Hey everyone! Krystalle from Massively.com here. I hope you all made it home safe and sound and are enjoying being back at home with your gaming computers, in your comfy chairs/beds. I know I’ve missed my beloved office! (That’s an old picture of it above. Much more filled with geekstuff now.)

I’d like to take a moment to thank all our awesome sponsors and contributors, as well as the many guests who came to lend their own brand of awesome to our track this year:

Track sponsors:

• Artix Entertainment
• Comcast /Xfinity
• Sony Online Entertainment

Guests / Panelists:

• Battle & Brew
• Brandon M. “Oxhorn” Dennis (who wrote up a great post about his adventure!)
• Brian “Psychochild” Green
• Cartoon Network
• CCP / EVE Online
• CK Knight / Curse.com
• Hi-Rez Studios / Global Agenda
• Jeff Lewis
• Kingdom of Loathing
• Lessons in Lore / Chad and Megan Tindale
• Sandeep Parikh
• Sean Becker
• Seraphina Brennan / Massively.com
• Shawn Schuster / Massively.com & GuildCast
• Star Wars Combine
• Romily Rilynn, our mistress of Machinima

And those who, while unable to make it, contributed prizes for us to give away!

• Bigfoot Networks
• Blizzard Entertainment
• Funcom
• Gazillion Entertainment
• Icarus Studios
• Kingsisle Entertainment

Without our above sponsors and guests, we wouldn’t have been able to pull off the epic win of this year’s MMO track. Many thanks, everyone!

Also, I wanted to take a moment to post some of the information from my panels, since some people did not grab the handouts I’d made. You can find it all after the break!

Kid-friendly MMOs / Virtual Worlds:

• AdventureQuest Worlds
• Club Penguin
• Digimon Battle
• Fantage
• FusionFall
• Free Realms
• Hello Kitty Online
• Jumpstart World
• Kung Fu Panda World
• LEGO Universe Online
• Maplestory
• Moshi Monsters
• MyMiniPeeps -  (Note: beta! Reg code “mmpfriends”)
• Pixie Hollow
• PopTropica
• Puzzle Pirates
• RuneScape
• Super Hero Squad Online
• WebbliWorld
• Wizard 101
• ZulaWorld

Free-to-play & Freemium MMOs:

• Allods Online
• Battle of the Immortals
• Black Prophecy
• Dungeons & Dragons Online
• Digimon Battle
• EverQuest II Extended
• Face of Mankind
• Forsaken World
• Free Realms
• FusionFall
• Godswar Online
• Hello Kitty Online
• Kingdom of Loathing
• Lord of the Rings Online
• Mabinogi
• MapleStory
• Need For Speed: World
• SoulMaster
• Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures
• Taikodom
• Vindictus
• Wizard 101
• Zentia

Upcoming MMOs:

• Black Prophecy
• DC Universe Online
• Earthrise
• End of Nations
• EverQuest II Extended
• Fallout Online
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Forsaken World
• Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising (rezzed, no joke!)
• GuildWars 2
• Jumpgate Evolution
• LEGO Universe
• Might & Magic: Heroes Kingdoms
• Poisonville
• Super Hero Squad Online
  *Note: There is another Marvel MMO with a classic comic art style currently under development*
• Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Taikodom
• Rift: Planes of Telara
• TERA
• The Secret World
• Vindictus
• World of Tanks

If you have any questions about materials covered during any of my panels, feel free to ping me. You can email me at krystalle AT massively DOT com, or say hello on Twitter.

Hopefully, we’ll see you all next year!

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.

It’s been a crazy week in the land of SnarkCast, and Krys and Grim have already been overtaken by events given that we recorded this podcast before:

1. The Dragon*Con Staff Meeting last weekend.
2. Blizzard was allowed to partially re-launch WoW in China.

Oh well, them’s the breaks.  In any event, enjoy the podcast (show notes are included after the jump).  Thanks for listening, and we’ll be recording a new podcast very soon.

