[LoL] Fiora and Gangplank, two changes, two reactions

Over the next few patches Riot is making major modifications to several League of Legends characters including Miss Fortune, Gangplank, and Fiora. The latter two occurred at roughly the same time, and the player reactions to each serve to demonstrate the prevalent sexism of how we depict women in video games.

[Blizz] Changing of the Guard

Today it was announced that Blizzard would be announcing the next World of Warcraft Expansion at Gamescom on August 6th. This came as no surprise after the latest patch dropped in June and players are already expressing boredom. Bear in mind that Blizzard is racing a clock it set for itself. They promised repeatedly that players would not suffer a repeat of the debacle that lead to a 429 day gap between the release of Siege of Ogrimmar and the release of Warlords of Draenor. However, the news that this announcement would come at Gamescom instead of Blizzcon has ruffled some feathers.

[WoW] Tanaan is close to perfect, but I can't seem to love it

Continuing a trend started with Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard has released Timeless Jungle Tanaan Isle Gul'dan's Welfare Loot Headquarters Tanaan Jungle as the final patch's "catch up and stuff to do" zone to (supposedly) finish off Warlords of Draenor. In continuation of the "zone to do shit in every patch" trend started with Pandaria's 5.2 "The Thunder King", the zone was designed to give players plenty of solo content to chew on, and engineered to draw the content out for as long as attention spans will hold. There's certainly a lot to do, and a lot of RNG involved, but the RNG is not the worst I've encountered and the zone reflects several iterations on the concept. In short, Tanaan is as close to perfect as Blizzard has yet come, and I "like" it, but I can't seem to love it.

The glory of the Group Finder

In the past I have been very critical of Blizzard's automatic group finding tools, and being a socially awkward and shy person I am usually reluctant to try to form groups myself outside of my guild. So I was resistant to the idea of using the Group Finder initially, but after giving it a shot in Tanaan jungle my opinion has been completely changed.