I could see people wanting to retain the tetris inventory, purely because that's how the inventory was in D1 + D2 and don't really want to see another part of the game move away from the originals, especially if the new system is copied from WoW.

Personally, when I first started playing WoW, I expected a Diablo inventory, but was pleasantly surprised at just how much better the bag system worked.

Big thumbs up from me.

 

I was in a similar situation with WoW. I'm a bit different in that I actually used WoW as a substitute for a very serious addiction I had to Heroine (yes, I made some very poor life choices). I became so addicted to WoW that it took priority. I would attribute a large part of that to the fact that I desperatly wanted to take my mind off the Heroine, and WoW, being as consuming as it is, did that exceptionally well.

Strangely enough, after 3 years and a bit of being a pretty extreme WoW addict, I was able to fairly easily drop it once I had become bored with it.

 

Sucking might be a strong word, there have been some decent games released this year. Nothing close to last years almost continuous string of "epic" games with broad appeal though.

I do agree with you however, that there are some games with great potential and much broader appeal slated for later this year that will turn this slump around. I'm not a big fan of CoD myself, but I have no doubt that it will do very well, in sales and reviews. Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands are two games I'm watching closely and hope they turn out good.

 

Their decision truly baffles and is going to hurt competitive play immensely. There are big problems associated with listen servers: The host is always at an advantage, upstream limitations on most internet connections (700kb/s down and 20kb/s up is a typical example), latency in general to players is worse than to a dedicated rack server at a datacenter etc. etc.

These were problems ID Software foresaw already with Quake 1, which is exactly why they came up with the dedicated server setup in the first place! We are even seeing strategy games, a genre known for P2P play and matchmaking, moving towards dedicated servers because to put it bluntly, they have proven to be the BEST setup for online gaming.

Infinity Ward have have done so many things well, then to make such fundamental mistake with their multiplayer, effectively restricting a big part of their competitive community to LAN play? One can only hope they realize their mistake very shortly after release and get the dedicated server software to the public ASAP.

 

Bit late on the reply here =) I just realized your from ZA aswell.

Unfortunately yes, your in store for a big download on a 384kbs line.
The install files I'm sure are around 1.8GB though, thats still huge
for 384kbs.

I'm lucky enough to be one of the few ZA guys with a 4mbs line, and
1.8GB at that speed is just a smoke and a cup of coffee till its
finished. The point I'm trying to make is that services like Impulse
and Steam are not catered at all for our rubbish overpriced line
speeds. 1.8GB on a 30mbs line? Don't blink, you might miss the progress
bar filling up.

I'm not sure of the difference between the download and archive feature in ImpulseAnywhere and Impulse, I haven't used ImpulseAnywhere myself.
I have however used the download and archive feature in Impulse  to
play a 6 man LAN already and it worked perfectly.