f13.net

Some guy PMed this to me on Dorkfall's forums. There's no way to prove or disprove what he says, but it does make sense.


I'm assuming he wasn't under an NDA or anything.

What the hell would be for sale? A disc full of manufactured renderings and concept art? Maybe a "feature_list.doc"?

custom libs, source, incomplete stuff

any licensing deals they had I wonder?

Is this a random PM, or someone you know pretty well?

If it's a random PM, I'll chalk it up to griefing until further notice.

My guess is:

Concept art
Various art and 3d models used for screenshots
A basic 3d engine
A vBulletin License
A few thousand delusional fanboys

I wouldn't doubt this a bit.  Darkfall, Thrones of Chaos / Mourning, Dark and Light, Atriarch, and a bunch more.  I don't think these are going anywhere and some of them are outright scams.

you forgot Wish

So a couple of investors looking to do a quick cash in after watching WoW make billions check out buying a smaller game and realize that it's not as easy as it looks to make Money Hats inthe world of MMORPGS.

Nothing to see here.

I think Wish was different.  They seemed to get a lot done.  Berry picking, wood chopping, goat on goat action.  They went into beta and then it was like they suddenly got scared, shouted, "WE CAN'T DO THIS", and ran off.  It was weird and wee bit sad.

Yeah, that one seemed weird. I think they ran out of money and saw people leaving in droves over the connectivity issues and closed up shop.

I was in the beta(well done tech demo) when they closed up.  It didn't seemed to have an technical problems.  Basicly, they created this platform to host a massive world.  I think they panicked when they realized how expensive it would be to fill that world with custom content.  I personally would have shifted my plans to explore player-made and dynamic content rather than despair that I couldn't fill every inch of North America with hand-made quests.

I cannot be sure what went on with Wish.  There were places it needed improvement, but I was having fun during the beta, and not finding a lot of bugs.

Their claim was that they ran the numbers and would never be profitable.  A week later their server was on e-bay and that was the end.

Mourning/Thrones of Chaos is one I've followed on and off through its various incarnations. I actually beta-tested it a few years ago. It looked to me like a nice successor to UO. And the artwork is really nice -- not anime, not WoW-style cartoon, but a nice realistic style. But they've had a real struggle to get out the door. I'm hoping for their sake that something eventually comes of it.

It's a random PM, but LC (and I, before I drifted into outer space) is big on making fun of games like Darkfall and even SB. We hit those SB beta boards hard.

The guy probably messaged LC over the last thread he started, which contained this image:

(http://imgred.com/http://www.fpdoms.org/images/fromfpdoms.jpg)

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

I'm trying to contact him on MSN. He is still offline right now. I will see if he can offer any proof.


I tried accessing the Mourning/RoT/ToC forums for info on this guy, but all I got was this message:

"Forums will remain closed for the time being due to a pending business deal. Thank you for your patience!"

and from the latest dorkfall update:

"The beta development milestone was met early in December. Since then we've had a fully functional and stable beta build up on remote servers, which is being patched regularly. At the moment we're using part of this system to show the game to prospective partners, distributors, publishers, technology providers, etc. Our motivation here is to provide the best quality assurance, distribution, and service for the game and its players, so we consider this to be a very important phase for Darkfall."

A fully functional beta is running, but none of the testers that signed up almost two years ago have been let in? The update sounds more like an advertisement to me.

"Hey we have a working game (engine demo) now. Come buy us out!"

I still can't believe Wish got cancelled, especially since they had a real substantial product (huge land mass already made, totally dynamic quest system working, not too many technical problems, etc..). 

From what  I can tell what did them in was public appearance. 

1) The staggered acceptance of "open beta applicants.'  If you followed the boards at all (I followed the game for quite a while) a lot of people were pissed because they were told it was a one month open beta, but not everyone was able to play from day 1.  A lot of people got pissed even though ti was explained beforehand that this would occur and the reasons why (it was a beta test, they needed to correctly stress test the server). 

2) Server crashes.  While there weren't many, but there were quite a few in the week that the beta was going on, and people saw the crashes, coupled with the fact that not everyone was in the open beta yet (my above paragraph) made idiots go to boards and proclaim how shitty the code was.

3) Point and click.  A lot of people really did not care to take the time to find the advantages that PnC movement can give and instead hated the fact that it wasn't using the normal control scheme.  Also, since PnC does movement totally on server side (i.e. where you are is really where you are, unlike most games these days) the lag was more noticable (even though it was barely bigger then regular games). 

