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Xfire and WoW Insider, live from the BlizzCon floor
Our BlizzCon coverage continues all this week-- we're sending our staff out to Anaheim (I'll be out there on Tuesday laying all the groundwork), culminating in the second BlizzCon event on Friday and Saturday. So whether you're going or not, stay tuned to WoW Insider all week for breaking news, liveblogging events, and pictures, video, and tons of coverage from Blizzard's big get-together.And don't forget that all of our coverage is being co-presented with Xfire. In addition to their BlizzCon info page, they've also set up a special "blizzcon2007" account, and both Xfire and WoW Insider staff members will be blogging there during the event. Also, if you have an Xfire account, be sure to add "blizzcon2007" to your Friends-- that way, you'll be able to get invites to Xfire chats later this week coming directly from the BlizzCon exhibit hall. And if you don't have an Xfire account, then get one for free!So this is it. It's time to hear about Zul'Aman and the next expansion. It's time to see Starcraft II playable and in action. And maybe it's time to hear about that third game Blizzard is working on? At BlizzCon, you never know. Stay tuned to both WoW Insider and Xfire to find out.
BlizzCon schedule leaked
Blizzard has, inexplicably, been keeping the schedule for BlizzCon under wraps. We at WoW Insider have been frantically planning coverage here, and yet we haven't heard a peep from Blizzard about what to expect during the show. But now WorldofWar has posted what seems to be a leaked schedule for the event (no word on how they obtained it), and we'll finally have some idea of how the days are laid out. Here's what to expect if you're headed to BlizzCon: World of Warcraft and Starcraft II open gaming WoW, Warcraft III, and Starcraft tournaments An opening ceremony (where they'll announce a new game or expansion?) Panels on WoW classes, dungeons and raids, professions and items, and PvP A Starcraft II gameplay demo More panels on Warcraft Art, Blizzard Sound/Music, Careers in Gaming, Cinematics, Starcraft II Lore and Art, WoW UI mods, the TCG, and the Expanded Universe (likely the Warcraft novels) And the convention will wrap up with a big concert from L70ETC and Video Games Live hosted by Jay Mohr.Sounds like a full few days! Of course there will also be an exhibit hall open the whole time, but we haven't heard much of what will be in there (don't forget that Xfire will be there, as well as Upper Deck and all the TCG folks, and of course the WoW Insider party will be before the convention starts on Thursday night). Stay tuned for more details as we get them. Under a week left!
WoW Insider and Xfire at Blizzcon
You may not have realized this yet (I didn't until just now), but we are only a week and a half away from Blizzcon. On August 3 and 4 in Anaheim, CA, Blizzard will host its second huge convention, and WoW Insider will be there covering every second of it. From top to bottom, from start to end, from sign-in to close, we've got you covered. Whether you're going or not, we'll have exclusive interviews, tons of pictures and videos, and everything you need to know about Blizzard's premiere event.And to make our coverage even better, we're teaming up with Xfire-- they're also going to be at Blizzcon, and they'll be hosting live online chats all weekend long, as well as posting their own Blizzcon coverage as well. Various WoW Insider staffers will show up on their service as well (for a few exclusive chats), and they're even planning to do a live chat directly with the Blizzard team.Things are going to get crazy in the next week, and even crazier as the world of Azeroth heads to Anaheim. If you're coming to Blizzcon, we'll see you there, and even if not, stay tuned for the best Blizzcon coverage on the 'net. Blizzcon is almost upon us-- ready check!
Xfire Debate Club: Best and Worst Classes transcript
The transcripts from the sixth Xfire Debate Club ("Best and Worst Classes in WoW") are now available on Xfire's main site. On the main floor, I moderated a debate between such heavy hitters as Wowhead's Skosiris, Curse's Mek and Teza, Ming the rogue, and arena masters Tarde, Nuvas and Tiz. I wasn't able to format the full transcript for WoW Insider, but feel free to visit the link so you can see me ask questions and the panelists ... well, ignore them and keep arguing about the last question, or fight about which arena is the most interesting, or claim that the other panelists will one day be working for them. But it was fun anyway! Xfire also has a transcript from the open debate room, where Xfire users debated the questions themselves. I'd like to thank everyone who came to the debate or proposed questions to ask. I hope to see you all again on Xfire!
Xfire Debate Club debates the console war (defense forces, UNITE!)
