I’m one of the approximately 100,000 people participating in the World of Warcraft closed stress test beta, and I’ve noticed something interesting about Blizzard’s games: They all have exceptionally high production values, unreal levels of polish, and have been very well tested. The graphics are gorgeous, the sound is fantastic, the models and animations are sublime, the environment is engaging, the interface is supremely usable and manageable, and the game system is thorough and adaptive. The only problem with it is that it’s full of obnoxious people; the newbie zones were absolutely flooded with everyone trying to kill the same couple of quest creatures yesterday evening and night. The volume will settle down and people will spread out over time, but it was annoying as all hell. I also am really fond of something that Dark Age of Camelot did called role-playing servers. On these servers there were naming restrictions such that you’d never see people named “SupaDupafly” and “DeathKillerBoy” running around, and there was a moratorium on out-of-character chat. It made for a much more pleasant experience for players such as myself who don’t like to see the same weenies who ruin Counter-Strike ruin their massively multiplayer role-playing games as well.