World of Warcraft

Blizzard has just announced via its Warcraft Twitter account and the forums that the Customer Support team now has its own Twitter. The full text of the forum announcement is below:

Auryk

You can now follow all Blizzard Entertainment Customer Support news and updates on Twitter. Just head over to @BlizzardCS, (http://twitter.com/BlizzardCS) for the latest Support [...]

Blizzard has announced on the loading screen another round of 24-hour maintenance for select realms to happen on Tuesday. This is part of the continuing plan to upgrade all servers before Cataclysm. The servers not listed will be undergoing normal maintenance, though that often means that those servers’ downtime will also be extended at least [...]

A judge in the California Central District Court ruled Thursday that Scapegaming, also known as Alyson Reeves, has lost its lawsuit against Blizzard. Scapegaming had set up private Blizzard servers that included a microtransactions market. Blizzard sued them in October 2009 for copyright infringement.
As we’ve covered here before, private servers are a violation of license [...]

Earlier this week, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) responded to some posts regarding totems. There have been some doom-and-gloom comments and, unfortunately, very few positive ones. (Nice to see Strawberry get a mention in one of GC’s replies.) Since I’m now the elemental shaman columnist here, I thought I’d weigh in with my own thoughts on [...]

Blizzard has chosen 500 winners of its Cataclysm Beta Guild Contest, and the winners have been notified via email. For the beta contest guild leaders had to submit a 250 word essay explaining why their guild was deserving of an invite into the Cataclysm beta. The winners receive 10 Cataclysm beta invites — one for [...]

A poster on the forums queried the developers on what a day at the office for the class balance team entailed. This is one of those topics that I’m sure most of us have wondered about from time to time. Do they spend their days skimming Arena Junkies and Elitist Jerks looking at feedback, or [...]

The URL may include the word “beta,” but the new Battle.net site is live and seems to be fully functional. Some changes we’ve noticed at first glance are:

Complete change to the interface and navigation.
You can check a box to stay logged in.
It gives the status of their franchises.

What’s not there: an ability to chat with [...]

Blizzard has provided three updates to Real ID news that broke today. One of them we reported on earlier (the fact that our real life names will not be displayed retroactively). The other two are about parental controls and Blizzard’s attentiveness to the response.
We provide all three responses after the break.
If you’re interested in contributing [...]

Lore nerds, rejoice! Weeks back, Blizzard asked official forum-goers to submit questions for the CDev (Creative Development) team in this thread. Questions have been answered, and there is information-a-plenty. We learn about the ethereals’ home planet, pieces of lore about the tol’vir and the oft-reviled Obsidian Destroyer unit from Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne [...]

PC Gamer posted an interview with Tom Chilton where he discussed the possibility of World of Warcraft eventually going free-to-play. He clarified that there are no active plans for this now, but he can imagine a future where it would be possible.
As massively multiplayer games become more mainstream, a common tactic to compete with WoW [...]