Misleading Numbers Are Misleading

Recently Blizzard announced a subscription base of 11.5 million subscribers.  It appears that 70% of them never make it past level 10.  Does anyone else have a hard time believing this?  Are they saying 70% of the characters don’t make it past level 10 or 70% of subscribers don’t level past 10?  The former I can understand but the latter is just unbelievable…simply unbelievable.  If you head to every city or zone and “/who 1-80″ and count how many sub-level 10 players you find (total) and compare it to how many 11-80 players you find (total) I highly doubt you’d ever find more than twice as many sub-level 10 than 11-80.

Maybe the sub-level 10 accounts just never get on anymore?  Are you suggesting that people pay $15 per month, consistently, and not play at all?  I have a hard time believing that.  Perhaps it does happen but these numbers suggest over 8 million people pay $15 per month and do nothing.  Bullshit.

It is very common for people with one or more 80-level toon to have a lowbie character or two used primarily for banking purposes.  So, it’s understandable that it might be the case that 70% of the characters don’t make it past level 10 but not 70% of the players.

People are also criticizing the subscriber base for “not having any growth since 2008″.  Apparently there were 11.5 million subscribers in late 2008, which is how many there are now.  Does that mean WoW has hit a plateau?  I don’t think so.  Why?  Did everyone forget the huge China fiasco that recently occurred?  I’m sure there are millions of subscribers there who are now unable to play.   Once the China situation gets fixed I’m sure we will see a sky-rocket in the numbers.  Maybe as high as 15 million?  Speculation…

What Does A Tank Miss?

The question is quite cryptic but the answer I’m looking for is:  The LFG wait time.  As most of you are aware the new LFG tool, which groups you with characters across realms, is in full use by almost everyone who plays – from level 13 up to 80.  As you would expect DPS players typically have the longest wait.  When I queue up on my mage or warrior (as dps) I’m usually farming eternals for about 15 minutes before I get a group.  For healers that time is significantly reduced.  When I queue on my paladin or priest (as healing) I’ll usually wait about 2 minutes before I get a group – occasionally I’ll get a group instantly.

This all pales in comparison to the tank.  When I queue as my druid (as tank) I’ve never (seriously, never) waited longer than 30 seconds for a group.  That means, as a tank, when I queue for a dungeon I better be ready to go right then.  No finishing up this auction or getting that enchanted really quick.  No, no, no…it’s go time.

Being the selfish, greedy pricks that people are it’s becoming more and more common to see the following advertisements in trade chat:

“Geared tank queueing for randoms.  Join me for 15g per dungeon to get the fast queues.”

People will do anything to take advantage of others.  It’s sickening.  When I queue with my druid I always spam the following in trade chat:

“Better geared tank queueing for randoms.  Since I’m not a douche I offer the quick queue for free.  PST with role.”

I’ll typically wait about 30 seconds for people to contact me then I queue up.  There are usually 2 or 3 people who take me up on the offer.  We always get an instant queue and have yet to have a run last much more than 25 minutes.  I’ve got Nexus down to a 17 minute run and OK down to 12 minutes (if you skip a few bosses).

How can people stand themselves being so selfish as to charge people for fast queues?  The greed…the disgusting greed.

Bleh…Just Can’t Do It…

Yesterday I was convinced to join my ‘old guild’ for ICC25.  I say ‘old guild’ because I never really do anything with them anymore.  My Druid, DK and Hunter are in that guild but my Mage, Priest and Warrior are all in other guilds.  They originally asked if I could heal on my druid.  Not a chance.  I have no interest whatsoever in raid healing ever again as long as I live.  Ever.

I told them they might be able to convince me to come on my priest as dps or my druid as a tank.  They took me up on the priest.  What a huge fucking mistake!  I hated every femtosecond in that place.  From the moment I was invited to the raid to the moment I ninja logged I was miserable.  We killed the first boss with little issue and a very nice caster dagger dropped.  I thought ‘well, this might not be so bad after all’.  I was soon reminded that they use a DKP system and my priest was at the bottom of the priority list.

Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer DKP over /random any day of the week.  I didn’t realize DKP was going to be used for that run (as there were other non-guild members there too).  I felt slightly cheated but care so little about raid progression that it didn’t bother me much.  It was then I realized I had nothing to gain from continuing other than frustration.  I don’t particularly like anyone in that guild.  I have no chance at any of the gear.  I don’t care about the fights.  I don’t want to see more bosses.  I hate raiding.  What the fuck was I there for?  I have no idea!  It’s like slave labor in there.  Bleh!

