Posts with tag awards

15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft personalities of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

It's not uncommon anymore for guilds to hold regular, real-life meetups. Even entire house party weekends aren't too far off the radar among groups who really relish the game and one another's company. But the bar set by <The Incredibles> of Boulderfist (US-A) is simply ... Well, it wouldn't be stretching things for the sake of a play on words to say the IncrediCon event has set the bar incredibly high. There's not a detail of these gatherings that's not related to World of Warcraft: picnics, banquets, over-the-top publicity posters, hotel welcome packages, game-themed menus -- even custom-designed, WoW-themed beer labels. (Talk about tossing one back with the guildies ...)

The pièce de resistance of each year's event, however, is clearly The Increddy, a golden statuette (à la Oscars) awarded to a guild volunteer or leader for service to the five-year-old group. We'll be featuring the Increddy and the dizzying array of other items created for Incredicon-related fun in next week's World of Warcrafts (previously planned for yesterday, but bumped so we could serve up some WoW-inspired menus for your Fourth of July celebration). This week, we talked to Increddy crafter and guild officer Theraven, pulling together our conversations into a Q&A-style look at the incredible Incredicon meetups.

Spicytuna has a nice little writeup about a much-discussed but never implemented feature in World of Warcraft: player housing. Blizzard has borrowed (and subsequently improved upon) many of the most common features in MMOs -- they revamped leveling with ideas like rested XP and recruit-a-friend, they changed the endgame with the ideas of Heroic instances and daily quests, and they've tweaked PvP with battlegrounds, Wintergrasp and Arenas.

But for some reason they've never taken on the idea of player housing: a place in the game for players to make their own. The reason we've always heard is that they never landed on a good implementation of it -- if they couldn't do it right, they wouldn't do it at all.

But Spicytuna proves there's no shortage of ideas. The main thought so far is that such an area would be instanced, as having actual buildings in the game as player houses just leads to emptied out ghettos of buildings left to rot.

Apparently there were a few Blizzard blokes at E3 last week, even though we didn't see them wandering the floor at all. Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams were both there to accept their awards for world records from Guinness after making it into the 2009 Gaming edition. World of Warcraft picked up a record for the most popular MMORPG in the world (with, as you probably know, 12 million players), and Starcraft gained recognition for being the best-selling PC strategy game, with 9.5 million copies sold worldwide. Neither of these awards are really that much of a surprise -- both games have already garnered tons of other awards, and both games are already squarely in the pantheon of the best and biggest PC games ever sold. But being recognized is always nice, we're sure.

They honored a number of other extremely popular games and services as well, including two big Activision Blizzard titles: Call of Duty 4 was recognized for being the most-played online video game, and Guitar Hero was recognized for being the best-selling rhythm game series (though Red Octane, the game's original publisher, was honored, and they've only recently been acquired by the Activision overlords).

Congrats to all the award winners, as if they even needed it. Something tells us the millions and millions of dollars in revenue from all of these games was probably a nicer reward than Guinness recognition. Just a guess.

I have to say: I am so happy that we have fishing dailies back in the game. Leafshine has found a new addiction to fishing, and I have, too: though I'm a little underwhelmed with the actual rewards (while I was a little taken aback by the cooking daily awards system when it first came out, now I really like it, and wish they'd come up with a version of that for fishing), I like the quests, and I like taking my hard-earned Mastercraft Kalua'k Fishing Pole and going out into the world to find some fish. Leafshine is exactly right: it's a terrific way to kill a few minutes that really doesn't feel like a grind at all. And while you're out fishing, there's no better time to keep an eye out for pools, too -- you never know when that Turtle mount might drop.

You might say that fishing is boring, and it is -- though they've made some really generous changes to how it levels up, you're still going to be clicking a bobber for a long, long time. But it's never been so rewarding in terms of what you can get, and it is probably the most fleshed-out minigame in Azeroth. If you, like me, sometimes prefer a little break from the usual combat (the war, if you will, of Warcraft), I can't recommend Fishing highly enough.

Medievaldragon has all the results from the recent MI6 marketing conference (where Blizzard was nominated for a number of awards), and apparently it's a clean sweep: Blizzard won in all six awards they were nominated in. Pretty impressive -- they won for overall marketing on Wrath of the Lich King (which seemed like a tough category for them), best product packaging for the expansion and best product logo for Diablo III, as well as two awards for their TV campaign, including best writing on the Ozzy Osbourne commercial.

