Does getting every achievement in World of Warcraft mean you’ve “beaten” the game? I wouldn’t say so, but that seems to be the meme going around, with word that a man in Taiwan has ticked off all but one achievements in the game.

The character, Small Gray (according to Google Translate), has 986 of the game’s achievements. There are 986 achievements in the game, but sharper eyes than mine have noticed that he only got to magic number 986 via a glitch. He’s actually missing one achievement called “BB King,” but he glitched the game to give him one, unearned achievement.

The bottom line is, the guy has 986 out of 986. Good for him.

The beauty of this is that a new patch, Patch 3.3, comes out in the next few days, so he’ll have a whole bunch of new achievements to attain.

More importantly than any of this: achievements are dumb. I don’t care for them, no sir.

World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing?

You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II.

I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. “Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them.”

I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week.

It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: “Gentlemen, it’s here.” (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, “Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!” Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his “addiction,” but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life.

The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, “Yes! I can buy a mount now!”

Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, “job” only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the “young people” market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? “Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in.”

I still have that character to this day.

I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. “Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.”) I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an “art” class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered “art.” Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time.

A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006.

I’m probably never going to stop paying, either.

So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.

Short version: A comfortable mouse whose main gimmick will take hours upon hours of dedication on your part to fully exploit.

Like a dork, I looked up the word “naga” in Wikipedia, and it turns out that it refers to “a deity or class of entity or being, taking the form of a very great snake—specifically the King Cobra, found in Hinduism and Buddhism.” That would explain the snake-like logo of the Razer Naga ($80, available now), a new mouse that’s aimed at people who play MMOs, specifically World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. The biggest feature: 12 buttons on the left-hand side of the mouse.

Unlike last year’s SteelSeries World of Warcraft Gaming Mouse, the Razer Naga doesn’t come with the full Blizzard licensing. If that matters to you you’re a fool. And also unlike said SteelSeries mouse, the buttons here don’t stick like an old Sega Genesis controller after using it for a few hours.

It works, out of the box, with both Windows (tested on Windows 7) and Mac OS X (tested on Snow Leopard). Thank you, Razer. No need for my fellow Mac users to spring for a third-party driver just to use the mouse!

So let’s do this. I tested the mouse using World of Warcraft over a period of two weeks. That may seem excessive, but this mouse absolutely has a learning curve. The documentation that comes with the mouse—I actually read the instruction manual!—says to expect up to 18 hours to get used to the mouse. Yes, 18 hours. As Doug said in our chatroom, you might as well learn Russian.

The mouse’s raison d’être is the 12 buttons on the left-hand side, where your thumb would normally rest. The 12 buttons are designed to replace any number of keyboard keys that you’d use to play the game. You know, 1 is regular attack, then 2 through whatever for your spells and whatnot.

My latest character, an Affliction Blood Elf Warlock, has the following key-mapping:

1: Shoot

2: Shadow Bolt

3: Immolate

4: Corruption

5: Curse of Agony

6: Life Tap

7: Drain Life

8: Health Funnel

9: Drain Soul

0: Rain of Fire

-: Fear

=: Howl of Terror

These spells and abilities are mapped over to the 1-12 buttons on the mouse.

Razer has created an AddOn for both games that rearranges your on-screen icons, à la Bartender, to better visually correlate the 12 mouse buttons to your spells and abilities. (Here’s a screenshot of the interface AddOn. It’s the squares on the right-hand side.)

As I said, using the 12 buttons effectively will absolutely take you several hours, especially if you’ve been playing the game for a long time. It’s like trying to write your name with your left hand when you’re a righty.

I had gotten used to running close to a mob, then taking taking my middle finger off the “W” key, then hitting 4, 5, 6, 3, and 1 till the mob died. (See the above key-mapping for what those numbers translate to.) Now all of a sudden your left hand stays on the WASD keys, while your right thumb has to navigate the little button patch on the mouse.

After about of week with the new playing scheme, I had more or less acclimated myself. I now quest with the 12 buttons just fine, but I still find myself going back to the ol’ keyboard when PVPing. I find that the frantic nature of PVP doesn’t really lend itself to the 12 buttons. Practice makes perfect, of course, and you may be more patient than I am, but I couldn’t get used to PVPing with the 12 buttons even after several days.

