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As if in response to predictions of the beginning of the end, Blizzard's market dominance in US PC game sales was reaffirmed in late August through the NPD Group's research. In fact, World of Warcraft garnered three of the top spots on the PC game sales chart, with The Diablo Battle Chest and The Warcraft III Battle Chest thrown in for good measure, Gamesindustry.biz reports.

While it could be argued that World of Warcraft's steady retail box sales silences all erroneous claims of the rise of a WoW-killer (oops... uttered the dreaded phrase), this doesn't seem to take into account all those Warhammer Online pre-orders placed in August. In that case, September might paint a different picture. But let's face it -- WoW's not going away anytime in the foreseeable future. And despite the knocks World of Warcraft takes from some MMO gamers, would you really want a world without Warcraft?

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

It's no secret that modern MMO design has changed drastically in the years following World of Warcraft. The secret of the game's success has been the topic of discussion for every gaming blog and review site for the past four years. Yet while everyone tends to focus on what World of Warcraft did right, there are a few areas where the game underperforms. In particular, the grouping and guild systems seem to encourage quid pro quo relationships between players as they are leveling or gearing up their characters. That's not to say that Blizzard was trying to discourage strong bonds between players, but more that they were concentrating on making one of the first solo friendly games in the genre. They eventually reached this goal by developing the questing system we now see emulated in almost every modern game. Unfortunately, this focus on solo questing has had some major unintended consequences for those who like leveling in groups.

As long as World of Warcraft remains the top performing MMO on the market most game developers are going to assume that only the minority of players actually prefer grouping. I've seen people compare the subscription numbers of World of Warcraft to games like EverQuest 2 to support this argument. It's obvious that most players would rather keep the solo friendly format then be forced back into the days of required grouping. However, the situation doesn't require that MMOs have to be designed to cater to just one style of gameplay. Some minor changes could be implemented in modern questing and leveling design, which would greatly encourage cooperative grouping. Most MMOs that are oriented on solo questing only discourage grouping by accident and not on purpose. Still some of these "accidents" tend to be very annoying to anyone trying to level with a group of friends.

Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, sat down with GamesIndustry.biz for an interview during Games Convention a few weeks ago. He had a number of interesting things to say, with the piece's discussion ranging from StarCraft II's progress to the challenges of jugglng three successful franchises. In a comment that World of Warcraft players might be particuarly interested to hear, Pearce describes the success of their incredibly popular MMO as 'exhausting' more than anything else.

If you've ever wondered why there aren't more patches, more often, to World of Warcraft, Pearce answers your mental query: "We've got almost 3000 employees worldwide now, and the majority of that growth is due to the success of World of Warcraft. As a company we've found ourselves spread very, very thin - because the World of Warcraft community has a voracious appetite for content. That development team is 130 people, they're working on content patches, they're working on an expansion set, they've got their hands full - and then we've got the other development teams that we need to continue to support as well." Be sure to read the full interview for more on Pearce's view of their runaway mega giant.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

How fast can you go from zero to 60? The question sounds like it's right out of a Ferrari brochure, but we assure you, we're talking about World of Warcraft. The most recent promotion Blizzard's come out with, Recruit-a-Friend, allows for a steep increase in experience gains. We said there would be 'hyper-fast leveling' but this is absolutely insane -- our sister site WoW Insider has a video of one of their readers (Brian) leveling a paladin from character creation to level 60 in just 20 minutes.

Brian needed the grantable levels from a recruited account of course, so the real 'work' was done beforehand, but this is still quite a sight. Check out the video below the cut for some ding madness.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

The MMO industry is a battle with many weapons, and words are as powerful as code or quests in this field. Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel fired another salvo in a recent interview with Eurogamer, saying that he sees the company's Lord of the Rings Online as the next big mass-market MMO success story. Tie-ins with the upcoming Hobbit movie, the company's aggressive patching schedule, and the Mines of Moria expansion all have the game poised, Steefel thinks, for blowout popularity.

In that lengthy discussion with Eurogamer, Steefel also hinted at big changes coming to LotRO that might help with that blowout. The executive producer heavily hinted that their in-development console title is a console version of LotRO, which could be a big win for the MMO. He also intimated that the company's $14.99 subscription fee may be on the way out, with an alternative business model stepping in to take its place. Check out the full interview for all the juicy details!

Recent discussions in the official World of Warcraft UI forums might be of interest to folks that like to tweak their user interface. Which, we think, is pretty well everyone. There's a lengthy post from 'blue' poster Iriel there all about changes to the UI elements coming in Wrath of the Lich King. Tech-savvy UI tweakers will find a lot to love there, with new unit functions and plenty of tweaks to how old ones worked, Even better, it sounds like a ton of our user-created information will be stored on the Blizzard servers, from Macros key bindings to UI settings.

It's all 'Beta' information until the expansion launches, of course, so some of these listed items may change between now and the game's release date. Head on over to the official forums to check out the full details, and be sure to stop by WoW Insider for more on the game's changing UI.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

Blizzard is making it easy for you to start planning for the launch of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The official WoW website's talent tree calculator now represents the current WotLK build's talent trees for all classes, including the new Death Knight prestige class.

