Blizzard has several different studios. The main one's working on World of Warcraft (they're working on the expansion, The Burning Crusade atm); Blizzard North, which made the Diablo games, is working on some new unannounced project, and Swinging Ape Studios are working on SC: Ghost. So no, the company isn't really focusing on only one game.
Lack of dedication and work ethic? Get a clue, mate. Blizzard is arguably the best game developer in the world. The reason why they're indefinitely delaying Starcraft: Ghost is probably because it's not amazingly great, not because they just can't be bothered working on it anymore. Blizzard, unlike Electronic Arts, don't make games for the same of making money per se; they make games because they love games. Because their games have all been extremely successful, and because they've got millions of die-hard fans, releasing something that's below their quality standard would only tarnish their name. They've got enough money, so they can afford to indefinitely delay a project. Ever heard of Warcraft Adventures? They completely cancelled that game after years of development because it didn't live up to their standards.
BBC's 2005 UK Gamer Research Shows Different
on
Adults Love Video Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
BBC's 2005 UK Gamer research shows quite different results.
In the UK, most gamers are young, and the percentage of gamers in each age group decreases for older age groups. Also, in all age groups, male gamers outnumber female gamers slightly.
I find it a bit hard to believe that the gaming culture in the US is drastically different from the UK one. I think the different results are mainly due to different research methodologies and different definitions of things such as "gamer". For example, the CES people got their survey results from teenagers via telephone, and adult results via Web-form survey. If somebody asked me how much I play face to face or over the telephone, I'd be more likely to understate how much I really play (because I'm kinda embarassed by how much I play games). I'd give a more truthful answer to a paper or a Web form.
The full report costs $499 USD. Without access to that it's kinda hard to judge how good or poor the study's research really was.
May a Magic: The Gathering player offer money to his opponent during a tournament game for not playing his UberBadAssCardOfPwnage?
MMOs are games, and money in those games are part of it. Real world laws and politics have no say over it. It's up to the game creator to decide the rules. Blizzard will ban you if you buy or sell gold because they believe it degrades the sense of achievment players get from working for their rewards. And A Magic: The Gathering referee will probably tell you to leave if you try to buy your way to victory in a tournament game.
EVE Online apparently went through 11 development cycles, with several complete re-codes, over a period of a few years. Their graphics / MMO engine was so ambitious at the time that the developers couldn't do it one big go, so they did it in numerous steps. For them, it paid off.
Feedback systems can always be exploited in some way. Nobody would want to give feedback, even if the a$$hole in the group deserves it, in fear of getting negative feedback in return. You'd have every player ask for positive feedback after every dungeon run, which would be annoying, and it would be hard to say "you did alright, but not quite good enough to deserve a positive rating" to mediocre players you got along, but didn't really have a great time, with. Honestly evaluating people may offend them.
eBay's simpler than a social game. On eBay, you're happy if you get your stuff in the mailbox on time, or if the buyer pays you prompty - that's more or less all there's too the interaction. In a MMORPG, there are way more variables which make up how happy you are with somebody, and so the scale is much finer. If you'd keep the MMORPG feedback system simple (with, say, negative, neutral, and positive), then everyone will expect positive feedback (like on eBay), and the system wouldn't give much indication as to how good (skilled, polite, helpful etc.) the players really are. Make it too complex, and you'll have the problem with players getting pissed off at not getting MAX/MAX points at the end of every group. Also, you'd probably end up having guilds unbiasly give each other feedback, as somebody else already said...
A system like this could be helpful. People would know and remember who the ninja looters are, but it could also be abused (false "ninjalooter!!" accusations could be made" - although maybe this could be solved like on eBay, with a function for being able to comment on some feedback one has received to defend ones self against such false accusations). In the end, word of mouth of who the nice guys and bad guys are usually gets around, although not to everyone and not very quickly.
Developing a feedback system is probably viewed as merely a nice little bonus feature by developers, and thus isn't something MMORPGs have. It's hard to predict how well such a system will perform and how useful it really will be in practice, so implementing it is a bit risky.
