Why Online Gaming Sucks Now

A bit of background: back in the early 2000's, I spent a lot of time having no life and playing online games. My favorite was Ragnarok Online, but there was a diverse selection of enjoyable games to play, and you could always find something new and interesting if you looked--diverse games were sprouting up all over the place (games like Gunbound, FlyFF, Runescape, World of Warcraft, Gunz, and others), and they all had their own lively communities of players who were excited for a new gaming experience. These games were all popular because of the innovation of their design; players enjoyed the unique feeling of the games and were able to divide their attention among several at any given time without losing interest.

As anyone who's been a gamer for long knows, however, all games eventually lose popularity and die. Old is replaced by new, and as long as game designers maintain their innovation, more exciting and popular games emerge. However, one game seems to have ruined all of this forever: World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft was probably the most popular online games in history, and even most non-gamers have certainly heard of it. And while that isn't a problem in and of itself, World of Warcraft's immense popularity seems to have caused every major online game designer in the world to lose their originality--even though many new games have since entered the online gaming scene, the vast majority of them (Runes of Magic, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars - The Old Republic, and plenty of others) still follow the basic design of World of Warcraft--they all follow the same pseudo-dynamic 3D targeting combat system almost purely cooldown-based abilities, and most of them have very similar world design, so you can play through any one of them and feel like you're just playing a different flavor of World of Warcraft. There's still plenty of room for innovation with the combat system, but none is ever made because it's easier to just market a clone of WoW to the disturbing number of players who aren't already fed up with it.

I really hope some creative game designers come along soon, because if I see another WoW clone I'm going to puke.

π = 4?

Clearly, something has gone wrong here. In my spare time and while trying to refresh my memory of integral calculus, I managed to mistakenly show that pi (3.14159...) is equal to 4. It took me quite a while to realize what my mistake was, though, and everyone else I showed it to was stumped as well. Can you find the error in this derivation?