Yes, WoW has evolved substantially since its launch. To all intents and purposes, Burning Crusade was "WoW2", Lich King was "WoW3" and so on. The game changes more through expansions (and even through some of the larger patches) than... say... Call of Duty changes between entire games.

Before WoW, levelling up was almost the whole point of MMOs and end-game content was something only a small proportion of players ever saw. In Final Fantasy XI or Everquest, many players still wouldn't have reached the level cap after playing for a year or more.

WoW's great innovation - and one of the big reasons for its success - was to cut down the length of the level grind and make end-game play (which tends to involve more skill and more social interaction) available to a much larger pool of players. Vanilla WoW was a huge shift in that direction compared to older MMOs and Blizzard have shifted the game even further that way with every subsequent expansion.

Almost every MMO launched since WoW has tried to duplicate that formula, but failed to add enough of a distinctive twist to it to lure people away from it in the long-term. If the re-launched Final Fantasy XIV - which is very impressive indeed and the most successful MMO launch since WoW - has one really killer feature, it is that it shifts the tone and nature of both levelling and end-game content substantially away from the WoW model (without ignoring WoW's evolutions of the genre entirely).

Pay-to-win isn't - quite - what's on offer here. Blizzard haven't yet gone that far.

If you've played WoW for any time, you'll know that the game only really "begins" once you hit the level cap. Certainly, there isn't much point in comparing yourself to other players until you hit the maximum level. What Blizzard are selling here is the opportunity to skip the extended tutorial/storyline hybrid that comes before the game starts in earnest.

Genuine pay-to-win would be the sale of any kind of advantage, be it gear, increased access to instances (such as a waiver on weekly lock-outs) or any kind of character power-boost or income-boost once at the level cap. So far, Blizzard have not gone in that direction (though many other MMOs do). I think Blizzard still understand that would be a step too far for the player-base they've built up and would likely kill their cash-cow. MMOs that do use that model tend to have relatively short lifespans, while WoW is still going strong after the better part of a decade on the basis of a subscription model.

In fact, the pure subscription-model is by no means as dead as many people seem to think. There was a real worry, after the disaster of the initial Old Republic launch, that the model was no longer viable in a world of free-to-play-pay-to-win. But the re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV late last year was extremely successful (and remains successful several months after launch) on the basis of a subscription model with no microtransactions at all.

Seriously, it's nothing like 100-hours game time to get a character to max level and it's much less if it's not your first character. There are a few factors that affect how long it will take (if you do marathon play sessions it will take longer than if you play in bursts with rested state), but I'd estimate no more than 60 for a first character, as of Mists of Pandaria. And a good chunk of that will be on the final 5 levels, which (last time I checked) hadn't yet been accelerated in the same way as the pre-Pandaria content.

I've done alts in under 40 hours of playtime, through a combination of rested state and heirlooms. Combine those and the little xp-progress bar absolutely shoots across the bottom of the screen. Plus levelling an alt is actually kinda fun, particularly with the group-finder making low-level dungeon runs a much better way to level up.

I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.

So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).

There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).

If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).

And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.

So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.

Oh dear...

The point about France was regarding the fact that the country has an official regulator for its language. A regulator which has quasi-legal (though thankfully no longer legal) powers to prohibit the use of languages other than French in public communications in France.

The blasphemy laws point has been an active point of debate in many EU countries over the last few years - ever since the mohammed-cartoons controversy. There was a major debate in the UK around the Racial and Religous Hatred Act 2006, which, in its original form, would effectively have criminalised any speech that offended somebody on religious grounds. Happily, the bill was amended (against the Government's wishes) as it went through Parliament and ended up somewhat diluted; though it still arguably has a chilling effect. There are still active campaigns by religious groups (primarily though not exclusively Islamic) for legislation that would duplicate the intention of the original bill.

The last time Germany had the presidency of the EU in 2007, it used that power to ensure the Commission (a terrifyingly unaccountable organisation) began the process of introducing legislation that would have effectively made Germany's censorship of video-game content mandatory Europe-wide. Happily, the clock ran out on it and the Portuguese presidency which followed was, depending on who you listen to, either more liberal-minded or more distracted by the looming economic crisis, so the whole thing dropped. Germany doesn't get another Presidency until 2020, but the smart money would be on them trying again - or leaning on another country to try again. Particularly if the Eurozone financial crisis does blow over, allowing social issues like this to return to the prominence they had in the middle part of the last decade.