Aye, Quake 3 (and the pro mods) is extremely well-balanced, especially all the weapons as you say, and is therefore still the best action-oriented multiplayer FPS imho. In Unreal Tournament, a lot of the weapons are really quite shit weak in my opinion, and they aren't quite as varied as the ones in Q3. In Q3, every single weapon is useful in some situation. UT is also way too slow, and I feel the maps have too many large areas which favour sniper-like (straight, instant shot) weapons.
FEAR had really ugly level design, and it didn't run all too well on my system, so I didn't play it much... it's a shame as the story seemed kinda good (for a game).
Blizzard have released quite a lot since release. See for yourself: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/imple mented/index.html (Mauradon, Gurubashi Arena, Dire Maul, Azuregos, Lord Kazzak, the PvP honour system, the elemental invasions, PvP Battlegrounds (unlike you, I and many others find them very fun), Blackwing Lair, Darkmoon Faire, Fishing contest, Zul-Gurub 20-man raid zone, Silithus and Searing Gorge revamps, the 4 Dragons, linked auction houses, Ahn'Quiraj (20-man and 40-man raid zones, and s***loads of bugfixes, character class fixes and revamps, and holiday festivals).
Sorry for sounding like a fanboy, but no hobby modders would be able to create content of the same quality Blizzard's content is. Creating an instance isn't simply a couple-of-days 3D Studio Max job (more like couple of weeks to get an internal release done). The thing needs to fit into the game world and into the storyline, and it needs to fulfil the needs of the players. Interesting new encounters take quite a lot of time to design, test and balance, and adding items which are useful yet not game-breaking isn't a simple task either. Then there are all the quests, sound effects and voice acting, artwork - going to concept art to the final textured model doesn't just take a day or two. Loads of people work on instances - writers, game and level designers, modelers, texturers, sound people, and lots of testers.
I don't play Battlefield, but I play a lot of Counter-Strike (been playing since beta 1) and I have come across a lot of community-made stuff (the whole game was a community-made game before 1.6), and even there 3rd party maps tended to suck. First person shooter maps are a lot simpler to create (and even they take weeks of work, lots of testing, and lots of post-release tweaking) than proper WoW instances with all the content. With newer, more sophisticated engines which allow for more polys and higher-res textures, it's getting harder and harder for modders to create high-quality content. Creating maps for CS1.6 which were as good as the official maps was hard - doing so for Counter-Strike: Source is way harder.
And even if Blizzard would let players create content, how would it be integrated into the game world? You can't just let players create new items (they'd all create uber-legendary weapons which drop off rabbits).
The only feasible thing is maybe for Blizzard to hold some sort of a "create a design for a new weapon or other visible item" contest. Creating concept art and models for itemsis something a few people in the community could do. As for whole instances, I doubt any non-professional would be able to create something of the same standards of Blizzard's content.
It really depends on when you join your guild / raid group. To me it sounds like you just tagged along on a Molten Core raid with a bunch of people who already knew what to do. If you're one of the older groups who started raiding the end-game instances when they got released and when strategies on how to beat the bosses weren't widely spread, you wouldn't say the game's easy. Normally it takes weeks of learning to beat the end-game PvP encounters. Weeks of just getting your ass handed to you and having to pay lots of gold for equipment repair costs.
Things do get easier when strategies and tactics spread, true, but it's still hard for a completely new raid group to start being victorious.
Molten Core is the easiest place to get epics, but I wouldn't say it's easier than Stratholme. Stratholme only requires 5 people. MC requires 40. The more people you have, the more likely somebody will make a mistake and things won't go as planned. Okay, people can make minor mistakes in MC - there not everyone *has* to play extremely efficiently. However, in order to beat Razorgore or Nefarion in the Blackwing Lair, everyone does. Beating Razorgore takes most guilds many weeks of training. I'd guess that less than 1% of the player population has beaten Nefarion. And the newest raid zone in WoW, Ahn'Qiraj is even harder than Blackwing Lair...
