Respectfully, I think the military is the ultimate cooperative ANTI social unit. It's just anti the other social group. The war chimps make is not really the type of war we make, at least in the last 100 years (or farther back). The only real killing chimps commit to is if they manage to corner another chimp all by its lonesome, otherwise the type of war they wage is highly ornamental (kinda of like some Indonesian tribes).

The close social bonds that form within military units are a result of closeness due to a harsh environment, an environment in which you destroy other human beings and they destroy you.

The military just dehumanizes the enemy better than any other group, and honestly, if you look at it on a global scale, that is pretty sociopathic.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. IMO, only the strong must survive, lest all others drown our civilization with their resource needs.

I see nothing in that article that is a concrete design choice the GW2 team has made to specifically address the "problems" of current MMOs. They simply provide out-of-context examples of potentially cool scenarios. Wouldn't it be cool if we fired through walls of fire!!!! Yes it would, the first 15 times.

MMO design needs to take a radical step away from "MMO combat mechanics" into other directions (some people suggested more social aspects which I do not like) in order to be innovative. These mechanics were spawned by old school D&D mechanics by way of MUDs, and honestly, these ideas are OLD. Not all are bad, either. Until they do innovate though, no amount of marketing by game studios will convince me to subscribe to their new games. Neither will it convince all the people currently playing WoW to switch to something else.

There is a reason millions are playing that game. It provides cheap entertainment value for them, through a myriad of activities that, although repetitive, are greatly enhanced through the social aspect that is provided by online connectivity to a context of a world. Combat is boring, UNLESS you have to orchestrate with 25 people. Crafting is boring UNLESS you can sell your wares to a market economy. And so on.

As soon as a game is created to provide the same or greater entertainment value to people, they will jump. It just has to be innovative enough to make them jump. And yeah, open world group quests already failed, with WAR. That game could have been a radical attempt to reforge the MMO landscape, but the designers instead opted to play it safe and re-create WoW. Who will be next? From what I have read it doesn't seem like GW2 is ready to take up that cup.

Agreed. This whole article is like an evil being from another dimension, attempting to enter our world, and destroy our reality's fabric by posting RIDCULOUS non news. iFrames??? Yyyyyeaaahhhh. It makes sense if you look at who wrote it though. Not to be evil or anything, but check out the "About The Author" page. There is some seriously scary shit there. I can't believe this made it to the Slashdot front page.

What these guys are doing: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth.
Sure they are living in their parent's basement, but they seem genuinely talented, both artistically and technologically. Other game developers that are trying to cater to billions have already given up and have nothing to complain about.

Of the search results from google.cn. That's a big deal, folks. Let's see how this plays out....

Is that like a jiggawatt?

There are some good reasons mentioned here, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents as well. I have used Wicket professionally and loved it. I evaluated the GWT on my own time and was moderately impressed. HOWEVER:

Most people that are in charge of project are not going to pick a "new and cool" component-based web framework like the GWT or Wicket simply because they are afraid of what they do not know. I am not talking about some guy providing professional services (those are the people mostly using Wicket and GWT actually) but about primary architects at medium to large corporations with multi-million dollar budgets.

Why do they not make what I think is the right choice? The fear is part of it of course, but these guys are good, smart professionals, so there must be another reason. I believe that reason is the glut of web frameworks currently available on the Java platform. Even evaluating one takes time a lot of these people do not have. If they cannot evaluate everything, they cannot agree on anything, so there is no industry wide consensus. Most of these people are very careful risk-averse individuals (a good trait to have for an engineer), and there we are.