Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, California were temporarily evacuated today when a 5.4 magnitude earthquake struck the Chino Hills area in southern California. Chino Hills is about 30 miles from Irvine.

According to the information on the login screen, in-game and phone support were momentarily unavailable, however everything is now back to business as usual. No servers or other game services have been affected by the earthquake. All the technology is operating smoothly.

Our own Dan O'Halloran was in private chat with us all when the earthquake struck. He reported that while it was a good shaking, it was "nothing to go home about." Perhaps if we're lucky the earthquake shook a few more Beta keys out of Blizzard. We can only hope.

Take a look after the break for the full in-game news released by Blizzard.

It's an interesting moment, the one that mikkeneko talks about over on WoW LJ. It's the one where you first enter a battleground, or an Arena, or just head out into the world, attack someone of the opposite faction and win, and first realize that yes, you can PvP.

I come, like many more experienced gamers, from a Counterstrike background (and a Doom and Quake background before that), so I've almost always known the thrill of taking on other humans at their own computers. But this moment happened for me before I ever played WoW -- back in the days of Dark Age of Camelot, I entered a battleground, saw nameless player opponents in front of me flagged red, actually killed one, and realized that yes, I could actually do this. Our own Dan O'Halloran just recently had this experience in WoW, I believe -- he told us on the podcast a little while back that he'd never played PvP, and a week or so later, he told me he'd tried out a battleground and learned it was actually a lot of fun.

PvP isn't hard -- you mostly play the character as you play it in PvE, and as fast as high-end Arena matches can get, battlegrounds especially are simple enough for even casual players to enter and at least partly influence the battle. I don't remember what's so scary about PvP but I do remember it being scary way back when. If you haven't played PvP yet, though, you're missing out -- jump into a battleground, throw some spells or swords around, and you'll find that you too can PvP.