Its just irritating to no end. I usually turn the general channel off but I would like to have some large area chat channel for when I am soloing to have someone to talk to. Just not about stupid things or ruining the game content. I don’t know how people can ask for solutions to quests and such and still play the game. It seems to take away all challenge and reinforce the treadmill if you have all the answers, like playing through a puzzle game for the first time with the strategy guide. Makes no sense to meeee.

Anyways to answer Cyrris, the people around me in-game never really detracted from the universe much. Most people didn’t do retarded things. In the beta you can expect to have a lot of ridiculous character names but even those I didn’t find much of. Overall I think it should be ok. I ran into a few role players too which was a good time, i’ll post details next update.

What I have to say about wow is basically the same as Doc Holliday. Tho purely graphical the engine isnt as good as the one used in, say, lineage2, what the WoW engine excells at is dynamic loading. SWG wasnt too good at it, and if you stood at a high mountain in lineage 2 you could see the edges of the levelroom, since it was still basically the unreal engine.

Not so with the WoW engine. the gryphon rides are so smooth, and you never really see the edge of the world, and I could run it wil all details max. And I have a GeForce3.

One thing I have to say is that I think the animations could have done a little better. They’re not ugly, not at all, they’re just not the best I’ve ever seen, and thus allow for improvement.

I think Blizzard purposely traded off pure graphical goodness for fast loading times and good dynamic loading. That said, the game never really ‘feels’ ugly looking or outdated, but if you stop and take a look at everything you’ll find that where most engines nowadays would use staticmeshes, WoW still has textures.

And thank god for that, because the World of Warcraft loads a lot faster than one UT2004 level. Personally I think the tradeoff was a succes.

Not that it’d matter too much in a stress test/beta style thing. I mean, I know JohnDoe went dancing half-naked in the streets with his character when the test came to an end.