This reviewer is definitely a reviewer I don't need to hear any more of. I shut it off after the first ten seconds. The ironic thing is the review itself is more intolerable than the movie it's trying to lambaste.

I'm going to have to say that the phantom menace is better than this review video. The reviewer's tone is so boring, so monotonic, that I can't watch more than 10 seconds of the video. George Lucas at least let me get to the end of _his_ film!

UIpdate from mmo-champion.com: "The next unlock will happen on January 5th, if each wing is unlocked after a month it means that we won't see Arthas before April but if I had to give my opinion I would say that it will probably be faster than that. The 4 weeks are probably here to let people test the rest of the content without focusing too much on raid instances."

So there you have it folks, they're giving themselves plenty of time to harvest those delicious greenbacks without updating the content at all. If MMOs are supposed to be constantly evolving persistent worlds, WoW now wins the award for consistently stagnant persistent world.

The "other content" they're referring to are the 5-player dungeons, but those will just get toasted by the end of the week.

If you want to remain playing WoW, you might want to consider putting a dent in Blizzard's coffers by cancelling your subscription at least until the new raid zone is fully released on normal difficulty.

Patch 3.3 is Blizzard's big squeeze for subscription cash before the next expansion. Each wing past the first wing of the raid dungeon is locked out on a real-time timer such that the dungeon incrementally opens. What's worse, is the final boss of each wing has an attempt count which also increases linearly as more wings open. All this is to forcefully stop well-coordinated teams of players from beating the dungeon quickly, and I don't just mean in one week. There are guilds out there who are capable of beating this thing in a couple months in about the 50th percentile of raiding guilds, but with the harsh attempt count on the bosses of each wing it will most likely lock these guilds out for more than that, keeping the subscription cash flowing longer than it needs to. To top it all off, hard modes won't be accessible until the whole dungeon is cleared, and when that happens, they're granting all players a buff to their statistics to make it easier to beat the dungeon. That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.

Blizzard has gotten so addicted to the high revenues that they're willing to implement game mechanics based around keeping people subscribing with minimal content updates. As a result, I've cancelled my subscription and I can safely say I won't be returning to Azeroth again -- ever.

As Auxis alluded to below, you can simply write a hack to tell the game that gameguard is running when it's not. These hacks are readily available for Lineage II (and I suspect almost every other game popular enough to warrant them), so all gameguard does is treat the gamer like a criminal while doing little to actually prevent unauthorized use.

Well their key must be in the executable somewhere if it works through some type of encryption. Find it, change it, and then make a fake steam server which unlocks the game.