• Intro
• WRUP? (Also known as “What are you playing?”)
• AOC’s “come back” promotion
  • http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&template=content&func_id=2926&table=CONTENT
• WoW’s legal trouble in little China
  • http://www.jlmpacificepoch.com/newsstories?id=152539_0_5_0_M
• Global Agenda Beta starting on July 24
  • http://www.globalagendagame.com
• Professor Griefer & CoH
  • http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html
• CoH: Issue 16 announced
  • http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/game_updates/issue_16/issue_16_overview.html
• Cryptic”Nemesis Online, can we start calling it “CoH 2″ now?
  • http://www.massively.com/2009/07/16/cryptic-could-make-champions-counterpart-nemesis-online
• Eurogamer does re-review of Darkfall, rates it 4/10
  • http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/darkfall-online-second-review
  • http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/darkfall-online-review
• Why MMO’s are like Men/Women
  • http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2009/07/12/mmorpgs-are-a-lot-like-women/
  • http://divagoth.com/2009/07/12/why-mmos-are-like-men-a-reply/
• Dragon*Con News Storytelling in MMO’s panel is added
  • TERRY FREAKIN’ GILLIAM IS COMING!!!
  • DC*MMO T-shirts in da house

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

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.

This week, we’ll be talking with Blizzard, 38 Studios, and Netdevil again in attempts to get them on board.  We are also working on some events with our friends at Battle & Brew, a local gaming pub in Atlanta.  We’ll be providing additional details on that in upcoming weeks.

Finally, we spoke with Funcom last week, and they have got a lot of plans for Dragon*Con this year.  We are adding a Friday Night Party to the schedule, and they’ll be presenting panels on Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, and possibly a panel on their upcoming title as well.  They will also be providing some prizes for our contests and live-action quest as well.

Now that Dragon*Con is only a couple more months away, we’ll be updating the site more frequently.  Stay tuned.

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.

News may be a little slow over the next couple of weeks, but I can say that Sunday at Dragon*Con is going to highlight Sony Online Entertainment.  SOE will have 7 panels on Sunday and is planning a huge party for Sunday night.  If you can’t make it to Fan Faire this year, come to Dragon*Con.  We’re going to have our own!

We’re going to do another podcast this week, and it will probably be ready by Friday.

NCSoft (City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars) will not be joining us this year at Dragon*Con, but they have been gracious enough to send some stuff for us to give away.

We’re working very hard on Blizzard, 38 Studios, and NetDevil this week, and hopefully one (or more) of them will agree to participate this year.

Our World of Warcraft “gathering” this year is going to be something special.  Last year, the games and contests we held seemed to go over quite well, and this year we thought we’d emphasize that theme.  This year, our WoW “Meet and Greet” will be called the “Tournament of Azeroth”.   We’ll have prizes for all of the competitors, and music, drinks, and fun for all of the spectators.  It should be a blast.

I have put most of the schedule into the D*C database, which means we have a schedule, but we’re still lacking most of the panel descriptions, so I can’t call it “done” yet.  A couple of changes are going down for this year.

We are only running one panel on Monday, but it’s going to be 3 hours long.  Monday will be the day where you can join the entire DC*MMO staff and ask questions, provide feedback, or just hang out and wind down from the convention.  We would up doing something similar in the lobby of the Marriott last year, and it was a true pleasure to meet and get to know some of our fans without the hectic pace and schedule of trying to run a panel track.

We are also leaving an empty block of time each day so that our staff can take a break, eat a decent meal, or, heaven forbid, attend a few functions at the con themselves.  Last year, we ran pretty much around-the-clock, and I think it showed by Sunday.

That said, we still have 42 events on the schedule this year, unless I am mistaken, that’s more than every other track aside from (maybe) Main Programming.

Please join us later this week for our podcast where Krystalle and I will go into more details about what we have planned for this year as well as the latest and greatest news from around the MMO world.

Jumpgate Evolution from NetDevil is high on our list of targeted companies.  It seems like everyone and their fairy godmother is looking for a Sci-Fi themed MMO, and these guys will be going live in June.  With a little luck, we’ll be getting them to Dragon*Con to give you guys an up-close and personal look at the game.

