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Warsong Gulch changes may not have helped much

Aloud on the podcast last week, I wondered if the patch 2.4 changes to WSG had made a difference (I haven't been able to make it in there yet -- too busy writing about Hello Kitty Online, of course), and now maxomi is wondering the same thing: since the changes dropped, has WSG actually been fixed?

Unfortunately, from what we're told, the answer is no. The changes, designed to cut off turtling and players who ran around with the flag without capturing it, first made the enemy flag carriers trackable after 45 seconds, and then gave a damage debuff to the flag carrier after ten minutes (which doubled at fifteen). But all the reports from players say that makes no difference -- people still turtle away, even with the tracking and debuff, and eventually both drop the flag and the whole thing resets.

So what's the solution? If you crib some notes from other capture the flag games, a match timer sounds like the best option, and indeed, that's what most people are suggesting. Blizzard would have to determine how long to tune it, but the idea would be that after a given amount of time, if there was no winner, the match would end in a draw, with both sides losing in terms of a reward. It doesn't seem like Blizzard can force players to fight, so the best option overall might be to just call it in a time limit, and keep the matches from going on for long amounts of time.

Upper Deck announces WoW minis game

Upper Deck has dropped an announcement about the final conquest of the Warcraft universe over the complete whole of nerd-dom: they're going to make a WoW minis game (yes, there's already an RPG system, so until someone puts together an official LARPing league, I think we're done here). The miniatures will come out in Fall of this year, and the game will feature standalone raid and dungeon scenarios, which means you can play against your friends or play by yourself against "automated dungeons." Upper Deck also says that there will be an Organized Play structure for the game, including Local and World Championships.

There's nothing yet about any "loot minis"-- Blizzard is apparently working closely with Upper Deck to put this together, so you'd think they might try to replicate the loot cards of the TCG, but I'm sure that if they do come up with something like that, we'll hear about it. There's also no word on actual gameplay yet, but Upper Deck says that they'll update the site with a downloadable gameplay demo, so we can see exactly how it will work.

Excited about this? Halo has been to the mini universe already, as has Marvel and DC. Will Warcraft have success in this, the last of the realms of nerd-dom?

WotLK is one of Yahoo!'s most anticipated games of 2008


Wrath of the Lich King made Yahoo! Games' list of 10 anticipated games in 2008. It's the only expansion on the list, and it stands proudly alongside other legendary intellectual properties like Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Halo, Fallout, and Grand Theft Auto.

It's definitely unusual for an expansion pack to make a list like this; that just goes to show you how extraordinary World of Warcraft is as a cultural phenomenon. Now if only I knew when this blasted expansion might be coming out, I could stop sitting around and fantasizing about playing as a Death Knight. No, wait ... I'd still be doing that anyway.

WoW is among five most popular game communities

ActionTrip put together a pretty interesting list that includes World of Warcraft-- they've tried to list the top five most popular game communities. Online gaming is just a huge pasttime, obviously (thanks in large part to Blizzard's magnum online opus), and so there are quite a few communities that have built up around various games. But they've supposedly crunched the numbers, and they say they've come up with the five biggest.

The Sims, Counterstrike, and Halo are all predictably on the list, as is World of Warcraft. Not too unexpected-- these aren't just the biggest communities in online gaming, they're also four of the biggest games of all time. But most surprising, RuneScape also joins the others. It's a Java-based (as in played in your browser) MMORPG that's basically an updated, graphical MUD. And their numbers are very surprising-- they have 9 million free accounts playing, as well as 1 million paid accounts, which (if those were all separate users, which I doubt) would put them in range of WoW itself. Of course, a free game (that's played in a browser and not bought in a store) will always have a larger available playerbase than a retail game that has a subscription charge, but considering that 13% of all PC gamers have reportedly played RuneScape, that's a pretty big deal.

The other interesting, WoW-related fact that ActionTrip dug up is this: apparently PC gamers are still playing WoW more than four times as much as any other PC game. There's no question that since its inception, WoW has changed the face of PC gaming, and no matter what happens in the future, it's currently one of the biggest videogame communities in history.

[ via WorldofWar.net ]


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