So it turns out that I don’t need to have a blade for my carpentry shop in order to use it. The message that popped up whenever I attempted to build a carpentry shop did not make it quite clear enough to me that I only needed a carpentry blade if I wanted to use my carpentry shop to cut boards. I can use it for all of the other carpentry-related things (like making shovels) without a blade. I mean, maybe it might be nice to have a more permanent wood plane that doesn’t require replacement of the blade every 5 boards, but I think I’ve been making some nice strides in that area.

I’ve learned how to use keyboard shortcuts to make things faster. If I build multiple wood planes near each other, I just need to hold down [P] for “Plane a piece of wood into a board” as I wiggle my mouse pointer over the various wood planes. I originally thought the keyboard shortcuts were broken. They only seemed to work half of the time on my wood plane, I would quite often press it and nothing would happen, and then I’d make another board and try the shortcut again and it would work fine. It took me about a week of reading over various posts on the subject of this game before I grasped the concept that keyboard shortcuts are based on which item my mouse pointer is hovering over. So THAT’s why it kept giving me errors telling me I couldn’t pick up the grass from my drying rack when I was standing over near the brick racks wondering why I couldn’t use the keyboard shortcuts to pick up my finished bricks. This has sped up my productivity quite a bit — When making firebricks, as long as I have all of the necessary items in my bag, I just move my mouse over to my kiln, hit [T]ake all items out, fill with [W]ood, fill with Fire[B]ricks, and set the thing on [F]ire. A few seconds of typing keys instead of a ton of clicking.

Sadly, I haven’t had as much luck with the flax growing shortcuts. They don’t seem to work as well, especially since just enabling the shortcuts in the menu forces my character to run over to each field to complete each action. I tried just holding down the “[W]eed this field” key while I waved my mouse over the field like I did with my brick racks and wood planes, but it just resulted in my character running over to the first one and repeating the weeding motion several dozen times while all of the other fields started growing wild and going to seed until I eventually manually overrode her by having her run somewhere else. With the shortcuts disabled, I can stand in the middle of the field (I can handle around 20 flax plots at once at this point) and click on all of the ones on screen, and she won’t move.

Now that I’ve got a shovel, I think it’s time to learn me some fishing. I guess building a sculpture for my art test is still a priority, but… fishing!

If there’s one thing that bugs me about A Tale in the Desert, it’s how seemingly arbitrary some of the things I need to construct are in their requirements, and how many of them are mismatched with the items they’re obviously constructed out of when you look at them afterward.

One of the simplest machines you learn how to build is a Wood Plane. It is built out of four pieces of Slate and a Stone Blade (which you made out of two more pieces of slate). You use it to create Boards out of Wood. However, when you craft it, and look at the model of the thing you just made, it is quite obviously made out of wood. I’m pretty sure it’s made out of Boards, holding up a work surface made of Slate and a Stone Blade, and what appear to be weights on the moving parts that are some kind of stone, possibly other pieces of Slate. But the frame of the machine is made of Boards. Obviously, you can’t require Boards to build the thing that you need to make Boards. That would be unplayable. It just annoys me that no wood whatsoever is required in its construction, not even wood that hasn’t been cut into Boards. Nor are you required to use any kind of wooden pegs or nails to attach these pieces together in some way, even though you learn how to make those items later and they’re required to make more advanced machines.

The Brick Racks? You need four Boards to make them, but they don’t appear to be made out of wood at all, but rather some kind of clay. The Flax Comb appears to be made out of some kind of metal with spikes attached to it held by a wooden frame, but you somehow constructed it out of Boards, Bricks, and Thorns. I don’t see any Bricks on that thing at all. The Distaff I use to create my Thread, Twine, and Rope appears to be made out of several medium-sized stones, long beams of wood, and some kind of metal tray at the top, with this complicated wheel system set up (I’m assuming the rope there is just a visual representation of the rope I am using it to create, just like the Wood Plane has some boards lying on the ground nearby), but all I need to craft it is Boards, lots and lots of Bricks, and some Wood. I certainly don’t need a wheel or a pulley, which is great, because I don’t really know how I would make one. I made a basic loom out of some Boards and Twine, but in order to make a better loom, I need to make a Loom Frame in a Carpentry shop. I fail to see how that Loom Frame is any different from the wooden frame I already created for my existing loom.

