But that's half the point - Blizzard is actively discouraging GBLT friendly guilds, while sitting on their hands about other exclusive guilds. There are plenty of nationality based guilds (I'm in a guild of Australian players), and there is a large number of Christian guilds (and probably other religion based guilds as well). By passively accepting these guilds but actively discouraging gay friendly groups, they're opening themselves to justified criticisms. For my mind, whether or not the GBLT friendly guilds exist is neither here nor there, but making an example of them while leaving other guilds untouched smacks of discrimination.
WoW has in-game marriages like this as well, though perhaps not to that level. But that's not the issue. The issue isn't about players having gay characters, or two same-gender characters trying to get married. The issue is about gay players being able to play in a gay-friendly guild, and Blizzard not allowing them to do so.
I think the main reason for the uproar isn't the "gay rights" issue, though it's certainly part of it. The problem is more that they've just drawn a line in the sand, saying "no real life issues allowed". That's fine, it's their game world and their perogative. However, it's hypocritical of them to allow other guilds based around real life issues like Christian guilds (which exist in large numbers) or nationality based guilds to continue operating, but not allowing guilds based around other real life issues to form.
Yeah, it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup, but I think Blizzard has mis-judged this one. I'd imagine they'll quietly relent in a month or two when everything has settled down.
Personally, I don't think Starcraft: Ghost should be in there either. Sure, it's been in development for a long time, but Blizzard are renowned for taking a long time to develop games, and it shows through in their track record. Good games take time to develop, companies like Rockstar North and Blizzard who take their time in development produce the highest quality games (eg GTA series, Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo etc).
I'd rather they took their time to get things right, rather than the EA model of "ready or not it must ship on date x" and releasing disappointing games.
This is the same reason you've never seen a licensed Ferrari in a game that (even tangentially) involves running from the police. They'll happily license to games like Gotham Racing which don't involve police chases, but something like Need For Speed: Most Wanted is definitely out.
Yeah we have that here in Australia too (along with pretty severe download limits), but that's not what TFA is about. What they want to do is divide websites into different categories, and then charge different amounts for different categories. For example, the biggest sites on the net might get classified "Premium" sites -- Google, Amazon, eBay, CNN, maybe even/. -- which you then have to pay extra for.
Want to use a P2P service? Extra charge.
Want to access a site that has streaming content? Extra charge.
Online gaming? Extra charge.
Pr0n? You'll need to purchase our "protect-the-kiddies" plan, it's only $69 extra per month!! Without it, you can still access up to five jpg images per month!
Clearly they've forgotten that "their" bandwidth is something that we (and the content providers we access) already pay through the nose for.
Well spotted! I find it hard to believe that it's just a coincidence, especially when considering that the virus only targets proprietary formats like.doc and.pdf, while leaving opendoc files alone.
I think you're right, but only up to a point. MC has been in the game since launch in November 2004 - that's nearly 15 months ago. It's not surprising that the strategies are well-known, so that even newly created guilds won't have a huge problem running through it. Heck, it was at least six months before anyone managed to take down Onyxia, at the time the hardest encounter in the game, but I've seen guilds kill her with only 15 people!
Blackwing Lair is different though. Rather than the MC-style "tank and heal the main boss while other groups deal with the adds" encounters, Blackwing Lair actually takes real skill and participation from pretty much every member of the raid for things to work. For example the Vael fight requires four rotating tanks to counter his "instant death after 30 seconds" ability. If every aspect of the fight doesn't go perfectly, you're looking at a wipe, though at least the fight is over in 3-4 minutes either way. Other encounters require absolutely perfect positioning of both the mob and the different roles (eg keeping casters/healers in line of sight of the tank, but out of the monster's line of sight), not to mention the timing and placement of offtanks and secondary offtanks.
And then you get to the Nefarion encounter, where he has abilities beyond anything you've seen before. Stage one of the encounter involves fighting at least 42 of his Drakonid minions, while he's running around invulnerable and casting shadow bolts and polymorphs. Once you're done there, he starts his class calls, which are customised debuffs for each class. EG Rogues get automatically teleported and stunlocked directly in his line of fire; priests casting heals end up casting debuffs instead; hunters get their equipped ranged weapons reduced to zero durability; mages polymorph random teammates; warriors get stuck in beserker stance etc. Getting around these takes real skill and knowledge from everyone in the raid. Finally, once he's at around 20%, all 42 of the elite mobs you killed before get resurrected, and you still have to fight him and his class calls. Anyone who takes down Nefarian has earned good rewards.