4) The UI.  I didn't mind it so much but the UI wasn't great, and a lot of people couldn't look past it to see the game behind it.  It didn't really mesh well with a fantasy game.

To me, Wish seemed the perfect example of "perception is reality."  With all four of these points people went to boards and bitched about how crappy of a game Wish was, and that news spread like a lot of other gaming news does.  I think the reason why it got cancelled unlike other games is that Wish was still quite early in it's development cycle (had at least another 6+ months of closed beta scheduled before the next open beta) so they could assess if the bad press would be enough to hurt them in the long run.  I also think that Wish was a perfect example of how most players don't treat Betas as an actual beta and instead use it as a pre-release test.  It had it's problems, but it also was at least a half-a-year from release, if not more and I can only wonder if things would have been differently if they didn't use the beta system the way they did (closed, open, closed, open, closed, open).

I still had the most fun (pve wise) in Wish then I have in almost every other game for the dynamic quest stuff.

And back on the original topic, I can't believe the PM is real because he blatantly gives away his position (webmaster of their website).  I can't think of any company out there that lets their employees talk about big internal happenings (hell most of Mythic didn't even know about the EA buyout till it happened because of the inside trading laws) so if he really did work for them, he wouldn't give such an easy way to identify him as the leaker of secrets.  Furthermore, he claims that he worked for Thrones of Chaos but was told by the company who was going to acquire them about their backup choices.  If I was trying to acquire a company I wouldn't tell them what my backup choices were, I'd keep that internal.  Sounds too fishy for me to believe it's real.

They didn't have a substantial fucking product. Wish was a train wreck from day one. Wish got canceled because it was a terrible piece of shit. Claiming otherwise makes you an asshole with bad opinions. Yes, opinions can be and often are, wrong.

Nope. Wish was surely better than all these other mmorpgs popping occasionally like the one in this thread.

Wish was a solid game already when we got to play it. It worked and was vaguely fun to play even with most mechanics still to be developed. Maybe it was going to be a failure, but as a small MMO it could have worked.

Wish didn't go anywhere because of terrible management and direction, not because the team was clueless. It's really one of the smaller games that actually WORKED in all its essential parts and was playable. Hell, with more money it could have been more solid than Vanguard.

And it also had very nice towns. That kind of mood was never recaptured in any other game.

Then it was ALSO terrible for a number of choices. Like the one-server architecture or point and click movement. But, still, it wasn't vaporware like many other games we hear about nowadays. Just a project that went to shit because of bad management.

Btw, personal opinions aside, Eve-Online for example in beta was in a much worse state if you compare it to what was achieved in Wish beta.

If Wish was such a great game, then why is it still canceled? Meanwhile someone is buying a game like Thrones of Shit. Does that make sense?

Wish was cancelled because they got cold feet.

The rest live on because the teams want to sell. Or they have a good product. Or both.

Wish had nice crafting and resource collection but their plan for tons of bespoke player driven content always struck me as unrealistic.  Still if a broken piece of shit like Horizons can limp along forever with a few thousand subs I'm sure Wish could've found it's audience.

Some people actually paid money for SEED.  There's a market for everything.

I'm not sure if I should take that image as a compiment or an insult, but it made me laugh!

I played some Wish for about ten minutes before I got diarrhea of the eyes -- often called eyearrhea, familiar to people that hate brown and mustard-yellow.  When the client crashed, there was a popup window with a coupon code for tromantadine at Walgreen's pharmacy.

Goats.  Attack Goats of Death.

Find a nice torque SS, and then compare it to this image (http://vaultmedia.ign.com/rpgvault/image/darkfall06080804_1155018884.jpg). It should be obvious.

that screenshot made me hungry. looks like melted chocolate walls or something  :-P

That's more style than graphical quality. Check the details. I think Torque could do as well with a competent artist on a team who knew how to use the thing. Can't speak much for the persistent world abilities of the engine though. Maybe Stephen could?

Ahh, you mean like the ones posted Here? (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9013.70)

Or maybe here? (http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1313)

No, wait...maybe here (http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1276).

Nah, maybe we'll just settle with something like this (http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1138).

Oh, and all of the above except for 1 will run at 30+ fps on a computer you bought 3 years ago...

yep, you're right, it IS obvious...it's the art that counts. Anyone can take a great engine and get a game that looks terrible, and not just anyone can take a good engine and make some amazing visual appeal.

