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What also is being questioned is your level of moral outrage. Just stating that sometimes a company makes a bad long term decision in favour of short term profit and then stating that this move by Blizzard could prove to be such an example would have been reasonable. What is being questoioned is your moral outrage at this change and your insistence that it will mean that Blizzard alienates major parts of it’s audience, with nothing to back up this argument than a single example of the explotation of another franchise in another field and your own inability to stand up to peer pressure.

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Also, thank you so much for protecting my privacy. I value your honorable intentions very much. All that clever hacking you did to discover my true identity can not be replicated by mere mortals, so my secret is safe. Well, unless they click on my name… Do’h!

In any event I am sorry you didn’t find me among the great journalists. That’s probably because I am not one. The last time we conversed, being “great” was not a requirement. I regret letting you down. Since I’ve done a number of reviews/interviews in the past, I figured that it qualified me as having been “in the gaming press.” My apologies if I was wrong.

Now, all this BS aside, none of your points stand up to the slightest criticism. Fans got what they wanted. Period. End of story. A tiny minority is upset, but they are always upset. There is absolutely no indication that any of the things you are trying to frighten us with will happen.

You seem to base your entire questionable theory on the assumption that people will rebel. Unless you or provide records of you having seen the future – this argument is pure speculation and will make you the laughing stock of any high-school debate team.

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Ha-ha-ha! Good one! Not only have you assumed (and assumed wrong at that) but you’ve actually used your Assumption to make an argument? Fail any logic classes lately?

Sorry, sir, but I fail to find any references to Alaric (or your real name which I won’t post for privacy’s sake) the famous video game journalist anywhere. Your blog doesn’t count by the way.

We heard your little rant about how looks is a central core element of MMOs the first time, dim-sum.

And yet you still fail at reading comprehension as I will soon demonstrate instead of making a NEW point here. ;-)

For example:

The argument about this being a slippery slope is also rather strange, A slippery slope to what? We aren’t Blizzard’s slaves. If prices become too high they will lose subscribers because we will move elsewhere. So what exactly is the problem?

To answer that I will just paste in part of my previous post.

It’s also like Larington said – WoW makes a SHITLOAD of money, Blizzard makes a SHITLOAD of SHITLOAD of money and that attracts money sharks. Thousands of games with subscription fees OR micro-payments are doing absolutely fine BUT when people see money making opportunities of this scale they start acting “weird”. They will bump a company to shareholder heaven and pull out just before it all comes crashing down because a given company or franchise have had all their life force drained out. Basically they discard it like a used condom and who has to suffer? The real fans of a given game/product/franchise because the bubble simply bursts.

Remember that while I AM theorizing about WoW in particular, I am describing what happened in real life to all too many franchises (I used the example of Star Trek, I could use the example of point&click adventure games that are slowly recovering from the shock or the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983). This isn’t pure fiction, this madness has a pattern and you could see it if you followed gaming/franchise/product history or analyzed famous company breakdowns. It’s very, very sad, since if handled properly you can make EPIC amounts of money with minimal investment (minimal compared to having to create a whole new franchise after killing the last one through greed) off any franchise that is popular enough.

To sum it up in Tarzan-speech so you understand:

Company scores a major hit.
Company and its shareholders get greedy.
Company starts trying to make money off the franchise like crazy.
People rebel (exactly what you said – they are not the company’s slaves) and become less interested in the franchise.
Franchise stops being profitable.
Company drops franchise.
Fans of the franchise have to suffer.

Do I have to use the Star Trek Enterprise example (just ONE of the many examples) again?

People like Star Trek.
Paramount starts churning out movies, games and new series.
People get bored from the franchise-overload.
Nobody watches Star Trek Enterprise.
Paramount drops Star Trek Enterprise.
Star Trek fans have to suffer.

(The above example shouldn’t be interpreted as a sad autobiographical story but as real-life proof how these things work – I could name more.)

Oh man, discussions on the internet are really funny.

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Personally, I think its a shame that Starcraft Ghost was cancelled because WoW was demanding too much development resources (IE content creators, designers, etc.) from the company as a whole. I think I would rather have seen Starcraft Ghost, though sadly I don’t think we’ll ever get to know if that would have been the ‘better’ game.

By the way, on the subject of the use of the word ‘addicted’ in the contect of to computer games, I remember once reading an Ernest Adams article about how we should avoid using the word to describe good games, like how in books you might say its a “real page turner”, but you’d never actually call a book addictive. Of course, good is a subjective term – I find WoW to be a dull button pressing contest wrapped in an admittedly stylish 3d environment, but others seem to find WoW to be really, er, compelling.

I think WoW is a bit boring personally.

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I am SO glad Blizzard felt the need to merge with Activision.

/sarcasm.

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