As Blackwing Lair strategies become more widely known, it will probably become almost as easy (or as practiced) as the Molten Core. At which point the hardcore guilds have moved on to AQ40, and eventually Naxxramos. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that over time, things that are difficult at first become much much easier. I suggest that you have trouble with Stratholme because you don't run it very often. If you ran it as often as MC, you'd probably breeze through it with ease.
Hate to make a "me too!" post, but I'm definitely seeing the same thing. I've had GMail for about 18 months now, and from the time I signed up until about December 2005 I was getting spam about one message per week. Since then, it's jumped significantly up to around 10 messages per day. This didn't seem to coincide with anything in particular, I've never posted the address anywhere or given it to any company I was even vaguely suspicious of. It doesn't particularly bother me as they all end up in the spam folder, but it's still frustrating to watch the folder balloon in size.
1. Open your Gmail account
2. Go to Options, turn the Web Clips bar back on
3. Open up your spam folder, click on the handy (but probably sponsored) links
4. Cook meal
5. Tasty profit!!
I've been playing WoW since the open beta, and I've got a pretty reasonable idea of how the servers work just through observation. Basically, the game world is split into servers - the game world is identical across all servers (except of course for the characters).
Each "server" is actually a small cluster, probably a rack-sized cluster of machines, with each machine performing only one specific function. Each cluster has two world servers (one for each continent - Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms), which track the player's location and handle the PvE/PvP/NPC interactions. The server's items database is on a separate machine, I presume this is also where the loot tables are located. The cluster also includes an "instance" server which performs the same tasks as the world servers but limited only to the instance dungeons, a chat server which (obviously) looks after all the chat and mail functions, and an authentication server which deals with login requests and queues.
I'm sure there are other machines in the cluster, this is just what I've figured out from watching how the game works over the last 14 or so months. As a another poster mentioned, the servers are believed to run on Linux and Oracle, but I don't know if this has ever been confirmed.
Relating this back to the topic at hand, it's surprising the entire server cluster would go down just because of a large number of people in one area. Usually this is limited to just one of the continents, and people on the other continent or in an instance aren't affected. I don't think it's productive to simply whine about Blizzard like the article submitter, as they were reasonably proactive about limiting crowds. When it was obvious that Medivh would be the first server to complete the quest and open the gates, Blizzard disabled character creation on those servers. The world event was also set up to create several points of interest in other areas, spreading out the crowds from just around the gate. GMs were also on hand and teleporting any players under level 50 out of the area around the gate. I'm sure they've done an awful lot of stress testing of the event internally (the event itself wasn't available on the test server), but it's the first one they've orchestrated and teething problems are to be expected. I'll be surprised if the next world event suffers from similar problems. With that said, Blizzard got lucky with Medivh being the first to open the gates as they're a PvE server. I'll be quite interested to see how the servers hold up when the crowds watching the opening on a PvP server aren't just standing around but are fighting as well.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this!! Pre-release marketing seems to entirely revolve around pre-rendered cinematics or cutscenes, and show nothing of the actual gameplay! Witness the original World of Warcraft trailer - not one second of gameplay footage, just pre-rendered crap that isn't even in the game! GTA: San Andreas was also guilty of this; pretty much all three trailers were composed of cutscene footage, though they at least appeared in the game, used the game engine, and were skippable!
I think this is partly a symptom of the generation leap from PS2/Xbox/GC to PS3/X360/Revolution. As developers get better and better at developing for the new generation of systems, they rely less on FMV and pre-rendered cinematics and more on the capabilities of the new system. The same thing happened in PC gaming with the switch from floppies to CDs in the mid-90s. Suddenly there's heaps more space on the game media, so chucking on some filler FMVs is pretty cost-effective.
Yes, but apparently what pirates love about BitTorrent is that unlike, say, KaZaA where a folder is shared and someone can get busted for every single file available, adding up to millions of dollars, with BitTorrent they can only prove that you downloaded *one* file. Sure, they might set something up to track people across different torrents, but there are thousands upon thousands of torrents posted every single day, and monitoring all of them would be exceedingly difficult. Not to mention the technical issues imposed by dynamic IPs and such.
Sure, you're not anonymous while using BitTorrent, in fact quite the opposite as you rightly point out, but the potential damage is limited compared to other p2p options and thus it's not such an appealing financial target for the content cartels. Sueing/C&D-ing the aggregator sites is probably the best approach which they seemed to follow for awhile, but since the shutdown of Suprnova 14 months ago I havn't seen any successful shutdowns involving torrent aggregators. I'd say a piracy shakeup is looming and probably overdue.
