The box looks like it'll stand up to a Zerg rush...

It’s a rare day when $99.99 doesn’t seem like a stupid amount of money to pay for a video game. Steel Battalion, with it’s “you’re going to need a bigger boat lap” controller was one of the earliest titles to hit the century mark. Blizzard seems to have found a way to justify separating us from a C-note with the Collector’s Edition of StarCraft II, even though there’s no release date set yet. For those of you who haven’t seen the trailer yet, Dani posted about it here.

In addition to the sequel of the wildly-popular original, a Duke Nukem-esque ten years in development, there are a whole passel of goodies tucked into that big honking box:

• THE ART OF STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY – 176 pages of concepts and 3d renderings

• JIM RAYNOR “DOG TAG” USB DRIVE – Replica of Jim Raynor’s in-game dog tag is a 2GB USB thumb drive, pre-loaded with the original StarCraft and Brood War Expansion

• BEHIND THE SCENES DVD – Dev interviews, all the cut-scene animations (with director commentary), and discussion of the original SC’s place in gaming lore

• STARCRAFT COMIC ISSUE #0

• GAME SOUNDTRACK – 14 tracks from the game itself, plus a couple of bonus tunes. I’m a sucker for game soundtracks – they make the daily commute suck less, that’s for sure.

• WORLD OF WARCRAFT IN-GAME PET – Maybe you’ll want Baby Thor as a companion to your shenanigans in Azeroth

The highlights:

• New Expansion coming, called Cataclysm
• New races for Horde (Goblin) and Alliance (Worgen)
• Level Cap raised to 85
• Skill caps raised another 75 points
• Lots of new zones in Azeroth, and mega changes to existing zones. (example, The Barrens will now be two zones)
• Goblin Racial: Rocket Jump  / +1% to casting/attack speed / 15 to Alchemy / Personal Hobgoblin servant
• Worgen Racial: Don’t need a skinning knife to get leather / Sprint / Worgen Form / Reduced duration diseases and curses
• Goblin Classes: All but Paladin and Druid
• Worgen Classes: All but Shaman and Paladin
• Following Item Stats are gone:  MP5, Spellpower, Defense, Attack Power, Armor Penetration
• Major Changes to: Haste and Block
• Reforging allows crafters to change stats on gear
• Big changes to Fishing
• No more spell ranks.  Spell power increases as you level.
• Warlock shards no longer stored in bags
• New race/class combos… Say hi to the Dwarf Mage (back from Beta!)

There are some more bits of information here, but don’t take my word for it… See for yourself.

Oh, and they unveiled the Monk class for Diablo 3, but this is an MMO site, and I’m sure none of you are interested in that.

In this week’s show, we snarkify (otherwise known as “show notes”):

• E3
  • Booth Babes
  • Underwear as Swag
  • A “Stripper Game”
  • News from Sony Online Entertainment
    • Free Realms
    • The Agency
    • Hong Kong Shuffle
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic
  • Global Agenda
    • Bogus “Awards” given at E3
    • DC*MMO takes a studio tour
    • “Open All Night” demo at Dragon*Con
• Sony Fan Faire
  • Star Wars Galaxies
    • Zombies
    • User-created content
    • The Gungan Gun
  • SOE’s big party at Dragon*Con
• Blizzard
  • No LAN play for Starcraft II
  • What’s Wrong With WoW?
  • Special Interview w/Dr. Tran
  • WoW Faction changes
  • WoW may be an MMO with training wheels, but it serves an important purpose.
• EVE Online
  • Yet another bank scam
  • BoB is dead
• Age of Conan
  • Huge upcoming patch
  • “Fixing” stats and itemization
  • Problems with questing in AoC
• Warhammer Online
  • How to “Kill 10 rats” correctly
  • Public quests
  • Mark Jacobs leaving Mythic
  • Mythic is now part of Bioware
  • How will Bioware change WAR?
• City of Heroes
  • Issue 15 is coming
  • The 5th Column is back!
  • New costumes and facial options
  • Is it better to look good? or have uber stats on gear?
• Dragon*Con stuff
  • Schedule is done!
  • 50 panels and events scheduled on MMO track
  • WoW trivia event being combined into Hardcore MMO Trivia contest
  • 5 different parties planned on the MMO track this year.
• Closing Music and gag reel.

(Opening music, courtesy of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, “Isis Unveiled”)

That’s what we have in place so far for the MMO track this year.  More importantly, we’re not done yet.

We’ve got a few more commitments to nail down.  Once we submit the final schedule to the powers that be, we’ll post an unofficial schedule here.  Once the schedule is made official, we’ll have links to iCal and XML files so you can put the entire weekend of events in your phone or PDA.  Why?  Because we’re geeks, and we love our toys too.

Stay tuned, folks.  We’re only a couple more months away.

We’ve all experienced how quickly a chat channel can descend into an irritation. Off-topic comments, yelling, cross-chat, and other useless information all rapidly reduce the usefulness of the channel to near zero. Countless players have had their gaming experience negatively affected by this problem, many to such an extent that they quit the game. This post is for those of you in World of Warcraft that are close to this point. There is hope.

Drop that Channel!

The World of Warcraft chat interface comes with perhaps the most useful feature imaginable: /leave. By default, all newly created characters are automatically joined to a number of chat channels that often fall prey to clutter. Trade, Local Defense, General, and LookingForGroup are all very useful when you need them but only make it harder to read comments made by those in your party, guild, or private conversations.

Since each is numbered, you can simply use the /leave [channel #] command to drop from it. Once you’ve left these channels, you’ll only be receiving party, guild, /say, system, and private messages. With only what you need when you need it, your enjoyment of the game on the whole should improve.