World of Warcraft players, prepare to take November 13 off from work or school, for that’s the day that Wrath of the Lich King goes on sale. The $40 price tag is about what I expected.
We’ve covered the game here and there, mainly some of the bigger features (because we all know the level of minutia we could get into when talking WoW), but this is it.
And if the game itself isn’t enough for you, there’s a $70 collector’s edition that includes a 208-page art book, an in-game pet, a behind-the-scenes DVD, the soundtrack on CD, a mouse pad, and some exclusive trading cards.
I can’t say how happy this announcement just made me, especially since I wasn’t expecting to see the game until at least the Springtime.
Just a quick note to you World of Warcraft players. Blizzard will now let you transfer your PVE character to a PVP realm. Keep in mind that you still have to pay $25 per transfer.
Now, how wise it is to transfer from PVE to PVP, I don’t know, especially if you plan on engaging in any serious PVP combat. Odds are you’ll have to re-spec, find new gear, etc. just to be competent against other players. Plus there’s the whole, “Oh, that’s a living, breathing person I’m playing against, not some cheap AI mob.”
But I guess it’s better than trying to level all the way up to 70 again.
Despite being some four years old, the userbase of Blizzard’s World of Warcraftcontinues to grow, if only at a so-so rate. One of the game’s lead designers said as much at the Games Convention, allaying fears (well, message board banter) that maybe, just maybe, interest in the game had peaked.
The game had some 10 million subscribers as of last January.
Now, that may not be completely indicative of how many people actively play the game—I keep paying for my account but seldom actually play—but that doesn’t much matter to Blizzard. As long as you’re paying your $15 a month, Blizzard’s as happy as an Orc in Orgrimmar.
And who knows what’ll happen when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. I imagine there will be folks who buy it, install it, and play for like an hour then let the account continue to collect dust. That’s my plan.
It seems that tucked away in the folds of IFA, there is a tiny laptop taking the ancient Commodore family name. Some enterprising Norwegians wrote it up, and included in the post what appears to be the hottest girl I have ever seen. I don’t know if you can tell (I’m really good at photoshopping) but she’s not actually holding the Commodore — I just craftily made it look like she is so I could put her on the front page. I think she works for Siemens (giggle). Click below for more and better pics of Commodore’s baby lappy.
Why, oh why, did these lady deprived dudes, not only create the system to physically run in World of Warcraft, but then film themselves for all of us to make fun of them. Why?
This is the opening cinematic to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the upcoming expansion pack that will ruin countless lives. (I’d say it would ruin mine, but you can’t ruin *nothing* so hah.)
Like every Blizzard-created cinematic, it’s really, really good.
Remember the RAM-SAN 500, that flash RAID array that basically is the fastest thing on the earth right now? Well, if you’re a special effects artist or run a huge, high speed media database or something, you might need a little more space than they have available. So what do you do? You stack eight of them on top of one another and you run that thing as one hell of a high-speed storage solution.
It goes at 800,000 I/Os per second, has 12GB/s of bandwidth, and uses only 2.5KW of power – that’s about three high-end power supplies’ worth.
Don’t have quite that amount of scrilla? Well, you can always pick up the more budget solution, but it’s only 6.5TB of high-speed flash memory. Normally I’d flip my bit over something like that, but after seeing that RAM-SAN array, everything else seems to have gotten its volume turned down a bit.
Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig.
Last month, Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, won their case over MDY and Michael Donnelly, creator of grindbot software Glider. Now, Blizzard wants to make sure the code never sees the light of day.
Blizzard won the case by arguing that since Glider was loaded into RAM, it could be considered a copyright violation. Blizzard also won in its summary judgment motion on grounds that Glider interfered with Blizzard’s relationship with its customers. Read More
When I was a boy, Legos were good for having crash-em-up derbies (Instructions: You and your friends take a big green board each and build cars. The owner of the Legos gets all the good wheels. Crash the cars into each other. Repeat.) Now they have the damn things solving Rubik’s Cubes like some sort of manic hog-skinning machine that needed some time off. The full instructions and code are here but I enjoy just watching this thing go.
