wrath-release
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The Lawbringer: No, you can't sue Blizzard over the Dance Studio
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Imagine, if you will, a time long ago. A time before we cared about dual specs, Ulduar, Sartharion, and the rest. Back before hard modes and vehicle fights. I speak of that fabled time at the end of The Burning Crusade, when Kil'jaden was reentering the world through the Sunwell and there was something about a girl and some manga ... There was a lot of supplemental reading. Wrath of the Lich King was announced, and we were all excited. One of the more community-jolting announcements during the Wrath of the Lich King launch trailer related to new character dances. Since then, the Dance Studio has become a legend in its own right, being called everything from the second coming of the WoW messiah to a dumb waste of time for designers and developers who could be working on more "important" projects. Some people believe it will never come, and others still hold onto embers of hope.
Wrath expected in China in mid-November
Because of all the chaos (from switched providers to government approval) on China's version of World of Warcraft, they haven't actually had a chance to release the Wrath expansion over there yet. They were planning to bring it out ASAP, but that obviously never worked out. But we hear now, finally, that the wait is almost over. They are still going through content checks, and Netease (WoW's new provider over there) says it has some more work to do, but at this point they're aiming for a mid-November release. This doesn't mean much for us in the rest of the world -- and before you commenters mention goldsellers, know that most "Chinese goldfarmers" actually play on NA/EU servers anyway, and have been doing so even with the outage overseas. It does, however, mean that China's guilds and playerbase at large will finally have access to all of the content we've enjoyed for almost a year (the expansion was released in North America and Europe last November 13th -- remember that?), including death knights, the new Naxxramas, and all of the other Northrend content. The release should be a nice bonus for Netease as well -- they've been working hard to try and get the game up to date, and releasing the current expansion should help bring in a nice group of new customers.
WoW back online in China
The long wait is finally over -- World of Warcraft's servers are finally back online in China after they went offline all the way back at the beginning of June, due to a switch between former host The9 and current host NetEase. It took a while for the government to approve the move (and some have even suggested that the delay wasn't completely legit), but things are finally back to business as usual, according to a few sources out of China.A few more interesting facts have arisen with this news as well: apparently NetEase has spent over a million yuan (about $146,000) per day to keep up and maintain the game and its servers during the past month of closed beta and free play. Of course, that includes customer support and all the other costs. Even with that price, however, the company is still expected to grow. We haven't heard any population numbers worldwide for WoW since this whole deal began, but you have to think that they lost at least a few players due to all of the problems. Of course, the release of Wrath over there may bring back some players, but even though they were planning to have it out before all of this happened, the switchover has delayed it even further. All they need is more government approval, but as the outage proved, that can sometimes be hard to get.
Chinese release of Wrath of the Lich King still delayed
Around early February, it was reported that Wrath of the Lich King's Chinese release had been delayed. It was suspected that the launch was postponed until after the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) which occurred in the first week of March, but things are starting to look a little bleak.There are rumors abounds that Blizzard and The9 are having something of a falling out, but it's being reported that things are going much more poorly on The9's end. Specifically, they've hit some trouble with the censorship board. You might recall that China has some very, very strict rules when it comes to things like video games and movies. Many of the models in the base World of Warcraft game needed to be altered to conform to these rules, such as the exposed bones on the Forsaken and the bones left behind when a player dies.
