Could someone explain this to me? Blizzard is now saying they’re ‘exploring potential partners for mainland China‘ distribution of WoW.

 In fact, Blizzard’s statement also indicated that it has invited The9 to negotiate in a bid to distribute the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion set, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and to discuss its release in mainland China, which is currently planned for next year. Since it seems as if it would not be possible for different companies to manage the original WoW and its expansion, a switch of distributor for both may possibly be on the cards, though Blizzard’s formal statement simply commented that further details on distribution will be “revealed at a later date”.

I don’t follow this stuff nearly close enough. What did The9 do?

Tobold’s on the money, as usual, when it comes to a frustrating element in World of Warcraft.

“On new servers guilds often invite lots of people at first, establish some sort of average advancement speed, and kick out the players falling behind. On the high end, people leveling up faster than the average just leave the guild on their own and join a faster guild. On the new server that opened last Thursday, I joined a guild on Friday, and Saturday I observed the guild master kicking out everybody who hadn’t been online since 2 days. Guild membership becomes as disposable as a Kleenex, there is no more loyalty from the member towards his guild, nor from the guild towards a member.” 

This is exactly what happened to my first WoW guild: I didn’t stay up with the curve, and eventually there ceased to be a point to my being a part of the organization. There was no guild leadership, so I wasn’t kicked out, but I essentially spent the best part of my time leveling up in WoW with no support whatsoever. I think I grouped with guildies like twice since game launch. My fault, I know, but I’ve never really reflected on it in a larger context.

Darniaq opens up the guns, and admits how annoying all those bastards still talking about pre-Trammel UO are.

“I do not apologize for being an unwashed mass.
I do not apologize for coming to something only because I heard about it after it got full mass market advertising.
I do not apologize for starting UO only because Renaissance made it a game someone like myself, at 29, could actually play.”

Here here!

Acclaim is breaking down another genre wall, going for the first commercial chop-socky MMOG. IGN has some media about the game, called 9Dragons. More info promised at E3, of course. Now all we need is a really good horror MMOG and we’ll have most of our bases covered!

I was shocked when I saw they were even going to try for one MMOG-related magazine, but now Gamasutra posts that a second publication is going to try to grab a share in this twitchy, spastic market.

 ”Scheduled for the end of May, the first issue will feature interviews, instance maps, questing guides, and articles on players’ interaction with various games, and will include input from Beckett Media as well as industry professionals and gamers. The company also publishes trading card related magazines including Beckett Baseball and Beckett Magic The Gathering, as well as Beckett Anime and Manga magazine.“

Yup! It’s being published by a baseball card company. So scared. I give it and its Massive counterpart about six months.

Grouchy Gnome, over on Nerfbat, is EQII Community Relations Manager Blackguard.

As long as he keeps on writing, I don’t see the problem.

“I’m a gamer who likes to talk design and actually gets to do some of that (though admittedly, almost all the nitty-gritty development is performed by our wonderful dev team, and the only time I’ve really gotten into that level of design was when I was an Apprentice Designer, which was pre-Manager for me). I might say I’m in one of those positions that I used to dream about: I do get to discuss overall design concepts and influence decisions, but I don’t actually have to implement them; we leave that to the smart people.”

Here here!

but it’s really really hard when WarCry makes it so easy.

“April 5th, DDO finally patched in a big, bad red dragon. Less than 48 hours later it was dead. Now, it is basically getting farmed. Strategy guides for taking down the toughest encounter in the game are appearing less than a week after the content was patched in.”