Friday, June 30, 2006

Start Up the Horses

Let's say someone sells you a car. Truly, it's the most amazing car you've ever driven. You enjoy driving it so much that you go to one of those special racing schools, just to increase your skills so that you can drive it as well as it deserves to be driven.

There's just one problem. If you try to start it up at the wrong time of the day, it won't turn over. There are plenty of days where you spend thirty or even forty-five minutes trying to get the car to start. It's infuriating, but the damn car drives so well when it does start that you just grit your teeth and keep going.

Clearly, the car has a defect.

So you wait eighteen months for the car company to fix their problem. This week, they make the big announcement. Your car can be fixed, kind of--but it's going to cost you twenty-five dollars. It's not a guaranteed fix, but it should improve the starting problem. If it doesn't though, you can't try another fix for six months.

In other news, Blizzard has temporarily jumped onto the jackass wagon. Here's how the World of Warcraft character transfer system is going to work.

From 1UP:
The new character transfer service will cost players $25 per character (not per account) and they will be able to transfer from a list of servers to a list of servers (realms with high populations likely won't be able to receive new players to further cripple the server loads). Players will only be able to transfer a particular character once every six months and also won't be able to transfer from PvE (player versus environment) to PvP (player versus player) rulesets (the vice versa, however, will be allowed).

WTF?

Let me get this straight. I have friends who can't log in to the game that they're paying for without a significant wait during peak hours. This is not the fault of my friends--rather, the responsibility lies with the company they're paying for the service. This service--WOW--is grossing a BILLION dollars a year in subscription fees. And they're going to charge US twenty-five dollars a character to smooth out THEIR load-balancing issues?

Man, that's just embarrassing.

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