Gamespy had an article where Blizzard's Next Gen MMO was mentioned again. (Anything we can scrape together, right?)

In it, they discuss WoW's basic formula and if there were any major changes planned for Mists of Pandaria. An interesting connection between Titan and World of Warcraft is implied.

"We have some awesome ideas, and we're developing a next-generation MMO here at Blizzard, so we're experimenting with a lot of different ideas there," said lead quest designer Dave Kosak. "I can't say any more about that, but I'll tell you that we're not going to significantly change up WoW at any point in the future. I think there's an expectation when you play WoW. Honestly, I think our combat game is really fun. When you get a quest to kill ten things, that lets you be your class, and you know exactly what to do, which means that you can concentrate on the story, concentrate on the atmosphere, concentrate on chatting with your friends. You can really be in the world."

A while back I had believed that Titan would be very similar to WoW, but much more improved, dumbed down for larger audiences, better NPC AI, and more action packed. I think this is the first team they ever said something like this (ie, "using WOW" rather than "it won't compete with WOW.) Basically, they take WOW and now they're experimenting with different ideas and ways to do things to create a new game.

Most of the original Titan team came from scifi driven backgrounds, including Halo and the old Starcraft Ghost team. But, now they're trickling in WOW developers to continue work on the project.

I'm reminded of Blizzard's "Decision Gun".. maybe it was used for Titan too? :)

Now, it's been a while since I talked about the subject, but if I recall, the WOW Engine was used as alpha testing for Titan.. or possibly Warcraft 4, I can't remember (heck, maybe both.)

There have been some fun rumors that the Next Gen MMO will be a giant new DOTA type game. I'm not sure if I agree with that.. I think there will be facets of shorter action games (like MMOFPS matches) within it, but I am most certain that eSports are planned for Titan (which is also the reason why I think it will be more action packed.) Blizzard has been updating all of their eSports Job Postings too.. they used to all be "Starcraft 2" specific but now they just mention eSports initiatives for Blizzard titles in general. :)

Meaning that eSports is planned for their other future games.

Diablo 3 is one potential too, but not for a long time. Some employees are "all for" a PVP Arena (with RM wages), but the game will be primarily PVE to start out. If there's a lot of PVP integration by the time Diablo 3 X1 comes out, things will look more and more likely for larger PVP battles and arenas. I can see a larger push for competitive PVP especially if JW is moved to head up another project, as unfortunate as that would be.

Please Please Please Play Our Game!

So, the biggest news yesterday and today was about the new "Limited Time Offer" Scroll of Resurrection.

I haven't played WOW in a couple years now, so this doesn't affect me. But I can see how this is really going to piss off a lot of current players.

Basically, a player can send a Scroll of Resurrection to a friend. When they accept the scroll, they're given 7 days of free game time. If they have the original WoW, TBC, or WOTLK they are immediately upgraded to the full digital Cataclysm (and all previous expansions) for free.

This is permanent; you get all of the expansion packs including Cataclysm for free.

With the past issues surrounding the various Christmas deals in NA vs EU, I can see this really upsetting a lot of players. This was something that Blizzard has obviously been planning for a long time and during the time when they were offering each expansion pack for a reduced price, they knew that if players were to just wait another couple months they could have gotten it all for free instead. Many players took advantage of the Christmas savings, and will now realize their huge mistake.

It doesn't end there, though.

The recipient also gets a free level 80. They can make use of their free 7 days, create a new level 1 Cataclysm character, and then Claim Rewards from their Battle.net Account. The character is immediately leveled to 80 and they are allowed the option of a free server transfer.

The level 80 also gets the following:

• Full Level 80 gear (All iLvl 232 Greens).
• Level 80 bags (4 Frostweave 20-slots).
• 75 Gold.
• Reagents, Food, Water (20 Baked Manta Ray, 20 Heavy Frostweave Bandages).
• 280% flight speed skill (if not yet learned).
• 280% Fast Mount (e.g. Horde gets Swift Purple Wind Rider Mount.)
• Flight paths for a level 80 character.
• 450/450 First Aid, all other Profession slots open.
• All spells and abilities purchased and learned up to Level 80.
• All talent builds completed for you in advance, however you have no glyphs.
• All old items are unequipped and mailed to you.

So, as you can see.. it's worth a TON of gold. Plus, those who spent months leveling to 80 are now going to see the unfairness of others getting free Level 80's from Blizzard.

This is where it's really clever though. They get all of this cool stuff, but they can only play for 7 days. Once the 7 days expire, they already have the full Cataclysm expansion pack and a Level 80 with great gear and all spells.. they might as well just pay the $15 to continue playing.

Basically, players are paying the subscription fee to get a new Level 80 and a ton of gold while also avoiding a lot of work. The sender of the Scroll, as a reward, will receive an uninspired (but cool looking "must have") mount. I wonder what other pets/mounts they'll just "make spectral" and try to sell? They obviously can't put these up on the Blizzard Store, because it's too obvious as being greedy.. but they can come up with a lot of clever marketing strategies, like what they just did now, to offload these re-skinned virtual items for profit.

This just screams desperation (that's the perception which isn't necessarily a good thing from an investment standpoint) and it's quite obvious to their existing customers what's going on. To mitigate the fan rage, now might be a really good time to finally announce something that has been long anticipated to millions of fans.

Upcoming MOP Press Event

I follow Diablo a lot more closely, and I haven't read anything about MOP since last October (and even then, it was very limited), so forgive me if this has already been covered before in other articles.

With the upcoming Press Event though, I figured I would talk briefly about what I'm generally expecting of the game and at the event.

• During the event they will be discussing, in great detail, the new zones, raids, dungeons, and PVP Battlegrounds. (This doesn't really interest me though.)
• They'll talk about the number (and new types) of quests being added. They'll show off some vanity figures like total number of new quests or creatures created for MOP.
• I'm not expecting any big Guild changes or announcements, but I am hoping that they'll fix Archaeology and discuss major changes to it (to make it more fun or "needed".) They should make dungeons (or other forms of instances), quests, and quest chains that make use Archaeology for example.
• I don't think they'll be cutting anything big out of the game like what they announced during the last Cataclysm Press Event (Path of Titans).
• They'll talk about the major Talent changes. It's going to have a domino effect on many glyphs, too, so they'll be touching on those.
• I think the Item Squish is going to happen, so they'll definitely be talking about this. I think everyone already knows what to expect, but I don't think many players believe it's actually going to happen. It needs to happen though (the issue of content consumption).
• Finally, I don't know if this will be announced during the Press Event or not, but I'm predicting that Blizzard will be removing the 10 player realm limitation. Instead of 50 per account with 10 per realm, it will just be 50 per account. Depending on the outcome of their various marketing schemes over the next year, if subscriptions continue to drop, expect realm merging (possibly disguised as something else.)

And now for the big mysterious one that no one knows anything about: PVE Scenarios.

This is the one I'm most interested in. And, I'm predicting that you'll see a lot of the same ideas from this old post. Basically, cross-faction quests and dungeons (instances) using all old assets.

Content consumption is a really big problem in World of Warcraft, and it's easier on their developers and creative minds to simply recycle and reuse old dungeons, locations, and assets. The problem is encouraging players to reuse these old assets.

I think PVE Scenarios will either be small instances (or phased areas) that have just been copied and pasted from existing locations. Basically, it's a "dungeon" but some of them will be outdoors. These will also be cross-faction quests and parties (in some scenarios Horde and Alliance will work or party together for a common goal) to reduce queue time and so that Blizzard can get factions to finally visit unvisited territory. So, you can expect a lot of the PVE Scenarios to take place in dungeons or zones that the opposite faction typically don't visit (like early level opposite faction areas, Ragefire, Stockades, etc.) PVE Scenario queuing will also highly likely be cross-realm too.

This might also expand into "larger PVE Scenarios" while will actually just be cross-faction dungeons, but with a really good explanation. This gives WOW Devs the excuse to re-use older dungeons, but having an explanation for their lore (why are mortal enemies working together?) There's also "PVE Battlegrounds", where they're working against each other by doing quests, but they don't actually engage in PVP combat.