After the first boss kill everyone took a 5 minute afk with the caveat that if you weren’t back in time for the next pull you would get kicked from the raid.  I purposefully stayed afk until after the pull so they would kick me from the raid and I could continue with my evening.  1 pull.  2 pulls.  3 pulls.  Never got kicked.  Alt-F4.  I went to bed.

Sound Off

Blizzard has once again hit the nail on the head with the new LFG tool.  Absolutely amazing – the possible additions they are discussing for it are equally amazing (cross-realm friends etc).  So, when I find an awesome druid healer who was really funny and not a douche I can purposefully try to queue with them another time.  Killer!

If you are a tank in H ToC please note that you must tank all mobs sufficiently far away from their starting door otherwise there is a line-of-sight (LOS) bug that prevents casters from dpsing them and, more importantly, the healer from healing YOU.  Now, if you were unaware of this bug that’s fine.  To claim that you always tank them there and have never had problems before, then refuse to adjust to this blatant problem is not fine.  It’s down right retarded.  Then to get mad at the group and ninja leave is douchedom.  Then to requeue for the same instance only to come back to the same 4 people you just left and then leave again nominates you for douche-bag-of-the-month.  Congratulations, Borntokill (warrior), you packed more doucheness into a single event than I’ve witnessed in a very long time.

To appreciate the truly hilarious is next to godliness.  As a priest you can hover 30 yrds over a flying enemy and cast Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain on them.  Then, very quickly, cast Levitate on yourself to land safely on the ground.  If the enemy remains in their position you can remount and repeat this maneuver until they are dead.  What is truly hilarious is when it’s a druid in flight form who tries to cast Rejuv on themselves and re-pop flight form to get away.  Too bad, buddy, you’re in combat now…and you just fell to your death. 

Having the random daily heroic be Halls of Reflection is unlucky.  Choosing to put a tank with 30k hp in there with us is sabotage.

Speaking of Halls of Reflection, having Sylvannis die on the 4th (last) wall when the last Abom has around 40-50k hp left sucks.  Having it happen 3 times in a row is enfuriating.  The dps necessary for that guantlet is insane.  Like…the average output damage produced by all 3 dps and the tank needs to exceed 3k – for a total of 12k dps, sustained, for the entire gauntlet.  When I tank it, on my druid, I can maybe hit 2300 dps.  That means I need at least one of the other dps to pull nearly 4k dps for the entire gauntlet.  Maybe I just need better gear?  Well, I roll with 40% dodge (up to 55% with cooldowns/procs), 40% crit and 40k hp(up to 65k with cooldowns).  What else do I need?

It’s a terrible state of affairs for the raiding frost mage – they are too awesome right now and will be getting nerfed (my prediction).  Patch 3.3 gave them a permanent elemental pet and let’s their Deep Freeze ability hit stun-immune mobs (bosses) like a truck.  Unfortunately it’s just too much.  I have a mage with 2 questing greens, about 3 heroic epics and the rest are questing/ilvl175-200 blues who can easily get 3k dps on boss fights.  I have 1300 spellpower and my Deep Freeze can crit for over 17.5k!  I expect nerfs incoming very soon.

The more I do PvP on my warrior the more I hate the fact that I have to do Arena to get PvP weapons.  Arena is just a bunch of counter-comp bullshit.  I sincerely hope rated BGs will be better.  On the bright side I was able to get the two-handed axe from Scourge Lord Tyrannus.  A considerable upgrade, even for PvP.

When you are running a dungeon it’s entirely unacceptable to be a healer and roll need on a healing necklace from the first boss then roll need on a caster necklace from the second boss…during the same run.  I ran Forge of Souls on my shadow priest with a random LFG and a shaman was healing.  We down the first boss and the epic healing necklace drops.  It would have been a side-grade for me so I passed on it when I noticed he had rolled ‘need’.  We continue and kill the last boss.  The epic caster necklace drops and was a considerable upgrade for me.  He rolls ‘need’ again.  Not cool.  Even if his second spec is elemental you don’t need more than one item unless nobody else needs.  It’s just common courtesy.  Luckily my ‘need’ roll surpassed his and I walked away with it.  The audacity still angers me.

