Apparently, several Blizzcon live stream listeners overhead a private conversation between Kat Hunter and Geoff Keighley. They weren't aware that their mics were still on, and they were discussing what now is considered a Warcraft IV leak.

This just comes one day after they were talking about how they were surprised there were no leaks. :) It looks like the audio has been cut out (so it wasn't just a rehearsal of something they were going to say) from the stream if you try to rewind now, but I'm hunting around to see if anyone had recorded it.

Here are some pieces of what was discussed:

* Kat Hunter was singing and cursing about her ear piece.
* Kat complaining about Metzen, he was pissed at her for leaking Warcraft 4.

Geoff: "I can't believe you leaked Warcraft 4."
Geoff: "Chris Metzen is pissed about you breaking the news."
Kat?: "Yeah, there was no leaks until Kat Hunter was here"

Sources: 1 2

There a lot of talk on twitter about it too.

Here's a transcript of the conversation, care of Mascotte who still had the conversation cached:

K: Look at those great razer headsets
G: I know
G: Fansy
G: Hello everybody, welcome to our live set
G: (Responding to an unheard question): Yeah
G: (Responding to an unheard question): Right..
(Music playing now, hard to hear anything besides it)
K: Yes thank you
(Someone eating an apple or something)
K: *Coughing*
K: *eating microphone it sounds*
K, now on phone: I need you to do me a favor, you dont have to do it but i need someone to do it this morning, i need you to take the camera in the office, its in the red box by the desk to the left, i need to document every shelf on the store on the backside
(This really isnt interesting at all, just typing this for completion sake)
K: And if someone can take pictures of the front of hall and display cases which is estimated at 4:30
K: And if security stops you say that you have authorization from (full name of someone, not posting since it doesn't add anything) to photograph the art store ony.
K: Thank you, bye.
(couple of seconds of nothing ness)
G(Talking to unknown third person): So am i sure you understand this euh.. Cool.
G: Is there sounds up here or we dont know?
G: OMG they are here! (Reacting to people walking in it seems)
G: For the hordee.., For the hordee
K: Why are they running?
G: For the hordee.., For the hordee
K: Yeah they are coming in.
G: Go go gooo
K: (Awkward laugh)
G: Omg they got warcraft 4 overhere (directed towards the people entering)
K: *Laughing* Yeah..
G: Yes Kat, Kat broke the news yesterday of warcraft 4 (This are his exact words, not MoP, not WoW, Warcraft 4)
K: There are no *Interrupted by G*
G: Metzen was pissed about that.
K: There are no leaks untill Kat Hunter got on stage.
G: I know!
G: Metzen was like how fucking will you..
K: Yeah couldn't believe she (talking in third person now) leaked warcraft 4.
G: Couldn't believe it either!
G: Sow how late was it last night?
K: Didnt get done until 11:30 (This is where the conversation shifts towards what time she ended up going to bed etc so im stopping right here).

Sounds like Kat was imitating Chris Metzen, "I can't believe she leaked Warcraft 4." It was related to a conversation from the previous day with Michael Morhaime where she accidentally asked about WC4 but received no denial (i.e, "All RTS resources currently focused on SC2"). This added conversation, however, does confirm that they know it was an accidental leak.

(I'm still digging up more information, will update as this progresses. But it looks like folks can still record the conversation if it was precached.)

Here we go, this is an audio recording of the WC4 specific conversation towards the end. Even if it was an accident, it shouldn't have been that big of a deal. But Kat sounds very upset about the whole ordeal, Geoff is making fun of her, Metzen is pissed with her, and Blizzard edited the audio stream to remove the conversation. Normally I would just ignore it (ie, the accident from yesterday), but the serious response to the "leak" tells me it was, in fact, a leak. :)

And, here's the full recording, thanks to Mascotte.

Kat made a Twitter response regarding Warcraft 4. It looks like it was posted about 1 hour before her new leak. Poor Kat. Geoff was being a pain in the ass, and she sounded very uncomfortable and maybe a little scared about the whole thing.. but it definitely didn't sound like sarcasm to me.

22 Oct
@kathunter haha, that was icky! we also heard you talk about warcraft 4...oops? ;P
@AmehSweet seriously there is no Warcraft 4. It is a joke from yesterday :)

22 Oct
@kathunter why did you talk about warcraft4 before preshow today but we never heard of it again
@Linkie1987 because Geoff and I were making fun of the misunderstanding the day before. We thought it was funny.

Nice cover. So, Kat Hunter, Licensing Project Manager at Blizzard for almost 3 years, prior Frag Doll, professional gamer, and avid World of Warcraft player was confused about the difference between WoW Mists of Pandaria and Warcraft IV. Uh huh.. sure. :)

Kat Hunter would never.. EVER.. confuse World of Warcraft's "4th Expansion Pack" with "Warcraft 4". A lot of users are attributing her mistake to not understanding the difference, which isn't true.

I wonder if she's talking about the "first mistake" or "second mistake" though, before the confidential conversation with Geoff?

