Welcome to Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter column which is written by a guy who doesn't generally spec for said talent.

So. I'm here. I'm not completely wrapped up in Wrath, I promise. In fact, just to show how much I am not wrapped up in the here and now, in the long lines for the queues and prospect of getting a beautiful worm pet and all that good stuff, I'm going to predict the future!

Let's look at some of the promises and perils that 3.1 and other future patches will bring for the Hunter.

The Warcraft storyline has come a long way since Orcs and Humans. Bobbyjeh of Aman'Thul asked how Blizzard maintains their "seemingly endless lore and story arc. Nethaera responded that the company has a Historian on staff as well as an expanding department dedicated to lore. They cover all three of the major Blizzard universes. They help to keep continuity in the game and keeps things interesting for our resident Lore Nerd.

While I was doing the quest chain for my Swift Flight Form, I wondered to myself. What does someone who's been asleep for so long know about Outland? I've often wondered how it is that new Draenei characters all crashed "one month ago." As some pointed out, there has been some discontinuity in the Warcraft Universe. But Blizzard does a pretty good job of keeping their story straight. No stranger than C3PO saying, "Thank the maker," when technically, Darth Vader is the maker. We accept these plot holes and move on.

Most of the news coming up from Blizzard has focused on Wrath of the Lich King. We've been working to cover the most up-to-date information on the expansion while staying on top of current events in the existing game. I am excited for Wrath, but I'm taking my time to enjoy the now until it comes out. There are still plenty of interesting non-Wrath-related things going on.

It can be a tough balance between sharing new mechanics and presenting spoilers. We've added features to the site like Ask a Beta Tester and Lichborne, which can be readily ignored if you're not up for spoilers. We've had some requests to slow down on the Wrath news, but many many more to keep it up. How much information do you want before the xpac is released? Take our little poll and let us know where you stand.

Wrath of the Lich King news started off as a trickle. First it was the development of the expansion than the addition of the Death Knight class. Then we had a lot of speculation and evasive answers from Blizzard. Now that the Beta test has been opened up there has been a flood of information. Most of this comes from the observations and mining of players, more so than Blizzard itself. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the WoW experience is waiting for Blizzard to give us information.

There are some tidbits that we're all excited to hear. When will we see Wrath go live? Will there be another expansion? Where does Kalgan live, and does he have decent body guards? I'd like to know if there are any plans for additional server types in the future.

We always do our best here to get as much information about WoW as possible as quickly as we can. If you had the opportunity to ask your three most burning questions of the game developers, what would you ask?

Once Wrath of the Lich King is released, we will have a whole new end-game continent. Just like how we got a whole new planet in the Burning Crusade. Since the first expansion was released many areas in the old world have been largely unused. There is very little World PvP going on in Eastern Plaguelands, most pre-sixty instances lay dormant except for quick runs with high level characters, and Onyxia lurks alone until someone nostalgic for original WoW until someone comes to slay her.

Dazknight of EU-Lightning's blade posed the question, what will happen to Burning Crusade content once Wrath comes out. If Blizzard continues to work only on the latest endgame content, it's likely that Outland, The Isle of Quel'Danas, dailies, and everything we currently experience will be largely forgotten. Noxmortum of EU-Kilrogg believes that Outland will be the province of characters leveling from 58 to 68, full of Death Knights for the first few weeks and then more of a ghost land than the Ghostlands. Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley will quite probably become very lonely, indeed.

With the Wrath Beta Opt-in available, we're one step closer to the expansion. We're all anxiously awaiting the time when the expansion is ready. I'm still having fun with the existing World of Warcraft, but I'm a bit antsy. There is a lot of frustration over existing conditions, especially when it comes to PvP.

Chloroform of EU-Magtheridon isn't interested in waiting. He listed his grievances in the EU-PVP Forum, "Balance issues, queue times, destroying premades, AFK problems, uneven teams, world pvp screwed by 9000yd aggro range ultra guards." Like many others, Jasse of EU-Bronzebeard blames the arena for the death of PvP.

While WoW is obviously a child of the early 21st century, all the practical tools used in D&D have existed for thousands of years. One might well wonder: "why didn't Plato (or any other suitably wise old figure out of history) ever think of putting together a dungeon adventure?" A recent Escapist magazine article asks that very question, and then provides us with a bunch of theories about what roleplaying is and why people do it. All these are interesting in themselves, but they leave me wondering "but wait... why didn't Plato ever think of it?" The answer I think the article is trying to give is that roleplaying is actually a form of social innovation that couldn't have existed before, because the culture and ideas to give it form hadn't developed until the '60s.

