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More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shocker dept.

Blizzard has announced their intention to follow up this year's Burning Crusade expansion with a new World of Warcraft add-on every year. While not terribly surprising, they have also announced that they're working on a major announcement for next year. Consensus seems to be that it will likely be another Starcraft game, given comments by Blizzard COO Paul Sams. "StarCraft is my absolutely favorite game of all time. As you probably already know, there is no doubt that we will continue the StarCraft and Diablo franchise, and trust me, I will be the happiest person in the world when we announce StarCraft 2."

8 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. -1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. by base3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Remember bnetd, boycott Blizzard/Vivendi.

    --
    One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
    1. Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. by base3 · · Score: 3, Informative

      No they didn't. Just because the server emulation happened to have the side effect of enabling people to play for free doesn't mean that Blizzard had any moral right to shutdown a project that wasn't infringing its precious intellectual property. By your logic, the VCR and any other device "enabling" copyright infringement should be subject to being sued out of existence.

      --
      One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
    2. Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. by egburr · · Score: 3, Informative

      I ran a bnetd server at home, so my friends and I could play. Battlenet was useless. When using battlenet, we would spend an hour or more trying to login, and then not be able to see each other even though we were all in the same private chat room and all on the same server. When we could see each other, often starting a game would fail. When we actually managed to play a game, we would usually lose our battlenet connecting during the game, so after the game ended we had to start the whole painful process over again. When I ran my bnetd server, we could all get on quickly and never had trouble seeing each other or starting games. We went from playing one or two games in an evening to four or five games, sometimes even more depending on if the next day was a workday or not. When Blizzard shut bnetd down, we quit playing Starcraft on a regular basis, and switched to Age of Empires. Now we occasionally will play a game or two of Startcraft, and find the battlenet servers to be decent. I figure that is probably because people have moved on to other games so battlenet isn't as overloaded as it used to be.

      --

      Edward Burr
      Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
    3. Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      If I remember correctly, the bnetd guys asked Blizzard about checking legitimacy, and were told no way. They then asked about including the CD-Key checks, and were again told no way. I think the arguments were:

      1. Wouldn't check across all the bnetd servers people could possibly be running.
      2. Since people had the source, they could just comment out the check code, and go on with life.

      #2 is the flimsiest one, I think. The people that would take the time to download, edit, and recompile the source are the ones that are running keygens and cd-cracks anyway.

      Here's a comment from the bnetd group: http://www.techliberation.com/archives/040327.php
    4. Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs. by toddestan · · Score: 2, Informative

      Could you come up with some other reasons for bnetd?

      Sure. Blizzard was (probably still is) terrible at policing their own servers. Back when I played Diablo II, cheating in the form of duped/hacked items, as well as cheating by using programs like Maphack were rampant. Blizzard made a token effort to stop it every once and a while, but for the most part they simply didn't care. On the other hand, there were bnetd servers whose admins took a hardline stance against using hacks. Also many of the bnetd admins also would kick griefers that Blizzard would do absolutely nothing about on the battlenet servers.

      Another reason for bnetd is that it also allowed users to play online with previous patches of the game. Blizzard made some huge changes to Diablo II over the years, and many liked the previous versions better than the current versions.

  2. Re:We've Heard This Before by rob1980 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The grade-on-a-curve honor system cheesed everybody off because the only way you can make high warlord/grand marshal is to essentially quit your job and pvp for 14 hours a day. It wasn't just the casual players, fortunately. I guess they thought it would work, and after awhile saw that it didn't - a new honor system is going in with the expansion.

  3. Re:We've Heard This Before by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    And if you've read the expansion details:

    1. PvP honor is going to no longer be based on a "ladder" and is going to be more like XP. Meaning that a casual player will still potentially reach the top PvP rank, it may just take longer than a hard-core PvPer.

    2. The new raid instances will be designed for no more than 25 people. This will make end-game more accessible to casual players, more than likely.

  4. Slow news day by LargeWu · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's a meta-announcement.

    I wonder if we can get slashdot to come up with a topic icon for "slow news day"