WoW Insider on Massively Speaking this week
Miss hearing Turpster and I on the same podcast? I do too -- I think our show has definitely come into its own, but at this point, there's just a scheduling conflict keeping us apart (Turpster's new show is recorded at exactly the same time as ours). Worry not, however, because whenever we can, we'll try to podcast together, and here's your first chance to hear us again: Michael Zenke and Shawn Schuster of our sister site's Massively Speaking podcast invited both of us on to sit down and talk about the Wrath release with them.It was a lot of fun -- we talked about the Wrath launch and how it went, and then went on to hit on some of the most important new features for MMO fans in general, and how Blizzard has really done some great work with the new expansion (while also simultaneously borrowing from other developers). And we confronted the topic of whether there was enough content in Wrath at all, and whether it was a bad thing that all the PvE instances have already been cleared. And finally we talked about the future of WoW, and where we might be headed next.We had a great time (as you can probably hear), and you can listen to the show right on Massively. WoW Insider covers WoW, but Massively covers all MMOs, so if you're also a fan of Guild Wars or LotRO or Warhammer, check them out. And if you're a Turpster fan (who isn't, really?), you can also see him every week in his video series over there, called TurpsterVision. Thanks to Zenke and Schuster for letting us run amuck on their podcast -- we'll have to return the favor on the WoW Insider Show soon.
Two attendees already in line at NYC Best Buy event
Whether you're attending the midnight release event at Best Buy in New York City or not, you might be interested in the fact that they've set up their own Twitter account to document the event. It looks like it's getting some use earlier than expected, too. It's currently a little after 3 PM in New York, and the first two attendees have already been waiting in line for at least two hours!I think it's beyond cool that they took the time to set up this feed. Liveblogs are some of the funnest things to read on days like today, and Twitter is the perfect venue for it if you don't have your own dedicated site set up for something like that. And those early attendees? Okay, they're a little crazy, but I'll go ahead and give them props for it. Events like this don't happen every day, so you might as well make a story out of it. When The Burning Crusade launched, I walked three hours in a Wisconsin winter while it was snowing to pick up my copy. Was it insane? Yes. Was it fun? Yes! If you don't have a story to tell after an event like this, you missing half of the fun. Go out and make the best of today!If you plan on following this feed and you're new to Twitter, don't forget to follow WoW Insider's very own twitter account where you'll see alerts and anecdotes from our team. You might also be interested in some silly fun and want to follow a few Warcraft characters as they tweet.
Reserve your Death Knight name right now
Cameo of Dethecus has a good idea -- if there's a specific name for your Death Knight that you want, probably best to grab it right now. You can create a character with the name on your server right now, and then when Wrath comes out next week, delete the placeholder character and the name should be freed up for your DK.During the beta, I called my Death Knight Dingbat, only because it was the first thing that jumped to mind. But it was a little silly to hear the great knights of the Scourge ordering me around as Dingbat, so I'll probably go with something a little more threatening for the actual release: Marton? Erathor? Killahdk?Whatever it is, now's probably a good time to check and make sure your name is free and get a toon in place before someone else takes it. And please: spare us from the "Darth" names. Nobody, including Arthas, wants those.
WoW Insider Show tomorrow afternoon on WoW Radio
We have a confession to make -- this week's WoW Insider Show has already been recorded. I know, I know, we really enjoy getting on IRC and doing the show live, too, but Duncor the (so-called) Dependable is heading out to a wedding this weekend, and since he's our producer, we had to fudge things a little bit, and we recorded the show last night. Worry not, though -- we'll still be playing the show for the first time on Saturday afternoon at 3:30 over on WoW Radio, and if I'm around, I'll try to jump into IRC to chat while we listen.The good news is that we finally have some good Mage talk in the show -- blogger Andy "Aurdon" Scott of ISheepThings.com joined us on the show, and if you've been waiting to hear some good discussion about the food-and-drink dispensers of the world, you'll hear it. John "BigBearButt" Patricelli was also on with us with his great insight as always, and Duncor came on as well (Turpster is still jetlagged from his trip to the States and will be back next week). And in addition to all the Mage talk, we talked about the release date for Wrath, whether that mount achievement is too hard, and whether it's ok for motorcycles to be in a fantasy game, among many other things.If you want to chat on IRC Saturday afternoon while we listen to the show, join us at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel, or just click "Chat" on the WoW Radio homepage. And you can email us, as always, at theshow@wow.com. Be sure to tune in tomorrow afternoon -- it won't be live (have a nice time at the wedding, Duncor!), but it will be a good listen.