A friend of mine and I decided to ‘RP level’ some new alts.  I rolled a shaman (filling out my last character slot on the server) and he rolled a hunter.  Neither of us have any experience doing any RP so it’s not really going well.  What we decided to do to fulfill the ‘RP’ part is to do all the quest lines that lead to the dungeons as we level up.  Then, to challenge us, we have decided to duo the dungeons rather than get a group for it.  I’m rolling elemental and he is hitting up beast mastery (I’ll get dual spec at 40 and go resto).  We got him a crocalisk for his tenacity pet and rolled through RFC at level 13 without a hitch.  It’s surprisingly good experience too.  We leveled from 13 to 15 in one dungeon clear – and got a few upgrades to boot.  Our next ‘RP’ experience will be Wailing Caverns, followed quickly by The Deadmines.  We’ve unlocked all but 1 quest for Wailing Caverns but The Deadmines doesn’t have Horde quests.  Who cares, right?  We just want to kill Smite…and VC.

Averaged Out Awesome

After work I headed home to try and check out the new 5-man dungeons.  To my surprise the server was still down.  I had read that all the servers were back up, which is why I headed home in the first place – clearly mine was still down.  After about 30 minutes it came up (talk about good timing) and I proceeded to jump on with my druid and try and get our group together (3 friends and my wife).  We determined, very quickly, that there was a metric shit ton of people crowding in Icecrown and almost nobody could actually get in.

We fought the loading-screen boss for about an hour and decided to do some 3v3 instead and get our rating up to 1200 real quick so the rogue and priest could unlock another piece of gear.  Our friend lives on PST time and was just getting off work and still needed to grab dinner and download the patch (fortunately just the small 5mb one).  I was a bit hesitant because my addons were acting a bit funny, which is to be expected after any patch.  Fortunately I don’t really use any addons that affect gameplay but rather ones like Chatmod, Gearscore and VanKos…but an error message popping up on your screen, for any reason, is annoying and potentially devastating if it happens in arena play.  They really wanted to do 3s so I reluctantly went along with it.

We ended up winning a few and losing to a team we really, really shouldn’t have lost to – rogue/rogue/feral druid.  We lost 28 points when we lost to that stupid RRD team.  Well, fortunately we continued to queue…and so did they.  We smashed them the 2nd time around.  And the 3rd.  And the 4th.  And…

Yup, it seemed like they were the only other team in the queue at the time so we were able to nab some really easy wins.  They won the first round and we didn’t lose any others following.  In fact, save the first round, we only had 1 of us die once during the entire rest of the fights against them.  It was pretty sweet.

We did lose to another lame team (disc/resto druid/rogue)…I can’t imagine how we could kill them with the comp we have (disc/rogue/warr).  We simply couldn’t put out enough damage with enough CC to kill either healer.  I’d really like to see a team like that get trashed because I think it’s fundamentally against what the intent of a gladiator tournament really is.  It’s pretty much the same reason why I think it’s incredibly lame when prot pallies wearing healing gear just dominate in arena play.  This is a topic of another discussion altogether.

Our friend finally gets on and we group up and attempt to get in to the new dungeons again.  More errors occur and we decide to just run a few heroics with the new LFG tool.  Holy mother of god that thing is nice.  It’s a significant upgrade from all the previous versions.  Kudos, Blizzard on such a wonderful tool.  It’s fun to use and easy to navigate.  We ended up doing 3 heroics (HoS, VH and AN).  We got a few more achievements, an ass load of gold and had a great time doing it.  It was odd.  We’ve already run those heroics 1091098320987 times but it was still fun.  How does that work?

Well, after these runs we decided to try the new dungeons one last time.  No luck!  The rogue and priest were about 9 and 13 points shy of getting to 1200, respectively.  We jump in some 3s and ran a few.  The rogue hit 1203 but the priest was still 1199.  The rogue quickly purchased the new bracers to ensure he got them (he was honor capped so he needed to spend the honor on something…had been buying epic gems until now).  We jumped in one more and wiped up and got the priest the bracers too.

Being the nice guy that I am I jumped on my DK and enchanted them both up.  Now they are happy, happy, happy.  Hopefully we’ll get them to 1300 by the weekend. 

I’m still only at 1473 on my warrior with the 2s team I’m on.  We need to grind that up to 1800 quick!