I'm extremely familiar with the workings of EU institutions and, indeed, have spent time working in Brussels. They do have some positives and produce the occasional outbreak of common sense, but if you wish to delude yourself that they are perfect - or even more good than bad - then that's your mistake.

Another person making a snarky comment about Atlas Shrugged while clearly never having read it.

John Galt is a major proponent of the gold standard. As in, seriously major. It's one of the main economic themes of the book. Bitcoin would have horrified him (had he been real).

Atlas Shrugged may not be "right", but it is much harder to dismiss than the average college undergrad leftie assumes.

Actually, we're generally much more prone to censorship here in Europe. Many of the countries in the EU have hang-ups on particular issues for historical reasons (eg. Germany on Nazi imagery and violence, France on the use of other languages). Many countries are also developing exciting new hang-ups and things they can censor, driven mainly by the three prongs of the Islamic far-right (pushing hard for new blasphemy laws), the authoritarian left (in thrall to both multiculturalism and radical feminism, both of which depend upon censorship) and an overbearing security culture (well... see pretty much 50% of slashdot's front page stories). And the general approach taken by the EU is to adopt the most draconian elements of each member nation's policies. If we get through the next German presidency of the EU without its ridiculous censorship standards being forced on the whole of Europe, we shall be extremely lucky.

Individuals and corporates in the US certainly practice self-censorship. But you are much more likely to encounter state-censorship in Europe - and it's getting more likely all the time.

But we're generally ok with swearing. So it's all absolutely fine.

Everybody's blaming Germany, but the nature of the content that was actually cut might imply that the cause is elsewhere. Not that I want for a moment to excuse Germany's censorship policies, which are ludicrous.

But the cut content is basically - anal probe aside - mostly abortion related. The EU still contains some very, very Catholic countries. In Spain in particular, it's a real no-go topic. Also in the Republic of Ireland and Poland to some degree (though less so there than it would have been a couple of years ago). It's quite possible the EU version was censored due to fears about reaction in one or more of those countries.

What we have in a lot of cities - and London is an absolute exemplar of this (New York isn't quite as bad) - is a model of urban development which, through pricing and housing availability, forces most people to live in suburbs but commute to work in the city centre.

There are big, big drawbacks to that model.

First, your average citizen wastes a lot of time commuting. While travel-time isn't necessarily dead time in either productivity or leisure terms, the nature of commuter mass-transit makes it worse than most other types of journeys. People are crammed into high density vehicles, may not have a seat and may need to make frequent changes of bus/train. It's not enjoyable and it's very hard to be productive while going through it.

Second, it places huge strains on your transport networks. It channels most of your commuter traffic into two huge peaks (usually a very sharp morning peak and a longer but still significant evening peak). Road travel generally just can't cope with the resultant congestion. Railways (including underground and light rail) are more effective at moving large numbers of people but have very high fixed infrastructure costs (a mile of railway costs many times more per annum to maintain than a mile of road), meaning they inevitably require large taxpayer subsidies. Worse still, because of the "peaky" nature of commuter traffic, you have to spec your mass-transit systems to handle the peaks and accept that they'll be pulling around mostly fresh air for at least 18 hours every day.

And all of that congestion? Pretty terrible for the environment. High carbon emissions and, if you're relying on cars, buses or diesel trains, horrible for air quality as well.

Ideally, you want people to live close to their workplaces. Some cities are better at that than others - ironically, often those which have evolved without much assistance from urban-planners (who historically have loved to neatly segment industrial, commercial and residential districts apart - a trend that SimCity hardly helped reduce).

So google-buses aren't necessarily fantastic either, if you're moving people a long distance to an out-of-town campus. They're probably better than the city-centre model, because their traffic is more likely to be contra-flow. But ideally, you might have small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city, each with appropriate housing nearby.

Pretty much any genre aside from party games is perfectly fine on the PC. And party-games is a genre that had a brief spike in popularity on the Wii but is now, mercifully, consigned back to oblivion. Everything else - from platformers to fighting games (ugh) to RPGs to shooters is perfectly fine on the PC. Almost all of them are fine on a home console (RTSes still don't quite work there and fpses will never be quite as good as on mouse and keyboard). Most are also fine on a Vita and, to a lesser extent, a 3DS.