I only have one Jug to carry water in, so I am limited to carrying one unit of water at a time, which makes growing onions very annoying since they need to be constantly watered. I can’t make a pottery wheel, which is required to make more Jugs (I can’t just make freeform jugs by hand), because I need a Flywheel cut out of stone, and I neither have stone nor do I know how to cut it. I am unable to carry water without a Jug, which makes sense until you consider the rest of the inventory system, which allows you to carry incredible amounts of the most random things without any of THOSE items needing containers.

I carried twenty units of Tar halfway across Egypt without any kind of container whatsoever. I carry 100 units of Mud without a container when I make my bricks, and when I drop it on the ground, it’s sitting in some kind of basket, rather than just being a pile of mud on the ground. Where did that basket come from? I certainly didn’t make it. If I wanted to make a storage basket to keep things in, I’d need a considerable amount of Dried Flax and, for some reason, some Boards. If you’re going to require me to have a container to pick up one item, why don’t I need a container for every item that’s liquid or semi-liquid?

With my bare hands, without any skills whatsoever, I am able to slaughter a sheep, butcher it into several units of mutton, tan its hide into leather, and render its fat into oil (which does not require a container to carry). I do this simply by clicking on a sheep and selecting “slaughter this sheep” without requiring any additional tasks. I am, however, unable to create a sharpened stick without a knife made out of flint and a specific Carving skill.

I can build a Rabbit Hutch, but the key item needed to build it is a Clay Dome, which requires some incredibly complicated structural pottery skill that I don’t even have the slightest idea how to learn. Is there a reason why the Rabbit Hutch has to specifically be made out of a Clay Dome? Why can’t I just make THAT out of Boards and Bricks like everything else I’m building, and just have it LOOK like it’s a clay dome? Or hell, are rabbits that picky that it needs to be a dome? I don’t get it.

I made a small Obelisk for my architecture test, which brought me up to level 4, and though it appeared to be a solid piece of stone taller than I am, it was apparently built out of lots of bricks, boards, canvas, and slate. It is apparently a clever ruse to make you THINK it’s a solid stone obelisk, when in fact it’s an obelisk made out of bricks and wood that is merely covered with a slate outer facing. Or something.

I can’t learn how to fish because Arthropodology is a requirement to find insects to make lures out of, but I need 100 Dirt to learn that skill. I am apparently unable to collect Dirt without a shovel, and I can’t figure out how to make a shovel other than some mention in the wiki of blacksmithing. I hear mention of a slate shovel, but I’d need to make that in a carpentry shop I think, and I’d need blacksmithing to make the blade for that carpentry shop. There are some people out there who have learned fishing, and I’m not entirely sure how. Maybe they know of a shovel that I don’t.

So for now, my goals are to build myself a sheep pen, reach 500 onions grown so that my character will continue to grow them while I’m offline, collect enough Flint to learn how to make a Rock Saw, probably build a Masonry shop just because I am capable of gathering all of the materials to do so, and toss some kind of sculpture out along the road for people to vote on so that I can get my next level. Maybe I’ll build that Carpentry Shop just for the hell of it, even if I don’t have a blade to put on it.

So I tend to follow a Massively article called Rise and Shiny, where the columnist checks out one seldom-mentioned MMO per week, in an attempt to try out more new things, or something. This week’s game (which will get an article this weekend) is a game called Istaria. I went to their website to see if it looked interesting, and watched their little trailer. Hmm, ugly graphics, generic “evil army of undead” premise, but player-built towns are sorta interesting, I guess. I was just about to the point in the trailer where I was getting bored and about to stop it midway when they unveiled the one thing that makes the game worth looking into.

