It's a mystery to me why monks have such a badass rep in fantasy games when real monks are a little creepy

The Big News:

First off Diablo 3. A real money auction house is a pretty ingenious idea. It essential neuters the type of black market economies that have sprung up in Warcraft. Gold farmers have been a blight on the game experience of WoW for years and Blizzard has been fighting a losing campaign against them for almost the entire life of the game. The main complaint against the cash AH is that it puts a pay wall between certain levels of characters. I say bollocks, it’s a pay wall you can acknowledge or ignore, it’s not like a Zynga game where they practically beg you to spend money to save time, you never even have to look at it if you don’t want to. Plus the harder difficulty levels don’t even allow you to access it, so if you want the ‘real game’ and avoid playing against twinked out kids with their mums credit card, there you go. What Blizzard have really done in Diablo 3 is made everyone a gold farmer, flooding the market with casual competitors to professional farmers who are only to happy to undercut the professional prices and ensured they get a small cut off all the profits. Clever girl.

In this visual metaphor Blizzard are the raptor offscreen on the left, Muldoon is the gold farmers

The online requirement is more troublesome. Reactions to the news have ranged from foamingly crazy to relaxed shrugs. Blizzard has reacted much as they did to the Real ID fiasco with a bewildered, ‘it’s no big deal, calm down, can I have my cat back please?’.

There’s two reasons why I think it’s slightly more of a bigger deal than Blizzard make it out to be. One, although some of the world has reached the height of an always on, swift internet culture some countries, like us in Australia, are still catching up. Where I live my expensive internet connection drops out from time to time. I accept that this affects my accessibility to online multiplayer games, but stopping me from playing on my own as well? Obviously a bad thing. PC games might not be dying, but decisions like this are what send people to their couches to play console games. Like literally, when that happens I will go and play Skyrim and when that happens I may not come back until I have a beard and/or need to change my nappy.

My second problem is that Blizzard, to me at least, have always had a reputation for accessibility. Their games were never the swaggering Crysis types, which required a computer that had fallen through a worm hole from the future to install them. Blizzard made games that almost everyone could play on their crappy desktop stolen from work; and they were always great games to boot. I can walk into a game store today and say, ‘good sir, sell me your Starcraft game!’, and without batting an eyelid, without any sense of sarcasm, the blue haired youth at the counter will ask, ‘which one?’. Because you can still buy the original, and not for ironic or hipster reasons, almost fifteen years after it was released. The whole reason for that popularity is a combination of incredible quality and accessibility. I understand the reasons that they want to maintain all players online all the time, but for old school Blizzard fans it’s a bit of a bummer.

In addition to the Mists of Pandaria rumour (link) there was also news of Warcraft losing a few hundred thousand subscribers last quarter, followed closely by comments proclaiming the end of WoW. If you look at the numbers though, that means their regular subscribers have dropped from just over 12 million, to just under 12 million. This subscriber drop off is pretty cyclical following about six months after each expansion drops. There’s probably a pretty strong argument that the subscriber accounts that have dropped off are additional accounts of existing users to power level characters as quickly after the recent expansion and patches and now they’ve sapped the marrow from the game they’re shutting down the spare accounts they don’t need. World of Warcraft will be kicking around for a long while yet

Plus now I have an excuse to post the awesome full Game Informer cover

Cool News of the Week:

I’ve posted all ready about Borderlands 2 but it’s extremely cool that Borderlands is getting a sequel. I’ve only recently picked up the only expansion I didn’t review, Claptraps Robot Revolution, and look forward to playing through that. The diminutive, blue haired tough guy in the images released so far is called Salvador (great name) and he’s a Gunzerker (great class name) with special abilities all related to, obviously, guns. It’s also been revealed all the characters from the last game will all appear as NPC’s.

This is a franchise that even Activision decided was unworthy of milking, Squaresoft have gone off the deep end.

Stupid News of the Week:

After Activision axed True Crime: Hong Kong (or something) gamers breathed a sigh of relief. In this case Activision were less capitalist bastards killing another franchise, and more noble veterinarians putting down a very sick dog nobody wanted who suffered non stop dysentery. Square Enix decided to destroy what little faith anybody had in them as a games company and resurrect the crusted corpse of True Crime purchasing the title with the intention to finish it and release it. They say they’re excited about a new opportunity, I say they’ll blow millions, then can it and announce Final Fantasy Versus has been delayed again.

Suddenly you're wondering just what peripheral applications those bionic arms have aren't you?

Weird News of the Week:

Deus Ex Human Revolution has been censored in Japan to remove a ‘sexual object’. I’m not sure what I find weirder, the fact a serious science fiction game like Deus Ex involves a rubber wang at some point (which I’m guessing is the object being censored), or that a country that has a giant statue of a skirted cartoon school girl with a train line running between her knees saw fit to censor it.

No, that's totally acceptable

And that's the first Tuesday Cap. Come back next week for... next weeks... one. I guess. Or troll our forums for entertainment.