The news you’ve all been waiting for (hopefully) has finally arrived! Blizzard has finally announced the release date for Wrath of the Lich King! They’ve also announced that there will indeed be a Collector’s Edition, and pricing information for both versions of the expansion!

The regular version of Wrath will run you $40 USD, and the collector’s edition will cost $70 USD.

What makes the collector’s edition (shown here) so special? Check it out:

* World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King on DVD-ROM.
* The Art of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, a 208-page book featuring never-before-seen images from the game.
* An exclusive in-game pet: Frosty, the baby frost wyrm.
* A behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, the Wrath of the Lich King intro cinematic with director’s commentary, and more.
* The official soundtrack CD, containing 21 epic tracks from the game, along with exclusive bonus tracks.
* A mouse pad featuring a map of the newly opened continent of Northrend.
* Two World of Warcraft Trading Card Game March of the Legion™ starter decks, along with two exclusive cards available only in the Collector’s Edition.

I’ll certainly be trying to get the collector’s edition, but the regular edition is already available for pre-order at a number of online retailers if you want to stake your claim early! Head over to the official site for details!

(image courtesy of MMO Champion)

I have a hard enough time pulling myself away from my computer (and of course, subsequently from WoW) to go to work, much less play Guitar Hero, but I think the trip to the living room just got a little easier. Activision (who merged with Blizzard back in December of 2007) announced in a press release today that Guitar Hero III players can grab the epic ballad I Am Murloc by Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain as a free download from the XBox LIVE Marketplace if you’re rocking out on the XBox 360, and from the PlayStation Store if you jam on the PS3.

Never heard of it? Check out the video!

The song will be available starting tomorrow, and was released in conjunction with the Blizzard Entertainment WorldWide Invitational in Paris scheduled for this weekend. It makes sense that Activision and Blizzard are trying to do a little mingling of two of their most popular properties, and I wish them both all the best, but I can’t help but take this as a reminder that we got jilted out of a Bard Hero Class. I mean, I know it was an April Fool’s joke, but come on!

Wowhead has been bought by Gold Sellers IGE for a reported $1 million USD
Lots of reports about it here, here,and here.

Sure it’s a really nice thing for Blizzard to do but people on the PvP servers are going to feel really creepy about ganking quest givers now.

Is it just me, or does the current April Fools “joke” fit just well into that corporate “our users are losers” Blizzard climate of late? Guess 9 million customers are rarely contributory to corporate humility, but this time… So far, Blizz’ reaction to much any legitimate question lately and complaint has been a condescending “QQ more, nub”. Let’s see…

Users: Blizz, please fix Druid range bug.

Blizz: QQ more, lrn2notbecat

or..

Users: Blizz, please fix Mage blink bug

Blizz: QQ more, lrn2notblink

and then, there’s…

Users: Blizz, the Druid “fix” is a bad nerf,
itemization is not up to par with other classes and will lead to a
situation as pre-2.0 come Karazhan.

Blizz: QQ more, nublet, Durid is b 4 heelz.

and, finally, today:

Users: Blizz, why did you disable cross-faction inspects and then introduce the Armory, which produces well-formed XML which can be easily downloaded and - using a 24 line Ruby script - turned into a feed for an addon which basically pre-loads all Arena teams in my Battlegroup and lets me “inspect” them in-game?

Blizz: Here’s a tinfoil hat, troll. Shed more tears, will ya?

… to wit, the “tinfoil hat” is made from “troll tears” and allows users to “see the truth”, which they “can not handle”.

In short, maybe I am overreacting. But to brand everyone who had issues with the Armory as a “crying troll” and prescribe a “tinfoil hat”, basically dismissing all concerns about the Armory, is … well … not very customer-oriented corporate. Or, maybe, Joi will have to rewrite his “Wisdom of Rob Pardo” and rename it “Lessons why it’s bad to hire a bunch of untrained Everquest no-life raiders to define your corporate culture, especially if some of them were the worst trolls and tear-shedding server-crashers in EQ history themselves”.