The search function on bittorrent.com now filters out copyrighted results, as [BT creator] Bram Cohen signed an agreement with the MPAA. The best places to download torrents from are the torrent aggregator sites - suprnova.org was the best known of these but it was shut down ages ago. I think Slyck.com has a list of torrent aggregator sites; I know a few but I'd rather not post them;)
uTorrent can do the single port forwarding thing as well. I can't remember where the option is (I don't have it installed on this PC, I'm at work), but it's definitely there.
If your PC is more than a year or so old, I fully recommend trying uTorrent. You get almost all the functionality of Azureus, without the CPU/RAM hogging. On my poor old PC (Athlon 1800XP @ 1.49Ghz, 1G of RAM), I could pretty much only run Freecell and Firefox before my machine would start to struggle. uTorrent, by comparison, puts almost no load on the system. Sometimes I even forget it's running!
Azureus was definitely the best BT client out there a year ago, but I think it's day has done. Most people I know have switched over to uTorrent, and I'm seeing that the swarms I download from.
I've had and maintained Windows boxes fairly constantly for the last 15 years, and to date the only Windows virus I've had problems with was CIH (aka Chernobyl). That was pretty bad though, a completely busted hard drive.
The only other virus to penetrate my defences was stoned.angelina, back in the DOS days. Don't think I even had a virus scanner back then.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm *not* one of these griefers, but I've seen them many many times on my server. Since they don't directly affect me most of the time, I think their antics are childish, but at least they're original and funny (when it's not you!).
You're right in that there's no benefit to the griefer for doing so other than laughs when they post screenshots of their mischief on the forums. It's not like the Diablo games where killing another player meant you could loot their gear, and the only effect on the player is that they have to potentially spend a few minutes running back to their corpse.
Farming in WoW basically means grinding the same areas over and over again. Some mobs drop higher amounts of loot than others, and these are the biggest targets for the farmers. One high level zone has very few quests near said mobs, so people grinding those monsters repeatedly are probably farming. Some people do target the farmers and harass them whenever possible, but since there's no real reward for doing so, it doesn't last long.
Yep! I'm on the US Blackrock server, our friendly local griefers are a guild called "Fun and Games" (FAG).
They've done some hilariously evil stuff over the past year: ninja looting, sabotaging raids, conspiring with Alliance players to grief Horde (they're a Horde guild). Plenty of ganking Alliance as well.
They've done stuff like use the Warlock's Summon ability to summon a player into Gurubashi Arena (where anyone, including your own faction, can attack you) and then kill them. Another trick is standing at the edge of a several thousand foot cliff and using Mind Control or Fear to make someone fall to their death. Doing this on the boat between islands or the zeppelin/tram between major cities is also hilarious. My personal favourite is the Warlock spell Ritual of Doom. This spell summons a very powerful demon, but it requires four other people to cast and casting will randomly kill one of the participants. Also, the demon must be immediately enslaved by the Warlock, otherwise it will start attacking the other players. The trick is to get yourself to low health, then go to a low-level area and ask for some help casting a spell. Summon the demon, then use the Life Tap spell (which sacrifices health for mana) to kill yourself, while the demon kills the other low-level players in one hit. Hilarious when it's not you. There are heaps of other stories as well, but I can't think of more offhand.
Not to mention that their plan is designed to get them all killed, and fast. Divine Intervention straight away? AoE fear? Not to mention Leroy wants the Devout shoulders - why would you want cloth armour as a paladin? As you said, if someone draws additional aggro, you let them die. Anybody who didn't learn that in the Deadmines shouldn't really be playing WoW;)
Whereas with the two competing HD formats, I don't think you will find entertainment titles that will be exclusive to a given format.
I don't think this is the case. I'm pretty sure that major studios are supporting one or the other, possibly because of exclusivity contracts (but that's just speculation). Regardless, Sony Pictures owns a significant chunk of the market, and I'd be very surprised if any of their films were released on HD-DVD. That's just not The Sony Way.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's half the point - Blizzard is actively discouraging GBLT friendly guilds, while sitting on their hands about other exclusive guilds. There are plenty of nationality based guilds (I'm in a guild of Australian players), and there is a large number of Christian guilds (and probably other religion based guilds as well). By passively accepting these guilds but actively discouraging gay friendly groups, they're opening themselves to justified criticisms. For my mind, whether or not the GBLT friendly guilds exist is neither here nor there, but making an example of them while leaving other guilds untouched smacks of discrimination.
