lol, I hated that so much. The original design of blink had so many problems with the way it worked, it is better now. i'd say the failure rate isn't as high as you suggest, maybe 1-2%, not 5%

The wow movie has been in the writing phase for 4 years now? but information on the movie is even scarcer than info on Titan.

Played one of the beta's for Tera and amazingly impressed with Combat. It was perfectly responsive and you didn't have lag or timing issues when you had to dodge an attack, even with 100's of people on screen. With the U.S./EU markets, they're going to have lesson the Korean grind and put more end-game/PVP in it to make it a success here, otherwise guild wars will topple Tera pretty easily.

And no, it isn't fixed. The greatest thing about blink is that they "fixed" it for the actual release . http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.1.0 (release day had a patch, sure every one remembers that one). http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.1.0 Blink has also appeared in several other patches. Pretty sure they acknowledged that the fix for this is not going to happen.

Darth Malgus story doesn't seem much more interesting than the summary. He was a simple orphan boy who showed an affinity for the dark side when he killed a servent. he was sent to a military academy and grew through the ranks from a no body to Emperor. He had some good quotes, lead a few armies and campaigns and killed republic armies. The only defining moment was when he decided that the relationship he had with a woman was a weakness, so he killed her. He was also tricked in to fighting a battle that was just leverage for a peace treaty. The text of the wiki page for Malgus is long, no doubt, and filled with an aweful lot of fluff. Not to mention that the biography (the majority of the wiki page) is a more in depth version of the synopsis, which is rather short. On the other hand, the story of the Lich King and how Arthas became who is was, starts many years before Arthas and involved masterful deception at the hands of Kil'jaeden, Ner'zhul and Mal'ganis http://www.wowwiki.com/Rise_of_the_Lich_King Just the summary of Arthas has more of a plot than Malganus. Would you rather see that, as a movie? or see a movie about a boy that went to sith school, became a general and later emperor and killed a bunch of people? Wait, we already have dozens of movies like that. Aside from becoming Emperor, the story of Anikan Skywalker is close enough. The other supporting aspect of the story of Arthas being WAY more in depth than Malgus, is that Arthas not only has 2 whole expansions JUST FOR HIM (Warcraft 3, TFT and WotLK), he has a 300+ page hardcover about his life. http://www.wowwiki.com/Arthas:_Rise_of_the_Lich_King

This is an old announcement from 2008, they haven't had an update like this in some time. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17062 So right there, your numbers are already incorrect. Even by some logical extrapolation methods, your number would still be wrong. the pay by hour thing, well they addressed that also. So no, if you buy a card and activate it and don't play again for 30 days, then you're not counted as a subscriber.

You can find this on any press release from blizzard concerning subscription numbers Trial accounts are not and never have been included. Blizzard has, at one time, issued a statement saying that the people that multibox do not add any meaningful results to the subscription numbers (meaning they are rounded off).

I am totally confused by what you are trying to say. first, you say that 3rd party isn't an option? What do you mean? 3rd party game clients? Well NO you definitely do not want a 3rd party coming in and writing you a game client. I mean, can you honestly think of a less secure method of playing wow there? If you mean by addons, then 3rd party addons are explicitly allowed in World of Warcraft. I don't know if you realize this but the entire UI itself, is a collection of addons written by wow. These would be 1st party addons, btw. Here is blizzards new Raid UI http://wowprogramming.com/utils/xmlbrowser/live/AddOns/Blizzard_RaidUI/Blizzard_RaidUI.xml http://wowprogramming.com/utils/xmlbrowser/live/AddOns/Blizzard_RaidUI/Blizzard_RaidUI.lua Now, what basics are you talking about. your second paragraph seems to be a mess of incomplete thoughts. What about the simplest things in the UI that they can't do. Are you talking about unlocking frames, moving elements around, and all that jazz? You can do that in warcraft. its actually not difficult, but they don't provide an "editor" to speak, in the way that Bioware is doing. There's no need to when you have a modding community that is so expansive as World of Warcraft. When an addon is so widely used that it becomes easier and better for blizzard to maintain it, they contact the author and negotiate with them on integrating their addon in to the default UI. Your point is just random dribble coming from your mouth. Warcrafts UI has expanded 10fold from release to it's current version. They've added hundreds of what used to be 3rd party addons directly in to the UI. Power Auras, Threat Meters Buff/debuff display Character Sheet Changes Item Compare. Action Bar updates Map Changes Quest Log, Tracker window and Quest helper type additions Combat Log (it's always been there yes, but the current log is modeled after HitsMod, which allowed you to customize what the log displayed). Moving the loot window to the cursor Chatbox updates Floating Combat Text (it's been there but was never as advanced as it is now) Raid Frames have gone through dozens of updates. All of those were 3rd party addons incorporated in to wow.