It looks like this weekend Blizzard went on another broad sweeping account closure fest but perhaps they are now reaching a bit too far? According to this penalty level diagram there are several different forms of punishment you can receive if you are found to be breaking the rules which in and of itself makes a lot of sense. Mess up, get a warning. Break a bit of a bigger rule get suspended. All the way up to having your account canceled. According to this page account closure is “very rare” but since it has happened to more than one person I know on Eitrigg in the past few days, I’m wondering if they are just skipping the other levels and jumping right to that. The people I know were not involved with any kind of hacking or exploits, and in these cases the problem seem to sit firmly in this rule:

This category applies to players who have:

* Accessed an account reported as compromised and are not the registered user of said account.
* Knowingly or unknowingly received items/gold from a compromised account.

If a player is found to have participated in one of these acts, he/she may:

* Have the transferred items/gold removed from the account.
* Receive an account penalty up to and including account closure if the registered user of the account perpetrated the compromise.

Emphasis mine. So are you following this? If you receive something in game from another player, without any knowledge of who that player is or what they are doing you can have your account completely shut down without a single warning. Ever buy anything listed on the trade channel rather than in the AH? Seems like that is enough for a cancellation at this point. This seems extremely heavy handed to me.

This week has been a real rough one over on Eitrigg. First, there was the adventure of the missing NPCs on Wednesday night. Then there were the repeated crashes of Kalimdor, and then of Azeroth, throughout the week, and now, right as we’re going in to try Hakkar again, the server goes down like a cheap hooker: nasty and full of teeth.

So, I’m over on Khadgar, dealing damage with my dwarf paladin, who’s up to a whole level 6, while I’m waiting for Eitrigg to sort out its issues. The problem here is that Eitrigg has several guilds full of really productive, high-profile advocates for the game, but you are quiet when it comes to our badly broken server, we get very frustrated.

Fix it. Before I roll a gnome.

Who doesn’t know Alamo? He taught the Durid (if you believe this is a typo I implore you to read the thread while it still exists) how 2 b bare, how 2 be heelz, and how 2 ninnervate. Along with Kralnor and few others, he is part of the World of Warcraft player lore, the ones who did something funny, insightful, or powerful enough to be remembered in perpetuity.

Some get this through community. Others through Blizzard’s own mechanisms, such as the “green” posters, many of which most of us might have a hard time naming.

Alamo used to be stickied on the Druid forums. All across the realms “drink a pot, nub” became the rallying cry of Druids unwilling to spec into restoration, “bare durid is 4 tank, lol” used to be the /say command triggered by SwiftShift. In a nutshell it was good, well mannered, well natured, and clean fun.

Then something happened. The new forums came and stickies became rare. The Druid community, unwilling to lose Alamo, see him - who is something of an idol of the class - go the way of all old threads, asked for stickies and came a-bumping. In a class forum where daily discoveries of more nerfs to the Druid class are about as prevalent as blue postings are absent (other than the one where Drysc claimed that ‘potions and procs in feral forms [...] are a bug’, something kinda contradicted by the fact that those acts had custom tailored animations and items received the “Classes: Druid” tag), Alamo brought a smile to the faces of many.

Along comes Coreiel (forum signature: “What I do, I don’t do for you”, good one for a member of the customer service department). A bona fide blue post, a real CM, someone to ask and answer the many questions and concerns Druids seem to have these days. The news? Alamo will not be stickied. Asking for Alamo to be stickied will result in a temporary ban of the poster from the forums. Responding and questioning the decision will lead to a … permanent ban.

Also banned, those who voiced the common “Tom Chilton hates Druid’s” (sic!) phrase. Some posters were perma-banned up three times (on different accounts) asking for clarification on Druid issues, others simply had their threads deleted.

Blizzard’s customer facing side exhibits more and more signs of the god complex native to monopolies and large scale operations. To counter the most prevalent argument, the fact that Blizzard only closed “whiner” threads and derogatory ASCII art, an example: One of the most informative mathematical analysis of DPS scaling, complete with recommendations what to work towards and how to overcome some weaknesses and bugs was deleted after the original author suggested one of the bugs had been known since patch 1.5.

A bunch of insulting and whiny children? Or a class with serious concerns, hoping for “blue” clarification and receiving the death sentence for one of its only light hearted legendary threads, disappointed in the fact that Blizzard communication only happens to take away?

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?

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.