What kind of game would require entire screens of statistics and graphs? I mean, other than EVE online?

The real result is that geolocation filters will become more prevalent, with content providers making it so their website are only viewable from the states/countries they intend to market their stuff to (and wherfe they know their content isn't illegal).

It's highly annoying. It's already pretty enraging when you come across a website that pretty much tells you "fuck you, this content can only be viewed from the usa".

Typical /. kneejerk reaction comment from someone too lazy to read even the summary.

If you did so, you'd have found out that what the guy complains about is in fact the lack of unification of the process, where every other game company seems to be rolling their own distribution platform with the assorted bundle of crapware to run the games on it.

Heck, you can even run into these problems even if you install games only from steam.

I'm not saying that your account can't get hacked if you're no an idiot, but that I'd much rather risk that than have to use an authenticator.

1) It isn't a matter of idiocy on the end-user's part when you have major companies releasing extremely exploitable software and patches that introduce even more security flaws. I sure hope you don't run any software that you personally haven't looked at the source, compiled yourself, and know is 100% secure, because otherwise you're an idiot, by your own lights.

How do you explain that people seemingly get their wow accounts stolen more often than, say their credit card numbers? Do you really think that hackers target WoW more or that those people just tend to be careless with their accounts?
I don't install much of anything on windows anyway, I use it only for gaming. I do everything else in linux.

2) Is your time really worth so little that having to re-do something to get back to where you were if your account got hacked isn't a bother? Or maybe you just really like redoing stuff? I liked getting my characters to 80 and getting them geared up, too, but now that they are I'd really rather not have to redo it because someone slipped an ad with malware attached through to a site (slashdot) that I'm trying to support by not blocking ads...

I guess that I'm not a very typical wow player. The endgame bores me. I used to have fun at endgame by ganking people, but now the game's all about grinding instances for gear and the only difficult part is winning the loot roll when something drops. Leveling is actually more fun than that because you can still have to play hide and seek with people of the opposite faction from times to times. But indeed, I seldom play wow at all nowadays.

3) Double sided tape. I have mine attached to my monitor because that's the only place I'd use it. I've lost my glasses when I was wearing them atop my head; I've not lost this thing yet because it's stuck to my monitor. I even didn't have a hard time reattaching it to the new monitor I just bought.

I'm not going to tape all kind of crap to my monitor. And what if I want to play from somewhere else than home? I often play wow during lunch breaks with some coworkers, for instance.

Essentially, it should be a matter of personal choice. I should be the one deciding how secure I want my account to be. But of course, as usual wow has to cater to the lowest common denominator and people too stupid to keep their account secure.

1. Most people who have their account stolen probably think the same
Which doesn't really matter.

3. It's hardly worse than a CD check (a physical object needed to play)
And indeed CD checks ARE annoying as hell. The first thing I do when I purchase a game that have a CD check is to grab a cracked binary from the web.

I would hate for it to become mandatory. I just don't need it because (and I don't think I'm alone with these reasons):

1. I'm not an idiot and am careful enough that someone stealing my account is unlikely
2. Losing my wow account wouldn't even be a big deal to me, it's not like leveling a character and gearing it up takes ages
3. I don't want to rely on a physical object that I can lose or misplace to log in into a game.

The article just skims the surface of the lawyer's 90 pages essay. He does address all of these points. It's actually a very interesting read.

Nope. I think he got knighted for his outstanding rendition of the facepalm.

While it is unrealistic to expect things to be bug free, most game developers have a lot to learn about quality and good development practices. You'd be surprised of how incompetent some game developers can be and how many sane coding practices they routinely sacrifice on the altar of premature optimization. Factor in time pressure encouraging the usage of quick and dirty solutions as well as often a lack of proper testing coverage across enough different hardware/OS configurations and you have a recipe for disaster.

Also note how all the example in the article are PC games. That's because when they release a PC game, developers and publishers don't have to submit themselves to a third party authority that enforces quality, whereas for a console game your game have to survive the extensive testing of the console manufacturer to make it to manufacturing.

However, if consumers can get bugged games refunded, then it will provide the pressure that publishers and developers lack to release quality pc games (since they'e mostly unable to do it by themselves). So all in all I think this will be a good thing for PC games.

It's not like every dungeon would have to be like this. A lot of wow players seem to have that annoying sense of entitlement that make them think they they have a right to demand that every bit of the content in the game to be tailored towards their own specific taste.
Please note that all I'd like is for world pvp to still exist. There was a time where it existed along with instances but now it has been completely torn apart mostly to provide a little additional convenience to people who like nothing but run instances all day long in the form of a little less downtime.

Hilariously enough, they now have server capacity problems because too many people are trying to launch instances. People always come up with that strawman argument against open world content that the servers can't handle hundred of players at the same place like it necessarily have to involve that many players, but you know what? Instances aren't cheap either because you need to handle lots of mobs and their associated AI scripts for the benefit of only 5 players.

"The coolness of dungeons would NOT be possible to implement as "open world content", because in that case you have a big guild, and they kill all the content. If you are in the same faction as them, you can suck up to them, but if they are the opposite faction they'll just roll right over you and aoe you down like so many trash packs."

That would make it a challenge, which would actually make the entire thing much cooler. Dungeons in wow are not challenging, clearing them is merely a ritual you need to accomplish to get to roll on the loot.

The only times I ever had fun in a dungeon in a MMO was camelot castle in anarchy online (which was otherwise not that good).

It was a public dungeon with a set of pvp enabled set of corridors, rooms and a final room with a dragon. It meant that people from your own faction had to work together to take control of the place over the opposite faction and keep defending it while another group went and killed the dragon.

So many people were involved that you had little chance to win any of the loot rolls but people were going there for the sheer fun of it. It could have used a slightly lower limit of the number of players allowed in the place but it was pretty good.

That, and also playing hide and seek with the groups of vigilantes trying to take revenge on you for ganking people doing their daily quests on quel'danas, etc.
There's lot of fun to be had with free form pvp.

"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game."
Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?

"As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins."
No, it doesn't always devolve into zerging. The moments I enjoyed best in the game were doing small scale world pvp.

Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.

See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.

To implement that, they made it so that people teleport directly into the instance instead of having to travel in the open game world to the instance's entrance, because you can't see people from other servers in the open world.

Since there is also generally a very unhealthy focus on instanced content rather than open-world content, what it means in practice is that wow is not really a MMO anymore. People hang out in capital cities, which function as glorified lobbies like you find in non-MMO multiplayer games, they form a party and then teleport inside of a private dungeon.

You have almost no opportunity to meet random people on your adventures anymore because people of maximum levle have seldom any reason to bother ever going out in the open world. And leveling from 1 to 80 has also been made trivial and is therefore a minor part of the game.

It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring. This game has turned from a MMORPG into a glorified dungeon crawling game.