Posts with tag Blizzard

The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it. Blizzard's design philosophy follows some key elements:

Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun.

From Worlds in Motion we've learned that Blizzard has suffered yet another setback in China.

As reported by JLM Pacific Epoch, the Beijing Municipal Higher People's Court has found that The9, Blizzard's onetime partner in China violated the copyrights of five Chinese fonts owned by Founder Technology Group. The9, Blizzard, and two other parties have been ordered to pay a fine of RMB 1.45 million, or approximately US$ 212,000. The9 has appealed the order to the People's Supreme Court. (Lovely place by the way. Just watch the steps.)

To recap, Blizzard had licensed World of Warcraft to The9 to distribute the game in China. Apparently, in localizing the game for China, The9 used five fonts for the Chinese text in game. However, these fonts are owned by Founder Technology Group, who sued The9 and Blizzard for copyright infringement in 2007, requesting damages of RMB 100M, or about US$ 13M. In September 2007, when The Burning Crusade was released in China, all of the Founder Technology Group fonts were replaced with fonts that Blizzard had permission to use "as a gesture of goodwill to the gaming community" "without any admission of liability."

Given the rocky relationship between The9 and Blizzard, it is likely that this fine will be yet another bone of contention between the companies and that responsibility for this fine may end up being decided in yet another court battle. Stay tuned!

Though it took longer than expected to receive them and FedEx decided it was a wise idea to throw them into the mound of snow next to my well-shoveled porch rather than placing them on the porch or (gasp!) ringing the doorbell so I could accept them myself, my house now has two new guests. The Gryphon Hatchling and Winder Rider plushies now have resting places atop my significant other's desk, where they stand vigilant to inflict cuteness on whoever may need it. In the gallery at the bottom of this post, you'll find a number of pictures of them, held by my little sister because there simply wasn't enough cute in the plushies alone.

Like most licensed Blizzard products, these plushies are very high quality. I was almost surprised by the amount of work put into the little details. The necklaces (bibs? zoo-tabards?) worn by the plushies are embroidered. They're not screen-printed felt or anything like that, so I don't expect they'll come apart anytime soon. The plushies also shipped in individual drawstring bags to carry and store them in, so they're not exposed to the elements when you inevitably shove them in your closet because really, are you going to keep these on display forever? Probably not!

I do still think that $25 price tag for a stuffed animal is incredibly steep, but considering what people were willing to pay for in-game pets alone, it's not anymore expensive than what you would usually pay for a Blizzard product. Keep an eye on the site, because we might have a pair of these to give away in the coming weeks.

Upper Deck has issued their own news release statement regarding the dropped license of the World of Warcraft: Trading Card Game. The decline in sales and economic downturn has been cited as the cause of their discontinued product. For now though, it appears that World of Warcraft products will still be up for sale until the end of March. However, their future products like the Class Starter Decks, Wrathgate Boosters, Souls of Vengeance Starters, Deluxe Starter and Boosters will not be produced.

This announcement comes at the heels of the Yu-Gi-Oh! counterfeiting controversy revealed a few short weeks ago. Upper Deck has been caught printing hundreds of thousands of counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and managed to settle with Konami. We're not sure if the two are related but it may have had an impact on their agreements. Who knows?

There is no information right now as to which company will partner with Blizzard in regards to the WoW: TCG. I tried out the game myself at BlizzCon 2009, but I had recently gone back into Magic: the Gathering, and there is no way I can afford to get into another hobby at the moment.

The topic of player housing continues to crop up as a question on the official forums. Blizzard has stated that guild halls or guild housing will not to be included in the game (at least, not any time soon).

According to Bornakk:

While this originally came up before I was around, I think this has been answered at some BlizzCons since then. While we think this could be a fun idea, we also like the idea of seeing a lot of people in cities and don't want to make main cities feel like ghost towns - if you need an example of this head to Silvermoon (yeah, that's a cheap shot, I know). So for now this idea remains an interesting idea but we'd have to make sure it fits into the game well and meets our expectations which are pretty high for something like this.

The last game I participated in which had guild housing was Guild Wars. Inside, it stored various mementos and trinkets from different epic quests or sigils that my guild had won in the Hall of Heroes (and this was a long time ago, mind you). But that was it! There wasn't much to do from a PvE standpoint. I think we had our own vendor and a "Guild Lord" (someone like Drek or Vanndar Stormpike in Alterac Valley). Later versions of the game had guilds attacking other guilds on their turf. The guild hall in this respect played a huge PvP component the game because the hall you selected would also be your home base complete with various terrain advantages and defenses if you were "attacked" by other guilds.

Now that would be cool.

Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be a purpose to having a guild hall in the game. However, I'm not going to completely discount the idea. Just because the developers have said they're ruling it out now doesn't mean it won't be included later in the future. Players continued to ask about flying around in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, right? All it takes is a new expansion, but at least we're getting it.

I'm shotgunning the Beer Garden.

Every so often someone looks back to 40-man raiding: this time it's Zarhym on the official forums, answering a question about raiding's future and their possible return. I have to say that every time someone decides that the 40-man raid game should come back, I cringe a little bit. So Zarhym's answer works for me.