And to allay a fear I read somewhere, no, I really didn’t find that pushing one of the 12 buttons would cause the mouse to move a great deal, if at all. It’s not as if you need to exact an incredible amount of force on the buttons to get them to click.

So it’s a fine mouse, yes, but you really do need to be prepared to fully re-train yourself on how to play the game.

Is it any better than using the plain on’ keyboard keys? Meh, I wouldn’t say so, and I expect that many of you are already used to your current setup. Still, it’s a fine mouse in its own right, and its use to you is 100 percent dependent on your willingness to learn how to effectively use it.

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Just a friendly remind to all my fellow World of Warcraft players. You need to migrate your account to a Battle.net account by the end of the day today, lest you’re unable to login.

Why is Blizzard doing this? Probably to make things easier on its end, but you’ll also see some benefits. One day, Battle.net will be, and I hate to use the phrase, a type of “social network” for Blizzard gamers. You’ll be able to message your friends across different games while in the game and all that jazz.

For your troubles, Blizzard will send you an in-game pet, Mr. Chilly.

I converted my account about a month ago and have had zero problems.

Really big World of Warcraft news today, friends. (Why do I write so much about WoW? Oh, you know, it’s just the biggest, most successful MMO in history. Not writing about it would be like covering tech with mentioning Microsoft or Apple.) Blizzard is now selling in-game pets that you can buy with real money, $10. We’re talking cash money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.

It’s significant because it marks the first time that Blizzard has gotten into the business of selling in-game items for real world currency. It’s key to note that this is merely an in-game pet; it’s a vanity item. It’s not like you can buy a brand new sword or piece of armor with your dollars and cents.

Silver lining: when you buy a certain pet, $5 of the $10 will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, so that’s at least admirable.

Now, we could speculate till we pass out, “will Blizzard one day sell proper, in-game items, like weapons and armor?” But we won’t do that.

via wow.com

Clearly nobody has any idea what’s going on in China regarding World of Warcraft. The rules over there are such that Blizzard just can’t open up shop, but has to contract a local company to run the game for Chinese users. Fair enough, and Blizzard has contracted NetEase to do such a thing. The problem is that NetEase keeps running into problems getting the game’s expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, approved for public consumption.

In fact, the body responsible for approving the game, General Administration of Press and Publication, has just told NetEase to take a hike. Well, more specifically, GAPP has told NetEast that its review of The Burning Crusade is now officially on hold, and that it would do well to stop accepting new subscriptions lest it puts its Internet connection in jeopardy.

I’d be lying if I said this story affected me in any obvious way, but I still think it’s interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m busy all day and night farming for cloth to level my burgeoning Tailoring profession.

Back before I started playing World of Warcraft (because of something that was work-related, incidentally), I used to tease my then-roommate about playing it well into the night, every night. I was a freshman at a certain horrendously expensive school, and my gaming started and stopped with my Xbox; I had no time for time-sink PC games. Not my roommate, no sir. The day the game came out—he had also been part of the beta—he plopped into his small, uncomfortable chair, Sunkist in hand (man alive did he love Sunkist for some reason), and quested well into the night away.

That was five years ago, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but no other game has even come close to de-throning Blizzard’s little engine that… still does.

Look at the game’s subscription numbers. The current estimate is that some 13.1 million people subscribe to the game in one shape or fashion. Lump all these people together in the same geographic area, and it would be the third biggest city in the world, after Mumbai and Shanghai. (Or, to put it in American terms, that’s nearly twice the population of New York City proper.) That, and the game is still growing… Wrath of the Lich King isn’t even available in China yet! When that hits, bam! Hello, even more money.

So we’ve established that WoW is big; that’s not exactly breaking news. Its closest competitors, I think, at least in the West, are Warhammer Online and AION. Apparently AION has had some technical issues that has driven players away, and Warhammer Online sorta came and went. And it’s not that these games aren’t good, but that, well, if all my friends play WoW, why would I abandon them?

That’s why WoW is where it is, and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon: too many people are playing for someone to come along and not it off its perch. That’s not to say that another game won’t come along and find a successful niche of its own—my money’s on Star Wars: The Old Republic, whenever that comes out!—but you’re crazy if you think another game is going to “kill” WoW.

And what will kill WoW? WoW 2, provided Blizzard wants to rock the boat, so to speak.

The gist is, WoW seems to be pretty much unbeatable right now. It launched at just the right time, with just the right lore, with just the right number of updates, with just the right fanbase.