Even though we were unable to do the new 5-mans we did have a great time and pulled the arena team up and get some new gear for the rogue and priest.  All-in-all a wonderful night.

Counter Comp in BGs?

As you progress in PvP you realize that every class has a counter-class.  That is, there exists a class, that when played correctly, will utterly destroy you unless you get extremely lucky.  Let’s face it, when you come across players who know how to play their class there simply is no ‘getting lucky’.  You must simply out play them if you expect to beat them.  Period.

So, counter-classes are really just a matter of ‘I know what to do against you’ and it just so happens that when the know-how is there nothing can be done on your part to win.  Nothing*.  Let’s look at some examples.

* Keep in mind I’m talking about equal gear/skill/ability here.  Obviously a toon in full Relentless gear can be given to an infant and it won’t mean squat.

Rogue vs Mage.  Classic counter-comp.  If the rogue knows what to do the mage is dead.  Period.  No matter how good the mage is the rogue will win 90% of the time.  Again, as long as the rogue knows what to do.  Open with garrote/silence.  Finish with a 5 point eviscerate.  Cloak of shadows, sprint.  Dead.

Another great example is Mage vs Warrior.  It is useless for the warrior to try if the mage knows anything about their class.  Charge = Blink.  Spell Reflect = Ice Lance.  Keep up slowing effects and the warrior can never touch the mage.  Never.

What about Warlock vs Paladin.  Death Coil followed by Chain Fear.  DoT, Chaos Bolt, win.  Devour the Hammer of Justice.  Seduce to keep at range.  Whatever works.  Just eat them up.

Every class has them and every class will be faced with them.  Arena is all about figuring out what partners you need in order to out-comp the other team.  It’s simply a game of counter-comps.  This is why I’m all in favor of rated BGs coming in Cataclysm.

When have you ever stepped in a BG and realized the other 10/15/40 players were a counter-comp to your 10/15/40 players?  Yeah, never gonna happen.  At a BG scale it’s a matter of organization…for the most part.  I’d speculate about 70% organization/skill and 30% gear.  Sometimes, no matter how well you play or how hard you try, the other team is going to sufficiently out gear yours and they will win.

Notice, however, there is 0% reserved for counter-comp situations.  It just doesn’t happen in BGs.  (unless the other team happens to be a stack of nothing but paladins)

What is a more deserving venue for the best possible PvP gear in the game than BGs?  I’m not talking about stupid /afk honor grinds but rated BGs.  Ones that you get with your guild, organize, strategize and conquer.  That is where the skill will come in.  Once you get to high rated BGs it will be 100% organization/skill and 0% gear.

The current arena setup is just a bunch of counter-comps destroying other counter-comps.  Lame and lamenting.

Where’s The Appeal?!?

With the recent arena activity I’ve been involved in with my warrior I’ve had to do a great deal of BGs to get the honor to buy all the Relentless off-set pieces.  Those things are damn expensive!  Each costs either around 48k honor or 62k honor.  Considering a single BG yields 800-1600 honor (for a win) you can do the math yourself to see that even one single 62k honor grind can take a while. (3 pieces that cost 62k and the 4 pieces that cost 48k = about 375k honor)

While doing some BGs and WGs with friends yesterday we decided to take a break and run H ToC to get our rogue another dagger.  It’d be great for him.  Currently he wields it in the main hand but it would be a significant upgrade for his off-hand too.  Why can’t he just get a PvP weapon?  Well, because you can’t get any PvP weapons with honor.  Lame!

Anyway, we jump in H ToC.  We’ve got the priest healing, druid tanking, rogue and my warrior dpsing.  We needed a fifth and my wife helped us out by jumping on her DK.  Off we go to get his dagger (or a second Edge of Ruin for me).  We do the jousting and are ready to fight the first three mobs.  It’s the Rogue/Warrior/Hunter combo.  No heals to deal with, which was nice, but that is a lot of incoming damage.  It turns out the rogue dropping poison on the ground really hurts everyone.  With 4 melee the priest was overwhelmed and the tank died.  Followed by the rest of us in short order.