The other explanation for the factions suddenly working together has do with the "peace of body and mind" bullcrap brought by the spiritual Pandaren. Metzen kept saying that Mists of Pandaria will be all about "chilling out" and "getting along" with everyone after all..

In the end, though, this is just a LFG for both Alliance/Horde. They all get teleported cross-realm to an instanced area, you do something, you're not allowed to leave the area (or you fail the quest if it's phased), and then you get teleported back to your original location when the PVE Scenario is completed. They've learned a lot of lessons about cross-faction trading, so I don't think players will be able to easily exploit this new feature like how they used to be able to in Battlegrounds.

In a recent "Pach Attack" video, Michael Pachter said that we'll ultimately see the Real Money Auction House expanded to World of Warcraft. Especially if the D3 RMAH is financially successful for Blizzard, which I'm confident it will be.

Mind you, I don't think it will be as financially successful as it could have been with the Listing Fees, but they'll still be making decent coin from the new system. Plus, you can count on Blizzard always finding new methods to encourage RMAH use and to introduce wide varieties of (highly preferable) items that players can sell on the RMAH. For example, new affixes, non-gear based items that improve your in-game experience and cool or rare aesthetic changes (like glowing wings or eyes).

You can also count on new Paid Services, and especially ones that enhance your RMAH experience. For example, a Mobile AH or a "RMAH Preferred User" plan where users pay a monthly fee to get access to better RMAH features, such as selling >10 Active Items (or maybe additional in-game fees for going over the limit).

Some users are very excited about the idea of getting a RMAH in the World of Warcraft. Others however, are completely against it, since the idea of a RMAH in any Blizzard title is considered hypocritical considering their past stance on Real Money Trading.

Diablo 3 will help them with their "acceptance issues" though.

So, I emailed Robert Bridenbecker (VP of Online Technologies) about the possibility of getting a RMAH in World of Warcraft. It was very general question, and in retrospect, I should have been more specific. (I try to keep emails short because it increases the chance of a response.)

Dec 9, 2011

Hi Rob,

What are the chances of getting a Diablo-style Real Money Auction House in World of Warcraft eventually?

I haven't played WoW for a couple years now, but the RMAH is just the kind of feature that would get me back into the game. :)

Dec 9, 2011

Retrofitting something like the RMT AH into an established game like WoW is considerably more challenging than building a game with the AH in mind.

So while it's probably unlikely, we are always evaluating areas that could further engage players. I will pass your thoughts along to the team.

Rob

I had forgotten about the age of World of Warcraft. They have the people to do it, but integrating a RMAH into WOW would be a very challenging process and it would be like bringing a new F2P Marketplace model into Asheron's Call. A lot of work and completely possible.. but is it worth the expense and time? Would they make enough money back to make the project worthwhile?

After some more thought on the subject, I was thinking that a RMAH might not even be a good idea for WOW after all.

So, I guess my question was a little premature. What I should have asked was if there was a way to integrate the RMAH but in a different form?

If you think about it, even if players really liked the idea, a RMAH really isn't well suited for WOW.

Due to the fees associated with selling items (especially with their inability to use Listing Fees), the RMAH is designed for high level items. But, all of the high level items in WOW are BOP and Blizzard already has the entire game designed around Dungeons, Raids, and Fixed Loot Tables. Putting high level items on the AH would destroy Dungeons & Raids, wasting all of their content (and work), and make users bore more quickly. They need to constantly consume content, and Blizzard has been working to slow down that process to keep players engaged. So however the RMAH is designed, it can't be around items. (Something to consider for their Next Gen MMO.)

So, I had a better idea.

What if the WOW Armory also acted as a character sales market? This would allow sales of items, gold, and characters simultaneously.

Players could put their individual characters up for sale (or as an auction) for a fixed fee. Maybe even a "Make an Offer" feature for players who would like an account from someone who isn't selling their account. :)

Blizzard could collect a fixed fee of $25-$40 per sale. And, characters might typically sell for $60-500 depending on their level, gold or items.

Battle.net already has Paid Character Transfers, so this is just an enhanced version of the service. It's easy to integrate, eliminates a lot of WOW development time (web development work instead of in-game), and it's a RMT solution that works well to solve for the BOP item problem. It also allows for gold trading, and Blizzard can control the amount of gold that is being transferred through usual restrictions (like what they have already: maximum gold, level, guild removal, etc.)

Here's the follow-up email I sent to Rob, along with his response which I just received today:

Feb 15, 2012

It's me again. :)

I promise not to do this too often (if ever again), because I know you're a very busy person and I want to keep your inbox as clear as possible. So, I'll keep this as short as possible.

I realized that a RMT AH for WOW might not be a good idea after all due to the nature of weapons and gear being BOP. All of the high level items can't be sold on a RMT AH, like what can be done in D3.

Given the in-game technical challenges, I have a better solution.

What about using the Armory as a Character Sales Market? This way, you're killing two birds with one stone.

- Armory Character Page can have a Buy/Sell/Bid option. Even a "Make Offer" if the account isn't for sale.
- No RMT specifically for items or gold is needed in-game or out. These come with the player and are included in the price.
- Character is locked for 24 hours during the sale process. Total on-hand gold is visible to potential buyers (which is technically already visible through achievements).
- Systems are already in place for Character Transfers. Easier to integrate by the web development team.
- This new service can charge $25 like a typical Paid Character Transfer, while lowering normal Paid Transfers (owner to owner for $10-15.)

The benefit of doing it this way is that it's much easier on the team, can be deployed much more quickly (if the D3 RMAH is deemed a success), it will kill the blackmarket power leveling services (as well as item/gold sales), it's a much better and secure process, and by lowering service costs and introducing this new service it can bring in more players (e.g. transferring players to family members or friends.)

A new system like this can have several positive side effects for Blizzard, not only in further engaging players, but also putting a major bottleneck on blackmarket sales and with that, a cascade of other side-effects like reducing botting, power leveling and spamming. Meaning, less customer support and GM expenses.

Feb 21, 2012

We're always looking at new ways to engage the player base and concepts like this are some of the exciting reasons why introducing the auction house and the Armory keep us loving our jobs. Thanks for continuing to think of fun and new exciting things, as well as ways that, as a player, you'd like to see us extend our worlds.

Rob

I really hope they seriously consider this approach.

It's impossible to create a RMAH for items, but selling gold and/or selling characters is a very viable possibility.

Restrictive enough to discourage certain players or groups, but open enough so that most players could engage in it if they want. It opens up the possibility of getting family and friends to jump right into the game with you, if they wanted to skip the long grinding process (characters can be given to friends as gifts for example.)

It would also destroy the WOW blackmarket, giving players a safe way to exchange gold, items, or "power level" characters. It will eliminate sites that sell gold, and stop spamming. Botters, of course, will increase in number so that high level accounts can be sold.. but that's the beauty of this new system; Blizzard can allow certain characters or accounts to be eligible, and not others. For example, they need to be a certain level first, they're restricted on the amount of gold they can carry, or they need to first wait a certain amount of time before they're eligible (even if a botter power leveled a new character, they still need to wait 90 days to sell it.) Power leveling groups won't take this risk, because they would have to sit on a idle account, and there's a very good chance it will be banned once the account is investigated (Blizzard has more time to investigate and more illegitimate behavior patterns to look for.)

Even if Blizzard were to create some kind of item-based RMAH, it would still be years away. They need to see the financial results of the Diablo 3 auction house, and long term advantages/disadvantages to decide whether it's worth the investment or not. It's something that would come with a new expansion pack, and they definitely wouldn't have it planned right now for Mists of Pandaria. Meaning, that the next expansion pack is more likely.. and you're looking at a 2-3 year wait at the very least.

Changing all items to BOE, though, would be very bad for the entire game dynamic, and because of the technical challenges, it's highly unlikely that they'll create a RMAH for high-end gear. Besides the Armory Character Market, however, Blizzard could alternatively sell Conquest or Valor points (or some other method where cash can be exchanged for high end items) to players. But, then Blizzard would be selling directly to the players and printing the money themselves.. something that they wouldn't do. It would have to be a "player-driven economy" so that they're not blamed for exploiting the users.

