More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard 121
Blizzard has announced their intention to follow up this year's Burning Crusade expansion with a new World of Warcraft add-on every year. While not terribly surprising, they have also announced that they're working on a major announcement for next year. Consensus seems to be that it will likely be another Starcraft game, given comments by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2."
Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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For free tech support, go to htt [freetechsupport.us]
starcraft 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Geez, and this is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Geez, and this is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
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-Rick
Re:Geez, and this is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Vivendi Universal, on the other hand, is quite happy.
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Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010.
If it's well done, polished, and fun to play, I will wait.Re: (Score:2)
you sure you're not being over generous with that estemate?
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It has been well known for almost a year that Blizzard have 2 or 3 other titles they are working on that have yet to be announced. So thats a 4 year cycle. How long were the titles in development before even that tidbit came out? Add on some more time.
Aside from that, 2010 seems a bit far down the line. I get the feeling that WoW has certainly taught Blizzard not to make any big announcements until what they
Re:Geez, and this is news? (Score:5, Funny)
San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.
"We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."
A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."
"Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."
This Just In.... (Score:3, Funny)
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Ladies and gentlemen.. (Score:5, Funny)
..and that is next year, I shall make an important announcement.
*bow*
Thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen, you're far too kind. I'd like to thank you all for being here today, I'd like to thank Rob Malda and everyone else who made this possible, and I'd like to thank my mom.
*bow*
Thank you all for your time, please enjoy the cocktails.
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Starcraft 2 ? Diablo 3? (Score:3, Funny)
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By the way, everyone knows it's a toss up between Lost Vikings 3 and Rock & Roll Racing Online.
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That is still in my top ten games ever. Just so damn addictive. Any kind of R&RR game would just, well, errr, Rock, I guess
We've Heard This Before (Score:5, Interesting)
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A lot of the problems Bliz has had have stemmed from the fact that they keep underestimating the amount of interest people will have in the new features.
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1. PvP honor is going to no longer be based on a "ladder" and is going to be more like XP. Meaning that a casual player will still potentially reach the top PvP rank, it may just take longer than a hard-core PvPer.
2. The new raid instances will be designed for no more than 25 people. This will make end-game more accessible to casual players, more than likely.
Re:We've Heard This Before (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW, I don't consider "25-man" good enough. IMO, they should add a new 5-man and 10-man for every 15 levels or so. All the new instances are level 60 instances, and that's not fair to people who are just starting-- they deserve new content too.
Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters. When you enter with your group, the instance would create monsters designed to give you at least a little challenge. (This scheme works in Oblivion; why not put it in an MMO?) That would make it so when you're level 60, you can run any instance in the game and have a good time.
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This would also prevent higher-level players from farming in lower-level dungeons.
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Of course, hardcore players only represent about 2% of the overall WOW population (look at Census data; only about 10% level 60, and that's slanted because hardcore players are on more often and are thus more likely to be counted).
Blizzard should have been ad
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It's not just WoW. Blizzard has had the problem of going after the hardcore gamers at the expense of the casual players since at least StarCraft. WarCraft II had a decent skirmish mode. So did StarCraft. Then, with the Brood War expansion, suddenly the
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Hear Hear! I play war3:tft once a week in skirmish mode with some old college friends for fun while we chat using skype and we resorted to playing games with us outnumbering the computer opponents by 1...2v1, 3v2, etc...we sometimes can manage 2v2 but that's with 1 comp on normal and one on easy. In 3v2 we can do one insane and one normal but we still outnumber t
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I disagree. The real hardcore players are too busy playing to spend hours a day on the forums.
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That doesn't make any sense at all. If they were just starting, the old content would be new to them. The old content is actually pretty freaking amazing, too.
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You know that adding features for non-casual players doesn't take anything away from casual players? I don't see how forty geeks in a raid on the other side of a map takes away enjoyment for a casual player killing rabbits for a few minutes during a lunch break.
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(If you go by the sum total, casual players pay significantly more than hardcore players because there are significantly more casual players. Casual players are also less of a strain on their servers and bandwidth costs.)
