I pulled the plug on WoW today.  I deleted it off of my primary machine (it's still installed on my MacBook Pro in case I really need to do something there) and deleted my Safari bookmarks to imba and the guild forum, etc.  I'm done, indefinitely.  The game is great and I made some great friends playing, but Blizzard finally over-trivialized the game.  I think the whole 1 Emblem of Triumph = 500 reputation (of Hodir, if that's what you want) put me over the edge.  You're Exalted with Hodir?  Maybe you spent the time doing the dailies or maybe you just traded in a bunch of Emblems of Triumph.  You have a whole set of iLvl 231 gear?  It no longer means you are a seasoned raider.  It just means you wasted a massive amount of time grinding through a crapload of heroics.  Woop-tee-doo.  Meh, I have other things to do which actually do set me apart from others.  I would have stayed for the raiding but, lately, we just can't even field a consistent team of players.  Every week it's the same thing: pug a few n00bs who are undergeared, underskilled, and don't know the encounters so we waste time.  No longer.  Moving on.  'Nuff said.  laterz!

I've been playing World of Warcraft for 2 years and 3 months. Don't even ask me how many hours I've put into this game. I have 3 accounts (I only play on two) and a dozen characters, including 3 that I've leveled to 70 and 2 of which are keyed for Karazhan. I have lots of great things to say about the game and I've had a lot of fun playing it. But some things about the game are starting to wear on me. Sure, it's a grind. It can be mind-numbing farming the materials for crafting certain items and for keeping an in-game income going. But the grind can be therapeutic also. After a long stressful day at work, doing a repetitive activity can be relaxing, so much more so if you can chat online with a friend or two at the same time. I've talked about tanking and how it is preparatory for certain events in work life. Tanking is leadership, pure and simple, and the best tanks also make excellent leaders and managers. At work, if you screw up, you're protected from viciousness by political correctness. In the game, if you screw up, people call you on it immediately and directly and in not-so-nice terms. But I've reached a point where all of my in-game pursuits require other people, and sometimes lots of other people. Tonight I signed up for a Kara raid, which requires 10 people. 11 people signed up, apparently, so someone had to be cut. It came down to me and one other mage. I didn't get to go. It's like grade school all over again and you feel like the kid who was picked last for kickball. The thing that annoys me, though, is that not going had nothing to do with skill or preparation or anything quantifiable. I was probably more prepared than the other guy - I brought double the minimum requirements for every consumable. I know how to play my mage very well. I've read all the encounters and know my role in each. I have the best gear of any mage in the guild (in terms of +spell damage) other than a few veterans. None of that factored into the decision. In fact, the raid leader offered to let us "roll" on the spot, meaning roll the dice, best roll gets to go. That's a pretty good sign that I'm in the wrong guild. I like organization and planning, not chance. Unfortunately, this is the 6th guild I've been in on Ysera and never once did I get to go to Kara with a guild. Some of that is my fault, for not pursuing a raid spot more often. But guilds are too often disorganized and unmotivated. They don't recruit good players and don't always reward dedication. And five man PUGs? They're worse than a crap shoot. Anyway, I'm done venting. But I'm starting to question this expenditure of time. I'm in the market for a new distraction. Might be, I'm ready to take my l33t skillz back into the real world and fight my battles in the ultimate arena: business. Time will tell.

As predicted, the new Sony PlayStation 3 will be used in conjunction with folding@Home to put those spare near-supercomputer cycles of the Cell to work finding cures for disease.  Awesome!!! Funny, but banned commercial from Ikea.  Another good one here. Sucks to get caught in this. If you need some new fonts, try looking through the 10,000 or so fonts here.

Recently, I started playing what may be the best computer game of all time. The game is World of Warcraft (WoW), in a class of games knowns as MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Essentially, the game is everything that the classic Dungeons & Dragons ever promised. When I was a kid, my uncle introduced me to D&D, the original fantasy role playing game. D&D allows you to venture off into a fantasy world as a made-up character, perhaps a fighter or a cleric, but a character with abilities that you will never have in your real world. It was a great way to escape from the perils of being a teenager. Back then, it was still first edition rules in the red books with expert rules in the blue books. While I don't have an original copy of the basic rules, I do still have a copy of the 1st edition expert rules. I also have the original Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide...but I digress. Needless to say, after that introduction, I was always fascinated by the fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons. However, D&D always had some fundamental problems with it. The first problem was that every game required at least two people, and really it required at least three. One person played as the Dungeon Master or DM and the others formed a "party" of characters who would venture through the fantasy world. So this requirement pretty much immediately kept me from playing very much - no one I knew really got into the game. Second, the game has numerous - read *very many* - rules which the DM must master and implement perfectly and fairly. I never did meet a DM who really knew these rules. They are complicated, requiring various dice rolls to ascertain the results of party interaction with monsters and the environment. A simple dungeon could take hours to get through because of the slow navigation of the rules. Another problem was that the players depended on the DM to verbally give a good description of the environment, which again put more dependecies on the skill of the DM. A bad DM could easily ruin the game for everyone, enough so that some would never play the game again. The solution to all of these issues comes in the form of WoW. The computer takes over the role of Dungeon Master. The environment is beautifully rendered in 3D. Environmental sounds and the occasional appropriate tune pipe vibrantly through the speakers. The game is "massively multiplayer" which means that it is played over the Internet with thousands of other players at the same time. Currently 4.5 million people play WoW. The first night I played it, I saw hundreds of characters and since then, thousands. So even if I start out as a "party of one", I can meet other players online and join their groups to work cooperatively on various game goals known as "quests." As it happens, though, a buddy of mine decided to pick up the game at the same time as I did. D&D was always the most fun when questing around with good friends and WoW is no exception. It's truly a blast to play this game in a cooperative fashion with friends. Add a decent Internet connection with Instant Messaging and a headset for audio conversations and the game can be played as if all the players were sitting around a table, like in the old days, conversing about the unfolding adventure. The onerous rules are seamlessly implemented by the computer program making every interaction highly enjoyable and interesting. Battles with monsters are a fair and intelligent orchestration of player vs. monster foe. Tedious details such as awarding experience and treasure are automatic and transparent. Additionally, the game handles beautifully some details that n one could ever get right in D&D. For example, the mixing of reagents for particular spells or the concept of professions and talents as alternative goals. The only problem with this game is that it is more addictive than crack. Hours can pass by without notice. Day becomes night, night becomes early morning. In the end, the most important skill may be the ability to shut down the game and walk away. And WoW is only the beginning. It is very obvious that this form of gaming could easily come to dominate the entertainment industry. Consider the numbers - a really good Hollywood movie does, say, $100 million in tickets sales with a $10 ticket price. So about 10,000,000 people go see such a movie. WoW costs $50 and 4.5 million people have bought it and play it. That's $225 million right away. Now consider that those 4.5 million people also pay $15 a month to continue playing. That's a recurring monthly revenue of almost $70 million. Now, if you are a Hollywood entertainment company, would you rather invest $20M into a single movie with the one-time $80 profit or the $20M into a game which can generate $1 billion of revenue in less than 2 years? As the graphics get better and the AI of the game characters gets smarter, the game will get even more interesting. For those of us who grew up in the early years of D&D, this game is the realization of everything we always hoped for. I am opening a new blog, just about my experiences in this game, at wowclassguide.com.