WoW Expansion Playable At BlizzCon

Gamespot has the news that the World of Warcraft expansion will be playable at BlizzCon this year. Our own ScuttleMonkey will be there, and should have some sort of first hand impressions for us when he returns from the wilds of the west. Relatedly, MMORPG.com has a lengthy look at the Battlegrounds, analyzing what works and what doesn't in Blizzard's PvP emporiums. Finally (and confusingly), Battle.net seems to indicate that some sort of announcement should be coming our way today. Update: 10/07 23:13 GMT by Z : As discussed in the comments, the "new thing" for today was a redesign of the battle.net site.

mystery announcement

[Diabolus777]

A while back, blizzard made a similar splash screen for battle.net with a countdown timer and a fuzzy background image. for something like a week, people claimed that the announcement was to be Starcraft 2 or diablo 3. And then Blizzard disappointed everyone with the Starcraft:ghost announcement. This game isnt even complete yet. Now, will they do the same? They know people have been dying for sequels to Starcraft and Diablo, yet, they continually tease fans with vague replies. I hope this is it, cause I

Re:mystery announcement

[praedictus]

Rumors have been flying since the sent the remainder of Blizz North to the main branch...

While a Diablo 3 announcement would be welcome, I expect them to announce something along the lines of the Warcraft III board game finally shipping or some such.

Hurm.

[Slime-dogg]

I'd rather they produce new game content, instead of working on an expansion. There are over 30 locations that still need to be added to the game, and this isn't even including the actual walled off areas that appear on the map, but are not accessible in-game.

Then again, it would be nice to see the level cap raised a bit.

Re:Hurm.

[SScorpio]

Umm... expansions for MMORPGs have a lot of content and aren't just level cap raises. Now if your talking about how those locations should have been available when the game was released and not have to pay for them in an expansion. Well... that's corporate america rushing games out the door, and making the user pay more.

30?

[MachDelta]

I dunno about 30 locations. It might depend what you defined as a "location" though. Here are some off the top of my head (with Google as a refresher):

Quel'Thalas - North of the plaguelands. Former home of the High Elves before Arthas sacked Silvermoon and the Sunwell
Northrend - Arctic continent. Azjol-Nerub, Icecrown Glacier (Arthas' current digs), Dragonblight plains, Drak'Tharon Keep, etc, etc.
Tomb of Sargeras - Tiny island/dungeon east of Stormwind.
The Broken Isles - Buncha islands west of Stormwi

As long as...

[Digital Vomit]

As long as we don't have to pay extra for the expansion, I'm okay with it.

Re:As long as...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you'll have to pay for it. If you didn't, it would be called a content patch!

What the hell?

[H3lldr0p]

I checked out the .Net and all I found was a some ascii art I needed to highlight to see. It kinda looked like an owl with the word "Narly" under it. If this is some sort of announcement, color me confused.

Re:What the hell?

[ReverendLoki]

For me, it is some ASCII art, consisting solely of 1s and 0s forming a solid rectangular block with the image created by varying the level of whitein each character, on a black background, with the text "NO WAI!!" spelled out in the ASCII artwork. It's hard to tell what it is, but it looks almost chicken or a duck facing left.

In the page source, at the bottom of the page is the text "get ready" in the middle of a comment tag.

<!-- get ready -->

See this...

[antdude]

See Blue's News [bluesnews.com] about the pictures, ASCII arts, the dumb Internet fad, etc.

Re:See this...

[H3lldr0p]

Bloody freaking hell. I think I just lost 20 IQ points for finding out about that idiocy. The Theory [penny-arcade.com] continues to gather instances where it is proven correct.

Battle.net announcement is up. It's a new design

[_xeno_]

Just loaded Battle.net, and got the new Battle.net website design. (Actually, I got a lot of Flashblocked content, but...)

Apparently the announcement is soley that they redesigned their website. (To use tons of Flash, at that.)

It's, uh, Flashy.

It's a new website is all

[sunbane]

It is up now... new battle.net website is the mysterious page... Just when I was going to decode that ascii on the image to see if it meant anything...

WoW gangster

[JavaLord]

The wow gangster [ytmnd.com] will be at blizzcon!