@ Rob:

Heh! Well said.

@ Pete:

Yup. I’ve been there. I remember that I once bought a game “infected” with Starforce. I found out few days later and promptly cracked the shit out of it, and performed all the proscribed registry edits and surgical driver removal steps that I found online.

My CD drive died short time later. It’s possible it’s unrelated but it was a weird coincidence.

@ sapientidiot:

It’s almost as if the only reason for the existence of customer support was to provide a buffer between the customers and the people who could actually help them.

Oh, also props for using Gentoo. Quick question – how long does it take to install that beast on average? I never actually messed around with it, but it is on my list of things to do.

@ Alphast:

Yeah, I hate slaughtering boars in bulk. I do however enjoy the random dungeon stuff. Some of the higher level ones actually break away from the mold.

For example last night I ran Zul’Farrak for the first time and there is an awesome scripted battle in there. You rescue some captive prisoners on top of this huge pyramid and a whole army of guards assembles below you. Your party has to fight your way down the stairs facing hordes of enemies.

There are also some really cool places to see in the game – especially in Outland and Northend. I only know this because I was looking my brother over the shoulder as he was playing.

The unfortunate part is that the first 30-40 levels tend to be mind numbing grind and drag. Once you get into the 50’s and 60’s all of a sudden there are cool instances to run with a lot of scripted events and actual story lines, set piece battles and etc… Supposedly the Death Knight starting areas are really interesting too but I haven’t seen them.

The point is, that the game makes you grind to get there. The Cataclysm may actually change that a bit. It seems they will be injecting a lot of new content into the starting areas, reducing the grind and etc…

I suspect I will get bored with it again soon. I want to see if I can take my main all the way up to 80 without actually grinding or losing interest – just doing stuff that are fun to me.

Also, I will be taking breaks to play some single player games as well so that I can do reviews. :)

Aren’t you bored of slaughtering boars by the millions already? Or of chatting with mindleas lusers to get the stuff you are missing? It’s the fact that you are still playing this game which amazes me the most, to be honest…

I cant ever think of a single time when email support has ever been useful to me. Unless you count emailing a software developer directly as support. The only time i’ve emailed companies is to thank them for something, and they tend to be smaller companies and they usually respond with a non generic “thanks back” or (a sometimes generic) “here have some freebies”.

It’s often easier (less hassle) to just pirate the software. I remember once I got B17 Flying Fortress for my birthday or Christmas and I was so excited to own a RETAIL copy of a game. I have acquired maybe 5 retail PC games my entire life. Anyway I pop it in, install it, and wouldn’t you know it wouldn’t detect the disk so first thing I have to do after installing my retail game is find a no CD patch. I think I ended up downloading an entire pirated version of the game.

We had a similar situation at a LAN party where a bunch of people showed up with retail versions of the games. We thought this is great, it’s going to make things so much easier and faster that having to deal with typical patches, no CDs, cracks etc. Anyway we ended up having to install pirated versions on everyone’s machines for some reason. I believe it was Starcraft but don’t quote me on that.

I’m not condoning software piracy but just saying sometimes it’s easier. Like downloading a movie versus getting up to get the retail dvd and stick it in the player.

Friends don’t let friends play WoW.