I can understand Blizzards desire to clean up the forums by removing the "veil of anonymity" but I still think this is a terrible idea.  There will be enough dark natured people, who don't care if you know their names, posting trollish crap.  The big problem is what happens the first time a disagreement moves from the forums into the real world?  Some nut job who disagrees with you now has your real name.  He is a few steps from locating you for the purpose of killing you and eating your brains.  Seriously this may clean out the forums more than it cleans them up.

oh you think thats funny?  In the future wars will be fought thru RTS games and people will be forced to submit to disintegration in order to comply with the game results!  When that happens, the Koreans will rule the world! 

Sorry Daehawk,  I think smugglers get an Ewok for a pet.    

and that's the key.  You still have the basic aggro magnet/ glass cannon/ giver of life set up, but with a unique mechanic involved.  The fight sequence TOR showed was very early game and the players had basic skills. Who knows what direction the mechanics will go the further in to the game you are.  Here's the rub though, MMO's are social games, you know, that whole multi-player thing.  Therefor some kind of built in dependency is crucial or you get a single player game.  Unfortunately, in games like WoW, you have issues finding certain crucial classes.  Ive seen many raids stopped dead because they could'nt find a healer or a tank.  Ive never seen one dropped because of lack of dps players  ( lack of competent dps is another issue entirely. )   Someone mentioned a system where you can swap out skill sets,  I like that idea it gives you the opportunity to mix it up a bit and have people become competent in various roles.  Still Im sure people would end up getting type cast in specific roles because they do them well.
  Since you're asking for ideas on MMO changes, one last change I would do is to scale raids down.  Unless you have an uber-guild, getting together 25 competent players to run a raid is a pain in the butt.  Yeah I know a lot of guilds can do it but a lot of guilds cant.  I feel its wrong to "gear punish" those groups who cant get into the 25 man raids.  Hell there are times I think 10 mans are a bit much.  I would love to see a game that concentrates on smaller groups for end game gear.  Its fine to set up the big raids but scale the encounters so that smaller groups can benefit as well.  Otherwise you severely limit the end game potential of a huge part of your customer base.  That seems like a bad idea to me.  Of course that's a personal preference thing for me,  Ive always been partial to the smaller, close knit, friends kind of guild.  I find the larger "uber guilds" to be impersonal and eventually clic-ish with an elitist faction and the n00bs faction.  Anyways,  thats my 2cents worth.

Well Square has done the smart thing.  It appears that they are packaging the security token with the game.  At least in the Collectors Edition,  not sure about the standard.  Take notice Blizzard, this is a damn good idea.

You mean the Secret World is still alive?!  I thought that died in development when AOC launched so poorly.  I always thought the concept was cool,  hopefully they can do better with this than they did with Conan ( I did hear AOC is MUCH better now )  Always glad to see something out of the basic fantasy realm in an MMO

Capital punishment is state sanctioned murder and I have personal issues with that.  In this case I can understand the immediate eye for and eye reaction but I still think the legal system has to play out.  While the person who committed this crime is surely not civilized, we cant supersede the rules of society.  Not even in this case.  Hopefully the system works and this person receives the punishment he is due.  Oh and regarding the insanity plea,  that is mostly a literary gimmick and not very useful in the real world.  Most people understand that crimes of this nature are not perpetrated by individuals that are "sane" by societies standards.  Hell most of us can even concieve of committing such an act.  The insanity plea is not used because an act is not sane, its used when the person is considered to " lack the mental capacity to realize they have committed a crime".  Reading further on the insanity plea I found that less than 1% of defendants plea insanity and that 1% fails 75% of the time.  Anyways a link to a pretty good article on the insanity plea you might find interesting  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/aron/qa227.htm

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.

damn  thats way too young.  RIP man

let that player fart flowers out his butt

I heard that is a Consular power at later levels, be careful using it though, it generates a crap ton of aggro!   

