News item
If you doubt the viability of cosmetic fob microtransactions, Blizzard has 220,000 reasons why you’re wrong. That’s how many people bought a Pandaren Monk pet from the Blizzard store. The MTV Multiplayer blog crunched the numbers from Blizzard’s Make-a-Wish charity drive, which announced a $1.1 million take for sick kids. At $5 a panda [...]

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 [...]

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.

So World of Warcraft recently hit 11 million subscribers–big freakin’ deal. It turns out that Call of Duty 4 has 14 million (though in all fairness, it’s not terribly surprising that more people are playing a 5 minute multiplayer action game than a 300 hour MMORPG). In apparent celebration of this fact, Robert Bowling, Infinitum Ward community manager posted some basic descriptive statistics about the popular FPS on his blog.

Probably the most interesting factoid is that, of all the people kicking your butt when you log on, only about half have bothered to complete the game. It’s certainly true that fighting humans demands a different skill set than fighting scripted AI, but this means that most players have missed Call of Duty 4’s succinct and generally excellent campaign mode. Hell, after listening to the chatter, I’m pretty sure that half of them don’t even know what a ghillie suit is.

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 [...]

With the economy in the tank, it seems that beggars can be choosers. According to gamesindustry.biz, some employers are now filtering out World of Warcraft players from their eligible ranks. The rationale is simple: WoW eats up sleep and mindshare that could otherwise be devoted to the job at hand. So, with such an abundance of desperate employees in the job market, why settle for the ones who aren’t obsessed with the job?

The news bit started down in the message board trenches, so take it with the grain of salt it deserves, but the corporate reasoning has a certain verisimilitude. This, along with the fact that the blog that originally hosted this story has been suspended does raise some questions. However, it is too early at this juncture to rule out accusations of libel or simple excessive traffic as explanations for the blog’s disappearance.

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.