Can someone name me some actual real world, large software projects based on functional programming? (Projects led by university professors don't count.) Dismissing OO completely because it is "anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature" seems kinda strange to me. I write parallel and modular OO software all the time... Maybe it's just me misunderstanding something.

Your colleague should have kept a small shrubbery at the side of her desk to cushion falling objects (assuming that's the morale of the article).

I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader. I'd say the current WoW has more in common with FarmVille than Everquest :P.

You're right, as far as I know, none of these "failed" WoW-killers actually turned out as big financial losses. They usually start out with a huge amount of preorders and a couple of months of insane growth, mostly from WoW-players who are tired of the game and want to try something new. But after a few months these people often realize how good WoW actually is and go back to play that again (or quit MMORPGs completely). I've seen it so many times.

I'm not sure what it is going to take to keep these players hooked more than a few months, but sure, if some company figures it out then they might win over Blizzard in the long (very long) run.

Indeed.

As you say, people usually quit in groups because nobody wants to play anymore if all their friends have stopped.

Basically my entire guild quit the game shortly after WOTLK was released, but for every people who stops playing, either a new casual player wants to try the game or an old WoW veteran is drawn back by nostalgia. If you check out the WoW subscription numbers, they've been remarkably stable since WOTLK.

Another thing we shouldn't forget is how much we've changed ourselves. Personally I like to complain about how WoW isn't like in the "good old days", but thinking about it, it's probably mainly because I'm out-MMORPG'd. When I finally cancel my WoW account (probably soon since I'm not really playing the game anymore), I don't think I'll go on to another MMORPG, and I believe a lot of other players feel the same way.

More than 10 million people are playing World of Warcraft, all with social connections within the game.

Sure, maybe in a few years only 5 million people will be playing, but it will probably still be the biggest MMORPG out there.

Of course the game isn't going to live forever, but the idea of Guild Wars 2 "beating" WoW is just absurd.

I've played WoW since release and I share your view that the game is going downhill (since end of TBC). The reward/effort ratio is simply too high for the average old-school MMORPG player. But we need to realize that we're a tiny minority, nobody cares if we stop playing. We can go play Rift or Guild Wars 2 or whatever, Blizzard isn't going to notice it.

WoW caters to a huge spectrum of player types. The cartoonish style of the game appeals to casual players ranging from young kids to housewives. Just looking at the screenshots of Guild Wars 2 I can tell you that it's not going to have the same impact. Realistic looking hot chicks? I don't think the average casual housewife is going to enjoy that the same way as nerds like us.

Sure, if you read the MMO-champion forums you'll easily get the idea that all WoW-players hate WoW and want to quit... But it's just a (very) loud minority. WoW isn't going anywhere in the near future.

There's just no way any MMO is going to "beat" World of Warcraft, except maybe Blizzard's next one. Maybe Guild Wars 2 is going to be a better game in every way possible, it's not going to matter anything... It's like if I sat down and made a "social network" site that was better in every way than facebook, and then expected that everyone would stop using facebook and use my service instead. It's just not going to happen, the momentum is too big.

Trying to market a large fantasy-themed MMORPG at the moment is naive at best.

I don't think many (if any) game developers are using either OpenGL 4 or DirectX 11 at their full potentials yet. Especially DirectX 11 is designed to allow a lot of multithreading and decoupling the GPU pipeline from the CPU. If you implement a naive rendering engine with OpenGL or DirectX, sure, you'll find that most of the time you're just sitting around waiting for synchronization and buffers flushing. But if you design your software around multithreading and the new API features, you can squeeze a lot more juice out of the system. Also, I'm sure there's a lot of geometry shader pipeline tricks waiting to be discovered, which will further decouple the GPU from the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if we "soon" see the merging of the vertex and geometry shader pipelines, might even together with compute shaders. When that happens, the differences between OpenGL and DX is propably going to be very minor (and very, very close to the hardware layer).

Wind power isn't completely without its dangers. Wouldn't want to be near that. :P

World of Warcraft uses a TCP protocol (would post a link to the reverse engineered protocol information as proof, but Blizzard seem pretty aggressive at hunting such sites down so couldn't find it on Google :P)

So, where in your code would you put the delay in order to be sure that it won't cause the game to feel less responsive? Just after the rendering? How exactly will you determine the duration of the delay? How about timing accuracy? Sleep() on Windows is in milliseconds. And how will you deal with frame rendering time suddenly dropping or rising? I know it doesn't matter in the menus of Starcraft II, but I can promise you that some crazy Koreans will care a lot if Blizzard put an (unnecessary) Sleep() in their main loop. Of course this needs to be an option (which it is).

There's a difference between learning what does what and learning how to use every skill you have effectively. A lot of players fail at the first step, only learning what 5-6 skills they'll use the most and ignoring the rest. The result is Paladins who don't heal others, Warriors who tank in Berzerker Stance with a 2H, and Druids who aren't aware they're different from Rogues.

I also find it quite strange that people continuosly bash WoW for being so incredibly easy, and how everybody can learn to play it in a matter of minutes. How can it be then, that a very large percentage of random groups you do instances with, fail miserably because someone don't know how to play? Even if the instance run is successful, it could always have been done faster and more smooth. I think many people believe they play perfectly, even though that's not the case. And unfortunately most people are reluctant to point out these people's weaknesses - the most contructive criticism that usually comes accross is in the style of "OMG L2P noob, WTFBBQ!!? LOL LOL you suck!!1". Which of course not is taken seriously by anyone. And no, it's not just about having good gear. A player with good gear can still go total pew pew on some mobs, outaggroing the tank by miles, and maybe think he's the best player in the world because he's on the top of the damage meter. Etc, etc.