World of Warcraft - New PvP Mercenary Mode Announced

Blizzard have announced a new feature; Mercenary Mode. Mercenary Mode is a feature that will allow characters to fight for the opposite faction as a mercenary. As a mercenary, you will be seamlessly integrated into the enemies team as one of their own. Mercenary Mode will only for Ashran and unrated Battlegrounds. 

In addition, when you join the other faction's team as a mercenary, you will become that race entirely. This means you will gain their racials, passives and of course the look of that race. You have the option to not be a mercenary of course, but if you want to become a Mercenary, you can talk to an NPC either in Stormshield or Warspear to enable Mercenary Mode.

Concerns have been "raised" about players who chose the Human race, as Humans get a racial that allows them to remove Crowd Control effects, so they are looking into other options besides Humans having to spend Conquest or Honor on a trinket to replace the racial's effects.

If you ask me, they should simply do racial abilities as they do talents; let people select a single racial ability, a single racial passive and make it easy to change using Tomes of the Clear mind. This would then remove race imbalances and instead mean that your selection of race is purely cosmetic.

As for the actual Mercenary Mode, players have reacted quite negatively, with the only real complaint being that players from other factions will try to sabotage a victory when placed on the opposite team. This is a very real concern, as people really do have hatred for the other faction and I'm sure there are some players that would stop at nothing to waste everyone else's time.

As for me, I think its a very cool idea. I like the idea of being able to play as an Alliance character without having to faction change. The reason why Blizzard have introduced Mercenary Mode is because the queue times for Alliance are much longer than Horde; for both Ashran and unrated Battlegrounds. The sheer number of PvP players on Alliance heavily outweighs the Horde's numbers, I'd blame this purely on the fact that all the competitive PvPers have gone to Alliance so that they can play as a Human, so that they can have another damage trinket. Indeed, racial imbalance is currently a huge problem in PvP, and needs to be sorted out.

PewDiePie - YouTube's Richest

So its came up recently about how much PewDiePie has earned in 2014. I'm not going to list figures here but rather list my thoughts on how he responded. If you want a quick read, I think he responded honestly and adequately.

So to start, he made the video in response to the amount of publicity he was getting as a result of the amount he earned in 2014, being leaked.  Throughout the video, he simply stated that he never started YouTube with the intent of making money from it. At the very beginning of his career, he worked at a hot dog stand and made videos in his spare time. He says that even if he didn't get to the position he is in now, he would still be happy if he was working at a hot-dog stand whilst still making YouTube videos.

So who would be happy working at a hot-dog stand? I doubt any one has the dream of selling hot-dogs, but it did allow him to support himself financially and still fulfill his passion, which was video creation; he was happy. 

However, he doesn't deny that the vast riches at his disposal isn't pleasing. In today's world, everyone needs money, and money has allowed him to not worry about his finances, as when he first met his Girlfriend, CutiePie, they struggled to afford the monthly bills once they started living together.

For the second point of the video, he addressed the comments. He dealt with a wide variety of comments that mostly criticized his income in relation to what he does for a living. There are many comments about how military personal should be paid more, as they lay their lives on the line for their country. To which he responded that it'd be a great idea to inject more money into war related options (sarcasm of course). He dealt with numerous comments in a calm manor and was simply honest about his thoughts and feelings. He concluded that he finds it strange that the general public care more about his money situation that he does, and as a result, urges people to not care as much. Because money doesn't make people happy.

I've found an even greater level of respect as a result of his responses. They were mature, honest and showed that following your heart is the best path to take in life. There's no point in pursuing boring goals that you are not interested in. 

As quickly as the topic had arisen, even quicker did PewDiePie put out a video addressing the issue.