Reviewing the image you posted by the way shows some glaring failures in both artwork and technology:

--terribly stretched textures on the bridge he's walking on in the foreground
--no shadowing at all
--completely half-assed sky
--very sloppy character for what should be highest level of detail
--I see at least two probable transparency rendering sort order issues
--flat out terribly modeled trees

I could go on if you like, but if you want to compare a funded project using years to develop a single decent screenshot (and I said decent--personally, I think it's rather weak) against some of the work indie developers can do with NO budget and good artists, I'm not stressed about it in the least :)

The Darkfall project is about seven years old now. My guess is that a bunch of guys locked themselves in an office with a giant stack of "For Dummies" books. The "learn as you go" method didn't work out too well for them. Now they are stuck with a big pile of shit.

I think LC's point was that much better could be done with a relatively inexpensive alternative to developing a shit-tastic graphics engine like that in-house.

What I got from the comparison LC made was a compliment to the Torque images and a "he he look what happens if you use the colour swatches from the new faecalphiliacs' 'Brown Around Town' collection for your entire game palette then draw it on screen using the Finger-Painting API" to the other one.  Shouldn't you be happy?

Wasn't really offended, but yes, the second response did appear to be saying that Torque sucked, so I responded in that manner.

Thinking why, it's because the darkfall image posted at first glance does look pretty ok (even with the critiques I posted, it's still not a bad image), yet the one that may have been Torque (the original image) was obviously not with any decent art!

Like I said in my first comment, I wasn't sure if it was meant as a compliment or not ;)

Interestingly, and disclaimer: we don't officially condone this at all, but we had a Torque user export WoW models into our import format and bring them into TGE-Advanced...and in many ways they looked better than the original source art within WoW.

There's no solid way to 100% compare performance settings, scene management, and a host of unqualifiable/measureable factors that go into a scene, but given even median technology it really is the art that counts, not the engine.

Honestly I think the Darkfall Engine and Art looks like shit. I think your critique was way too generous. This game just will further damage the reputation and future of PvP oriented games like Shadowbane did.

The torque engine is nice. There are a lot of games that could benefit from using it instead of their own half ass engines.  Maybe we will see a MMO using it in the future.

 

There are upcoming Unreal 3 based games that look like complete turds. Sometimes it's not the engine at all.

Luckily, or not as time will tell, Age of Conan seems to have taken the spot of the most anticipated PvP game for now.  I think Darkfall will probably continue to fade into obscurity.  Even if it managed to some how get itself released, who's going to care?  If they keep trying to bring it up to date... "beautify" it, they say... it'll never get released and if they stop trying to beautify it, no one will want to look at it.  I'm surprised it hasn't completely disappeared from the minds of everyone already.  Or the internet.

One further comment on this...ironically, I fully respect Darkfall, Wish, Mourning, and all the "indie" teams out their that have tried. Sadly, most have failed (some miserably), but this stuff is not easy---AA/AAA studios have failed miserably as well, even after throwing millions of dollars at the challenges.

I'm honestly not sure if people remember how I first came to f13--but it wasn't as a GG employee, it was as a GG customer with grandiose ideas and designs for my own MMO--with a team and everything (well parts of a team at least). We worked our asses off, and I personally spent 10+ hours a day managing the team to design and develop a game we wanted to play, and that we thought others would as well.

We made it to Milestone 1 (of 8)...and reality hit. I got hired by GG and of course lost a lot of my free time (I was a freelance healthcare consultant at the time, which gave me literally months of free time), but even so the technical, managerial, art asset production, and a host of other problems drove us into the ground, and the project never made it any further.

I went into it with fully open eyes--I knew the challenges, and knew that this wasn't a trivial thing...I'm just glad in many ways that I made the decision to cut the project at the one year point, instead of 3, or 5, or 7 when it became too 'expensive' to give it up.

These indie MMO's may have wound up sucking, and may have had incredibly bad decisions along the way, and may have been total wastes of time, but damn I respect the tenacity and raw motivation of the teams that gave it a go.

"It's better to have tried and failed, then to have never tried at all. (Uknown to me)

I thought, "This poster is FUCKING HIGH!" Then I saw who posted it.

