Apparently giant wall of text = insightful? You don't know what you are talking about. Any fresh 80 can get geared up in a matter of weeks to be running the current raid content, thanks to the way Blizzard uses emblems. How do I know? Cause I've done it. Got my druid to 80 at the beginning of this patch, and now I'm the best geared healer in my guild, and I it was almost entirely by pugging heroics. O well, news is a day old now so I guess no one cares.

Do you even play WoW? Game mechanics are better than they have ever been. PvP isn't at its peak, but thats a minority of the players. I think it's pretty clear that generalizations taken from other MMOs simply do not apply to this game.

These are "Feats of Strength" and do not count towards the "Achievements" that they are talking about here.

The escapist had an article a few weeks ago making the same point. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/view-from-the-road/6500-A-View-From-the-Road-The-Subscription-Equation

That's not what cognitive dissonance is. Cognitive dissonance is when you take an action that contradicts or is not explained by your beliefs about how you should have acted, and you change your beliefs after the fact in order to explain the action you took. It is not just when you have some kind of mental uncomfortableness. I'm sure wikipedia has examples.

so no wonder I have the desire to play World of Warcraft again...

Clearly they didn't count WoW, since it has a huge number of Native Americans (Tauren), as well as Jamaicans (Troll), and the Scottish (as always... Dwarves). Plus, if I'm going to be staring at an ass for months of gametime, it's going to at least be an ass that's pleasing to stare at, so I tended to pick females of the reasonably attractive races (human and night elf... gnome if u're into that sort of thing...).

The NDA asks us really not to share "ANY INFORMATION", so I assume that's why.

Does that mean if we chip in to buy them some PS3s or some 360s we might get rid of these ridiculous console-exclusivity deals?

Thought I'd do a short summary of his argument by just presenting the results... now you have everything you need to know to discuss this subject! No need to rtfa.

Tried to think of a similar situation, but the closest I could think of was when Obama pointed out that keeping your tires inflated to the proper psi could save a lot of gas for the whole nation. McCain criticized it because, I dunno, it wasn't as sexy as electric cars? It's actually a perfectly reasonable suggestion that would be effective and easy to do, and as far as I can tell McCain was forced to "fight" it because the other guy brought it up first. I can't off the top of my head think of any things like this going the other way. However, Obama was sort of criticized or made fun of for agreeing with Hillary in the primaries too much.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2008/08/07/tire-pressure-taunt/

Yes it's Fox News, but it was the first google hit and I'm lazy.

I know this is a joke, but you've clearly never played DotA :) It has the most advanced gameplay of literally any game I've ever played in all my years of gaming. Saving me a couple of keystrokes is all this program does. I've been using it for a couple weeks now. While it is helpful, it's hardly playing for me.

It could actually be simpler to do it his way. Icons never move, and he already knows where they are going to be on the screen, so no need to figure out what the data under the hood looks like. While it's certainly more processor intensive, and probably less elegant, Warcraft 3 is a pretty old game, so I don't think it's a big deal for most computers to handle the extra load. Or he could just be doing it cause it's more fun this way :)

Nuts I need to read the summary all the way to the bottom...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91526-3D-Realms-Shutting-Down
Deep Silver and Apogee Software have issued the following statement: "Deep Silver and Apogee Software are not affected by the situation at 3D Realms. Development on the Duke Nukem Trilogy is continuing as planned."