You can try on all sorts of new specs taking into account the talent tree changes and new abilities coming in the expansion, which is due out later this year.

The most interesting aspect to this is the ability to really explore in detail what kinds of abilities are available to the Death Knight. The information has been public for a while but if you haven't been following every single interview, it's cool to be able to go to one place and interact with what's there.

The latest Blizzcast is live! This fifth outing is the post-Worldwide Invitational episode. The bulk of its running time is dedicated to Diablo 3. If you're interested in that pseudo-MMO, action-RPG goodness, then there is a ton of information in there. Diablo 3 Community Manager Bashiok interviews Lead Designer Jay Wilson about the game. It's detailed stuff (e.g., several minutes dedicated to Blizzard's reasons for abandoning the grid-like inventory management of the earlier Diablo games), so Blizzard fans should check it out.

Of course, here at Massively we have a special interest in World of Warcraft. We're sad to report that Blizzcast #5 is a little light on WoW or Wrath of the Lich King discussion. Community Manager Nethaera participates in the first half of the podcast, and she talks a little bit about WotLK, but she mostly shares in the post-Diablo 3 announcement glee.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

We're not going to get into those arguments again. You know, the ones that focus on whether any given game is a (cough)-killer or not. All the same, the thrust and riposte between corporate figures is always a delight to read. The latest comment is very much in the 'we could take you all down with only one Dalek' vein.

We're indebted to mtv.com for bringing us a lengthy interview with Mark Jacobs, who is VP of Mythic as well as being lead designer for Warhammer Online. Jacobs takes the opportunity to dismiss the figure of one billion dollars, the sum cited by Activision Blizzard CEO as the sum it would take for a competitor to take on World of Warcraft, as 'ridiculous numbers'.

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	Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online features, and don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!

Silicon Knights President Dennis Dyack is apparently a balanced gamer. Sure, he's worked on games like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and he's president of the company behind the big Xbox 360 exclusive Too Human. But it would appear that he's also a connoisseur of MMOs.

He told videogaming247 that EVE Online is (for him, at least) a better game than World of Warcraft. "I know it's a lot harder core," he said, "but the depth of it's unparalleled and I love it." It's been mentioned again and again how different the EVE and WoW experiences are. They represent two fundamentally opposing game design philosophies. That serves as a reminder that this genre can be potentially achieve more than the treadmill-loving, fantasy RPG style it has become known for.

But Dyack had one complaint that applied to both titles. "I have to ... force myself to stop playing those games because it takes too much time," he said. That seems to be a problem with MMOs in general -- especially ones that use the subscription model. Blizzard and CCP want you to invest as much time as possible into the game so you'll stay subscribed, right? Looks like it backfired in Dyack's case. We wouldn't be surprised if it alienated a lot of other potential subscribers as well.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

Newsmagazine The Economist ran an article titled "Playing for profit" about using video game technology to increase productivity in the workplace. The article -- which was a sort of book report on "Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business" by David Edery and Ethan Mollick -- looked to trends such as game mods and web-based-games-as-marketing-tools for inspiration, but special emphasis was placed on MMOs, including World of Warcaft and EVE Online.

Believe it or not, the WoW feature that was heralded by the writer was the soul-crushing grind! Or rather, the grind was compared to the sorts of tasks that your average office worker has to sit through each day. WoW provides a context -- the leveling system and other rewards -- that (supposedly) makes the grind worth the trouble. Companies should emulate that, the article says.

EVE, on the other hand, was used to demonstrate what not to do. That's pretty ironic, since The Econimist's editorial stance is all about economic and societal openness! Regardless, the author pointed to the famous incident in which a CCP employee provided inside help to a corporation at war, using it as an example of the dangers of game-playing in a business environment.

In addition to offering game-related downloads, our sister site Big Download covers PC news in general -- not just MMOs. But when it put together a list of the most anticipated games of the coming season, two MMOs figured prominently: Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

In addition to simply listing the games, Big Download rates each release's chance of success. Of WotLK it says "near-perfect ... as close to a slam dunk as you're likely to get." On the other hand, it's a bit more skeptical about Warhammer Online. The article says that WAR's chances of success are "in question" because new MMOs in general usually have a rough time of it.

Check out the feature for more details, and to see what the other games on the list are if you're into more than just MMOs.

In a sea of Wrath of the Lich King beta reviews, it's nice to occasionally get some that aren't aimed towards the hardest of the hardcore, consisting of flavor-of-the-week buzzwords and catchy acronyms. Over at the MTV Multiplayer blog, we get treated to a casual review of the Wrath beta, focusing on the Death Knight and the character carry-over experience.

In this review, we're told of this player's thoughts on how WotLK is "more of the same - but better." They're particularly happy with how the Death Knight isn't just a new class thrown into the mix, but it has its own storyline and unique set of skills that combine elements of the other classes. The achievement system is also discussed (and praised) in detail, but just enough to interest people who may be looking at World of Warcraft for the first time. Yes, there are people like that out there somewhere.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!