Well Mr_game_designer_who's_writing_his_own_MMO, how many subscribers does your game have?
WoW isn't half-assed at both PvE and PvP. Both its PvP and PvE games are amazing. And actually World of Warcraft is the most casual-friendly MMO there is. That's why it's so popular. You're totally wrong with your "You have leetsauce gear, or you are a noob" argument. Only a small percentage of the playerbase is into getting a full suit of epix.
Oh, I forgot to mention Codemasters (http://www.codemasters.co.uk/) in my previous post. They're a European publisher and developer (they do both) based in England. They're a f***ing huge company and make loads of different games, ranging from MMORPGs (D&D: Stormreach, DF Online), tactical shooters (Operation Flashpoint), racing games (TOCA series, Colin McRae series), and loads of other stuff.
Some of their sports games (Colin McRae Rally, their snooker and football series) don't seem to get any attention in America and Japan, since those sports aren't very popular there, I guess. Their Colin McRae games are the best rally driving games ever, yet if you search for CMR reviews, you'll only find few, mostly on European gaming sites.
Another game everyone knows of but probably doesn't realise it's made by Europeans:
FarCry (developed by Crytek, a German company).
Part of the reason why a lot of people don't know where games got made is the fact that journalists always mention the publishers first, and the developers second. They give the publishers all the credit, undeservedly so. If you ask a random gamer "Who made Battlefield 2?", he'll say "Electronic Arts", not "DICE".
Do you have a rank 14 character? Achieving this requires like 12+ hours of PvPing each day, for 3 months or so, without any breaks. (For those who don't know, the ranking system in WoW is relative - at the last few ranks, if you stop PvPing for a week, other people will overtake you and you'll have to put in lots of work to get back ahead).
Do you have a character with full epics? If you were in one of the first raid groups on your server, this will take maybe 4-6 months. If you join an existing raid group with members who already have lots of epics, you might make it in less time.
Have you already cleared Blackwing Lair with your raid guild? This is the hardest raid dungeon at the moment, and only the best raid guilds on each server manage to kill Nefarion, the boss of this place.
If you've said "yes" to all that, then you're h4rdc0r3. Otherwise, stop being a would-be elitist.:p
World of Warcraft is very easy to get into, and it's a lot of fun from start to "finish". Getting to level 60 isn't hard, but that doesn't mean there aren't challenges for the ubergrinding, hardcore, obsessive-compulsive, 24/7 gamers.
Read the facts before you talk trash:
http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml
They clearly state that they only count the people currently subscribed, and those who've played from Internet game rooms in the last 7 days only.
World of Warcraft's Customer Definition World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
And JFYI, World of Warcraft was the best-selling PC game of 2005 in the U.S., according to "NDP Group":
Professional snooker is a considered a sport in the United Kingdom (and probably in other places too). They don't really do any more physical movement than a Quake player. And apparently they sometimes even drink a bit of beer while playing. So sport doesn't have to involve physical fitness.
I do consider professional Quake, Counter-Strike etc. a sport, but not as a very serious one. Quakers and Counter-Strikers are teenagers and students who probably will do something completely different for a living in three years. Real sport athlets usually do what they do for life - once their bodies start to physically deteriorate, they often become coaches or commentators or something. Football, rubgy, cricket... those are professional sports. Those games have been established, and they won't change much in the future. Quake, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2 and other games played by pro gamers will be replaced by other games in five years or so, and that's why I think professional gaming won't ever be big - the scene's just too dynamic.
Yeah, but how many people play those games? A few hundred? Maybe a few thousand? I wonder why they aren't very popular. Maybe they just suck, but maybe most people who are going to spend some time playing games actually want to play a game in which IRL rich people can't cheat their way through.
Penny Arcade is a geek gamer site, not a "normal" gamer site. What I'm saying is, the gamers who actually give a sh*t about Penny Arcade probably play Tux Racer or Soldat or Minesweeper. Large corporate gaming sites like GameSpy, GameSpot or IGN are probably quite a bit more influential.