If that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.

Really, really big news today for World of Warcraft players. Today’s the day that Zygor’s leveling guide hits version 2.0. Leveling guides are used by players to hit level 80 (or, soon, 85) as quickly as possible so they can more quickly enjoy the endgame content. Think of them like GameFAQs or the old school Brady Games or Versus Books strategy guides.

I’ve used a handful of guides over the years, and I’ve liked Zygor’s the best. Granted, I’ve never hit 80 yet on any of my characters—my latest alt is a level 49 Blood Elf Warlock—so what do I know, but the Zygor guides were pretty handy for automatically updating quest objectives as you moved along. Handy map markers, detailed directions, etc. It’s a fine guide. A bit pricey at $60 for Horde or Alliance (they’re sold separately, I’m afraid) but if you’re committed to dinging 80 then it’s not a bad investment.

So what’s new in version 2.0? Well, judging by the Web site (I haven’t grabbed the new version yet since the Internet connection at the TechCrunch office in New York is hot garbage, and I don’t have the game installed on my laptop)

• It’s updated to include content (quests and the like) up to patch 3.2.2a (the most recent one, of course)

• There’s some sort of new UI that’s customizable

• A talent advisor. Sort of, “what talent build should I use when I’m grinding/when I’m running an instance?” etc. (Not sure if that’s a pre-order bonus or not)

• Totally complies with Blizzard’s add-on rules. It’s just a leveling guide, no different than Quest Helper or anything!

I think that’s it. Like I said, I can’t try it out till I get home late tonight, and that’s provided the Web site comes back online so I can download it in the first place!

I’m pretty excited, I have to admit. I want to ding 80 before Christmas, which should be easy enough (again, level 49 right now) but my play schedule is pretty wacky.

Yes, WoW is more or less the reason I get out of bed in the morning. Sad but true!

Yup, another airline is poised to offer in-flight Wi-Fi. United Airlines has said that it will start use of Aircell’s Gogo service beginning with flights between New York and California. It’s $12.95 for laptop access for the duration of the flight.

A grand total of 13 planes (Boeing 757s) will be equipped with Wi-Fi. If I had any business in California, I would just play World of Warcraft for the duration of the flight.

Oh, and one thing I was wonder: what kind of security are we looking at here? Can some punk kid just fire up Ettercap, and steal everyone’s username/password to every single site they visit? You can see the headline now: HACKING AT 30,000 FEET!

Picture added for humorous effect.

We all know that real world officials have used games like World of Warcraft to monitor the spread of infectious diseases, like trout flu. But what’s new to my eyes, broken pieces of junk that they are (I wouldn’t be able see Jupiter even if I were five feet away from it), is that researchers are using them to study economics. It’s simultaneously a bad and good idea.

It’s good in that you’ve got a lot of people to study, all of whom are buying and selling goods on the Auction House (or your preferred game’s equivalent). But the thing is that not everyone is motivated by pure profit, which seems to be the case in the Real World. Someone could be trying to level up a skill (like, say, Leatherworking) just for the sake of leveling it up, and not trying to make any money on the transaction. So they’ll make a piece of armor, and sell it for next to nothing just because. Then you’ve got people who like to disrupt, selling items for way below the “real” value just to ruin the economy. My brother actually did that back in the early days of Star Wars Galaxies.

One thing that researchers have already observed: when a new server opens up, or when it allows transfers to it, the flood of new players, with their new items in their knapsacks, be on the lookout for inflation. If, prior to the server opening up to new players, there was only 10 of Item X on sale, and now all of a sudden 100 items are on sale, say goodbye to your profit margins.

So, yeah… happy Jocktober, everyone.

Chinese gamers can once again feel the joy of buying an epic on the Auction House for 100G, then selling it for 300G to some sap. Yes, World of Warcraft is officially, 100 percent back in China. This is clearly huge news that’s totally worth your time of day.

You’ll recall that WoW had been offline in China for quite some time, owing to a dispute between Blizzard, the local company handling the game’s operation, and the Chinese government. The game had to be censored to a degree, and then it was put into a beta, and then is came out. Oh, that’s where we are today—it’s out again.

Kotaku says more than half of WoW’s players comes from China, so you can imagine that this must have been quite the headache for Blizzard to deal with.