Look, Wish was decent fun in Alpha 6, if only because it was different. When the alpha patch was opened where everyone and their goat was a goatfucking goat herder pet herding goat fucking goaty goat and if you didn't goat your way to victory, you died a horrible death, the game was dead of a self-inflicted goat wound to the goat.

In short, too many fucking goats. The program died when MahrinSkel got shitcanned.

Uh... what?

If you'd played the Wish alpha/beta, you'd know what I meant.

Apparently much goattery?

I did play Beta... but I don't remember much about goats. To be honest, I actually had fun.

It's clear the game had a long, long way to go... but they actually *had* something.

Probably easier to fly to the moon.

I was saying this in IRC the other day, but I'd respect someone more who channeled their ambitions towards single player games. Most of the people dreaming of making MMO's are fools, not to be admired. (This isn't directed at you, since I knew nothing of your game) I've found little reason to have admiration for some amateur company that thinks they can make an mmo. In every case I can think of, their projects have turned out to be full blown fiascos.

This applies even more in today's market. I don't like WoW much, but I'll give them credit for raising the bar on production value. Now gamers are going to expect that from other games of the same type.

Thing is, that cost them like what? $60 or $70 million dollars?

If you have less than 5 or 10, what hope is there for you making a RPG based MMO like that? Dark and Light?

Just give it up. Please. Buy a catchy domain name, create a hundred flash games, and save your money. It'll be more fun anyways. These "games" are shit. Will always be shit. Have always been shit. Even IF you polish it up with 50 million dollar bills.

What's interesting Stray is that this is exactly the message from GG (not in your words of course). Indies aren't going to make the best MMO evah....make the games you can excel at--small, interesting, innovative, enjoyable. It's why TGB was put together as a product.

Ironically, folks just have a hard time getting it. No one really WANTS to make anything but the next MMO. I kid you not, one of the recent questions in our TGB user's forums was "Does TGB come with full MMO networking support for 10,000+ player???"

I cried irl a bit.

I'm guessing you don't know much about dorkfall. The developers have been less than honest (lied their asses off) over the years. It's hard to respect someone that strings people along like they do.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with going at a MMO with a smaller budget. I think the problem lies with indies on small budgets getting themselves riled up and proclaiming to themselves (and others) that they're going to build THE VERY BEST MMO OF ALL TIME (with more content than ALL of the current MMOs put together!) with no experience and small budgets.

However, if you look realistically at what you have and plan accordingly, I don't see what's wrong with indie MMO development. Dofus, Minions of Mirth, the recently announced Earth Eternal, etc. There's probably as many small budget/indie successes as there are failures. It's just that the successes and failures tend to create a visible explosion in proportion to their very nature. You promise the world and blow up, everyone notices. You plan and execute realistically, and only a certain amount of people notice that.

And this is not all that different from what I think.

Heh.  I'd be thrilled to make a game that had 10,000 accounts.  Which is the sort of thing that was doable with MUDs, less so with MMOGs (or would they just be MOGs at this point?) mostly due to art.  I've taught a good dozen stay at home moms how to write room descs.  Using 3d tools is just a teeny bit more difficult.

I think a lot of indie studios start out with big ideas about how every other MMOG has failed and how they will succeed because they ran an 8 year D&D campaign that all their friends said was great.

Then, as Zepp has said, reality hits. Art is hard, content is hard, database managment is hard.

I think that the next generation of MMOGs will see a lot more off-the-shelf products used. PhysX for in-game physics, established game engines for graphics / world-building, other 3rd party applications to take away some of the burden of doing it all in-house. Hell, there'd probably be money in buying up dying MMOGs, ripping the artwork / core components out of them and offering these libraries for sale to companies who don't want to do everything from scratch.

And yes, there are independent MMOGs out there that obviously make enough to keep going, but they aren't the car crashes that f13 likes to slow down and watch.

I should have pointed out as well that TGB is our 2-d engine, intended for retro casual game development, an introducation to learning game development, or your standard scroller/shooter/popper/card game stuff. It can certainly be used for more, but to want it to have a full backend architecture to handle a 2D MMO for $100 is just silly really, especially at that level.

There almost certainly is. Every time I've ventured out to play one of the functionally identical Asian games that somehow gets released for free in America (Scions of Fate (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9186.msg264584#msg264584) most recently) I get the sinking suspicion that they're all stealing art. I hear the same sounds, I see familiar monsters or familiar trees... not merely the same models but the same TEXTURES. I'll bet they're even copying code. I get the feeling that instead of starting new servers, game companies just make 'new' games. If some team thinks of a clever addition to the tired old framework, they don't release it as part of an expansion... they start their own company and frame that single innovation with a patchwork quilt of recycled content.

