Nethack is not an MMO. No persistent world, no game economy. Saying MMOs should be like Nethack is like saying Street Fighter should be like Sim City.

Nothing wrong with either game, but they have fundamental and irreconcilable differences.

You've missed my point completely - it's absolutely nothing to do with the loot.

If all of the dungeons in an MMO could be beaten with no deaths on the first attempt, the game would be seriously lacking in challenge. The actual fun in WoWlike MMOs (and yes, they can be a lot of fun) is in overcoming difficult (sometimes extremely difficult) fights in a large group by the use of co-operative tactics. You're going to die. Repeatedly. That's part of the game. If you want permadeath, then you've either made the game impossibly difficult and time consuming, or you've compensated for this by turning it into a very different, much easier (and far inferior) game.

Saying that WoWlike MMOs need to have permadeath is like saying that fighting games should incorporate city-building elements. It's a gameplay mechanic that simply doesn't fit with the genre.

Contrary to the general cynicism displayed in these parts, WoWlike MMOs do have a fairly solid gameplay core that is much more than just "keep people playing the subs". Leaving player-vs-player aside for now, they are, at heart, large-group co-op games (and often very difficult ones).

At the heart of a WoWlike is raiding. And at the heart of raiding is fighting against bosses. Leaving aside casual-oriented "raid-finder" modes, raid bosses are generally tuned so that, at the level of gear players will have when they are first encountered, they are challenging fights with little room for error. The satisfaction in the game comes from overcoming that challenge and working with others to defeat the bosses. The level of co-operation required goes far beyond that found in most other genres. I have no shortage of criticisms of WoW, but I can attest from personal experience that the "rush" associated with my first kill of certain bosses (Illidan, Kil'Jaeden, the Lich King) was like nothing else in gaming - and that was irrespective of whether I got any gear from it.

But with the difficulty tuned as high as it is, death is inevitable and very much part of the game. You learn from your deaths and adapt accordingly. Imagine Dark Souls with permadeath? A WoWlike with permadeath would be like that... but worse.

It's a myth that every MMO besides WoW has failed. There have been successful ones before and since. Not on the scale of WoW, perhaps, but then they've generally not had the resources put into them that WoW has either.

Before WoW launched, 500,000 subscribers was considered a massive success and very profitable. Many people have been able to get by on similar figures since.

If Blizzard want to move people off WoW content and onto other projects, they need to work out something that gives players something to do without driving too many away. Daily quests overload isn't the answer.

If you really believed what you were saying, you wouldn't be posting AC.

Almost certainly wrong.

Despite a recent partial recovery due to the release of MoP, WoW does seem to be in decline. Its player numbers have been in gradual retreat, with a few dips and bumps, at least since the middle days of Cataclysm and arguably since the latter days of Lich King.

However, most MMOs to date, including many commercially successful MMOs, have spent most of their lifespan in decline. Everquest and Ultima Online's subscriber counts both peaked in their first two years, but both games had a lifespan long beyond that point (indeed, the continued life of Everquest was one of the biggest obstacles to its own sequel). Final Fantasy XI launched in Japan in 2002, had a player count that peaked shortly after the European launch in 2004, but is still alive and well today (Square-Enix keep threatening to kill it, but probably won't dare until and unless they can turn things arounf with Final Fantasy XIV). Lord of the Rings Online launched fairly well, had a gradually declining player-base for years, then as that started to dip towards a critical mass, it went Free to Play and is, by all accounts, reinvigorated.

There are occasional exceptions; MMOs which have such dramatic subscriber-bleed that they go into a death-spiral. I have a feeling that despite the huge amounts invested in it, this will be the fate of Star Wars: Old Republic if the free to play relaunch doesn't succeed (and I doubt it will, the f2p offering is more like a demo than an actual game).

But by and large, successful MMOs continue to live on for many years after their subscriber base peaks. WoW's achievement was that it continued to grow for quite as long as it did. At some point, Blizzard can put it into a low-dev-costs "semi-hibernation" and continue to run it for years, possibly introducing a few pay-to-win elements along the way.

I wouldn't be surprised if WoW was still alive and (relatively) healthy in 2022.

The review touches upon the issue of the ridiculous number of daily quests required. I've been playing MoP myself and I can confirm that Blizzard have got something very, very badly wrong here. The daily quests are too numerous, too essential and far too boring. With a small number of exceptions, they all tend to be variations on the old "kill six snow moose" themes. Except this time it's panda-mooses. And you usually have to kill more than six of them.

It's worse still if you play as a tank or healer. DPS players can at least blitz through individual enemies quite quickly. As a tank or healer, the health pools for enemies take so long to chip down that the daily quest grind can actually take hours. Plus the daily quests are tied into the valor point system, so unless you are a hardcore raider, you're more or less tied into continuing with daily quest grinds even after you max out your reputation. JOY!