Very impressive across the board. Congrats to Blizzard on all their wins yet again.

Get ready to put a few more awards on the (ever-growing) shelf, Blizzard -- MI6, which is a conference about marketing video games, has nominated Blizzard in no less than six different categories for all of their marketing of Wrath of the Lich King. Everything from the Wrath of the Lich King launch campaign in general to the Diablo III logo specifically has been nominated for an award. The TV spots have gotten special attention, too -- the entire "What's your game?" campaign is nominated, as is the Ozzy Osbourne spot in two different categories, for best writing and oustanding TV or theatrical ad.

You can download the full list of finalists over on the MI6 site -- the rest of the nominations are kind off all over the place, though the marketing for Fallout 3 is in there quite a bit, including up against Blizzard for best writing, and best overall marketing campaign. The awards are going down in San Francisco on April 8th -- good luck to Blizzard on all of their hard work.

We still do have one request though: for the next ad, can we maybe get a girl who plays WoW? Sure, a Gnome in the cinematics would be nice, too, but so far, on the TV commercials, it's been all dudes.

A big congrats to our friends over at The Guild, who picked up a trio of awards at Saturday night's Streamys Awards, honoring the best in web video over the past year. The show picked up Best Comedy Web Series, and Best Ensemble Cast, and Felicia Day was a big winner herself -- not only did she win Best Female Actor in a Comedy Web Series (beating out Lisa Kudrow, Megan Mullally and one of my favorites, Kristen Schaal), but that other little web series she was in, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, picked up a slew of awards on its own. And in other WoW Streamys news, as we said on the podcast post today, Alex Albrecht picked up an award for Best Web Series Host for his WoW video podcast, Project Lore.

StoryGas has a list of all the winners (a list that's strangely missing from the official Streamys site) and LG15today has pictures from the ceremony, including a few cast members of The Guild all dressed up in their finest. 12seconds.tv has video of most of the award winners as well, including Felicia. Sounds like it was a blast. Congrats to all the winners -- this was definitely an excellent season of the show, and we can't wait to see the next one!

Throw another nomination on the list for Wrath of the Lich King -- Blizzard's cinematic team has been nominated for an Elan award for the WotLK cinematic in the category of Best Animated Short Subject. And the nom is well deserved: while the trailer broke with the tradition of showing the various races and classes of Warcraft doing battle with each other, Blizzard's choice to instead recap the story of Arthas and the Lich King while he summoned Sindragosa worked well and looked amazing.

Unfortunately, Blizzard missed out in the actual game nominations -- for best PC game, the expansion was overshadowed by Fallout 3, Crysis Warhead, Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria, and Left 4 Dead. You can argue amongst yourselves whether that's justified or not. But we're sure Blizzard is happy with the animation nomination anyway -- their competition there is Turbo Dogs, so they'll probably do fine when the awards are announced on April 25th.

[via BlizzPlanet]

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has been nominated for yet another award -- this time, Wrath has received a nod for Best Game of the Year by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Videogame awards. UK residents can vote for the game right now over on their site, and a nice set of prizes, including a big TV, a Playstation 3, and copies of all ten nominated games going to one lucky voter. Voting is closed on March 9th, and the winners should be announced soon after that.

And in case you've been wondering about the AIAS nominations we mentioned a little while ago, Blizzard is going about 33%. While they did win the award for best MMO game of the year (beating out Warhammer Online), Wrath of the Lich King lost its other two categories -- Left 4 Dead was awarded Best Computer Game, and Metal Gear Solid 4 won for Best Music over the Lich King's silky tones.

Guess you can't win them all. But considering that the second expansion of a years-old MMO is still garnering honors, Blizzard has nothing to be ashamed of.

[via WorldofWar]

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has honored Wrath of the Lich King with three different nominations in their yearly awards. The game was nominated for both the Computer Game of the Year and Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the Year (both of which are pretty obvious choices, though as an expansion pack, it's probably not a complete shoo-in for either category), and also for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition. That one's not really a surprise either, though, when you consider that the music in the game is terrific, and Wrath's music especially is great.