WoW has in-game marriages like this as well, though perhaps not to that level. But that's not the issue. The issue isn't about players having gay characters, or two same-gender characters trying to get married. The issue is about gay players being able to play in a gay-friendly guild, and Blizzard not allowing them to do so.
I think the main reason for the uproar isn't the "gay rights" issue, though it's certainly part of it. The problem is more that they've just drawn a line in the sand, saying "no real life issues allowed". That's fine, it's their game world and their perogative. However, it's hypocritical of them to allow other guilds based around real life issues like Christian guilds (which exist in large numbers) or nationality based guilds to continue operating, but not allowing guilds based around other real life issues to form.
Yeah, it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup, but I think Blizzard has mis-judged this one. I'd imagine they'll quietly relent in a month or two when everything has settled down.
Personally, I don't think Starcraft: Ghost should be in there either. Sure, it's been in development for a long time, but Blizzard are renowned for taking a long time to develop games, and it shows through in their track record. Good games take time to develop, companies like Rockstar North and Blizzard who take their time in development produce the highest quality games (eg GTA series, Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo etc).
I'd rather they took their time to get things right, rather than the EA model of "ready or not it must ship on date x" and releasing disappointing games.
This is the same reason you've never seen a licensed Ferrari in a game that (even tangentially) involves running from the police. They'll happily license to games like Gotham Racing which don't involve police chases, but something like Need For Speed: Most Wanted is definitely out.
Yeah we have that here in Australia too (along with pretty severe download limits), but that's not what TFA is about. What they want to do is divide websites into different categories, and then charge different amounts for different categories. For example, the biggest sites on the net might get classified "Premium" sites -- Google, Amazon, eBay, CNN, maybe even /. -- which you then have to pay extra for.
Want to use a P2P service? Extra charge.
Want to access a site that has streaming content? Extra charge.
Online gaming? Extra charge.
Pr0n? You'll need to purchase our "protect-the-kiddies" plan, it's only $69 extra per month!! Without it, you can still access up to five jpg images per month!
Clearly they've forgotten that "their" bandwidth is something that we (and the content providers we access) already pay through the nose for.
Well spotted! I find it hard to believe that it's just a coincidence, especially when considering that the virus only targets proprietary formats like .doc and .pdf, while leaving opendoc files alone.
I guess you've never been in the Barrens general chat then :)
I swear, whoever said "don't-discuss-religion-or-politics" had the Barrens general chat in mind.
I think you're right, but only up to a point. MC has been in the game since launch in November 2004 - that's nearly 15 months ago. It's not surprising that the strategies are well-known, so that even newly created guilds won't have a huge problem running through it. Heck, it was at least six months before anyone managed to take down Onyxia, at the time the hardest encounter in the game, but I've seen guilds kill her with only 15 people!
Blackwing Lair is different though. Rather than the MC-style "tank and heal the main boss while other groups deal with the adds" encounters, Blackwing Lair actually takes real skill and participation from pretty much every member of the raid for things to work. For example the Vael fight requires four rotating tanks to counter his "instant death after 30 seconds" ability. If every aspect of the fight doesn't go perfectly, you're looking at a wipe, though at least the fight is over in 3-4 minutes either way. Other encounters require absolutely perfect positioning of both the mob and the different roles (eg keeping casters/healers in line of sight of the tank, but out of the monster's line of sight), not to mention the timing and placement of offtanks and secondary offtanks.
And then you get to the Nefarion encounter, where he has abilities beyond anything you've seen before. Stage one of the encounter involves fighting at least 42 of his Drakonid minions, while he's running around invulnerable and casting shadow bolts and polymorphs. Once you're done there, he starts his class calls, which are customised debuffs for each class. EG Rogues get automatically teleported and stunlocked directly in his line of fire; priests casting heals end up casting debuffs instead; hunters get their equipped ranged weapons reduced to zero durability; mages polymorph random teammates; warriors get stuck in beserker stance etc. Getting around these takes real skill and knowledge from everyone in the raid. Finally, once he's at around 20%, all 42 of the elite mobs you killed before get resurrected, and you still have to fight him and his class calls. Anyone who takes down Nefarian has earned good rewards.
