WoW’s latest update isn’t so much well-rounded as rotund, bulging with new, tangible additions to the game. If PvP is your poison, you’ll be pleased to hear that 5.3 heralds the arrival of a new Battleground in Deepwind Gorge, as well as a new arena in The Tiger’s Peak. If not, you’ve four new scenarios to choose from, all available at the new Heroic difficulty - though you’ll need a pre-made group to weather those particularly vicious storms.
Read and Comment
Blizzard tend to spend weeks in consultation with the StarCraft 2 community over even the smallest alteration to the curvature of an alien butterfly’s wings, mindful of the earthquakes it could cause internationally - especially as the StarCraft World Championship Series 2013 gets underway.
Emboldened by a week’s worth of testing, examining ladder stats, watching tournament matches and gathering feedback from pros, however, the dev team is now ready to tweak a single number in the game’s exquisite battle equation. Spore Crawler damage has been increased from 15 + 15 when fighting biological enemies to 15 + 30.
Read and Comment
‘Self-found’ is the Diablo community’s esoteric term for a philosophy of play we were all very familiar with before the Auction House: making it through the campaign without recourse to online selling or buying of gear. It’s become something of an old school phenomenon of late, and it was only a matter of time before somebody like popular streamer Archon put the question to Blizzard: What are the chances of us seeing an officially-sanctioned self-found mode in-game in the future?
Read and Comment
Gosh, that’s a mouthful. The StarCraft 2 World Championship Series, Blizzard’s first ever hash at a unified annual tournament, has been ticking over for about a month and a half now. Victories have been hard-won, dreams crushed, and it's about time for the regional finals. They begin next week.
Read and Comment
Spotlight
?Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Blizzard have brought the North American Diablo 3 auction house back online following a full audit of transactions carried out since the 1.0.8 patch was released earlier this week. The patch introduced a gold duplicating bug which saw some players generating billions of free gold.
Blizzard opted to perform an audit instead of a server rollback as they “didn't like the idea of punishing [the majority of players] for the bad behavior of a few people".
Read and Comment
Yesterday, we learned that World of Warcraft’s subscriber numbers are falling. Again. At its peak, World of Warcraft reached over 12 million subscribers; today, that number is at 8.3 million, and Activision and Blizzard expect subscriber numbers to decrease further.
What’s going on? Why are people quitting WoW, and can Blizzard halt the decline?
Read and Comment
World of Warcraft has seen a significant dip in subscriptions over the last three months. Activision have reported a 1.3 million decline in the financial quarter ending March 31, leaving Blizzard’s MMO with a still-enviable subscriber base of 8.3 million.
Read and Comment
Diablo’s 1.0.8 patch went live yesterday, implementing some of the changes Blizzard have mused aloud about in recent weeks - magic and gold find bonuses when playing co-op, for instance, and notifications in multiplayer for Elite monster encounters. But it also introduced something entirely unexpected - a gold duping bug that saw some players acquire billions in a matter of hours. Blizzard promptly shut down the Diablo auction house in response, and have already plugged the leak - but refused player calls for a global rollback.
Read and Comment
What are eSports tournaments for? If you’re a fan, you’re looking for drama, suspense, and passion. Tournaments have to be more than just demonstrations of skill.
Two examples: over the weekend at Dreamhack, Sweden’s mercurial Protoss, NaNiwa, faced off against Brood War legend Jaedong in front of a delirious home crowd. The combination of star power, a close series, and the crowd’s fever-pitch excitement made it an unforgettable series.
Meanwhile, the League of Legends Championship Series is about narrative; about the long game. The story of this weekend wasn’t the prize pool, or the possibility of relegation. It was the astonishing twists and upsets that came from young teams that have finally come into their own.
The success of both Dreamhack and the LCS stand in sharp contrast to the stumbles of Blizzard’s Starcraft 2 World Championship Series.
Read and Comment
World-famous guild Exodus have decided to drop out of World of Warcraft’s 25-man hardcore raiding race. In a farewell post, Guild member Killars said that the “game isn’t to blame", but rather “the raiding community".
Read and Comment
Blizzard have been plugging away at ways to make Diablo 3 a more invigorating experience without resorting to primary colours. They’ve done their best for co-op, and have now turned their attention to legendary items, with the aim of making every drop something to write home about.
Read and Comment
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has been in the spotlight since being announced at PAX East back in March. It’s goal is simple: make collective card games as easy to understand as they are fun to play. Blizzard have been teasing us with tidbits of the game over the last month; here we have another shoutcasted duel between a Warrior and a Paladin.
Read and Comment
Thanks to WoW 5.3, the XP chasm between level 85 and 90 is set to become smaller than it’s ever been - and all without recourse to shaman mob farming on the Townlong Steppes, or eBay.
Read and Comment
In homage to the work of J.J. Abrams, Blizzard are introducing a new craftable pet for anyone trained in the engineer profession: the Bad Robot mascot. If you watched Lost, Star Trek, or any other project Abrams had a major part in, you’re likely already familiar with the little guy. If not, I’ve included the logo video below (I’m nice like that).
Read and Comment
When WoW’s lattermost expansion launched, you might remember it was Nightelf Druid Fs who first scaled the dizzy Pandarian heights of level 90. Hours later, however, she was sent packing by Blizzard amid accusations of cheating, and her account was reset to level 87.
Well. Nearly seven months on, Blizzard’s Ent Council have changed their minds.
Read and Comment
Blizzards big reveal at PAX East was Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a free-to-play collectible card game set within the World of Warcraft universe. We got kind of a hands-on with Hearthstone when we sent Rob to PAX East. He seems to like it.
Now you can see why: in this video of an example duel, between the renowned mage Jaina Proudmoore and the legendary shaman Thrall. Spoiler: someone loses.
Read and Comment
Blizzard are ploughing ahead with preparations for their recently-announced World Championship Series. In lieu of a previous season from which to pull qualifying players, the Irvine monolith have cherry-picked 24 likely suspects each from America, Europe, and Korea to take part in the upcoming Premier League.
Read and Comment
World of Warcraft’s 5.3 patch is going to be doing more than just giving spectacles to all the game’s pets, it’s also going to make troubleshooting a whole bunch easier: Blizzard are working on a new in-game web browser that will allow you to search through their bug database, seeking out support threads relevant to your problem.
Read and Comment
Forgive the grave accent, but I trust you’ll find the occasion warrants it. As reward for an as-yet unknown achievement related to newly-announced Blizzard CCG Hearthstone - most likely purchasing a card pack during the upcoming beta - World of Warcraft players will become the beneficiaries of flying, flaming nags.
Read and Comment
Blizzard last week made the frank admission that multiplayer Diablo 3 can “often feel not worth the effort". “Even if you enjoy playing with your friends, it can often feel easier and more efficient to play solo," said Wyatt Cheng.
Patch 1.0.8 is released on the Public Test Realm today. It sees the dev team take a few small steps in the direction of better playing in company and, in lieu of the more significant redesigns planned, one big leap towards improving the rewards for doing so.
Read and Comment
Pages