Here are the first two parts of the series to bring you up to speed:

Power Creep in Pandaria -- Part 1
Power Creep in Pandaria -- Part 2

It was only supposed to be two parts, but I realized another trend while writing those original posts. This was originally supposed to be an addition to Part 2, but it ended up getting so "textful" (as things often do here), that I just decided just to create a new post. :)

The Death Knight

The topic of content consumption got me thinking that this is probably the main reason why Blizzard abandoned the Hero Class format.

Because the Death Knight class started so high level, it skipped all of the starting zones and content. Blizzard would later realize that this was a mistake, and it's probably the reason why they'll never do it again. Their decision, after all, wouldn't have had anything to do with the DK skills or abilities since they can easily be scaled or balanced.

Players liked the idea of skipping a lot of the beginning content, but it didn't benefit Blizzard in the end so that same mistake can't be made again. (In any of their games FYI.)

And the timing seems to work out well too. When WOTLK first came out, they didn't understand the issue of content consumption (or maybe they didn't think it would become an issue due to the wealth of creative material they had already amassed.) It wasn't until mid-to-late WOTLK did they start making changes and adding new features to re-use older content. Then, Cataclysm came out and the entire expansion pack was ALL ABOUT reusing old content. To make their intentions ever more clear; it introduced the new Archaeology Profession. :)

A Belated Solution

There's actually still a way to correct this "failure" and it might be really fun for users and Blizzard alike.

Basically, create an "Origins" story for the Death Knight class where you start at level 1 and show their progression and character development from a simple peasant to a Death Knight.

Since you don't want to take away the instant 55 Level Up, this could be a completely optional "Starting From The Beginning" feature.

For example,

• You create a new character and select the DK class.
• You are then given an option for your "Starting" pre-DK class (e.g. a Warrior, Mage, etc.)
• After some introductory in-game cinematics, or even a brief Level 1-5 tutorial stage, you're given the option to "Skip To Your Rebirth?". (The Origins story stops here, and you just jump to the main DK story.)
• If you continue the "Origins" story, you're locked in.
• You start out as a "Farmer" Class earning a meager living on a farm. :)
• You level the temporary "Farmer" Class until 10, at which point you join the military or a resistance, and you switch to the early level "Starting" class you had previously selected. (e.g. You train to become a Warrior, Mage, Rogue, whatever.)
• Blizzard could have a lot of fun with a temporary 1-10 "Farmer" class too.
• At this point (Level 10), you can start doing normal quests and such that have already been created by Blizzard. But, now there will be new customized quests only available for your character that develop the back story. Even every 10 levels there could be missions or special quests that work into the main lore. (Like going off to war, war campaigns, secret missions, rising through the ranks in the "Military" or "Resistance", your family, new lore discovered, etc.)
• As you rise through the ranks, it finally culminates at your death (at Level 50 or 55) by the hands of the Undead. At which point the main DK story kicks in.

This gives Blizzard an excuse to use some of their old lore and back-history on the Death Knights that they haven't used yet.

Plus, they're not creating a whole series of new quests just for the "Origins" story, but rather bits and pieces here and there (like every 10 levels). Less development time.

Players will go through all old content again, which is what they want. But, they will still have the option of jumping right to their Level 55 DK if they want to.

To encourage players to follow the "Origins" path instead, though, they can offer special bonuses that are made available during the story line: special gear with really cool aesthetics (they will be farmed for transmogrification), new pets (which players will jump at the chance for upcoming Pet Battles), vanity stuff, new achievements, or trinkets that have special visual effects.

I suppose the "Origins" path could also be made available as DLC.. especially with the new Battle.net Balance. :)

If not, at least Blizzard could use it as a test to determine if other "Origin" features could be successful for other classes (Rogues assassinating their way to the top of their Rogue guild before getting kicked out). In order to experience the "Origins" story, players must create a new class. Players may or may not like this, but it would definitely be very cool for the DK class. And, having special bonuses for following this path, however, might encourage many players to do it. Especially the ones who haven't created alt characters yet, which Blizzard already knows.

What do you think? If you guys really like the idea, drop some hints with Blizzard. :)

I think it would be a lot of fun, plus it addresses a lot of the issues they're trying to fix.

Why Are They Doing This?

The rate of content consumption is also a quality vs quantity struggle. Content consumption is harmful to Blizzard and it needs to be regulated and controlled. Right now, it's very important to slow it down and get older content consumed again. Blizzard wants to deliver higher quality content, at a slower rate, rather than quantity (bad quality at a higher rate.)

High leveled players will start visiting older dungeons and raids again, because the item drops will be useful again. They want players to re-consume old content so that they don't have to put out as much anymore, or at such a high rate. It's basically a way to buy them time to produce higher quality future content.

The Item Squish will get players progressing more slowly in higher tiered dungeons and raids. Because of the difficulty to progress, it slows down our growth rate to match content delivery. It doesn't, though, make dungeons more difficult to complete.. this isn't about making dungeons harder (that was an attempt made by Blizzard, but it failed), it's more about "not jumping ahead" too quickly to new content.

The Item Squish is really smart from a business standpoint and for future planning. I hope that other MMORPG developers don't make this same mistake, and you can be confident that Diablo 3 and Titan won't be making this same power creep mistake in their own expansion packs.

• This change starts setting a new pace for players that Blizzard wants. Players are consuming content too quickly, and Blizzard needs to slow them down.
• This gets players prepared for future games and expansion packs. After MOP, expansion packs will debut with a smaller number of zones and dungeons, so that they can be added as major content patches later when Blizzard is ready.
• It's possible that MOP might be the last major Expansion Pack, and future "expansion packs" will be more DLC (smaller Digital Download only mini expansion packs.)
• Old content is no longer wasted and unused.
• Players now have more to do, and more options available. This is the big one: giving players more options, rather than being stuck with the same dungeon run over and over.
• Content is no longer skipped over, and players must progress through Blizzard's content at a certain rate (more lore delivered this way too.)
• This gives players the impression that Blizzard is "constantly delivering" and "updating" the game. They cut out content that should have been released in the expansion pack, but instead release it in smaller bits at a time.
• Players are happy that there's a constant flow of new content to consume, even if they don't realize they're being fed with smaller portions.
• Originally, Blizzard was going to deliver monthly major content, which didn't work out for obvious reasons. It's an old sore spot that they're finally able to address.
• Slowing down consumption gives the artists and designers more time to create new content. Less stress, and less time needed to figure out how to ramp up item stats for new dungeons, encounters, or expansion packs.

Blizzard Already Doing The Prep Work?

In the past, Blizzard has already tried several methods to get players re-visiting old content:

• The Cataclysm expansion pack itself.
• Adding Heroic difficulty levels to dungeons.
• Dailies and Seasonal Events that require traveling all over the World of Warcraft.
• The Archaeology (/spit) profession.
• Transmogrification.
• Exploration (hidden gems) and Exploration Achievements.
• Lore quests that sent you to many destinations.
• Special Events that only take place within older Dungeons.
• "Path of Titans" was meant to do this too, but it was cut.

The idea was to make more "new options" and "new places" available but by re-using all older content that might have been skipped, run through too quickly, or just unnecessary (like old items.) Blizzard is trying to re-use everything in the game to avoid hard questions about content delivery and so that hard work isn't wasted. It's also a really cheap way to avoid costs, resources and work. Doing this saves them a TON of money.

They also tried different ways of extending longevity and controlling content consumption:

• Leveling restrictions. Once you hit 80, you HAVE to move onto CATA or else you receive only 10% experience gains.
• Making dungeon encounters difficult in the beginning, and then nerf them later.
• New Dungeons rolled out more slowly. Less zones/dungeons in Expansion Packs. Introduced as Major Content Patches after 2-3 months.
• PVP Seasons, locking in items until Blizzard is ready for the next round of consumption.
• New Talent Changes to shake things up, make things new/novel again.
• And of course, all of the obvious stuff to keep players busy, like professions, auction house, exploration, achievements, pet battles, seasonal events, etc.

