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The company licensed to operate World of Warcraft in China – home to 4 million of the MMO’s global installation base – still can’t find smooth sailing after being cleared to operate the game’s first expansion pack two weeks ago.

NetEase’s project chief for World of Warcraft, Li Riqiang, resigned without explanation, the company announced. No replacement has been named.

This latest disruption comes a couple weeks after NetEase had suspended all new registrations for the game, as it waited for government censors to approve the launch of The Burning Crusade.

Source ~ Kotaku

Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, donated $1.1 million to The Make-A-Wish Foundation on Tuesday.

In a press release Wednesday, the charity dedicated to bringing joy to the lives of children with life-threatening medical conditions applauded the gamemaker for its large contribution.

The dough didn’t come straight out of Blizzard’s pocket. Players of the popular MMO pitched in by buying the Pandaren Monk in-game pet (pictured above left). Blizzard promised to donate $5 every time a player made a $10 microtransaction to gain the pet during the months of November and December.

“This donation also reflects the spirit and generosity of our players,” said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. “Their enthusiasm for World of Warcraft and for supporting a good cause made this possible.”

Full Story ~ Wired

It seems Blizzard has been taking on unofficial WoW applications in the Apple Apps Store. According to Gaming Angels, Blizzard has asked the owners of Armory Browser, Warcraft Arena Calculator, and Warcraft Characters to remove the apps. Granted, these are all paid apps, but it seems that Blizzard doesn’t plan on stopping there and will target the free apps next. No explanation for these take-down requests have been posted yet, but many speculate that Blizzard may be creating a few apps of their own.

Blizzard can add another notch on its belt. In a recent victory in their ongoing campaign against World of Warcraft bots, a federal judge has ruled that not only did the Glider bot break the EULA, it can be classified as a circumvention device under the DMCA.

“As we’ve noted before, Blizzard’s legal arguments, which Judge David G. Campbell largely accepted, could have far-reaching and troubling implications for the software industry. Donnelly is not the most sympathetic defendant, and some users may cheer the demise of a software vendor that helps users break the rules of Blizzard’s wildly popular role playing game. But the sweeping language of Judge Campbell’s decision, combined with his equally troubling decision last summer, creates a lot of new uncertainty for software vendors seeking to enter software markets dominated by entrenched incumbents and achieve interoperability with legacy platforms.”

Read the whole story here.

A lot of gamers would know Uwe Boll. He’s the guy who directed several movie adaptations for video games such as House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. He’s also the brains behind the new Far Cry movie.

Despite his long history in making movie adaptations of video games though, Boll doesn’t seem to be Blizzard’s prime choice for making the World of Warcraft movie. In fact, as MTV reports, they practically laughed at him when he offered to do so.

Boll recently got into contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard to make the movie. Boll relates the reply he got was a flat-out denial:

We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.

Source

Thank goodness Uwe Boll won’t get his hands on this popular game to make a movie. It’s been a good six or seven months, I’d say, since I pulled myself from the clutches of WoW (although I still have my level 70 toon just in case…), but still, if it was made into a movie, I’d prefer it be made into a good one. Blood Rayne was a serious letdown.

For all the Uwe Boll haters, the comment “not to you… especially not to you” has to be extremely humorous and rewarding. However, it is hard to dislike someone too much that doesn’t seem to mind putting that out there. I have to, at least, hand him that.

The World of Warcraft updating system is a standalone application that automates the task of keeping your add-ons current.

Anyone that has been playing World of Warcraft for any length of time knows how frustrating a new content patch can be. The scripting system in WoW is under constant modification to help add-on writers; unfortunately this does result in add-ons breaking quite often and requires them to be updated – a very time-consuming effort if you have more than a few installed.

WoWus was created to help alleviate the pains of keeping your installation in workable order; please see the Features section for further information.

Latest Changes:
WoWus 1.05
6th February, 2008
– Other: “Name, Description” is now again the default search field in the Search Pane.
– Fixed: Corrupted addon downloads will not result in the addon being removed from WoW.
– Fixed: A somewhat rare startup exception problem.

Download WoWus 1.05

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that its juggernaut MMO, World of Warcraft, has reached 10 million subscribers. The announcement is a note to would-be competitors – listen up Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Warhammer Online* – the 800 lbs. gorilla keeps getting bigger.

Not only does that subscriber number far surpass the proportions fathomed by MMO-makers pre-WoW, but Blizzard also clarified what the company means by “subscriber.” Specificity further underlines the credibility of the 10 million figure. (The number doesn’t include unused pre-paid cards, for instance.) Blizzard also noted that the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, was the best-selling PC game of 2007, holding the record for fastest-selling PC game of all time. Nearly 2.4 million copies flew off store shelves in its first 24 hours it was available.

Writing this, it strikes me how much WoW seemed like a side project when it was originally announced. Compared to the massive popularity of Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft, it seemed, well, marginal. Of course, now the blockbuster title far overshadows any of those franchises. For the time being, in any case.

Source

It seems Blizzard has a new celebrity featured in their newest WoW commercial. Vern Troyer (of Mini-Me fame) plays WoW and shares a sneak peek in the video below at his character — which looks a LOT like him btw!

H/T: Gaming Angels