Late 'Warcraft' expansion pack to debut

DALLAS — Each day, millions of people around the world gaze at their computer screens to explore a dangerous fantasy world of treasure-filled dungeons and flame-breathing dragons, a land where mortal enemies lurk around every corner.

It's the "World of Warcraft," the most successful online game ever, and it's a world about to get a whole lot bigger with Tuesday's release of a $39.99 enhancement called "The Burning Crusade."

From China to the United States, from Australia to Europe, more than 8 million registered users now pay up to $15 a month to gather with hundreds of other real people who masquerade as digital avatars in the never-ending fantasy world of Azeroth.

"The Burning Crusade" adds new locales such as Karazhan, Hellfire Citadel and Tempest Keep to Azeroth, and presents a spiraling war against demonic forces where the game's two opposing factions — the Alliance and the Horde — will face powerful new enemies.

Players will have access to the new realm of Outland that's nearly as large as the existing game world, and the highest level characters can achieve has been raised from 60 to 70.

There are two new races to choose from as well: the remnants of an ancient space-faring civilization called the Draenei, and the Blood Elves, who are addicted to arcane magic.

But in a market already overpopulated with dwarves, paladins and trolls, is there room for even more of the same? If fans are any indication, the answer is a definite yes.

Trey Hancock, 26, has been shooting fireballs and frost novas to crush his mortal enemies in the video game "World of Warcraft" since it first launched in 2004. In his years of playing, the Houston resident led a guild of more than 200 people and raised four characters to the current top level of 60 — including his main character, a mage named Oraj.

Like many others, Hancock said he took a break in anticipation of the expansion, where his first goal will be to take Oraj to level 70.

"I haven't played for the last week because I know once it comes out I'm going to be playing it nonstop," he said.

It's just the sort of enthusiasm the company behind the game, Blizzard Entertainment Inc., is banking on.

"We were going to be happy if we got a million worldwide subscribers, we didn't feel like that was shooting the moon," said Rob Pardo, Blizzard's vice president of game design and the lead designer for "World of Warcraft." "The way it blew up is far beyond our wildest expectations. But now that we are at the mark we are, we feel there's still an ability to grow that customer base even further."

Released in November 2004, "World of Warcraft" brought several new elements to the genre of massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, or MMORPGs. Most significantly, it was simple to play and a had high level of polish, according to Jon Wood, managing editor of the gaming Web site MMORPG.com.

"I think Blizzard looked at what was out there and found out what worked and what didn't work," he said. "The truth of the matter is, the game is very polished. The fact that it's very smooth and easy to learn has put them out front."

Pardo said polish has always been the mantra for the game's creators.

"It's extremely complicated, all the things we have to get right," he said. "We were on track for a Christmas release but we really felt like we should make sure the product's right for our customers."

"Warcraft's" popularity has transcended video game culture and spawned a series of action figures, comic books, novels and trading cards.

The game was even the focus of a recent "South Park" episode where Eric Cartman and friends balloon into overweight, pimply video addicts bent on defeating a rampaging player who threatens the very existence of the game.

The pop culture references extend into the game world, too. If you type "/dance" as a male Blood Elf, for example, your character will strut around with moves similar to the uberdorky hero of the movie "Napoleon Dynamite."

"We're all entertainment geeks ourselves," Pardo said. "Part of our design process is having fun and putting in those references. It's kind of our way of giving homage to the things that inspire us."

David Daryani, owner of Tru-Gamerz video gaming center in Dallas, said his customers regularly queue up to play the game, especially on the weekends. As a longtime "WoW" player himself, Daryani, 38, said he hasn't played much lately but was looking forward to seeing the new content and returning to his favorite activity: player versus player combat.

"If you have a bad day, you get on and say 'I'm just going to kick some Alliance butt,'" he said. "It just relieves some stress."

Burning Crusade CE fetching $$$ on eBay

Sold-out deluxe edition of first expansion to popular MMOG is drawing almost three times its retail price on online auction site.