Grasping at straws? (Score:1)
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-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Didn't the bnetd people request from Blizzard the info they'd need to implement the CD check? And Blizzard refused/ignored them?
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And to whoever modded me down over this, I really hope you lose your ability to mod. While you may not agree with what I am saying, that is NOT a reason to mod a person down.
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Well, I don't know how their key generation/validation works at all (completely useless if it's public?), so I'll leave that alone. But yes, I know what you're saying.
I was taking issue with what you said about bnetd's "primary reason for existence [being] to get around using valid keys" (you know...the part I quoted? :P) All I'm saying is that specifically attempting to implement the key validation is a pretty good indicator that they wanted to be/stay legit.
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Sure. Blizzard was (probably still is) terrible at policing their own servers. Back when I played Diablo II, cheating in the form of duped/hacked items, as well as cheating by using programs like Maphack were rampant. Blizzard made a token effort to stop it every once and a while, but for the most part they simply didn't care. On the other hand, there were bnetd servers whose admins took a hardline stance against using hacks. Also many of the bnetd ad
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If you have a problem with a law and you think it's unconstitutional. Boycotting a video game isn't going to change that law. Especially when a majority of people that have play
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Obviously, that's true, but that doesn't mean I am ever going to give one thin dime to those who use those laws.
Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. (Score:4, Informative)
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Shut it down? http://www.pvpgn.org/ [pvpgn.org]
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If I remember correctly, the bnetd guys asked Blizzard about checking legitimacy, and were told no way. They then asked about including the CD-Key checks, and were again told no way. I think the arguments were:
1. Wouldn't check across all the bnetd servers people could possibly be running.
2. Since people had the source, they could just comment out the check code, and go on with life.
#2 is the flimsiest one, I think. The people that would take the time to download, edit, and recompile the source are th
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Since people had the source, they could just comment out the check code, release a forked version of bnetd, and go on with life.
After all, who would download bnetd when you can get bnetd-nocheck for the same low price of $0?
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Not true. It was a full host to networked games of most of Blizzard's titles. the bnetd project probably put the cart before the cart by asking blizz to give them the ability to check for auth codes *after* writing their software but they did ask. Blizz said no. Blizz only took them to court after they got a hold of the war3 beta and modded bnetd to host it. Blizz looked the other way more or less up to that point.
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You think boycotting is going to make a difference when WoW has 6 million subscribers?
But please, continue your own self-sastisfying boycott. Last time I was on bnet, it had too many crybabies and whiners.
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Umm I know this. I've played bnetd (so I didn't have to pay for the game) and I read the wikipedia article. Maybe I don't FULLY understand the situation. But I know enough to figure that a few people boycotting Blizzard isn't going to accomplish a DAMN thing.
"Do you think all the legitimate owners would go back to bnet after bnetd was shut down?"
What the hell are you talking about? Of course legitimate owners went back and played on bnet. I did.
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Wow churn (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the large guilds are gone, they dont play as much, and people just pop on to talk to friends.
I cant wait until the expansion when they disconnect honor/rank from pvp'ing and allow smaller groups for instances. Non-instance pvp, The casual player suffers from wow's (l33t guild) attitude.
I think many people are just paying but not playing, soon people will finally just cancel the accounts.
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Although I do agree, being able to solo quests is nice
You couldn't be more wrong (Score:2)
The population of one server droping says NOTHING of the population of other/new servers.
Sure, the oldest servers are going to lose players, but as long as the new ones *gain* players faster, it's a net gain.
WoW is *still* growing faster than any MMO, ever. You're gonna have to come up with something more than anecdotal evidence to discount the volumes of evidence of that.
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Slow news day (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder if we can get slashdot to come up with a topic icon for "slow news day"
Lack of faith. (Score:1)
World of.... (Score:2)
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Best GSC Char:Max Level Probe Worst... (Score:2)
Worst GSC ( Galaxy of Star Craft ) would be an infested Terran. Might be good for quick guest accounts, and you get to go out with a bang!