But anway... Blizzard doesn't need gaming sites to tell them they've got a problem. If you have a look at their forums, you see dozens of people being critical every minute of every hour of every day. Those are the people Blizzard cares about, actual customers, not Penny freaking Arcade.
I've never spent more than 10 minutes running from A to B in World of Warcraft. I'm level 40 btw, so I'm not just talking about the low-level game.
Most quests in the game can be completed in less than 30 minutes (from start to finish).
Running from the graveyard to your body: dude, check your watch. The longest I ever spent running from the graveyard to my body was just over 4 minutes.
de_piranesi
de_torn (I'm not sure if this one's in CS:S)
cs_backalley (again, not sure if this one's in CS:S)
de_dust2 (even though it's a bit over-played)
Those are some great maps too.:)
It's too bad that Blizzard / Vivendi doesn't give us Europeans a treat for making us wait for months until we can play their game (hopefully the wait will soon be over). There's no good reason for the delays over here, except for bad project management. Obviously, they can do what they want, but it's quite pathetic that Europeans are always (except for now, of course -/salute City of Heroes dudes!) treated as second-class customers by American MMORPG developers/publishers. We're just as large, MMORPG gamer-wise, as the Americans.
It's too bad that City of Heroes is only getting released in Europe this late. With World of Warcraft getting released some time in February too (presumably), most MMORPG gamers probably won't give a damn about CoH.
Slashdot Mirror
Know Westwood Studios? They don't have the rights to the Command & Conquer franchise anymore.
Blizzard has several different studios. The main one's working on World of Warcraft (they're working on the expansion, The Burning Crusade atm); Blizzard North, which made the Diablo games, is working on some new unannounced project, and Swinging Ape Studios are working on SC: Ghost. So no, the company isn't really focusing on only one game. Lack of dedication and work ethic? Get a clue, mate. Blizzard is arguably the best game developer in the world. The reason why they're indefinitely delaying Starcraft: Ghost is probably because it's not amazingly great, not because they just can't be bothered working on it anymore. Blizzard, unlike Electronic Arts, don't make games for the same of making money per se; they make games because they love games. Because their games have all been extremely successful, and because they've got millions of die-hard fans, releasing something that's below their quality standard would only tarnish their name. They've got enough money, so they can afford to indefinitely delay a project. Ever heard of Warcraft Adventures? They completely cancelled that game after years of development because it didn't live up to their standards.
BBC's 2005 UK Gamer research shows quite different results.
U K_Games_Research_2005.pdf
http://open.bbc.co.uk/newmediaresearch/files/BBC_
In the UK, most gamers are young, and the percentage of gamers in each age group decreases for older age groups. Also, in all age groups, male gamers outnumber female gamers slightly.
I find it a bit hard to believe that the gaming culture in the US is drastically different from the UK one. I think the different results are mainly due to different research methodologies and different definitions of things such as "gamer". For example, the CES people got their survey results from teenagers via telephone, and adult results via Web-form survey. If somebody asked me how much I play face to face or over the telephone, I'd be more likely to understate how much I really play (because I'm kinda embarassed by how much I play games). I'd give a more truthful answer to a paper or a Web form.
The full report costs $499 USD. Without access to that it's kinda hard to judge how good or poor the study's research really was.
May a Magic: The Gathering player offer money to his opponent during a tournament game for not playing his UberBadAssCardOfPwnage? MMOs are games, and money in those games are part of it. Real world laws and politics have no say over it. It's up to the game creator to decide the rules. Blizzard will ban you if you buy or sell gold because they believe it degrades the sense of achievment players get from working for their rewards. And A Magic: The Gathering referee will probably tell you to leave if you try to buy your way to victory in a tournament game.
EVE Online apparently went through 11 development cycles, with several complete re-codes, over a period of a few years. Their graphics / MMO engine was so ambitious at the time that the developers couldn't do it one big go, so they did it in numerous steps. For them, it paid off.
