Category: General Geekery

This could just as well be random. Things that I don’t necessarily know where to put someplace else.

What Happened to WoW?

DPS logo
~ Andy ~ Leave a comment

Easy – Obsession with numbers happened to WoW.

I wrote a few years ago about the DPS Meters, Theorycrafting and what I thought their impact was on MMOs. I think it’s more true today than it was then. This isn’t to say that WoW doesn’t have a myriad of other problems because it does but I think this is a foundational issue with WoW. But I can’t help but think that Blizzard’s momentum of bad decisions might have actually started to overcome the community inertia that kept the game on top.

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The Promise of MMOs

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Warner Bros. Pictures

One grain of sand. That is all that remains of my once vast empire.

The Child-like Empress, The Neverending Story

One of my all-time favorite movies is The Neverending Story. The Nothing is one of the scariest villains ever. It was unknowable, utterly alien in its motives–like despair incarnate, the void. Towards the end of the movie, the Nothing had consumed nearly everything and all that was left was a single grain of sand.

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Proposed PA legislation attempts to put ‘Sin tax’ on Video Games

By Alex E. Proimos - https://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/4199675334/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22535544
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Today in “legislators are comically out of touch with how the world woks”, State Legislators in Pennsylvania put forth a bill that would add a 10% tax to any video game that receives a M for Mature or AO – Adult only rating from the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). The state would then take that money and put into the “Digital Protection for School Safety account”…because you know, protect the children. Unfortunately, text doesn’t let me express just how big my eye-roll at reading this was.

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Nevertheless, I Persist.

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Social media is drowning in misinformation and ideological war that many don’t even know we are fighting, even as they wade into ideological battle after ideological battle. Groups manipulate and subvert systems on social media to amplify their ideas, giving them a credibility they haven’t earned and don’t actually represent the will of the people. Death threats are common. Say the wrong thing, or say the right thing and the wrong person sees it and suddenly you are the target what can only be described as terrorist attack to silence you.

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Twitter, it’s not me, it’s you.

~ Andy ~ 3 Comments

After months of toxicity, complacence and what amounts to the implementation of “there are good people on both sides,” I quit Twitter. While there was a straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s something thats been building since about 2014. Twitter has been a corrupt, hateful, toxic place that generates Jack Dorsey money, and destroys our national dialog — not because of the format of Twitter, but the greed of the company.

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