Massively^™

We love The Escapist over here at Massively. Take for instance Jared Rea's recent article, "Beautiful 21st Century" -- a piece about one company's attempt to overcome the stigma attached to most older Korean MMOs that make it to the western market: beautiful but grindy. Perhaps the most notable Korean title currently played in the west is NCsoft's Lineage II which, despite being a beautiful game, has drawn some flack from gamers about its steep grind (although this is becoming less of a problem).

NCsoft is working to change this perception of their forthcoming Korean-developed titles, particularly in light of their upcoming MMO Aion: The Tower of Eternity. Much of the problem that NCsoft faces is similar to what all companies, game or otherwise, face when taking their brand overseas -- being recognized as a global brand rather than seen in the limited light of their offerings in a given region of the world.

This year, Activision and Blizzard merged under French media group Vivendi (Blizzard's parent company) to become the biggest, baddest game publisher in the known universe. To make sure investors know just how awesome that event was, Vivendi sent out a press release describing its generally excellent financial condition.

Earnings for Vivendi as a whole were reported to be up 10.2% for the first six months of this year. While game division earnings are still actually down compared to this time last year, that should be no cause for alarm. It can be attributed to the lack of a World of Warcraft expansion. By this time last year, The Burning Crusade had reached store shelves.

Vivendi assured investors that it still plans to release Wrath of the Lich King by the end of this year, so that bump is still coming. But will Wrath be as big as The Burning Crusade? By definition it can't be any bigger, because you have to have played the TBC content to reach the point where you can enjoy most of what Wrath has to offer, right? Apparently we'll see soon.

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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!

This week's column is going to be a little different than the norm I usually cover, but it still falls into that which I love and dedicate my craft to -- the analysis of MMO culture. And who better to analyze than the bane of a game's existence, the fanboi!

They're right, you're wrong. Their opinion is obviously the best opinion on the planet, even if it consists of "this gaem is teh rox, ur dumb and obviuosly a gey retard." (It always fascinates me how they can screw up a word like gay, but can somehow gain the coherence to spell retard correctly.) They clog up the message boards by defending everything the developer does, right down to eating an egg sandwich during their hour long lunch breaks.

They probably mean well and want their game of choice to succeed, but they end up doing more damage to the community at large than good. So let's dedicate this column to the fanboi and how much they screw things up for everyone.

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!

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!

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!

Throughout this year there hasn't really been an MMO released that's became a stand-in for my main game, which I actually don't even have as of right now. So with the summer's end nearing, I thought a look six or so months into the future releases would be an interesting topic. I know what some people may be thinking, Age of Conan did indeed come out just as summer was starting. While Funcom's newest game did hit rather recently, it just wasn't what I was looking for in a game overall. So if you're in the same boat as me, or just want to read about some of the upcoming MMOs worth playing, feel free to click the image above to start reading.

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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Urban exploration and free running are activities normally associated with the real world. In recent years, however, MMOs such as Everquest 2, Age of Conan and World of Warcraft have become a digital stage for the arts. With entire new virtual worlds to explore, no risk of injury and no physical fitness required, it's understandable that many would-be free runners are going digital.

In this article, I take a visual tour of the world of urban exploration and rooftop running in MMOs and explain how you can learn to clamber onto the rooftops in your favourite game.

With Wrath of the Lich King coming out very soon, and four years of the game's history behind us, it's nice to just sit back and read something about the basic fundamentals of World of Warcraft. In a recent article over at GameSetWatch, they've dissected what WoW means to the average person and why it has become so popular.

As the article admits itself, yes, this is in fact another World of Warcraft article. However, it approaches the game from a slightly different angle as the author realizes what the game is all about retrospectively. It's not a beginner's guide to the game, but more like a beginner's guide to what to expect from the people who play the game, and what to expect from yourself if you're getting into the game for the first time. It's certainly worth a read.

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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!