= 3l t.asp?a=download&vid=41
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/?type
http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Defau
Feedback systems can always be exploited in some way. Nobody would want to give feedback, even if the a$$hole in the group deserves it, in fear of getting negative feedback in return. You'd have every player ask for positive feedback after every dungeon run, which would be annoying, and it would be hard to say "you did alright, but not quite good enough to deserve a positive rating" to mediocre players you got along, but didn't really have a great time, with. Honestly evaluating people may offend them.
eBay's simpler than a social game. On eBay, you're happy if you get your stuff in the mailbox on time, or if the buyer pays you prompty - that's more or less all there's too the interaction. In a MMORPG, there are way more variables which make up how happy you are with somebody, and so the scale is much finer. If you'd keep the MMORPG feedback system simple (with, say, negative, neutral, and positive), then everyone will expect positive feedback (like on eBay), and the system wouldn't give much indication as to how good (skilled, polite, helpful etc.) the players really are. Make it too complex, and you'll have the problem with players getting pissed off at not getting MAX/MAX points at the end of every group. Also, you'd probably end up having guilds unbiasly give each other feedback, as somebody else already said...
A system like this could be helpful. People would know and remember who the ninja looters are, but it could also be abused (false "ninjalooter!!" accusations could be made" - although maybe this could be solved like on eBay, with a function for being able to comment on some feedback one has received to defend ones self against such false accusations). In the end, word of mouth of who the nice guys and bad guys are usually gets around, although not to everyone and not very quickly.
Developing a feedback system is probably viewed as merely a nice little bonus feature by developers, and thus isn't something MMORPGs have. It's hard to predict how well such a system will perform and how useful it really will be in practice, so implementing it is a bit risky.
Aye, Quake 3 (and the pro mods) is extremely well-balanced, especially all the weapons as you say, and is therefore still the best action-oriented multiplayer FPS imho. In Unreal Tournament, a lot of the weapons are really quite shit weak in my opinion, and they aren't quite as varied as the ones in Q3. In Q3, every single weapon is useful in some situation. UT is also way too slow, and I feel the maps have too many large areas which favour sniper-like (straight, instant shot) weapons.
FEAR had really ugly level design, and it didn't run all too well on my system, so I didn't play it much... it's a shame as the story seemed kinda good (for a game).
Blizzard have released quite a lot since release. See for yourself: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/imple mented/index.html (Mauradon, Gurubashi Arena, Dire Maul, Azuregos, Lord Kazzak, the PvP honour system, the elemental invasions, PvP Battlegrounds (unlike you, I and many others find them very fun), Blackwing Lair, Darkmoon Faire, Fishing contest, Zul-Gurub 20-man raid zone, Silithus and Searing Gorge revamps, the 4 Dragons, linked auction houses, Ahn'Quiraj (20-man and 40-man raid zones, and s***loads of bugfixes, character class fixes and revamps, and holiday festivals).
Sorry for sounding like a fanboy, but no hobby modders would be able to create content of the same quality Blizzard's content is. Creating an instance isn't simply a couple-of-days 3D Studio Max job (more like couple of weeks to get an internal release done). The thing needs to fit into the game world and into the storyline, and it needs to fulfil the needs of the players. Interesting new encounters take quite a lot of time to design, test and balance, and adding items which are useful yet not game-breaking isn't a simple task either. Then there are all the quests, sound effects and voice acting, artwork - going to concept art to the final textured model doesn't just take a day or two. Loads of people work on instances - writers, game and level designers, modelers, texturers, sound people, and lots of testers.
I don't play Battlefield, but I play a lot of Counter-Strike (been playing since beta 1) and I have come across a lot of community-made stuff (the whole game was a community-made game before 1.6), and even there 3rd party maps tended to suck. First person shooter maps are a lot simpler to create (and even they take weeks of work, lots of testing, and lots of post-release tweaking) than proper WoW instances with all the content. With newer, more sophisticated engines which allow for more polys and higher-res textures, it's getting harder and harder for modders to create high-quality content. Creating maps for CS1.6 which were as good as the official maps was hard - doing so for Counter-Strike: Source is way harder.
