Still though - why are these guys so angry? There are, I think, two root causes for the unchecked fury. One is that 'WoW' has become a negative term to a lot of gamers. It carries connotations of grinding and repetition and dumbed-down cartoon noobishness or whatever - witness too the anger around Diablo 3's art style. There's also the simple fact of its popularity - Coldplay sell a lot of records, and it's for precisely that reason (as much as the fact they make awful music) that a lot of people despise 'em. The ubiquity is cloying. There's crossover with the Sims too - the games' own interestingess ignored by a certain slice of gamers because they consider them aimed at a different audience, thus somehow beneath them. So WoW is a dirty word, interpreted as an insult even when it's not intended as one.

It's beyond simply gamers' own distaste for WoW, though. In the wider world, that is to say the tabloids and worried mothers, WoW is a by-word for the worst stereotypes of PC gaming: anti-social fat guys, killing pretend boars for 24 hours a day, speaking in tongues of statistics and cod-Shakespeare. While the stereotypes may be largely inaccurate, no-one wants to be associated with that - you say WAR is like WoW and people feel insulted. While there are plenty of concrete reasons to be given why WAR is not the same as WoW, it's telling that a great many of the angry comments haven't listed them - they've just called us stupid and wrong (and much worse). And it's because they're offended as much as because of traditional web tribalism. With its darker theme and focus on all-out war, Warhammer Online is considered cool where other MMOs are not. Say it's like WoW and people feel you're undermining its cool, and that you're accusing it of being old news rather than this impossibly momentous upcoming event in their lives.

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