Speaking as an outsider to American culture, I find Lincoln particularly fascinating - America has turned him into a deity. He’s there on his big stone throne, like a Pharaoh, saviour of the slaves, redeemer of the US.

And yet, his good deeds were done for cynical, political and economic reasons. And where the rest of…

“Obviously context is important, but how much context do you need before you stop dehumanizing people who are much like you, just a little different-looking?”

This is a precarious notion. People fling this sort of argument around in the West, while failing to grasp that they are absolutely and mercilessly condemning…

I find it fascinating that this particular quirk of game physics has never, ever been solved - that just as the inside of something is untextured, so too is it considered non-solid, so collision becomes a weird one-way system, allowing for the old “murdering people from under the map” trick.

I mean, I’ve done my fair…

“has long been seen as one of the world’s most prestigious developers of role-playing games, thanks to hits like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Mass Effect trilogy, and”

BALDUR’S GATE

Gah, why has this franchise just been forgotten? Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 represent Bioware’s best writing. Nothing they have…

And... roleplaying games are even older. So...

?

Does the age of a game mean its underlying genre has to change? That seems rather silly, doesn’t it?

Because if we continue down that (il)logical path, it leads us to a place where any RPG of sufficient age should strip all of its stats and leveling entirely; that it…

“Pretty sure the whole point of the game since Vanilla was end game...”

That’s a good trick, considering vanilla didn’t really have end game content figured out yet, and was lacking in that regard until various raids were patched in at a later date. Hell, there wasn’t even a PVP system at first; not even *reward* for…

Have you actually leveled all the way from 1 to the cap under the new system yet, or are you just talking out of the wrong end here?

Because ultimately, XP is just a pacing system. If you’re running out of quests to do, not enough XP is being given to you, and you’re right. If you’re not running out of quests to do?…

Yeah, that argument never made sense to me. Sense of power and progress comes from things getting *harder*, not from things getting easier. The point is that you become powerful enough to face that challenge; that’s what makes you feel powerful.

And that’s basic game design - risk and reward are supposed to increase…

“Elites feel like elites again”

Last night, on my new level 20 Shaman, I did that quest where you kill the centaurs until their boss shows up. Nobody was around to help me...

...so I ended up spamming ghost wolf to keep distance, flame shock to keep aggro, and pulled the elite all the way back to crossroads. Where he…

I’d recommend you actually leap in right now. There are currently a *lot* of people starting again - all the lowbie areas are pretty busy at the moment. Plus, if you have (as I did when I left during Wrath) a level 80 or two, you will have already unlocked a load of transmogs and stuff - it automatically goes through…

Speaking as someone who left in Wrath, and came back just before Christmas... it was totally broken then. Leveling was truly awful. 1-shot killing everything, hitting level 20 without even trying, just from picking some flowers.

It’s much better than I thought it would be though, now I waited for the patch. Orgrimmar…

If you’re not interested in the stories, and you’re not interested in the gameplay (because the gameplay was totally broken before this patch too - 1-shotting enemies *is* broken gameplay) then one has to ask... why somebody is playing the game at all?

Yeah, because an RPG that actually expects you to play through its content and level up a character is totally FORCING you to spend money on a metagame convenience that will let you bypass the whole thing.

After all, what else can you do? Play the game? Don’t be stupid.

I mean, what a world we live in... where an RPG…

Which is a valid statement. Speaking as someone who just got back to the game before Christmas, having been away since Wrath... it amazed me how utterly broken it was, and how the entire culture has been allowed to change in a bad way.

Used to be that leveling *was* the game. Oh sure, there was endgame content, but the…

Hey now... if you’re gonna kill the goblins, you have to remove those pervy, freaky little gnomes first. And the space goats. And the endless stream of ERP-wet-dream elf races, while you’re at it.

“Dungeon of the Endless is a rouge-like”

In which you level up by applying fabulous makeup.

I thought the robot in question was actually that crazy medic bot that went berserk and killed everyone, then felt bad about it afterwards?

“However ghoulish this new reality sounds, it’s hard to deny that the gimmick works.”

Er, that’s highly debatable. A *lot* of people found the CGI’d resurrections in Rogue One kinda... bad (myself included, and I loved it). Like, besides any actual emotional element, they were just so glaringly *not human*. Tarkin…

To be honest, I don’t think it matters - the actual story has been mangled beyond repair at this point by the expansions. Like, as a new player, you look up in the sky and see a creepy green demon planet. And the whole world has already suffered from the effects of a big Dragon having broken loose. And the Lich King…

The Crossroads is under attack!