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For this week's Community Blog Topic, we're going to talk about race. Which one is your favorite playable race? For me it's the Forsaken. I love how tragic their backstory is. I love the concept of a zombie race that isn't mindless. And I love their leader, The Banshee Queen, The Dark Lady, Lady Sylvanas Windrunner. I really love their starting quests and I particularly think Silverpine Forest is brilliant. Everyone should play through it at least once. Even if you aren't into playing Horde, it's the only way to get the full story of the worgen -- which I agree isn't quite fair to the ex-Gilneans.
I also love getting into arguments about whether or not they are evil. As I said in that post, I consider them more amoral than immoral. I also think that Sylvanas's current way of increasing the population makes perfect sense for them. It's an excellent use of the otherwise unemployed Val'kyr and why let all of those dead bodies go to waste?
The odd thing is that I actually don't have any high level undead characters. My max level characters are a tauren, a blood elf and a pandaren. That's partially due to the classes I play. Forsaken can't be druids or paladins. They can be monks, but I hopped on the panda bandwagon when monks were released and didn't look back.
I have a mage who is closing in on 90, but she's a goblin -- having jumped on that bandwagon back when goblins were fresh and new. This is all guilting me into either playing one of my lower level undead alts or creating a new one.
So what is your favorite playable race? Is it also the race of your main character? Do you have several characters of your preferred race, or are you disloyal like me? Why do you prefer your favorite race? Blog your answer and put a link into the comments below or just respond by leaving a comment. We'll spotlight some of the responses next week. Tags: community-blog-topic, featured, game-discussion, gamer-discussion, world-of-warcraft-discussion, world-of-warcraft-topics, wow-discussion, wow-hot-topics, wow-issues, wow-topics
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Last week, we asked "What is your favorite class and spec?" We got many answers from altoholics who couldn't choose to enthusiastic odes. Here's what everyone had to say, listed in order of popularity. 
For most of my WoW career, my main character and first love was a druid. I particularly liked the balance spec even when it wasn't fashionable to do so. I still like my druid, but she is not even close to my favorite character. I've leveled paladins and mages, priests and shamans. I've toyed with hunters and warlocks. But the class that I love the best now is most definitely the monk. 
Last week's Community Blog Topic was whether or not servers should be merged to alleviate the problem with low population servers. With the announcement that Virtual Realms will be tested on the patch 5.4 PTR, this subject became very timely, if not a little belated. Blizzard's answer to whether or not servers should be merged seems to be yes ... kinda. Rather than merging servers into several bigger servers, Virtual Realms will cluster several separate realms together into one big meta server with a shared AH and the ability to join guilds and groups cross realm. I assume that like servers will be put together, just like CRZ, so that PVE and PVP players won't be mixed. 
The last Community Blog Topic discussed what features we wish WoW had. Many people had wishes that would be solutions for the current low population server problem. Mine was to have one free character transfer per month. Others suggested that realms be merged and there was also much talk about making WoW one giant server. 
A problem with both merging servers and having just one enormous server would be names. We get very attached to our character names and would like to keep them even when moving. One way that this could be accomplished would be the addition of surnames. So my goblin mage could be Tizzi Sparklepants and therefore be able to keep her name even if there are many other Tizzis out there. 
Last week, we asked, "What 3 features do you wish WoW had?" Quite a few people answered, many with more than three features. For myself, I suggested cross-realm mail, one free server transfer a month, and story questlines for each class. Here's the breakdown of the responses. 
Last week, we asked "What's wrong with WoW?" After four blog posts and over 300 comments, it is obvious that quite a few people have very strong thoughts on the subject. We specifically asked what people thought were the reasons that World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers were declining, so I'll be highlighting some of the responses that focus on that. 
In the results of last week's Blog Community Topic, many people included wish lists for changes to World of Warcraft along with what they felt was wrong with the game. there were quite a few good ideas, but not really related to the topic. So this week, we want to know what is your list of the top three features you would like added to WoW. 
We've talked a lot recently about what's right with WoW. Whether it's the metacommunity, making with the stabby, lore, friends, etc., World of Warcraft keeps us coming back for more. But at the same time, 1.3 million people have left the game since February of this year. WoW still has the most active accounts over all other MMOs at 8.3 million, but people are leaving. Why do you think that is? 
Some tout the age of the game as being a problem. While Blizzard is on the forefront of some gaming mechanics, other aspects of Azeroth are inherited from the early days of MMOs. The graphics for the vanilla races in particular are the most complained about. And rightly so. We get attached to the look of our characters, but upgrades to the classic races are long overdue.
Previously in Community Blog Topic, we talked about the punishment of funsuckers. Conversely, last week we talked about rewarding players who are known for good behavior. 