Dragons are a playable race.

Bonafide fire-breathing flying quadrupedal western-style dragons. You can have a hoard and a lair and everything.

As someone who would give almost anything to be a dragon in the real world, I immediately had questions. Can I start a dragon character right away, or by “can become a dragon” you mean that I have to reach a high enough level and then go through some kind of ascension to become one, and only the best players can be dragons as a mark of prestige (and therefore this would be too much work for me to ever achieve)? Do I have to pay extra to be a dragon? Is this game even free-to-play? I see something there regarding a 15-day trial, but someone said something about being able to play for free.

I was a little concerned about the “now works on Vista!” comment, with no mention of whether Windows 7 was supported or not. And how one of the items on their main page was a news post explaining their game’s name change over two years ago.

It took me forever to get the game installed, and while I was doing so, I checked out their payment options. It appears that there is a free-to-play option, but you’re only able to be a Human character. If you subscribe for $15 a month you can play as any race. What I don’t understand is, in a game that lets you play as a DRAGON, why you would want to be a badly proportioned dwarf for the same price as WoW. At any rate, they also have a 15-day free trial option where you can play as any race, so I made myself an account with this option.

I finally got the game installed, and tried to start up the patcher a few times, but it kept getting stuck on something, and making me look at the horribly low-quality graphics of the launcher. What is that, a 16-color scale? It’s made of gray, brown, and green, with individual pixels of each color very visible. I kept closing it and restarting it with different options disabled, and it eventually (after several hours of poking at it between Guild Wars quests) got past the patcher to the actual game.

I had a great deal of difficulty just getting from there to the character select screen. I use Comodo as my antivirus of choice, and when I start up a new program, it will pop up and ask me if I’m sure I want to allow that program to change something, usually two or three times until all of its different security options recognize the program as trusted. However, Istaria, like many programs, is on full-screen by default, and like some other programs, it is not possible to alt-tab out, since the game will merely take over again as soon as you try to leave. I even tried Ctrl-Alt-Deleting my way to the Task Manager, but as soon as I got it to open, the game went full-screen again. I ended up having to Alt-F4 my way out of the initial loading screen (it hangs there indefinitely as long as Comodo is blocking its connections), tell Comodo it’s okay, start the game back up, alt-F4 out of the game to tell Comodo the next thing is okay, etc.

All in all I didn’t even get the game up and running until around 11:30 pm, so I didn’t have a very long time to look through the gameplay itself.

I started on the character creation screen and immediately looked at the dragon, then clicked through all of the other races, judged them blocky and badly proportioned, and went back to the dragon. I am in favor of the character customization, as there were a great deal of different texture and color options for various parts of this dragon, as well as sliders for height, muscle, and fatness. Though it’s a little sad how many of the color options were bright primary colors and how few options I had for more muted accents. You can give your dragon a wide variety of different spot and stripe patterns, but the only colors available are bright, almost fluorescent, primary colors, with no options for simple white or black stripes.

I eventually went without stripes or spots, as a light blue/silver dragon (as always) and chose a character name. Though it asks you for a first name and a last name, you still have to have a unique first name. This made me sad, for Kiryn was already taken.

One thing I’ve noticed about my MMO habits: the very first time I start up a brand-new game, I immediately go straight for the options panel, and anything you put in my way to prevent me from getting to that options panel puts me into a bad mood. I want to put the game in windowed mode, turn up the graphics from the god-awful low resolution most games are set to by default (from the philosophy that people are more likely to stop playing your game if the framerate is bad than if it’s ugly?), see if the game will allow me to scale the UI up so that things aren’t teensy-tiny after switching to said higher resolution, and look over the keybindings. If the game even lets me change the keybindings.

I like looking over keybindings before I do anything else because it gives me an opportunity to change the WASD movement to something more familiar (I don’t know what’s up with games forcing me to use A and D for turning when they’re supposed to be for strafing) and it also lets me look over the possible options to see what kinds of windows they’ll expect me to open regularly.

