No they don't. This is what they count:

The difference isn't because of taxes etc, it's just because they can. It's really rather obvious when the Origin price is 550 while the box copy goes for 450.

I don't get all this Casual vs Hardcore stuff. MMO's need both. You need your game to be casual friendly, because that's how you get people to start playing in the first place. People don't start out with huge guilds and countless people on their friendslist, they need to be able to play without a heavy investment. As people play and meet more and more people in the game, they get more invested in the game and crave more and more content and so the casual player BECOMES hardcore eventually. Without the hardcore you have noone to build that very important community that every MMO needs and without the casuals you don't have the people that bring in the money and are on the edge of joining the community.

Dude, that's "customer reach of more than 19 million players worldwide." Which is very different from subscriber. As far as subscribers goes: http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png http://mmodata.blogspot.com/ You'll see that Lineage 2 was at 800kish subs in 2009 and going downwards. The thing about Pandaren is that they were originally an Aprils Fools joke that Blizzard ran just before Warcraft 3 was released, where they were shown to be the 4th or 5th race I believe. The art assets from the joke were put into the game as the Pandaren Monk and this mini campaign for the Beastmaster. So now they've taken this Aprils Fools joke and actually made the entire expansion about the guys. Personally I think it's pretty awesome and I'm looking forward to seeing what they'll do with it. I think most people that are tired with WoW cancelled a long time ago. Most people I know cancelled around Feb/March as by then Cata had nothing more to give.

Do you know what they call RPG's without numbers? Storytelling excercises. Stop pretending that RPG's have ever been about anything other then numbers.

How exactly does tanking/healing get worse? I enjoy getting into whatever instance I want in 0.001 sec when I queue as tank and about 3 min when I queue as healer.

I think that WoW has been helping slightly pushing the genre in the right direction ever since they started to make many boss damage mechanics into "You die" rather then "You take some damage" putting more and more of the job of surviving onto the DPS themselves rather then the healers. If you just take those kinds of ideas a bit further you could possibly eliminate the Healing role. Eliminating the Tanking role should then be rather easy.

Clearly you didn't play 3rd edition DnD. Both Clerics and Wizards were self sufficient machines of doom and destruction. And real life fighting doesn't have tanks and healers. In real life the Tanks aren't there to soak damage, they're there to completely dominate the enemy, crushing everything in their path to rubble while being armed with some of the heaviest weaponry on the entire battlefield. There's no-one in the back waving a magic wand to make people stop being wounded, what there is is people with low-mobility high-range weaponry hoping that the enemy won't be able to fire back. Even if you go back a thousand years most of the damage was still caused by the heavy infantry and heavy cavalry. The lighter elements are there to flank/trap the enemy and there's still no healing clerics.

I'm amused by WoW having 700 ratings while SWTOR has 1047. Seems people are a bit more passionate about one then the other : p

Well, you can fairly easily change what login server you connect to, however the login server will as far as I know only allow you to login with a local account. Though since it's only during downtime you could just make a trial account in the US if you wanted to.

Naive Developer crashes head first into Harsh Reality of MMO's. Harsh Reality of MMO's stands unfaced! A lot of developers seem to wish they could do something new and different, but in the end it turns out to be technically impossible.

So you've only played **** MMO's? The industry leader does the EU maintenance 3AM to 9 AM GMT+1. Suppose they're once again proving that it's not random chance they're the industry leader.

Dispute all you want, it is a holiday period for most people. Everyone in higher or lower education are free and those that aren't are mostly on vacation.

I truly loved when WoW patched out ability levels entirely and made them scale with level instead.

My sub is cancelled, I'm just getting my money's worth levelling to 50.

Who the heck floods another continents servers 3am to 8am?

WoW does maintenance 3am to like 8am in my time zone. That affects me about once a year, even their extended maintenance barely reaches the afternoon, it's only when something horrendous happens and they're down the entire day that you really notice and then you get game-time added to your account.

Well, it doesn't really matter -why- they're doing it like this. If they designed their infrastructure in such a way they can't split their maintenance, then it was rather stupid/short-sighted of them to set up their infrastructure that way. Usually the way these things go down is that there's plenty of people at the Company that knows the idea is horrendously bad, but it gets pushed through by management for cost saving reasons.

GC was hired into the Age of Empires: Rise of Rome development team based on an Age of Empires custom map he did, where he continued making maps. By Age of Empires 2 he was the Lead designer and continued being the Lead Designer in Ensemble Studious until 2008 after which he was hired by Blizzard, having then 10 years of industry experience. There he mostly took over Tom Chiltons(Kalgan) job of Class/Proffession mechanics, meanwhile there's still 5 other game designers doing the rest of the game. If you remember, Kalgan was universally hated on at the forums, so it's not surprising they changed the public face.

You know what's not cost effective? When a sizeable chunk of your EU customers quit. Every 1,000 subs that quit could hire 2-3 Server Technicians.

The EU servers are in Ireland, next!

I really wonder what went through Bioware's heads when they decided to have a unified maintenance. Hurr, durr, I wonder why all the other companies split their maintenance, so stupid and inefficient! We'll just take a giant dump on our EU customers instead! I mean really, the question of how to handle this was solved over a decade ago.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if Bioware can't manage something all the other IT companies manage, that's Biowares screwup. When you are an adult, and you pay for a service, then you expect to get that service delivered. When you don't get that service delivered, you're expected to deliver a complaint. If you still don't get your service delivered, you're expected to sue for compensation. That is how Adults and Companies are supposed to interact with eachother.

/facepalm I think we can safely disregard this dude.

Did you fail to notice that none of the Kolto Injections after the first 2 actually healed him? The cast bar completed, no heal landed.