This might be old news to pop culture fanatics, but the gorgeous Mila Kunis, star of That 70’s Show and the voice of Family Guy’s Meg Griffin is a World of Warcraft fan. Her boyfriend Macauley Culkin is too. Funny that - with Home Alone being a great descriptor for many inhabitants of Azeroth.
Don’t believe it? Read the guys at Complex quiz her about the game. The Culkster has to step in towards the end to help name all the major geographical features of Azeroth, but we forgive her.
It was bound to happen…and frankly we are surprised it took so long. Nonetheless, very soon you will be able to order a figurine of your World of Warcraft character. The idea comes from one of the Xbox’s founding fathers, Ed Fries, after he saw the Spore figure system.
The company is called FigurePrints and you can already demo the system. Having a little figure to demonstrate how much of your life you’ve wasted won’t come cheap though; as one will set you back US$100. Even at that price we are sure they will have trouble keeping up with demands.
J!nx has the perfect wrapping solution for those with Warcraft-obsessed friends or family – World of Warcraft wrapping paper. The paper comes in both Alliance and Horde varieties and costs US $6.99 for 4 sheets. Check after the jump for a pic of the Alliance print.
Dell have just released a special World of Warcraft edition of their XPS M1730 notebook. The notebook comes in both Horde and Alliance flavors, with the game, expansion pack, and important patches pre-installed and ready to raid. The specs are a little overpowered for WoW, with the base model featuring a 2.2GHz T7500 Core 2 Duo, dual 512MB Geforce 8700M cards, AGEIA PhysX card, 2GB of DDR2, and 160GB of storage – OK, maybe a lot overpowered.
You wouldn’t want to rock this bad boy at the office (unless you work at Blizzard,) but if you’re still enchanted by this impractical beast you can have one for just US$4,500.
You could think that after 3 years, World of Warcraft popularity would be decreasing - but you would be wrong. Vivendi have just announced the sales figures for the 3rd quarter in which figures were up 19% to US$315.2 million. Probably the most earth shattering information release was that WoW currently has 9.3 million subscribers. That is more people playing WoW than the populations of Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Ireland or New Zealand.
The World of Warcraft 2.3 patch has launched, and it’s a biggie. Dust Wallow Marsh sees the most changes with about 50 new quests, a new town and instance. Another new introduction is Guild Banks where a guild master can manage the guild’s loot. It is now faster to level from 20 to 60, with the amount of experience needed going down, and the amount of experience given for quests increasing. To see the full list of notes, check after the jump - I’m warning you though, it’s huge.
Irony doesn’t get much sweeter than this - World of Warcraft soap. Is it the most redundant item in the history of mankind, or the most earth shatteringly brilliant ploy to get WoW addicts to bathe? Either way you can purchase them on Etsy for $14.87 which entitles you to two soaps from a wide range of fragrances.
You’ve surely heard about people finding and losing partners due to World of Warcraft - but Judge Judy hadn’t even heard of the game until recently. Thanks to those wonderful tubes that make up the interwebs, you can watch her crash course on pop culture in the video embedded above.
Last months data from Xfire has revealed a drop of 18% in hours played for World of Warcraft. The drop is not just exclusive to WoW, as many of the top ten MMOs have experienced a similar drop. Second and third spots occupied by Guild Wars and Silkroad Online dropped 13% and 27% respectively. One explanation for the drop is the end of summer holidays in the US, causing many students back to their studies - Halo 3 is also likely to be a contributing factor.
Top FPSs have also taken a hit, with Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer and Counter-Strike Source losing 12% and 18% of their audiences respectively.
No doubt about it, there’s plenty of cashed-up gamers out there these days. One in particular, a World of Warcraft player by the name of Shaks, has the strange ability to make the people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on collections of shrink-wrapped video games look like savvy investors by comparison.
When a player by the name of Zeuzo decided to sell a Level 70 Rogue armed with what is arguably the best set of gear in the entire game, Shaks was first in line with the 7,000 Euro (USD $9,700) asking price.
Shaks either didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Blizzard doesn’t like people selling their WoW characters, and that it was absolutely certain that a purchase of this magnitude would get covered by every video game forum/blog on the internet - meaning it was only a matter of time before it came to the attention of Blizzard.
Nevertheless, after a brief, and reportedly rather shameless display of suckage in a PvP area, Shaks was banned from World of Warcraft. We suggest anyone planning a similar purchase find a better way to spend the money, such as hiring someone to slap you around the head each time you plan a similar purchase.
