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#worldofwarcraft Remember that Mists of Pandaria beta test I told you all about yesterday? My invite came last night, and this morning I got a chance to create my first female Pandaren Monk. Watch her come to life before your very eyes! More »

#worldofwarcraft Blizzard is gearing up for the beta test of World of Warcraft's next expansion, so it's time to opt-in or be left out. Or you could just purchase a World of Warcraft annual pass for guaranteed beta access and a free copy of Diablo III. More »

Blizzard likes betas. I’ve never known a company to be quite so willing to let people prod at their work-in-progress game stuff. It’s almost as if they get something out of it in return! My theory is while you play, they take the vast amounts of data that you generate and output it as raw code. That code is then tinted green and displayed on a black background and just continues to scroll day and night. When Blizzard’s monitors have been on too long with no interference from the user, the code is then displayed. Internally I believe this to be called a “Matrix Screen Saver”. So a beta to their upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria™ was inevitable, because after Diablo III’s launch everyone at Blizzard will be taking some much needed foot-on-table time, and those screens will need looking after. And if you’d like to hop into the Pandaria beta, there are a few instructions for you to follow.(more…)

#worldofwarcraft Last October, Blizzard announced their newest World of Warcraft expansion, The Mists of Pandaria. One of the major selling points for the expansion is a new player character race: panda-bear people called Pandaren. More »

#blizzard With the long-awaited Diablo III due out in May some 12 years after the release of Diablo II, we decided to take a look back at the release history of the company that puts out a new game "When it's done." More »

#toys In October, Sideshow will be releasing this enormous statue of World of Warcraft's Arthas, better known to everyone who doesn't play World of Warcraft as The Lich King. More »

#halloffame The MMO Hall of Fame was created to recognize massively multiplayer online games from 1996 on up for bringing "years of excitement to millions of fans". Which games made it into the inaugural class of 2012? More »

#worldofwarcraft A number of recent research studies conducted on games and gamers have found a generally positive trend in the effect that gaming has on players' brains, the Wall Street Journal Reports. Not only is World of Warcraft good for senior citizens brain function, it's good for a lot of other groups as well. More »

I've abandoned my level 36 Dwarf rogue!

You may have heard about World of Warcraft's recent drop in subscribers. Once known as the world's most ubiquitous massively multiplayer online role-playing game (hell, it still pretty much is), the game has lost a decent number of players in the last fiscal year or so, though there are still something like 10 million of them currently active.

Unsurprisingly, Blizzard is not interested in having players leave WoW. Instead, the publisher is exclusively interested in making those players who have dropped out come back. And they're removing quite a few barriers to entry in order to make it happen.

Today the publisher announced the new Scroll of Resurrection, a deeply nefarious device existing players can unleash on so-called "friends" who have abandoned the battle for Azeroth like Daniel Plainview abandoned his child. Should the wayward player happen to accept the aforementioned scroll, they'll be able to jump back into the game with the following perks:

A single character immediately boosted all the way to level 80A FREE upgrade to Cataclysm (which means that someone who hasn’t played since the original release would receive all of the game’s additional content for free, including the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions.)An optional FREE character move and faction change (specifically to the inviter’s realm and faction.)7 FREE days of game time, available immediatelyThat's all well and good for the former turncoat who saw the error of their ways and came crawling back because they got a bunch of free stuff, but what of the loyal player who sent the scroll? What reward awaits them for their distribution of email fliers to their former guildmates? They will be getting free mounts. Provided the newly scrolled friend renews and pays for at least 30 days of play, Alliance players will receive a free Spectral Gryphon, while Horde characters get a free Spectral Wind Rider.All of this does, of course, hinge on former players having friends who still play World of Warcraft. Blizzard isn't just sending these things out all willy-nilly. Also, this is a limited time offer, so if you are planning on sending out a scroll, head over on to Blizzard's official page for this whole promotion and get crackin'.

#worldofwarcraft What does it take to lure a lapsed player back to World of Warcraft? With subscription numbers slowly-but-surely dropping, Blizzard launches the new Scroll of Resurrection program, granting returning players a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion and an instant jump to level 80 — they just need to be asked. More »

And I really did just reference a song by banal, atonal post-Britpop cash-ins Embrace. I should be banned from the internet. The point is that World of Warcraft, whose slow subscriber decline can no longer be written off as a mere blip on its spotless record (though similarly, having 10 million current subscribers is still a titanic matter), has just made a big, bold play to lure lapsed subscribers back to the venerable world of Azeroth. Just introduced is the Scroll of Resurrection, which must be ‘cast’ by existing players on the accounts of lapsed chums. Once done, the returning player will receive seven days of free game time, an upgrade to all the WoW expansions (if they don’t have them already), a free realm transfer if they want it, and the option to auto-boost one character all the way to level 80. Bloody hell.

So, in one fell swoop you get to shortcut a bunch of money and a bunch of levelling. And to reattach yourself to the Warcraft-teat, of course.(more…)

World of Warcraft creator Blizzard will make a big announcement about its popular MMORPG in two weeks, the website BlizzPlanet reports. They've dug up an image that seems to hint at some sort of cross-faction gameplay reveal. [BlizzPlanet] More »

#worldofwarcraft Reader Clay McCay sends us this image of a tattoo he recently had finished. And yes, that is a giant Worgen covering his entire back. More »

It’s boom and bust in the world of The World of Warcraft. With subscriber numbers in the last quarter down to 10.2 million, from 12 million in 2010, VentureBeat reports that Blizzard will cut around 12 percent of its workforce, 600 staff. According to the company, the majority of staff affected are likely to be in customer service and sales roles, with only around 60 development roles being cut. Blizzard says its release and development schedules will be unchanged.