For the past several days, the splash page on Blizzard.com has shown this mysterious, ice blue image. (I’ve been AFK since Monday, so this is all news to me.) As such, Internet speculation is in high gear. Is it Diablo III? Maybe a new race from Starcraft II? No one knows, which makes all the speculation particularly fruitless.
Given that I’ve never playedStarcraft nor Diablo, I couldn’t tell you what any of the symbols in the picture mean. Unless the Alliance logo shows up, I’m useless in figuring out this puzzle.
The MMORPG world is too big a target to resist, I guess. Worm-wranglers in China created a worm falled Frethog, which this new one Taterf is based on. It copies itself around, executes whenever you look at it, and by means of keylogging, packet sniffing, or other methods, determines your online game login info. It’s targeting the big ones, like WoW, Lineage, and even Steam.
Once they’ve got your info, they’re free to do what they want: auction off your items, change your password and sell your account, or just play it I suppose, though I doubt that’s happening much. Anyhow, Microsoft’s threat center blog notes that it’s made up a huge proportion of the worms their Removal Tool has cleaned up, so if you’ve noticed anything fishy lately on your PC, it might be a good idea to run the MSRT or your malware removal tool of choice, just in case.
There were still a few surprises up Microsoft’s sleeve today at this little conference I’m at. They’re talking about the SDK, testing the surface with robotic arms, and they demoed some totally freaking awesome apps they’ve got running in launch or alpha state. Believe me, you do wish you were here. Lots more pictures inside.
We tested some eye-tracking software like this at CeBIT this year but this takes the concept to a whole other level. It’s basically a system for tracking your gaze that has been retrofitted to work with WoW. Why? I guess it could let the handicapped or, sadly, the catastrophically lazy, play the game without having to touch a keyboard. My money is on the former.
Eye-gaze systems bounce infrared light from LEDs at the bottom of a computer monitor and track a person’s eye movements using stereo infrared cameras. This setup can calculate where on a screen the user is looking with an accuracy of about 5 mm.
Flying SPACE MARINES! FLYING SPACE MARINES! FLYING… SPACE MARINES! THAT SHOOT EACH OTHER! FLYING ONES! The manifold wonders of nature are truly bounteous and only $49.99 for two!
I take issue with the classification of World of Warcraft as a “violent game” in this study, but I suppose it’s more violent than Animal Crossing. The study, done at Middlesex University in the UK, had just under 300 people of all ages playing WoW for a couple hours, and found that players were more tired and calm after their gaming session.
It’s not a really in-depth study, but it’s a nice to have something to point to when ignorant people suggest that these games are just murder simulators that rile up kids and give them some unholy blood lust. With WoW, of course, the risk is more for loot lust.
A day late and several thousand experience points short, I forgot to mention that World of Warcraft Patch 2.4.0 went live yesterday. Compared to the previous release, 2.3.0, this latest upgrade doesn’t seem as significant, though it still adds a decent amount of new content.
There’s a whole new island to explore, for one. The Isle of Quel’Danas, aka Sunwell Isle, which has on it two dungeons for players to explore.
Having found Osama bin Laden, making Iraq a safe place to live, and winning the war on conventional terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security is going after terrorists in the last place they can hide: World of Warcraft.
Your tax money is going to the Reynard project, where US intelligence agents are scouting out Azeroth for “suspicious behavior”, most likely Orks in turbans.
It seems that tucked away in the folds of IFA, there is 
Remember the 
The MMORPG world is too big a target to resist, I guess. Worm-wranglers in China created a worm falled Frethog, which this new one Taterf is based on. It copies itself around, executes whenever you look at it, and by means of keylogging, packet sniffing, or other methods, 