Even with the Item Squish, even though it's "just an idea", they've already made arrangements to start getting players prepared for it (and for internal testing purposes):

• Ghostcrawler's Forum Post, of course, making everyone aware.
• Creating items that have scaling stats like Heirlooms. This means that full fledged Level-Scaling throughout the whole game is possible. In my opinion, this ruins games. It's a very lazy way of thinking, so I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard actually imposed this on users one day.
• Buffs, Spell Damage and Mana Utilization is all based off percentage calculations (of base numbers) now instead of fixed numbers in the past.
• Changing Tool Tips to get players familiar with "Costs 20% of Base MP" calculations. So, when the change comes.. all of the Ability Tool Tips and Descriptions still stay the same. :)
• Another New Talent System (skill based rather than number manipulation.)

(Note: I haven't played the game in many years now, so if there are any other pieces you've noticed in-game that relate to this, let me know and I'll add it to these lists.)

Other Alternatives

The big problem with the Item Squish is the feeling of being nerfed. It doesn't matter if everything else is normalized, once those big numbers disappear there's going to be a lot of rage.

Role Playing Games are all about creating a better player (better than everyone else), so it's very important to give them a feeling of progression and a godlike sense. Everyone wants to a god, after all. :)

This is a problem that only affects high level players though. There's an alternative option available where high level players stay the same (still godlike), the power creep issue is fixed, and you can make low level players feel better about themselves.

The "Item Inflation" Method

What you do is eliminate the power creep between Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, so no huge item stat increase between the transition. This just leaves power creep issues which span from Vanilla to Cataclysm. During those phases you create an Item Inflation.

So, something like this:

What happens here is that everything scales properly from Vanilla all the way to the end of MOP. But, new characters will start out with (what they think is) uber awesome gear stats, but mobs are also adjusted so they still take the same length of the time to kill.

High level players stay the same, and low level players feel awesome again. Big changes are going to happen anyways, but at least in this scenario, high level players are happy, there's no mass exodus, and Blizzard receives the same result: no more power creep.

Even Ghostcrawler's "large number calculations" don't even need to be used in this approach; because of the relative progression, large numbers can just be "displayed" for users to see, but they're actually represented by smaller numbers (and smaller calculations) on the back-end. Having uneven exponential growths in their numbers, like how it is now, is what led to their problems. Not that any of this should have been a problem in the first place.. even 2 trillion isn't exactly a very big number for modern computers.

The Future

Because of this approach Blizzard is taking, you can start to make assumptions about their future games and expansion packs. For example, there won't be "uber items" available within Diablo X1 or Titan expansions. They also plan on leaving out a ton of content so that it can be added later as a major content patch.. new dungeons, mobs, bosses, or rares added to Diablo later for example.

This gives Diablo 3 the impression of frequent content addition, even though all of it was originally intended in the first full package. Titan will be the same. New expansions will have, say 2-3 "dungeons", and 4-5 new "dungeons" will be added for the following 2 years before the next expansion pack.

Blizzard wants players to keep reusing old content over and over and over. They'll find new methods to get you revisiting older content (e.g. difficulty levels.) This is almost how Diablo 3 was completely designed from the ground up. :)

With Item Squishing or Inflation, because dungeons take longer to progress, Blizzard can start introducing even newer ways to get players visiting older dungeons. For example, rare spawns with high-level stats that appear in older dungeons. So, a Level 90 might visit Level 75-80 Dungeons, take a long time to beat the dungeon, only so that there might be a chance of a rare boss appearing that carries Level 90 items. WOW players will roam for rares, just like in Diablo 3.

Oh, and one interesting note about Item Squishing.. it's going to bring back the good old days of bugs and exploits. :) There are a lot of mobs, abilities and items to go through.. and some will be missed. So, there might be a mob with an uber-damaging ability still based on old calculations, or a special item/gear piece missed that still has uber-stats. A lot of unchanged "bugged" stuff is going to make it's way through, and they'll be exploited quite a bit. :)

They would have to make the change during a quiet period.. so, months before launch or months after launch. With my Item Inflation method, though, there's less likely chance of exploitation, because bugged items can only be underpowered and they would really only have to specifically focus on boss skills. :)

I'm switching gears here for a moment, because I really wanted to talk about Mists of Pandaria and one potentially significant upcoming change.

Two months before Cataclysm came out, TOD made a post about Cataclysm "Repeating the Past". His idea was trying to make items from Classic Dungeons (and the Dungeons themselves) useful or novel again, and in general, to get players using older dungeons again because they were practically empty with the introduction of new expansion packs. After all, it's a shame that all of that immense work had went into designing the art and media, only to be abandoned at the onset of the next expansion pack release.

"With scaled gear, you can still have the same old equipment look (with or without a slightly different name) but with different stats scaled for the player. They've already been doing this experimentation with heirlooms, so it shouldn't be that hard to do it with old instance drops."

Remarkably (maybe even suspiciously) clairvoyant of the new Transmogrification system, wouldn't you say? That post is also relevant for another issue.

Transmogrification is one of Blizzard's latest attempt to get players revisiting classic dungeons, and to bring in diversity and novelty once again to the game. But Mists of Pandaria will also be introducing (maybe) a new fix to correct the power creep issues and to make all older items, dungeons and quests viable and even fun again.

Blizzard is calling this "The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria". It's an older post and you've probably read it already.

All of the discussions I've seen about this potential update is "Me me me. How does this effect me?" They want to talk about it's impact and how it affects players. No one is talking about WHY they're doing it. Even Ghostcrawler never fully explained why they're doing it.. only that "because the numbers are too big" and that "users might not like it."

So, what are the real reasons then? We know that the change must be financially motivated.. so what are the reasons from a business perspective? That's what I want to talk about. :)

A Quick Recap

Blizzard wants to fix the power creep issue through two "options":

Option 1

The first option was Ghostcrawler's "Mega Damage solution". It basically means following the same route they've already been taking, but to change the appearance of the big numbers because they take up too much space on the screen.

In regards to these "big numbers", Ghostcrawler wrote;

"Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can’t quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we’d have to solve all of those problems as well."

I hope no one actually bought this. He's talking about "big numbers" like 150,000 instead of 20,000. We're not talking about calculating monster prime numbers that are 2^32,123,456-1 digits long. It sounds like an old man trying to describe these new fancy com-pu-ter ma-chines. :)

None of this really matters though. He kept this part of his post really short, exaggerated the issue, and tried to shrug the whole thing off as a ridiculous "alternative option". This means that he has no intention of even considering this and the team has already set their sights on the Item Squish option.

This is like when you go to your parents and ask them for something ridiculously overpriced, so that when they say no, you can "reluctantly settle" for what you really wanted in the first place.

The "Mega Damage solution" is not really a serious option.

Option 2

This is the Item Squish. I trust that you already understand what they're planning on doing.

Basically, they're going to take gear stats and "even everything out" so that it's a consistent power growth from Vanilla all the way to Mists of Pandaria without any major "bursts" in item power. The term "Green is the new Purple" will no longer apply to future expansion packs.

They want to make growth rates more like this:

Fig. 5. Item level vs. character level before and after ‘squish’. Brown = vanilla. Green = BC. Blue = LK. Red = Cat
And, of course, users are split on this potential update. Mostly because players will feel as though it's a major nerf.

But, it's not just the players and their items getting the "nerf", mobs and bosses will also be adjusted accordingly. You'll still be healing and damaging at the same percentiles as normal, but you'll just see smaller numbers on the screen.

However, they will be making it so that soloing old content will be much harder, but you'll receive viable awards based on the difficulty level. Because there will be a marginal difference between level 85 and 90, you can still run CATA dungeons (and even WOTLK dungeons) for gear that can be used in level 90 encounters.

Everything in the game will be changed relatively, and they want the entire game back to how it was with "expansions" within Vanilla (ie, major content updates like dungeon additions).