So tonight when you get home and log into WoW, especially if you are logging in to roleplay your character, remember that you are participating in an activity that is on the growing edge of human civilization. Just as, all those hundreds of years ago, it was a great innovation for the Greek playwright Aeschylus to bring two actors onto the stage at once as opposed to letting one actor and a chorus carry the show -- in our own era, the way players get together today to collaboratively create worlds, characters and stories with one another is a new and exciting innovation that never existed before. Roleplaying itself is one of many brilliant and beautiful examples of how society and culture continue to evolve and progress well into the the future... and beyond.

Tipster Felwrathe forwarded an article to us the other day by Forbes.com writer Michael Noer entitled "The Future of Video Games." He puts Warcraft in this category as well - despite the fact that some would still call it a Computer game rather than a video game (or the more elegant term, vidcon). And while he does manage not to take potshots at the game as others have, he still makes a few somewhat surprising predictions about what the future holds.

All the World's a Stage is a roleplaying column for thoughtful minds, published on Sunday evenings.

"David and his ilk are the last of a dying species!" cry out the Scrooges of WoW, "soon the creature 'Homo Sapiens Theatricalus,' more commonly known as a 'WoW Roleplayer' will go the way of the dodo, only to be spoken of in the annals of gaming history! Roleplaying is dead! Long live cynicism!"

Thus you may have heard -- but fear not: these rumors of roleplaying's demise have been greatly exaggerated. They're just reflections of a negative attitude on the part of people who don't really know what roleplaying is all about. Yet many roleplayers still get genuinely frustrated these days. "Things used to be so much better," they can be heard to say, "Back in the day, RP servers were just full of people roleplaying with everyone else... but now... <sigh>... it's just not the same." Indeed, Blizzard originally set up special realms specifically for roleplaying with their own special rules of conduct, and in the beginning these same roleplayers used to stand up for themselves when they saw others ignoring the rules that made their environment so special.

But then the WoW population doubled, tripled, and again quadrupled. It's been good for Blizzard's business, but not so good for the RP community, who thrived on their tight-knit system of knowledge and interaction. Nowadays, some players who might hope to give roleplaying a try start a character on an RP server only to find that no one seems to be roleplaying there. "Where did all the roleplayers go?" they ask. "What ever happened to those roleplaying rules? And how can I find people to roleplay with now?"

People are always talking about WoW as the 800-pound gorilla of the current gaming world (or at least the MMO sub-world). I don't have much non-WoW MMO experience, so I don't know where WoW innovated or where it just took/refined standard genre tropes. I do know that WoW must be making a big splash in the economic side of the gaming industry, with its massive legions of subscribers. I remember reading a while back about some game developers saying WoW was bad for the business because a lot of people were just playing WoW and not buying other games, and there may be something to that; I, for one, would almost certainly have bought a Wii by now if it wasn't for WoW.

What have you observed WoW's influence to be, good or bad, artistic or economic, in the gaming industry? What further influences do you predict it will have?

This Newsweek article -- yet another mainstream look at this strange concept called World of Warcraft -- unexpectedly asks a very interesting question. Is WoW a game? Sadly, the article devotes most of its time to explaining the concept of WoW to an outside audience, rather than getting stuck into a discussion of virtual worlds, their categorisation, and their future.

It's often been said that WoW can be more like a job than a hobby; the regular hours, the repetitive tasks, the camaraderie, the rewards. The question asked by the Newsweek piece, however, has a different angle from the old "work vs play" debate. Instead, it asks -- is this the future? Are WoW's immersiveness, its ability to sneak into lives, its vast popularity all indicators of what virtual worlds in the future will hold? I think so.

'Serious' virtual worlds could easily take lessons from WoW on how to be fun, but while WoW may be exemplary with regards to current MMO design, it's still very much rooted in the 'entertainment' sphere -- future developments away from gaming and towards everyday pervasive virtual worlds have to cater for the seven million WoW-heads, and will be more easily received as a result.

The most important question of all, though, is: when we live and work in the Matrix, will there still be night elves called Légolass?

[Thanks, Dave]

Yesterday's news that Blizzard will be focusing exclusively on MMO games in the future has been debated ever since it first hit the media, but this might just clear up the controversy once and for all...or at least debunk it, which is half as good.

The Cesspit.net has aquired scanned copies of the Wall Street presentation from which the rumors originally sprang, and there is nothing to be found within that would lead anyone to believe that Blizzard is out of the single-player game market. Where the rumors came from, then, is still a mystery, but it looks like that is in fact all they are. I still wanna see that Starcraft MMO, though...

We'll be making an appearance at E3 next week, and we hope to find more about the future of WoW there. However, for anyone interested in life beyond Azeroth, there's a whole host of other MMORPGs currently in development -- from Hello Kitty to post-apocalyptic sci-fi -- and our mothership Joystiq's taken a look at them all.

Whether any of these games will prove a WoW-killer is debatable. Would you give up your level 60 epic-clad character to try out a new MMO? If not, have some comfort in the fact that several of these games will be free to play -- either permanently, or they'll use in-game currency sales as revenue -- so you might be able to keep up two at once.