Posted by Spooner | 4 Comments

Stupid lawsuits run rampant against MMO companies

See, now this is just stupid. I saw the article originally on the Aion Tower and could barely believe it. It seems that any asshole can file a lawsuit and have a case these days. You know, I could end my money problems in a heartbeat, all I need to do is get in on some of this class-action stuff, I already have the asshole part down pact.

PalTalk, holders of two patents, one of which allows for chatting while playing an online game, recently filed a patent infringement lawsuit targeted at NCSoft, Blizzard Entertainment, Sony Online, Turbine Entertainment, and Jagex. PalTalk recently won an undisclosed amount from Microsoft’s X-Box Live for a similar patent claim, and now looks to target all the big fishes for their cut of the MMO pie.

Additionally Worlds.com has filed a claim against NCSoft and Activision, parent company of World of Warcraft, for infringing on patents held for “scalable virtual worlds with thousands of users”. If successful, they will no doubt target all of the other MMO companies for its share of the wealth.

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Posted by Spooner | 8 Comments

What’s up with Blizzard this Holiday Season?

I’ll just give your guys the straight up truth, you probably won’t see anything WoW related here until Blizzcon other than typical news reports and such. Frankly there just isn’t anything worth reporting or even discussing, it’s all been said 100 times over already and the fact that item levels are probably going to hit the 300’s before Wrath is finished just proves my point that WoW has become nothing but a mindless gear grind in the end game. I’m a little confused at Blizzard right now. We all knew that their merger with Activision was going to change things but not exactly how. I’m not saying its been for worse, but it is different.

As an anti-piracy measure and to force users to utilize Bnet, Starcraft 2 is not going to support LAN play. I know this is going affect the game’s popularity, which sucks because we’ve been waiting OVER 10 FUCKING YEARS for Starcraft 2 and so help me this shit better deliver. The original Starcraft is the national sport of a country for heaven’s sake; those are pretty big shoes to fill. And now it’s been pushed back to 2010 which means there isn’t going to be jack shit going on for Blizzard sales over the Holidays (barring any CRAZY announcement at Blizzcon).

On top of everything we have what the majority of players are feeling as a lackluster and underwhelming Patch 3.2 while new MMOs and other games in general are seeing tons of Fall releases (Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Aion, Batman Arkham Asylum, Halo 3 ODST, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed 2) I mean shit guys, look at that list of great games from casual to hardcore across all genres and platforms… and then there’s the Wrath of the Welfare King.

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