And even if Blizzard would let players create content, how would it be integrated into the game world? You can't just let players create new items (they'd all create uber-legendary weapons which drop off rabbits).
The only feasible thing is maybe for Blizzard to hold some sort of a "create a design for a new weapon or other visible item" contest. Creating concept art and models for itemsis something a few people in the community could do. As for whole instances, I doubt any non-professional would be able to create something of the same standards of Blizzard's content.
It really depends on when you join your guild / raid group. To me it sounds like you just tagged along on a Molten Core raid with a bunch of people who already knew what to do. If you're one of the older groups who started raiding the end-game instances when they got released and when strategies on how to beat the bosses weren't widely spread, you wouldn't say the game's easy. Normally it takes weeks of learning to beat the end-game PvP encounters. Weeks of just getting your ass handed to you and having to pay lots of gold for equipment repair costs.
Things do get easier when strategies and tactics spread, true, but it's still hard for a completely new raid group to start being victorious.
Molten Core is the easiest place to get epics, but I wouldn't say it's easier than Stratholme. Stratholme only requires 5 people. MC requires 40. The more people you have, the more likely somebody will make a mistake and things won't go as planned. Okay, people can make minor mistakes in MC - there not everyone *has* to play extremely efficiently. However, in order to beat Razorgore or Nefarion in the Blackwing Lair, everyone does. Beating Razorgore takes most guilds many weeks of training. I'd guess that less than 1% of the player population has beaten Nefarion. And the newest raid zone in WoW, Ahn'Qiraj is even harder than Blackwing Lair...
Well Mr_game_designer_who's_writing_his_own_MMO, how many subscribers does your game have? WoW isn't half-assed at both PvE and PvP. Both its PvP and PvE games are amazing. And actually World of Warcraft is the most casual-friendly MMO there is. That's why it's so popular. You're totally wrong with your "You have leetsauce gear, or you are a noob" argument. Only a small percentage of the playerbase is into getting a full suit of epix.
Oh, I forgot to mention Codemasters (http://www.codemasters.co.uk/) in my previous post. They're a European publisher and developer (they do both) based in England. They're a f***ing huge company and make loads of different games, ranging from MMORPGs (D&D: Stormreach, DF Online), tactical shooters (Operation Flashpoint), racing games (TOCA series, Colin McRae series), and loads of other stuff.
Some of their sports games (Colin McRae Rally, their snooker and football series) don't seem to get any attention in America and Japan, since those sports aren't very popular there, I guess. Their Colin McRae games are the best rally driving games ever, yet if you search for CMR reviews, you'll only find few, mostly on European gaming sites.
Another game everyone knows of but probably doesn't realise it's made by Europeans:
FarCry (developed by Crytek, a German company).
Part of the reason why a lot of people don't know where games got made is the fact that journalists always mention the publishers first, and the developers second. They give the publishers all the credit, undeservedly so. If you ask a random gamer "Who made Battlefield 2?", he'll say "Electronic Arts", not "DICE".
Achieving this requires like 12+ hours of PvPing each day, for 3 months or so, without any breaks. (For those who don't know, the ranking system in WoW is relative - at the last few ranks, if you stop PvPing for a week, other people will overtake you and you'll have to put in lots of work to get back ahead).
If you were in one of the first raid groups on your server, this will take maybe 4-6 months. If you join an existing raid group with members who already have lots of epics, you might make it in less time.
This is the hardest raid dungeon at the moment, and only the best raid guilds on each server manage to kill Nefarion, the boss of this place.
If you've said "yes" to all that, then you're h4rdc0r3. Otherwise, stop being a would-be elitist.
