Five new Warcraft 3 replays are now online at the usual place, and with them comes the first fifth of a massive new feature on Warcraft 3 strategy. Not useful strategy, mind you, just the sort of strategy we tend to employ in these wacky replays of ours.

This feature was originally intended to be little more than a brief footnote at the bottom of the replays page, a short definition of terms for everyone too busy to keep up with years worth of The DORK Club extended family’s Warcraft 3 lingo. Of course, as an obsessive-compulsive nutcase, I couldn’t leave things so unfinished. So enjoy this needlessly in-depth exploration of Battle.net stupidity that would’ve been relevant six years ago.

This new feature also serves as the testing ground for the site’s new look, which as you can see, looks almost exactly like the old one. Specifically, it looks like the site currently should. It’s been a year since I re-redesigned the site, so I figured it was finally time to correct some of those formatting quirks. The new code will migrate to the rest of the site just as soon as I’m confident my faux columns and CSS wizardry display at least marginally well on computers other than my own.

I spent a great many hours playing Mythos this weekend, slowly working my way towards Zone 3 with my cyclops bloodletter. Expect plenty of long-winded impressions once I get there.

As I was playing, I couldn’t help but notice other players boasting in chat about the time they’d spent with other MMOs, comparing battle scars like veterans of some foreign war. “I played EverQuest for five years!” “I was in Azeroth for eighteen months!”

It’s a common enough practice across the genre, a way for obsessive-compulsive MMO players to quickly earn the respect of their peers, but I hadn’t noticed the obvious “and I survived” element before this weekend. These are people who aren’t just recounting their time spent with a harmless diversion; they are thankful they walked away with their lives intact. For an MMO player, our generation’s Vietnam isn’t Iraq—it’s World of Warcraft. And by their estimation I’ve done a tour in Paragon City, Aerynth, Middle-earth, and three tours in Azeroth—The Shit itself.

And I survived.

Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day, the most universally hated day in the games industry (right after E3), especially here on the Internet. A fanbase of gullible shut-ins ready and willing to accept even the most outlandish claims as gospel causes developers and publishers to shoot off fake press releases with complete disregard for the mental well-being of anyone unfortunate enough to read them.

If MMO players count every massively multiplayer game that doesn’t claim their life as a mark of honor, then every Internet user should be thankful for every April Fool’s Day that leaves them breathing. Tomorrow won’t be pretty; the fake press releases and screenshots have already begun their slow march across message boards and fansites. By morning, the attack will be in full force – stories of Smash Bros. Brawl DLC, EA buying GTA forums, and a playable chicken race in LotRO – but we’ve gotten through worse and we’ll get through this. We’ll remain skeptical and hold our ground.

And we’ll survive.

I believe it was just this morning I vowed to give up on this nightly update thing altogether. No, this isn’t a textbook example of irony; this is one of those instances when a nightly update is actually required.

This site will most likely be rather inactive tomorrow, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading it for more than the past week. I have a job interview tomorrow, and as such can’t devote an entire day to reposting video game news here. With any luck, the world and (more importantly) the Internet will survive.

We’ll see how willing I am to dig through RSS feeds by the time I get home. I make no promises.

The site was down for a few hours again last night, meaning I had no opportunity to post a nightly update before bedtime. Frankly, I think more nights are going to go without nightly updates in the future. Rather than force myself to drone on and on about some tangentially-related, boring topic, I’ll simply reserve the right to post worthless blog posts whenever the need arises.

We’re a week into The DORK Club’s new direction and I’m still playing with style and format a bit. I’m still not entirely sure how bloggy or newsy individual posts should be, and am trying to find some sort of balance between the two extremes. I don’t exactly want to sink to Kotaku or Joystiq (or The DORK Club circa one week ago) levels of baseless speculation and personal bias, but I don’t want this site to be so painfully dry either. Again, should have totally just let this site sit dormant for a week while I worked all this stuff out.

So, expect to see nightly updates less often, and not necessarily at night. I’ll most likely only post them when the site is actually updated in some way (ding sound effects, Warcraft 3 replays). I do, however, rather like the idea of a personal game journal, but I play far fewer games than this site may lead you to believe. Still, this might be something you see in the future in place of the mindless nonsense of the past week.

As you can see, my Sisters of Battle army has been busy purging the Kaurava system of heretics, with non-believers now confined to a single planet. It’s been a long, repetitive journey to get to this point, but now only the Necron and Eldar armies stand between me and a bland in-game cinematic. I plan to rip through the Necron territories as quickly as possible before savoring each and every Eldar kill. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s space elves.

In other RTS news, three new Warcraft 3 replays are now online. The extended DORK Club family and I have been working on getting our 25 win icons on these terrible, terrible accounts of ours. If we actually used viable strategies, we might even earn them before this time next year.

In order to ease this site’s transition from sporadically-updated personal site to rapidfire news blog, I’ve installed an RSS reader (specifically, RSS Reader) and subscribed to every gaming site with anything even remotely resembling an RSS feed. Every ten minutes the program chimes annoyingly and informs me of any new headlines. This allows me to spend my days watching news stories slowly crawl their way across the Internet, as every gaming news sites digests and regurgitates the same scrapes of new information. Of course, I’ve subscribed to this site as well, and I like to watch as this obscure corner of the Internet beats many of the larger sites to copy-pasting the news of the day. Take that, Kotaku.

Mostly I’ve just been posting news stories that interest me which, as I’m sure you can imagine, significantly limits the pool of potential posts. As fun as it is to watch Guitar Hero and Rock Band stories worm through my tracked RSS feeds, I’ll refrain from adding to the rhythm game noise. Unless it’s to reiterate how much I suck at them.

Also, I’m still not quite sure what to do with these nightly blog posts, as this meandering, self-indulgent mess clearly shows. Don’t be too surprised should they disappear entirely at any point in the coming weeks. For now, just be thankful I spared you the pretentious analysis of The Decalogue I got halfway through writing for tonight. Next time, you may not be so lucky.