Found a link to Blizzard's forums which led to this:

Sure to be removed quickly, because I don't recall a Blizzard employee that has ever referenced another MMORPG on their forums before. They corporately maintain some kind of fog-of-war over that stuff.

It's perfectly sane and reasonable of course, you can't expect people to play their own game much, if at all, but they've got an interest in these kind of games so there has to be an outlet in competing products. There's a bunch of other normal reasons, too many to list really.

Much of the fanboi trash talk seems so silly when (during the trade-shows especially) it's probably usual for the devs, CMs and employeees of these companies to sit down together over coffee to discuss what they have in common. Many of them have worked together in the past, the talent is related and interwoven this way. You can catch competing devs smiling at each other on discussion panels and they're honest smiles at that.

I've always liked Eyonix, even back when Warlocks saw no love and as the Warlock CM rep he was too busy enjoying his Mage. =P

I found the link for this on the AoC forums in a thread with the sensationalist topic "Even Blizzard employees play AOC", right underneath "AoC is the Ralph Nader of MMOs" and right above "Is Funcom Gutlessly Caving In To The Prudes..?" which just goes to prove that regardless of any differences in the games themselves, the general forums are exactly the same.

**Post & comments deleted because fanboi ire is pointless over a game I won't be playing anyway**

Just like I'd done with WoW a few years back, I've intentionally skipped the Beta opportunities with Age of Conan. These are two games with so much potential that I don't wish to ruin my experience testing a beta that can be wildly different from the full game.

I've played enough betas (especially MMO betas: Ultima Online, Everquest, Guild Wars, etc.) to expect frustrations and disappointments that can all be avoided with a bit of patience for the actual game.

As expected, I'm seeing a variety of first impressions from the current 'Open' Beta of Age of Conan, that's very reminiscent of beta info leaked from World of Warcraft before its initial release. None of those reviews are fair of course, whether glowing praise or doom and gloom. You just cannot rate a game based upon its beta, no matter how close to release it is. At the most, you can get a general impression of gameplay.

The WoW comparison:

If WoW had to survive on the merits of its release (let alone beta), it would have failed miserably. Penny Arcade actually withdrew their 2004 Game of the Year award due to WoW's lack of server stability. The real test that Blizzard passed was in halting the game sales (yeah, they did that), refunding time to players and addressing the stability issue, although it took them months. At the time, WoW had sold just over 600,000 copies of the game, which was a great achievement but a far cry from the millions they have now.

As a player in 2004, I was thrilled to be playing WoW. I rarely commented on the bugs & problems (first day: fell out of the world, got stuck numerously in flower-picking pose, disconnected from server continuously) since I had expected them. I expect Age of Conan to have its share of issues too, in fact I'd assume more, it's designed to a much higher standard of visuals compared to WoW (which was hardly state of the art in 2004, let alone now).

The real test for any MMORPG if you ask me, is twofold:

• Is the gameplay fun? This is subjective of course. What's fun for me isn't necessarily for you, but there are some commonalities to mass-market fun. WoW certainly meets most player's standards, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. Age of Conan's PvP beta gained some glowing reviews, though personally I'm more interested in PvE fun so I'll just have to wait to see, but what I've seen during development looks good and the RPG world certainly suits me.
• Are they a standup company? If there are problems, will they fix it? Or will they just cave, count their losses and dump the whole thing? I don't think I need to give examples of companies that are not what I'd consider standup in the MMORPG field, some of them are notorious and have either outright mismanaged their game developments or have let good games die on the vine.

  Blizzard is clearly a standup MMORPG company, they pulled their socks up when they needed to. I'd say Funcom's experience with Anarchy Online shows they are legit and worthy of faith too.

Funcom doesn't want a repeat of their nearly disastrous Anarchy Online launch. Proof that they're working to avoid that is in their current beta, which is clearly a stress test complete with heavy-duty debugging software. The downside is the impression they're leaving on the beta-testers while they try to push the client and servers to the breaking point, because as expected, things are breaking. That's the nature of the beast.

I'm pretty stoked with the pending release of Age of Conan, from what I've seen this game will suit me better than any that have come previously. I'm really looking forward to watching the game mature as it goes along.

Hell, I'll just be thrilled to play a fantasy MMORPG with no elves!

Considering that I let my WoW account lapse into suspension around Christmas, I was a bit surprised to get an email response today regarding a GM complaint I made in October.

