Tom Chilton (also known as Kalgan or Evocare) might feel a little bit of deja vu these days. Maybe it’s just the time of year, the weather, or the music they play on the radio on his way to work, but more likely it’s an uneasy feeling that something that’s dismissed internally might have repercussions externally.

February 28, 2003, is a day to remember. That very day Ultima Online died. First it was just a more or less subdued roar, then a cry, and then … the once mighty empire of Electronic Arts’ leading MMORP came a-crashing down. Others took its place, players moved into Asheron’s Call and EQ only to be absorbed by World of Warcraft. Such is the nature of migrating societies, such is the course of the entertainment industry.

If today feels familiar to Tom Chilton, it is very likely because of his latest project, The Burning Crusade.
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In Probably the most slap-dash article ever written on the topic, The Toronto Star has once again confused the World of Warcraft with a dating site.
WTF? I mean really, if you are going to do an article on WoW at least have the decency to play the game for more than 15 minutes before making sweeping generalizations or delarations about “What a world we’ve built for ourselves!”.
And why approach it from the perspective of an online singles bar?

You can read the article yourself, (It took me several runs at it to make it through), but you would think that with a subject like the largest online game ever created; you could do better.

Lifted from Slashdot earlier today:

“Many Cedega (formerly WINEX) users claim to have been mistakenly caught up in a security sweep of the U.S. game servers performed by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Game Master (GM) staff. Affected users received the same strongly-worded ‘Notice of Account Closure’ email messages that true bot users did, in which they were accused of the ‘Use of Third Party Automation Software.’ While diagnosis of this event continues early speculation points to Blizzard’s use of the Warden anti-cheating spyware application that is bundled with World of Warcraft, and the odd things that may have been produced by it when it was run via Cedega. Emails to World of Warcraft’s Account Administration staff continue to go unanswered while the list of affected people continues to grow.”

Cedega is a popular VM for Wow gamers on the Linux platform. In their effort to ban accounts using bots, it seems Blizzard is being a little overzealous. It also seems the debate is now shifting focus to whether or not playing on Linux is *against* the TOS. Doe anyone here play on Linux?

Take that Second Life! Kalevipoeg of We Know / Eitrigg (AKA Ross Mayfield CEO of SocialText) just announced that SocialText will be holding a press conference inside the World of Warcraft. Of course there are some rules you have to abide by if you plan to attend:

• Questions will only be taken from journalists in PvP mode
• We have developed means of determining if you are a Chinese Gold Farmer, so do not outsource your participation
• Keep your armor on, do not /dance unless you are an orc, use of other emotes are encouraged

Anyone want to start guessing how long until the lawyers at Blizzard get World of Warcraft Island yanked from the internets? Note to game developers: always a better idea to come up with your own name for things. ALWAYS.

Here’s a few screenshots of visuals around Outland-

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