Weird things about the keybindings in Istaria:

1. When you bind a key to something that is already bound to something else, it does not unbind the other action. It merely highlights it in red and forces you to look through the list of bindings for conflicts and change them yourself.
2. To unbind a key from an action, you left-click on it when it is already selected. I only discovered this after accidentally binding something to escape, then backspace, then resetting all of my keybindings accidentally by pressing the various buttons on the window (I still don’t know what the difference is between “Default Keybindings” and “Reset Keybindings” since pressing “Reset Keybindings” changed them back to what they were by default, I’m afraid to press the other button now) then searching through the help documentation until it told me what to do. Extremely unintuitive. I usually go through the keybindings and unbind all of the ones I don’t expect to be using frequently, and then return to the options menu later if I find that I do need a keybinding for that window after all. It’s like the Skills window in WoW: Why would I need a separate keybinding when I just just press C and then click the Skills tab? I don’t need to look at my skills THAT often.
3. Related to #2 above, I CANNOT use my left mouse button to move the camera. I was able to bind the right mouse button to moving my character around (and the camera with it), but since left-clicking is the method by which you unbind keys, it is not possible to bind it to free camera rotate, and it most certainly does not do this by default.
4. I also attempted to bind my Spellbook to P, but then when I actually pressed P later in an attempt to open my spellbook, it opened my Knowledge panel. Knowledge was the next thing on the keybindings list after Spellbook, and I did not have it bound to anything. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to open my spellbook again — the first time it opened, it was done for me automatically as part of the tutorial.

So I finally sorted out my keybindings (with the exception that I still couldn’t move the camera with left-click) and set off in the direction I was facing to talk to the nearby intro NPC. He told me a few things about how I’m one of the “Gifted” and if I want to know more about anything, there’s a book near the shrine over there. Oh, the shrine? He must be talking about that fountain-looking thing next to where I started. So I walk back over there, and start going around it, looking for some kind of book.

I found no book. Instead, I found a beetle. A very hostile beetle. I wanted to see what combat was like, so I walked up to it and clicked my “attack” button, found on a teensy tiny (no UI scaling = sadpanda) action interface that was placed in the upper left of the screen by default. I managed to find my current health and the target’s frame, hidden in tiny black boxes in the upper right corner. And my action bar (which had no skills on it) was a teensy tiny vertical bar in the lower left corner. All of these things were movable, so I crammed them all in the bottom center of the screen so that I could actually see all of my relevant info at the same time rather than all of it being spread as far apart as humanly possible. I hate it when games push all of my useful info into different corners of my 26-inch monitor. I hated it in WoW and I hated it in Guild Wars until I figured out how to rearrange my UI to actually make sense.

I thought the combat pose for my dragon was pretty neat, with my wings half-spread and my neck arched a little. Unfortunately, beetles a quarter my size seem to be the natural predators for dragon hatchlings, and I was unable to do any damage to it at all (when I finally found my combat log, it was full of “you miss” and “beetle does 5 damage to you”). It quickly overpowered me and once I had figured out where my health bar even was, it was down to 2 health, so I ran away screaming in the direction of my starter NPC, then around in some other direction, since the beetle was still following me. Eventually it stopped following and ran back to its spawn point, and I realized there was a pavilion with a book in front of me. Success!

So I interacted with the book, and it didn’t really answer any of my questions. It told me that in order to become an adult dragon and learn to fly, I needed to complete the rite of passage given by some guy (presumably also a dragon) in some town, but it didn’t tell me how to get there from where I was. So I ran through the area, trying my best to avoid the beetles that didn’t even appear on my screen most of the time until I was practically on top of them, until I found a path leading out of the starting forest into a barren mountainous passageway. I encountered a larger dragon who told me that in order to join the adventurer’s school, I needed to defeat one of the beetles in the previous area. But don’t fret, it’ll be easy if you use your breath attack!