If you expect Americans to pay a monthly fee for your game you'll need to work harder than that, but not much. Drop development costs low enough and you won't have to charge the industry standard. Players who aren't paying "premium" fees don't necessarily expect premium content. Leave them pleasantly surprised and they'll go tell their friends what a great new MMOG they found... not realizing how little is actually new.

Every game's got spiders, scorpions, wolves, bears and skeletons... just buy somebody else's models and animations and even if you distort and re-skin them to fit your art direction, you'll still save a bundle in time and energy and produce something better than your own team could have made on its own.

The next WoW won't be running on Torque, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Garage Games' tools build the foundation for an American Flyff.

I suspect since the business of making games is quite thriving there, there's quite a few people who make money offering the content packs (character models, textures, objects, sounds, UI elements) just like on the western side of world they focus more on offering the turn-key code middleware.

That and their games are published by large companies so i can easily see such company hand the content packs to the small groups starting on new projects, so they can get working prototypes faster, without need to reinvent the goblin model again and again. (extra bonus is, any new content made for standardized characters and such is reusable in the other games utilizing the same models... so if company owns few such games, there's certain synnergy going while each of these games expand their content base separately)

Every asian game has the same bloody, half assed chat system. Just with diferent textures.
It's like they had some "Make your own mmo 20076 ultra premium" on sale - you just move sliders (Gameworld: SF, Fantasy, Mecha # of characters 1-...3) and press compile.

Colton of LoudAnt claims to have sold Thrones of Chaos and posted the comment "Game is sold I made my money GL on being ugly fat losers". Turned to a crazy flame war on MMORPG.com and KRELSLIBRARY.org. Media Investagtions, IRS reportings and the such have cause Colton to look up the personal information of critics of the game. Anyway...

Reading..
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/forum/805
http://www.krelslibrary.org/forum/viewforum.php?id=1
Colton's investigation of a critics' info..
http://www.neverwinpoker.com/phpnuke/html/ftopic-33200-0.html

O NOES!!!  (http://www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/images/smilies/wow.gif)

Did we interview these guys? I don't remember.

The internet is scary sometimes, I tend to avoid it.

Which guys?  The Darkfall ones or the Thrones of Mourning thingy ones?  I don't think you did Mourning.  That used to be those Romanians... Egomonster, Adonis, et al and I KNOW you didn't interview that crazy Colton guy.  I would have remembered that because I'm sure you would have ended up beating the shit out of him.  I don't think you interrogated either one.  I do remember you trying to run down (err... figuratively speaking) Claus from Darkfall who was very wily and able to avoid you. 

Someone linked Colton to f13's forums. Prepare for incoming frivolous lawsuit threats.

Finally we just get our heavy hitters.

Maybe we need a Useless Gaming Forum. The Gaming Graveyard doesn't quite do it.

call it

"The Shit Can"

A forum for vaporware, crapware, shadowbane, and turbine games.

You made me giggle, LC.  DAMN YOU!

Putting Turbine in the group is just wrong. They aren't shit. At least not at the caliber of shit we've seen lately.

I like Turbine, too.  It was the Shadowbane that made me giggle.   :-P

They seemed to have linked it on January 29th and the thread looks dead.  I don't think they're sending us any heavy hitters.  I don't think they care.   :cry:

MMORPG.COM responded by silently removing Thrones of Chaos from their list.

Who gives a shit?

Late last year thrones was approached by a few different companies wanting to purchase a mmog. One of them was Red Bull (the soft drink company) and that is how the information about a Darkfall sale was leaked. Basically in one of the phone conferences with the Vice President of Red bull , he stated that they looked over a few different games for possible purchase and Darkfall was one of them. He also said that when the company making df found out they were not interested in purchasing anymore and were going to move in a different direction with something else they sent him emails lowering the buyout price and trying to change his mind but there was no longer interest. The asking price he mentioned for df was first 2 million , than they dropped it to 1 million. Why did the sale not happen?  He basically said that it wasn't up to par for a purchase for whatever reasons.
 
Of course nothing less than a public denial of any type of sale from the producer of the project was expected , as any mention of a sale would have the fanbase crumble overnight as fast as Dark and Light after the release of SoG.  :wink:

Take this for what it is - a post by someone on the internet. However , I know it to be reality.

