GCO: "It seems that video game developers and publishers, after a bit of an hiatus, are beginning to "re-open support" to Apple’s operating system, Blizzard reveals that a beta for StarCraft II is in the advance stages of development and that they do plan to release the beta next month on Mac operating systems."
The Escapist cornered Rob Pardo at the GDC 2010 to ask if Blizzard has plans to license Battle.net to third parties.
Rob Pardo responded it’s a theme the team has talked about and basically would be a lot of work and a challenge on their end to maintain. It would also represent a somewhat competitive platform for Blizzard giving the example that if Blizzard was to release a game and a third party game was on sale at the same time.
Currently a small amount of lucky gamers are participating in StarCraft II’s beta. Unfortunately for the players who didn’t get in, Blizzard intends to keep the beta a very exclusive event.
Hollywood’s biggest talent agency is being called to duty.
Signaling their intention to set up a new deal soon, Vince Zampella and Jason West, the recently fired heads of the studio that produced the blockbuster video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, have agreed to be represented by the Creative Artists Agency.
West and Zampella, the former president and chief executive, respectively, of Encino-based Infinity Ward, were fired on March 1 due to an undisclosed dispute with their bosses at Activision Blizzard, Inc
A few days ago, Dustin Browder told VG247 their goal is to maintain a flow of 10,000 beta testers, and they don’t have them yet. Even if that was the case, if the numbers go down due to some people not login to play, they might invite more people.
This is not a given, however.
On the other hand, Blizzard have promised other way to get beta keys.
Ex: "$400 is a lot of money. It can buy you a video game console and a controller, more than a year of World of Warcraft subscription time or a couple grams of crack cocaine. Incidentally, all three things are probably a better investment of money than what gamers have recently been dropping $400 on Ebay for — an entrance key for Blizzard’s ongoing beta for the highly anticipated StarCraft II.
Or is it?"
Blizzard offered a brief preview of the Mastery System, which takes over and expands the 51 points Talent Tree system in World of Warcraft: Cataclsym.
The preview focuses on the priest and death knight classes. A Blizzard representative hints the Cataclysm website will get a generous update in upcoming days.
The World of Warcraft "Corrupted Blood" Plague (Blizzard)
This one was actually fun to watch. A glitch caused a disease intended to be confined to only one area to spread to the entire world of the World of Warcraft. It gradually reduced players’ health — not a big problem for higher-level players, but it killed others in seconds flat. Good Samaritans spent their time setting up virtual clinics and directing people away from infected areas, while pranksters (or assholes, depending on your point of view) deliberately spread the disease until Blizzard reset the servers.
The StarCraft II beta Battle.net matchmaking settings have been turned away from skill level matching to quick matching, StarCraft: IncGamers reports.
Blizzard announced to fans that "the Find Match functionality is currently configured to find games more quickly, rather than find evenly matched games." The idea is likely to get more games going to let the developer get a better statistical overview of unit balance.
There has been threads and mails going around the web for how to run a StarCraft II replay offline, if you as a player would ever have a wobbly internet. Several of these have had a certain "hack-inspired" quality, and it’s NOT recommended to do any sort of pirating or modifying of Blizzard files. In fact, try to avoid this topic all together! Considering you can get suspended for account sharing, you should take it easy with this -much more serious – offence.
Fortunately, replays can be played offline without modifying any game files, if you have the client installed.