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With WWI past us, BlizzCon not due for several more months, and no more major patches due until the expansion hits, now is the time for discontent among World of Warcraft players. While accounts will surge back to life with the arrival of Arthus and Northrend, from now until then it's going to be increasingly hard to get your guildmates in-game. Raids will flag, Arena teams will disband, and /gquit will be a common 4am turn of phrase.

What about you? Are you sticking with Azeroth through to the new expansion content? Or are you going to give Blizzard's behemoth a break until then, and let visions of snowdrifts in the North carry you happily through the summer months? What's your account look like for next month, faithful readers?

Ignorance is bliss.
-- Thomas Grey

Knowing is half the battle.
-- G.I. Joe

It goes by many names -- Rumor. Speculation. Innuendo. Suggestion. Suble hints. Vague allusions. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Slips of the keyboard. Loose lips sinking ships. Detective work. Snooping. Unearthing forbidden knowledge. Call it what you will, by whatever method you choose, but it's become an increasingly inescapable fact of life regarding the games we play, especially those in the shared iterations of persistent worlds.

We're referring, of course, to knowing about content before it's on our hot little hard drives.

[Note: Many of the links that follow do, in fact, go to information about pending updates and patches. If you're averse to reading this sort of information, please skip over link text that contains an asterisk. (*)]

Lets go back about ten years or so to the original EverQuest. Now it isn't my intention to pick on any one game, I just happen to be more familiar with it than Ultima Online or Meridian 59. For the sake of immersion let me assume the role of a 1999 copy of EverQuest that you happen to be playing on your gaming machine back in the last year of the last century.

You just died in EverQuest. How dare you die! Since you had the nerve to be defeated in combat, you'll now be required to run from your binding point -- which could potentially be very far away -- to your dead body, which contains all of your equipment and bags that just happen to hold all of your inventory. If you fail to do this, then you lose all of these items. Oh but you've already lost some experience and possibly de-leveled if you happened to have recently leveled up.

Hey! Why are you logging out? So what if you think you'd rather play Half-Life right now, this is the game you're paying for monthly. Don't you think you'd better get the most out of it? Hah! See? I knew you were only bluffing. All right, now get to running, noob.

It's a hectic summer over at Blizzard HQ. Inundating the masses with Wrath of the Lich King across the pond at the World Wide Invitational, announcing Diablo 3 on top of that, and battling it out in the courts against the kingpin responsible for World of Warcraft's bot brigade. Aside from all that, there's the whole pending merger with Activision and Vivendi approval process with Blizzard Entertainment right in the middle.

The latest legal development involves a preliminary injunction filed by some shareholders who weren't satisfied with the $27.50 per share offer. The injunction suit was filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery last February by the Wayne County Employee's Retirement System in an attempt to halt the merger. Activision has announced that a Delaware Court junked that preliminary injunction, a decision made by the very illuminated and WoW-knowledgeable Chief Judge William B. Chandler III. Activision will be holding a stockholder meeting next Tuesday on July 8, if approved the merger will complete on July 9th and a new titan, Activision Blizzard will join forces and the gaming world will never be the same again.

We wonder how many level 70 characters the Judge plays or maybe he's already level 75 in the WotlK beta?

Today's question actually comes from Age of Conan's in-game chat. While the sane among you may marvel at the fact that my brain cells did not immediately shrivel and die upon coming into contact with your average chat channel ranter, I'll describe the discussion using enough creative editing to shield you, our loyal readers, from some of the more mind-numbing motes of mental malfeasance on display that night.

• "This game sucks, they only designed one class to be a main tank!"
• "No game should ever be released with bugs. Look at how Blizzard did with WoW!"
• "My class sucks. They should make it more powerful and nerf everyone else. There is no balance in this game."

I think you get the idea. To the valiant souls who tried to answer these criticisms intelligently and thoughtfully, I salute you. When faced with intelligent responses to their rants, one of our misguided miscreants fired back with a very good question.

What do you know about designing an MMO? If you know so much, how come you don't write games?

As a former game developer myself, and as someone with several years of experience in the commercial software development industry, allow me a chance to use my bully pulpit in order to answer their points.

The moment everyone's been waiting for -- aside from a release date -- is finally here, Wrath of the Lich King US beta opt-ins are now available! All you're required to do is sign into your World of Warcraft account and make a couple clicks and bang, you're done. Do be warned that you'll only get an email if you're actually accepted into the WotLK beta and not a simple confirmation email for entering.

We can't imagine that it'll be very long before the beta actually starts now that Blizzard is accepting both EU and US entries. Once the beta does begin information about what we can expect from World of Warcraft's next expansion should begin to flow even more freely. It's possible that we'll see the beta begin before Blizzcon 08, so make sure to get your submissions in fast, while the clickin's still good!

We've seen bits and pieces of Blizzard's upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, but the people over at Computer and Video Games.com were lucky enough to get a complete run through of the major locations of Northrend, and some of the many, many quests we'll all be doing when the expansion goes live.

Northrend is a cold, harsh land, and its inhabitants are likewise not people with whom you trifle. When you step off the ship or zeppelin, you will be immediately enlisted in the ongoing war against the enemy faction as well as the numberless legions of Arthas' followers. Check it out, and prepare to be astonished.