We discussed movement and tried again.  Everyone moved out of the whirlwind and off of the poison.  I disarm the warrior.  I intervene to the priest to mitigate how much damage he takes.  I charge back in for the critical Mortal Strike.  Things were going great.  We kill the warrior (2nd target) and jump on the Hunter.  Hot damn, I must be pulling aggro!  Hot damn, the tank isn’t taunting!  Hot damn, the tank is dead!  Oh, snap…well I have about 32k hp in my PvP gear (which is really the only gear I have) and figure the priest can probably heal me through the Hunter with little issue.  Hot damn, I’m not getting any healing!  Hot damn, the healer is dead!  Well, I pop Enraged Regeneration and my Herbalism Heal and we end up killing the hunter with me still at around 80% health.  On to the 2nd boss…

We start on the adds and I’m running in circles around them.  Disarm.  Intervene.  Bobbing in and out in between my swing timers.  You know, doing the whole “PvP thing”.  It was during the first trash pack I realized I can just stand behind them and swing.  hahahaha…I seriously had forgotten that NPCs just stand there and let you beat on them.  They don’t care if they take a Mortal Strike to the back.

I couldn’t do it…I found myself running back and forth behind them just to stay interested.  How remarkably easy and boring it is to PvE.  During the boss fights I was trying to Charge/Intercept for interrupts, Intervene for mobility, Shield Bash/Pummel for silences, Spell Reflect for mitigation and confusion.  Turns out I didn’t need to do any of that because all the bosses were immune to interrupts/silences (for the most part) and nobody was targeting me so Spell Reflect wasn’t needed.  I literally had no idea what to do when I wasn’t trying to stay alive.

So, I just sit here and push my buttons whenever they are off cool downs?  Gah, so boring!  Where’s the appeal?

More BGs, Please.

My warrior has recently entered the arena scene.  It’s been frustrating, fun, stressful and satisfying…all at the same time.  He runs in a 2v2 bracket and a 3v3 bracket.  My 2s partner is a BiS disc priest (guess who’s getting carried).  My 3s partners are two RL friends of mine (disc priest and rogue).

In one week we’ve gotten my 3s team up to 1100+ and my 2s team up to 1400+.  I’m very satisfied with that.  A little more time and I’ll have my 2s team at 1800+ so I can finally get my relentless weapon.  Then, hopefully, I can land a very good 5v5 team and get up to 2200+ and get full relentless.  (hey, one can dream, right?)

The only unfortunate aspect of this situation is that with my personal rating at 1400+ I have unlocked 3 relentless pieces (boots, waist and bracers) but they cost more honor than I had available (62k, 62k and 38k, respectively).  Well, I was able to turn in marks and Stone Keeper’s Shards to buy the boots and waist right away.  I’m currently about 15k away from the bracers (not too bad, imo).  Sadly it doesn’t stop there…

I’m sure we are going to get my 2s team to at least 1500+ by the end of the week (Tuesday) and hopefully to 1700+ or even 1800+ by the end of the next week.  That will unlock a metric shit ton of relentless gear and I need to farm an equivalent metric shit ton of honor to buy it.  Oh, my…I have a lot of BG grinding to do.  All is not so bad…

…unless you consider that BG queue times are ridiculous.  What is the deal here?  I’ll spend 30 minutes waiting in queue for Strands of the Ancients or Isle of Conquest.  Meanwhile Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin have 2 minute queues.  Sometimes.  Depending on the time of day WSG and AB even have 20 to 30 minute queues.  What is the deal?  I hate that we have to turn in 1 of each mark type in order to complete the “For More Honor…” quest.  It’s obvious that very few people enjoy IoC or SotA, but we are forced to suffer through them if we want to stay competitive in our gear.

Couple all this with the fact that retribution paladins are still OP and I’m just pissed.  Fortunately I have had little trouble with ret paladins as my arena rating increases.  It turns out that once the gear levels get high enough they become less and less of a threat.  My disc priest partner can pretty much kill a ret paladin without my assistance.  haha…did I mention I really like my 2s partner?

3.3 Coming Soon

The word is out.  Patch 3.3 lands this coming Tuesday, November 24th. (Edit:  Apparently it was postponed two weeks.  Now it’s Tuesday, December 8th.) Will the random LFG work as well as people have been claiming?  Apparently the PTR reviews of the new LFG tool is nothing but positive.  Perhaps I’m too much of a skeptic, cynic or a pessimist but I just can’t imagine it’s going to be much more than 1000 DPS and 20 healers and 30 tanks.  We’ll see…

I’m looking forward to seeing what the new Ice Crown Citadel 5-man is.  The raids can go shit on themselves for all I care.  (what a magnificent was of time they are)

I also like the idea of getting rewarded for using the random LFG.  I’m all about that.  From what I’ve heard players will get rewarded ‘more’ the fewer non-PuG players they have in the group.  Since I run the majority of my 5-mans with two (or three) RL friends we may not actually see much of this reward.  Meh…whatever.  I’m just happy they are putting more players into the pool as options.

