[5 Lessions in 5 Years]

I've been tagged! Man, I totally missed this one! D=
I haven't been playing MMOs for 5 years yet, but I think I've got 5 lessions anyway.

1. A Guild Lives or Dies By Its Structure
Organization is the key to success. Write down your guild's values and goals, and uphold them. Support your teammates, think about morale. This is not just for raiding guilds; any strong community needs open communication, structure and goals to thrive and grow.

2. A MMO is Only as Fun as The People You Play With
In a MMO, the people you're around make a big difference in the atmosphere of your experience. Being a guildless soloer who only does pick-up groups gives you a totally different feel than a person in an active, close-knit guild. I never would have stuck with WoW past the first year if I hadn't had my guild.

3. Your Gaming Time is Your Own
Running lowbies through content, giving gold, etc. is fine... but be aware that some folks will milk you for all it's worth unless you put boundaries on your time. It's not a bad thing to log in and just want to play for yourself, don't be ashamed to stand up for that.

4. I Love You IRL, But Can't Stand You Ingame.
It's not always ducks and bunnies to get RL friends/significant others playing the same MMO as you. =P

5. Remember to Have Fun
Sometimes, you just need to sit back, stop the rep farming and instance grinds, and take a ride thru the zone you went through at level 2 and wave at the lowbies. Find creative ways to do silly things. Remember to make your own fun sometimes, and don't get stuck on the treadmill.

[Blizzard: 1 Hackers: 0]

Warden has been quietly updated in the latest WoW patch, basically breaking all current bots and hacks for the game. And, of course, the people who made it their mission to override Warden, are crying about it.

The Warden program scans your computer for illegal processes that are influencing the game (speed hacks, bots, etc. has been decried as and evil 'breach of privacy' by some players (those who're running those bots and hacks, most likely). Most of their arguments are just whines from people who hate having their 'freedom' to cheat forcefully denied. Scott sums it up:

But the real bottom line: if you don’t like Warden and find it an invasion of privacy, vote with your pocketbook and don’t pay for WoW. It’s really that simple. Histrionics on message boards aside, playing WoW is not some kind of constitutional right, it’s a contract between you and Blizzard. As part of that contract, Blizzard is going to be looking over your shoulder while you’re playing. If you’re not OK with that, there are, believe it or not, other online games out there, some of which have been rumored to resemble WoW to varying degrees.

Game developers have not only the right, but the expected duty, to enforce a clean and open playing field. As black hats get better at breaking them, white hats are going to get sneakier (and sometimes overbearing) in protecting them. The arms race will never end.

Or as we say in WoW: Q.Q more, nubs.

[Once Again, the Grind is the 'Real' Challenge]

Via Warcry:

"In keeping with their insane ability to tear through content, the first Illidan kill by the Chinese guild The Seven was recently [Oct 29th 2007] reported on the WoW forums.

While we've seen quite our share of Illidan kills on this side of the world so you may be asking "so what?"

Burning Crusade came out on September 7th in China, meaning it took only 51/52 days for to level to 70, gear up, and kill Illidan. From the screenshot you can see that many members are still sporting their tier 3, which speaks volumes for how powerful it actually is.

Naysayers may say that due to the various bugfixes and changes that went live prior to China even receiving the expansion they had access to a much better tuned Outlands than we did, but you can't deny how impressive this is, even if they had a little bit of an easier time of it than we did."

  ...Because removing attunement quests, bugged trash mobs, and rep grinds makes it 'easier' to kill the top Outlands raid boss while wearing mostly Old World T3 Gear. Right.

Yep, many MMO players have a very weird definition of 'difficulty'. I'd say this Chinese guild did an amazing job, seeing as how they were largely undergeared and still beat the Black Temple encounters this fast. But in the bizarre e-peen contest that is getting 'World First' raid kills in WoW, any excuse you can use to diminish someone else's achievement (and believe me, the cattiness I've seen between 'hardcore' guilds trying to demean each others' raid progress is hilarious in it's pettiness sometimes) is fair game. Sad that folks can't even give a 'grats' to these guys without adding an '...even though you did have it easier than us!' snark.

