I read a comic once when I was a kid, where this guy’s body was controlled from inside by all these tiny versions of himself, like some warped kind of Matryoshka doll marionette. I presume it was intended as light-hearted humour, though in retrospect there’s an oddly sinister edge to the concept.

I thought about that while I was shaving; the gel I use is oddly similar in appearance and texture to a male bodily fluid that I care not to think too much about.

How many hairs? one of them would say, staring in wonder through from the back of my mechanical eyeballs, watching the sink fill up with discarded hair. It’s like a little Vietnam in that sink. Body hair instead of trees, but smells about the same.

Many, sir, the other would reply from within the tangled mass of rusting cables inside my brain.

Many.

Life, such that it is: a conglomeration of supremely wasted time, irradiated eyeballs slowly wasting away staring at imaginary worlds — worlds of Warcraft, indeed — while my corporeal form gradually decays under the malnutritious regime of Pepsi Max, abhorrently-branded “Xtreme” Pringles, and bland microwave ready-meals which provide barely the minimal amount of sustenance in order to avoid untimely death.

So now you can stop wondering.

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see — thanks, perhaps, to my one ill-fated former experience in the Ahn’Qiraj region, with a pick-up group so mythically inept that it instilled a deep terror of that whole place in my mind, a group so thoroughly uncoordinated and inexperienced that I’m surprised they could even unsheathe their own swords without falling upon them. In retrospect, part of me wishes they had, but I digress.

While being somewhat of a self-indulgent segue and not entirely relevant to the point at hand, given Ahn’Qiraj was designed back in the days when level 60 was the highest rung on the ladder, it does seem like the game is changing — evolving, some may say — into something which is, to put it bluntly, easier. With a mass appeal that already extends across the globe to people who would never normally play an MMORPG, it makes perfect sense for Blizzard to cater to their biggest paying audience, that being the oft-derided casual gamers. As someone who has played WoW on-and-off since launch, and seen the ‘hard mode’ of things before the way became paved for the newer players, I can understand and even relate to the bitterness some feel, with newer players having their hands held through content that the older players had to slog through. We also had to walk to work uphill both ways in the snow, and all that.

In the years since launch, the world (of Warcraft) has changed around us in numerous subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways. With the upcoming expansion Cataclysm promising to rend the world into something new and unfamiliar, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the smaller changes that happened ‘under the hood’, so to speak. Once upon a time owning an epic mount was something of a badge of honour, an achievement in its own right, yet now we see freshly-rolled characters charging mounts through the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale with wild abandon, tearing up the roads as early as level 40 on cheaper-than-ever epic mounts, and even soaring through the skies of Outland shortly after their arrival.

Speaking of flying mounts, Hellfire Peninsula has certainly become a lot less of a headache-inducing nightmare compared to previous visits as older characters, and I’m sure Squick — my venerable shaman — has only the happiest Tauren feelings about the whole thing. Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace, once the banes of re-rollers everywhere, are now almost enjoyable. Heirloom gear with bonuses to experience provide a smoother run. City reputation is no longer the stuff of tears and misery. Even the classes are easier to play than ever — I for one am immensely grateful that, not only do shamans have abilities to provide a built-in totem bar, but we also have fewer, more general-use totems instead of a million and one to cover all the minutiae.

In a way, patches 2.0 and 3.0 were more than mere patches — it’s as if we’re playing World of Warcraft 2 and World of Warcraft 3 already, with changes and improvements to the game system happening fluidly and almost inconceivably around us, a perspective driven further home by Cataclysm’s promises to reshape the now rather dusty old-world, which is shoddy and outdated compared to Blizzard’s more recent offerings. Rather than other games — such as EverQuest, which attempted to re-make itself from scratch with a newer engine and modernized gameplay in EverQuest II — it seems as though Blizzard consider World of Warcraft a work-in-progress, a piece of art which is constantly being changed and improved, with the old, ugly parts cut out and replaced as seamlessly as possible to follow the game’s constant, organic evolution.

I can’t help but miss the old days, though. Sure, they were the days when only the best of the best could even hope to acquire any kind of good gear, back when trying to find a group was a case of standing in the middle of Orgrimmar yelling, “LF4M UBRS, NEED TANK!” But no matter how clumsy, how shoddy (at least, compared to Wrath and future promised offerings), how brutally unfair and obnoxiously limiting the old-world was, it’ll still always hold some small place in my heart — a very, very small place. In a crazy sort of way, some part of me will be a little sad to see it gone, when the world is broken and reshaped forever — or, at least, until the next expansion.

So here I am, sick as a dog, coughing up the spawn of Nurgle and wishing doom upon whatever foul miscreant carried this plague to fruition before carelessly spreading the filth in their general vicinity, like the meatspace version of an AoE. My frame of mind is snide, my love for the human race is at an all-time low — sounds to me like the ideal time for a rant. The topic today, dear readers, is that of loopholes in game design, and how far is too far?

I always tended to favour the tank builds. This probably says a lot about my mentality.

Let me take you back to a lesser-known Xbox 360 game, Chromehounds, a spiritual successor to the Armored Core series of mech simulators. Chromehounds was at least fairly original in that it allowed the players a great deal of freedom when constructing their own mechs — while it was still a Lego-like experience of fitting pieces together, there were various add-on blocks that served no purpose other than as hubs to connect pieces together in unusual directions. The gear available was moderately varied, with everything from the slow, steady quad-legs base (intended for artillery and other weapons of massive scope), all the way through bipedal, caterpillar tracks, and even the fast-yet-frail wheeled approach.

A great idea in theory, but sadly, poor planning and some issues which could simply not have been forseen came into play, and the game degenerated into what I can only describe as a festival of bullshit. Three core builds emerged, each crowning themselves the king of Chromehounds — the Gator, which used connector blocks in such a way to obscure the cockpit with guns, something that was never intended; the Quad Cannon (more commonly known as QC), perhaps the least cheap of the trio but still annoying in its own right, and the game-breaking Double Double (DD build), which abused the quality of reverse-joint bipedal legs — sniper legs, meant to support the high-recoil sniper cannons — to field not one, but two battleship-sized double cannons, providing enough firepower in four barrels to annihilate almost any other HOUND in a single attack. What was intended to be mounted alone on a slow, unwieldy four-legged beast was now being used deux fois on lighter, faster, more mobile machines, and the quality of the online experience swiftly dropped with it.

I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but unfortunately such behaviour is troublingly prevalent in the sphere of online gaming. Penny Arcade recently ran a strip expressing the distaste that I think many of us feel about the recent abuses on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where players take a specific set of “perks” (character customization options, to allow for different gameplay styles) to become literal ninjas, rushing about the battlefield armed with nothing but a combat knife — or the double shotgun build, which while somewhat more plausible, is still squarely in the same ball-park. In a game based around — as the name would imply — modern warfare, there’s something almost mildly insulting about seeing assassin-wannabes rushing hither and dither with nothing more than sharpened metal sticks, doubly so when their iniquitous endeavours succeed.

I could throw out a dozen more examples, but I think my point stands: At what point does manipulating game mechanics — to the extent that, while not “cheating” per se, players are using tools clearly in an unfair way that they were not intended — stop becoming “tactical”, and start bordering on the grim badlands of the harrowed exploit? Where, indeed, do we draw the line, if one is to be drawn at all?