Last week's Xfire debate was destined to leave behind the burnt wreckage of myriad fanboy fallacies. The topic: the console war. Readers of Joystiq (and, more pointedly, Joystiq's comments) are all too familiar with this toxic byproduct of a multiplatform video game industry. Consumers ally themselves with a product and, in the worst cases, logic and rationality (not to mention civility) are collateral damage in the brutal battle for console supremacy.Moderator Dan Hsu ran the show, with a cast including Slashdot's Zonk, Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield, console-specific writers from Xboxic, Cubed3, and PS3forums, and even your humble Joystiq blogger answering questions. While there were no secret revelations, or dramatic conclusions, it was interesting to see how similar many of our opinions of the big three were, based on their performance to date. Maybe that's why everyone was so civil ...
WoW Insider on the Xfire Debate Club
Once again, WoW Insider has been asked to participate in the Xfire Debate Club on June 19th at 6 pm EST. The subject will be the best and worst classes in WoW in both PvE and PvP. I'll be moderating the debate this time around. Previously, Mike Schramm has debated and moderated with Xfire, but he's hiding from Kungen in the Witness Protection Program busy with work. This club's panel guests include Skosiris, the chief architect of Wowhead; Mek, a guild master and raid leader from Curse; Teza, the man behind Worldofraids; Ming, the infamous rogue theorycrafter; and Zeksy, Tiz and Nuvas, who are all members of the top arena teams in the US and Europe. And as always, everyone can participate in the open floor debate, and we'll be taking questions from the floor for the guest panel. So if you have strong views on class balance, would like to hear the opinions of PVE and PVP leaders, or simply want to see me get utterly owned by Ming, check out the Debate Club page. I'd also like to hear some ideas for questions to ask the panelists, so if you've got a question in mind, put it in the comments!
Xfire Debate Club, uh, debates video game censorship
Should video games be expurgated for perceived obscene and/or indecent content? At 4:00 p.m. EDT today, Xfire Debate Club will be hosting talks concerning video game censorship. The heated exchange of words will be moderated by Henry Lowood of Stanford University. Other participants include: California State Senator Leland Yee ECA CEO Hal Halpin Game Politics Editor (and Joystiq contributor) Dennis McCauley Russ Pitts of Escapist Magazine Video game researcher Matteo Bittanti Dan Isett, Parents Television Council Those interested in participating in the debate can contact Xfire directly (Xfire account is required), although you may not be able to reach them this close to the start. A transcript is forthcoming.Update: the transcript is now available.
Transcripts posted from "Life After 70" chat with WoW Insider
Our good friends at Xfire have posted the transcripts of last Wednesday's chat about "Life After 70," which I was able to moderate. The guests-- Teza from World of Raids, Nopher from Last Resort on Kazzak-EU, and Skosiris from Wowhead (Awake from Nihilum couldn't make it because they heard Vashj had been hotfixed)-- all did a great job answering the metric ton of questions I tried to push at them, and the "viewers" had a lot of interesting stuff to say as well.You can see the transcript from the Main Room here, and the transcript from the Open Debate room over here. Both are definitely interesting read throughs. Both of the higher level guilds echoed what Death and Taxes have said-- they use Paladins to heal, and shadow priests to DPS. They also told me that the loot from the 25 man raids has just not matched up to the loot from heroics or Karazhan (although hopefully that will be corrected a bit in the upcoming 2.1 patch). And perhaps most interesting, they said that the drop to 25 man raids didn't create that much drama in their guilds-- for them, the most drama came from the 10 man limit in Karazhan.All in all, we had a great time, and I'll thank Xfire again for putting it all together (especially Nicolas Cerrato for coordinating everything this time around). If you were able to make it out to the chat (it was set earlier in the afternoon in America, so Europeans could have a prime time chat for themselves), thanks to you as well.
WoW Insider returns to Xfire for "Life After 70"
The good folks at Xfire have asked us back to their "Two-Handed Sword" debate club (those of you who joined us last time will remember how much fun it was), and this time they're moving us up in the world: I'm going to moderate. Yes indeedy! The topic is "Life After 70," and they've got some great guests on. Teza from World of Raids is returning as well, and because they're making a point to focus on European players this time around, Awake from Nihilum will be on, as well as Nopher from Last Resort. And the list of guests is finished off by Evilseed from the very informative Wowhead.com.The chat will be all online, so to join us, you'll have to download and install Xfire, but don't worry, it's free and extremely simple. If you do join us, you'll be able to "listen" in live, as well as join the Open room chat to talk with other players about what we're discussing (that room was even crazier than the main room last time-- I loved it). So the chat will be next Wednesday, April the 11th, at 2pm Eastern time. That's 20:00 CEST if you're in Europe-- they're giving you guys a chance to have a nice primetime even this time. Please join up with us and say hello-- I want lots of WoW Insider representation!And as I said, this time around I'm not just a guest, I'll be moderating. That means I have to ask questions, I'm pretty sure, so if you have any questions or discussion ideas you'd like me to bring to the chat, please post them in the comments below, and if I choose your question, I'll even mention your name during the chat as a WoW insider reader. Thanks! See you on Xfire next Wednesday!
