World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (of awesome)

So the latest rumours about the latest expansion have been announced. Looks like the World of Warcraft developers are taking the game pretty much a full circle back to Azeroth and back to the old kingdoms. Cue the usual whinging about lore this and arthas that, and something about paladins (either over or underpowered). Thankfully it looks like Blizzard have grown a massive set of balls and are set to tear the old world apart and remake it which is significantly awesome. Lots of angry “lorefags” are complaining because now the story isn’t what it used to be. These are the same people that probably ended up having a psyhciatric assesment after trying to kill themselves because dumbledore died in the harry potter books and now everything wasn’t the same. Incidentally anyone reading this who is angry at changes to the story, welcome to the world of storytelling, you know where things progress and advance and change. If you want something to keep you happy here is a short story by myself “two people met and fell in love and lived happily ever after, no kids, no change of jobs, no nothing, they did exactly the same thing everyday for 74 years until they died at the same time, because if one died before the other it may have almost have made it different, they both died in their sleep, no excitement at all…”

Anyway, now that i’ve set up protection against the crying morons, the following are the details that have been released so far, with a bit of personal opinion and commentary.

Pay to Play or Pay to Win?

Something that’s been thrown around a bit in the MMORPG discussion ring recently is the whole free to play and pay to play argument. There are always people with opinions on the matters and there is no shortage of apparent firepower for either side when debating issues related to these games. I’ve played a lot of different games in my time, including free to play and pay to play and this entire article focuses on my own personal preference between the two, and the reasons behind the preference. This is not an attack on your chosen subscription model, your chosen genre or game, or indeed your own personal opinion, or even an attack on you personally.