It was a pretty simple matter of a griefing player, but the GM that answered in-game originally gave a form response of "disputes on PvP servers are expected to be handled by PvP resolutions". Except Silvermoon is a PvE server and the complaint wasn't about PvP per se (nobody was flagged). So at the time, I sent off a simple GM feedback complaint that the GM hadn't taken the time to check the server-type.

It's rather amusing that a complaint of a lax GM gets responded to months later.

Overall, during my 3 years playing WoW, I would say that the customer service was good. Especially the in-game customer service. Blizzard made it very clear early on that they intended to have in-game solutions to stop gold farmers, griefers and other player-involved disruptions. Indeed, the GMs I'd spoken to expressed policies that they wanted players to report to GMs more, not less.

After Burning Crusade however, the situation seemed to change. Blizzard's customer service went downhill in a big way, both in-game and out. GMs were poorly trained, slow to respond and sometimes acted like they were being bothered rather than happy to help. This became more and more evident as players explained their GM experiences on the forums, then the forum posts themselves started getting removed.

Honestly, it wasn't a big factor in my leaving WoW. I left because of gaps in the game. But it's indicative of changes with Blizzard: they were once a company that focused on the details.

I'm quietly waving goodbye to World of Warcraft after 3 years.

I considered leaving as far back as last year, during the Burning Crusade beta. After such a long wait for WoW's first expansion, it didn't deliver much ooomph for me.

Sakkara, Nelg and I began started discussing other games (mostly Warhammer at the time) over our usual dinners out. Eventually we all decided that our next 'online home' would be Age of Conan, in fact our entire guild will likely migrate to Funcom's upcoming MMO. At first we worried that AoC was coming out too soon, but then it got delayed and now here I am, ready to leave WoW while AoC is still a few months away.

I won't have troubles finding things to occupy my time, if anything I have too much on my plate for hours of gametime anyway.

I was going to write some sappy stuff here about my experiences in WoW, but maybe later. I did do the cheesy forums goodbye post. Right now there are two days left on my account and I think I'll login to transfer my collected materials and gold to the guild bank.

I hate patch day. Some folks love it, I probably would too if WoW patches were all about new content, but they aren't. And my dislike of patch day isn't just because of the inherent bugs or the server downtime, it's something more to the core of the game.

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet: Blizzard has created a Metagame out of "balancing" within WoW, by changing how the system works each major patch.

Yes, I'm very jaded and cynical.

I used to think it was just ordinary mundane balancing, the sort that comes along with nearly every MMO and gets tedious after a bit, but settles down over time. I strongly (that would put it mildly) disagree that any game needs "constant perpetual balancing", that's akin to game designer wanking. But I don't even think that's what they do with WoW. I think the whole point is to keep players occupied and busy with a new system every month or two. I'm certain that the peeps at Blizzard also feel like they're improving the game with each of the systematic changes, but much like The Vision wasn't really about the "epic" aspects of EQ, Blizzard's systematic changes aren't completely about improving the game.

I think most players are perfectly fine with that.

Here's how I became aware of WoW's Systematic Metagame:

A friend's comments about "skill" in WoW threw it right into my face. WoW does not have strong strategic or tactical elements and it certainly doesn't involve any physical or twitch abilities, but it is a systematic game. If you do not learn the system, you're labelled a noob and won't be able to play to the best of your abilities. Learning the ins-and-outs of the system is in fact a large portion of the game. This is true for most MMORPGs, especially ones that use the Tank + Healer + DPS paradigm.

So Blizzard perpetually changing the system, does keep a lot of players from getting bored. Except, for me at least, it has worn me down. Oddly, I'm more bored with having to re-learn the system each patch. For once, I'd like to jump into some new content WITHOUT having significant base elements of the game changed.

I'd like to feel a bit more comfortable, after playing for 3 years, there's a point where I do not wish to be on the edge of my seat. =P

At Blizzcon, Blizzard has confirmed the next WoW expansion will be Wrath of the Lich King, but I don't see any mention of a release date and very few details overall, which is very disappointing. There's not much to confirm or deny the speculation from the leaked info.

Certainly more details will follow, they sort of have to, there's not much there so far. Even their expansion mini-site is like a short press release. This is less info than I recall from when they announced TBC, which we at least had a ballpark for release. I understand the concept of "done when it's done", but I just don't think that cuts it with MMO expansions, it leaves many players wondering how to pace their gameplay with the current content.

Perhaps they're holding back the date information for the rest of Blizzcon? I sure hope so, this is info players would like to know right away.