“Breath attack?” I wondered. Thankfully, at this point, my spellbook automatically opened and showed me the (teensy tiny) icons for the various skills I had. None of which were placed on my action bar by default. I apparently have a breath attack! And a bite attack! And something called… Draconic Insight. I wonder what that does? It says it gives me a buff called Draconic Insight. Yes, but what does it DO? I tried using it, and indeed, it gave me a buff called Draconic Insight. Didn’t appear to have any effect, but I wasn’t quite sure how to open my character panel to see if it increased any of my stats. If it did, it didn’t say so in the description for the spell or the buff it caused.

So, armed with a (tiny little) action bar (that was still annoyingly vertical with no way to change it to being a more familiar horizontal) full of skills that I could use to kill beetles, I ran my little scaly self back to the forest, and hunted down some of those beetles. The first time I tried, I failed, and ended up dying, which led to a further explanation of the game’s lore reason for why you can just return from the dead (it has something to do with the fact that you’re one of the “Gifted” but still allows them to kill off story NPCs who are not similarly “Gifted”) and so after respawning at my bind point a few paces away, I went back in and tried breathing fire on the beetles again.

Success! This time I killed one! I attempted to loot it, but the game didn’t do anything when I right-clicked on the corpse, and the “gather” option in my action panel seems to be used for mining and such. Victorious, I returned to the NPC, who told me to go back and kill more beetles for a beetle horn, warning me that I might need to kill several before finding one of sufficient quality. Well, I guess I’ll have to figure out how to loot things now, eh? He also gave me a tiny brass bell that I could add to my “hoard” — I tried clicking the ? on the Equipment panel with the Hoard area to try to figure out what the gameplay purpose of the hoard was, but it didn’t even mention it in the lengthy tutorial window — it was just telling me that I could equip things, and pointing out various parts of the UI that seemed pretty obvious to me.

I returned to the beetles and killed a few, double-clicking on them to loot them this time. After killing my third one and starting to wonder how many I would have to kill until I get this quest item, I opened up my bag and actually looked at the descriptions for the (teensy tiny) items that were dropping. Turns out that bronze-colored circle with a T on it wasn’t a coin after all, but a beetle horn. Yes, that makes perfect sense. I actually had two of them. So I returned to the teacher again, and he told me how great I was and granted me enough experience to reach level 2.

At this point, the nonscaling UI was starting to give me a headache, as were most of the other parts of the game that seemed to be as confusing as possible to prevent me from having fun. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play it. It was time for sleep.

So I decided that even though I’m probably resubscribing to WoW when Cataclysm comes out, barring any new evil from the RealID system, I remain uninterested in endgame, and realized we really don’t have anything to DO in WoW right now that we haven’t already done three times. So I’m leaving my account disabled until Cataclysm, the loss of my subscription a kind of punishment for the shit Blizzard tried to pull on us all last week.

And it’s sad, but that event broke my tie to Blizzard, and I honestly don’t see myself playing Cataclysm much longer than it takes to explore the new redesigned leveling content. I really have no interest or intention in raiding against Deathwing, despite Blizzard finally giving me the freedom to do so in a 10-man without being a second-class player.

Until then, my fiance and I needed a new game to play together in the nights after I get home from work. We were talking about all the awesome upcoming MMOs that aren’t coming out until next year, and when we were talking about how awesome Guild Wars 2 was looking, he remembered that he used to play Guild Wars, back before I got my new powerbook 5 years ago and convinced him to come play WoW with me. Literally the only reason why he came to play WoW with me rather than me going to play Guild Wars with him was because I was a mac gamer at the time, and WoW was the only MMO that would run on a mac.

So rather than recover his account from all the draconian security measures NCSoft has implemented in the past 5 years, we both bought the Guild Wars trilogy, main game plus two expansions for only $40 (when the main game alone costs $20 and each expansion costs $30 if purchased individually), free to play after that point with no subscription cost ever. If I get bored with it next week, I can come back 3 years from now and log on again.

