Yesterday we talked about all those things we that strike us as unrealistic or odd in World of Warcraft. Your discussion of these different things got me thinking: what if Blizzard decided to make the game more interactively social? After all, players have often said that they want guild and player housing -- why stop there? Why have a house if you couldn't have more interactivity with your friends' characters, such as cooking various meals together, talking, hugging, playing music, or even playing a Warcraft version of chess or something -- all with new animations that looked right? Honestly, the way things look in WoW now, social interaction mostly involves standing there, repeating the same "talk" animation over and over as you chat. Imagine if there were a great deal more variety in what your characters could do together, just like -- and bear with me on this -- certain elements of The Sims.

Some of you hate The Sims with a passion, and I respect that. And to be clear, I'm not really talking about making WoW into a "people simulator" like The Sims is. You and I both would play The Sims if we wanted to simulate people -- we play WoW for adventure! No, I'm talking about adding some optional elements to WoW, similar to roleplaying, which would add a sense of life and actual living to the game and don't get the way of your killing things at the same time, so that it doesn't feel like killing computer-generated mobs is all there is.

If you do support adding more non-combative, socializing elements to the game, what sort of elements do you think would work? Mini-games such as WoW Chess, perhaps? Additional interactive animations, such as hugging, handshaking or even kissing? Perhaps even the ability to pick up objects and move them to a different location, such as moving chairs about or kicking a ball around? Would you even go to the extreme of including things like toilets, basic hunger and thirst needs, or other elements that we have in real life? Where would you draw the line where the similarity to real life should stop?

Nelson dropped us a link to this apparent handout to Walmart employees about the upcoming release of the Burning Crusade expansion in that store. There's some common info on there (did you know WoW "has taken the PC gaming world by storm"?), but there's also some interesting info about how sales might go, and exactly how many copies are showing up in each store.

After a little introduction about the game and how popular it is, there's two stats that jump out: Walmart expects (due to a survey-- done by.. Blizzard? Analysts?) that a whopping 90% of current WoW players will be buying the expansion, and that 75% said they would pick it up within the first 10 days of release. By my math, considering their figure of 7.5 million players, that's just over half a million (I need to stop doing math on this site-- thanks, JP) 5 million copies of the expansion pack sold in just the first ten days (!). As a comparison, the best-selling expansion pack of all time so far, Sims: Livin' Large, sold 700,000 copies in its first year. Holy moly!

As for Walmart numbers, they say 2,008 stores will each be receiving half-pallets of 60 copies, which is 120,480 right there. The flyer also notes that product will be showing up in stores on the 8th (which means it's there RIGHT NOW), and that it's not to be sold until 12:01 am on the 16th. From my time working at Gamestop, I well know that some of these stores will break street date (usually they just don't realize how important the item is, and accidentally sell it early), but I also know that if the publisher finds out they did so, they risk not receiving product next time-- so try bribing the Walmart people at your (and their) own risk. But with these numbers, and this plan, it looks like Burning Crusade might be ready to make history on Tuesday.

[ Thanks, Nelson! ]