As Blackwing Lair strategies become more widely known, it will probably become almost as easy (or as practiced) as the Molten Core. At which point the hardcore guilds have moved on to AQ40, and eventually Naxxramos. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that over time, things that are difficult at first become much much easier. I suggest that you have trouble with Stratholme because you don't run it very often. If you ran it as often as MC, you'd probably breeze through it with ease.
Hate to make a "me too!" post, but I'm definitely seeing the same thing. I've had GMail for about 18 months now, and from the time I signed up until about December 2005 I was getting spam about one message per week. Since then, it's jumped significantly up to around 10 messages per day. This didn't seem to coincide with anything in particular, I've never posted the address anywhere or given it to any company I was even vaguely suspicious of. It doesn't particularly bother me as they all end up in the spam folder, but it's still frustrating to watch the folder balloon in size.
If you want more tasty spam recipes:
1. Open your Gmail account
2. Go to Options, turn the Web Clips bar back on
3. Open up your spam folder, click on the handy (but probably sponsored) links
4. Cook meal
5. Tasty profit!!
I've been playing WoW since the open beta, and I've got a pretty reasonable idea of how the servers work just through observation. Basically, the game world is split into servers - the game world is identical across all servers (except of course for the characters).
Each "server" is actually a small cluster, probably a rack-sized cluster of machines, with each machine performing only one specific function. Each cluster has two world servers (one for each continent - Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms), which track the player's location and handle the PvE/PvP/NPC interactions. The server's items database is on a separate machine, I presume this is also where the loot tables are located. The cluster also includes an "instance" server which performs the same tasks as the world servers but limited only to the instance dungeons, a chat server which (obviously) looks after all the chat and mail functions, and an authentication server which deals with login requests and queues.
I'm sure there are other machines in the cluster, this is just what I've figured out from watching how the game works over the last 14 or so months. As a another poster mentioned, the servers are believed to run on Linux and Oracle, but I don't know if this has ever been confirmed.
Relating this back to the topic at hand, it's surprising the entire server cluster would go down just because of a large number of people in one area. Usually this is limited to just one of the continents, and people on the other continent or in an instance aren't affected. I don't think it's productive to simply whine about Blizzard like the article submitter, as they were reasonably proactive about limiting crowds. When it was obvious that Medivh would be the first server to complete the quest and open the gates, Blizzard disabled character creation on those servers. The world event was also set up to create several points of interest in other areas, spreading out the crowds from just around the gate. GMs were also on hand and teleporting any players under level 50 out of the area around the gate. I'm sure they've done an awful lot of stress testing of the event internally (the event itself wasn't available on the test server), but it's the first one they've orchestrated and teething problems are to be expected. I'll be surprised if the next world event suffers from similar problems. With that said, Blizzard got lucky with Medivh being the first to open the gates as they're a PvE server. I'll be quite interested to see how the servers hold up when the crowds watching the opening on a PvP server aren't just standing around but are fighting as well.
I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this!! Pre-release marketing seems to entirely revolve around pre-rendered cinematics or cutscenes, and show nothing of the actual gameplay! Witness the original World of Warcraft trailer - not one second of gameplay footage, just pre-rendered crap that isn't even in the game! GTA: San Andreas was also guilty of this; pretty much all three trailers were composed of cutscene footage, though they at least appeared in the game, used the game engine, and were skippable!
I think this is partly a symptom of the generation leap from PS2/Xbox/GC to PS3/X360/Revolution. As developers get better and better at developing for the new generation of systems, they rely less on FMV and pre-rendered cinematics and more on the capabilities of the new system. The same thing happened in PC gaming with the switch from floppies to CDs in the mid-90s. Suddenly there's heaps more space on the game media, so chucking on some filler FMVs is pretty cost-effective.
Richard Nixon has expressed interest in the procedure. It's his first step towards becoming the President of Earth.
Yes, but apparently what pirates love about BitTorrent is that unlike, say, KaZaA where a folder is shared and someone can get busted for every single file available, adding up to millions of dollars, with BitTorrent they can only prove that you downloaded *one* file. Sure, they might set something up to track people across different torrents, but there are thousands upon thousands of torrents posted every single day, and monitoring all of them would be exceedingly difficult. Not to mention the technical issues imposed by dynamic IPs and such.
Sure, you're not anonymous while using BitTorrent, in fact quite the opposite as you rightly point out, but the potential damage is limited compared to other p2p options and thus it's not such an appealing financial target for the content cartels. Sueing/C&D-ing the aggregator sites is probably the best approach which they seemed to follow for awhile, but since the shutdown of Suprnova 14 months ago I havn't seen any successful shutdowns involving torrent aggregators. I'd say a piracy shakeup is looming and probably overdue.