By Tim Surette, GameSpot

Posted Jan 4, 2007 4:58 pm PT

The eBay bonanza of next-gen console auctions was all the rage over the holiday season, with shoppers hoping to snag a hard-to-find Wii or PlayStation 3 and willing to pay extra for the convenience. The console auctions have since settled down dramatically, but now a new gaming product high in demand and low in supply is getting attention in auctions.

The Collector's Edition of the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Expansion Pack is drawing bids of almost three times its retail price on eBay. The add-on to the popular PC game will be launched in mid-January, and preorders of the expansion's deluxe edition have been sold out for months.

The CE of The Burning Crusade retails for $69.99 and includes the Art of the Burning Crusade book, a behind-the-scenes DVD, two WOW trading card packs with three exclusive cards, a mouse pad, the soundtrack, and an exclusive in-game pet.

In addition to the aforementioned goodies, the CE is a rare commodity for those who play the game, which had amassed 7.5 million subscribers worldwide as of November.

When asked how many copies of the Collector's Edition would be released, a Blizzard representative told GameSpot, "We're unable to provide a specific number, but we can say that a very limited quantity of them will be made and no more will be reprinted after the initial allotment."

Currently, some auctions for the CE of the original World of Warcraft are going for more than $300.

On the Blogger home page...

The new version of Blogger in beta is dead!
Long live the new version of Blogger!

(P.S. The old version of Blogger is not dead, but it would like to retire for a little while... maybe go to Hawaii or play World of Warcraft all day? It begs you to let it play World of Warcraft all day.)

I'm still playing...

I have been 29 since August playing in the BGs. I play nearly every night too.

I so enjoy the PvP.

Game Statistics

Welcome to the Game Stats page! This page provides you with up-to-date statistics about some of the most important aspects of World of Warcraft: most sought-after items in the Auction House, most common player-created items, the fiercest killers in the NPC kingdom, most gathered and found items, most looted items, and the most popular quests. Click on one of the banners below to see more.

These stats are updated daily and you can even do a side-by-side comparison for up to seven days to see how the statistics are progressing, so make sure to check back often!

WoW Screenshots

a WoW blog I ran into

WoW meets South Park

World of Warcraft Addict Blog

Nice looking new WoW blog

Kaliban's Class Loot Lists

Kaliban's Class Loot Lists

I started playing again...

Back in the second week of June thanks to my buddy TK.

I started a mage and have been enjoying him. I did not want to try PvP but TK had me play one game of WSG and I was hooked. I stayed 19 for weeks and now I have been 29 for weeks. I hate to move on.

Chinese Coke / WoW commercial

Warcraft Conquers The World

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost 7 million paying subscribers and has become the first truly global video game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980s, The New York Times reported.

That makes the massively multiplayer online role-playing game one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind, the newspaper reported. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

Warcraft has more players in China, where it has engaged in co-promotions with major brands such as Coca-Cola, than in the United States: There are more than 3 million players in China and slightly fewer than 2 million in the United States. And as with most video games, a clear majority of players worldwide are male.

There is also a rabid legion of fans in South Korea, which has the world's most fervent gaming culture, and more than a million people play in Europe.

Since the game’s introduction in November 2004, the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players.

There are servers customized for six written languages: English, both simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, German and French. Spanish is in development.

Recipe Database

If you have ever wanted to know what recipes are available for your profession, Warcry's World of Warcraft fan site now has a complete list of recipes, including what reagents they require, and what they create, all able to be arranged by profession type.
World of Warcraft WarCry : Recipe Database

ALL YOUR BLOG ARE BELONG TO US

A nice looking WoW blog.
ALL YOUR BLOG ARE BELONG TO US

Guides - Darkmoon Faire

Guides - Darkmoon Faire

Truefaith Vestments

Robe for Priests
Thottbot World of Warcraft: Truefaith Vestments

Robe of the Archmage

Thottbot World of Warcraft: Robe of the Archmage

Warcraft's Azeroth Gets Blogged

The international blog site Metroblogging has added Azeroth, a fictional territory in the world of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, to its list of 45 real cities from around the world. This is the first "virtual city" listed on Metroblogging and could be the beginning of a whole new niche of blogging that Boingboing.net facetiously called "MMORPBLOGGING."

