More WoW, Major 2007 Announcement for Blizzard

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."

Comments

Well..

[Necreia]

I'm very excited to see more of the Starcraft series, as long as it is not MMO.

Re:Well..

[Cornflake917]

Many of the developers who created Starcraft split from Blizzard and went off to make Guild Wars. This scares me. I want too see a new Starcraft sooo bad, but not if it's ruined by people who don't know what there doing.

starcraft 2

[legoburner]

Pleeeeease let it be starcraft 2, and have it be more fun than warcraft 3. I need more starcraft chips and it seems they have stopped selling them at my local korean importers. There is the small matter of the game being as addictive as all hell too.

Geez, and this is news?

[theRhinoceros]

Wow. An announcement that there will be an announcement next year about a game that likely will not come out for a while after that, barring no (ahem) delays. Anything to get hits on a blog/AdSense clicks, right?

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[Ryan Amos]

Yeah, from Blizzard's track record, if they announce Starcraft 2 next year, we'll see it around 2010. And I'm not kidding about that, actually.

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[jackbird]

With a billion a year in WoW subscriptions, I think retail Xmas sales are icing on the cake to Blizzard.

Re:Geez, and this is news?

[happyemoticon]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.

"We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."

A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."

"Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."

This Just In....

[cjb909]

Blizzard announces they will be making a major Announcement!

Ladies and gentlemen..

[Rob T Firefly]

I have an important announcement to make...

..and that is next year, I shall make an important announcement.

*bow*
Thank you, thank you ladies and gentlemen, you're far too kind. I'd like to thank you all for being here today, I'd like to thank Rob Malda and everyone else who made this possible, and I'd like to thank my mom.
*bow*
Thank you all for your time, please enjoy the cocktails.

Starcraft 2 ? Diablo 3?

[Chaffar]

You guys are all wrong... They're obviously gonna release Blackthorne 2 :)

Re:Starcraft 2 ? Diablo 3?

[another_fanboy]

Monsters are no match for a man with a shotgun. I wonder if this is where Bruce Campbell got his insperation...

We've Heard This Before

[Blakey Rat]

They also promised that they'd release a patch every month for the at least the first year when the game came out, and we've seen how they've hit that goal. They also announced that WOW was a game intended to make casual players happy, before adding in that "grade-on-a-curve" honor system that casual players can't possibly excel at. Not that I have anything against Blizzard, but considering what's happened in the past, I would wait to get excited until it actually does happen. In fact... that applies to pretty much all of these press releases.

Re:We've Heard This Before

[rob1980]

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.

Re:We've Heard This Before

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but my point is that they've been selling WOW as "the MMO for the casual player" since it opened, while at the same time modifying the game to be *less* friendly to the casual player. (Adding in the honor system, adding in 40-man insane-hard raids, etc.) It's great that they're finally getting around to fixing that, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of WOW's press releases in the past have been almost-lies.

BTW, I don't consider "25-man" good enough. IMO, they should add a new 5-man and 10-man for every 15 levels or so. All the new instances are level 60 instances, and that's not fair to people who are just starting-- they deserve new content too.

Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters. When you enter with your group, the instance would create monsters designed to give you at least a little challenge. (This scheme works in Oblivion; why not put it in an MMO?) That would make it so when you're level 60, you can run any instance in the game and have a good time.

Re:We've Heard This Before

[another_fanboy]

Also IMO, they should add in an auto-level system so that the game can, say, run Deadmines as a higher level dungeon by bumping up the levels of all the monsters.

This would also prevent higher-level players from farming in lower-level dungeons.

-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

Remember bnetd, boycott Blizzard/Vivendi.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[CrazyJim1]

I think the Slashdot community was/is wrong with bnetd. Bnetd allowed circumvention of Blizzard's copy protection and thats about all it did. I played on it when I couldn't get into betas of various Blizzard games, but I eventually bought the legit game in the store. If Bnetd was not shutdown, it could have spawned to support millions of players. That is to say, millions of people playing without first paying for a copy of the game.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

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.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[base3]

Just because you happened to use it to avoid paying for the game doesn't mean that the people who were getting together on their own servers using the software they paid for were all committing copyright infringement. Blizzard used an unconstitutional law to persecute an open source project, and they will never see another dime from me. Unfortunately, there are plenty of sheep unwilling to vote against their war on freedom with their wallets.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[egburr]

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.

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:-1, DMCA-wielding jackbooted thugs.

[toddestan]

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.

Wow churn

[BrookHarty]

I've been playing since beta, and checking the stats on my server, the number of total online players have been going down hill for the last year.

Many of the large guilds are gone, they dont play as much, and people just pop on to talk to friends.

I cant wait until the expansion when they disconnect honor/rank from pvp'ing and allow smaller groups for instances. Non-instance pvp, The casual player suffers from wow's (l33t guild) attitude.

I think many people are just paying but not playing, soon people will finally just cancel the accounts.

Slow news day

[LargeWu]

It's a meta-announcement.

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

Ob. Futurama Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Hermes: Sweet gorilla of Manila! A letter from the Central Bureaucracy!

[Hermes takes a piece of paper out of the red tube.] Attention, Hermes Conrad: You are about to receive a letter from the Central Bureaucracy.

[Another red tube appears and Hermes takes a piece of paper out of.] My God! It's from the Central Bureaucracy!

Obligatory Penny Arcade

[Zinnian]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/06/16

Re:World of....

[Blakey Rat]

Ooo, I want to play as a Zergling rogue!

Re:If they don't release on the Wii, I won't play

[freshman_a]

Sorry, Blizzard, I loved Starcraft I and II, Diablo I and II, but ..

So... you loved their PC games, including one that never existed (perhaps you mean StarCraft: Brood Wars, not Starcraft II?), but you will only buy the game they have yet to announce if they release it on a system that has yet to be released and you have yet to actually play?

Please tell me there is some sort of sarcasm or humor that I'm missing...

Blizzard

[Blaaguuu]

1. Make Extremely Adictive Game. 2. Charge Monthly Fee. 3. Profit. 4. Make Millions of Already Addicted Players Buy Additional Content. 5. Buy Solid Gold Yacht.