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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Posted by Spooner | 7 Comments

Its Summer, why are you reading this?

So your server is a little less populated right? The auction house brokers aren’t as slam packed at the moment? Are the prices on the AH just a little deflated? Welcome to the Summer season in gaming, specifically in the World of Warcraft.

There won’t be another in-game holiday for a long while and there probably won’t be new raiding content until the Fall starts up anyways, so what’s a player to do? Log off. That’s right, log off. Now’s the time when everything sort of calms down a bit for the World of Warcraft. Recruitment gets a little harder because all raiding guilds are trying to keep doing runs but are forced to cope with the seasonal drop in most available recruits.

Its time to go check out the summer block-busters at the theaters. Family vacations, summer jobs, sports, beaches, babes, and all night parties take first priority in the lives of a lot of gamers; especially since the gaming industry typically poops out during the summer only to annihilate in the Fall.

We’ve got the next Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 coming out. Left 4 Dead 2 as well. Blizzcon is going to announce more titles to whet the appetite towards the end of August. Aion is a new(ish) MMO coming to the western world in September; and I won’t even begin to lament on how awesome Starcraft 2 (and the ensuing beta) is going to be any day now.

For me, dailies have already stagnated to the point where I won’t bother doing them, maybe the crusader ones for another 10 days and the jewelcrafting for a few more tokens. Family issues dealt with, I’m making a return to raiding but I expect that to be my only real motivation for logging on and even then its mainly because of the people I raid with and not so much the content. I’m pretty much waiting with bated breath for 3.2 to drop so I can bitch slap that raid content and then dive 100% into Starcraft 2’s beta. It would be nice though to take the 30 minute flight over to the Bahamas and soak up a little bit of paradise.

So if you’re still plugging through as hard and deep as possible through Azeroth, how are you passing the time?

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