Metroblogging co-founder Sean Bonner told SCI FI Wire that the Azeroth blog is different from other Warcraft blogs because writers "living in the city" are posting information related to life in Azeroth itself, versus the news commonly found on most other Warcraft blogs.

"Since we use WoW so much like a physical place, we wanted to see if talking about something virtual—as opposed to a physical city, like the other blogs—would work," Bonner said in an interview. "WoW is really a space where people go and hang out and 'live,' so to speak. Our approach to the Azeroth blog is the same [as] with other cities on Metroblogging. It's a bunch of people who live in the city talking about life in that city. And instead of reporting that Blizzard's going to release this patch or that macro, like the 20 or 30 blog sites out there now, this is more about the people playing the game and treating it like a place, rather than a game that's being played."

The Azeroth blog was launched on April 14 and has since grown in content and traffic by the day. The site receives on average 5,000 hits per day and is updated regularly with new content, such as a recently added glossary of commonly used words.

Bonner and his co-founding friend, Jason Defillippo, launched Metroblogging in November 2003 with the Los Angeles blog. Since then, Metroblogging has expanded to cover cities around the world, including Istanbul, Tokyo and cities in Pakistan, as well as most major American cities.

"There's already tons of blogs for every game," Bonner said. "They're usually news-type sites or blogs reporting on the game itself. There's even role-playing blogs, where people are blogging as their character in specific cities in games. But we didn't want to take that approach, either."
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel

'World of Warcraft' battles server problems

With 6 million subscribers, each of whom pays $15 a month, Blizzard Entertainment's online game "World of Warcraft" has become a billion-dollar enterprise.

Now comes the hard part: Making sure WoW is always up and running. Some players are angered by ongoing server problems that have led the game to crash without warning while they were playing. Complaints have also surfaced about long lag times and frustrating waits to even play.

Despite Blizzard's contention that it's been keeping WoW customers informed of system problems at all times, some players contend that the company has been slow to react to complaints and reluctant to offer support when problems arise.

According to players, the problems have been especially acute since Blizzard implemented its last major patch to WoW, in late March. At that time, the company acknowledged it had some temporary server problems but said they'd resolve themselves within hours. But some players say that ever since then, they're routinely encountered "urgent maintenance" that can result in being booted from the game at any time.

"Being a system administrator myself, I have some understanding of what goes on in a corporate data center," said Evgeny Krevets, a sometimes-frustrated WoW player. "I don't know Blizzard's system setup. What I do know is that if I kept performing 'urgent maintenance' and taking the service down without warning for eight-hour periods, I would be out of a job."

Blizzard blames some of the problems--such as the disconnection, for several hours on Friday, of players linked to several servers--on AT&T, its network provider. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.)

It also argues that online games like WoW that have to manage hundreds of thousands, or millions, of accounts, are simply prone to network issues.

"Due to the complex nature of massively multiplayer games like 'World of Warcraft,' technical issues such as the ones some of our players have experienced recently may occur on occasion," Blizzard spokeswoman Lisa Jensen, said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "Our commitment to our players is to provide effective solutions as quickly and carefully as possible whenever any such situation occurs."

WoW is what is known as a "sharded" online game. That means the game's many players are divided up among a large number of servers, or "shards," because no individual server could handle the full player base. This is common in the online games space.

As a result, players can usually choose which server they wish to play on, and each server can take on its own characteristics due to the specific guilds that play on them. In some games, like "EverQuest II," different servers can even have different operating rules.