And I have to say, my mental image of Guild Wars was rather like Everquest 2: it was pre-WoW, and not as successful, so it had to be inferior. But from what I’ve seen (up to level 4 so far) this game has amazingly gorgeous graphics, and has a lot of UI conveniences that I would have to install mods for in WoW, or things that I could never do in WoW. Being able to turn off display of my helm, or choose to display it only when I’m in town? The accuracy of my spells having a lot to do with my distance and relative elevation from the target? If there’s a hill between me and my target, my fireball will run into the hill instead of just flying right through it? Now that’s crazy talk.

The party system IS a little annoying, I admit. It’s partly because my fiance’s antivirus would disconnect him from the game every time he loaded into a new zone, and whenever he logged back on, he’d be in the nearest city instead of simply loading back into the zone I was in. It isn’t possible to join someone’s party unless they’re in the same instance of the same city that you are, and it isn’t possible to fast travel when in a group, so whenever that happened, I’d have to teleport back to the city, make sure we were both in the same instance, invite him to my party again, and then we’d both have to walk from there to our quest location a second time.

I love how there are quests that want me to pick up a heavy object and carry it somewhere, and this object does not go into my bag, and actually slows down my movement speed and prevents me from attacking as long as my hands are occupied. And how when we’re partied, only one of us actually has to pick up the quest item that the NPC wants us to recover — because there’s only one of them! “Find my missing flute” she says. In WoW, one person would pick up the flute, and then the other person would wait for it to respawn, and then pick up their copy of it. In Guild Wars, because each area is instanced just for your party, you can have one person carry the quest item back to the NPC and then you all get credit for it. My eyes open wide and I say “ooooh, so realistic!”

There isn’t a crafting system, and there isn’t an auction house. I find this to be freeing more than anything else. You don’t feel like you’re required to level up a crafting skill just because it’s there. Without crafting, there’s very little you’d actually want to purchase from other players, so there’s no need for an auction house. Thinking back on it, I feel that Champions Online would have probably been a stronger game if it HADN’T had an auction house. That game did have crafting, but I found enough stuff to level it myself from quests and drops, so there was no reason to want to buy anything from other players. But you know, WoW has an auction house, our game needs to have one too!

I especially love the class mechanics. Being able to have a main class and a sub-class, and have TONS of skills for each one is great. I like that I’m only allowed to have 8 skills at a time, and I can rearrange them to whatever I want for free whenever I’m in a town. The game is balanced around me NOT having access to the dozens of niche skills my class can learn at the same time, while making the mere act of choosing which skills I want to bring with me be an interesting decision. I love how my main class has one attribute that is more open-ended to benefit whatever my subclass is as well, such as the elementalist’s larger mana pool.

I played an Elementalist (mage) for a bit when I was checking out the game, but I eventually got bored of the fireball spam and settled on a Necromancer/Monk, or Necromonk as I like to call her. Largely because the dances are class-specific and the only female dance I actually liked was the Necromancer’s Thriller dance, and also I like having the option of being a healer. With 10 total classes, each main/sub class combination is like a class of its own, some with multiple builds of skills and attributes you can switch out. There are 90 different combinations, almost all of them viable and specialized for certain things. Some combinations are great for PvP, but suck at PvE. Some of them are great for solo grinding, but terrible in groups. Hell, you can make a combination whose only purpose is being a mana battery.

This whole game feels really quite innovative, and then I remember that it’s been out longer than WoW has. And that I’ll never have to feel guilty any more, like I do in WoW, where I feel like I’m wasting my subscription if I’m not playing — there’s no hassle of trying to decide if I want to play next week and canceling my account if I don’t, and then going to the trouble to resubscribe when I do feel like playing. It’s always there. If there’s a stretch of time when I don’t really feel like playing, or if I’m working so much overtime that I don’t have time, I can just… not play.

WoW’s answer to people not wanting to play through the leveling content every time they want to make a new alt is to simply make that leveling content more fun. Guild Wars’ answer is to simply let you skip that content if you want. With all the different combinations and only 8 character slots, I don’t blame them. I can see myself deleting and creating new level 20 alts all over the place just to mess around with different combos.