This is where I make the tenuous link between China, MMOs, and gold farming. Although I will say this: I am so damn sick of corpse spam in the game. It totally takes you out of the game, so to speak. I was going to do a “Please Kill the Corpse Spam, Blizzard” post, but then I’m like, “You idiot, you don’t think Blizzard’s already working on the problem? What good will your complaint do?”

Anyway, WoW is back in China. Let us celebrate by having many brews at Brewfest, which is still my favorite in-game holiday.

Above: Nicholas and Dave talking about World of Warcraft in the CrunchGear chat room. I threw in some stuff about EverQuest to try to be funny and they ignored me.

Nerds [CrunchGear.com]

While it has seemed at times like it’s running on a old TRS-80, Blizzard is using some very cutting-edge equipment to keep us entertained. Apparently, in order for you to be able to log in whenever you want, it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. They even monitor the weather in the areas where the data centers are, just to ensure that the servers don’t go down in the middle of that Naxx raid.

I think we’ve all wondered where our $14.95 a month has been going, and now we know: massive amounts of hardware so you can complain that the last patch “ruined” the game.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 19, is Pirates’ Day in World of Warcraft. “Commoners wearing pirate garb have appeared in all the world’s cities with the news that the Dread Captain DeMeza and her crew have landed in Booty Bay and declared it Pirates’ Day!” Great, yes, but I say we take it one step further: let’s bring Pirates’ Day to the Real World.

Yes, there’s already Talk Like a Pirate Day, but that holiday, like so many others, has become so commercialized over the years. With Pirates’ Day, I propose the following:

• We all dress up like pirates, even if we have to go to non-pirate places, e.g., the bank, the supermarket, the local pizza place, the local nightclub, etc.

• Piracy will be encouraged. That’s either digital piracy or the Spanish Main kind. You’ll have to supply your own boat, however.

• Any and all jokes told during the day will have to be pirate themed. “Did ya see the man with the peg leg? That was me who shot him, lol!”

• Pirate lingo will be encouraged. Words like “matey” and “wench,” while rustic to our ears, are just part of the ambiance on Pirates’ Day.

I’m open to other suggestions because it’s quite obvious this list ran out of steam after the second bullet point.

via wow.com

World of Warcraft was originally released in 2004, and is currently the most popular MMO in the world. With local servers in Europe and Asia, odds are you’ve either played WoW, know someone who has, or are at least aware that there is a game called WoW available. Since the game was originally published, there’s been two expansions released, The Burning Crusade in 2007, and then Wrath of the Lich King in 2008. Since then, Blizzard has continued to release free content updates featuring new dungeons, and pvp areas, however there hasn’t been a major update in almost a year.

WoW is starting to run into the same problem faced by games like Everquest, and Asheron’s Call. The people who were going to buy the game bought it, leveled up their characters, and are maybe getting a little bored. You can only level a character up so many times before you start to find it repetitive, and while raiding and PVP is fun, finding a group can be difficult, and pvp can be frustrating for some.

So why is Cataclsym the only direction for WoW to go? Because Azeroth has gone stale. Unless they want to end up like the Ultima Online’s and Everquest’s out there, they have to revamp it. So how do they do it? They either release World of Warcraft 2, or they do something like Cataclysm: create a world altering event, that is going to make people want to start over, to create a character just to experience the new content and art. And maybe get some of those people who left for other MMO’s to come back into the fold.

What’s even better is, World of Warcraft evolves. From the most popular user written modifications, to the way the starting areas for a character works, Blizzard is always paying attention to what people really like. 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King featured a very dynamic and scripted starting area for the new death knight character, and people loved that fact that they could quickly pass through the initial ten levels, get some skills and gear, and jump into the more interesting content. Blizzard has stated that the Cataclysm expansion will have that same content with the two new races available to players, the goblins and worgens. Again, listening to the players is one of the best things they can do, because it will make people feel like they are actually making a difference in how the world is evolving and developing.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it was released. Frankly, I’ve grown a bit bored with it, but the new Cataclysm expansion (at least what we’ve seen of it) has rekindled my excitement. I sure I’ll be pre-ordering it and standing out in the cold to pick up my copy at midnight.

Halloween is rapidly approaching, and many of you are no doubt looking for a cool costume to show off at various social gatherings. Me? I’m leaning toward being iTunes— afat and bloated CD with a blue music note as a hat. But that’s me; maybe you’d actually like people to understand what you are? How about this, then: a Blood Elf or Night Elf?