WoW Insider coming to Xfire on January 31st
Xfire is a gaming chat program (like Steam or Xbox Live, they allow you to create friends lists and join your friends in games online, but unlike those two they also allow you to IM those friends, either in or out of game), and they're working lately on building a community around the program through a series of online chats. They recently talked with PVP creator Scott Kurtz, this week they're chatting with MC Frontalot, and at the end of the month, they're dipping all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, and chatting with-- well, me.They're starting a series of "debates" on the channel (called the Xfire Debate Club: The Two-Handed Sword), and on the 31st at 7pm EST, the very first subject is World of Warcraft. I'm going to be chatting live on there, along with representatives from Curse, World of Raids, and TavernCast. What exactly we're talking about hasn't yet been revealed to me, but I'm sure the Burning Crusade will take the spotlight (and of course I'm planning to at least sneak a few snide comments in about how Horde is better than Alliance). In fact, if you've got something you want me to try and bring up, feel free to say something in the comments here, and I'll do my best to squeeze it in.And please come check out the debate live-- you can download Xfire right here, then just fire it up January 31st at 7pm EST. And if you want to join in on the debate and ask us questions (as well as future debates, I believe), just drop an email to "xfirecontests@xfire.com" with the subject "Xfire Debate Club" and the username you create on Xfire.But even if you don't have questions to ask, please do come and watch the chat-- I'm interested to see what the guys from Curse, WoR, and TavernCast have to say, and I'm very interested to see what Xfire users have to ask about the World of Warcraft. Should be fun.
Gamer's Week: Frag Joystiq on Xfire tonight!
The guys at Xfire were nice enough to invite us to partake in their Gamer's Week festivities (remember, MTV bought em). I'll be signing onto the service for a chat at 8pm EST before getting seriously pwned by anyone and everyone in Call of Duty 2. We'll be playing with professional teams like Pandemic, Revolution Sports, Forbidden, Verge, 20ID and Paradigm Shift, Check-Six and Enervate ... or so they tell me. In short, i'm dead.They've agreed to give Joystiq readers up to twenty slots (!), so if you want to game get fragged tonight, lemme know in the comments below. Why settle for a killing when we can make it a slaughter? More details on tonight's event can be found at Xfire.
WoW Moviewatch: That's the World of Warcraft That You Play
I wouldn't have thought it would be possible to pack so many sweeping class generalizations into a single video -- but I have been proven wrong with this one. This was another entry in the Summer Movie Contest and landed 3rd place in the Music/Dance category.
Winners of the Summer Movie Contest announced!
myFlash = new FlashObject('http://www.gametrailers.com/umremote312.swf', 'swffile', 480, 409, 8); myFlash.altTxt = ''; myFlash.addVariable('umid', 16025); myFlash.write(); Just like last year's Summer Movie Contest, Xfire and Blizzard have brought some great moviemakers out of the woodwork with offerings of fabulous prizes. And Joystiq has the scoop on the awards ceremony, held on the Standford Stanford campus in Palo Alto, CA. Above is the overall winner, Edge of Remorse. For a list of the rest of the winners, read on.[Update: I r spel gud.]
World of Warcraft machinima contest winners
myFlash = new FlashObject('http://www.gametrailers.com/umremote312.swf', 'swffile', 480, 409, 8); myFlash.altTxt = ''; myFlash.addVariable('umid', 16025); myFlash.write(); The Blizzard/Xfire-sponsored World of Warcraft machinima contest is happening now on the lovely Stanford campus in Palo Alto, CA. The event kicked off with a screening of the 1st and 2nd place winners for all four categories: Music Video/Dance, Comedy, Short Feature, and Drama/Action. The winners earned some pretty sweet prizes, like an Athlon FX processor, an XFX GeForce 7900 GT video card, and more. The Best Overall winner, Jason Choi's operatic Edge of Remorse (embedded above), wins a "top end enthusiast PC" worth $5,000, courtesy of that other processing giant, AMD. Congrats, Jason!We've embedded all eight winning videos after the break, along with links to the runners-up in each of the four categories.
