Warcraft III Battlechest

Platform: PC
ESRB Rating: T

World of Warcraft is the powerhouse in the MMO universe right now, let’s face it. The MMO addict in your life either plays WoW endlessly or has at least dabbled in it. If your friend or family member has been living under a rock, or just playing MMOs too much, they may not know the full story of Arthas (the main focus and arch-nemesis of the latest WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King). Show them the original story with Warcraft III Reign of Chaos and the expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. It has talent trees, hero classes, and familiar faces. This RTS will be a new love for the MMO gamer in your life.

Diablo II

Platform: PC
ESRB Rating: M

Yes, yes, another Blizzard game. Really, I’m not a Blizzard fanboi, but you have to admit they make some damn good games! This is another game that is sure to be a favorite with MMO gamers. It’s an action-adventure RPG with loot, loot, and more loot. MMO players are loot whores, and this game will satisfy all their loot needs. It’s easy to get in and, again, has alot of familiarities with the talent trees and playing as a hero. Oh, yeah, the story is pretty good as well.

Prepaid Gaming Cards

Great, something that isn’t directly WoW related! Whether it’s a subscription MMO or a microtransaction MMO there will most likely be prepaid time or currency cards. These can usually be found at a local Walmart, GameStop, or Best Buy. These stores cover a wide range of game cards so it will be simple to find the specific game you need.

Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard

This keyboard is one of the top rated and most commonly used gaming keyboards on the market today. If you’re certain your friend or family member doesn’t have one of these already I would highly suggest purchasing this baby. The keyboard keys illuminate, and it has an LCD display in the top-center that will display gaming stats and automatically recognize the game you are logging into to play. The programmable “G” keys are the selling point on this keyboard. There are 18 programmable keys that can be used for simple key bindings or complex macros. Your friend will even be able to macro skill and cast sequences with the G15 software to use in game. Don’t know what that means? Don’t worry, your friend will thank you for it.
Purchase the G15 keyboard and search for other Logitech gaming items: Logitech

5-Hour Energy 12-Pack

Whether the hardcore MMO player in your life is into PvP or PvE, chances are they have pulled all nighters at least a few times before. What a better way to feed their addiction and encourage more sleepless nights with 5-Hour Energy shots! Pulling all nighters may not be the most healthy thing someone can do, but you want to give your friend what he wants and what he’ll use. Hey, he may even hang out with you once every few months for it.
Buy a 12-pack of 5-Hour Energy from Amazon: 5-Hour Energy

J!NX Gift Certificate

If you’re a bit afraid of buying something specific for your friend, you can never go wrong with a gift certificate. J!NX has tons of MMO and general gaming and geeky items to choose from. Your family member or friend is sure to find something right for them at this online store.
Search for items or purchase a gift certificate: J!NX

If that milestone wasn’t great enough, Blizzard is celebrating their 15th birthday. Bitmob published an interview with Art Director Sam Didier, Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton, and Lead Systems Designer Greg Street in honor of their birthday today. It’s a great read if you’re interested in hearing lead developers discuss the past, present, and future of Blizzard Entertainment.

Happy birthday WoW and Blizzard!

These cute little guys first appeared a few months ago data-mined through MMO-Champion, along with a video of the Panderan Monk idle animation. Since the release of these pets it’s rumored that ‘Lil KT frostbolts cats that it sees! If you play World of Warcraft and have been to the Naxxramas raid, you know the deal with Kel’Thuzad and the cat Mr. Bigglesworth.

This news was not met happily with a lot of people in the community though. My Twitter account erupted with half of the people excited, and the other half extremely disappointed. The disappointment derives from Blizzard already charging $15/month subscription, and now they’re charging $10 for each pet. Of course, there’s the opinion: Don’t buy it if you don’t like it; but some see this as just the beginning. They suspect there will be more microtransactions for different items in the future.

Where do you stand on this issue? Do you see the pets as just something fun to enjoy by the people willing to spend real money in place of something they have to grind for, or do you think it is an outrage that Blizzard would charge real money for pets instead of using them as an in-game reward?

You can read the full post below with all the raid test times!

We are scheduling raid tests in Icecrown Citadel for October 26-30.

The schedule is as follows:

US Servers

Monday, October 26 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Festergut
Wednesday, October 28 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Icecrown Gunship Battle
Thursday, October 29 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Sindragosa
Friday, October 30 at 7PM EDT / 4 PM PDT – Valithria Dreamwalker

EU Servers

Tuesday, October 27 at 19:30 CEST – Lord Marrowgar
Wednesday, October 28 at 19:30 CEST – Lady Deathwhisper
Thursday, October 29 at 19:30 CEST – Professor Putricide
Friday, October 30 at 19:30 CEST – Rotface

Only normal difficulties will be tested, although 10 and 25 player raids will be available.

The Icecrown Citadel raid test schedule will be very flexible, and can change at a moment’s notice due to build status, bugs, and server issues. Remember that this is the test server, so things can, do, and will break from time to time. Check this forum for the latest Icecrown Citadel raid testing schedule information in the weeks to come.