Ob. Futurama Quote (Score:5, Funny)
[Hermes takes a piece of paper out of the red tube.] Attention, Hermes Conrad: You are about to receive a letter from the Central Bureaucracy.
[Another red tube appears and Hermes takes a piece of paper out of.] My God! It's from the Central Bureaucracy!
An expansion a year? Pfft! (Score:2)
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Alright now, I think we have to give Blizzard a little bit of credit here. I acknowledge their status as money-grubbing consumer pimps; however, they do tend to put out product that pleases their customer base. One expansion a year actually seems a little much to me. I'm sure if we add on the classic Blizzard delays it'll be closer to a year and a half. What I'm saying is, I'm pretty happy about that. Does anyone else remember how much was added with Lord of Destruction? If they manage to improve upon WoW t
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One problem I found with too many expansions (Score:2)
I guess everyone either didn't like Desert of Flames or had run it before and were leveling alts. Personally I enjoyed the Arabian Nights theme i
I think Diablo 3 is more likely... (Score:2)
Actually a big announcement would be Starcraft Ghost coming out next year for the 360 also... but that would just piss off the fans because what we really want is Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.
Will this be a future dup? (Score:1, Troll)
Obligatory Penny Arcade (Score:2, Funny)
Don't get too excited (Score:1)
That said, Starcraft 2 would be incredible!
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Starcraft 2? (Score:1)
Er, I mean StarCraft franchise.
Is it just me or have they really kicked the dead horse that is WarCraft a bit too much? WoW was cool for maybe a few months, but now I hate it. Friends of mine lock themselves away for weeks (not days - weeks) and then boast they helped their guildmates kill some random boss. Good job, buddy, you just killed a mythical being, 2 weeks, and your GPA!
Nonetheless, I do hope like crazy it's something with StarCraft. (Hopefully StarCraft 2, not some MMO as
If they don't release on the Wii, I won't play it (Score:1)
Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but
Re:If they don't release on the Wii, I won't play (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but
So... you loved their PC games, including one that never existed (perhaps you mean StarCraft: Brood Wars, not Starcraft II?), but you will only buy the game they have yet to announce if they release it on a system that has yet to be released and you have yet to actually play?
Please tell me there is some sort of sarcasm or humor that I'm missing...
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Either it works on the Wii or I won't play it. Period.
I hope so (Score:2)
Rob
WoW lol (Score:1)
WoW: monthly fee and yearly "addons", LOL.
though starcraft isn't dead?
damn straight.
Re:GW lol (Score:1)
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guild wars isn't about mind numbing hours of leveling rpg characters.
guild wars is about its vast and unparralelled PvP modes, strategies, etc.
and it sounds like you've never even been in a guild that got team arena builds going, GvGd actively / set up GvG builds, (did did hall of heroes), etc. etc.
and factions added nothing? [insert eye roll here]
I've played guild wars for almost 400 hours, and am still loving it,
oh, and I'm going to com
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400 hours isn't a lot for a MMORPG btw.
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guild wars isn't about PK, owning noobs, interupting online funerals by massacring people, and getting to level a million. it's about strategizing and competing.
arenanet prefers to call guild wars a "cooperative/competative online RPG" which fits the bill quite well. and yes, it does vary a lot from standard MMORPGs, (and a large sum of people believe that it's much more interesting and entertain
Blizzard (Score:2, Insightful)
Blizzard? Blizzard who? (Score:1)
Diablo,
Diablo 2,
Diablo 2: expansion,
StarCraft,
StarCraft: expansion,
WarCraft,
WarCraft 2,
WarCraft 2 expansion,
WarCraft 2 weird online something edition,
WarCraft 3,
WarCraft 3 expansion,
World of Warcraft,
World of Warcraft expansion (pick a number)
Let's make something original and turn our franchises into something different:
WarCraft Adventures... canned.
StarCraft Ghost... put on hold indefinitely.
Really, they make good games, bu
I hear it wil be called "StarCraft Forever" (Score:1)