Understanding The Problem

I think it's a very good idea for the Item Squish, and it's something they should have done a long time ago. They probably started to realize the implications by late mid-late WOTLK.. it definitely wasn't during TBC. :)

What it comes down to is a problem of content consumption versus our need for growth.

Blizzard spent a lot of time building dungeons, raids, instances, and scripted events. During Vanilla, most players on average had visited all of the dungeons/raids and rather frequently. They consumed the content slowly, at the pace the Blizzard preferred.

Once TBC rolled out (and follow up expansion packs), there was no more need to visit old dungeons, and they would just skip ahead to end game content. Older dungeons didn't need to be visited anymore, especially with players carrying you through pre-raid or end game content. Dungeons, raids, and capital cities became ghost towns. (Something that wasn't a good impression for new players, which is why they made capital cities central quest hubs again.)

Since players grew faster than they could consume content, Blizzard was (is) always under increased pressure to produce new content for us.

And, there's a finite limit to the amount of content they can provide for us before it just become recycled garbage. Everything needs to be slowed down, from player growth to player consumption to content creation to creative process and resources.

It was really fun in the beginning, but they burned through so many ideas (i.e. dungeon designs, art, audio effects, encounters, mobs and bosses) that they're now realizing that they need to start saving up this content for future use and not allow it to be consumed so quickly.

There's also the issue of creative burnout, something also experienced in the music and book industry. The video game industry is not immune from writer's block. If things move too quickly, and they don't keep filling up their "creativity pool" (for future expansion packs and games), then their games start getting repetitive or boring, and they have to resort to common world objects for creative inspiration, like using every kind of animal as a race, mob or boss. I can't remember.. did they already do a Cow Boss, Lobster Boss, Bird Boss, Snake Boss, Tiger Boss, or Panther Boss? :)

More to come..

Apparently, a WoW Law Enforcement guide was leaked by Anonymous/AntiSec.

It's already on a couple other blog sites already, where you can check out the various law enforcement guidelines.

For example, how "Player Mail is not maintained for more than 180 days."

The document doesn't really cover Player Chat very well though. It says they can do realtime monitoring of chat, and they describe Player Chat Logs, but they don't say anything about retention of older chat logs.. so, they only retain old Mailbox messages?

There was also another contradiction. In one paragraph, Blizzard wrote "Warcraft alone has more than 9 million active users worldwide spread across several hundred servers", but later they wrote "Because Blizzard has over eleven million active users, Blizzard does not have the ability to retain all types of information indefinitely." In December 2008, they announced 11.5 million subscribers and then in Feb 2010 Morhaime announced that there had been no growth since 2008.

Maybe they dipped quite a larger subscription number than everyone had estimated? (e.g. 11.5 to 9 million)

This was the really interesting part though:

Blizzard currently maintains more than 500 WoW servers with well over 100 dedicated to the North American region.. Each server can host more than 3500 players at the same time.

This is the first time I've ever seen a source directly from Blizzard confirming the maximum number of concurrent players per realm (i.e. "players at the same time"). It was always estimated that each WOW Realm could support about 5000-6000 concurrent player logins.

Although WarcraftRealms isn't a very good source for total player counts (because there's a lot of overlap of players), it is a very good source for daily player activity.

If you look at the Average Daily Activity Chart here, it shows total number of players logged in during each hourly interval. Remember though, that the same players might be logged in for 8 hours straight. And, if you look at the graph below the chart, they all max out at around 3500 concurrently per realm. :)

If you assume that an average player spends 3 hours per day playing WOW, that's about 6950 unique players per realm (on average) that play throughout the day. Blizzard has less than 900 realms worldwide, which makes it about 6.3 million players.

I wouldn't be surprised if this 2009 policy is the exact same one still used today. Documents like these are very rarely updated, and it doesn't look like they spent a lot of time preparing it. Still, it's pretty interesting..

.. is going to blow your mind. Does this clickbait title work?

So, you want to hear something really messed up? I'm willing to bet that no one knows this (except Blizzard).

During the Blizzcon 2010 opening ceremonies, Michael Morhaime said that there were "more than 100,000 virtual attendees" watching across over 100 countries live via DIRECTV. (This was also when Blizzard DOTA was first announced, and he said it would be free to "all Battle.net players in the coming months.")

Next, during the Q3 2010 Earnings Call following Blizzcon 2010, Michael Morhaime said "More than 25,000 people attended the show with another 95,000 paid viewers following along via DIRECTV or the live Internet stream." (27,000 attendees were later reported.)

But wait.. don't you remember all of those RAYV problems? Oh right.. Blizzard also partnered with RAYV to provide live streaming through the Blizzard site.

In 2009 and 2010, Blizzcon was available live via Blizzard (RAYV) and DIRECTV as a Pay Per View event.

To clarify, there were TWO streams available for purchase: DIRECTV and BLIZZARD DIRECT

During the opening ceremonies, all of the official announcements, and shareholders meetings, Michael Morhaime only revealed the DIRECTV numbers. He was very careful about his wording, and he did not share their internal "Blizzard Direct" figures. How interesting.

However, RAYV sure did share this information in one of their official case studies.

Blizzcon 2010 served over 550,000 unique viewers watching over 100,000,000 minutes of online streaming in a single weekend, The [sic] premium package subscription cost $40 and included HD streaming of the entire event plus a special “pet code” [sic]

This was no typo. 550,000 paid viewers are mentioned multiple times in various RAYV releases. (Update: Even though they "served" customers and mention the premium package in the same statement, it's possible that there could be a percentage of free stream viewers in that 550k figure.)

So, there were 95,000 to 100,000 paid DIRECTV customers and over 550,000 paid BLIZZARD customers. HOLY CRAP.

Blizzard only revealed the 95,000 number though. It was a preplanned, calculated, and strategically worded delivery of speech. :)

It makes so much sense too.. with more than 25,000 (to 27,000) attendees and tickets selling out in minutes, why would virtual attendees only be 3x that number? 650,000+ viewers makes much more sense, but Blizzard does NOT want you to know this information.

It's exactly like what Michael Morhaime said, "margins are higher when we sell direct." SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER when sold direct, in fact. (I mentioned that citation yesterday too.)

In their partnership with DIRECTV, they are probably taking a larger cut away from Blizzard. But, by using RAYV technology (back in 2009 and 2010) using their own website and resources, they made a TON more revenue from virtual ticket sales.

But 2011 is even more interesting.

During the Blizzcon 2011 Opening Ceremonies, Michael Morhaime gave a "shout out" specifically to the DIRECTV members only. He said there were "more than 60,000 from 130 countries who bought a virtual ticket." So sneaky. :)

He didn't mention the number of virtual attendees who watched through the direct Blizzard live feed though. And last year, it was over 5 times the number of DIRECTV customers.

SO, IS YOUR MIND BLOWN NOW? (Hopefully not just by the number of actual viewers, but also the other revelation.)

If there were 100,000 DIRECTV customers last year, but only 60,000 this year, it's very likely that even more customers are using the Blizzard live stream this year. (By the way, there were "over 26,000" attendees announced at Blizzcon 2011 vs "over 25,000" at Blizzcon 2010.)

How much do you want to bet that the Blizzard live stream numbers will NOT be shared at this upcoming shareholders meeting? They'll only announce the outsourced DIRECTV figures, and very carefully word it. :)

Blizzard is okay with sharing numbers on behalf of partners or citing research publications (who don't have access to their internal digital numbers), but they're highly secretive when it comes to internal figures and revenues.

* UPDATE (10/26/2011)

RAYV has just updated their blog with statistics from the Blizzcon 2011 live stream.

For the third year in a row, RayV partnered with Blizzard and Direct TV to broadcast Blizzcon to virtual ticket holders. The virtual ticket increases in popularity every year. Virtual ticket holders can tune in on their computers and watch all performances, panels, and matches live. The virtual ticket also guarantees VOD access for up to two weeks after the event is over.

