Brief commentary on the latest Big Issues

There've been several pieces of major WoW-related news in the past couple of days, though none of them have actually excited me much. Still, I thought I'd write down my thoughts on them at least in a very condensed form:

Diablo III RMT

So, apparently you'll be able to buy virtual items in Diablo III with real money. Wait, I've never played any of the previous Diablo games and have no interest in the next installment either, why should I care? Because WoW might end up going down the same road if the system turns out to be successful? Hm.

To be honest, I'm not too concerned about that. WoW is still quite different from Diablo from what I understand (many items are BoP, loot is shared in groups, there are different servers etc.) so I don't think that they'd be able to just port the system over quickly or easily even if it does turn out to be a success.

Though, for the record, I'm against RMT, micro-transactions and all that stuff. I just like to pay my subscription and then never have to worry about real money while immersing myself in the experience of being a troll in a dress.

Mists of Pandaria

MMO-Champion once again claims to know all about the next expansion before it's officially announced. Colour me sceptical, but I wouldn't put it beyond Blizzard to just be messing with our heads in this case. After all, they know that this is the kind of thing that people would look into for clues, and the Pandaren have always been a joke race, so an expansion centred around them would be the perfect fit for a practical joke.

Then again, I also thought that the early Cataclysm leaks were a bunch of bollocks, because the developers would never just destroy all their own work, right? And Garrosh becoming warchief? Lol...

If it does turn out to be a real expansion, I'm amazingly indifferent. I know some people are crazy about Pandaren, but as someone who's "only" a WoW fan, not a Blizzard fan, the entirety of my knowledge about this race can be summed up by what I know from Chen's Empty Keg, a quest that doesn't even exist anymore. There was a guy called Chen Stormstout, and he was a panda and liked to drink. Okay. I have to admit, I don't really care. Just bring it on I guess.

WoW losing another 300k subscribers

There are quite a few things that I'm not happy with in the game right now, but I grow tired of ranting even faster than I grow tired of the things that I ranted about to begin with! There are probably a lot of different reasons for the subscriber loss, but there are still plenty of people playing. It's not all bad. I do hope though that if Blizzard attempts to regain those lost subscribers, they won't do so by simply throwing more raid bosses and daily quests at people without doing anything else.