The mobile platforms are not good for some types of game - yes. Touchscreen controls are poor for many types of game, in fact. But this isn't putting off mobile developers; if anything, the problem for iOS and Android is that the barriers to entry are too low. Quality indie games have a much better chance of success on Steam or the PSN, where they have to meet a certain quality filter for release.

I fundamentally don't buy into the idea that we need even more startups and indie-studios. Sure, the occasional gem comes from the indies (and thanks to the likes of Steam and the PSN, they tend to get the recognition and success they deserve), but mostly, we just get the kind of crud that jams up the stores on the mobile marketplaces. The best games, like it or not, continue to come from the mid-sized and major studios.

On app-lite and app-purchase models, I have no complaints. Rovio's means of selling Angry Birds is absolutely fine with me (and I adore Bad Piggies). But if you think that's still how most games on the mobile stores are pushed these days, you're at least 18 months behind the times. Rovio are, sad to say, an echo of an older, better time for mobile gaming (yes, this world moves fast).

And if you look around for other examples of games crippled by pay-to-win, they are legion. Dungeon Siege is just a recent high-profile example. The problem is that game mechanics are being actively stripped out in favour of mechanisms designed to get the player to pay more and more.

In the old days of arcade games, difficulty levels would be set very high so that players would have to put in more coins. Harsh? Yes, absolutely. But a skilled player could still go a long time off a single coin. The free to play mobile (and facebook) model these days has become one where, figuratively Pac-Man will DEFINITELY die after 15 seconds unless you put another coin in - but so long as you keep feeding those coins in, he's permanently under a power-pill effect.

I'm really not sure where you're going here - and I've lost track of what the first point you're trying to make is. With the days of Wii-shovelware behind us, there aren't really any party game developers other than Nintendo in the business any more anyway. I know full well that Nintendo is a horrible company to work with; they are certainly no more virtuous than Sony and MS (and in some respects less so) - but they always benefit from a "sympathy for the underdog" factor.

And no, demo + purchase is not the same as what's happening in mobile gaming now - if you think it is, then I can only suspect you haven't followed what's been happening on the mobile platforms at all.

Demo + Purchase is an old and established way of selling games. You give the customer a bit of it free, if they like it, they make a one-time purchase and buy the rest. If they don't, they move on. It's not a perfect system (I can think of games whose first levels - the bit used in the demo - have been far better than the rest of the game), but it is reasonably honest.

The mobile "free to pay/pay-to-win" and "paywall" models are very different. You can, in principle, play the whole game for free. But you will be forced to "grind" sections of the game for hours, or simply wait with the game idle for hours or even days between taking actions. At any time, you can spend money to speed things up. But you can never pay a fixed sum and "own" the game. There's always another paywall along in a few minutes.

Worse, any semblance of game design goes out the window. These games aren't designed to reward skill - quite the opposite. The last thing the developers want is for a skilled player to encounter the paywall less frequently. Rather, they are designed to form a direct correlation between success in the game and the amount of money you spend. More information and analysis is here.

Sorry, that should have been "with the exception of Mortal Kombat".

Fighting games make it to PC pretty well, by and large. Certainly, the big titles (with the exception of Street Fighter) do. Party games tend to be limited to the Nintendo platforms. If you want them, go there. Most people are happy without them.

By "paywalled", I meant pay-to-win, or free-to-start-playing-but-pay-through-the-nose-if-you-want-to-play-for-more-than-ten-minutes. See the recent Dungeon Keeper "remake" (or rather, butchery) for mobiles - and many other examples as well.

I'd agree on Papers Please. It's absolutely no fun whatsoever, but it is also an absolutely fascinating experience. It has a real moral depth and complexity that really does show up how shallow the morality systems in the average Bioware RPG are.

It's slightly more traditionally game-like, but if you liked Papers Please, I'd urge you to try The Banner Saga. It does a similar thing about forcing the player to make difficult and morally ambiguous decisions without clear-cut consequences. Plus it has vikings, which is always a plus.

I disagree, however, on Gone Home. When I was in my first year at university, one of the guys on my hall was a member of a film club. One night, I got dragged along to see the film that they'd been working on for the last six months. I will never forgive him for the 90 minutes of my life spent watching people walking around slowly without saying anything and staring meaningfully at loaves of bread in a baker's window. Gone Home struck me as a similarly undergraduate pile of hipster rubbish.