I love it.

-WowGog

Currently, the population of Earth is estimated to be around 6.7 billion people. As of this week, roughly 0.1 percent of the sum of modern humanity plays World of Warcraft. Today, Blizzard Entertainment announced that more than 8 million people subscribe to the massive massively multiplayer online role-playing game, setting a new milestone for the title more than two years after its fall 2004 release.

The tour of Blizzard HQ now includes a visit to its basement (pictured).

As it is with the real-world population, Chinese subscribers are the largest demographic in Azeroth, totaling 3.5 million players. Next up is North America, with 2 million players, followed by Europe, with 1.5 million–the remainder of subscribers are in other territories. Subscription rates vary by region, but US players pay $14.95 each month to play WOW after doling out the suggested retail price for the game, which has been lowered to just $19.99.

“We’re ecstatic that the World of Warcraft community has continued to grow steadily since we launched the game,” said Blizzard president and cofounder Mike Morhaime, presumably while being fed grapes and fanned with palm fronds atop a gigantic pile of cash. “This milestone wouldn’t have been possible for us to achieve without the incredible support of our players.”

Though its original world is already popular, World of Warcraft’s borders will soon grow, courtesy of next week’s release of the Burning Crusade expansion pack. Like the original WOW, it is rated T for Teen. However, at $39.99 it will cost more than the original game, which is required to play the expansion.

WOW: 8 million served
World’s top MMORPG proves even more popular, hitting McDonald’s-esque milestone more than two years after its release.
By Tor Thorsen, GameSpot
Posted Jan 11, 2007 12:01 pm PT

Wow, I’m seeing a lot of new people come to this site with Google Analytics and it’s just growing by the second! I just started this Blog and I’m really happy to see that people are genuinely interested in what I’m doing here! I have people from the UK, Germany, Venezuela, Canada and it just keeps growing! I want to build and make this site much bigger than what it is, to review every guide I could get my hands on, but without your help I can’t…

To sum it up I need your support. I would like to be able to go out there and review every guide I get my hands on and post Videos up here….but I pay full price for the guides every time I buy one. At this moment, $37 each time I need to make a video really bites into me. If you can’t afford to follow the links on the bottom of the page and purchase a guide to help support me please follow the relevant ads you see on the right side of the page or on the bottom of the page right above my links.

But simply clicking on one of these Ads or banners, you help show your support for GogReview and make it possible for me to create new and better guides. All you have to do is Click. Seriously, it’s that simple. Please read the Support page for more information. Thank you.

-WowGog

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is being prepared for release in mainland China with Blizzard’s market partner The9.

“We’re thrilled that gamers around the world have continued to embrace World of Warcraft so enthusiastically,” said Blizzard president Mike Morhaime.

“We’ve worked hard to provide a compelling experience for our players, and we plan to continue updating the game with exciting new content for them to enjoy for many years to come.”

World of Warcraft debuted in America in November 2004, and was the best-selling PC game for the next two years.

Available in seven languages, the ground-breaking game still sits at, or near, the top of PC games lists worldwide.

- NZ HERALD STAFF
read more | digg story

I found the previous article on the New Zealand Herald but I couldn’t find a specific author.

-WowGog

Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart.

But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat — and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and …

… realized he was an 11-year-old boy, complete with squeaky, prepubescent vocal chords. When he laughed, his voice shot up abruptly into an octave range that induced headaches and probably killed any dogs within earshot. Oh, and he used “motherfucker” about four times a sentence, except when his mother came into his bedroom to check on him.

I still enjoyed questing with him — he was a terrific World of Warcraft player. But there’s no doubt that hearing each other’s voices abruptly changed our social milieu. He seemed equally weirded out by me — a 38-year-old guy who undoubtedly sounds more like his father than anyone he recognizes as a “gamer.” After an hour of this, we all politely logged off and never hooked up again.

I had just experienced the latest culture-shock in online worlds: The advent of voice. Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe.

There are good reasons why so many multiplayer online games are launching with voice-chat software. Partly it’s to welcome newbies, who often find that old-school text-chat is simply too complicated. Also, voice chat makes pell-mell action easier to handle: If you’re running a guild raid with 50 people, it’s much easier to bark orders than to type them out (which is why voice chat has long been popular on first-person shooters on Xbox Live).

But many players are now discovering that voice tweaks the social environment — and sometimes kills off part of what made their favorite world so much fun.

