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World of Warcraft down to 7.7 million subscribers
Back in May, we were told that World of Warcraft subscriptions had fallen to 8.3 million. Now there are reports that the MMO has lost even more subscribers, dropping to 7.7 million subscribers worldwide. Those of you keeping score at home will probably recognize that the game hasn't fallen below 8 million since before the game's first expansion launched some six years ago. On the one hand, World of Warcraft is obviously nowhere near failure, considering that it's still far and away the game with the largest number of subscribers on the market. On the other hand, that margin is slowly shrinking, and the game continues to have a slow decline of subscriptions over the past several months. It's unsure when the game will be getting its next expansion, but we know that changes are coming to the game's business model, so it's quite possible that Blizzard still has some tricks up its sleeves.
TUAW's Daily App: Ponk
At its core, Ponk plays a lot like Dr. Mario or Tetris. You have different colored balls falling from the top of the screen, and you've got to line them up with balls of the same color to make them disappear and score points. But Ponk takes its touchscreen placement very seriously -- touch not only comes into play as you actually maneuver the pieces into place, but you can also do things like freeze the screen to move already-dropped balls around. Something like that would be tough to do with traditional controls, but on a touchscreen, you're just dragging and dropping. There are three different gameplay modes to mess around with, and Game Center achievements and leaderboards to fight on as well. For just 99 cents on the App Store, Ponk is a satisfying puzzle/action game with a nice full feature set. Give it a shot if you want to try something new with the old dropping-block genre.
Drag and drop your windows into tidiness with Cinch
I'd never heard of Cinch, just mentioned over at Cult of Mac, but it's such a great idea I thought I'd check into it. Basically, Cinch does what all great Mac software does: it works in the background and lets you do what you want to do, skipping completely all the usual nonsense you usually have to do in between. Basically, it's a window helper -- all you have to do is drag any window on your desktop to a side of the screen, and it'll put the window maximized in that space. Drag it to the top, and it'll maximize it across the screen. When you're done, drag the window away, and it returns to its original size. There's a great screencast on the Irradiated Software website that shows some of the possibilities. One idea that really appeals to me is dragging two Finder windows quickly to either side of the screen to both browse two folders at the same time, and then pass files back and forth between them. Cinch reminds me of this old chat by Quicksilver creator Nicholas Jitkoff, where he talked about software that didn't worry about what you wanted to do and just let you do. Cinch serves its purpose in that same way. It's available over on the website for US$7.
The ups and downs of the Battered Hilt
Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up. The silver lining, if you really want one, have terrible luck, and don't ever expect to have all that money, is that the price will probably go down eventually. Bornakk says that as people move up into Icecrown and start picking up weapons that are even better than the sister blade, demand is likely to drop off a bit. But he also says that Blizzard does want this to be a special and relatively rare item, so you'll still have to probably either be lucky or ready to grind it out. Good luck -- I'm out there searching for one with you.
Apple market share drops slightly in the past year
Don't look now, but Apple's slow market share incline may have just turned into a slow decline. Not only does a new report by research and advisory company Gartner, Inc say that Apple's market share in the US slipped just a little bit over the past year (from 7.5% to 7.4%), but that as you can see above, there's a steep little decline from the 8% it was in the last quarter of 2008. The PC market overall is down as well, a 6.5% decline since the beginning of last year.Does that mean it's time to sell the AAPL stock? Probably not -- as you can see from the graph, there's still been a nice steady growth in market share since 2006, and the current economy has all ships falling a little bit with the tide as it goes out. But it does mean that Apple might be having more trouble than they want breaking out into more of the market. If that is their goal anyway -- Gartner's report also notes that Apple's relatively higher ASP (Average Selling Price) "created challenges for it in the tough economy," but when have we ever known them to go cheap?So Apple's not up in the short term, but who is? Well maybe Goldman Sachs is. But we don't entirely trust those guys. And in case you're wondering: none of this is actual financial advice, and none of it should be used to make any decisions that might lose you money. You've been warned.[via TechMeme]
WoW Rookie: Oops GTG TTYL bye
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic."Oops GTG TTYL bye" – heard that one before, in the middle of an instance? You don't want to be that guy.Today's World of Warcraft is a far cry from Tomb Raider or Lego Indiana Jones, which can leave you writhing in your chair for what seems like an eternity before your next save point. For an MMO, WoW's gameplay has become reasonably bite-sized – so don't get caught virtually chewing with your mouth open by dropping out of groups early.True, many instances can be completed so quickly and many players are so experienced that dashing through a quick instance can seem almost trivial. But a group is a social creature, and accepting a group invitation means accepting a reasonable responsibility to treat the other players' time with respect.
More realm issues today
Bornakk announced today on the general discussion forums (why he didn't do this on the tech support forums, I don't know...) that they are having a number of realms randomly drop people. Indeed, this happened to me over on Eldre'Thalas this morning.If you are having issues, remember that you can go to the Blizzard's tech support forums and ask a question there. You can also check out our guide for solving all these connection issues, if Blizzard doesn't come through with a solution for you.We'll keep you updated on this weekend hiccup – stay tuned to WoW Insider for the latest!
