I wanted to take a moment to post an update on the issue I wrote about earlier regarding Valve's swear-word filter on their forums. A short time after I posted the original article, the filter itself was edited and "gay" was removed; unfortunately this appears to be a Pyrrhic victory.

I've had a on/off subscription to EVE for years, although it usually lapses in a short space of time. EVE is a game I want desperately to love and play and enjoy but every time I try, I feel like I've walked into the middle of a group of people laughing over an inside joke and I don't get where the entertainment lies. EVE can be unforgiving if you're a solo player, as the bulk of it lies in epic fleet warfare requiring the synchronization of a large group of players. While there are things to do on your own, my experiences with mining are about as interesting as I suspect spending hours inside an actual mine would be.

"With Rockstar Games releasing The Ballad of Gay Tony, will Valve ever include a gay character in any of their games?" That was the gist of a thread created on the official Steam forums several weeks ago. Innocuous question or not, however, the thread itself was quickly locked and hidden from public view by one of Valve's volunteer moderators, a fate that almost every other discussion of LGBT topics on the official Steam forums ends with, as well.

South Australia's Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has long stood in the way of efforts to gauge public opinion on whether or not Australia should have an R18+ classification for video games, but finally it looks like the federal government has decided to take things into their own hands. Residents of Australia can submit a comment to the Commonwealth government on the topic of the R18+ classification, the first time that public opinion has been solicited directly on this topic.

In the latest patch to drop last week, Blizzard has again improved upon ways to find additional players for instances. The new Dungeon Finder tool is their newest toy and after playing with it for a few days I have to say, I'm completely blown away by how helpful it is. In the end this is probably one of the most impressive interface changes I've seen happen to WoW and I can only hope that other games take a page from Blizzard on this and release their own versions in the future.

World of Warcraft is the 300-pound gorilla at the top of the MMOG pyramid; seeing the oodles of cash being raked in by Blizzard, most other developers are understandably interested in getting a piece of the same pie. Allods Online is an upcoming free-to-play MMOG from Russian developer Astrum Online Entertainment; at first glance it would be easy to dismiss Allods as yet another carbon-copy of WoW. But Allods has some strong originality going for it that could present it as a compelling AAA title once it gets its Western release.

Exciting news for everyone still invested in World of Warcraft – patch 3.3 is out at long last, one year and one month since Wrath of the Lich King was released. The big event for this patch is the opening of Icecrown, the citadel of the Lich King himself. Finally, the culmination of WoW's second expansion nears as players will be able to face Arthas, the "Big Bad" of Wrath, in final confrontation.