I think I’m finally over World of Warcraft.

As you can see, I scrounged together enough honor to purchase four pieces of the season 2 honor gear. Sure, they’re welfare epics, but at least I finally look cool again. I’m just not motived to log on and play any more, and didn’t even touch the game all weekend. While World of Warcraft is a significantly better game at 70 than it ever was at 60, The Burning Crusade lacks that original magic that infused every tediously repetitive moment of vanilla WoW.

For me, World of Warcraft, and MMOs in general, have always been more about goofing off with friends than playing the actual game; we raid and run PvP trains because it’s an excuse to play together. And at this point, none of my friends are playing. The majority of the characters on my friends list have transfered to other servers, and most of those who remain are banned or inactive. Running around Shattrath, I don’t recognize any of the names I see in any of the chat channels; the players and the guilds on both sides of the Horde-Alliance divide that once made the game so much fun for me on Dark Iron are long gone. Most of the characters standing in my way at the bank or in front of the flight master probably didn’t even exist before the expansion, back when Insane Kitties was neck-deep in Naxxramas.

That was in the Fall of 2006 (18 months already!), which was also the last time I played Diablo 2 with any real seriousness. At the time, the dorkclub.com extended family and I would spend most of our gaming time leveling a handful of oddball Hardcore characters, only venturing back into Naxx at night when the Australians woke up.

The differences between the two games were startling, and we joked in channel ikpriest that you could run a dozen Baal runs in the time it took to get the raid together and inside Naxxramas. Finding new loot in Diablo 2 took hours, not weeks, and you could reach any place in the game world in minutes. Obviously, we were having a lot more fun with Diablo 2 than we were with World of Warcraft.

Though I’ve sunk more hours into Blizzard’s MMORPG, no other game has held my interest as long as Diablo 2. Just yesterday I started up a new raise skeleton/dexterity necromancer (clearly a recipe for success) after a few unsuccessful minutes spent with SamWaterson, the fist of the heavens/holy shock paladin. It’s a game that never gets old. For all its failings – and there are many – Diablo 2 is a game that is infinitely replayable, and always rewards teamwork and cleverness. I can see myself still hoping on Diablo 2 every few years and leveling a character to that “proof of concept” point even after downloading Diablo 3 through Blizzard’s proprietary digital download service in 2011. I can’t imagine myself ever spending much time with World of Warcraft again, except maybe to level a Deathknight to 80.

Me working at an MMO company is like a pedophile getting a job at a preschool. Nevermind the games we publish; not a day goes by without at least one lengthy World of Warcraft discussion. My boss tells me about his pick-up Sunwell Plateau raid and relays last night’s PvP stories. Half the office does their daily quests during their lunch break. And then on Thursday night, I shared a BART ride home with a co-worker—A solid forty minutes spent reminiscing about those halcyon days of raiding at 60.

It was only a matter of time:

I’m weak. I couldn’t hold out until Wrath of the Lich King.

PvP zones, destructible buildings, siege weapons, and a new class that plays like the combination of an affliction warlock, a frost mage, and a vampire ensures I’ll at least level to 80. But in the meantime, arena season 4 starts on June 24, and I’ve got AVs to AFK in so I can buy the season 2 arena set when it’s downgraded to honor gear. If everyone’s favorite figureprintable priest is going to lay dormant, nothing more than a searchable query in the Armory, then he may as well look awesome while doing it.

EDIT – The first thing I see when I log in:

:(

Prolific World of Warcraft add-on maker cknight has released the latest version of his Cartographer mod, transforming WoW’s static in-game world map into a Google Maps-inspired dynamic map.

Even though the add-on is only in beta, it’s already an extremely impressive achievement, and I look forward to experimenting with it when I reactivate my WoW account in the coming weeks (Really! …Probably).

Of course, as any Lord of the Rings Online player knows, Azeroth isn’t the first virtual fantasy world to get the Google Maps treatment. Arda Online’s map of Middle-Earth has been helping LotRO players find there way from the Shire to the Trollshaws for months now.

