Warcraft Experience

Lucipher from Burning Blade asks on the forums if there will be an open beta for Burning Crusade, and Eyonix says, pretty unequivocally: Nope.

Well that’s kind of a bummer. If you haven’t got a beta key from Blizzcon, aren’t rich enough to buy one, and don’t know anyone who works at Blizzard, you’re pretty much out of luck. In one sense, it’s not really a bad thing– playing in an open beta, especially for an expansion, is like reading a gigantic spoiler of a movie you can’t wait to see. But as Lucipher says, it does mean no demo for the Burning Crusade. Either you’ll be paying full price to check out the new talents, dungeons, and races, or you won’t be playing them at all. Then again, are there still people out there who haven’t decided whether they’re getting the expansion or not? I would guess that by now you know what you’re going to do once that box hits stores.

Of course, you could go the cynical route. Tyrus from Executus points out (not uninsightfully), that “open beta will be the 6 months after BC goes retail of course.” It’s funny– because it’s probably true.

Is your Avatar more like ‘you’ than you are?

Are you making a lot of virtual money? And turning it into ‘real’ money?

Are you a typical online gamer, or do you break the geek-mould?

The BBC is making a new documentary about the meteoric rise of MMORPGs and other virtual worlds: featuring interviews with game designers, psychologists, economists and of course, gamers – which is where you come in…

We’re looking for a wide range of gamers (UK and US) to feature in the film – from teenagers to pensioners, newbies to guild leaders, and from addicts to part-timers.

We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if:

• You’re passionate about your Avatar – whether it’s just like you, or contrasts dramatically with your life offline
• You make real money through your dealings in a game
  download easy a full
• You are worried about addiction – either for yourself, a friend, or a relative
• You are organising a protest or event in a game
• You regularly meet with other gamers in the outside world

If you’re interested, please get in touch by emailing virtualworlds@bbc.co.uk. We’ll follow up with a phone call. The film will be broadcast in the UK early next year as part of the “Horizon” series. For those based outside the UK who haven’t heard of Horizon, it’s the BBC’s flagship science documentary series – please take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/index.shtml for details of our most recent films.

Direct2Drive wanted to spread the word about the newly added World of Warcraft to their download arsenal. Yup, World of Warcraft Download is available for you right now How does this work? It’s simple. Buy The World of Warcraft, then download and install the file. That’s it! You’re playing your brand new game and you never even had to leave your house!

World of Warcraft @ Direct2Drive

Eyonix posted the following on the WoW official forums:

A post was made in the Realm Status forum, however, I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that we will be issuing rolling restarts for all realms beginning at 5:00 AM PDT, Wednesday July 12. This is being done in order to address a minor technical issue. We only anticipate each realm to be impacted for approximately 15 minutes.
We apologize for the interruption.

To check out the forum thread visit here.

This upgrade addresses more general, character specific, user interface and other issues as detailed in the change notes. Remember if you can’t download it from the auto-updater you can get it from the following sites:

3dgamers,
fileplanet (requires account),
wow.filenuts.com (free downloads and also has a new look btw),
gamershell.

Some patch notes

General

* Fixed an issue where players were still being disconnected in 1.11.0 when trying to log back in within 20 seconds of a client crash.
* Fixed an issue where it was possible to place special bags inside one another.
* Applied a fix where players reported that they are sometimes unable to resurrect at their corpse.
* Fixed a graphical error where when viewing a character from a second computer, a player who had his weapons sheathed did not appear to have any weapons on his side or back.
* Fixed an issue where a player received a fatigue bar after a disconnection occurred during a flight path over deep water.
* The Looking For Group channel is now defaulted off. Players will need to join the channel to access it. (/join LFG)
* Fixed an issue where temporary weapon enhancements such as poisons would not persist after zoning or logging.

Thirty more realms are eligible for the Paid Character Transfer! For a full list of eligible realms, please click here. To find out when your realm will become eligible to transfer off of, please click here.

WoW Stratics is hosting a Screenshot Caption Contest! If you think you can come up with some witty, meaningful and downright hilarious captions for the screenshots they have selected, then head on over and give it a shot!