Posted on July 30th, 2009 by admin
Gamasutra has received an interesting stat from the good folks at NPD: after hearing that The Sims 3 sold over 800,000 copies in its first month, they were curious to see what kind of unit sales our own World of Warcraft has experienced. And the numbers are pretty big: among the original game and all of the expansion packs since the vanilla release over four years ago, NPD says 8.6 million boxes of WoW have been sold in the US. That’s a little misleading if you’re comparing it to actual subscription numbers: remember that this is over three different releases (so the actual number of all-time players, not current players, is probably 1/3 of that), and it includes different collectors’ editions of each of the three game editions. So there are nowhere near 8.6 million US players of WoW — that’s just how many times players have come through the retail line with the various releases.
What that is, however, is a lot of money. Gamasutra estimates that at an average of $30 for each unit sold (the vanilla game currently retails at $20, but the expansions all sell at $40, and of
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Posted on July 27th, 2009 by admin
A pair of contests popped up on the World of Warcraft official site in the past few days, reminding everyone of a small and closing window to try and get to BlizzCon. One contest, sponsored by Alienware, requires absolutely nothing more than signing up for the DELL newsletter through their Back to School 2009 promo page. That’s it. No, seriously, that’s it. Of course, it comes with the usual caveat that only allows entries from the United States, but it’s a shot at winning BlizzCon tickets without so much as getting up from your comfortable chair. Read the official rules carefully, though, because it doesn’t seem like the tickets come with airfare or accommodations (go figure!).
The second contest is run by Nvidia, and it sounds like a sweeter deal because unlike most contests, this one is open to the residents of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and India (except those guys from Tamil Nadu). Sounds great, right? Well, you also need to purchase one of the following qualifying graphics cards to enter – an NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT,
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Posted on July 23rd, 2009 by admin
Well Sam Raimi is the Warcraft movie’s director, and yet with all of the epic action we expect from it, he can’t do the job alone. We asked a while back about who you would cast in the movie, but what do you think about the other crew members? Somebody’s got to run the cameras and the lights, and make the music and do the CGI, right?
The Lord of the Rings is probably the closest relative to an ideal Warcraft movie, I’d think, and Andrew Lesnie worked closely with Peter Jackson to shoot all of those movies. Bruno Delbonnel is another choice — he not only shot Amelie and the latest Harry Potter, but he’s been Oscar nominated a number of times. Wally Pfeister has worked closely with Legendary Pictures (who are producing the movie) and Christopher Nolan, shooting both of the latest Batman movies and The Prestige as well.
As for music, you’d think that there’d be plenty of Warcraft music already, but Hans Zimmer or Howard Shore might be two ideas for composers. After that, I don’t know — who would do costumes? Effects? It’d be great to have
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Posted on July 20th, 2009 by admin
All the World’s a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one man in his time plays many roles.
Every guild tries to make itself unique in one way or another, and yet much of the time it’s hard to tell many guilds apart. Most guilds say something like “we are a group of friends” who “focus on casual play” or “on raiding progression” or something which can make clear its priorities in the game, whether in PvP, PvE, or RP.
Roleplaying guilds have a special opportunity to distinguish themselves with all these elements and then some. In addition to raiding schedules, loot distribution rules, and whatnot, they also have a story — some idea of where the people in this guild come from, and what binds them together. The story theme that binds them may be something as simple as striving to fight against all evil threats to their homeland, or it could be as involved as running a weekly faire, full of trading, performance, and all manner of festivities.
Most roleplayers seem to just drift into an
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Posted on July 16th, 2009 by admin
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.
Big Hit Box gives a rundown of enchants for Enhancement Shaman.
Gray Matter responds to the official Druid Q&A from the eyes of a Moonkin.
4 haelz responds to the Q&A from the eyes of a Resto Druid.
Forever a Noob walks Rogues through Ulduar’s Assembly of Iron.
And OutDPS walks Hunters through General Vezax!
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Posted on July 13th, 2009 by admin
Every once in awhile, on a semi-regular basis, at randomly determined intervals, Arcane Brilliance (a weekly Mage column that is apparently also self-aware) likes to indulge in a little self analysis. Unsurprisingly, Arcane Brilliance’s verdict is usually positive. Arcane Brilliance thinks very highly of itself, an attribute about which you may already have become painfully cognizant, if you have even briefly glanced at any Arcane Brilliances previous to this one.
Yes, we’ve done this before. But in a persistent game like WoW, where the nature of things are in such constant flux, I like to take a step back every now and again, gain a bit of perspective, and take a long look at the class I love and its place within that ever-fluid world. I choose this week, as we approach the second major content patch of this second expansion of the World of Warcraft, to do so once more.
On my imaginary WoW timeline (and in this case, when I say “imaginary,” I mean completely made up), I have patch 3.2 as the literal midpoint of the game, halfway through the game’s middle expansion.
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Posted on July 10th, 2009 by admin
I was just bemoaning that we haven’t gotten a chance to see patch 3.2’s new raid content yet. It looks like that chance will come sooner than I expected: tomorrow night!
Daelo has just posted a testing schedule for Trial of the Crusader (a.k.a. Crusader’s Coliseum).
North American realms: Lord Jaraxxus, Thursday, July 9, starting at 7 PM EDT
European realms: Eydis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane, Thursday, July 9, starting at 19:00 CEST
Both of these fights will be available in normal mode (10 or 25) only, not heroic. The new 5-man, Trial of the Champion, will be open “later in the PTR cycle.”
He also notes that Koralon, the new Vault boss, will be up, and you’ll be able to access it if your side has Wintergrasp. Tanking and DPS Patchwerks will make a return. Unlike the patch 3.1 PTR tanking Patchwerk, this one just hits really hard (“as hard as Algalon”), all the time (instead of ramping his damage up over time).
Oh, and one more thing: there is, apparently, no trash at all in this raid. Woot?
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Posted on July 7th, 2009 by admin
Totem Talk is our weekly look at all things shaman. Matthew Rossi would like to remind any readers with screenshots of their Horde shamans to email them to matthew.rossi@wow.com and not put them in the comments, where he is likely to forget they exist. In addition to being extremely hairy, he is somewhat ponderous in his recall.
The past couple of weeks have been exciting with Q&A’s to analyze and PTR changes to consider. It’s been easy for me to forget that I left our round-up of mail drops in Uldar half-way through the 25 man items. One of the things I forgot to gripe about as much as I really should have last time we discussed Ulduar mail is the complete and utter lack of mail boots for elemental shamans in the instance. As of the last time I checked, there are three pairs of boots in Ulduar 25: two enhancement, (yes yes, I suppose hunters might use them too) and one mostly suited to restoration shamans. And I covered all three pairs of boots last time anyway.
Let’s get right to the heart of it, shall we?
Ulduar 25 cont.
Darkcore Leggings – Why are these great for an
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Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by admin
Perhaps the biggest news in the past week — aside from ‘Cataclysm’, that is — hasn’t been Patch 3.2 itself but a service Blizzard has apparently been working on for some time. Paid faction changes. We received quite a number of tips about it and even saw our story make a cameo on Attack of the Show. Players have been asking for something like this for a while, and there have been incidents of entire guilds rerolling from scratch to defect.
Of course, with the shocking news comes a lot of questions, so Nethaera hops on over to the forums and answered a few concerns that players had. The biggest bummer for me was that I couldn’t change race within my own faction! So… let me get this straight… I can change faction and become a totally different race but I can’t swap my Blood Elf Death Knight into an Orc? Blasphemy! Unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t think choice of race isn’t something you can regret unlike faction choice. Anyway, more answers after the jump…
Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A.. No.
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