I agree with where you're coming from.  Did you notice though that all the MMO's you mentioned are fantasy based? At least TOR is out of that mold.  With a project like TOR, I just dont seeing them taking major risks.  I can almost hear the money people saying, " Its StarWars, it will print money based on the name alone"  Regardless of whether thats true or even rational, I just get the feeling that they are going to rely on a tried and true formula and hope that the Star Wars setting makes it something special.
 Regarding innovation in MMO's I believe that for something truly innovative to show up, it will probably have to be on a lesser, almost indie developed scale.  If it proves to be successful, then maybe a major development company will buy it out and run with it.  Major corporations tend to avoid risk.  Look at Blizzard, what have they done thats new in the last 15 years?  Hey look, StarCraft II is coming out and soon we will have a new Diablo!!!  Heck their most successful idea was to turn a popular RTS game into an MMO.   Bioware had Dragons Age, that was totally new!  UH really?  Good game but I think they could have called it Dungeons and Dragons Age without missing a beat if it wasn't for Wizards of the Coast.  I guess my point is that the major gaming studios havent been innovative for decades, they just try to improve on what came before.

The truly difficult part is trying to come up with something innovative, yet accessible to a large spectrum of skill levels, from hard core to casual players.  Like it or not, WoW has set the standard for financially viable MMORPGs. You have $100 million in development costs so what are you going to do?  Risk it all on something completely different and end up alienating your customer base or try to improve on a very successful formula?    Remember, the bottom line is they need mass appeal to get a major customer base, if they try too hard to build a game that caters to the hard core player at the expense of the average player, then they cut out the vast majority of their paying customers.   There is one thing I think TOR can do to help its cause.  Make ships more than space born hostels.  If they can come up with a way to add ship to ship combat without it being a complete twitch-fest, then they may have something.
  Regardless of whether TOR ends up being a reskinned WoW or not, Im still going to give it a shot.  At least its not another generic fantasy setting.

Nope, I do not have cable.  I watch HD over the air with an antenna and get a lot of stuff off the internet.  I deal with the ads because thats the cost of watching the stuff for free.  CeeKay, that sounds like a good plan there but youll be glued to hulu for a month so have a mini fridge with plenty o' beer near at hand!

you can watch the Fox, NBC and ABC shows on the networks own sites, why would I want to pay for that?  On top of that you still have the ads?  No thanks!

Lol,  I don't hate Blizzard.  They are a great gaming company that makes great games.  I am ticked about the hacking issue but that's more due to the popularity of WoW.  My issues with the authenticator are more about principle than expense, the $6 is very a very minor cost when compared to the $150 or more you pay in subscription fees per year.  If blizzard is giving away authenticators for free, you just pay the shipping cost ( which is BS btw it doesn't cost $6 to mail that thing ) then why shouldn't Blizzard put them in the next expansion package?  As far as the not playing Diablo 3 because of WoW, Diablo is a fully contained single player game and you don't need to play on battlenet to enjoy it, so I can and will play it without having to deal with the issues I had with WoW.   One last thing,  Jersoc if you are going to continue to spew your usual trollish crap, please make an effort to form coherent sentences.  Oh and if the authenticator is 99.9% hack proof, that still means over 110,000 accounts can be hacked. You say its 100% the persons fault and then show that even the authenticator isn't 100% hack proof. So thank you for proving yourself wrong.

I wasnt sure about the authenticator on cells since I dont have a droid or iphone I cant get it, but while checking into it on Blizzards site it said there was a charge for the phone program.  I guess thats been eliminated.  As far as the "hardware" its a cheap ass random number generator that they probably produce for less than a buck and yes since Blizz is so high and mighty about "owning" the in game content then I feel they should provide the  means to protect it.  As far as whether Blizzard has been hacked,  when my account got taken, a large amount of people I knew in game were hacked within a 2 week window, we are talking about 15 accounts.  Most of those people, myself included took care not to go to sites that had hack potential and had never been hacked in all the years we had played.  There was word that some hackers had backdoor hacked blizzard through their armory link and coincidentally Armory was soon taken down for over a week.  So to sum up, yes I think Blizzard was hacked and accounts were accessed on their end.  No, I dont believe there was anything in my system that caused my account to be hacked. I checked my system out and had my IT friend at work go through it and he found no intrusions into my system.  I never said that it was an "inside job" nor do I think it was.  I believe that considering how cheap the authenticators are, even if they did cost Blizzard $6 a piece ( which they dont ) that would be a very cheap fix for them to fix what is a major problem.  Also remember that if 90 percent of Blizzards customers remain hack free thats still over 1 million accounts being hacked.  Now can I say everything Ive said is 100% correct?  Of course not, hell philosophically I cant say with 100% certainty that I even exist or that you do.  But Im pretty damn sure we do.