A lot of people don’t like the free-to-play model, saying that it encourages the developers to make the game less fun if you’re not buying things from the cash shop. Well I say the subscription model has a similar problem — it convinces the devs to draw out every bit of content as long as possible, make you do the same daily quest every day for two weeks to get a single piece of gear, so that you’ll keep subscribing. I still haven’t figured out ArenaNet’s deal. How do they make so much money? They don’t have a cash shop, they’re staying afloat by sheer box sales alone. That just… makes them want to make the game as fun as possible, so that people will tell their friends about it and buy more boxes? I haven’t heard anything about people having multiple accounts… I’m still not sure what the downside is here.

I ask my fiance why he stopped playing Guild Wars to play WoW with me, and he says “because I love you.” And that’s the most important thing, really.

I think I’m more excited about Guild Wars 2 than Cataclysm now. Especially since their touted “complete talent revamp” has me saying “meh, that’s the same talent we have now, boring” over and over — and my pally partner is extremely upset that the thing he gets at level 10 is the shield throw ability, and his Ardent Defender is now an active ability that can only be used below 35% health. Thanks for unveiling those, Blizzard. My interest in your expansion is less and less with every passing day.

I won’t repeat all of what I said in my long listing out of reasons why this is Not At All Acceptable. I’ll add in some new things I thought of regarding the nature of real names on the internet.

1. Unlike internet handles, real names are not unique. What happens when, through some stroke of luck, the biggest troll on your realm forum has the same name you do? How do you tell them apart, since displaying character names is completely optional?
2. What if someone bought your account from you on eBay and continues to keep it active via gamecards, and uses it to post on the forums? Employers could google you and find flame-posts from some dude you barely even know.
3. How are people under 18 supposed to post in the forums using the accounts that are registered under their parents, even with parental permission to post?

But all of this is moot now, because Blizzard backed down. I wasn’t entirely sure they were going to, to be honest, and it made me sad. Because I was not going to back down from my principles in order to play Cataclysm, but it looked like it was going to be really fun. Especially after the announcement they made the day after this bombshell that they’re more or less turning 10 classes into 30 subclasses. Normally I would have been really excited about a huge announcement like that, because Blizzard basically said “we showed you these talent trees, you said they didn’t look cataclysmic enough, we agreed and tossed them out and redesigned the whole system from scratch in a really awesome way.” But that announcement was buried under discussion of the RealID issue.

I’ve been through so many emotional rollercoasters over the last few days, and in the end, the main emotion that won out over anger, fear, curiosity, and hope turned out to be a profound sense of betrayal. Blizzard isn’t stupid. They thought this through. They knew all of the pros and cons. Someone showed someone else some charts and spreadsheets and said “we could lose 37% of our subscribers if we make such a change,” and someone else replied “Hmm, that sounds acceptable to me.”

The thing that really bothers me about that thought is that WoW could lose 90% of its subscribers, and it would still be considered a “success” in today’s market, it would still have more subscribers than any other subscription MMO out there right now. Someone in a board room must have decided that was an acceptable cost for major social change.

That’s where I draw the line. That’s where I say, enough is enough. I’m putting my foot down. I’m not going to stand for this any more. If Blizzard doesn’t care about me, then why should they keep getting my money? There’s potential for this kind of change to snowball out of control, to get so much worse. Sure it doesn’t affect me personally right now, but someday it will. And that’s when I’ll look back and say, why didn’t I speak up about this when it was initially making me uneasy?

But then, see, I go cancel my account and a few hours later they announce that they’ve changed their minds, and due to the PR disaster this was turning out to be, with thousands of PAGES of replies, you’ll no longer be required to use your real name on the forums when the system goes live. I feel like a hero. I feel like we’re all heroes. We’ve spoken out against injustice and our words made a difference. I feel like celebrating!

I feel like someone at Blizzard has discovered a way to harness the power of nerd rage to run their servers, and this was a stress test.