Good blog. The new MMO's coming out have made improvements over such trailblazing games like EQ, which really was a big MMO for a while, and catered to a lot of people. Games such as WoW, cater both to hardcore and casual players. Blizzard's current marketing strategy to keep subscriptions is to make good gear easier to get. There's still massive timesinks in the game, regardless of what the typical wowfanboi will tell you. After playing multiple mmo's, started in EQ, played it, went to AO(Anarchy Online, decent sci-fi game when you ignore the bugs), played City of Heroes(great game, just lackluster once you get to the highest level, also a lack of villains/pvp at the time), and eventually WoW(who hasn't played it....), and now WAR. WAR improved a lot, and I'm certain they pushed hard and got people like Blizzard to notice that they have to improve in order to maintain their playerbase. It'll be another month or two before the first WoW: WotLK which has more end game content, and even then, it'll probably be defeated within hours of being LIVE. But WAR pushed hard to make things less tedious and more fun, but I still had issues with the game. I think there were entirely too many servers at launch, leading to underpopulated realms, which led to lackluster RvR in the RvR lakes. Scenario's, like Battlegrounds, kill World PvP. But I have to credit WAR with having the better PvP system. Actual rewards, recognition, and balance is part of the gameplay. As for WoW's PvP, it is terrible. There's entirely too many crowd control and escape abilties put into the game. Sometimes, your character wouldn't even be able to fight back before he died. With WAR, rarely would you encounter a situation where you weren't able to fight or survive, but the drawback was that if 4 Bright Wizards(substitute Sorc's) were set on you, you just wanted to cry as you were turned into mush very very quickly. Unlike WoW, Mythic made sure that high DPS had significant drawbacks like limited survivability and limited crowd control. Unlike Blizzards design of DPS classes, which have a dozen abilities to make sure they survive or keep you from killing them.

Less tedious crap like looting quest items is good(WAR +1), lots of quests(WoW +1), great PvP(WAR +1), shorter travel time(WAR+1), and epic story raids(WoW+1), hardcore combat effects(AoC +1), dynamic stats system(AO +1), would make a great game.
But the fantasy market is swamped as is. WoW, WAR, AoC, LotRO, EQII, Darkfall(LoL), Lineage II, etc are all competing for the same market share. Yet, there's still no decent Sci-Fi mmo's out there that can really introduce fun gameplay and immersing story. Tabula Rasa was terrible. Anarchy Online suffered hard because Funcom cannot make a non-bug ridden game. Star Wars Galaxies was terrible, well, because of Sony mainly. And EVE.... well, EVE isn't bad, but it really doesn't appeal to most people, but it definately does have its very own niche market.

 

Deathknights will just be a hard counter to healing and magic classes.  Consider the following: how many classes use absorb shields and consider how many use healing? That's a good amount of counters, but we'll see how they can do against rogues, warriors, and hunters.  It's not really in my opinion that MS needs a nerf, but rather than other classes need to be buffed up in the arena.  As much as Rogues QQ, Hunters are probably the worst off of all the classes currently.

 

Amusing to say the least but hardly worth mentioning. ****** are in every part of this world.  Women who use their looks to get ahead, nothing new.

 

There should be a site where you sign up for WAR... oh wait, there already is.  Just simply making WAR beta much more open, Mythic could definately take a chunk of Blizzard's subscription base simply on the premise of promising something new instead of a rehash of TBC, which will be WotLK.  At 60, PvP was balanced, now at 70, it is horribly broken.  People thought warriors were bad at 60, then *****ed about them at 70, now they're getting 10 more talent points?  The same applies to Warlocks and whatever other class people think are particularly strong at a time.  WoW was originally designed with 51 talent points in mind, and never really left room for dynamic increases in talent points such that a semblance of balance would remain.  I plan to move on and soon, if not WAR, then just to quit MMO's in general since they don't provide the same level of PvP satisfaction that I so desire which I can find easily in FPS's and RTS's.  WAR will do well, but kill WoW? Doubtful, if anything it'll kick Blizzard in the ass for not doing what Mythic does or will do.

 

Ouch, if this is a sign of things to come for Vindication... then ugh.