Posts with tag tweet

As you might know from our video tour, the new Darkmoon Faire island coming in patch 4.3 is loaded up with carnival-style minigames you can play with purchasable tickets. Faire-goers can look forward to playing games like Tonk Battle, Whack-a-Gnoll, and Ring Toss, but you have to figure ... what games did Blizzard consider before adding the ones we get in 4.3? We started guessing on Twitter, then let the WoW Twitter community take over with the #RejectedDarkmoonFaireMinigames hashtag.

Unsurprisingly, you guys killed it. Here are a few of our favorites from the hundreds of entries we got.

There's been a fair amount of new Cataclysm info trickling out of Blizzard's volcano lair lately, but of course, we still want more. There are whole systems we know next to nothing about! An entire continent whose cataclysmic changes are still a complete mystery! And just what the heck happens to Cairne Bloodhoof? Our little hearts can't take the suspense. So we did what any normal people would do: took to the nexus of short-form social networking (the Twitter) and asked you what you just had to know about Cataclysm.

As it turns out, plenty. And the variance in responses tells us one thing: we need a beta, stat. Here are some sample responses, with the rest hanging out after the break. Don't forget to follow us on the official WoW.com Twitter account!

• promisha @WoWInsider I want to what they are specifically doing to make VC and SFK heroic, other than just level change
• Shad0wembrace @WoWInsider I would really like to know if they are increasing the amount of characters on a server.
  
• Balekkar @WoWInsider what happens to Cairne Bloodhoof?
• Thrawnseg @WoWInsider How will raids be handled? Will it be like TBC or Wrath as in 1 path or many?

If you are following Blizzard's Diablo, StarCraft and Warcraft Twitter accounts, then you already know that Blizzard has announced three new Twitter contests.

For all three of them, you must be following the appropriate account. Here is a summary of each contest:

• Starcraft: Tweet how you are the biggest StarCraft 2 fan using the #SC2fan hashtag for a chance to win one of 500 Starcraft 2 beta keys.
• Diablo: Tweet an item name using the #D3unique hashtag to win one of many Diablo 3 prizes.
• Warcraft: Using the #Battlecry hashtag, tweet "For the Horde" when the background of the @warcraft twitter page shows a Horde flag and "For the Alliance" when the background is Alliance. Horde or Alliance prize packages are up for grabs in this sweepstakes.

These contests end August 24, 2009. Good luck everyone!

TweetMyGaming is a site started up by our friends over at gamerDNA (they routinely contribute to our sister site Massively, including sharing some great information on WoW's demographics), and while the site is designed to track all mentions of video games on Twitter, one game has more or less dominated the discussion since the site debuted about a month ago. Well, actually, it was The Sims 3 -- apparently as big as World of Warcraft is, it still can't stop EA's Sims series for sheer popularity (or top the series in sales). But still, WoW is sitting at a respectable number two in tweets, and watching the feed go by over on the game's page lets you in on all the different slices of the game's community, from the hardcore raiders to the folks just trying to grab some time to play.

Of course, all of the values on the site are constantly changing, and we're sure they're still tweaking the formula of how games move up and down the list -- The Sims 3 is coming hot off of its release a few weeks ago, and while WoW has a vibrant twitter community for sure, the news about mounts and the new patch 3.2 information last week probably helped keep it up on the radar (just wait and see what happens over BlizzCon -- I wouldn't be surprised to see WoW-related topics trending over Twitter at large).

But WoW is definitely a game that people talk about no matter what's in the news lately. Interesting, but not surprising, that it's holding its own even among the trendiest games on Twitter.

Patch days bring about major game changing news, and the WoW Insider crew is hard at work to bring you the very latest.

As we gotten the news in we've been tweeting about it left and right, and we'll continue to do this throughout the day. We're also responding to as many questions via tweets as we can.

And as a special treat for all you twittering people out there, we'll be giving away some WoW TCG Loot Card codes (courtesy of our good friends at WoWTCGLoot.com) over the next week or so. But the only way for you to get them is to follow us on Twitter and wait for the sign.

Of course, another good reason to follow us on twitter is that when we reach 9,000 followers, we'll be doing a video version of our podcast, The WoW Insider Show. Ever wonder what Mike Schramm looks like while talking? Want to see if Turpster really is a gnome warrior? And do writers here at WoW Insider really grow horns and walk around with pitch forks chanting monotone devilries while sacrificing baby Murlocs to Ghostcrawler in exchange for new patch information?

Follow us and find out!

I know what you're thinking! "If anyone could write up a scandalous exposé of what working at Blizzard is really like, it'd be our old pal Mike. I bet he's got the inside scoop of what goes on at Big Blue behind closed doors. I paid for the whole seat but I'll only need the edge."

Yeah, well. I'm going to disappoint you here and instead link you to an article from the OC Register, longtime reporter of all news Blizzard given the company's stature in the SoCal business world. They interviewed Blizzard COO Paul Sams about the studio's recent award of "One of the best places to work in Orange County" and why that award was deserved.

Gamers seem to get a lot of bad press. From controversial episodes in the early days of Dungeons and Dragons to WoW addictions that are more shameful than online porn. Anyone who doesn't know us might actually believe that we're 10 million basement-dwelling social troglodytes. The American Medical Association is even considering the addition of video game addictions to their big book of mental problems (also known as the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

A new study by Victoria University found just the opposite. They found that about 15% of their 621 participants qualified as problem gamers, that is they spent more than 50 hours a week playing games. Even among that 15 percent, only one percent showed signs of poor social skills. While there are some who have a major problem gaming habit most of us are normal people who unwind with a video game.

Soley saw something strange at the airport in Denver: a console with PC games on it, including none other than World of Warcraft. Apparently there was a kiosk with a bunch of different games installed on it, and for a small fee, you could jump in and play any number of games, from Valve's FPSes (including Portal!) to our own big MMORPG.

The company doing this is called Zazoox -- they have a site that shows off all of their different consoles and offers them (for a price and a service charge) to vendors who can then put them up in public places. World of Warcraft isn't actually on their games list yet, so apparently it's just being tested in Denver and other places. Apparently, the price is 25 cents a minute, but as some of the commenters to Soley's post say, if you're entering your WoW password on what is basically a public computer and something goes wrong, it could cost you a lot more than that.

Of course, overseas in Asia, this kind of thing is common -- the vast majority of WoW players there play in public cafes and Internet houses, and in fact the pricing scheme of the game itself there is per hour, not per month like it is here. But for some reason, this kind of ubiquitous public gaming has never taken off in the West -- maybe Zazoox's consoles will get people playing out in public.