WoW Machinima event at Stanford tonight
I'm sitting in a nondescript conference room in a humble office building in Menlo Park, CA, a quiet Silicon Valley burg, just next to Stanford University. A polite, uniformed team of Xfire employees check on me to make sure the internet connection works. A large plasma television -- the only thing in the office that seems flashy -- plays a loop of the winners in their World of Warcraft machinima contest. The event is tonight, and I've (surprisingly) been asked to be a panelist following the screening, along with two noted machinima creators and two academics researching the field.We've been posting about the nominees occasionally, like when movies (such as Jun Falkenstein's "Ballad of the Noob") find themselves on YouTube from behind Xfire's client-required downloads. I've managed to dig up all of the nominees from Gametrailers, whose Daniel Kayser is moderating the panel, and posted the links after the break. We'll run another post after the winners are announced, just in case you aren't able to make the event.Anyone in the area -- like, say ... Stanford students -- can stop by the Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater at 6:00pm PT to watch the three hour event. As usual, I've brought a handful of Joystiq shirts, so stop by and ask for one after enjoying the festivities.
WoW Moviewatch: WoW Logic
This video is one of the finalists in the music video catagory of Xfire's Summer Movie Contest. Beware, however -- its techno beat keeps getting stuck in my head....
WoW Moviewatch: The Ballad of the Noob
Another finalist in the Xfire Summer Movie Contest, The Ballad of the Noob is the tale of an intrepid newbie venturing outside of the safe confines of his starting zone. Okay, maybe it sounds silly, but it's very nicely done, so take a look-see.
Xfire is "complementary" to Sony's PNP service
Sony shot down last month's scuttlebutt that they'd be using Xfire as the middleware for their still secret -- and still horribly named -- PlayStation Network Platform. Instead, we've learned that Sony won't be using Xfire as the foundation for the PNP, but rather it will be used on "multiple titles" in addition to the already confirmed Dark Kingdom. Speaking with Next Generation, Xfire's Mike Cassidy calls their platform "complementary" to the PNP. PC Xfire users will be able to do things like chat with PS3 Xfire users ... and, uh, see what games they're playing. Seriously, it looks like that's it. Apparently, Sony is going it alone: "They have their own network platform that they will describe and roll out." We know ... but when?The idea is that many gamers playing Sony Online Entertainment's Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom may also be PC gamers with active Xfire accounts, so you'll have two friends lists for those games: PNP and Xfire. While this seems like a horribly clunky proposition, consider it a value add. We imagine Xfire won't be a requirement, but an option for interested gamers. As long as Sony has a consistent, underlying online gaming solution we'll be happy. You do have one of those, right Sony?
WoW Moviewatch: The Anti-Elf Anthem
Maybe I'm just letting my Horde colors shine, but I think this is hilarious... And, even if you're a Night Elf fan yourself, there's little in the world that's more amusing than a singing Tauren. In all seriousness, however, this is one of the finalists for the Xfire Summer Movie Contest.Update: I noticed the video link was no longer good, so I fixed it. Yay.
Fighting fire with Xfire: Sony's version of Xbox Live [update 1]
[Update 1: A Sony Online Entertainment has contacted 1UP and clarified that the Xfire technology was only being evaluated for the PS3 launch title, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. "This proposed deal is completely separate and independent from the PlayStation Network Platform, and is something that SOE was examining specifically for Dark Kingdom." It seems we're back to square one. Thanks, Sanchinos. Original post text retained below.]Sony's answer to Microsoft's online network has, up until now, been a vague structure loosely comprised of PS2 network adaptors, a variety of developer standards, some sticky tape and at least one used copy of Final Fantasy XI. With the arrival of the PS3 and its PlayStation Network Platform, Sony aims to round up all the loose components of online play and rudely shove them beneath something resembling an umbrella. 1UP has the scoop on just how the Japanese giant hopes to accomplish this -- enter Xfire, an established matchmaking and messaging client that Windows PC users are bound to be familiar with. By incorporating a modified version of Xfire into PNP, Sony should be adequately (and one should hope, rapidly) equipped with all the rocks it needs to create a mass avian extinction within the online realm.Extracted from the transcript of a Viacom earnings conference call, the information creates some expectation as to how exactly Sony's service will function and what adantages it may have over Xbox Live. Firstly, it seems fair to suggest that the PS3's network may interact with the PC in the same way Microsoft's Live Anywhere initiative does. Other features from Xfire should also make the migration to PNP, along with server browsing, friends tracking, voice chatting and matchmaking that inevitably connects you to a person keen on highlight pathetic skills and sexual orientations.Of course, it's still unclear as to how exactly PNP deals with private servers and those run by developers. Will it be a completely seamless process of joining and creating games, or will the only online unification be in the form of a PS3 menu that lets you search for servers across a myriad of games? More answers and details should be forthcoming soon.[Note: The above image is a mock-up. It is not a true representation of what PNP will be like. So there.]