What about the new class buffs/nerfs?  Well, I’m not overly concerned with any of that because I don’t care for the ‘hard-core’ aspect of the game.  Haste affecting DoTs?  I don’t care how non-hard-core you are that will be awesome.  I did a test run on my friend’s rogue last night.  If I can land a VT, SW:P and DP on him and let him ‘fly away’ he will die about 15 seconds later.

What does that mean?  That means when I’m in WG and I see an alliance hovering above me on their mount I can actually kill them as they fly away. 

How do I do this?  Well, I start with a 1.3 second cast of Vampiric Touch.  The moment it lands I put on a Shadow Word: Pain.  Then, as soon as the global cool down is released, I land a Devouring Plague.  Theoretically I can get all three up in about 2.5 seconds or so.  If they aren’t on their toes and flying away as soon as I start casting they could find themselves with 3 DoTs on them.

Who cares?  3 DoTs…big whoop.  Well, Mr. Sassy-Pants, it just so happens that in my PvP gear my 3 DoTs will do just over 26k damage to someone wearing 400 resil.  If they are wearing more resil those numbers will go down but 400 resil isn’t that small of an amount.  So, unless the person is a tank or has a ton of resil they likely can’t live through my 3 DoTs.

I love it.  I’m killing some elementals.  An alliance players swoops low to scope the scene.  I immediately cast my 3 DoTs on them.  They fly off.  I continue killing elementals and about 15-20 seconds later I see “Killing Blow” flash across my screen.  With the haste to DoTs that number may drop to 10-12 seconds.  Such fun!

A Perfect World…of Warcraft

When contemplating what would be the ideal WoW situation I come to a few enlightening conclusions.  All of these conclusions are basically derivatives of the opposite of what drives me nuts about WoW.  Basically, I’m easy like Sunday morning.  That is, if I’m not getting pissed I’m happy.  There are many people out there that operate on three levels – sad, content, happy.  I only operate on two – sad and happy.

If I find a PuG group that makes it through an instance without anyone talking in chat or being a douche I’m completely happy.  Most would call that boring but I call it a god-send.  Recently I’ve been getting the urge to tank on my druid during heroic runs.  I have 2 or 3 friends who consistently join me – rogue, spriest and sometimes a druid or warlock.  Unfortunately the druid is a tank so I end up healing when he goes with us.  When he’s not there, however, I get to be the bear.  GRRRR!

Two of the most recent PuG healers we’ve come across have said a total of 1 word for both runs.  Seriously, one druid, when asked if he would be healing, responded with:  “mhmm”.  That was all he said the entire time.  Even when asked a direct question he wouldn’t answer.  The other healer (remember I said 1 word for 2 different healers) didn’t say anything the entire time.  Not a single word.  It was lovely.  Heal, dps, tank and get out with some badges and a few extra gold.  Lovely, I say.

This got me to thinking.  My idea of the perfect MMO would be one where I didn’t have to communicate with the other players.  In fact, there was no avenue of communication whatsoever.  No chat.  No forums.  No websites.  No vent.  Nothing.  It would be absolutely amazing if everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to do and I didn’t have to hear your squeaky voice over vent or read your piss-poor grammar in chat.

Side note:  Everyone I see who types some derivative of “you fail”, “oh hai”, “l2play” or “noob” gets launched to the ignore list with haste.  If only the ignore list didn’t have a limit of 100 players.  I’m sure there are well over 1000 players worthy of ignore on my server alone.

When I put my idea to brass tacks it comes down to this:  I can’t wait until A.I. is to the point that I can play an “MMO” game comprised of me and a bunch of really smart NPCs.  Granted it wouldn’t be an MMO but you get the idea.  I have very fond memories of a game that was very, very close to this – Oblivion.  Man, that game was awesome.  The NPCs learned, changed and interacted with you like a real player without any of the asshatery.

I suppose it just comes down to the simple fact that a person with a platform for free speech coupled with anonymity ends up being a complete prick.  Granted this isn’t an original observation but I find it interesting how so much of my online satisfaction stems from this.