World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million

Have you ever heard the phrase; "television killed the radio star"? Or maybe this one; "The Burning Crusade killed World of Warcraft!". While television may have killed the radio star, The Burning Crusade has not killed World of Warcraft. In fact, World of Warcraft has grown: to nine million subscribers.

From all evidence, the growth is coming from the western market, contrary to what many MMO bloggers have been posting. The Burning Crusade has not launched in China yet, where WoW pulls in a few million of the current total user base! The ten million mark is not that far off, and TBC's launch in China may just be the spur to get it there. I firmly believe, and have for some time, that World of Warcraft will hit ten million by year's end.

This falls in line with what I've been reading and seeing lately. A lot of casual gamers are completely digging the extra ten levels of content, new zones, extended professions, and more accessible end-game content. Most raiders seem to have fallen off the horse as their "perfect" 40-man guilds disintegrated upon TBC's launch. It has been a hard road for them as they restructure, regroup, and realign for the 10 and 25 man content.

So, wouldn't raiders quitting in frustration decrease the numbers? No, because raiders make up a very tiny minority (just shy of 2%) of players. Casual and core gamers have and will continue to make up WoW's majority. Building the game around them has once again proven to be successful. It is a pleasure to read some of the reports from friends that have returned to WoW.

Actually, the more I read about The Burning Crusade, the more I want to play it. And I will play it. I have some time off coming up and I plan to give the TBC 10-day free trial a whirl.

Dear Shadowbane

Dear Shadowbane,

You suck.

I pondered over the last week how to write this letter, but nothing can say it better than those two simple words. You have peaked my interest for over a decade and you never once managed to satisfy my curiosity.

I bought your box, your expansions, and resubscribed my accounts many times. Now you are free, and you still suck. You lag, you crash, and worst of all, you still force people to level. Would it be so difficult to remove your barely working PvE content in favor of an instant level 75 system? No, I thought not. That would require thought and consideration for me, the player.

I've tried to make this work. I've spent restless days trying to rip my eyes out as another bug, lag spike, or plain bad game mechanic sucked another death out of my avatar. All in the vain hope that I would some day get to the "end game" and finally get the chance to PK some newbs. Alas, I never made it.

I'm done and I'm not coming back. Once again Shadowbane, you suck!

Yours truly,

Heartless_

Dreamblade: Organized Play Canceled

It is a sad day for any fans of the Dreamblade CMG from Wizards of the Coast. WotC has decided to cancel the 1k and 10k tournaments and other mainstream Organized Play aspects. Here is the Dear John letter:

Dear Dreamblade Players:

As you prepare your warbands for Augusts’ Dreamblade 50K championship, many of you may be wondering about the future of Dreamblade Organized Play (OP).

When we designed this game, we envisioned highly competitive organized play as one of the key things that makes the game great, and we provided robust organized play with Dreamblade. Despite our best efforts however, we didn’t get enough tournament players, and we can’t continue supporting the game with the same depth of OP that we’ve offered in the past. As a result, we will no longer be supporting the 1K and 10K events. The August 50K event will continue as scheduled, as will Edge Tournaments. We love this game and we know you do too. It’s a painful change but a necessary one.

Night Fusion, Dreamblade’s fifth set, releases in September and promises to be our most exciting set to date. It includes a number of new features that we have been reserving for Dreamblade’s second year. The success of Night Fusion will be very telling for Dreamblade as we gauge demand for the future. We hope fans come out in droves to support it!

Thank you for your passionate support of Dreamblade and your patience during this time. We hope to have the opportunity to continue to bring you this innovative and revolutionary game experience for some time to come.

Does this spell the end for Dreamblade? Not yet. Local Edge tournaments will still be supported, but historically they have been hard to maintain. The prizes for Edge events are sub par. Plus Edge events are easily ruined by veteran players playing top tier warbands forcing newer players to "buy up" or "ship out".

This is not a surprising announcement, but it is a sad one. Dreamblade is a great game that only suffers from a fairly high price point and low player population.

Grimwell Interview

Allakhazam has an interview with Grimwell, the Everquest 2 Community Manager. I just wanted to quote a couple answers he gave:

Allakhazam: You worked at and ran fan sites for some years before signing on with SOE. What's it like to be on the other end of the journalistic "mic?"

Grimwell: It's a lot easier to get into tradeshows and conferences, that's for sure! I love being on the 'other side of the mic' mostly because I have not forgotten what it is like to work so hard on a fansite. Everyone who has a fansite and works on it is doing so out of passion. Yes, there are those who are lucky enough to also draw a paycheck from it, but there is also a lot of passion.

I find that my position allows me not to just remember what it was like, but also to try to provide things that I always wished the game companies would do for and with fansites. That's an advantage because it makes it very easy to know exactly why a particular site is asking for specific information on a Game Update, or an interview, or a screen shot, or any other resource for their site. They just want to do a good job covering the game.

Allakhazam: Do you feel like your background working on fansites gives you a unique perspective as the Community Manager in contrast to your predecessors?

Grimwell: It definitely works in terms of my relationship with the fansites, but it's not something I can rest my hat on and then relax. The fansites are constantly evolving and needing new and different things to meet their goals. Plus, there is a lot to being a Community Manager that working on fansites does not prepare you for. There is a huge difference between being able to say "Wouldn't it be cool if?" or "If I was ever working on a game I'd…" and being on the other side of the coin and realizing just how wide of an impact even a small design change can have.

Go ahead and read the rest.

World of Warcraft: Possible PvP Changes?

Blue poster, Nethaera, commented on the official World of Warcraft forums that there are possible PvP changes in the pipeline.

We do have plans to add more battlegrounds in the future. How many, I couldn't answer for you at this time.

There is a method to the madness, however. Mostly, it has to do with making sure there is a healthy population of people to take part in the battlegrounds. If we have too many battlegrounds, the population will thin out and queues will go up. Where Arenas are quick battles that don't need a lot of time commitment (based on limiting how many games a team may choose to play beyond the minimum), battlegrounds tend to take a bit more time and have no real downside for playing them almost exclusively if people choose to.

We have more plans in the future in general for PvP though nothing more concrete that I can share with you right now. It's common knowledge that an expansion is in the works. More on the details will come in time as to what all will be included in it.

It is interesting how the last paragraph is worded. The tidbit about the expansion is mentioned after the part about possible general PvP changes. Could this mean that the next expansion will focus more heavily on the Alliance vs. Horde battle? It may just be wild speculation, but I don't think Blizzard wants to get tagged as "lazy" by just producing another expansion featuring just ten levels of content.

However, Blizzard usually sticks to what they do best and rarely stray from the beaten path. On top of this, it does not make much sense to release a PvP expansion when so many players enjoy WoW's casual quest based leveling.

Hopefully Blizzard will be a little quicker releasing the next expansion. Even though I haven't touched The Burning Crusade yet, I still want to see what Blizzard has in store for everyone.