For the first time, RayV also streamed regional Blizzard Tournaments. RayV streamed the GomTV tournament, based in Korea, and the SiTV tournament, based in China. Both streams added to the global reach of the Blizzard and RayV community.

The Blizzcon stream attracted countless online viewers. Over the weekend, RayV delivered over 2.26 Million hours of streamed content. There were over 740,000 viewers worldwide and at some points there were approximately 200,000 concurrent viewers.

So, Michael Morhaime announced that there were "more than 60,000" DIRECTV users who purchased the 2011 virtual ticket. But, there were another 740,000 viewers who used the Blizzard live stream instead of DIRECTV (this figure might also include those who watched the Opening Ceremony and SC2/WOW matches).

Those viewer counts are crazy, no wonder Blizzard doesn't like to share them. The "revealed" DIRECTV paid customers is just a fraction of the "unrevealed" paid customers who go through Blizzard directly. A good example of why digital sales are never revealed either.. if they're not there yet, retail sales will eventually just be a fraction of digital sales.

* -------------------

It's all about wording too, like what this blog has discussed so many.. many times. Remember when they said Blizzcon was a financial loss for the company.. but it was spoken in past tense? Or when Tom Chilton claimed that Mists of Pandaria was just a crazy rumor and speculation?

If you guys were interested in tallying up sales, Blizzcon tickets cost $175 (they were $100 for several years, then $125 in 2009, and then $150 in 2010). Virtual tickets cost $40 this year and last. (In 2010, they made approximately $30 million in revenue with $3-4 million in expenses.)

Because they're delivering streaming services themselves this year, their profit is probably even higher.

Activision Blizzard Objectives

All of these deceptive choice of words and "special features" are showing very clear objectives for the company and just how important it is to keep it secret. When Michael Morhaime said that he's a crazy CEO who gets to make crazy decisions, and "what if we just made Diablo 3 available for free to World of Warcraft subscribers".. that wasn't just a crazy "idea". It was with purpose and it was all part of a strategic plan for the company.

Their objective is to push digital sales of games, expansion packs and DLC as much as possible. Digital sales (and providing sales and services themselves) is more important to them than even Paid Services. DIGITAL SALES IS HUGE FOR THEM. And they're realizing it even more every day since a few years ago.

And, I don't think Blizzard wants their competitors to know just how much money they're making from digital sales. Profit margins are massive if you can cut out the middlemen. They're doing it with games, services, music, and even video streams now.

If other competitors aren't already doing this, they will be hurting badly and simply cannot compete with Activision Blizzard. There are just so many businesses out there that haven't realized the importance of digital delivery and just providing these services in house. They should be outsourcing labor, but OWNING the digital delivery systems and finding clever ways to get their customers to buy from their digital stores. This is how Activision Blizzard is destroying the competition.. if competitors can't keep up, they'll be just like Blockbuster still trying to rent out VHS tapes.

Future Plans

With their heavy emphasis on digital delivery, you can bet that both Activision and Blizzard will be finding new ways (and special promotions like "$10 off if you buy online" or "get it free by buying this") to push digital sales. One method is degrading the quality of retail boxes and promoting environmentalism or "green incentives" to move into digital.

Having an easy delivery system and purchase platform is key. The RMAH "B.NET BUCKS" system is a brilliant method to push even more digital sales.

And you can bet that Titan will be HUGE into the digital delivery system. Special coupons or incentives to buy Titan online, purchase DLC digitally, purchase expansion packs online, seamless client upgrade systems, etc.

To continue pushing the digital delivery method (to eventually replace most of their retail sales), Titan will also be incorporating a heavy payment system internal to Battle.net (e.g. more "B.NET BUCKS") If users can make money using Titan, they'll use their Battle.net credits to purchase more games or Titan expansion packs. Titan expansion packs will probably be smaller and delivered more quickly too, since they weren't able to do it in time for WOW but they can still do it for Titan. And with their digital sales objective, it makes much more sense.

More people (and in particular video game competition) need to be aware of where real game sales profit lies.

The WOW Annual Pass was quite an interesting new announcement at Blizzcon.. it's actually quite brilliant and I have to commend the marketing team.

Here is more information on the Annual Pass which I will be referencing.

From what I understand, this was a last minute change. It was probably an idea developed (or just implemented from an earlier idea) within the past 3 months or so after they decided not to make the surprise Christmas announcement.

It's being marketed just like a mobile contract. If you sign up with us, you get this fancy new phone for free.. and you only have to pay month to month! Cancel anytime you want! (Many view this contract scheme as a scam, but it's pleasantly ignored when it comes to a video game.)

Just like mobile contracts, users on jumping on board without considering the consequences. And, it's a common human trait not to fully understand long term consequences (which is being exploited by clever marketers) after all.

Here are some things to consider:

• You CANNOT cancel the monthly payments, so you better make sure you don't run out of funds and save up in advance (in case of monetary emergencies.)
• In order to be eligible, you need to pay for a recurring subscription already. Meaning that it will cost you an additional month (13 months) to get the offer: "Prior to accepting the offer you must have a recurring World of Warcraft subscription active on the associated account."
• You are stuck with the 12+1 month subscription, and it's deducted on a month to month basis.
• You are buying the standard digital copy only. You do not get a retail box.
• If you fail to make a payment: you lose the items, your account is disabled, you are charged the full amount for Diablo 3, and Blizzard is within their right to sue you: "If your World of Warcraft subscription lapses during the Twelve Month Commitment, or if you fail to make any required payments or timely payments, Blizzard reserves the right to terminate your participation in this offer in addition to any and all other remedies that may be available to Blizzard at law."
• Because of the guaranteed beta access, other WOW players are penalized access for this. It further encourages them to participate in the offer.
• You're locked into playing WOW even when D3 comes out next year. It's a limited time offer too, so you need to act fast!
• You are stuck with an entire year's subscription during a time when new games will be coming out: Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, Tera Online, SWTOR, Torchlight 2, Path of Exile, The Secret World, etc.
• When you're stuck with a subscription, you feel obligated to play the game to avoid a wasted expenditure.
• It's a great way to keep Blizzard players away from new MMOs and more importantly, their competitors.
• It gets Diablo 3 players to play WOW, and gets WOW users playing Diablo 3.
• Having so many players locked into a 1 year contract increases their subscriber counts (vanity figures for impressing shareholders) even if the accounts aren't being played. It's "Subscriber" counts, not actual players.
• Michael Morhaime stated that "their margins are higher when we sell direct." It's in Blizzards best interest to get you to use their digital downloads.. they are saving a ton of money by you not buying retail (they also lose a major cut from the retail sale too.)
• This is also why the new D3 RMAH and PayPal relationship is so important.. by building up B.NET bucks, their profit margins are going to skyrocket compared to retail loss. This is the future of all of their games. Keep your money within Blizzard, buy digital. Degrading the quality of retail boxes is a great way to encourage digital purchases too. (Remember the quality of materials that retail boxes used to carry?)

A very clever move, just like the Pokemon style combat pets.

(Blizzard will be selling even more pets in the Blizzard Pet Store now, with special pets having new abilities. Since it's not "game impacting" and only for "vanity pets", then it's perfectly acceptable to start selling weapons and armor.. but just on pets. (I don't literally mean real weapons and armor.. I'm talking special skills and pet stats.) It's also opening up WOW to a younger crowd, whereas Diablo 3 is targetting a more older/serious crowd. They'll have a couple games now to hold over the various demographic groups until Titan comes out for a more larger demographic.)

I wouldn't recommend the WOW Annual Pass for anyone.. unless either you're rich or you live in Australia. $100 for Diablo 3 is a pain in the ass, I'm so sorry for you guys. This deal is much more beneficial to you guys than everywhere else.

For everyone else though, please consider the repercussions.

The big problem I have is that you're FORCED to start paying for the WOW Subscription right away, during the time when Diablo 3 and other MMOs come out. It would be much more fair to players if you could buy the WOW Annual Pass now, but start using it at any time you want. But, their plan is to get users paying monthly fees for a year, knowing fully well that they'll never actually be playing WOW. Brilliant marketing strategy.