Certainly, WoW is hardly the first online service to be hit by network and server problems. Over the years, services like eBay, Amazon.com and E*Trade have all dealt with various forms of outages.

And even some WoW players who are frustrated by the inconsistency of their game acknowledge that providing constant uptime is tricky, especially considering how fast the service has grown.

"I don't know how much I fault (Blizzard), since many of my own companies have had scaling problems," said Joi Ito, a venture capitalist who has put money into well-known online outfits such as Technorati, and who runs a WoW guild--or team--filled with other tech executives and well-known bloggers. "However, the uptime is really not (at an acceptable) level for a real commercial service, so I hope they get better."
Ito said the server problems have been particularly frustrating for him and his guild members because of the particular flavor of virtual "quests" they often run in WoW.

"Difficulty logging in (and) servers going down--it's become a normal part of our lives," Ito said. "It really does suck for us because we're running higher-level (quests) where it takes us a few hours to get to the (goal) and sometimes the server suddenly goes down right near the end before we finish. And they are unannounced (and) you just see people on the server--guild list--start dropping off."

Another member of Ito's guild said he too had been having problems with the WoW servers, though of a different nature.
"I have waited to get online the last couple times I have played," said Eric Haller, a San Francisco blogger and investor.
"We moved (servers) because the old server was doing that, and now the brand new server is having the same issues."
Haller said he attributes the wait times--often about 10 to 15 minutes--to WoW's growth being so fast. He joked about how long he has to wait.

"When you live on Internet time, 10 minutes can seem like an eternity of delayed gratification," Haller said, "so it can be pretty frustrating."

Not all WoW players have experienced the server problems, and even some who have complained note that the issue may be slowly resolving itself.

"I decided to switch to another server over a week ago," Krevets said. "The amount of issues and problems I experienced were just too much for me. The new server that I've been playing on has not experienced any log-in problems or queues, so I've been quite happy so far."

In any case, with no shortage of massively multiplayer online games, such as "EverQuest," "City of Heroes," "Ultima Online" and others, on the market, some might wonder why angry WoW players don't just walk away.

But some say WoW has reached its 6 million subscriber threshold--no other American massively multiplayer online game has even broken a million--because its game play is easier to grasp for mainstream players. And because there are few other practical options for many such players, they feel Blizzard should take the performance problems more seriously.

"The thing is, there is no other real alternative" to WoW, Ito said. "So they sort of have a natural monopoly, and that's why people are so mad, I think. They can't vote with their feet. They just have to wait. And 'Blizz' has to realize that they have millions of hours of people's time hostage and should feel that responsibility."
'World of Warcraft' battles server problems CNET News.com

Families unite for online games

The Holman family gets together practically every weeknight and most weekends these days, even though Jean is in Dupont Circle, her father and sister Susan are in Pennsylvania, and her uncle and cousin are in Texas.

Together, they're also in Tyria, the virtual world of a fantasy computer game called Guild Wars, where they form the "Jelo" team, fighting the undead and other groups of players as a family unit. Along the way, they also might plan vacations or share family gossip.

Although computer games have often been thought of as a pastime for the antisocial, communal online worlds such as the one in Guild Wars are the hottest things in games these days. The most popular title in this genre, World of Warcraft, has more than 5 million subscribers -- all text-chatting with their fellow players or using microphones and headsets to collaborate on the latest monster-killing mission.

Game companies don't track how many families play online games together, but they say the trend helps drive their popularity. Some families play games to maintain contact from far-flung towns; some parents play online games with their kids in the next room as a way of bonding with them. Game designer Jack Emmert, at Guild Wars publisher NCsoft Corp., played his own game, City of Heroes, to stay in touch when his brother was serving in the Army and based in Korea.

If games are sometimes used to preserve familial bonds, they also can create those bonds. The game designers at Mythic Entertainment Inc. in Fairfax were recently invited to a wedding taking place this fall; the bride and groom met inside the online world of Mythic's flagship title, Dark Age of Camelot.