[Source: MMO-Champion]

We are scheduling raid tests in Icecrown Citadel for October 21-22.

The schedule is as follows:

US PTRs
October 21 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Festergut
October 22 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Icecrown Gunship Battle

EU PTRs
October 21 at 19:30 CEST – Rotface
October 22 at 19:30 CEST – Icecrown Gunship Battle

Only normal difficulties will be tested, although 10 and 25 player raids will be available.

The Icecrown Citadel raid is going to be the climax of the expansion and put to rest the story of Arthas Menethil that started in the PC game, Warcraft III. Will Arthas die? Will he be redeemed? Blizzard hasn’t, and won’t, revealed what will come of Arthas, but so far the raid itself is shaping up to be pretty epic with airship battles, a race against the opposite faction to the top of the citadel, and a mysterious long quest chain.

Everyone’s getting settled at their computers with their raiding pants on; they can’t wait to experience Icecrown Citadel. The “final frontier” of “Wrath of the Lich King” raiding.

[Source: MMO-Champion (Also More info on Icecrown Citadel there)]

Now, Blizzard has recently announced that ALL WoW players must convert to Battle.net by November 11^th. With Blizzard’s upcoming plans to make Battle.net more of a social networking tool, this comes as no surprise to most people. There are, of course, some people that are responding negatively to this requirement. It’s OK though, everyone who has converted and is converting a cute in-game pet penguin. That should soften the blow a bit for those living under a rock refusing to convert. So hurry and convert to Battle.net. You only have about another month to do so!

So why do people play for so long?  WoW is a large game, but it’s nothing a year spent playing it consistently won’t make you an expert at.  You could probably play it for a single season and do everything there was to do.  Even the heaviest of single player RPGs (I’m looking at you, Oblivion) only rope people in for triple digits.  Yet some people have five years logged in WoW.  What have they been doing this whole time?  Is it just a colorful chat room to them?  There are still people playing the original Everquest, which I believe just had its TEN YEAR anniversary.  Ten years… of one game.  Go ahead, boggle at that.  Boggle away.  I can’t seem to stop boggling.

It might be a good idea first to look at why people play this genre to begin with.  Some gamers simply don’t understand it.  First timers to the MMO world will wonder why the hell they’re killing 20 rats for this quest.  That doesn’t seem like a quest at all.  It seems like a job.  Yet millions of people start out that way.  Many gamers don’t understand how anyone can play a game with no story whatsoever.  Many people even shake their heads in disbelief that so many people would subject themselves to the whims and aggravations of the online community.  But for those in the circle, those in the know, this is a genre that provides near endless amounts of entertainment.  In short, people play because they like interacting with people in a social environment, they like proving to those people that they are better or equal players, and they like “living” in a persistent fantasy or sci-fi world.  There are other reasons, and people might not meet all these criteria, but in general these are the reasons to play.  But why play for so long?

Whenever I talk to people still in the midst of an MMO, say multiple years in, and I ask them why they still play it, the answers can vary to a degree, but I always see the few overriding comments highlighted below.

Time Investment

To paraphrase what I generally hear, “I’ve invested so much time into this character/account, I don’t think I could give it up now.”  People think because they’ve been playing for three years, that they’re somehow giving themselves up if they cancel their accounts and stop playing.    In a way this is relatable to real life situations.  It actually reminds me of many women I’ve talked to over the years who aren’t happy with their boyfriends/husbands but feel that if they quit now that they’ll have wasted so much time.  It’s frustrating for me to hear about such incidents, obviously for selfish reasons (I’m a man with needs!), but also because by clinging to something they feel important purely based on time invested, it isn’t making them happy.  Contrary to my rigid exterior, I’m often displeased to see people not enjoying life.  And as with relationships, people clinging to MMOs makes me frown.  Anyone who has tried to play a new MMO lately has noticed a disturbing trend.  There’s no one to play with.  When one particular game has dominated the market for so long, anything new trying to break that barrier is invariably squashed under its monstrous heel unless something miraculous or truly innovative happens.

Solution:  Just let it go!  You can’t look at games as some type of life investment.  Your level 50 Elven Nightshade isn’t going to collect interest and be worth triple at the end of some ten year financial cycle.  It’s going to be the same character you rolled up 50 levels ago with better gear and maybe a few more emotes to play with.  There may have been a time when you had fun stabbing people in the back and imagining the frustrated cursing of the player on the other side of that ethernet line, but if that’s no longer the case, it’s time to move on to a new journey.  When you’ve stopped having fun, consider the game beat and move on.  Unfortunately I can’t give the same advice on relationships.  I’m terrible at them.