In all honesty, I can't see myself sticking with this much longer. I returned to the game in the late Cataclysm era, having quit in the late Lich King era, thinking I'd stick with it on a casual basis. MoP has just turned that into a chore.

It's hilarious to watch the official "blue" forum posters try to defend the daily quest overload. They can't claim that it's fun or enjoyable. They can't claim that it's interesting. All they can do is keep coming up with new ways of saying "yes, it's a boring timesink, but we're not changing it".

I suspect Blizzard are desperate for ways of getting WoW development costs down so they can focus on other things. Their end-game content model is horribly inefficient and expensive. They create new raid and dungeon content, go through an exhaustive and exhausting testing and balancing process, release it, then have it rendered obsolete by the next tier, 4-6 months later.

I suspect the best thing Blizzard could do in the longer term, if they really do want to concentrate on other projects (including a WoW successor) without cutting off their income stream from WoW subs, would be to get to more of a steady-state end-game. Stop raising the level cap (leave it at 100, perhaps, as that's a nice round number) and move from the current "vertical" end-game into more of a "horizontal" model, like the one used by Final Fantasy XI and some other older MMOs.

They could re-tune all of the old raid content up to level 100 standards (which requires some work, but less than creating entirely new assets) and add multiple progression paths. They'd then be able to get away with adding new raid content far less frequently, while giving the player-base something to do that isn't an endless, tedious grind of soloed daily quests.

We've got a real plague of robocalls in the UK at the moment - I'll get a couple per weekend and if I'm at home for any reason during the week, I'll generally get 2-3 each afternoon. They're all from ambulance-chasing law firms trying to get people to bring lawsuits against banks following recent court verdicts on Payment Protection Insurance mis-selling.

Now, there's no denying that some of the banks were very naughty indeed on this issue. However, the robolawyers have no way of knowing whether the people they're contacting have ever taken out PPI and there have been many cases of people bringing suits on the basis of these calls despite never having taken out a loan with PPI.

My own modest proposal? Make the firms in question liable for a portion of the banks' own liabilities on PPI mis-selling (which are vast), remove any personal indemnities from the partners in said firms and do not allow them to apply for bankrupcy until they have disposed of absolutely all of their sale-able assets, including any internal organs that might have black market value.

Feels reasonable, all things considered.

Plagiarism does seem to be getting more and more common, with people getting ever more casual about it. When I was at University in the 90s, there were a small number of students caught engaging in plagiarism. If it was felt to be deliberate, it was basically immediate expulsion. If it was more likely to be carelessness or ignorance of proper academic processes, the consequences were still severe (being made to redo substantial chunks of work).

Speaking a couple of months ago to a niece who's now at University, I was told that around a third of the students in her year for her subject had been caught copying material from the net. The response, a few sessions where they were sat down and told "Plagiarism is bad, mkay".

I came across a hilarious example of (non academic) plagiarism a couple of months ago, while sifting a pile of job applications.

This was the first sift and I had a pile of about 50 in front of me (which I was aiming to get down to about 15 or so by weeding out the obvious no-hopers). We had three other people sitting down with a similar pile (200 applications for 2 posts - this has been the norm for us over the last couple of years - I guess the job market is a scary place right now).

Anyway, I'm only being fairly cursory about it, but even so, I spot that three of the applications seem to use the exact same stock few (clumsy, badly worded) paragraphs. I tap the first line of one of these paragraphs into google and the first hit is a "how to write a job application" site. A very poorly put together site (think site design that dates from the circa 1998 geocities era), written by somebody whose first language is probably not English. The paragraphs in question aren't even particularly relevant to our job application form (which is fairly specific and focussed).

A quick e-mail around to the other people on the panel turns up a total of 6 forms which use text from that site. Clearly it had somehow managed to get a high ranking for a few of the relevant search terms. But seriously, you're competing against hundreds of other people and you decide to use material you've copy/pasted from something that is only one step away from having animated gifs of dancing cats? Unless said site had itself plagiarised its content from somewhere else, of course..

Indeed - and it's no secret that the anime industry (both the Japanese creators and Western distributors) has often used levels of overseas piracy to determine which titles are worth licensing for release in the US/Europe.

It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent. However, it can generally be a good way of spotting whether a title and/or similar titles are worth a subtitled streaming release, a physical DVD/BD release or potentially a fancy special edition box.

But yes, there's the reverse importation problem - and this is as relevant to gaming as it is for anime. For whatever reason, Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/£20 per volume of 4-5 episodes. These days, US/EU distributors struggle to get away with that model for all but the very biggest of releases (Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the most recent example I can think of) - it's more normal to get volumes of 13 or so episodes, for not much more than $40/£25 per volume. Meanwhile in Japan, that $40 equivalent gets you a volume containing... two episodes. The situation is broadly similar on games, where prices for many titles (particularly Japanese-developed ones) are utterly eye-watering in Japan.

