Warcraft Experience

Looking for a long lost guild mate or even just a friend that you used to group up with but haven’t seen in ages? A great new community site has been launched that takes the concept of social network sites and incorporates it into an MMO environment where virtually every game on the market today is represented. For details, take a look at the press release:

GUILDMATES.COM - SOCIAL NETWORK SITE FOR MMO PLAYERS CELEBRATES OFFICIAL LAUNCH
SEATTLE, Washington, September 18th, 2006 - Guildmates.com announces a new way for MMO players to keep in touch with friends new and old. Guildmates is a growing social networking site made just for players of massively multiplayer online games.

At Guildmates users can easily search for long lost friends and guildmates from a database of over 100 MMOs. No longer do you need to wait for your friends to reactivate their accounts, dig through old emails, or search endlessly for long gone forums.

Creating your profile is easy and completely free. List your characters and they will be instantly added to the Guildmates database so other users will be able to search for you. How much personal information on your profile you choose to share with the world is completely up to you! Communicating with other users on Guildmates is simple with a built in mail system, forums, and instant messenger.

Find out more at www.guildmates.com

About us:
Guildmates.com is an independent company formed in 2006 by avid MMO’er Blake Peterson. Our mission is to provide a meeting place for gamers the world over and give players a chance to reach out to old friends and guildmates.

In the December 2006 issue of PC Gamer, the editors present a one page preview of The Burning Crusade highlighting the upcoming feature changes (pp 92):

• The end of 40-man raids
• Honor will be treated as currency for purchasing special items rather than the basis of a competitive ladder.
• The ladder system will live on in the new Arena Combat
• A new gem-cutting profession for socketing items
• New locations, including capital cities of the Blood Elves and the Dreanei: Silvermoon City and Exodar
• The city of Hallah, located in Nagrand (a captureable city)

If you haven’t seen the article yet, grab the December 2006 issue of PC Gamer at your local bookstore or sign up for your subscription today!

Blizzard is handing out a bit of compensation for those realms that had some downtime recently.

To compensate players for any inconvenience caused by the downtime experienced during this week’s retrofitting hardware maintenance, we will be issuing a 24-hour time extension to all players with an active account and characters on the affected realms (listed below).

Agamaggan | Alexstrasza | Alleria | Azshara | Balnazzar | Blackhand | Cho’gall | Dark Iron | Destromath | Dethecus | Detheroc | Emerald Dream | Garona | Gorgonnash | Greymane | Gul’dan | Hellscream | Illidan | Kael’thas | Kalecgos | Kirin Tor | Lightninghoof | Maelstrom | Malfurion | Moonrunner | Sargeras | Spinebreaker | Staghelm | Stormreaver | Twisting Nether | Ursin | Whisperwind | WildHammer

Thanks

WowVault is asking the following question. Go cast your vote if you are a retired WoW player on what will bring you back.

We wanted to get some feedback about what would get retired players back to World of Warcraft. Go cast your vote!

If you are, or were, a retired WoW player, what is the most appealing feature of The Burning Crusade expansion pack that might make you return? Go Vote Now!

Poll is also on right hand side on home page

Per Drysc about the new mount change:

This change was implemented after the latest revision of the patch notes was made available for inclusion into the 1.12.1 patch binary. It will be documented in a future revision however.

There will be effectively two riding skill levels, apprentice and journeyman. The cost for the riding skill will be significantly higher than it previously was, however this is offset by a drastically lower cost for the actual mount.

For current players with mounts there will be a seamless transition to the new system. You will continue to have your mount; you will continue to be able to use it, etc. What this change does for players who don’t yet have a mount or an epic mount is take the emphasis off of the mount itself, and put it on the riding skill. This helps give players access to more variety without requiring a large monetary investment if they, for instance, just want to pick a different colored horse.

In addition to the change of riding skills, the costs of Blue and Epic faction mounts has been significantly decreased. Now blue mounts costs 10 gold and epic mounts costs 100 gold.

Now some of you already have the Burning Crusade expansion pack…and some of you are like me and have been busy and haven’t gotten it yet.

In an effort to make a little extra spending cash (hey gotta buy BC somehow) I created a little Amazon store with all sorts of WoW related items for purchase. Be sure to check it out and don’t forget to buy something

Warcraft Experience Amazon Store

Good news for you Firefox users a new extension has been released for Firefox that lets users check the status of realms in World of Warcraft within the browser.

The extension is accessible through the Firefox Tools menu and lets you view current information about all realms on WoW, like which ones are up or not, the type of realm (RP,PVP,Normal), and their population size.

It can also be set up to track an individual realm and alert you if the status changes.

However the extension is still in Beta but it can be download here

World Of Warcraft has hit another milestone on the way, and is now on 7 million subscribers

The most successful massively multiplayer online game ever is probably an understatement. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has hit the 7 million subscriber mark, the company revealed during the Austin Game Conference.

There’s just no slowing down for WoW (a fitting acronym).
understatement.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has hit the 7 million subscriber mark, the company revealed during the Austin Game Conference. There’s just no slowing down for WoW (a fitting acronym).

Although Blizzard Entertainment has yet to issue an official release on the matter, according to our AOL-owned friends at Joystiq, the insanely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft has just hit a new milestone, as the game now has 7 million subscribers across the globe. Blizzard made the announcement during the Austin Game Conference this week.

It’s amazing to think that WoW has managed to gain an additional 1 million subscribers in just a matter of months—Blizzard announced the 6 million subscriber milestone in March. Just as impressive is the game’s truly global appeal. It’s rare that a game designed in North America could perform so well in Asia, but it seems that WoW has managed to attract a perfect blend of casual and hardcore types, regardless of territory.

Kim Daejoong, a Korean doctor of herbal medicine, summed it up perfectly in a recent article in The New York Times. “Hard-core gamers will play anything, no matter how difficult it is,” he said. “But in order to be a mainstream game for the general public, it has to be easily accessible, and there have to be lots of things for you to do, even alone. What WoW has done better than other games is be able to appeal to both audiences — hard-core players and more casual players — all within one game and bring them together. That’s why you’ve seen people all over the world get into the game.”

Rich Wickham, Microsoft’s director of Games for Windows Business, expressed a very similar sentiment. “World of Warcraft is an incredibly polished entertainment experience that appeals to more sorts of different players than any game I’ve seen,” he remarked. “It’s fun for both casual players and for the hard-core players for whom the game is more just than a game: it’s a lifestyle. Just as important, Blizzard has made a game that has a broader global appeal than what we’ve seen before.”

Indeed, it’s not likely that any MMO will be able to surpass the level of success that WoW has had, let alone replicate it. DFC Intelligence president David Cole recently took an in-depth look at this in a column called “Is it Possible to Surpass World of Warcraft?”

Read David Cole´s article here