There is a God.

YES

Dat 2004 technology

"Some folks were curious if we would start a new WvW instance if a map fills up. Due to how the game is structured, this is not really something we can do."

Wut?

Are we too busy copying WoW to remember why Guild Wars is better than it? I have to enter a queue like it's the FREAKING STONE AGE?

Coming Late to Early Guild Wars

Zubon is currently playing through Guild Wars for the first time - a move composed of much win. I wanted to re-post a reply I made to one of the commenters.

“That is a common misconception about GW. In it’s first months, the devs intended PvP to be the endgame content, but since most of the players didn’t care about their intentions and stayed in PvE, the game got more and more PvE-heavy.”

I disagree with this quite a bit. In the first few years of the game’s life, PvP was extremely popular and a massive focus, both for the casual and hardcore players. Random Arenas and then Alliance Battles were extremely popular with the former, while Guild vs Guild and Hall of Heroes offered a more competitive slant for the latter.

The pioneering ideas they had gave the game very strong appeal in the “super hardcore” competitive e-sports scene, eg
- mechanics that require active use of skills to prevent damage
- co-ordination of the team to “spike” down a target
- observer mode for all high-level games
- no reliance on grinding to achieve power
More prize money was up for grabs at the high point of this than had previously been offered in any competitive game.

But you are right that PvP is not as big of a focus now. Interest died off with each expansion because more and more skills and classes that did not fit with the fantastic balance of the original campaign devolved the metagame into “Build Wars”. Eventually all the high profile players moved on.

Hopefully they can get back to the core principles in GW2 and create another fantastic PvP experience.

Customer service 101

For those unfamiliar with the game's pricing system, the points I was refunded would usually take a few nights worth of playing to earn . They can be used to buy new champions or runes (which allow you to customize your loadout). Since I can spend these points in lieu of paying money to buy things, Riot are trading a little bit of cash in the immediate future for my long term goodwill. They also really made an effort to do this by searching their sales logs, because I purchased this champion at least a couple of months ago.

This kind of thing is ALWAYS a good investment in my book (see: Valve).

Diablo III skill calculator out

This is not usually a headline that would grab my attention. However this is not one of those pansy-arsed skill systems where you toss up between a +0.5% critical strike chance or a +2.3 damage increase. The skills, and especially the runes that you can customize them with, all sound massive and nutballs enough for me to be enjoying playing with this at least as much as I will the actual game itself:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk

Diablo 3 to be quite similar to Diablo 2

Probably about 50% of my unread posts today were about the latest Diablo 3 announcnements.

First, you must always be online to play, even in single player. This is of course absolute fail-train, because inevitably there will be server issues and at-home internet issues. I had several relatively high level single player characters in Diablo II that I used to play when the servers were down. Also, sometimes you just want to use cheats and run around wtf-pwning everything. But no longer.

Second, the in-game auction house will allow you to earn/spend real life cash. I actually APPLAUD this decision, because it will keep the dirty gold seller spam out of the game (if you own a copy of Diablo 2, make a public game for the lols. At least one bot will enter within about 10 seconds).

Third, mods will be super frowned upon. They were super frowned upon in Diablo II as well, and for multiplayer, that's fine (of course, people will still come up with a MapHack mod, and people will use it. I will personally risk the account ban when I get sufficiently tired enough of losing hardcore characters to ridiculous random extra fast boss spawns). It's annoying that people won't be able to use the engine to create neat-o new single player stuff, but I never bothered much with that stuff in the other Diablo games.

Verdict? Yes, heartless, we will still buy it. The fact that it's looking like an awesomely fun game dampens my outrage when they make announcements like this. Compared with the announcements for oh, say, SW:TOR, which just give me the lols because it looks awful (and no, I will NOT still buy that).

Sweatshop work

PBS via RPS: "The fact is that you can't really convey the extent of the hardships faced during a long, underpaying shift on a factory line in any medium. (You could craft a time-accurate simulation, but it would be difficult to rope many into playing it.)"

I lol'd.