There are 10.3 million people with active subscriptions to Warcraft. you pointed out approximately % 2.912e-5 of the population. Even if we say a good, 5% of the current population has the above issues, which is reasonable, that's roughly 500,000 people. Not really a large number in the scope of things. Also, blizzard knows that they have servers that are badly underpopulated. They have had that problem since BC. But you can't force people to move servers (with free transfers or server merges). They know that after 7 years people became bored which is why they're doing some of the things they are doing in mists.

I think he's saying it's time for Warcraft to be on Kitchen Nightmares?

In Warcraft, I was one of those guys that would spend a good 2-3 hours a day trying new specs out, even after they changed the trees the first time. Before dual spec, I think on my paladin had spent roughly 5k on respecs (3-4 times a week) and I NEVER respec'd to pvp, tank or DPS. I was a healer at the end of BC and through wrath (played a mage before that). When dual spec came out I was a tank/healer and the cycle started over again. I raided. In warcraft, in the guild I am in, we liked to be reasonably progressed. we did the content first, before any one else on the realm, in some cases we were months ahead of the 2nd best guild. We used recount and worldoflogs to improve our play, not to spread our epeen around (Even though it didnt hurt). We often varied slightly from the de-facto EJ spec because thats what you had to do, if you wanted to be the best. If you have ever payed attention to the top, top characters in the world they don't use standard cookie cutter builds either. They have unique choices that they needed as a raid. I never had a problem with spending 1-2pts in useless talents to get the skill(s) we needed to defeat an encounter first (usually top 100 US, if not world). Eventually though, with every little class balance, tweak or ability change, you had to go through your whole process of respecing, testing raiding with poor spec choices just to see how it worked, just to come back and do it again at the next minor patch when they decided the previous change was unbalanced and changed it again. When they created talents that began to move away from the cookie cutter DPS/Tank/healer optimum, you gained WAY more choices in how to play your class. Instead of spec's leaving you 1 extra point to put some where, you all of a sudden had 9. Those 9 extra points didn't make or break your ability to raid effectively, but it still lead to the cookie cutter problem. Yes, some people liked figuring out the cookie cutter builds. Look at EJ and you can see threads with thousands of posts where people debate the effectiveness of 1pt in crit v.s. 1 pt some where else. I've participated in those posts along with members of my guild and helped shaped the correct spec, rotations, buffs, everything. But in the end all that really lead to was this elitist, epeen flaunting recount in /trade chat after a raid. You know, all the things that the star wars community is apparently fed up with. You want to get rid of people being elitist jerks, but you want all the tools to continue being elitist jerks. I can't wait for 1.2 to be released and all the real theorycrafters come out and start playing star wars and completely blow every ones currently conceived notion that their spec's, rotations and playstyle are optimal. We'll have the same old elitist mentality when it comes to guild recruitment, flashpoints and operatives.

The better RTS, C&C or Starcraft is a 14 year old debate, since StarCraft was released. What's better is how you feel about micro v.s. macro management. The leaders of RTS though, are Asians (Specifically Koreans), and they will unanimously vote for SC/SC2 every time. Hell they have TV stations that play SC/Sc2 matches 24hrs day, it's like soccer is to Brazil.

