No this isn't an article from The Onion, but I wish it was a joke all the same. From Wired:

here will PopCap Games' megahit puzzle game Bejeweled pop up next? Would you believe ... World of Warcraft?

A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items.

The added level of addiction will no doubt entertain many World of Warcraft fans, but the real story here is how the game went from a student's pet project to solid evidence that PopCap doesn't subscribe to traditional ideas of corporate hegemony.

Bejeweled Coming to WoW

What I want to know is why they didn't go with Peggle instead....

Just goes to show how boring WoW is that you need to play a different game while playing it....

Eq I think was first to do this with gems, about hmm 7or 8 years ago ?
Eq and EQ2 both have an inbuilt Trading card game (think Magic the Gathering) that can even be played offline and has card drops in game.

WoW is only boring at max level ... long live the alt

...I see. I don't see the big deal with this except maybe that the Popcap are backing it. There are poker games and all sorts of game mods within WOW aren't there?

Indeed. There's been mods that add games to WoW for ages now - I remember playing Chess against guildmates during raid downtime back when we first started with BWL (and Blackrock was seriously unreliable). Kind of stopped that as the Chess mod we used had a nasty habit of popping up during encounters - beating the crap out of a Big Angry Dragon™ and suddenly you're prompted to get out of Check.

Guess it'll make those light windrider flights tolerable.

this story keeps getting sadder and sadder

Just goes to show how boring WoW is that you need to play a different game while playing it....

Cool. So can we now have a character in The Sims playing Bejeweled in WoW?

Jesus talk about getting official confirmation that Wow is boring as bats***. Although you have to give Bliz credit for having people pay a monthly sub to play someone elses game :P

That is just sad. Like pathetic. Wow is so boring to people that they need in-game... er, games? Mods I can understand but for blizzard to make this official? Talk about admitting your game is now a job rather than something fun and entertaining.

Frog wrote pacman into quake ... guess it was boring as bats*** too ?

I assume none of you have ever sat in a Quake/whatever/server waiting for a match to start

or playing an S&D cod4 and dying early and waiting the full time limit to play again.

but yer... wow is boring as f*** atm, even arena is boring.. i tried to do some the other day and got over it after RNG saved so many matches for our opponents.

Frog wrote a pacman game into quake as a scoreboard replacement I believe.

And I can remember spending ages bouncing (well bobbing in the water atleast) around in clanring practice mode wanting for wankers to ready up in team dm.

siftn't bind p color 2 13;ready

obes, besides you, jim, term and mantra, no one knows who frog is!

siftn't bind p color 2 13;ready

Hah, this was the first thing they made me do when I first started playing teamdm. Good days.

/bind p say "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD READY UP!1"

Frog wrote a pacman game into quake as a scoreboard replacement I believe.

it was pong.

And I can remember spending ages bouncing (well bobbing in the water atleast) around in clanring practice mode wanting for wankers to ready up in team dm.

team dm waiting had nuthn on when the rocket-arena mod hit the quake scene... that was so painful coz everyone at the time was playing ra n teh wait between spawns could be like 15 duels !$@!!$!@

obes, besides you, jim, term and mantra, no one knows who frog is!

so a noob might believe but frog was well-known in the quake-c mod community... plus ya know... rc clan member, aot clan memeber, writer of the frogbot, qld quake duel champion! ;p

Casa sucks to be you then. Frog left gaming and ...
This is Frog after he left Brisbane to go become important and rich and stuff

TLDR ? ... Medal of honor, COD2 and COD4 programmer.

At least in Quake when you were waiting for all the slow f***s to /ready you could mess around shooting each other though; I always found that fun enough to not be bored waiting for the game to start. From what I've seen of WoW (admittedly not much) I can see why you'd want Bejeweled though; when you're waiting for a big group thing to kick off or get ready there's a s***load of standing around waiting for everyone to get their s*** together.

you can /duel and kill each other pointlessly much like quake ...

"just like quake" my ass, at least in Quake when you were messing around like that there was still some skill involved. This is my main criticism of WoW and MMOs; the skill component of the game is almost non-existent

ever played any mmo trog ?
Or just casually bagged from afar while ironing a hanky for your head ?