Right now our plan is to look back on 40-player raids fondly as a format by which we were able to evolve and customize what we feel to be the best raid formats for World of Warcraft. I don't believe our developers have ever stated that they'll absolutely never do a 40-player raid again, but we're really happy with the raid variety we have now with 10- and 25-player raids featuring normal and Heroic difficulties.

I agree that there were some very epic moments in the old raid game: last night for instance I was looking at old screenshots of myself from those days and gabbing with the people who work here about our respective accomplishments and experiences in original WoW raiding. The great C'thun death beam chain ride, where we all mounted our bugs and rode in at once to see how high we could get it to go (I believe I took 6 million damage, with another 6 million resisted), the night I got my Sulfuras, the Onyxia attunement chain and what an incredible pain it was to wander around Desolace looking for Rexxar.

I'm a veteran of the 40-man raid game from both the Horde and Alliance side, and I have to say, I really only miss the experiences through the patina of time buffing up all the glory moments like killing the bosses for the first time and letting you forget the pure hassle of getting 40 people together. The griping over having to break up into 15-man groups to go run UBRS and MC the mobs there for a fire resistance buff for Vaelastrasz is long since forgotten. I think in the end 40-man raiding was cool and fun and an artifact of the games that preceded WoW, and it belongs in its place of honor but definitely in the past.

One of our readers, Bill, sent us a tip about a WoW account issue on The Consumerist. It seems that the ownership of Anonymous's friend's account is under dispute and Blizzard won't let him use it in the meantime. The ownership became disputed after the account was allegedly hacked, even though there was allegedly a mobile authenticator on the account. His friend has given up on the account, complete with Val'anyr, and has created a new one.

We can't confirm any of the facts in this case. I am willing to believe that Anonymous is truly upset and believes the story he tells to be true, even though he is posting anonymously. There are some serious red flags, however, that seem to point to Anonymous not having all of the facts:

In the last year, I have noticed that Blizzard has been making more of an effort to reach out to its community. When I say community, I mean the artists, the writers, the singers, bloggers, theorycrafters, and everything in between.

From having the three major franchises join Twitter, to the Battlecry Mosaic, to contests galore -- tell me, what does this mean to you? Have you participated in any of these contests or events? I myself actually entered the Fan Art Calendar contest just last night, and while I'm hardly expecting to win, it was not only a fun project to work on but it made me realize that Blizzard has at least a genuine-looking interest in its artistic fanbase.

Are you guys enjoying the contests? Or do you believe it's all a big corporate sham to make Blizzard seem all moonbeams and kittens?

Discuss amongst yourselves!

If you read WoW.com with any regularity, you probably saw and read our pieces on Friday discussing some rather curious policies Blizzard has recently instituted. There are two in particular that I'd like to discuss further: The care package for hacked accounts and the possibility of mandatory authenticators.

First, how many of you have had your accounts stolen, or know someone that had theirs stolen? Chances are good every single person that reads this post will raise their hand to that question. The problem is not a small one. I'm in a rather large guild, and every few weeks someone has their account stolen and the little bits of our guild bank they have access to go with them. My large guild is also just one guild in a larger guild alliance which suffers the same problems. Every two weeks or so, someone I see online on a regular basis gets their account stolen.

Several people have told us via our feedback page that they have received theirWorld of Warcraft Official Magazine in the mail. Last month, we got to see the preview and now many subscribers already have them in hand.

The WoW Magazine is a quarterly publication that is available via subscription only. U.S. subscriptions begin at $39.95 for a year and subscriptions are available to other countries at different rates. Our tipsters have described the magazine as having a graphic novel feel to them.

Did you subscribe to the magazine? If so, have you received your copy? We would love to read your reviews in the comments if you have.

Behold the miracle of confection. Made by Christina Drylie of Apple Valley, California it's one of the 10 winning entries in this year's Blizzard Holiday Desert contest. Warning: may erupt from Deepholm and unleash elemental devastation. In addition to the Aspect of Earth, we have Moonkin, Murlocs, Lord Marrowgar and Icecrown Citadel in edible form. Hasten yourselves to go forth and consume their images. Unfortunately you won't be able to actually eat any of the deserts, but it's the web, we haven't worked out how to make hypertext work for creating cake.

Blizzard helped an Indiana sheriff track an allegedly drug-dealing, definitely WoW-playing fugitive to Canada. Sheriff's Deputy Matt Roberson, who used to play World of Warcraft, discovered that Alfred Hightower aka Rastlynn, was an avid player. So he contacted Blizzard with a request for help in locating his quarry. Three months later, Blizzard sent Roberson a package containing Rastlynn's IP address, billing address and other info. After finding out the fugitive's latitude and longitude from his IP, Roberson used Google Search to pinpoint Rastlynn's exact location. With the cooperation of Canadian authorities, Hightower has been deported and now awaits his fate in the U.S.

Usually it is Blizzard that is calling the police for help, as in the cases of:

• The teenager who threatened to blow up a plane using in-game chat.
• The kid who threatened to kill himself if his ban wasn't removed.
• The teen who was arrested for making a suicide threat to a GM.