Items tagged with World-of-Warcraft
Just over 14 years ago, the first expansion to World of Warcraft released, and sold millions of copies in short order (almost 2.4 million on the very first day). Now it appears to be getting another release. For a brief time, assets pertaining to World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic appeared on Blizzard's website, including what appears to be a partial PR announcement. Those files have been removed, though not before the key info made its way to Reddit, ahead of a reveal that is likely to take place during this year's BlizzCon event (which runs from Friday, February 19 to Saturday, February 20). So, what exactly does this leak tell us about WoW: Burning Crusade Classic? For one, it's planned...
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About two years ago, NVIDIA started talking about a shader rendering method that applied varying levels of quality to different objects in the game world. That method was called Variable Rate Shading, or VRS. When applied skillfully and artfully in different areas of a scene that are less prominent in the gamer's field of view, the resulting rendered image quality wouldn't look all that different than if the whole scene had been fully shaded, though the graphics workload savings would improve performance significantly. Fast forward a year or so, and benchmarks became available for measuring the performance differences with and without VRS enabled. Indeed, there was performance to be...
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A big patch is on the way for World of Warcraft that will bring the game up to version 8.3, and it's called "Visions of N'Zoth". The patch will bring with it new content and the need for some players to level-up to be ready when the update launches on January 14. In a nutshell, the Visions of N'Zoth expansion will have players fighting the Old God N'Zoth. Players will fight alongside Magni, Wrathion, and other luminaries to empower Azeroth with defenses built by the Titans. The Old God will try and corrupt the minds of the players with Visions of N'Zoth, which is a new type of repeatable content that will see players exploring a "twisted reflection of a defeated future Azeroth." For players wanting...
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It seems that even Blizzard's World of Warcraft can be a cruel, cruel mistress. Unfortunate fans of the classic WoW experience had their days ruined today by a sustained DDOS attack on Blizzard's servers, according to multiple sources. It isn't just WoW Classic, either. Several independent sources are reporting that servers for the latest expansion, Battle of Azeroth, are also under attack. WoW Classic only launched on August 26th, 2019, which is just a couple of weeks ago at the time of writing. What kind of heartless monster would attack classic MMO fans at a time like this? Could it be a nefarious attack by North Korea, like the Sony breach of 2014? Could it be the work of jilted lovers,...
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On Friday a Community manager for Blizzard made an announcement that fans looking forward to playing World of Warcraft Classic won't want to hear. The community manager warned that based on name reservations so far, the Herod realm is shaping up to be massively overpopulated. The manager said that if all existing players on that server remain there, there will be queues in excess of 10,000 people. The hope is that some of the people who are registered on the Herod realm will move to different realms and ease the overpopulation on the Herod server. The community manager noted that Blizzard recently opened the Stalag realm and it is urging many players registered on the Herod server to move there....
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It's the end of an era. In a new post made on the World of Warcraft website, Blizzard announced that the Battle.net name is being pushed aside. From now on, the company will begin transitioning its front-facing services to ones that begin with the name "Blizzard", such as Blizzard Voice and Blizzard Streaming, which have already been revealed. When launched twenty years ago, Battle.net was setup to become an integral service for all forthcoming Blizzard titles. It was in effect the portal that allowed people to play their favorite Blizzard titles together, with the original Diablo becoming the first to make use of it on November 30, 1996. The biggest reasons for Blizzard's decision? One is the...
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Perhaps in an attempt to reinvigorate its slowly dwindling World of Warcraft user base, Activision Blizzard is considering adding in-game purchases to the online game. In a post on the Battle.net forums, Zarhym (aka Jonathan Brown, WoW Senior Community Rep) said: “We are currently exploring the possibility of adding a way for players in certain regions to make purchases directly within the game. As part of this process, elements related to this will be appearing on the PTR. We’ll provide additional updates on our plans as development progresses.” The comment pertained to the discovery of an in-game spell called the Enduring Elixir of Wisdom that would give the user a 100% increase...
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Activision Blizzard has been raking in the dough from its hugely successful subscription-based MMORPG game World of Warcraft for many years, but it appears as though the game is a just past it peak. According to the company’s Q1 2013 earnings report, the game lost 1.3 million subscribers in the last three months alone, dropping the game’s subscription numbers to 8.3 million subscribers. This follows the loss of about 1 million subscribers last summer. The current losses primarily came from the East, meaning that the West is still very much in love with the game, but Activision Blizzard CEO Robert A. Kotick seems to accept the fact that it’s only a matter of time until WoW fizzles...
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