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In a surprising statement released today, Blizzard has announced that 600 jobs within the company's infrastructure have been eliminated. According to the statement, 90% of those jobs were positions not directly tied to the development of the company's games.

Reportedly, the World of Warcraft development team is wholly unaffected by these layoffs.

Where, exactly, those jobs come from then is not entirely clear. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime is quoted in the release as saying "as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company," but makes no mention of what portions of the company's infrastructure will be affected by these layoffs. In fact, the only specific mention the release makes is that the World of Warcraft team is entirely unaffected by it.

The release also mentions that Blizzard's upcoming publishing schedule won't be affected by these layoffs, which is good news for those eagerly awaiting the publisher's next Diablo III delay announcement.

Still, with such an emphasis on the fact that so few of these jobs are directly tied to development, one can't help but wonder where, precisely, these cuts are coming from. Vox Games cites a source claiming that most of it came from the company's customer service department, which seems plausible. Still, Blizzard isn't saying one way or the other.

Regardless of who specifically was affected, we wish the best of luck to all those hit by the layoffs.

#blizzard Blizzard, the development studio behind the Diablo, StarCraft, and Warcraft franchises, has laid off 600 employees, it said today in a press release. More »

Blizzard has laid off 600 employees, 90 percent of whom are not involved in game development, a statement from Activision Blizzard reads. The cuts do not impact the World of Warcraft development team, the publisher was quick to assure, and its development and publishing schedules will not be affected.

"As Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company," Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, said. "Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier."

In the same statement, Blizzard announced that it is "recruiting and looking to hire qualified developers for a number of open positions."

Blizzard announced today that it's laying off a great number of employees. In a press release from the company, CEO Mike Morhaime had the following to say: Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company...

#worldofwarcraft For many years, researchers have conducted various studies on the effects games and play can have on the aging brain. More »

This video, released today by British site Zoomin.TV, shows us a side-by-side look at the world of recently-released Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and popular online game World of Warcraft. The two of them do seem to share some similarities when stacked up like this — some of the forests, deserts, and giant tree ramps (!) have a lot in common. More »

#arevideogamesevil? With every new day comes a new excuse for nasty people to crucify video games. This time it's a study by researchers at Brigham Young University, as reported by U.S. News in a story today titled "Spouses Being Pushed Aside For Video Games" that claims gaming is ruining marriages. More »

#speakuponkotaku Commenter Kinecticdamage tries to shock massively multiplayer online game developers out of their World of Warcraft-fueled haze and on track to create something truly unique and beautiful in today's Speak Up on Kotaku. More »

For years, WoW had a monopoly on the MMO market, so why not celebrate that with a board game? Blizzard Entertainment and USAopoly will launch Monopoly: World of Warcraft and Risk: StarCraft before year's end. A Facebook vote will determine what tokens make it into the final version of the Azeroth real estate simulator, which will retail for $39.95 "in specialty stores across North America."

Risk: Starcraft will include 290 custom playing pieces, featuring the Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions, along with six unique heroes. It rushes into specialty stores in North America this summer for $49.45.

For those looking to diversify their Risk portfolio, there are also Metal Gear Solid and Halo adaptations of the game about global conquest. Sadly, the best Monopoly jobs we've seen over the years are custom one-off crafts honoring Mass Effect and Fallout.

#boardgames Publisher Blizzard is partnering with Hasbro's USAopoly to release World of Warcraft Monopoly and StarCraft Risk, it said today. So now you can take breaks from your World of Warcraft and StarCraft sessions to play World of Warcraft and StarCraft. More »

#pullquote Not much, apparently, at least not in December. Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime was only able to give a vague answer to the question presented during the Q&A portion of today's Activision Blizzard financial results call, but that vagueness speaks volumes. More »

#worldofwarcraft Yesterday we posted an interview with former America's Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry, in which she tried to sell Stephen Totilo on her new pheromone fragrance Erox. In the end, though, we mainly talked about armpits. More »

We all have goals in life -- some of us work for our families, some seek money and fame, and some work for a greater good. Minecraft forum user Rumsey's chosen path is to recreate the entire World of Warcraft inside the indie sandbox hit, Minecraft. And as you can see above, he's doing pretty well -- the entire continent of Kalimdor (including the new zones from the Cataclysm expansion) is almost done, and he's well on his way to doing the rest, including all of the instances and dungeons.

Rumsey came up with some custom software to put it all together, which basically translates the current maps of WoW over to the measurements of Minecraft blocks. Rumsey is trying to keep Minecraft's "1 yard to 1 block" ratio, though that means he has to balance WoW's detail with Minecraft's inherent blockiness (and Minecraft's height limit of 128 blocks has required mods to make some of WoW's tallest features work). Still, what's been created so far is certainly recognizable as Azeroth.

Now if we can only get StarCraft, Crafting Mama, CrimeCraft, GemCraft, and macaroni and cheese in this project somehow.

#blizzcon Last month Blizzard announced that it's annual fan convention would be skipping a year, returning in 2012 so the developer can focus on things like developing games. Some fans took this well. The Elysiam World of Warcraft guild on the U.S. Shadowmoon server took to song. More »

#worldofwarcraft While doctors and psychologists continue to debate whether or not such a thing as online video game addiction exist, those of us that have been through it continue to chronicle our tales. Anthony Rosner's short film IRL demonstrates what happens when World of Warcraft becomes your life. More »

#worldofwarcraft More than 350 retired server blades—the physical manifestations of World of Warcraft's virtual realms—are being auctioned off by Blizzard, which will donate the proceeds to the renowned St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. More »