At this point, considering this is an expansion pack to a four year old game, it really does seem like it would be an honor just to be nominated for these. But we'll see -- the winners will be announced at the 2009 D.I.C.E. Summit, on February 18th-20th in Las Vegas. Good luck to Blizzard and their teams.

[via WorldofWar]

Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

2008 was the first year of "no Azeroth-raiding". No Molten Core, no Blackwing Lair, just Karazhan and beyond. Then Wrath of the Lich King came and gave us, not necessarily a new universe like Burning Crusade did, but an expanded and enhanced version of that which we all already knew.

And the hunter-loot flowed.

Say it with a very long O. Flooooowed.

By definition, Hunter-loot is just about everything in the game, except maces and plate armor. And sometimes we'll try to ninja that stuff too, just out of ignorance/spite/revenge/insanity. But no matter how you look at it, Zin'rokh the Destroyer of Worlds and Axe of the Gronn Lords aren't in this hunter-loot wheel-house discussion, if you catch what we mean.

Please join us in a rundown of the best pieces of honest-to-Elune hunter-loot of 2008. The loot doesn't need to be epic or powerful to make the list, but it does have to have some Significance.

What defines Significance? For our purpose, we're going to define it as: How much the gear affected our -- i.e, all hunters' -- lives. For example, very few hunters obtained the legendary bow from Sunwell, but that thing affected us all, didn't it.

So let the arguing and scoffing commence; here's the BigRedKitty awards for 2008 Hunter-loot.

Blizzard has posted that the commercial for the Toyota truck that used WoW as a setting has won a People's Choice Webby award for online commercial. It was beaten out for the actual award by those Mac vs. PC online ads that spanned across some of the most popular websites online, but in the voting, the people decided that "I am the lawgivaaa!" was a little more exciting and creative. And as big a fan as I am of John Hodgman (and I am a big fan), I have to agree.

So rack up another award for using Blizzard's game in television media. Personally, I'm waiting until the networks figure out that they need to set a sitcom in Azeroth -- can't wait to see "The Thunderhorns," coming to NBC this fall.

Our favorite little web video series, The Guild, has been nominated for a 2007 YouTube award in the series category, and voting is going on right now over on YouTube's awards page. There are a lot of different categories to choose from, but if you click on "Series," you can see all the nominated web series, and The Guild is in the list down at the bottom. This isn't the first award they've been up for, but on the blog they claim it's one of the biggest.

In the interests of fairness, we should remind you that you should vote for the series you like best -- Collegehumor's "Street Fighter: The Later Years" series is a funny bit of video, especially if you're a fan of the old fighting game. But we here at WoW Insider have a soft spot for The Guild, not only because it captures so perfect (and so weirdly) what it's like to have friends you've only known through Azeroth, but because, you know, they're WoW players, too.

As Oscar time gets closer, some of us gamers may start wishing for awards of our own. Mass Effect was at least as good as There Will Be Blood, right?

Luckily, on February 7th, we gamers got our own red carpet show, as The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences hosted the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards in conjunction with the DICE Summit at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. Blizzard, of course, managed to snag a few rewards of their own. Not only did the Burning Crusade pick up Massively Multi-player Game of the Year, but Blizzard President Mike Morhaime was inducted into the Academy's Hall of Fame.

Gamespot had video coverage of the event, which you can check out here, or if you'd rather just cut to the meaty stuff, the Academy's website has a PDF with a list of the winners here. You can also check out some wider commentary on all the awards from our friends at Joystiq here.

We'll expect trophies for Wrath of the Lich King and Starcraft II next year!

Blizzard's cinematic team deserves as many awards as they can get, in this writer's humble opinion. Even back in the Starcraft days, when graphics were 2D and it was all sprites and jumpy animation, the cinematics were exquisite. And now they've been nominated for yet another award-- Blizzard says their team has been nominated to receive honors from the Visual Effects Society's 6th Annual Awards for the Burning Crusade's cinematic seen above. And I don't disagree-- even more than a year (and a few runs through ten levels of Outland) after it's come out, Illidan's growl still rocks.

And man oh man I can't wait for the Wrath cinematic. As fun as it was to see Blood Elves, Draenei, and Illidan and the Skull of Gul'dan, seeing Arthas in cinematic form again is going to be even more awesome.