Question was brought up during the 2nd Day WOW Q&A.

Gregg Street mentioned that they've been talking about this particular question, and one of their ideas is to still have the maximum cap of number of characters, but allow the players to distribute them to whatever specific realm they want. (So, 50 toons on one realm.)

No promises though, it's still being discussed.

I think it's something unavoidable though.

During that Pre-Show coverage, Geoff Keighley & Kat Hunter were saying that there "Haven't been a lot of leaks" and the first time they haven't had any major leaks. :)

Yeah, right. Guess that's the benefit of having a smaller blog.. a lot of things go unnoticed.

I'll have some thoughts put up later on those other new developments that were announced. The "WOW Annual Pass" thing seemed kind of new and rushed, maybe it was to make up for the missing Diablo 3 release announcement. Things are just way too busy right now, and I've barely had a chance to use the PC. Sunday should be better.

* UPDATE (10/22/11 5:21 AM):

Okay, something SERIOUSLY WTF just happened. I was looking at the imgur link again and the "Posting Date" suddenly changed to "Saturday, October 22 at 10:53 GMT". As of right now it's saying it was uploaded "1 HOUR AGO" which is incorrect. I used IMGUR for this exact reason, so that it could be timestamped. I'll investigate to figure out what happened.

* UPDATE (10/22/11 5:57 AM):

Here's a comparison page you can use. This was posted around the same time as the original (so no weird /r/Diablo restructuring.)

Direct Link: http://i.imgur.com/FAp8v.png
Info Page: http://imgur.com/FAp8v

The reason those pages exist were because they were part of a puzzle on the "Important Notices" page.

Here's the specific entry:

* Research research research! If you find new information, share it. It's very important to read everything on the site from beginning to end. It helps many future blogposts make more sense. This blog covers many different topics, and important secrets or hidden gems and puzzles can be found anywhere. Keep your eyes open, investigate, and read..

If you noticed, there was discoloration of certain characters, and if you did a mouse-over you would have discovered "hidden" hyperlinks on the characters.

Each of the hyperlinks went here:

http://i.imgur.com/FAp8v.png - How to piece together the puzzle together
http://pastebin.com/RFUi5Mzz -> The letters "TM" and "Case Sensitive"
http://pastehtml.com/view/b47z32u7o.txt -> a link to Youtube where the letters were "r."
http://tinypaste.com/865cd -> The letters "5Q"

(There are info pages on each of those too showing when they were first uploaded, or when the Youtube comment was first made. I wanted to make sure everything had undeniable evidence, but I didn't anticipate this imgur.com quirk.)

They all combined to make: http://i.imgur.com/ TM 5Q r. png

And I found comments about the puzzle (and specific Blizzcon reveals) here, here, here, and here (this is a page with that Blogspot missing comments problem, but hopefully should be fixed soon.)

I can't believe I have to go through this nonsense. It was just supposed to be cut and dry.

* FINAL UPDATE

Ahh here we go! It's a stupid Reddit feature and just temporary. If you view the "embed codes" on the post, you can see the original posting date: http://imgur.com/TM5Qr?tags

The original is still there. Reddit changed info for some reason whenever it gets linked back. So now you can't flame me anymore assholes.

I'm finding that investigating new information on the net is getting pretty hard to come by. Unfortunately, there are a lot of tighter controls and internal policies now on how employees are allowed to act or what they are allowed to publish online (small things that they didn't consider before). It wasn't like this 2+ years ago. :)

With all of the exclusive Google sleuthing, I'm also seeing ways in which the search engine can be significantly improved so that casual searchers can get better information. I might write something up on that subject sometime in the future.

Anyways, with most gaming leak information drying up, I'm creating a new post all about finding gaming leaks yourself. And, how anyone can do it themselves with just some simple automated tools.

I'm also trying to finish up a bunch of other stuff, since we'll all be pretty busy this entire weekend and I probably won't be able to post anything new until after the weekend. Other than Blizzcon, I also have a ton of other real life stuff going on this weekend (so I'm going to be missing the second half of the Blizzcon streams on both days unfortunately).

I'm not really expecting much, though. We all pretty much know by now what's going to be happening at Blizzcon:

• Mists of Pandaria video during the opening ceremonies part providing all of the expansion pack details, the non-hero class, and a playable demo. (I can already hear that same Cataclysm narrator saying: "Azeroth has been shattered, but meanwhile within the MISTS there lurks a new evil..")
• SC2: Heart of the Swarm video and game details (players will see new units, gameplay sequences, and be able to play the HOTS expansion pack)
• Diablo 3 (stations setup for playing, new details, more Beta Keys given away)
• I'm hoping for a little surprise though, like the new D3 release date. After all, the original Blizzcon 2011 plan was to have a big Christmas surprise (i.e. late November D3 release date) announcement.
• I can see the whole event almost being identical to Blizzcon 2009 actually. Metzen introducing SC2 units, talk about rumor and speculation, and then the big MoP reveal.
• Mike Morhaime making nervous and unfunny jokes in the beginning before Metzen is brought in. Recap of the "amazing" Blizzcon 2010, and then a recap of Blizzcon 2011 during the closing ceremonies (ugh).

So yeah.. it's all pretty quiet.

But, you know.. there is this little thing that kind of started a little while ago. Enjoy. :)

I don't know if you guys noticed or not, but I made a quick update to The Original Daeity's old "Profit from Blizzard Authenticators?" post a while back.

I found an official investment-related document that proved everything he wrote was completely accurate. :)

The "Vasco Data Security International" 2006 document is here.

In it, Vasco (the manufacturer of the Blizzard Authenticator GoPass 6 line) detailed that in 2004, their cost per token was ~$3.50. In 2005, it was ~$3.00 each. And in 2006, it cost ~$2.00 each per token. You can imagine how much they probably cost now, especially with their significantly higher sales figures, bulk purchasing, and new technologies. It would be perfectly fair, though, to state that they cost no more than $2 each.

This document was also for the entire Digipass line, and the Blizzard Authenticator models are what you would call, the "bottom of the barrel." So those "Costs Per Token" also included their more expensive (on average) tokens. :)

Very interesting insight into the company though, for those who are completely convinced that tokens cost $10-20 to manufacture. There are tokens out there that can cost $1 to make, and then wholesalers/resellers put them up for $30-60 each.

If people only knew how much everyday ordinary items REALLY cost to manufacture and ship... :) Corporations need to keep all of this information highly confidential (oil, cars, paper products, food, electricity) or else there would be public outrage.

Okay, looks like it's finally online now.

It's a very disappointing read, and rather short. Nothing about Lore or Titan like what was implied, it was just a Metzen personal nostalgia and feelings piece..

Apparently, there's more to come though: "Check back tomorrow for part two!" (Even though this article was sort of Part Two already, so the next one would be Part Three.)

Still no updates on that PC Gamer article, where Nathan Grayson semi-implied that there would be more information on Titan lore. I think it was just a weirdly worded post that could be interpreted a few different ways, but it still looks like it was written that way intentionally to bring back his readers.

The latest updates are as follows:

On October 14 (last Friday), the author tweeted "Nearly done transcribing my Chris Metzen interview. He's an '80s nerd child to his very core. It's glorious."

And then followed by, "People are going to laugh at some of the things he said, but the degree of conviction in his words is incredible."

I figured his post would have been done by Monday, but I guess he's working on a lot of other articles.

Here's something interesting. In the 4.3 patch, Blizzard is restricting the naming policy again and changing it back to pre-2008 days in North America.

North American realms (excluding Brazilian, Latin American, and Oceanic realms) no longer permit letters with accents in character or guild names. Existing character and guild names with special characters will be unaffected by this change.

If you were around in the "Golden Days", World of Warcraft used to have very strict naming policies on all realms. No special characters, no famous names, no real world references, no partial or complete sentences, no "leet" or "dudespeak", no immersion breaking titles, etc. Everything had to be a true "fantasy name" (yes, even on normal realms) otherwise you would get a warning and a forced name change. Spam or Chuck, or example, would get reported.

