“We’re pleased to welcome the new and returning players who have helped World of Warcraft reach these new milestones, and we appreciate the enthusiasm and support that the game’s global community has continued to show,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We look forward to providing all of them with an excellent entertainment experience for a long time to come.”

Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft is now played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. The landmark was aided by the November 13 release of WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

According to Blizzard, Wrath of the Lich King sold more than 2.8 million copies within its first 24 hours of availability, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. The expansion has gone on to sell more than 4 million copies in its first month.

Very strange, and strange choice by Blizzard to do it this way in the first place. It also appears that a stack of Heavy Frostweave Bandages sells to vendors for only 5g, so the days of nabbing lower-than-3g stacks of cloth on the AH and selling them to vendors for a profit may be over. Which is fine, because your guild’s tailor could probably use it anyway. But I am bummed I haven’t see the manual drop yet — the better my gear gets, the less the non-heavy bandages do for me.

One of the weirdest changes in Northrend so far is the way First Aid training works, strangely enough. Used to be that once you hit a certain level, you could just go run to the trainer to train up the next wave of bandages (or you could buy a manual from a trainer somewhere), but not so in the expansion: to get Heavy Frostweave Bandages, you have to depend on what seems to be a world drop.

The rules are still a little hazy, and the plans to get it seem to be somewhere between experiment and superstition: we know for sure that you need to have 390 First Aid already to get the book to drop (though you need 400 to actually use it), and we know that it can drop from almost anywhere in the world. But apparently there are a few places where it drops more often: in Zul’Drak, sometimes in Sholazar Basin, and sometimes in dungeons. Other than that, everything else is just rumors — I haven’t gotten the book yet, and I’ve been 400 since I had enough Frostweave to level up. I heard it was on the AH for around 20g, but of course that varies by realm, and when I checked today, it wasn’t on the AH at all. And we’ve also heard that once you learn it, it won’t drop for you again, so there may eventually be an AH market for these — until all potential sellers actually learn the recipe, that is. And then there’s this, which just makes my head spin. We may see another level of Frostweave bandages in a future patch.

It obviously wasn’t without problems.
Here is what they did wrong:

Timing. If this event really did unfold the way Blizzard planned it to, then they planned it wrong. The zombie attack ratcheted up at a dizzying pace in just a few days, and then disappeared forever. The Scourge Invasion dragged on, so much so that at the end of it, the Scourge really had taken over Azeroth — no one needed any runes any more so the map was full of purple skulls that no one cared about. On one of our podcasts, BigBearButt said the most insightful complaint I heard about the Zombie event: it wasn’t that casual players didn’t like the zombie event, it was just that they didn’t have a clear indication of when it might end, and the thought of being bothered out of questing for weeks or even a month until Wrath was what caused the most complaining. I don’t disagree — if Blizzard really did have a schedule to follow (and didn’t cave to complaints, as they say) then that scheduling was terrible. Lore. Could you tell someone the story of what happened during the world event? “Some crates appeared with strange symbols in Booty Bay, and then Putress was working on a plague cure and then zombies disappeared so I guess he found it, but then more zombies showed up, and then the Herald of the Lich King yelled something and we were in Northrend.” Blizzard whiffed it completely on the lore of this event — who put those crates in Booty Bay? Read the rest of this entry »

Blizzard’s Cinterome explained that the downtime was intended to correct the PvP gear issue and that all players who purchased items should expect that the items will be removed from their inventories and any currency used to purchase said gear (Arena points, Honor, and cheap Marks of Honor) should be appropriately refunded. Now we’ve all got a more pressing issue ahead: what are we going to do for the next three hours?

However, when the realms finally came online, a pleasant surprise greeted excited players upon logging in — PvP gear was seemingly being given away for free. Ratings requirements were removed from some Season 4 gear, while a few Season 2 items were being sold by the vendors for absolutely nothing. For a short while, major cities were filled with players in full Season 2 Honor gear without any gems or enchantments. Not enchanting or socketing epic gear seems rather newbish, but it should be the wiser thing in hindsight. Blizzard stated that they were aware of the bug and advised players against purchasing the gear.

It doesn’t happen often, but when Blizzard breaks something, they seem to break it in a bad way. The recent Tuesday maintenance resulted in problems with in-game mail, forcing an extended downtime of several hours. Eventually, Blizzard decided to bring the realms back online while resolving the issue at the same time, allowing players to play the game before Wrath of the Lich King’s release. In lieu of restoring lost mail, Blizzard sent in-game mail to players about problems with, uh, in-game mail.

I found the DirecTV feed to be the best $40 I’ve spent in a long while. Besides the live coverage of the Blizzcon panels, they also showed exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the Blizzard offices and all kinds of cool stuff.

I also found the hosts to be a pleasant surprise. Rather than mindless moderaters to fill in the gaps, they were pretty competent about what they were saying and did a good job with their interviews. A couple stand-out interviews were Curt Schilling and Felicia Day.