Now Redbull is involved with Project Offset it seems which is a very good move as that project looks amazing. They recently threw them a party at GDC.

Alright, so I'm not going to say that Darkfall's general situation inspires me into a whirlwind of confidence, but I'm also noting that all of the people posting this "insider info" tend to also have one post on this board.

While not taking any stance in particular - I will say, through personal experience, that it smacks an awful lot of "griefing".

its kinda odd aaron. every time i visit aventurine, their studio size tends to increase.

mid development buy outs are common in the industry. whenever there are indie games there are always people walking in the middle of development and prospect about buying them. its natural. sometimes you need some venture capital and your product is floated.

its natural.

why?

because everyone who works on any game is a salaried employee. there are things to factor in such as inflation and cost of living - they change over a period of time. and an individual working in a studio has personal needs that expand with change.  and given the long work hours demanded in this industry, you need more incentive to stay in it.

do you know how many companies are interested in buying that oh-so-cool indie game product and put it out there?  after all - games are hip. to be hip is to be innovative. to be known for such things improves your corporate portfolio .

rumors are spread - they happen all the time. if you're going to be prom queen, you're also going to have to be the biggest freaking female bully around.  you're going to spread rumors - increase speculation about others so as to increase your own value.  it happens.

I think you're missing the point. The point being that whoever was looking to buy DF didn't because it supposadely wasn't good enough.

and if they really dropped their buy out price to 1 mill than thats a pretty desperate move and just shows that they themselves have no faith anymore in their own product....

even the gaming sites are starting to get tired of hearing about darkfall...

http://df.warcry.com/news/view/71439-Editorial-Corner-Beta-Date

I think you linked the wrong article.  The one you have there is complaining (beneath a veneer of infuriating flash pop-up ads) about not hearing enough information (like, a firm beta release date) about Darkfall.  Mostly it reads like "THIS JUST IN: STILL NOTHING HAPPENING WITH DARKFALL, STAY TUNED IN CASE SOMETHING DOES!"  The most recent information it's referencing seems to be from January, everything else is the author's personal views.  Is there maybe any real news, or anything?  No?

You're quoting a PM on an Internet forum and then discussing it as if it were true?

You guys are idiots.

Holy fuck it returns with a fantastic necropost.

Combined with grunk, I have to wonder if there's a full moon or some kind of celestial alignment going on.

Chart incoming.  I guess "Stupid Douchebag Week" naturally falls after E3.

Is this really first post by AW outside of that Den's UO subscription numbers thread ever?!

I noobed out and read the whole thread as if it was breaking news.  :mob:

I'm kinda new at this being in the know crap.

I think you're going to need to prove your point in chart form.

Yes.  I even checked his user stats.  "Posts in Den: 108" "posts in MMOgaming 1"

You know, if no one's using this thread, we could ask him about Trammel.

Maybe setting shit to prune after X time isn't a bad idea for the PC and MMOG forums (top level, not subforums).

I don't know what he's talking about!!!  :-o

Good thought. Has there ever really been a necro that was worth it?

I thought that finding a thread to necro, no matter how tangentially relevant to the topic you want to post about, was part of the whole fun of f13.  8-)

(http://www.bunkphotos.com/files/awchart.jpg)

(http://azaroth.org/piechart1.jpg)

(http://azaroth.org/graph3.jpg)

(http://azaroth.org/timetocock.jpg)

I was about to ask what "cawk" stood for... then I looked again.

Brain hurts.

I have to fit in, but I most certainly stole this graph:

(http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/6657/thesweetgraphkq7.jpg)

I want to be a thread winner so badly it hurts.

We live in great days, bros... Grunk showing up, AW cmoing back... all we need is that disruptive marketing chucklehead to come back and we'll reach critical loon mass.  Merusk must be right.  i sense a syzygy.

Unless schild has worked out the numbers-drawing power of the blogtroll.

Will this thing finally just officially die so all of my pvp nerd rage friends can quit slobbering about it every few days?

"Oh, WoW is sooooo great huh? WELL YOU JUST WAIT FOR DARKFALL TO COME OUT MAN! I GOT US ALL SIGNED UP!"

Do they just not know about Fury?

They need MEANINGFUL PVP and Fury doesn't have it. These are dudes looking for a lifestyle, not a game.

Have they thought about the military?

Le art.