Addiction

You know it’s out there.  It’s ugly.  It’s horrible.  It has its mangy claws in more gamers than people like to admit.  I myself felt its sharp fangs at one point.  It scared me enough that I never repeated the occurrence (and it almost made me lose someone important).  I don’t want to dwell on this point too much because I think it’s a negative aspect of a social experience that colors that experience entirely too much.  There are addicts, and their reason for continuing on in the game is that addiction.  But these aren’t the majority of people that exist within the MMO community.  They are a large minority in fact.  Addicts exist in every walk of life, either in substance cases, obsession cases, even work areas.  Alcohol isn’t inherently evil just because a few people have no self control.  Chances are decent the people addicted to WoW would find something else to be addicted to if it didn’t exist.

Solution: Get real help or just wake up.  For me (As a recovering addict!), the simplest thing for me was just to get a grip.  But this isn’t the solution for everyone.  Some people need professional assistance to get past an addiction.  This isn’t really the place to go into such a heavy matter, but an addiction to video games isn’t all that different from an addiction to anything else.  It can be both physical and mental, believe it or not.

“There’s nothing better to play.”

This reason doesn’t make much sense to me.  Right now, I am suffering from having entirely too much to play.  Even the thought of devoting so many hours to an MMO right now gives me the chills (they’re multiplyin’!)  There are so many games today that you can literally only play the A+++ titles and still have a full plate.   I often wonder if the people who claim not to have anything better to play are either too cheap to buy a new game, or are in secret suffering from one of the prior reasons and just not willing to admit it.  It would take a pretty amazing game not to stagnate after five years, or a very thick set of blinders.  Games progress every year, and while story and often gameplay are a subjective matter, the aspects of MMOs have little to do with either of those.  The draws of an MMO are the visuals, the community, and the content.  All three of these can improve year to year, and sticking with the same one for half a decade makes little sense.

Solution:  Give other games more than a few minutes to determine if they’re great or not.  Gamers today seem to have ADHD (I know I do) when it comes to trying new games.  We play a game for maybe a demo’s length and judge it inferior.  I’m certainly not saying to give every game a full ten hours, but opening one’s mind to even the possibility of something new can do wonders for one’s gaming variety.  There are so many good games, MMO and non-MMO, that limiting all your time to just one is a disservice to yourself and to others.

“All my friends play here.”

This is a fairly legitimate excuse for why you would stay with one game for so long.  This is the reason I stuck around so long in the various games I played.  And I really have few arguments against it.  It makes sense.  I like playing games with people, and friends are in fact people.  Often they’re even preferable people!  The camaraderie that MMOs engender is an oft overlooked advantage of the genre.  I have made people that I consider close friends through MMOs.  I may never meet them face to face, but in a digital age this isn’t even that important when considering friendship.  They are people I know, people I talk to about things non-gaming related, people I actually care about.  With my heart being locked in a steel cage a thousand feet below ground and perpetually frozen, it’s a difficult thing to make friends, but somehow MMOs forced it on me.  One might even call such a thing a miracle.

Solution:  Move as a group.  This is a recent development for me, but I’ve begun playing multiplayer games with a group of about ten people, and we move as one cohesive unit from one game to the next.  When the general concensus is that whatever we’re playing has run its course, we chuck on over to whatever looks new and fresh.  Not only does it keep us quite good as a group of competitive gamers, but it also keeps everything in our gaming world interesting and vivid.  It also avoids the risk of any new multiplayer game:  The risk of not making friends! (Cue thunder and lightning sound effects).  It sucks when you can’t connect with people in a game that is meant to engender a sense of community.  It usually means a short stint in that particular game.  Getting your friends to move around with you completely axes this problem.

There are bound to be other reasons people play games in this genre for so long.  There are people who get paid to, whether through the gold farming process or because they’re part of some elite PvP team in Europe (When, oh when will these advertisers contact me for my skills?).  And I’m sure somewhere across the space-time continuum there is a little boy playing Eve Online in order to save mankind and all the history of the world.  I think for the most part people play for the reasons listed above though.  MMORPGs have a life all their own, but it is limited by content, and when content starts to look like that mangy pair of underwear you have in the back of your dresser drawer that you keep saving mainly for days when laundry gets a little scarce and you don’t have quarters for the laundromat, it may be time to move on.  Games should be fun.  They’re created to be a fun, emotional or adrenaline-fueling experience.  Don’t let them get the better of you!  Variety is the spice of life, and other clichéd phrases!

UPDATE: Like all internet hit pieces of flair, there’s a Japanese remix of this kid Exorcisting his loss of WoW to Kirby’s theme song!

The Isle of Conquest will have your conquesting broken down and focused on five distinct areas; The Oil Derrick, The Cobalt Mine, The Docks, The Airship Hangar, and The Siege Workshop. Each one of these areas will be up for grabs to either side, similar to Arathi Basin. What isn’t similar though, is that each of these capture locations will provide your side in the conflict with benefits such as siege weaponry, increased resources and honor or airships that grant the ability to drop in a team for a tactical assault.
This really sounds like what I thought World of Warcraft was going to be when I first hopped into it shortly after release. The description offered by blizzard conjures up images of Warcraft 3, except with a player behind each individual unit. Depending on how this turns out, it’s definitely something that has the potential to start reeling people back in.

Sound like a good time? Then check it our right here.

[Source: WoW Under Development]