We will also be talking with 38 Studios this week about their game, code named Copernicus.  Since I am a notorious Boston Red Sox fan, you can imagine that I’m really looking forward to this release.  If you don’t know what the Sox have to do with this game, 38 Studios’ CEO is Curt Schilling, former pitcher, and major gaming fanatic,  for the Red Sox.

Our tireless crew of motley mischief makers is working hard on a couple of art projects for this year’s convention.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think you’ll like it.   We are in a deep debate on what we should call our WoW-themed competition event at this year’s convention.  Last year, we had Gnome Punting, Gnome Tossing, a dance contest, and other activities that set members of the Horde against members of the Alliance.  This year, we are going to expand on that theme and plan a party around it.  If you have suggestions for what we can call this little festival of mayhem, please let us know.

We also have our first podcast under our belts.  Krystalle and I give you all the inside scoop on what’s happening in MMO land.  Make sure you listen all the way to the very end for some entertaining outtakes. (and since this was our first podcast, there were more than a few to choose from)

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please contact us and let us know about it.  If you’d like to buy a shirt to help us out, that would be great too!.

The announcement was first made public on their forums (click here).  Blizzard’s representative, Aphewls, said that they will utilize microtransactions “in order to generate income as well as completely obviate the market for gold sellers and power levelling services.  This, combined with our recent move to prohibit addon developers from charging for their products, shows that Blizzard has a renewed determination to prohibit others from unjustly profiting from Blizzard’s work.”

So, with no further ado, here’s where we stand.

We will definitely be back in the Sheraton this year, specifically in the Athens and Augusta rooms.

The following companies have already confirmed that they will be participating in Dragon*Con this year:
Sony (EQ, EQ2, Star Wars Galaxies, DC Universe Online, Free Realms, The Agency)
Funcom (Age of Conan, Secret World, Anarchy Online)
CCP (EVE Online)
Adventure Quest (AQ Worlds)
Gaia Interactive (Gaia Online)
Wardog Studios (Force of Arms)
Cartoon Network (FusionFall)

We are still in talks with the following companies:
NCSoft (City of Heroes, Guild Wars)
EA/Mythic (Warhammer Online)
Cryptic Studios (Star Trek Online, Champions Online)
Bioware (Star Wars: The Old Republic)
Blizzard (DUHHHHHH)
38 Studios (Copernicus)
Frogster Interactive (Runes of Magic)

We are planning additional panels on topics such as
Guild Management
Dead MMO’s
Free MMO’s
WoW Lore (with authors Richard A. Knaak and Keith R.A. DeCandido)
The state of MMO gaming (with representatives from several MMO companies)
The Guild, starring Felicia Day (not nailed down yet, but we’re working on it)

Of course, we are also planning a series of parties/events for our night time sessions…
Quest Givers (yes, we’re doing the weekend-long live action quests again!)
Kickoff Party on Friday Night
World of Warcraft Trivia Contest
Hardcore MMO Trivia Contest (all games)
WoW Olympics (Gnome Tossing, Dodgeball, Dance Contest, Emote Contest, etc)
Kingdom of Loathing Party
Sony Party (EQ, EQ2, SWG, etc)

We are also working on getting all of the MMO games that we will be discussing included in the computer gaming lab in the Hilton so that you guys can try out some of these games on your own time.  As with all convention preparations, things can (and often do) change at the last minute, but this is a snapshot of where we are as of right now.  We have our 12th, and final, staff member on board for this year and we plan on moving very quickly to finalize our plans for this year so that you guys will have plenty of opportunity to get ready for an outstanding Dragon*Con this year.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please contact us and let us know about it.  If you’d like to buy a shirt to help us out, that would be great too!.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Richard Knaak has written several novels on Dragonlance, Diablo, Dragonrealm, and (most importantly to us) World of Warcraft.  It is our intention to pair Richard Knaak with Keith R.A. DeCandido for a panel on the Lore of Warcraft.  Who better to learn Warcraft’s back story from than the two gentlemen who (literally) wrote the book on the subject?  We will provide additional details on the Lore panel as things develop.

Mr. DeCandido, among other novels, has written the World of Warcraft novel Cycle of Hatred and we are making plans to have him participate in a “Lore of World of Warcraft” panel for this year’s convention.