  Lots of comments in that thread about their 'sub-par' gear too. I guess people are totally missing the point of how that makes what they did actually cooler. People are always whining about how gear > skill in WoW. A case appears where people overcame a gear handicap, it's all suddenly 'lol! What lamers!' Hilarious.

[XFire Debate on Women and PC Gaming]

Here's the transcript!
Scroll down a bit to get past the inane banter into the actual questions.

[A Hilarious Take on Game Violence]

It's not an oxymoron!



It's technically a review of the game itself, but Yahtzee hits on the topic of games and violence in general.

[By the way, WoW is not hardcore]

In case you've missed the memo; the consensus about World of Warcraft among 'established' MMORPG players, is that it's cheap fluff, dumbed down, too easy, and lacks any 'real' substance. In an average month on gaming forums, you can often find many topics dedicated to sneering at the game's percieved (and real) flaws. It's basically a hobby for some folks to keep reiterating everything they don't like about WoW -- it's the price of popularity; lots of people will hate you for it because they feel you don't 'deserve' it. With games it's no different.
So I was kind of confused when I read Plaguelands' rant on the upcoming Patch 2.3 changes to the lower level content of the game:

"WoW players can finally stop pressing their stylish red ‘More Ez-Mode’ buttons because leveling between 20 and 60 just got a lot easier come the 2.3 patch.

 * 15% reduction in experience needed per level between 20 and 60
* Overall experience gained by questing between 30 and 60 boosted
* Say goodbye to the difficult to kill elite mobs that chill outdoors in the sunshine, they’ll also have same if not better quality loot drops
* New quests (approx 60 or so) and a new goblin town smack dab in Dustwallow Marsh (levels 30 to 40)
* Dungeons will be retuned to a narrower level range. (example: SFK currently is 18-25, but will be gimped to 18-21)
* Dungeon quests will yield a higher experience reward and dungeons will also see revamped loot tables
Removing the challenge. – Check
Dumbing down the game. – Check
Serving 9 billion. – Check.
...Overall, not bad changes, but some of it feels like, damn, this is for sissies."

This is WoW... the game that personifies, in many people's minds, 'dumb and easy'. Why the streamlining of the lower level game content in accordance to what, in most everyone's mind, is already the case with the game as a whole, is being considered some kind of cheapening of the game, baffles me. The game has always been about 'fun' over difficulty when the choice had to be made. Since day one.
WoW is the game for people who have never played a MMORPG, those who don't have the time/desire to play anything more time consuming, and those who are just a fan of Warcraft's storyline.
But some people don't consider those things legitimate design choices -- they're considered 'cop-outs'.
If you are playing WoW, and feel a twinge of annoyance every time the game makes an adjustment to suit the 'non hardcore', be prepared to be annoyed a whole heck of a lot.
To be honest, I see this as just a rehash of the other million topics ever posted about how WoW is dumb, filled with idiots, and only for people that are lazy, unskilled noobs. It's not saying anything new, and it's frankly getting annoying to the rest of us who play the game and are getting tired of being insulted for doing so by just about everyone, any chance they get. Yes, WoW is not a hardcore MMORPG. We all know that already. 
WoW has plenty of issues that can be discussed on their own merit, and as long as people can't get past simply repeating 'Dumbed-down, too easy, filled with idiots' over and over again as their main point of discourse about the game, it's hard to get any kind of substantive discussion about the game's merits and flaws and gameplay possibilities. I seriously doubt the game it's ever going to change to suit the people who think it's too dumb and easy as it is now -- so I think we can safely move on from that point.
Hopefully, once the '08 crop of new MMOs comes out, we'll have some more quality 'advanced' MMORPGs to choose from, and perhaps some folks will be able to forgive WoW for not being what they wish it was.
Anyway, for people like me, leveling their 6th alt through the Old World content, those patch changes are a godsend. I guess that just makes me a sissy. But hey, since I don't play games in order to prove that I'm not one, I guess I can live with it. =P