Yes, Amazon now has latex elf ears, both in Blood Elf and Night Elf Style, for only $12. Presumably you’d have to then also buy a long, blonde wig for the effect to truly be, um, effective.

Or maybe you can dress up as a giant teabag, given that the country, apparently, is being torn apart by the pro- and anti-tea party brigades. I’m with Ron Bennington: just split the country apart; it’d solve so many problems!

via WoW.com

It started out looking legitimate enough; having received emails from Blizzard before, the format and tone looked legitimate. The first clue that something was wrong was when the URL that was shown in the email was different from the one that showed up on the webpage. Not to mention that to the best of my knowledge, “betasignup.com” is not a domain owned by Blizz, or somewhere they would ever send us.

After seeing the wrong URL come up, it was apparent it was a phishing expedition. The design of the page looked good, but when you refresh it, the captcha didn’t change.. Interesting eh? After bypassing the captcha screen, we get to the point: they ask for your account name, email address, and password. The fake site always warns to always check to make sure you are going to the “official” URL – a third different URL from the one included in the original email.

It gets better. After I entered in a fake user ID, password, and email address, the site told me that, “In order to ensure all accepted beta applicants have enough play time on their accounts, a 60 day pre-paid Game card is required.”

Yeah, right.

So not only are these scumbags trying to scam you for your account information, they are also trying to screw you over for a 60 day pre-paid card. Nice eh? This is why I use (and recommend you do too) the Blizzard authenticator. It’s easy to set up, and makes your account completely safe from any and all hacking attempts. There are two versions of the key, a dongle, and a mobile phone software version. The iPhone/iPod touch version is free, and definitely worth your time to set up.

So I hope you didn’t fall for that email. If you did, I suggest you contact Blizzard directly, unless your account is already gone.

Good news, everyone. It looks like Blizzard has finally defeated the Door Boss. That is, you should no longer, or not as frequently, run into the “additional instances cannot be launched” glitch. It truly is a time for celebration.

You’ll recall that, last Tuesday, there was an awful lot of server downtime, certainly more than one would expect on a Tuesday. (Tuesday, for the non-World of Warcraft players in the house, is set aside for regularly scheduled maintenance. Servers are typically down all morning.) You could go so far as to say it ruined my life! Well, it was during that extra long, extra tortuous downtime that Blizzard put a series of buffs on its equipment. The resulting buffs—upgrades. I’m trying to be cute here—have made it so that we can actually run instances. Rejoice!

This was a big problem on Aggramar last week. You try to run SFK or WC or whatever (my latest character is still only level 28) and you’d run into that dreaded, “cannot launch any more instances” glitch. So you’d stand there for many, many minutes, running in and out of the door, trying to launch the instance. It wasn’t fun, no.

So, with the servers upgraded, have we seen any results? I know I was able to enter Gnomer last night no problem, which is one tally in the anecdotal evidence column!

The World of Warcraft faction change went down yesterday. That is, for $30 Blizzard will take your Human Warrior and turn him into an Orc Warrior. It’s handy, yes. But the fun doesn’t stop there! Blizzard is prepping a service that’ll change your intra-faction race. That means you’ll be able to go from a Blood Elf Warlock to an Undead Warlock.

Is this news new? Well, not in the strictest sense of the word. Blizzard had mentioned it during Blizzcon, but sort of in a passing fashion. A recent official message board post re-confirms that, yes, race changing is planned.

It’s primarily an aesthetic change, I think. There’s a few racial traits that may be gained, but hardly anything worth paying for.

In other news, maybe I’ll become a Druid? Not in the game, but in real life. Respect for nature, sitting Indian style a lot, etc.

The World of Warcraft faction change service is now up and running. It costs $30, and will take your Alliance Priest and turn him or her into a Horde Priest. You can go from any race to any race: Human to Orc, Human to Blood Elf, Human to Troll, you get the idea.

Any and all changes are made from the Account Management section of worldofwarcraft.com. Note that, during the faction change, you can change anything else about the resulting character: name, hair color, hair style, etc. It basically comes down to, “Give us $30, and we’ll turn whatever you have into whatever you want, class permitting.” Like, you can’t change a Human Priest into an Orc Warrior.

The whole process, from the time you pay Blizzard, to the time you can run around your new capital city, could be as long as “several days.”

This doesn’t “break” the game, right?