The Wow Blog

Big Expansion Planned For World Of Warcraft

Of course World of Warcraft is already the most popular game there is. Millions of people pay to play the massive game every month. WOW has long been heralded for its’ cutting edge graphics and gameplay, and many people have went so far as to say they’re addicted to WOW. So the big question concering the game is: what do they do to top these accomplishments? Certainly, their new announced expansion will help with the future.

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World of Warcraft Client Patch 2.2.0

The latest World of Warcraft patch for clients is now available from the Warcraft Patch page. A number of bugs have been fixed, and features added.

A new feature for reporting players as being AFK in battlegrounds by right clicking has been added. When enough reports are registered, a 60 second debuff will begin to count down. Once the timer is up a new debuff will appear that will prevent the player from gaining any honor while it is on. This debuff can be negated as soon as the player engages in PvP combat.

The list is quite extensive, so I suggest you upgrade at once to enjoy all of the increased features and bug fixes.

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Machinima - Movie Making In The World Of WarCraft

Machinima has been going on for awhile, but Blizzard Entertainment has never formally recognized it, until now. Since the community of gamers has made so many movies, the company has decided to showcase the best of the lot.

To ensure that outstanding videos receive the praise and exposure they deserve, we are currently working toward expanding this site to include hosting and exhibition of player-created videos, both old and new, which demonstrate extraordinary storytelling, editing, direction, sound design and/or originality. We would like to show both the audience and the artists the whole spectrum; that it doesn’t always take the flashiest techniques to create a truly entertaining experience, while at the same time showing the more technically advanced films to provide inspiration and show what the art form is truly capable of achieving.

So, if you have a talent for Machinima, then now is the time to get to work and make a movie that everyone will remember.

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Death Knight Not A Hero Class

One of the big selling points of Wrath of the Lich King, is the introduction of the game’s first “hero class”, the Death Knight. But some gamers have already taken exception with the designation, for reasons outlined in this post.

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World Of WarCraft Battle Chest Coming October Second

If you’re a big fan of World of WarCraft, you will be excited to learn about the new Battle Chest which will be available next month.

Sooner than you think actually. We announced on our front page that we are making a World of Warcraft Battlechest in August. Here is a rundown on what it will include:

In early October, we’ll be releasing the World of Warcraft Battle Chest, which combines the DVD versions of World of Warcraft and the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, with the BradyGames strategy guides for both titles all in one package. At a suggested retail price of $39.99, this will be a great value for anyone looking to begin their World of Warcraft experience — and a great gift for anyone you’d like to share that experience with. The World of Warcraft Battle Chest will beginning shipping on October 2 and should be available in stores nationwide shortly thereafter.

Sounds like a decent expansion pack at a reasonable price.

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Blizzard Entertainment Bringing 100 Jobs To Cork, Ireland

Mike Morhaime, President and founder of Blizzard Entertainment recently announced plans to open up a new office in Cork, Ireland to service the demand for World of Warcraft and other games in European markets.

The new office is expected to start with an initial crew of 50 staffers and 50 more are expected to be added on within a three year time frame.

“We are fully committed to increasing the scale of our services as demand for ‘World of Warcraft’ and other Blizzard games continues to grow in Europe.

“With this new office in Ireland, we’ll be able to continue providing our European players with a high level of support for many years to come.”

The company will be looking for people to fill positions in the areas of customer support, web development, network administration, technical support, as well as ‘games masters’ who manage the massive online community of World of Warcraft.

Silicon Republic

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Support Outage For Wow Announced For 9/9/2007

If you need support tomorrow for World of WarCraft, be forewarned that there will be an outage tomorrow. The outage will last for 12 hours, so you may just end up waiting until Monday to get your questions answered.

On Sunday, September 9, we expect possible support delays between 6:00 AM PDT and 6:00 PM PDT due to some planned local area power maintenance. Players that submit GM tickets can expect slightly longer wait times during this time. This maintenance will not affect normal gameplay. We appreciate your patience during this time.

So don’t say you haven’t been warned! Hopefully you’ll be able to play tomorrow without need of Blizzard support.

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How To Rule The World Of WarCraft

Straight from a WOW convention in Austin Texas comes these 10 lessons on how to rule the World of WarCraft. The first keynote speech of Austin GDC, 2007 is called “How To Rule The World (of Warcraft): Ten Lessons” by Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., an executive producer on WoW.

Morhaime’s Ten Lessons

1. Put Gameplay First
2. Make Your Games Easy To Learn, Difficult To Master (Morhaime cited Guitar Hero as a good example of this principle)
3. Resist Pressure To Ship Early (In 1996 Diablo missed the Christmas deadline, but it still sold well. “Nobody looks back on Diablo and thinks ‘How much better it would have been if they had released it three weeks earlier’,” Morhaime said.)
4. Resist Pressure To Do Everything At Once
5. Estimate Demand (FInding out how many people have the technology and Internet infrastructure available to play your game.)
6. Human Resources Is Important (The success of WoW –which took Morhaime by surprise– meant an overnight scaling up of the company.)
7. Running An MMORPG Is Not Just Games Development (24/7 IT, customer service and community management are essential elements of a successful online game.)
8. Communicate (Or People Will Make Stuff Up) (Make sure your company has teams dedicated to keeping the community and internal company figures informed of bugs, fixes, and other games issues).
9. Avoid Financial Incentives (Minmize financial rewards from gaming sweatshops, credit card fraud, and account stealing.)
10. Test (Although companies are sometimes under pressure to release titles before they have been adequately tested. (Blizzard’s testing process involves three steps; everyone at Blizzard plays the game; a public beta is launched; a test site with dedicated test server is set up.)

Hard to argue with any of these really. If you ever plan on developing games, you’ll need to keep all of these in mind.

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World Of WarCraft Now Accepts PayPal

Good news for World of WarCraft subscribers who want to pay with PayPal: you can now!

We’re pleased to announce that we’re now able to accept PayPal payments for World of Warcraft subscriptions. Both current and new subscribers can now assign their PayPal account as their automatic payment method on the Account Management page. If you wish to open a PayPal account or want to learn more about the popular online payment system, the PayPal website has the details.

You can choose the option via your Account Management login page.

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World Of WarCraft Is One Big Country

If it were a country, and not a game, then World of WarCraft would be the 90th biggest one in the world. The game has now exceeded its’ 9 millionth subscriber.

Oh yeah, thanks to Videogamesblogger.com for this idea: If you plot World of Warcraft on the CIA’s World Factbook list of countries by population, Blizzard’s aggregate subscriber list across all servers places it as the 90th most populous country on Earth (of 237 listed), i.e. bigger than Haiti, Austria, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Israel, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland, and so on.

That’s a lot of people plugged in and playing. Plus, if it were a country, I bet it would be very well armed.

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