Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Yes, I am just naming this column after Pixies songs so I can embed them and not even attempt a theme. Thank you for noticing. I do have a gigantic love for many of our comments, though. They are fun to read and the threads are gigantically entertaining. I also really like when a gigantically different viewpoint is presented for discussion.

My love for the new guild perks in Cataclysm is gigantic, and so is Cyanea's:

This list is the reason why we couldn't have "guild talents" and why we get all of them instead.

Any hardcore PVE or PVP guild that doesn't have either the Honor point or the Hero point gain talent is not going to be competitive. A lot of more casual guilds could've easily picked them both up, but when you're in a hardcore guild striving for world/realm firsts or whatever the equivalent is for PVP you're going to go for the most effective point distribution, forcing players who do both (like me) or who are in a primarily PVE guild and mostly PVP and vice versa to leave their friends and find other guilds just to stay competitive.

All that whining about Guild Talents was pointless.

Pointless indeed. Turn the page for some more gigantically fun and/or interesting comments from the past week.

Biking through Azeroth

Some of us are Buff(ing) for BlizzCon. Saitenyo makes an inspiring suggestion for playing and working out at the same time.

I think this WoW-themed health column is kind of neat. As someone who is both an avid gamer, and fairly health-conscious, I can attest that there's no reason the two need to be mutually exclusive, even when your free time is limited.

Like you say in this article, there are a lot of ways to work around the cooking time issue: prepping larger meals once in a while so you can reheat leftovers for a quick meal later, making healthy snack packs, learning some quick and healthy recipes, etc.

However, I think a lot of people who are in my position end up stumped on the exercise issue. How do you motivate yourself to use your precious limited free time to exercise after a long day of work, when you'd really rather be using that time to do something fun like play WoW?

The answer is you do both at the same time!

While wracking my brain on how to motivate myself to exercise (I admittedly find it boring) I thought to myself, "Gee, if only I could find a way to motivate myself to exercise the way I'm motivated to play WoW." And then I figured out how to do just that.

Step 1: Buy a stationary bike. They're actually pretty affordable, and for me, it was a better option than buying a gym membership that I knew I'd never use.

Step 2: Buy a laptop caddy. Something like this.

That was the complicated part. I had to measure my stationary bike's dimensions and find a caddy that adjusted to fit comfortably over the bike while still leaving room to pedal.

Step 3: Set up the caddy over your stationary bike. Put your laptop on said caddy. Sit down, open WoW, start pedaling.

And there you have your very own WoW exercise machine! It's amazing how much easier it is to motivate yourself to exercise when you can also do something you consider fun at the same time. :)
That and you can tell people you lost 20 lbs playing WoW, which always evokes some amusing reactions. ;)

WoW for free?
Tom Chilton (lead game designer) spoke about a possible free future for WoW. Some excellent analysis was done in the comments, but I've featured just some of it here.

Miggs: Would be nice to be free

snowleopard233: It depends on what we would get for free, if there would be still an optional subscription plan and what you would get for it, as well as whether or not they expanded the micro-transaction store. A lot of these "free" mmo's often turn into games where you get for little for free and then have to keep shelling out clams for run of the mill stuff like multiple characters, more than three character options, and leveling past the starter zones. Having no subscription fees also allows for an entire population of goldsellers and spammers to create accounts without having to even pay for a subscription, whereas currently they have to recreate ten-day trials or steal other people's accounts. It's a common problem on a lot of the free mmo's out there. Mabinogi is apparently plagued with this kind of thing.

Of course that's not to say that with careful grooming and a well-handled transition a "free" option could not be implemented. DDO has been handling it quite nicely. It's just that changing your subscription model complicates a great many facets of the game and can result in a decrease of quality as well as cost to the player.

Golis: Actually, Free would not be nice to those who like the quality of the game. In all seriousness, if you read what Chilton is saying here, he is talking about end of life conditions for the product.

Once they have stopped all real design work, server upgrades, technology enhancements and developers and technicians have moved on to other products, They will squeeze some last coinage out of the remaining players who have not moved on to "the next thing."

Want to solo Sargaras? For a simple transaction of $49.99 you will be given the Axe of Hellacious Mangling. Procs: One dead god every 5 hits.

The game will not be the dynamic universe we know now. Balance will be thrown out the window. Sure some people will pay for that playstyle, but those are the same people who look for godmode cheats before they get the box out of Wal-mart.

Racism is bad; cultural differences are good

Srobart provokes thought in the comments of the latest Drama Mamas:

While I am guessing that most of these racists are children or young teenagers who are just trying to get attention, I do see a bigger problem here. The problem is that everywhere we look we can find "racism". There are OBVIOUS signs of racism, like the racial slurs, which are COMPLETELY and TOTALLY uncalled for in both the game and society as a whole. However, there are other things that people get over-sensitive about, like the "white healer" thing. This is almost as absurd as the story out of Los Angeles last week when the NAACP made a big stink over the word "black hole" on a greeting card, and a city councilman did the same thing a few weeks before that, when one of his white colleagues said "the money seems to be disappearing down a black hole". People need to grow a bit thicker skin and realize that not everything is race-related just because it MAY sound that way.

As far as I'm concerned, all these cries of racism both in game and in society in general are actually doing more to keep the various races from getting along than anything else. It's to the point of insanity. If we cannot DISCUSS race in an honest manner, how can we ever solve the problems between the races? We can't! If a minority speaks about race, nobody bats an eye. If a white person speaks about race, it's automatically racist, even if the comment is positive, or is not meant to be slanderous. This is one of the biggest problems facing America today, and WoW is NOT immune.

There are differences between the races, that's a fact. We should be celebrating and embracing those differences instead of forcing them down into the depths of our brain. Each and every race has something they can provide to others. Until people realize that and they begin to address in a honest manner, there will be no end to malicious racism. That being said, I see VERY little actual malicious racism coming from the white community these days, unless it's from children who are trying to get attention or just be a pain in the rear. I can't even remember the last time I heard an adult say something blatantly racist to hurt the feelings of a minority.

As always, I believe "racism" is blown WAY out of proportion in the USA and in other countries around the world. If the lunacy continues, it will hurt race relations more than it will help it. Those people who say that "black hole" is racist are hurting the relationship between whites and blacks just as much, if not more than, anyone else. The same could be said of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who would be out of a job if they didn't promote strife between the races. We need to remove ALL of the people who drive a wedge between whites and blacks, whether that person is white OR black. Until we do, there will be no peace between majority and minority, of that I am CERTAIN.

Useful definition

For a lighter discussion, we move on to the definition of "real life" in this Breakfast Topic.

Pwnzoar: "Real life?" What are these strange words you are speaking?

Zenith: It means you play with your alt on the Earth realm, sadly almost everyone is human there and most npc's are removed. Heck, I don't even know where my class trainer is

Rylka: The good news is that, even though it is a high population server, there is very little down time. Though the quest helper can be a bit buggy ...

Interesting combination

In a recent queue, Michael Gray discussed the differences between forsaken and death knights: "Vampires and zombies are both undead, but they can do wildly different things. Same thing with the forsaken and the death knights." We'll end today's sampling with the concern this caused.

(cutaia): Oh crap...by that logic, you could end up with zombie vampires! (Please don't let that turn into a new genre...)

Galestrom: As long as they aren't rocking sparkly makeup, I'm okay with it.

jorath: So... Craving for brains and lust for blood? Talk about high maintenance.

Tyr: ALL HAIL THE ZOMPIRES!

A big, big love.

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