Academics are just starting to dig in to the effects of computer and video games on players, and there isn't much consensus. Professor James Paul Gee, in the department of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin and the author of books examining the educational aspects of video games, argues that games are more a social pastime than an antisocial one.

"The prediction that this was going to be an isolating technology turned out to be so thoroughly wrong," said Gee, who sees the worlds forming in these games as a new type of public space. Gee started studying video games five years ago and ended up with a World of Warcraft habit of his own -- he plays on a team with other professors and academics.

Constant conversation
The Holman family formed its game squad after Christmas. On a recent rainy Saturday, Jean Holman is parked on her sofa with her dog, Scooter, and a bloody mary. On her laptop computer, team Jelo is fighting to clear out members of the Undead Army, which has taken over the Temple of Tolerance. There is a constant stream of conversation among the Holmans as they play, carried via a separate voice-chat program they installed on their computers.

Everybody on the team has a job. Jean, 34, who goes by the name Heather Greer in Guild Wars, is Jelo's "healer" -- a magical medic who patches up her teammates as they incur battle wounds from Grasping Ghouls and Skeleton Mesmers. A box on the right of the screen tells her which of her teammates' game characters are healthy and which are about to get killed; by clicking a few buttons on her keyboard and mouse, she's able to help keep her team alive by casting spells, though sometimes the magic runs low and they die.

As the mission progresses, sister Susan, 30, and Jean argue about who should get to set off certain events in the game or interact with some of the in-game characters. When the monsters are all safely dispatched, an hour or so later, Jean's dad takes his character down to a nearby beach for a swim. Jean's and Susan's characters run off and talk about the fashion choices they have made for their online personas.

"We fight; we get lost," is how Jean summarizes a typical session, which can run three or four hours. "In fact, it's identical to some of the summer vacations we've taken together." She plays the game so much, she's gotten behind on favorite TV show, "Smallville," which she records on her TiVo. When Tom DeLay announced he would resign from Congress, the family heard the news from Mike, Jean's uncle, while they were online, playing the game.

In some ways, the Holmans replicate their real-world relationships in the game. It was Jean's dad, Pat, who got hooked on the game first, so his character, Rex Rexter, has the most money and experience points in this world. When Susan or Jean wants virtual money for a new virtual outfit, they turn to him. He's also the one who tries to dictate the family's strategy.

But there are other ways of playing these games, and some fans say they use them as a means of switching around or breaking down the roles they have in the real world.

Psychologist Roger Fouts, a professor at Central Washington University, plays World of Warcraft in an online team with his son, daughter and son-in-law. For Fouts, World of Warcraft was one way of getting to know his son-in-law, and he said the game reveals personality traits he might not have noticed otherwise. For example, his son-in-law is skilled at getting fellow players organized for a mission and for making new players feel welcome to the team.

"I was very impressed," Fouts said.

Florida to Afghanistan
While they play, the family members can catch up on comings and goings. Recently, Fouts's son signed on to the game and let his dad know he was in the District for a conference, staying -- and playing World of Warcraft -- at the Mayflower Hotel.

For a family separated by the military, such games can be an intimate way of "being together" that goes beyond phone calls or e-mail. Rhonda Carswell lives in Florida, and her husband, Randy, is an Army National Guard medic stationed in Afghanistan, but they meet routinely in Paragon City of the superhero-themed game City of Heroes.

"It sounds silly to our non-gamer friends, but when I see his hero or villain, I feel like I am looking at him. . . . His choices of appearance and powers personify him perfectly," Rhonda said in an e-mail. The couple run missions together, and at the end of the day, they put their characters in yoga position in a "safe" part of the game's world and just talk.

Sometimes they run out of things to say; he can't talk about his duties, and she doesn't always have interesting news from home. But they always have the game and their favorite corners of the online world.

"Florida and Afghanistan may be half a world apart," she said, "but we can be together in Paragon City."

Cyberspace offers venue for a social pastime