The search function on bittorrent.com now filters out copyrighted results, as [BT creator] Bram Cohen signed an agreement with the MPAA. The best places to download torrents from are the torrent aggregator sites - suprnova.org was the best known of these but it was shut down ages ago. I think Slyck.com has a list of torrent aggregator sites; I know a few but I'd rather not post them ;)
uTorrent can do the single port forwarding thing as well. I can't remember where the option is (I don't have it installed on this PC, I'm at work), but it's definitely there.
If your PC is more than a year or so old, I fully recommend trying uTorrent. You get almost all the functionality of Azureus, without the CPU/RAM hogging. On my poor old PC (Athlon 1800XP @ 1.49Ghz, 1G of RAM), I could pretty much only run Freecell and Firefox before my machine would start to struggle. uTorrent, by comparison, puts almost no load on the system. Sometimes I even forget it's running!
Azureus was definitely the best BT client out there a year ago, but I think it's day has done. Most people I know have switched over to uTorrent, and I'm seeing that the swarms I download from.
I've had and maintained Windows boxes fairly constantly for the last 15 years, and to date the only Windows virus I've had problems with was CIH (aka Chernobyl). That was pretty bad though, a completely busted hard drive.
The only other virus to penetrate my defences was stoned.angelina, back in the DOS days. Don't think I even had a virus scanner back then.
Yes, in the sense that as a threat, I believe it's overblown. Much like terrorism - dangerous, but relatively rare.
;)
Fixed that for you
I think you misunderstood me. I'm *not* one of these griefers, but I've seen them many many times on my server. Since they don't directly affect me most of the time, I think their antics are childish, but at least they're original and funny (when it's not you!).
You're right in that there's no benefit to the griefer for doing so other than laughs when they post screenshots of their mischief on the forums. It's not like the Diablo games where killing another player meant you could loot their gear, and the only effect on the player is that they have to potentially spend a few minutes running back to their corpse.
Farming in WoW basically means grinding the same areas over and over again. Some mobs drop higher amounts of loot than others, and these are the biggest targets for the farmers. One high level zone has very few quests near said mobs, so people grinding those monsters repeatedly are probably farming. Some people do target the farmers and harass them whenever possible, but since there's no real reward for doing so, it doesn't last long.
Yep! I'm on the US Blackrock server, our friendly local griefers are a guild called "Fun and Games" (FAG).
They've done some hilariously evil stuff over the past year: ninja looting, sabotaging raids, conspiring with Alliance players to grief Horde (they're a Horde guild). Plenty of ganking Alliance as well.
They've done stuff like use the Warlock's Summon ability to summon a player into Gurubashi Arena (where anyone, including your own faction, can attack you) and then kill them. Another trick is standing at the edge of a several thousand foot cliff and using Mind Control or Fear to make someone fall to their death. Doing this on the boat between islands or the zeppelin/tram between major cities is also hilarious. My personal favourite is the Warlock spell Ritual of Doom. This spell summons a very powerful demon, but it requires four other people to cast and casting will randomly kill one of the participants. Also, the demon must be immediately enslaved by the Warlock, otherwise it will start attacking the other players. The trick is to get yourself to low health, then go to a low-level area and ask for some help casting a spell. Summon the demon, then use the Life Tap spell (which sacrifices health for mana) to kill yourself, while the demon kills the other low-level players in one hit. Hilarious when it's not you. There are heaps of other stories as well, but I can't think of more offhand.
Speak for yourself! I live to fuck ;)
The trouble with common sense is that it's not common enough.
Don't forget that Blu-Ray is a Sony format. It doesn't matter whether people buy movies or games, as Sony will make good money from both.
Not to mention that their plan is designed to get them all killed, and fast. Divine Intervention straight away? AoE fear? Not to mention Leroy wants the Devout shoulders - why would you want cloth armour as a paladin? As you said, if someone draws additional aggro, you let them die. Anybody who didn't learn that in the Deadmines shouldn't really be playing WoW ;)
Whereas with the two competing HD formats, I don't think you will find entertainment titles that will be exclusive to a given format.
I don't think this is the case. I'm pretty sure that major studios are supporting one or the other, possibly because of exclusivity contracts (but that's just speculation). Regardless, Sony Pictures owns a significant chunk of the market, and I'd be very surprised if any of their films were released on HD-DVD. That's just not The Sony Way.