So ever since a certain 12K pound elephant entered our happy little massively multiplayer niche of videogaming (we won't mention names, but said game involves murlocs and now draenei ), accurate sales and subscriber numbers have been hard to come by. But any gamer that loves what NetDevil's done with Auto Assault also hates logging on to see the four North American servers at "low" or "very low" population (my pleas for Scott Brown to substitute "low" and "very low" with fun snippets like "Norris vs. Diesel Nightly" or "Now With XXX Drive-Thru" fell on deaf ears). While there's little worse than a fanboy editor, I don't apologize for liking the game or giving it a positive "First Glimpse" review, and to prevent an epidemic of World of Warcraft-clones (ok, I said it), I wouldn't mind seeing experimental concepts like this do well.

With that in mind, I chatted briefly with Scott "Scorch" Brown, President of NetDevil at NCSoft's E3 developer "speed dating" event (no, really; you sit down for a few minutes with several prominent NCSoft developers as they wend their way from table to table). The good news: a chance to respec your abilities, the auction house, and several nice amenities are coming soon; the bad news... you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and in-town animations aren't likely to see much improvement (if improvement is even needed, bah).