Category: Video Game Industry News

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Five Days of Subscription Time Added by Way of Apology

The staff at blizzard has posted the following statement regarding the downtime with warlords.

Blizzard Entertainment

I know how much everyone was looking forward to this expansion, and once you were able to get in and start having fun, all the comments I’ve seen indicate that this is one of our best yet. But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that.

The first two days of the expansion were not a great experience, with many of you facing high queues or significant gameplay problems. We worked around the clock to tackle the demand issues and technical challenges, and fortunately things started looking better on Saturday. While millions of you were able to get in and play over the weekend, with many already reaching level 100, others still ran into very lengthy queues, particularly on the highest-population realms.

To help address this, we’ve expanded the new instancing tech we used to improve queues on Saturday and we’re continuing the process of applying that to raise the capacity of all realms again. This will result in approximately double the prelaunch capacity on each realm, which should greatly reduce queue times for most realms if not eliminate queues altogether.

In recognition of the difficulties so many of you ran into when trying to play over the first few days, we’re adding five days’ worth of extra time to every subscription in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe that was active as of Friday, November 14. Things are already in a much better place than they were going into the weekend, so I hope you’ll now be able to focus on having a ton of fun with this expansion.

I also hope you’ll accept my apology and keep your faith in us. The support voiced by many of you as we worked through the challenges was immensely appreciated. We’re extremely grateful to be part of such a passionate community. We love World of Warcraft, and we’re very proud of this expansion, so stumbling out of the gates like this was very disappointing for all of us.

On behalf of the World of Warcraft development team, as well as everyone at Blizzard, thank you all again for your patience and understanding.

See you in Draenor

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The Repopulation : Two Thousand Testers on board

October began with a slew of additions over three patches. It closed with a slew of new testers being invited into the game. The remaining backers will all be gaining access over the course of November. Let’s take a look back at some of the highlight additions in October.

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Housing and City elements continued to receive updates this month, including the introduction of player shops. A player with a housing unit in the persistent PvE world or in one of the player cities can place down several shop vendors. Other players can visit the shop vendor to browse the goods. Players can subscribe to shops to browse the goods remotely. You can purchase goods for pickup from a subscribed shop or pay a fee to have it delivered to you.

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World of Warcraft : Blizzcon 2014 Is Warcraft 4 Coming?

Warcraft 4: A brand spanking new entry within the series: Perhaps the most exciting, and to my mind, the most plausible, announcement that Blizzard will make would be that Warcraft some is finally making its way to the world. The built in market, the same audience that has been begging for more than a decade, is enormous. It can be a way for Blizzard for you to expand the Warcraft universe with techniques that go beyond the technique title itself. Blizzard has said that Warcraft has ten years of expansions and stories yet to tell. What better springboard for individuals stories and expansions than with the addition of Warcraft 4 and its most likely expansive lore?

In addition, with all the huge rise of eSports, a brand new potential goldmine could be created with competitive leagues forming around Wow 4, maybe even enough for you to unseat Starcraft 2’s eSports chokehold (for Blizzard solutions, that is) and give the company an opportunity to tap into the gigantic RTS eSports market place.

My money is definitely about Warcraft 4.