I thought you had to purchase a phone based authenticator but they could be free, regardless they can get an authenticator and link it to an unlimited amount of accounts, so a hacker only needs 1.  Thats pretty common now with hacked accounts.  They can block you from easily recovering your account with one.  So the weapon that Blizz devised to protect accounts is now used to help steal them.  I also have a big problem with Blizzrd charging for authenticators.  They claim that the online content of your account is the property of Blizzard, youre not allowed to sell it, etc... and then they charge you for an authenticator to protect what they claim is their property.  They should provide those things free of charge.  After all Im fairly sure my account was hacked on Blizzards end through Armory as there is absolutely no evidence that they did so thru my computer.  This is one of the main reasons I quit WoW.  The greed they showed in charging me $6 to protect thier property has cost them my monthly fee.  If they were smart they would include an authenticator in every box when the new expansion comes out.

I suspended my WoW account after I got hacked about 4 months ago.  Before I suspended it I went through all the BS to get it set straight and then I changed the e-mail account its attached to as well as the passwords.  I still constantly get e-mails to the old account it was linked to (but no longer) that are very official looking stating they are from Blizzard admin.  They hit me for various violations from gold farming, language violations, etc.  They all say my account has been suspended and provide a link to contact Blizz admin to unsuspend my account.  I also get e-mails constantly stating my password has been changed with a link to verify.  These emails are all scams and look extremely official.  If you ever get an email supposedly from blizzard never use the link.  Access Blizzard through the log in menu or call them directly.
  In my case its easy to tell these are scams as they are being sent to an email address not linked to my battlenet account, but I can guarantee you they hack tons of accounts this way. 

regardless of when the put out the next generation of xbox consoles, I figure for me at least its worth trading in my old out of warranty 360 for a shiny new one.  Im going from 20 to 250 gig of hd space,  getting hdmi out, much lower power consumption and more warranty time for about $100  out of pocket.  Sound good to me.

heres a link for CeeKay.  Yep its the ultimate mash-up.. when the vuvuzela meets Lord of The Rings and epic battle shall commence!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B2LPxggvqY

I reserved one at Gamestop today.  Going to take full advantage of the trade in deal.  Anyways, the rep at gamestop told me that the expected delivery date for my pre order was July 7th.  So, just over 2 weeks and the next batch should be here.

Handled my reserved order today and was told by gamestop the expected delivery date for the next batch is July 7th.  Since the trade in program is valid thru the 18th, I wont have to trade in my 360 until my new 360 arrives.  Yay

I was told by the rep at gamestop today that they would honor the trade in deal on reserved new 360's as long as you reserved one before the trade in deal expires. So it seems you can reserve one for $50 down and keep your current 360 until the new unit arrives, without losing your trade in value.  I should probably get that in writing though eh?

Yeah  I have a non hdmi model with a 20 gig hd, I think its worth the $120 Ill have to pay to get an extra 230 g of storage and the HDMI and thats not even accounting for the fact my 360 is over 3yrs old.  I found a transfer cable for $7 shipped so now I just have to wait for Gamestop to get more units and Im back in black.

cool  thanks for the replies!  I have too much on my external HD to allow a reconfigure so I guess Ill bite the bullet and get the transfer cable.  I found a place that sells them for like $7   Ill have to check on them to see how legit they are if so thats the cheapest wway to do this.  Kind of burns me tho that M$ doesnt provide a free method of transfering your data but for $7 Ill live with it.

the ad says must be in working condition to recieve full trade in value. 

heres a link to the ad   http://www.gamestop.com/gs/landing/xb360250trade/default.aspx

Quick question CeeKay.  Is there instructions somewhere on how to transfer 360 data to an external usb HD?  I have one and that seems to be the way to go.