Cartographer 3, Interview, Daily Blue, Contest [World of Raids]

Once again proving why it’s the most successful games developer in the world, Blizzard rejected an offer by talentless German film director Uwe Boll to direct a World of Warcraft movie.

Blizzard’s Paul Sams told Boll, “We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income.” And if there’s one thing Uwe Boll knows how to do, it’s make bad movies.

Said Boll, “To be honest, the real gamers are the typical download guys, right? They don’t pay anything for movies, because they illegally download the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the normal audience.”

Unfortunately for Boll, his previous video game adaptations such as House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale haven’t attracted that “normal audience” either. At least the man knows how to dream big.

Blizzard Rejects Uwe Boll’s World of Warcraft Movie; Boll Explains Importance of Ignoring Game Fans [Shacknews]

Blizzard’s European site has a new Insider interview with World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack and art director Chris Robinson about the lessons learned developing the Sunwell Plateau and the challenges in building the icy continent of Northrend for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Robinson explains that Wrath of the Lich King will have a much more grounded, traditional look than Burning Crusade, favoring Nordic and gothic designs to Outland’s bizarre alien landscapes and equipment. The art team is busy creating as many new items that reflect this art style as possible. “From the get-go, players will earn trophies of war that are very ‘Northrendy’ — for example, say, a two-handed axe that’s made of a dragon jaw, covered with spikes, leather, and other traditional materials,” says Robinson. “We want players to see the new gear and think, ‘Yeah, that guy’s been to Northrend.’”

Robinson also detailed their visual design philosophy for the continent itself, explaining, “The relatively green and ‘temperate’ starting areas will be fairly densely populated, but as the story progresses we expect players to get more spread out. By slowly adding more and more snow, we can enhance that growing sense of isolation and dread. It’s very much what Arthas must have experienced when he wandered the wastes of Northrend after destroying Mal’Ganis.”

According to Brack, the giant turtles of Warcraft II will be making a return in the expansion, acting as transports between the two starting zones on either end of the crescent-shaped continent of Northrend. Brack describes this solution to the problem of placing the two starting zones so far apart as “simple, effective, grounded in Warcraft lore, but … also one of those light moments that are so important to create the iconic Warcraft feel.”

Brack also reiterated Arthas’ role as arch-nemesis in the upcoming expansion. Blizzard wants players of all playstyles – from the casual PvPer to the hardcore raider – to interact with the titular Lich King from the onset. In Burning Crusade, only the top game’s top raiders ever saw villains Illidan and Kael’thas.

In closing, yes Blizzard, you can have all of my money.

Fury of the Sunwell and Beyond [WoW Europe via WoW Insider]

The9, the company that operates the Chinese version of World of Warcraft, announced today that a record-breaking one million players were recently simultaneously connected to the MMORPG.

With 5.5 million of WoW’s 10 million players playing on Chinese servers, nearly 20% of the country’s WoW-addicts would have been logged in concurrently to set the record, a feat The9 attributes to the arrival of the Burning Crusade expansion in China.

Poorly conceived claims that the majority of these players were actually gold farms - players who are logged in around the clock, collecting gold to sell for a profit - have already started springing up on the Internet. Of course, most Chinese gold farmers play on Western servers alongside most of the gold buyers, but who ever heard of logic getting in the way of a blog post?

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Surpasses One Million Peak Concurrent Player Milestone in Mainland China [The9 via Massively]

WoW Insider has confirmed through anonymous sources that Wrath of the Lich King, the next World of Warcraft expansion, has entered closed alpha. Currently a very select and prestigious few players are being chosen to participate in the testing under strict NDA.

With the expansion now in alpha, it appears Blizzard really is shooting for a Fall 2008 release date, putting it up against EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, which is currently billed as the only upcoming MMO that stands a chance at loosening Blizzard’s deathgrip on the market.

Burning Crusade, WoW’s last expansion, missed the crucial holiday release window, arriving in January of 2007, but still dominated the PC sales charts for that year. Blizzard’s “when it’s done” mantra often causes the developer to miss ideal release dates, but if the company’s unending flow of self-congratulatory press releases are anything to go by, their unmatched production values do more for sales than a well-timed release ever could. As such, a 2009 release date is still very much in the running.

