A lot of blogworthy news in a short amount of time, and no time to give them the full writeup they deserve.

The Frag Dolls are protesting the Miss World Series Video Games beauty contest. Next week, I hear David Caruso will be protesting ridiculous overacting.

THQ decides that World of Warcraft is too strong to compete against. News flash: in the 3 years it would optimistically take you to make a new entrant into the market, WoW will be five years old, and the MMO landscape will be very different. News flash #2: You don’t have to hit 6 Million to be successful in this market. UO and EQ were money hat factories with an order of magnitude fewer customers.

Apparently EA took the opposite lesson from the success of WoW. After months of rumor, EA has finally bought Mythic. Congratulations to everyone over at Mythic, especially the ones who just got rich.

Warhammer Online just catapulted to the front of the pack of the next-gen fantasy MMOs. Will it succeed? Speaking from experience, I’ll say it will depend greatly on whether EA listens to the people in the room who have actually succeeded in the MMO space before. I’m… skeptical, but I hope Mythic fares better than Origin and Kesmai.

UO to integrate Punkbuster in their service. Of note, the program will occasionally send screenshots of your UO client to the service. So I’d avoid any UI customizations that integrate porn into your paper doll.