* UPDATE:

If anyone has a virtual pass, would you mind recording the other Kat mention of Warcraft 4? Virtual ticket holders need to goto the WoW Class Talent System panel from day 1, and jump to the end. Then keep jumping forwards until you reach the in-between panel with Geoff and Kat. A YouTube link would be greatly appreciated. :) Apparently, she wasn't joking when she said she spoke to Metzen and other Blizzard developers and they said "Warcraft 4 is coming down the line". It was made distinct from the X4 expansion pack too (she said it was in addition to X4/MoP coming out, so it appears there's a lore integration being made).

There were a total of 3 conversations held regarding Warcraft 4. Only 2 of them were captured and posted publicly unfortunately. The first was with Kat and Metzen (which Blizzard deleted immediately from the stream) where she asked Metzen about WC4 and how she was talking to developers who were working on it, and he became visibily upset (she was definitely not talking to the dev team about MOP though). The second video, which is on YouTube, has Kat trying to cover it. And the third video is when Geoff is making fun of her, while both are trying to play it off as an accident.

• I found an interesting resume of a Blizzard employee who has been working there for the past 2.5 months.
  
  His name is Robert "Robby" Duncan, and here's the interesting part from his resume:
  

  2011 – Unannounced Game Title (Blizzard Entertainment - 2.5 months)
  
  Designed and implemented a series of single-player missions, developed new features, participated in key design decisions, and provided a thorough design-analysis of the entire product.

  As soon as I read the "participated in key design decisions", I immediately thought "this guy must be an intern!". As I scrolled down towards the bottom of the resume, it was confirmed. :)
  
  Blizzard has a 12 week paid internship program by the way.
  
  Here are the points that stood out:
  
  * This does not appear to be Titan, it's the other "unannounced" game that Blizzard has been working on.
  * Due to his early involvement in the project ("key design decision", "thorough design-analysis of the entire product"), this indicates that it's in very early stages of development. Titan is supposed to be much farther along.
  * Based on his expertise, it's a PC platform game. (He also has SC2 Editor experience.)
  * "Single-player missions" is RTS/MOBA language.
  
  Based on Blizzards franchise release trends, I've always assumed with 99% certainty that the other unannounced game was going to be WarCraft IV/SC2 Phoenix related. This looks to be a pretty good confirmation (coincidentally, even his email address was rduncanIV@gmaildotcom).
  
  Either that, he's slow, or he's trolling and it has nothing to do with a RTS franchise, even though he uses RTS language.
  

* UPDATE:


• I found a very interesting blog post that was made a few months ago by a Blizzard employee named Shay Pierce. In this post, he describes working on a prototype game within the Blizzard workplace:
  

  The idea started to come to me as I worked on card game and board game design prototypes - this, I realized, was a very pure form of game design. Though "table game" design gives you a limited set of tools compared to those you have on electronic games, it can really open your eyes as to what the core of game design really is.

  This could be very big news indeed. His mention of card games makes me think back to the Product Slate Leak, where WOW TCG was mentioned. This seems to be related to that online World of Warcraft trading card game. Perhaps this is what Robert is working on if it's not a RTS or MOBA title. "Team 4" would be the unannounced MMO and "Team 5" is this upcoming trading card game? A game like that would be very successful on PC and mobile.
  


• In other news, I caught a very interesting B.Net post about wagering within Diablo 3. It was written by Sixen, one of the Community MVPs on the official message boards.
  

  Date: 9/22/2011
  "It's something Force and I brought up at the Press Event back in July... Gambling, Replays, and Observer Mode to PvP. Jay Wilson said they're all cool ideas they want to do at some point in time... Just... Later on down the road."

  So, right now most of the focus is on PVE, but later on down the road Blizzard is really keen on implementing an observer mode and an in-game wagering/betting system for PVP arena matches. This totally fits in with the high stakes arena gambling system I mentioned in that old mock Diablo 3 X1 post. :)
  
  Not only that, but apparently Micah Whipple (aka Bashiok) is ALL FOR turning Diablo 3 into a whole PVP / E-Sports system with wagering and arena gambling for players. Very interesting indeed.. it might not be called gambling though, I've noticed that Blizzard has been very careful in how they use that word (for obvious reasons) and get rather nervous when it's mentioned.


• Because Diablo 3 is online only, it opens up some really cool features like what they have in World of Warcraft. Nothing has been announced yet, but I'm 100% certain that there will be holiday events and special activities during certain times of the year. Specific details about these events will most likely be exposed when people finally hack apart the retail code and patch updates. There will probably be Halloween stuff around town, Christmas presents, unique items that are only available on certain days, and even random events or encounters with a Holiday-based boss. 4-teaming a demonic Santa Claus for example. Since there's a server timer involved, I wonder if D3 will be implementing daily quests for players.. an extra way to level up, or earn gold for selling?


• Constance Wang apparently left Blizzard last month, and now she's developing content for the new Wildstar MMORPG. :) Constance, by the way, was a PA on the Titan team. She wasn't directly involved in development, but assisted with the research for them (ie, lore related stuff, library book diving, etc.)


• If you were curious if there were any Titan goodies in Kim Sellentin's tweets.. there aren't. I managed to find out. She's always been pretty careful about what she writes, though, especially after she started working at Blizzard.