BlizzCon Friday Wrapup

Besides the Burning Crusade announcement, there's lots of interesting stuff going on out in California. Gamespot reports from the scene and has a first look at the Blood Elf starting area. Meanwhile, Next Generation has the lay of the land from the first day of Blizzard's games get-together. From the Gamespot article: "As for the scene, Morhaime announced that slightly fewer than 8,000 attendees would be at Blizzcon, and there seemed to be about that many people crowding in Hall A of the Anaheim Convention Center. The line for showgoers to pick up their free goody bags seemed to snake as long as a line for a ride at nearby Disneyland, looking to be easily more than an hour's wait. Though there were dozens of computer stations, lines for Blizzcon attendees looking to play the new expansion pack were also quite long. Two GameSpot editors stood in line for about an hour to get 30 minutes of play time with the content."

Comments

Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Warcraft allows third-party UI mods via XML and LUA. Well, some of these mods are apparently entering into a gray area, and are considered to be "too powerful" or something. (I remember a very confusing statement by Blizzard about how mods that allow people to do something that people without the mod can't do are considered too powerful - but isn't that the entire point of a mod?)

So, anyway, there's a rumor going around that they announced at BlizzCon that mods are going to have to be digitally signed in a future content patch. Anyone know if this is true?

If it is true, it will kill all third-party mods, "legal" or not. Even if they allow third-party authors to apply for digital signatures, it will still prevent them from developing at all. You can't develop a modification if you have to get EVERY single version of it signed by Blizzard. Bugs happen, it's a fact of development. If you have to wait a day between tests of various versions, mod development will simply stop.

So, is this true? Does Blizzard really intend to close off modding to their player-base, and only allow certain "golden" mods? I can only hope that this isn't the case.

Re:Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[JavaLord]

These are just UI mods; the intention is to allow you to reconfigure your UI and see information which is given to you, but not in a useful way by the default UI. I'll take the Decursive example. Decursive looks at your party/raid, finds a debuff that you can cure, and uses the correct cure spell on that person, all with one button

Yeah, but take a paladin for example. Say im in a battleground with 7 teammates defending some point. A warlock and priest come up, and debuff/DoT everyone in my group (they are fast!). I can cleanse all 7 of them just by jamming on the decursive button seven times quickly. There is no way humanly possible you could do that without decursive. Those with decursive have a huge advantage over those without.

Video Recordings and Information from BlizzCon 05

[antdude]

WorldofWar.net posted new and confirmed information and media such as photographs, screenshots, and movie footages (including panels and presentations) of the BlizzCon (year 2005). The video presentations are quite funny to hear the fans yelling. Here are some samples of videos:

• Expansion Blood Elf Warrior gameplay Movie [28Mb]
  
• Rob Pardo Video Interview [47Mb]
  
• Sound-alike Contest Movie [86Mb]
  
• Original Song Contest Movie [35Mb]
  
• Dance-Alike Contest Movie [29Mb]
  
• Costume Contest [129mb]