (if you want the positive faction reputation points) when they get the auction house fixed, which they're working on.
2. The login servers, the servers that handle auth and character selection for startup, they suck. They're plagued with outages. Daily outages. Fortunately, they're usually resolved within a half hour or so. And, if you're already in-game, you don't even notice the login server outages. You need the login server to be up for about 30 seconds per day, so the odds are in your favor.
The good news?
If you pick a server with a medium to medium-high pop, you'll have very very few problems (you'll have more luck finding people to group with on servers with more people, but too many people on the server and you'll have queueing to get in). There is a site (www.wowcensus.com or something) that will feed you population statistics. Keep in mind those are voluntary reports, and may or may not be accurate. A better idea is to visit the forums at worlofwarcraft.com and see what realms get the most complaints
Also, the higher your level, the more time you'll spend in less-populated areas. My lvl 36 warlock spends a lot of time out in the boonies running down quests, and I have no performance issues at all until I return to a big city to sell stuff. My level 11 priest is in one of the lowbie areas, and it's not bad, but it will occasionally act funny (3 second lag on body looting, for example). My theory is a lot of people are playing one character up to level 15 or so, deciding they don't like that class/race/faction, and are picking up new characters. Nothing wrong with that, I did it myself. But, that keeps a higher-than-normal pop in the newbie and lowbie areas.
Finally, the game is a LOT of fun. Seriously. Very well thought out quests, neat items, I haven't had to farm monsters to get levels (almost all of my levelling has been from quests). Find a good guild on a good world and you'll have support structures to help you (higher level guildies pass down loot they can't use to lower level members, and you'll be expected to be generous when you get there).
That said, have I had problems? Yeah, I was trying to play on a Saturday evening and it took about 30 minutes to log in. Given that I've played nearly every day for a little over a month, I'd say that's a pretty decent rate of failure. I had one time I was on and got a broadcast message that the server was going to be rebooted in 20 minutes. I finished up what I was doing in about 10 minutes, logged out, played with the dog for a half hour, and logged back in. Honestly, I'd rather have them reboot the server periodically than ignore problems. So my failure/outage rate with the game has probably been about 3 to 5%. If your PS2 had a, say, 1 in 25 chance that a game you put into it would require you to clean the lens of the DVD player, would you still play? Most likely. It's not a matter of 4 out of 5, it's more on the scale of 1 in 25 or so.
Oh, and my warlock has a pointy hat. How cool is that? Blizzard gets bonus cool points for pointy hats. Now I just want a high-level crafting skill that lets me create self-propelled luggage with the attitude of a badly raised pit bull.
Blizzard could do better. But they're doing pretty good overall. Good enough that when someone on the boards says "I've had enough of the outages and queues, I'm cancelling my account" most of the replies are "Bummer for you. Hey can I have your stuff?"