Nope - they look boring as bats***. If there was any real skill - like manual dexterity or hand eye coordination or reflexes or the ability to tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps - WoW wouldn't have 10 million muppets playing it

So you define skill to be "manual dexterity/hand eye coordination/reflexes"

So by your definition.
The dudes doing the LHC, no real skills.
Stephen Hawking ... no real skills

But these guys .... MaD 5K1llz
http://www.qgl.org/lan/photos/2003/January/DSC02743.jpg

they're not just muppets; they're muppets with money.

Worth noting in that pics that of the 9 gamers (1 is too obscured) in that pic, only 2 are actually playing anything, the other 7 need bejeweled.

nope, I was saying that playing games like quake involve a real skill, and playing games like wow, don't

hey don't feel bad obes just because you've devoted the last few years to a game that any no-talent ass clown can play - its about whether or not its fun, not whether or not its challenging

I don't feel bad. I do feel that you haven't a clue.

Again what is your opinion based on ?
Your casual observance of entire genre through watching boba noob it up at work ?

ps. lol at quake being a "real skill".

Apart from boba playing games at mammoth (and a few lucky nerds like thresh) I don't know of anyone who turned being a lazy fps nerd into a living.

obes, jim, term, mantra, frog

NAMEDROP.

nope, I was saying that playing games like quake involve a real skill, and playing games like wow, don't

holy s***, i agree massively with trog

u dont need any skill to play wow, or any mmorg, just s*** loads of time

Sorry but I have to mostly disagree with the MMO bashers.

There are problems with the genre, but criticising it for an apparent lack of skill is ignorant. In WoW and other MMOs there are good players and bad. In particular it is pretty much impossible to win PVP arenas and battlegrounds without skill and co-ordination. You can't plonk a game newbie into the seat of a level 70 character and have them be successful in Kharazan (or whatever the end game raid zones are now). Although maybe if they are a Hunter ;)

Understanding the remarkably deep "TheoryCraft" side of most of the games is an involved process.

Being "successful" in an MMO is a huge timesink and requires way too much grinding. Much of the gameplay is repetitive and before WoW there was entirely too much downtime (waiting to recover from encounters). Apparently downtime was invented to stop players raping the hell out of servers, although that could be a rumour.

But its not a lack of skill that's the problem.

I understand both sides of the skill arguement given that I have played both types of games at length over many years. As far as raw talent goes in gaming I see no doubting high class FPS players abilities as more skilled than any MMO player. I am yet to see a major encounter in quake that is scripted in the sense that top end MMO raid encounters are.

I mean seriously you could train a monkey to roll his face across a keyboard to get a satisfactory result. Hell even wow players use that line to describe certain classes within their own game. As far as MMO's go wow is probably the easiest one there has ever been in more ways than I care to name and thats probably got more than just a little to do with why so many people play it.

Wow is probably one of the only big games ou there right now where you can go from being a zero to having the most elite gear while doing nothing more than riding on the coat tails of other people. However there is one aspect of wow that you won't find in quake and that is the insanely hard task of organising 25 people (old days 40 people) to have all their s*** together at the same time. There is more to it than that but it often takes some damn good leadership to get things happening when they need to.

I didn't see rading as a challenge personally because being totaly 100% scripted s*** it was just a matter of putting the square block in the square hole within a given time frame. Wow raiding is like a noob dancing class, step here shake this move there kick, step back twist and bow.... any idiot can get that right given enough time.

I won't going into wow "pvp" (s*** I feel f***ing dirty even putting wow and pvp in the same sentence) because it's a f***ing joke and always has been and always will be.

why must you turn this forum into a HOUSE OF LIES OBES!?!?!??!?!?

you know how skillful the pre-ready warmups are... spamming rockets at each other with 666 n unlimited ammo... orrrjeh TEH M4DSK1LLZ !@#! hahah :D


or in obes's case... spamming pines down the stairwell from the spiral or out of frog's hollow near the crates. :P~

hmm the sound of bouncing pineapples