After all, one of the great things about virtual worlds was that they were, well, virtual. You could adopt a brand-new persona, and leave your dull, dreary existence behind. Outside are the suburbs and your shift at Chick-fil-A; online is a land of snowcapped mountains where you sit astride a cat-like mount, while stars rain around you.

This lovely shift in identity was true even if you weren’t a hard-core “role player.” When I log on to World of Warcraft, I don’t try to seriously pretend I’m a medieval person. I happily text-chat with fellow players about 21st century stuff like music, Lost, our jobs. But somehow this social activity never breaks the “magic circle” of the game, the sense that we’re in a different place with different rules. Maybe it’s because text-chat is inherently abstract; it’s something that happens in our heads, in a sort of ludological backchannel of our minds.

But voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality — even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I’m Canadian by my nasal “oots.”) With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players — particularly younger men — could hear their voices. (”They got hit on a lot,” Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

“Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room,” as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog.

Yet here’s the thing: You can’t deny that voice chat can bring a huge amount of positive social good, too. Dmitri Williams, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did a study of World of Warcraft players for one month. The results? Those who used text-only chat experienced “drops in trust and happiness” amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships. Indeed, some guilds won’t even let you participate anymore unless you use voice chat, because text-only chat seems shifty.

And even I have to admit, voice chat will eventually allow for some awesome tricks. Imagine logging into World of Warcraft, realizing one of your friends isn’t there — and being able to call them on their real-world mobile phone.

Ultimately, this is about intimacy — how much of ourselves we’re willing to give away to strangers. Personally, I enjoy being able to construct identities carefully in text; that’s because I grew up with text as my main online mode. It’s possible that the impending generation of gamers will simply find voice chat more natural, in the same way that teenagers today happily blog about their personal lives and post pictures and videos of themselves. They regard personal revelation not as an incursion of privacy but a marker of authenticity.

Or maybe this will become a permanent culture clash, a sort of existential civil war in the game-o-verse. Perhaps gamers will demand their favorite online world create separate “text only” or “voice only” shards. This is one issue about which it’s hard to shut up.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive’s observations on his blog, collision detection.

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1) Step by Step DETAILED Instructions - Make sure that whatever guide that you look for has everything labeled out clearly for you. Don’t get into a World of Warcraft guide (or any game guide for that matter) and be lost somewhere in the middle because the author didn’t take time to write out all the details.

2) Video Examples - Sometimes when your in the middle of a quest the guide tells you to grab the “staff” but all you see is a really skinny tree. This is why an accompanied video REALLY helps clear up any confusion. Don’t buy a guide without them.

3) Maps and Coordinates - Not everybody has the entire World of Warcraft drawn out in their brains like me and you. And even then, we need some help at times. Make sure that whatever guide you get has Maps and EXACT coordinates to areas you need to be. This is seriously important.

4) Multiple Class Applications - Unless your buying a World of Warcraft guide that is only made for Blood Elves or Tauren Druid’s make sure that you could apply the same guide to multiple classes. We’re not all Magic Casters you know.

5) Realm Crossover ability - Make sure that the guide is detailed, but general enough to apply to several different realms. I play the World of Warcraft servers in Finland as well as California, so I always want to make sure I can use the guide wherever I go.

6) Equips and Spells - If the guide is class specific or it’s a leveling guide telling you what to do make sure that it always tells you what Equips, Spells and how much Gold you need for that particular section. I can’t tell you how many times I ventured into an area the guide told me to go and had my ass handed to me time and time again simple because I had the wrong equips on.

7) Easy to Use - Finally make sure the guide is fun and easy to use. If for any reason you can’t print out the guide or you don’t understand the contents, dump it. If you can’t get good customer support or find any FAQ’s turn around and run the other way.

And that’s it! Those are the things I try to incorporate when I review a guide for my website but if your just out looking for a guide and your confused on what to choose just look back at these seven things to look for and it’ll make your experience much better. If any of these steps are missing the guide is probably not worth it. Dump the guide and walk the other way. If all the steps are there it’ll boost your gaming to mad levels. Have fun. Peace.

Be sure to visit my Technorati Profile.

This is WowGog. As a lot of you already knew I was site owner to “world-of-warcraft-guide-of-guides.com”. Well that site just wasn’t what I was looking for when it came to everything that I’d like to offer. Here’s a little video going over the features and benefits introducing the new website. Enjoi.

So there you have it! Take a look around, visit my recommended sites, read my blog, and view the articles. Soon enough I’ll have a few more features to look forward to so be sure to subscribe to my RSS feeds as well. You could link those into your iGoogle homepage or your favorite RSS viewer. Peace.

-WowGog