This past weekend Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational, also known as "BlizzCon Europe", had PC gaming fans throwing up the horns. Massively's sister site WoW Insider was onhand with pen, camera, and laptop from keynote to closing shop. World of Warcraft news was plentiful, of course, with a huge amount of information revealed about the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion. If you read one writeup, you should probably tackle the Developer's Panel. Class changes, big picture ideas and more are all covered in that one talk. There's also some great information for raiders in the Dungeon discussion, and a lot of promising talk about PvP for those folks.

Every class got a mini-Christmas, with plenty of love for Death Knight fans, Shaman raiders, and every single Hunter out there. We also recommend checking out the goodie bag, Turpster's hilarious interpretive dance, and (if you're into that sort of thing) there was some big non-MMO news dropped at the event's keynote. Check it out.

Tobold, an astute MMOG blogger with some Blizzard PR clout, was also in attendance, and with press badge in hand grabbed a short interview with World of Warcraft's Lead Producer, J. Allen Brack. In the interview they discuss hero classes, WoW's expansion schedule, the shortage of tankers and healers players encounter when putting a pug together, and more. No earth-shattering revelation is exposed but it is a worthy effort at picking one of the top brains working on World of Warcraft.

Now that Blizzard's finally announced Diablo 3, ending a feverish period of second guessing and rampant speculation, one thing is clear: Despite how you may feel about the big reveal, the specter of Diablo 3 can finally be laid to rest. Waiting in the wings, however, is ... what?

Starcraft 2 is in process, so it's extremely unlikely that Blizzard would dilute that audience by announcing a Starcraft MMO. Ditto with a Diablo MMO, and we don't even know what its release date might be. World of Warcraft has Wrath of the Lich King coming (probably) next year. Can we assume that the next announcement will concern their "next-gen MMO"? Is that project the oft-mentioned "Hydra"? With two active fantasy titles and one science fiction game, what could the next big thing possibly be?

Massively's sister site WoW Insider is currently hard at work at the Worldwide Invitational, Blizzard's big to-do in France. They were onhand this morning for the big announcement, and though it's not really Massive we have to admit we're still pretty excited for Diablo 3. But you're here for MMO news, which the WI team has for you in spades. Representatives from Blizzard offered up a heaping helping of Wrath of the Lich King information, with some great info for just about every class. You're going to want to head to WoW Insider for the full monty, but here are a few highlights:

• Fury Warriors will be dual-weilding 2H weapons.
• Rogues will get a new AoE.
• Priests will get a new crowd control spell.
• Shaman totems will now affect an entire raid.
• Hunters (as if they weren't cool enough) are going to see pets having talent trees of their own. A complete revamp of the pet system.

Make sure to keep your eyes on WoW Insider all weekend for more Blizz-related news.

Gallery: Worldwide Invitational 2008

Blizzard fans all over the internet have worked themselves up into a frenzy over a vague splash screen at the company's website -- a melting wall of ice adorned with rune or sigil-like markings. Everyone's speculating. Is it Diablo 3? Maybe it's just a promo for Wrath of the Lich King. After all, the ice motif seems to fit, right?

Maybe not. During a Q&A session at GDC Paris 08, Blizzard VP Rob Pardo was asked to comment on "the new game." He replied saying, "So you want me to announce the game before the announcement?" That was a classic press conference or Q&A blunder; you're not supposed to accept the premise of an unwanted or hostile question!

What does it mean when Blizzard teases us so? Well, it could mean many things. This very type of teaser has been used for several other announcements in the past, so your guess is as good as ours. If we had to wager an educated guess, we would say that a closed beta start date and release date is about to be announced for Wrath of the Lich King coinciding with the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational. Although we'd also love to think that Blizzard was close to announcing their next MMO, but that probably won't happen for a very long time.

Then again, as far as we know Blizzard has never teased us about a release date. So if you want to start making your wild guesses now, that piece of information is a good place to start. If it's not WotLK-related, our second guess would be an announcement that Diablo 3 is being "thawed out" for everyone in the near future. Yeah, we know it's a (lame) stretch -- but that's half the fun of it!

Update: After some poking around, we've discovered something interesting. Out of all the Blizzard websites, diablo.com is the only one that points our browsers to this splash page. Simple coincidence or subtle hint? We'll let you guys be the judge.

Update 2: Apparently diablo.com has pointed to blizzard.com for a while now. It looks like simple coincidence is much more likely in this scenario.

Sorry I'm late, but my hard drive decided to try and break out of my computer case this week. Did I let such a disaster stop me from presenting my weekly edition of Ask Massively? Well, yes I did. As good as I am, I find it a wee bit difficult to bring forth my wit and wisdom to you without the benefit of a working computer. Now that I'm back and functional (no editorial comments, please) let us get down to business, which is gaming.

This week, we're going to revisit an old question. Sometimes it is wise to revise or even reverse an opinion based on new data, and this week presents us with an opportunity to do just that.

Hey Massively!

Now that Age of Conan has finally dropped and Warhammer Online is in the pipeline, how do you think World of Warcraft will maintain it's present level of mind share in the MMORPG space? Will new titles and expansions for existing games result in a net loss of available consumers for Wrath of the Lich King when it goes live?

-Curious

Um... Bingo?
(Pipeline? Level of Mind share? Who talks like that?)

Well curious, or can I call you George? I've been paying attention to some of the statements and opinions from players and fans of some of these upcoming titles, and opinions appear to be divided into 3 camps. Each of these mean different things, both for Blizzard and for Funcom and these lessons can and should be taken to heart by EA/Mythic if they want to have the kind of success that Age of Conan has enjoyed so far.