Expect plenty of impressions, screenshots, and spoilers when a unreasonably high percentage of World of Warcraft subscribors get access to Wrath of the Lich King’s beta later this year. As always, I’ll be excluded (left out of the cold, if you will! HA!), regardless of how many FigurePrints I order.

Breaking: Wrath of the Lich King is in alpha [WoW Insider]

World of Warcraft role-players will no longer need to worry about players with names like “Iownu,” “Halomasterchief,” and “Vindiesal” distracting them from the game’s fantasy setting. NameViolation, a new WoW interface addon for the latest version of the game, allows players on RP servers to quickly report character, guild, and pet names that violate Blizzard’s naming policy by right clicking on the offender.

The addon will automatically generate a GM-friendly message based on the specific rule the offending name violates. Because addons can’t page GMs directly, you only need to copy-paste the text into a GM ticket and patiently wait for “Xhaxorx” the night elf hunter to be renamed “Legeles.” Ah, sweet justice.

Blizzard recently implemented a similar system that allows player to automatically report players for spamming with a simple right click. While the developer has always policed spamming and gold selling to the full extent of their abilities, lesser issues like naming policy violations, which were heavily monitored at the game’s launch, have gone mostly ignored. It’s interesting to see the RP community beginning to enforce the game’s rules themselves.

NameViolation [WoW Interface via WOW Insider]

Jane Barnett of Middlesex University in London claims people are more relaxed after playing World of Warcraft. She conducted a study of just under 300 WoW players between the age of 12 and 83 and found “there were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger but this did very much depend on personality type.”

Barnett claims, “This will help us to develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to help distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life.”

She will showcase her findings at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference being held in Dublin.

So, there you have it: A laid back, mostly non-violent game doesn’t frustrate or anger those who play it. A shocking revelation, to be certain. Perhaps next time she’ll study the affects of Manhunt on convicted killers.

‘Violent’ games can lower anger says one UK university researcher [Strategy Informer]

World of Warcraft Coming to Consoles With Molten Core™

At long last, World of Warcraft is finally coming to consoles, though not exactly in the form many had hoped. Molten Core allows players to relive their first raiding experiences alone or with friends, and has a decidedly retro feel. Be sure to check out the concept art/screenshot comparisons. Once again, Blizzard has successfully replicated the distinct visual style of their talented artists in-game.

New Hero Class for Wrath of the Lich King: Bard

Capitalizing on the success of Guitar Hero (and the recent Activision/Vivendi merger), Blizzard’s newest hero class allows players to wield a guitar-based keyboard peripheral and destroy their enemies with the power of rock. Wrath of the Lich King may just have the first bard class in the history of MMOs that players actually want to play. Blizzard has plenty of screenshots and concept art over at their official site as well as a few sample talents and an example of a level 70 epic bard axe.

New StarCraft II Unit: Tauren Marine

The obscure planet of Azeroth was found to harbor a dizzying selection of humans, mutants, and aliens in a state of perpetual superstition and conflict. The most physically imposing of these warrior races were the so-called ‘tauren,’ an anthropomorphic bovine genotype with super-human stamina, overpowered racial combat abilities, and bizarrely well-developed horticultural skills.

Orc marines were already included in Warcraft 3, so tauren marines for StarCraft II seems like a natural progression. Furthermore, Blizzard’s continual cross-pollination of its series suggests that the inevitable Blizzardcraft isn’t too far away.

Introducing the Diablo Loot Piñata

Diablo players looking to replicate the series’ rewarding loot porn in the real world are in luck with Blizzard’s latest product. The Diablo Loot Piñata comes stuffed with the magical swords, shields, and shrunken heads Diablo players love. Experience the rush of taking on a colorful paper version of the Lord of Terror in the most realistic hardcore mode yet. Defeat the youngest of the Prime Evils to collect his fat loots!