Currently at Gamestop you can trade in your old xbox 360 towards a new on.  You get $100 for the 360, power supply, av cords and 1 controller.  If you have the wireless adapter, you can get $40 more.  For the 20g HD you get $30 and if you want to trade in any c wireless controllers they are $25

Im trading in my over 3 yr old 360, the 20 gig HD and the wirelless adapter and getting $170 towards the new one... not too bad!

Checked the Gamestop site and for accessories you can get some good money.  $30 for the 20 g HD,  $40 for the wireless adapter  ( I have one but cant find it   )  $25 for a extra controller

Ill save the extra controller but if I can find the adapter I can get $170 on the trade in.  My 360 is more than 3 years old so I think thats a great deal.  Calling today



Awesomeness  I found the adapter,  Cant pass up this upgrade now 

Ok if you do the Gamestop trade in, how do you transfer your harddrive info?  It would be nice if they did that for you when you traded in, would save the expense of a cable.

ok Im finding the vuvuzela meme a bit over done now, can we at least avoid the really poorly photoshopped crap?  thanks 

[Spoiler]

Just watched the finale on hulu.  Frikken awesome.  Walter Goggins deserves an emmy for his portrayal of Boyd Crowder, and Timothy Olyphant is my top choice now to play Roland in the new Dark Tower movie.  Absolutely a fantastic series and the finale was the best finale on TV this year.  Oh and the woman who plays Winona... gorgeous

Spoiler for Hiden:

I was totally convinced that Boyd was a fraud and running a long con,  until the finale, so well acted and written.  Oh and like Arlo?  the man has NO redeeming qualities and even sold out his son to a torturous death. Hes lucky he didnt take one to the head.

heres some alternate takes on the opening plane scene for you...   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kl78AVS8L4

I guess that Im just gonna go with the fact that this game has about 9 months of developement left.  Im sure theres a lot of work left to be done and reviews on an incomplete project are by nature incomplete reviews.  I do hope ships are more that just glorified housing.  Thats the one area where TOR could really make a splash.  Regardless, Im in day one.

And where is Bioware in all this? :-(

Theres some interesting info and a kick ass trailer for The Old Republic in the MMO forums if thats what youre interested in. 

WoW has too large of a subscription base for any new game to be a "WoW killer".  There will be only one WoW killer and thats WoW itself.  Theres already signs of it and while Cataclysm may keep the game viable, more and more people are getting tired of WoW and want something new.  Im sure what TOR and many other mmo's in development hope is that they can get a grip on those defectors along with the new mmo players and find a viable fan base for themselves.  I doubt they expect a subscriber base of 10 million  ( tho Im sure they'd love it! ) but I believe that TOR will have the legs to be around a long time.  I have faith in Bioware to create a fantastic game and I hope that at this time next years I will be spending many hours in thier universe. 

ps: that vid was all kinds of cool. 

Why are people suprised that theres not much origional stuff for the Kinect and the Wave?  They are both new unreleased tech and I expected pretty much what we got with the Wii to start.  No suprise there.  What will really determine if those peripherals sell will the the innovations that the outside game producers come up with.  Its way too early to make an informed judgement on these.  I expect it will be a bout a year before we start seeing if the tech is truly viable.  Until then Im going to reserve judgement.  Ill also reserve my wallet until they can prove to me that I should spend my hard earned dollars on either one.

I dont think all of the stargates are programmed with a 9th chevron.  So far I believe theyve only found 2 with that capability and both have blown up upon use.  The Destiny itself is the pinnacle of ancient technology before the race ascended.  The technology on that ship is invaluable and would completely change the capabilities of whoever figures it out.  Basically, who ever can benefit from Destiny's tech, assuming they can get the ship back to research it, controls the future of mankind. 

Until I saw that tshirt I had no idea that Bob and Jimi were related! 

Ive used Amazon quite a bit and have never had a past due delivery.  Sounds like you just got really unlucky.  Still Amazon made good on the laptop bag issue and of course its not their fault that you waited til the last minute to order, thus putting your need on a deadline.