Now if you've got a market that's willing to play along with prices like that, you're going to do everything you can to protect it - and that means doing whatever you can to block reverse importation. So yes, most Western (legal) streaming sites block Japanese IP addresses.

In the gaming sphere, Nintendo insist on full region locking (probably due to their Apple-style paternalist, authoritarian culture). Sony make it very hard to release region locked games on their console - there's only been one region locked PS3 game to date (Persona 4: Arena - and a worthy target for a boycott if ever there was one). But the 360... the 360 is more interesting. Microsoft neither ban nor mandate region locking; they leave it up to the publisher to decide (and don't lock the games they publish themselves). If you look at the trend for region locking on 360 games, while you can always find a few exceptions, a large of US releases will work on European consoles and vice versa, but very, very few will work on Japanese consoles. This at least partly explains why so many of the smaller Japanese developers have been willing to go the 360-exclusivity route during this console generation, despite the 360's poor installed base in Japan.

How long are you going to be there for? Because unless it's months and months, I would urge you to sort out your business affairs in advance and just not bother trying anything "clever" while you're out there. Because believe me, a bit of business inconvenience back home is nothing next to the world of hurt you will inflict upon yourself (albeit with some helpful assistance from others and their nice electrodes) in the admittedly fairly unlikely (but by no means impossible) scenario that you piss off the security side of what is still, despite a bit of spin and economic modernisation, a creepy totalitarian state apparatus.

Anyway... their country, their rules. When I travel to the USA, I'm generally struck by how stupidly low speed limits are, particularly given how well maintained, open and relatively quiet they are compared with ours here in the UK. But I don't plot and scheme for how I can drive at UK speeds - I follow the US speed limits. Now in the case of China, we're talking about rights that are rather more fundamental than "being allowed to drive fast" - but hey, you've chosen to go their on holiday (you've said you'll be a tourist) and you're a guest, so perhaps you should behave like on.

Besides, you'll get a lot more out of your holiday if you aren't constantly trying to work while you're out there. So as I said at the start, do whatever you can to organise things so you don't actually need to work while you're out there (or consider cancelling your trip and re-booking at a better time).

I'm posting on a website with a largely US audience. I know what the US terminology is and it does no harm to use it - and helps to eliminate the occasional misunderstanding.

It's good to know that the issue's being worked on - are there any links? (I'm genuinely interested in this stuff.)

I can see that the standardisation issue could be a tricky one (in a world where we still have no standard mobile phone or laptop chargers), but it surely can't be beyond our capacity to solve.

I think the actual issue is that we might be thinking about what infrastructure is needed for this in the wrong way.

I don't currently own a car (lucky enough to live in a London suburb with great public transport), but if I did, then an electric vehicle would make a lot of sense for what I'd use it for - short shopping trips and the like. However, the apartment complex I live in has no charging facilities in its car-park, so even though I own a parking space there (which currently sits empty), I'd have no way of charging one. Getting charging facilities installed would be seriously expensive.

I've often wondered if the conceptual model we use for electric cars isn't the wrong one. The current assumption is that when you buy an electric car, you also buy and own the battery, and you are responsible for keeping it charged.

Now - maybe there are umpteen good reasons why this couldn't work - but has anybody ever tried a different approach? I'm talking about a model where the cars have easily-swapped batteries, which the driver leases, rather than owning. So... you buy your car and you pay an upfront deposit for the lease of a battery. When your battery runs low, you go into a gas station (or in this case, gas/charging station), the battery gets removed and replaced by a fresh one from the station's "charging room".

You pay a fee to the station covering your share of its electricity costs for charging the battery plus whatever profit margin it requires (much like paying for your gas at the moment), and you drive off a few minutes after arriving. Meanwhile, "your" old battery is charged up at the station and swapped with another customer's empty battery once it's finished recharging. This eliminates a lot of the charge-time complaints associated with electric vehicles at the moment and also means that we don't need charging points in homes or at the roadside.

I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?

Sadly, it's not that easy (at least not in the UK, where resources for these things are limited and the emphasis for mental health is on "care in the community"). In particular, it was complicated by the fact that she'd been the first one to raise a complaint with the authorities. That makes it very difficult to lodge counter-complaints without them being discarded as retaliatory actions. Besides, from about the mid-point of this sequence, I knew that I was going to be moving out in the near future, so my motivation to do more than try to minimise the immediate grief was pretty low.

But yes, she clearly needed to be removed from the environment she was in - to provide her with treatment if any was likely to be effective and to protect other people from her in any event. I feel very, very sorry for whoever got the flat after me (a young couple, I'm told by my former upstairs neighbour - god, I hope they have a baby soon, a really loud, cranky baby).