World of Warcraft is very easy to get into, and it's a lot of fun from start to "finish". Getting to level 60 isn't hard, but that doesn't mean there aren't challenges for the ubergrinding, hardcore, obsessive-compulsive, 24/7 gamers.
Read the facts before you talk trash: http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml They clearly state that they only count the people currently subscribed, and those who've played from Internet game rooms in the last 7 days only.
From http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml
? campaign_id=apn_tech_up&chan=tc
World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
And JFYI, World of Warcraft was the best-selling PC game of 2005 in the U.S., according to "NDP Group":
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8F6N8L0A.htm
Err... What are you guys talking about? http://www.quake4game.com/ http://www.truecrime.com/ Check them out yourself. I'm asked to input my birth date by those sites, not my credit card number.
Professional snooker is a considered a sport in the United Kingdom (and probably in other places too). They don't really do any more physical movement than a Quake player. And apparently they sometimes even drink a bit of beer while playing. So sport doesn't have to involve physical fitness.
I do consider professional Quake, Counter-Strike etc. a sport, but not as a very serious one. Quakers and Counter-Strikers are teenagers and students who probably will do something completely different for a living in three years. Real sport athlets usually do what they do for life - once their bodies start to physically deteriorate, they often become coaches or commentators or something. Football, rubgy, cricket... those are professional sports. Those games have been established, and they won't change much in the future. Quake, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2 and other games played by pro gamers will be replaced by other games in five years or so, and that's why I think professional gaming won't ever be big - the scene's just too dynamic.
Look at the firstline of the category:
>=24 Mb to 32 Mb
I assume this is followed throughout displayed results. Still, it's a little a bit confusing at first, I admit.
So if you've got 512MB, you're in the "512 Mb to 1 Gb" category, not the previous one.
By the way, isn't 'b' bit and 'B' byte? If so, they should've presumably used MB, GB etc. instead of Mb, Gb etc.
Yeah, but how many people play those games? A few hundred? Maybe a few thousand? I wonder why they aren't very popular. Maybe they just suck, but maybe most people who are going to spend some time playing games actually want to play a game in which IRL rich people can't cheat their way through.
Penny Arcade is a geek gamer site, not a "normal" gamer site. What I'm saying is, the gamers who actually give a sh*t about Penny Arcade probably play Tux Racer or Soldat or Minesweeper. Large corporate gaming sites like GameSpy, GameSpot or IGN are probably quite a bit more influential.
But anway... Blizzard doesn't need gaming sites to tell them they've got a problem. If you have a look at their forums, you see dozens of people being critical every minute of every hour of every day. Those are the people Blizzard cares about, actual customers, not Penny freaking Arcade.
Dude, please don't blatantly exaggerate.
I've never spent more than 10 minutes running from A to B in World of Warcraft. I'm level 40 btw, so I'm not just talking about the low-level game.
Most quests in the game can be completed in less than 30 minutes (from start to finish).
Running from the graveyard to your body: dude, check your watch. The longest I ever spent running from the graveyard to my body was just over 4 minutes.
Bird trips also only take 3-4 minutes.
de_piranesi de_torn (I'm not sure if this one's in CS:S) cs_backalley (again, not sure if this one's in CS:S) de_dust2 (even though it's a bit over-played) Those are some great maps too. :)
It's too bad that Blizzard / Vivendi doesn't give us Europeans a treat for making us wait for months until we can play their game (hopefully the wait will soon be over). There's no good reason for the delays over here, except for bad project management. Obviously, they can do what they want, but it's quite pathetic that Europeans are always (except for now, of course - /salute City of Heroes dudes!) treated as second-class customers by American MMORPG developers/publishers. We're just as large, MMORPG gamer-wise, as the Americans.
It's too bad that City of Heroes is only getting released in Europe this late. With World of Warcraft getting released some time in February too (presumably), most MMORPG gamers probably won't give a damn about CoH.
Your best bet is to regularly check www.wow-europe.com. If they've got some sign-up in place, that's where you'll hear about it.
I'm guessing the second phase of the beta won't start for another week or so.