Father Xmas

There happens to be a write up on Ivy Bridge i5s yesterday at Xbit Labs. They got the i5-3570K up to 4.4GHz from it's stock 3.4GHz with minimal BIOS tweaking and no voltage changes. That said, it's temperature even with a huge $60 air cooler got to 81c (that's very warm). Non K i5s can still be overclocked by 400MHz (600MHz with Turbo Boost) which is still more than 10%.

Normally not with games as much. Again check out the article I linked to which they included the i7-3770K as well as the older i5-2500K, i7-2700K and the sad AMD FX-8150. Most of the performance gains are close are around the percentage due to the slightly faster clock speed of the i7. Applications that can spread it's calculations across as many threads as the system can handle do perform better in the i7, sometimes a lot (like video compression and 3D ray-trace rendering). But if you are just looking to browse and game, the around $100 premium for an i7 just isn't worth it. Better spending that $100 on a better graphics card, more memory or toward an SSD.

I wish the people realize that no game company on Earth honestly believes they can make a "WoW killer" anymore. WoW is an outlier, a fluke, the exception to the rule. Companies are now hoping for maybe a 10th of WoW's numbers.

True but it has run up a LOT since late October 2008 when it hit bottom at 24,400 KrW. Then Aion came out, became their biggest game, game revenues jumped 80% between 2008 and 2009 and the stock goes nuts.

No. In a society where your elder/superior is always right, the customer is the low man on the totem pole.

I don't think you can do that in any other game either so it's a wash.

As some pointed out, correlation isn't the same as causality.

And I agree with Uber. It's a pretty weak reason to leave a game because others abused a new system or because how the devs tried to fix it.

If I didn't use the system, why would I care if we get zillions of AE babies or that someone was grinding for skeeball tickets so they could make billions at Wentworths. The lack of grinding is what makes this game so unlike NCSoft's Korean imports. I explained to friends what people were doing in AE and they replied "how is that fun?"

If MA wasn't tied to a box release then it's possible that the devs would have plugged some of the earlier exploits before it's release but it was a box release and they had to get it to stores by the promised delivery date. Also as a minor aside it was also the only box Mac release. I can also understand why it was a box release. The concept of player created content for an MMO was revolutionary idea at the time. There's always been mission modding communities for FPS games but this was a honest to God mission builder. Lets make some noise about it.

I just don't get why someone would leave just because of MA. I can understand the straw/camel/back or five year burnout but not this.

Since NCSoft bought ArenaNet, lock, stock and barrel in 2002, ArenaNet would either have to buy themselves back from NCSoft as well as the IP. It would probably be easier to dissolve and reform as a new company and raise money as "the team that created GW and GW2".

Of course it doesn't. I'm guessing it's some kind of MMO strategy sim. I'm probably wrong.

Gee, I've wouldn't have guessed.