Blizzard lies to us, then losses money.

My friend and I recently had an argument when Blizzard stated, “We have over 11 million subscribers” of how many subscribers there actually were. He said around 5 to 6 million and I said 6 to 9 million. We argued back and forth a bit until I did some research and found a WoW addon that actually worked as a census which estimated about 5,600,000 active subscribers. The way the addon worked is that it crawled the /who channel which a player would use to find who is in the area and it sends that information to their database.

To keep it updated and to prevent from those trial users, it doesn’t log anyone lower than level 10 and it also deletes players who haven’t been on past 30 days. The result is a pretty accurate and detailed report of who plays what race, faction and class. The downside to it is that not everyone had to have it installed so that number could be higher.

The problem with Rock Band-type games

In my last post I commented on how addictive and fun Rock Band and Rock Band 2 was. And in the first paragraph I also commented on how pathetic it was. And in (not so) great cliffhanger methods, I teased how it was pathetic on my next post.

And here’s why it’s pathetic … because we’re playing plastic versions of real instruments. People who are so addicted to these kind of games should maybe, I don’t know, go out and buy the actual instrument? I’m kind of guilty on this although I have had experience with guitars and drums back in my youth/college years. Okay, I’m really guilty of this. But it’s amazing how much you can get into the game but then realize you’re just holding a plastic instrument that uses five buttons to play an entire song.