The World of Warcraft is impinging on real life again. Not to worry, nobody’s recently dead or addicted, but you can now reach out and touch Azeroth by 3G. According to Icrontic, Blizzard is integrating Warcraft’s auction house with the popular Armory website.
Warcraft fans will already be familiar with the Armory; it’s a web-accessible [...]

Blizzard is apparently trying to change the acronym MMORPG to mean Massively Monetized Online Role Playing Game. Gamasutra reports that the developer has opened a new pet store as a branch of the greater Blizzard store. The first virtual offerings available will be a Pandaren Monk and an impossibly cute miniature Kel’Thuzad. The [...]

This weekend, all flight paths lead to Anaheim, where Blizzard held its fourth quasi-annual convention, Blizzcon, The two-day celebration of all things Blizzard sported not only stations loaded up with upcoming titles Diablo III and Starcraft II, but also tournaments, a live raid, panel discussions, and tons of goodies to win or buy. Oh, and they officially announced World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the third expansion to Blizzard’s current money-printer, World of Warcraft. Pixelsocks.com’s own Katiegreen was on the ground, and provided this report.

I know this girl, let’s call her Sara, with a gaming problem. You see, her boyfriend is a hardcore World of Warcraft raider, which is a 20-30 hour commitment every week. There are certainly raiders out there who spend much more time with the game, but it’s still the kind of time that could really chew into your relationship. However, this isn’t another one of those Widows of Warcraft problems, because the boyfriend has lucked out: Sara wants to play the game with him, and they’ve used the recruit-a-friend program to whirlwind Sara from level 1 to level 61 in no time flat. They’ve had a grand old time tromping around Azeroth, killing X of Y and running the odd fetch quest, but now the boyfriend’s raiding responsibilities have grown, and Sara is twisting in the wind.

Shortly after Blizzard tried to transfer their China licensing to a new third party, the national World of Warcraft servers went silent. This fracas has been ongoing for a month now, and the blogosphere has been doing some speculative math about it. It turns out that about five million of Warcraft’s eleven million [...]

What is it about Warcraft that makes a patch a newsworthy story? Oh right. Whenever Blizzard screws it up, 11 million people pay the price. Apparently the patch released this past Tuesday was a doozy, too. According to WoW Insider, the biggest snafu of the latest patch happened in Wintergrasp, where whenever one side took the PvP objective, Northrend crashed. Think of the players as Indianna Jones, the PvP objective as the idol, and Northrend as the boulder, and you’ll get the idea. In addition to the non-functionality of a $30 expansion pack, a number of intended features were not implemented, and the mail system is outright losing mail again.

Now this all happened a handful of days ago, so Blizzard has been on the march, fixing what they can and disabling everything else. Just be sure you really want it when you decide to win out in Wintergrasp.

Ok, by now everyone who has so much as touched a computer has experienced the effects of anonymity on human behavior (nsfw). We need feedback from vocal tone, facial expressions, and general body language to keep us grounded, especially as we develop. When you lose the feedback, you can’t judge when you’ve overstepped [...]

There are no recovered addicts, just people who die before they relapse. Research from Blizzard (via gamesindustry.biz) shows that about half of Warhammer expatriates and nearly 70% of those who left for Age of Conan have returned to the warm embrace of Azeroth.

Players haven’t necessarily cancelled their other accounts, but the time demands of MMORPGs don’t exactly encourage playing multiple games unless you work at Massively. So it’s probably fair to guess that those players have actually shifted from game to game.

Player recidivism coincides with the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which will hit stores this week. Coincidence? Um, no.

28 minutes later
Image by
Katie McKiernan

The travel brochure says “Don’t eat the food” and it’s not kidding. Crates of infected grain have been delivered to all the major cities in World of Warcraft, spreading the same scourge that created the undead and ultimately the forsaken faction. Taking a cue from Resident Evil Outbreak, players infected by the scourge become zombies and can then attack and infect other players. Of course, other players and guards can reciprocate the aggression, though they run a risk of infection if they do. There’s a brief incubation period where the players can be cured, but clusters of bodies near the healers indicate that things could be going better.

The last time a plague ran rampant through Azeroth, it was a little less scripted. The introduction of the Blood God Hakkar propagated a disease called corrupted blood that killed any characters who had not yet reached endgame instantly. Epidemiologists tracked the spread of the disease through the game’s transit networks and used it to develop disease transmission models that may one day be useful for real world outbreaks of fatal contagions.

While the current oubreak is a bit more controlled, it does have one distinguishing feature that makes it different than the corrupted blood epidemic. The world narrative calls for increasing urgency in the outbreak, a fact that Blizzard has chosen to simulate by gradually decreasing the duration of the infection debuff.

Put another way, you used to have 10 minutes to find a healer. Now you have two.

The combination of Warcraft’s dense server populations and the gradually decreasing incubation period make the scourge an interesting source of modeling data. Shorter incubation means less chance to travel, but also means more rapid spreading in denser populations. Whether epidemiologists take notice or not, players can hope to see resolution of the disease plot line in the upcoming expansion: Wrath of the Lich King.

If you thought you were ripping Blizzard off at $15/month, worry not! The developer has worked out a way you can give something back. Bloggers at WarCry are reporting a button in the assets of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion beta labeled “Paid Character Customization.”

Though reluctant to comment on it at Blizzcon, WoW production director J. Allen Brak eventually conceded that the button was real and would be implemented in the future. Just when you thought you were safe from micropayments.

Anybody out there willing to pay cold hard cash to change your character’s hair color? Equipment? What would it take to make you part with an additional $2 for your favorite MMORPG?