BlizzCon Friday Wrapup

Besides the Burning Crusade announcement, there's lots of interesting stuff going on out in California. Gamespot reports from the scene and has a first look at the Blood Elf starting area. Meanwhile, Next Generation has the lay of the land from the first day of Blizzard's games get-together. From the Gamespot article: "As for the scene, Morhaime announced that slightly fewer than 8,000 attendees would be at Blizzcon, and there seemed to be about that many people crowding in Hall A of the Anaheim Convention Center. The line for showgoers to pick up their free goody bags seemed to snake as long as a line for a ride at nearby Disneyland, looking to be easily more than an hour's wait. Though there were dozens of computer stations, lines for Blizzcon attendees looking to play the new expansion pack were also quite long. Two GameSpot editors stood in line for about an hour to get 30 minutes of play time with the content."

From the GameSpot article...

[djflipstarx]

Quite a variety of people have made their way to the show, including parents and children who must have decided that a day at Blizzcon was more critical than spending it at school.

Jack Thompson: PIXELANTES ARE SKIPPING SCHOOL TO ATTEND A GAME CONVENTION?! MORE REASON GAMES ARE EVIL, TRUST ME.

Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Warcraft allows third-party UI mods via XML and LUA. Well, some of these mods are apparently entering into a gray area, and are considered to be "too powerful" or something. (I remember a very confusing statement by Blizzard about how mods that allow people to do something that people without the mod can't do are considered too powerful - but isn't that the entire point of a mod?)

So, anyway, there's a rumor going around that they announced at BlizzCon that mods are going to have to be digitally signed in a future content patch. Anyone know if this is true?

If it is true, it will kill all third-party mods, "legal" or not. Even if they allow third-party authors to apply for digital signatures, it will still prevent them from developing at all. You can't develop a modification if you have to get EVERY single version of it signed by Blizzard. Bugs happen, it's a fact of development. If you have to wait a day between tests of various versions, mod development will simply stop.

So, is this true? Does Blizzard really intend to close off modding to their player-base, and only allow certain "golden" mods? I can only hope that this isn't the case.