We did answer that question, it's quite easy. 0 They don't need to come out with multiple games every year or two like EA/Bioware has been doing to compete or set market trends.

From the wiki. "The Command & Conquer series has been a commercial success with over 30 million Command & Conquer games sold as of 2009." there are 9 major releases (not including expansion packs). average 3.3 million per title. StarCraft 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft "With more than 11 million copies sold worldwide as of February 2009" StarCraft 2 "At the time of its release, Starcraft II became the fastest selling real-time strategy game of all time, with over three million copies sold worldwide in the first month." Beats the previous C&C record "As of December 2010, the game has sold nearly 4.5 million units." Starcraft has sold an estimated of 15.5 million units, from 2 releases. more than double what C&C has done. If we're looking at pure sales numbers, Starcraft wins hands down. If we're going to look at blizzard RTS, we have to include Warcraft 2/3/tft and DotA, to which you'd have to be a fool to think that EA did better with C&C.

you know what ironic about your post, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westwood_Studios Acquired by Electronic Arts in 1998, closed in 2003 Then EA created a couple of C&C, then they pushed the IP off to bioware who is scheduled to release a new one in 2013.

Yes in 96, guess what blizzard did with that feedback? They spent the next two years creating StarCraft. The definitive RTS by which every RTS after has been judged against. people STILL play the original SC even though SC2 is out. You can't really improve on perfection.

haha, I didn't even think of that one. Not to mention that games today take years to make by themselves.

You know whats amazing though? Is that in the past 15 years blizzard only has had 3 IPs. Warcraft Diablo StarCraft yet, they're doing amazingly well for themselves. You do realize that any other game company would sell their soul to be able to focus on only a couple of IPs and have 15-20 years of unmatched success. The success of blizzard though, doesn't ride on Diablo 3, World of Warcraft or StarCraft but in their new game which has a new IP being developed for it and will be something completely different than any game we've seen before. Code named Titan, the project has been in development for 4 years so far. In contrast, Starcraft 2 was in development for 7 years, diablo 3 for 9 years and World of Warcraft took 5 years and started before Wc3 was released.

You didnt read the last half page of posts? Blizzard and Activision are more or less two separate companies under a holding company called Activision Blizzard, which Vivendi is the parent company. Holding companies is basically paperwork for share holders.

The other thing too, is that you can look at other games that EA has gotten their hands in to and watched their destruction also. EA should have just stuck with sports games, no one could deny that they were not the best at those.

"In 1994 the company became Blizzard Entertainment Inc before being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates and later by Vivendi." "Activision, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI) is the American holding company for Activision and Blizzard Entertainment. The company is majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA and was created through the merger of Activision and Vivendi Games" "Vivendi Games, formerly known as Vivendi Universal Games, was the holdings company for Sierra Entertainment and Blizzard Entertainment." Vivendi is still the parent company, Activision-Blizzard is the Holding company for Activision and Blizzard entertainment, which is two separate companies. A holding company is a company or firm that owns other companies' outstanding stock. Holding companies allow the reduction of risk for the owners and can allow the ownership and control of a number of different companies. If you want to get technical about it.

You forget Vendivil

d2 http://i1-games.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/6-378_2.jpg d3 http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Iai2jx8SEbo/TzWyhNWxYyI/AAAAAAAADjo/eNo2liFmZGU/s1600/Screenshot033.jpg Right, looks terrible doesn't it? Also, the largest problem with diablo 2 is that people hacked/farmed items and sold them on outside websites for money. Shame on blizzard for trying something to try to stop the problem before it starts. Having played diablo 2 since it's release up to about a year ago, Diablo 3 is an amazing improvement over D2.. it's like going from a Mud to 2012 WoW.

Blizzard does not answer to Activision any more than they did to any of the other parent companies that have been over blizzard.

http://my.mmosite.com/1cd10251c16a43d090e2399862b464a2/blog/item/97fe1133345ab8db5b46388c211ef910.html