Especially when the petition registers 20,000 in just a little more than a day since the news hit. The petition’s short and sweet: “Get Infinity Ward to review their decision not to allow fully dedicated servers for their forthcoming game release CoD:MW2. Remember that this Call of Duty was made popular by PC Gamers who have supported the series throughout.”

And that’s it. No list of high crimes and misdemeanours, just “think about what you’re doing here.”

The signatures can’t be taken to mean anything deeper than “I agree,” of course, for whatever reasons. For a deeper insight into why this matters to the PC Call of Duty community I do recommend you visit a site like BASHandSlash, whose webcast yesterday broke the news. It’s not just about concepts like lag-free playing and modding; it’s really upending how a significant and very vocal user base has enjoyed this series for a long time.

And whether it’s a petition or something else that forces a reaction, I can’t imagine Infinity Ward won’t have more to say about this.

Dedicated Servers for CoD:MW2 Petition [PetitionOnline.com, thanks Rob S.]

In late June, Blizzard defended the removal of LAN support – and thus the end of the LAN party for this game – as a way to “ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.” The petition, in a quite pleading tone of voice, asks for LAN support to be saved, for reasons of lag, customer convenience, and the game’s heritage.

I’m thinking the $$$ behind getting everyone on Battle.net or else is going to speak well more loudly to Blizzard than 100,000 voices, no matter how reasonable their requests or respctfully they’re worded. It makes me wonder if there ever was a useful Internet petition.

More than 100,000 Sign StarCraft II LAN Petition [VG247 via VE3D]

The “LAN in StarCraft 2 Please” petition isn’t really all that much of a petition when you get right now to it. It’s more of an attempt to reason with Blizzard, with a little bit of unabashed ass-kissery thrown in for good measure.

The new Battle.net sounds absolutely awesome from the sneak peeks you have given us, and people will most likely be using it exclusively, even if they only play single player. However, there is no harm in allowing LAN play as well, and it does bring further depth and life to what will probably become the top RTS of the next decade.

What kind of petition says “Please”? The kind that gets 5, 861 signees as of this writing. Nearly six thousand people, all politely demanding requesting that LAN be put back into the game, if that’s okay with everyone involved. I guess it says something about the StarCraft fan base. Where Diablo fans were ready to set themselves on fire over a brighter colour palette, StarCraft strategically weave their arguments together with shameless praise and respect, perhaps trying to sneak their way behind enemy lines to cut off their supplies or something. There has to be some sort of strategy involved here… I’m just not seeing it.

LAN in StarCraft 2 Please. [Petition Online - Thanks Kay!]

Students at the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, are up in arms over Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War for promoting the killing of deadly attack dogs.

Breanna Lucci, the 19-year-old president of the private high school’s Animal Rights Club started a petition against seeing her brother shooting at dogs in the game. So far more than 100 of Lucci’s classmates have signed the petition, which she hopes to forward to Activision, who will do absolutely nothing about it.

“Killing dogs as a form of entertainment … over and over again. That’s one of the objects of the game,” says Lucci, 19, a senior at NDA. “Parents need to know what they are buying their kids. Killing animals should not be a form of entertainment.”

One of the objects in the game? I suppose she could mean objectives, and she’d still be wrong. Killing the dogs is but one aspect of a much larger objective: staying alive.

See, running down the street shooting dogs willy-nilly is bad. You don’t pump them full of bullets for rolling over and wagging their tails. You give them hugs, and call them Mr. Snugglewuffkins, despite what their actual names might be. I think we can all get behind this idea.

Dogs trained to tear out your throat, on the other hand, you shoot. You shoot them quickly, and should they roll over on their backs and wag their little stumpy tails, you shoot them more, because that’s a trap. They don’t want belly rubs; they want to taste your innards.

Call me a monster or an extremist, but I think it’s perfectly fine to teach our children to defend themselves from wild animals that want to eat them.

I think the best part of the original story is the lede:

Breanna Lucci knows her two Pomeranians — Fluffy and Winnie the Pooh — would not last two seconds in “Call of Duty: World at War,” the immensely popular video game in which the animated gore piles high.

No, her two dogs wouldn’t survive two seconds. They’d be ripped apart by the virtual dogs she is trying to defend, possibly because they’re named “Fluffy” and “Winnie the Pooh”.

Incidentally, I think the Germans would have been a lot less sinister had they deployed squads of attack Pomeranians. “Kleine Hunde angreifen!”

NDA students protest video game’s depiction of cruelty to animals [Lowell Sun via Game Politics]

“One of the things that we considered when we were working on the visuals for ‘Diablo III’ is the fact that colour is your friend. We feel that colour actually helps to create a lot of highlights in the game so that there is contrast. A great analogy is like in ‘Lord of the Rings’ — not everything is dark. It allows you to see what a creepy dungeon can be like but if everything is dark it doesn’t allow you to have a lot of contrast.”

Lee also explains that they want players excited to enter and explore new areas, rather that simply provide the same dark environments over and over again.

Lee does admit that fan feedback is a major factor in how Blizzard develops titles. It’ll be interesting to see what impact – if any – the petition has on the development of the game.

‘Diablo III’ Producer Justifies Controversial Art Direction: ‘Colour Is Your Friend’ [MTV Multiplayer]

Outside scenarios with vivid colours, beautiful forests with colourful vegetation, shinny and beautiful waterfalls where even rainbows take place.

They hate rainbows! They can’t draw gothic fan art with rainbows in it!

*sigh* It just goes to show you that no matter how hard you try there’s just no pleasing some people.

Renewed artistic direction for Diablo 3 [PetetionOnline.com via WorthPlaying]