And of course, seeing Level 80 and Video Games Live were icing on the proverbial cake. Other than a few technical issues on the first day, I was blown away with the production quality and scope of the coverage. Hats off to Blizzard and DirecTV for making this possible. If you haven’t seen this yet, you don’t have a clue what you’re missing.

Reader Stephen dropped us a note to let us know that if you missed the DirecTV stream of BlizzCon the first time around, you’ve got another chance tomorrow: they’re going to show the whole thing again starting tomorrow morning. Seems pretty meh to us — from what we heard, the stream wasn’t all that great. And what you missed in terms of official panel information, you can get right from us here on the site. Anybody hear otherwise? Is this worth watching at all?

Of course, even if it’s not, there is still one reason to order it, and that is of course the BlizzCon bear. Apparently people who purchase this replay will still get a code good for an ingame bear, and given that the bear and the Starcraft II code from the convention is going for as high as $200 already on eBay, shelling out $40 for just the code might be worth it to you.

And you’ll pick up 16 hours of high-quality video along with it — who wouldn’t want to see Ghostcrawler in HD, right?

The winners of the contest were each awarded a Logitech G51 Surround Sound Speaker System. That rig retails for about $200, so that’s not a bad deal at all. Since I don’t even currently own speakers and use a pair of $15 headphones, I’m a little jealous. Maybe I’ll go out and buy some speakers soon. Not a $200 set, but speakers nonetheless.

I gotta say, some of them look incredible. The sheer amount of detail these people are able to pack into a pumpkin is pretty mind blowing. Like I mentioned when we displayed the Ghostcrawler pumpkin here, I’m barely capable of cutting big triangle eyes. My oafish hands would scream in horror if someone asked me to do something like these carvings. I wonder if the people who did these carvings are the sort that do it professionally for various holiday events. If not, they should be.

Blizzard might do this through Forebearance, but says that they’re also looking to reduce the duration of Forebearance through a hotfix. This means it’s a pretty serious issue considering the duration of Forebearance was also intended to balance or space out the use of Divine Shield and Divine Protection. They have no timetable for the change, although it should be expected that it will be applied soon. Blizzard doesn’t seem to hold back on nerfing the Paladin class, stating that “the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn’t seem to do enough to Ret’s dominance of PvP”.

These are very fast reactions to nerf a spec that was “dominant” for all of a few weeks in a metagame that is tuned for Level 80. This is an extremely disappointing course of action in comparison to the complete absence of nerfs to Druids despite their utter dominance of the Arena format for three seasons (reducing Cyclone’s range wasn’t quite the solution, was it?).

Paladin representation in Arenas went on sharp decline through all four seasons — and this includes the Holy spec.As much as Ghostcrawler tried to soften the blow in his post, there just isn’t any nice way to go about this — Blizzard is looking for a way to make Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath to be mutually exclusive once again. He says that the combination of both spells contribute to the impression that the spec is overpowered.

Browder mentioned support for modders, and explained a little bit about the map editor, even if nothing new really was mentioned. It seems Dustin is happier with making “good enough games that people buy” rather than DRM-infested pox that takes the good out of the game .

Browder is an SC2 developer. He and the PR-guy Bob Colayco discuss the single player split, talking about the advantages of it, more diverse missions in this form and what we should expect. They also touch on possible console porting (and why that will not work for the cheap wow gold), hardcore/softcore topics with Browder admitting becoming more hardcore.

He also seem to appreciate his new employer (Blizzard) more than Electronic Arts:

Blizzard Quote:  

Wired: That’s the exact opposite of what EA says.

Browder: Oh, I know. I used to work there. 

Wired: People are still buying WarCraft III just to play DotA.

Browder: I’ve heard many such stories. And even if it wasn’t money in our pocket, it’s still just a fun experience for them, and that’s all we’re here to sell. That’s all we’re trying to do.

For those of you not experiencing the issue, just about every time you try to enter an instance you receive a “transfer aborted” message or some other such error. This is causing quite a bit of havoc on guild as they try to push hard during the last few weeks of Burning Crusade raiding.

Blizzard is well aware of the realm issues that are plaguing the game tonight, October 21st. They have said in the opening in-game announcement that they’re working on it, and now have posted as much on the forums. They will also be restarting all realms shortly.

Of course, if you just don’t want to wait, and don’t have any particular ties to the server you happen to be on, then by all means, keep an eye out for the transfers. We’re not quite sure which servers will be affected yet, but We Hate PUGs saw Quel’thelas on the list already along with a long list of high pop realms, so while we’ll probably see more servers added to the low pop side, the high pop side there now is probably a fairly good indicator of the realms Blizzard sees as trouble. If you’re on one of those realms and ready to transfer, sit tight and wait for the announcement today, help is on the way.

Thundgot over on the EU forums says there’s a pretty drastic solution incoming to the busy servers incoming: Blizzard is going to offer free server transfers from high pop servers to low pop, so if you’ve really been driven nuts by all the queues and lag lately, this might be just what you need. On the other hand, don’t jump into anything too quickly — traffic problems are pretty common, especially when big patches (and, you know, expansions) come down, and odds are that once the expansion actually releases, things will die back down after a little while.