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World of Warcraft: Free or Paid 90s? Why the Hate?

So Blizzard is doing something pretty controversial with the whole boosted level 90 for Warlords of Draenor. Currently, it might even be out prior to Warlords of Draenor as it’s being tested in the PTR as of patch 5.4.7 and is part of the in-game store. What’s more interesting is the loads of typical complaints from people calling it p2w. Right now, I find it intensely amusing to see this backlash in the rise of the paid model but I want to examine this situation a little more.

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World of Warcraft: Should Heroic Raids Even Exist (as We Know Them)?

I enjoy the controversial discussions on whether or not LFR should exist. But the real question is whether Heroic Raids (or what will become known as Mythic Raids) really exist? Some numbers came out recently about the latest decline in World of Warcraft and I hope to analyze the cause behind what is another drop and the relationship between these drops, the priorities of where Blizzard sees the development of raiding content and high end raiding.

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Twitch TV, Social Media and Stickiness

Currently, I am working on a social media type of project and one of the things we constantly are discussing is the “stickiness” aspects of the way the application should work. For those who do not understand the concept of “stickiness,” it’s simply the idea of how users of an application consistently return and use it. Typical examples of “stickiness” in an application are comments, reviews, likes and other interactive elements. When I look over towards Twitch TV, I feel that certain people do understand this concept but most people struggle with growing their channels because they lack proper examples to engage and re-engage their audience.

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Symfony 2: Why You Should Move Your Logic into a Service

In typical MVC applications, people end up storing business logic into either the controller or the model layer. The problem in this approach is that in either case, you introduce code bloat and dependencies that should not really exist. Controllers, which are essentially the observer pattern, act as a traffic light, taking requests and directing them to another point. Models themselves should focus on the data within their domain. But what happens when you get complex interactions between these forces? What should you do? This is where the MOVE paradigm comes into play.

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Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition: Best Evil Party Combination?

Right now, I’m deciding on giving a purely evil party a try. There’s a LOT of ramifications by choosing this path since the vast majority of this game is based around being a relatively good party. What I want to discuss here is the implications of choosing an evil party and how that can affect the class combinations.

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