Most users have totally forgotten that, during the early days of Vanilla in 2004-2005, Blizzard was very strict about character names and players were actually banned for creating "non-fantasy" related character names. Character names like "Bob", "Bruce", "Dave" or "Chad" for example, would quickly get you a flagged account, a warning, or a ban if you continued to create names that wouldn't exist in the fantasy world. This happened to me and many friends. We were all forced to create new "fantasy" names" and this was on normal PVE and PVP servers. Complaining to GMs only resulted in threats. Part of the problem was that many of the support staff were green and recently hired, new to MMORPG's and trying to make an impression to their bosses. So they were very strict and tried to comply with all company policies. They're much more laid back now than they were before.

As the subscriber base grew, though, players started running out of names. So, in May 2005, it was relaxed allowing new naming conventions.

In April 2008, it was relaxed even further and they allowed special characters to accomodate the further growth of subscribers.

Officially though, Blizzard just said that the reason for the changes were because players wanted it. Just like the Real Money Auction House.. they "only did it because players asked for it". Character restrictions? Players wanted it. Removal of restrictions? Players wanted it. Reimplementation of those restrictions again? Players wanted it. D3 Online Only Requirement? Players wanted it. You know how it goes..

I just find it very interesting that they're putting these restrictions back in place. Having too many Character Names must not be a problem anymore if you see where I'm going. :)

Can't wait for the next Shareholders Meeting.. I wonder, too, if they'll be adjusting their definition of "Subscribers" again to accomodate the WOW Starter Edition.

Funny how people are completely convinced that since World of Warcraft has been around for 7 years, that there isn't anything left to exploit and all of the holes have been plugged. :)

What's even scarier, though, are the people who believe that "hacks" and "duping" have never happened in WOW. I see these arguments on forums all the time.. and it's very depressing each and very time. (Duping is still a common problem in WOW, and it's going to happen in Diablo 3 too.)

Anyways.. apparently, MMR exploits in World of Warcraft are still around. I don't really follow WOW anymore and I just learned about this by accident. I thought it was worth mentioning..

In fact, I can't remember a time when there HASN'T been a Match Making exploit available in WOW. These types of exploits have been around since Arenas were first launched. More details here on Reddit, and here's a link to the exploit. Users are trying to get as many people to know about the exploit as possible, so that Blizzard will do something about it.

The GCD hack was always my favorite though.

* I'm working on a new page for the front page and it should be available in a few days. It's somewhat of an overview for the site and important notices of information that everyone should be aware of. It might contain some really important information some day. I wonder if anyone will actually read it? :)

* I found out something rather interesting about World of Warcraft. I'm not sure sure how to approach it or write a blogpost about it. Hardly anyone knows about it, and everything would make sense by just describing it in one sentence really. So, I'm still mulling it over.

* Here are a couple quotes where Blizzard called RMT illegal. This goes along with that previous blogpost entitled "Blizzard v. RMT". I was able to find multiple sources for this information, but I'm quickly discovering that these quotes are disappearing all over the verse.

Here's one with a screenshot I took, just in case it vanishes. Make note of their EDIT TIME at the bottom of their posting. :)

Here's another official Blizzard quote too in regards to DRM:

"Not only do we believe that doing so would be illegal, but it also has the potential to damage the game economy and overall experience.."

This particular quote has been disappearing everywhere and I regret not taking screenshots of it earlier. Bashiok is most famous for saying it, but there were other representatives who re used it as well. If I ever find the old posts, I'll put them up here.

Correction: After listening to the conference call recording, Michael Morhaime did in fact attribute the 11.1 million subscribers to the end of Q2 only, so I heard it wrong. The Q3 meeting should be very interesting now and after the "F2P" WOW Starter pack I'm curious if they'll be reworking their Subscriber definition.

-----

Michael Morhaime adjusted their total subscriber levels to 11.4 to 11.1 million during yesterday's financial call. I've noticed that many people are, for some reason, saying that it only dipped to 11.1 for that quarter alone but it's higher now.

In actuality, Morhaime was reporting the 11.1 million subscribers as it stands right now (August 3 2011). It's not just subscribers for the second quarter 2011 ending June 30th, it's at this present moment.

This means that almost a month after the Cataclysm launch in China (July 12 2011), and over a month after the 4.2 content launch and simultaneous WoW Starter Edition launch (June 29 2011), they have still lost a considerable number of players.

The first month of a launch is when the largest number of players join too, and if you remember China made up about 50% of World of Warcraft's worldwide subscribers.

Something to think about.

I think there needs to be expansions into new territory and countries due to the growing boredom being experienced in existing regions. It's mostly the novelty wearing off too, and the "boredom" is typical of every game after a certain period of time. That seems to be one of their new strategies to increase subscribership.. but I wonder which countries are still left.

As you can tell by the those subscription and financials, things have been looking very bad over the past several months. Not only do these officially confirm the accuracy of previous estimates, but also the manipulation involved in the Subscriber™ definition. =]

As explained many times in the past, there's a significant difference between subscriptions and Blizzard Subscriptions™. Investors and the public get to see their public financials, but it's not like they're legally required to reveal actual subscriber numbers (or names) to anyone. They use a special definition for public announcements, but that's about it - and that number can be manipulated in any which way they want. I also have an interesting news reveal shortly where the Blizzard marketing team will soon be able to manipulate this number even further to their advantage. =]

Based on the subscription numbers, you can see that they've lost a little over 10% of their subscribers and they still haven't been able to fix their attrition issues while churn is in some serious trouble (i.e. the rate of losing players has been higher than gaining players for almost a year now.)

In regards to the sudden drop in players (and associated revenue), I'm not sure how they can keep this information hidden any longer. I don't know how they can continue justifying their public financials considering the massive losses in micro-transactions and pet/store sales. Even with such a sudden drop (ie, 700-800k Subscriptions™), I don't think an official or documented announcement will ever be made. The Q1 (Jan/Feb/Mar) 2011 financials call is coming up in a couple months and I'm really looking forwards to it, especially after the massive release of all of this information. =]

You should see some interesting and more desperate actions soon in order to increase their revenue. One of them is new pet/store sales, but I'll be putting that up in another post right after this one before my 2 major updates.

One of their acts of desperation, which I think I've talked about in the past, is turning World of Warcraft into a F2P system like what everyone else is doing. That's right! Blizzard is planning changing their treasured game into a F2P structure.. well, sort of. Basically, the free 14-day trial period is being changed to unlimited play up to level 20. The announcement is planned "at the end of Q2 2011", so you should hear about it very soon.

This information was actually pretty easy to find, a ton of employees knew about it already so I didn't have to go through my usual channels. I don't know any more details over than the F2P modification, however, because they need to keep gold farmers and spammers on a leash, I'm sure you'll see a lot of restrictions in place similar to the trial method. For example, chat, AH restrictions, and probably a limit on gold and/or a bank limit so that they can't be used as mules. I'm also not surprised by the timing of the announcement either, it's right at the cusp of a new quarter in which they want to drive their revenue and artificially increase subscription numbers. =]

You see, this new approach reeks of both desperation and brilliance. Subscription attrition has reached a terrible state, and they're going to continue plummeting for years to come. However, because of this new method and the influx of "free players", it will artificially increase their Subscription™ count astronomically. Will they be changing their special Subscriber™ definition, or will it remain the same? If you ever see a "12 million" or "13 million subscriber" announcement in the future, just remember that 3-4 million of those "subs" might be in fact F2P players. =] And those numbers don't even come close to real players as you're well aware..

From what I can tell, this is just the first step in a new long-term plan and they have a lot of other stuff scheduled for the future (e.g. lowering the cost of WoW, reduced expansion pack price points, and eventual subscription fees). I didn't like the "Cataclysm experiment", but I do like this experiment.. I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner.

Okay, now that I'm past all of the boring stuff, it's time to move onto the more important and mind-blowing updates! Should be up momentarily so please hold tight.. I'm sifting through a ton of information and emails here and trying to sort things out to find the important bits.