In fact WoW can be played purely with the mouse (minus high end raids). No keyboard needed. A more user friendly game than any other MMOG.
 

Lol Tobold.This is obviously the price of fame. I am reminded of stories of famous authors getting manuscripts from people they meet in the street. Take it as a compliment!!!
 

Apologies for 2nd post but your suggestion to the unsolicited contributor to "write your own blog" has reminded me of the admiration I feel for regular bloggers like yourself Tobold. How do you actually do it? Where do you get fresh ideas from every day? How long does it take to write? How do make the time to write in between gaming, working and home life? Does it ever become a chore? If you do feel like spilling the beans and letting us in on your blog writing secrets I think that would make a very interesting article.
 

You could google the email address, might help you find out who it is.
 

You could google the email address, might help you find out who it is.

Hehe, that was the first thing I tried, with no result. The mail appeared to come from the domain @mac.com. Either Apple started running a public webmail server (iMail?), or the address is fake.
 

Could probably do high end raids with just the mouse too, assuming you were on TS. Excepting the few encounters that target individuals, you could get away with it. It wouldn't be the easiest, but definately doable.
 

We'll know how much of the RMT gold was bot-farmed in the months following the expansion release. If you see prices double/triple/quadruple (which is what I expect), you know that most of that gold was bot-farmed.

If the gold-farming industry is crippled by the expansion pack, you will see prices on most items plummet, which might seem bad if you are selling stuff, but isn't really since this deflation benefits you when you take your hard-earned gold to the AH to spend it.

Also, a lot of these "hard-core" guilds that brag about server firsts all the time will get crushed, as they have (with very few exceptions) depended on gold purchasing to buy the mats/pots/etc. they needed to master new content.

This is SO worth giving up Decursive. In fact, I'd say content will have to be normalized to be playable in a non-Decursive world, so expect the jobs of druids/priests/shamans/pallies/mages to get easier as they nerf the remove-debuff encounters - my opinion, of course.
 

Dear Tobold,
I think I can clarify your mystery somewhat, you see, I'm the one who wrote the article you refer to as "drivel." While I risk breaking the sycophant tone of "gee Tobold, how do you do it?" replies that run above, perhaps you will be open to a bit of perspective.

I was the passenger in a F150 pickup that was hit from behind at a horrific speed. While I came away with a concussion and a couple minor fractures, the driver hit the steering wheel so hard that it ripped two vertebrae in his neck in half. In a blink, a guy I'd played high school football with went from jock to quadraplegic. Being a stubborn SOB, he refused to give up though and fought long and hard to get back maybe 80% of his right arm function and some 40% of his left. In a world where accomplishments are measured in metrics like opening a jar for himself, that's a long way.

We live in different cities now, and as I use videogames to share time with other friends, it seemed like an opportunity. Consoles are out - the controllers just aren't manageable. But I got into Warcraft not long ago and was struck by how really nice a lot of players were, then I found the whole addon community. I discovered things like Trimble's "MouseLook" and a couple different "smart keybind" mods that would let a guy who had less than half the use of his left hand at least play by mashing the spacebar a zillion times. No, he wouldn't have dominated the PVP world, but he could have played with reasonable competence.

Now I must confess that I don't know shit about this nefarious syndicate of gold farmers who are supposedly wreaking havoc with warcraft economies. Half of the stuff I read about the problem suggests that WoW gold-sellers are just another online scam for suckers. The economy on my server seems reasonably in line with what I can earn bashing around but maybe thats an anomaly. Surely there must be some way to simply monitor these clown and ban them for all eternity, but accepting for a moment that this problem is the bane of all online gaming, here was my simple position --

I don't think that addon capacity was created for the handicapped, just like I don't think that handrails were first invented for the handicapped either. You could rip the rails off every staircase in America and the nimble youth would sprint up and down without even noticing. But a very small percentage of America that a lot of people don't see, or choose not to see, rely on those rails. I don't know what kind of percentage of people who play online games have limited manual dexterity, I could argue percentages of some seven million Warcrafters to be a decent-sized group but honestly, I was only thinking of one guy and it pissed me off that with all of the options Your comment above "If they can move the mouse and use the keyboard sufficiently to just move around, the existence or not of intelligent macros doesn't make any difference to them." is simply insipid. Warcraft relies on keystrokes often made within a limited timeframe, especially in combat. It is one thing to be able to move the mouse and mash a key or two to move around and quite another to even survive a basic mob conflict. You just don't give a crap enough to care that it might be nice for somebody who can "just move around" might really have more fun if they didn't suck at the complicated stuff.

Blizzard might have dealt with this whole farming thing in some other way but they took the easy route and didn't give a damn if some decent folks got left behind. Business I guess - when you have a few million adolescents whining about the price of epic items who really cares about a few hundred, hell, even just a few, guys who just want to be able to play at all. What surprised me was some of the public responses to the issue. In a game where I'd met so many nice players and so many GREAT addon developers willing to tweak stuff to help us out, the vocal few on forums seem predominated by either gold-farmer paranoids or able-handed narcissists who think their ability to type quickly qualifies as "skillz" to which others must measure to be "worthy". Bah - let them try putting a mitten on their left hand and then tell me about their "skillz". Warcraft is a paid-to-play game, a service just like cable TV, who the hell cares how somebody else watches or plays? Surely the "skilled" cannot possibly be so insecure as to be threatened by somebody who needs some help to play? (Then again, there was that bunch of pro golfers who whined when a competitor with a leg problem needed a golf cart to compete, so perhaps insecurities really do run that deep...) The word "pathetic" comes to mind.

That my article was sent to you was my mistake. I'd asked someone more web-savvy than I to pull together a list of online zines that ran articles of that nature and I simply punched out copies to that list without vetting it first. My bad, and my apologies. I did not see a query from you if you really sent one but with an aggressive spam filter it might have gotten skimmed. The address you have is a good one and I try to respond to anything sent to me. Sorry that I'm not some felonious syndicate attempting to subvert the grand forum of your blog, I guess you'll have to find your gold-farming conspiracy somewhere else.

As for the "drivel" - well, sorry too that giving a damn about too small a group doesn't make your list of important topics. I just kinda hoped that there was some way to boot the gold-farmers or whatever without cutting my buddy out of the herd. On the outside I guess I hoped that a few others might give a damn too. Apparently I was wrong on both counts, at least until its somebody that you know and love that gets busted up.