Community response has been positive because everyone who played this joke of a game in beta knows how broken and ill-prepared for release it is. Another month might be enough to correct some of the bugs that make it practically unplayable, and maybe...I dunno, actually patch in some of the features they're touting as selling points. I doubt that'd be enough though.

This is great news. As impressed as I am with Free Realms, my major complaint is that it's 100% soloable, and there's no real incentive to be social. Introducing guilds will go a long way to help that.

At what point did it become our responsibility as consumers to know/care about content producers' financial success? What do subscriber metrics or profitability have to do with how much you enjoy a given product? Let the developer's accountants worry about the numbers and let's stay focused on having fun in their games.

Personally, I play and enjoy Free Realms (as a paying subscriber who's also spent $20 on Station Cash, for what it's worth). One million subscribers is a milestone worth noting, and I applaud SoE for reaching it.

Yes, please.

Everyone whined and complained that priest healing was gimped when BC came out too. For a while everyone was on the Paladin/Druid healer bandwagon and it was the end of priests as viable raid healers.

Then people got into T5 and realized that priests are actually kind of useful.

We'll still be top notch whack-a-mole players in Wrath, I promise.

I second the vote for Minimalist to handle automation functions. For handy, smart adapting buttons, nothing beats AutoBar, and it's useful for every class.

I seem to have inadvertently created a microcosmic illustration of one of the great and eternal linguistic debates.

On the one hand we have free-wheeling descriptive definition (for which Merriam-Webster is notorious) which simply seeks to catalog language in its native habitat. Yes, some people use "funner" to intensify "fun," and some argue that the mere fact of this use, without any additional discussion of its grammatical "correctness," is enough to make it a word and justify its place in a dictionary.

Then on the other hand we have the excessively pedantic efforts to nitpick every infinitesimal rule ever written regarding "proper" usage, conveniently ignoring the fact that many of them contradict each other, and even more have fallen by the wayside with the natural evolution of language.

I have no doubt that as the formal rules of the English language adapt to reflect usage, "funner" will become acceptable, but for now I defer to this rule of thumb: what would a newspaper editor say if you handed him a story containing the word? I can guarantee you it would be corrected to read "more fun."

There's no such word as "funner." The adjective phrase you're looking for is "more fun."

I rarely let my grammar nazi stripes show, but this is a big pet peeve of mine.

Oh, and yay for more positive hunter changes. Mine should be 70 just in time to see some of the Wrath buffs :D

It frustrates me that deep Holy and deep Disc can't both be viable PvE healing specs. Let Disc keep its survivability oriented talents so it can remain the PvP spec of choice....give Holy some utility talents toward the top of the tree so PvE Disc healers can fill out their spec.

Ideally I'd like to see 51/20/0 and 20/51/0 as viable PvE healing talents, perhaps with a Disc build still being slightly more optimized for PvP. A pure PvP build would require a deeper commitment to Disc...maybe 60/11/0 or so. Holy could be filled out with damage talents to ease the burdens of grinding for pure PvE players.

The bottom line is I'd love to see a day when raid leaders say, "Ok, for this fight we should take 1 Disc priest, 2 Holy priests, 2 trees, a pally and a shaman."

I had the same impressions about Discipline. Down through the first 31 points it's business as usual, then suddenly there's a glut of quality, PvE relevant talents. The only question is whether or not it will require taking too many filler talents to get that deep and what talents will be lost from the Holy tree. Like you said, it'll take some playing around with the talent calculator.

I've always been an advocate of letting priests spec into multiple "styles" of healing. After all, we're supposed to be the pure healing spec...if DPS classes can choose specs that let them alter the precise way they deal damage, why can't we have trees that let us do different types of healing?