It looks like patch 2.4.3 is going live, since it just downloaded today. Patch notes haven’t made it to the main page, though. They’re still on the test side.
Here they are: Public Test Realm Patch Notes
I’ll be buying a couple of those level 30 mounts ASAP.
From the G4 site: Bushnell Predicts End of ‘Warcraft’
In an interview with Gamasutra, [tag-tec]Bushnell[/tag-tec] said:
“[tag-tec]World of Warcraft[/tag-tec] just passed what I call the Bushnell Threshold. The Bushnell Threshold is… I watch my sons, and because they’re my sons, they tend to start things at the beginning, or sometimes a little bit before. So they play and play and play and play, and all of a sudden, they don’t play anymore. They stayed with World of Warcraft for a long time. My older son all of a sudden got Mage 72 or whatever it is and quit. All at once. Cold turkey. I didn’t think it was going to happen. And my 14-year-old is getting close to there, which is surprising.”
Well, my kids showed a similiar pattern, and then they keep coming back when something in the game sparks new interest. When [tag-tec]Wrath of the Lich King[/tag-tec] come out I expect they’ll be spending long hours exploring every last inch of the thing.
When you’ve leveled everything and raided everything and done every BG many many times the game gets a bit old.
Given the continuing growth of WoW and the fact that the #2 game is so far back that you have to use a telescope to see it… well, I don’t think WoW is ending anytime soon.
It’s also kind of funny to see an Atari guy saying this. Atari has had a record of sharp to brilliant ideas shot down with unbelievably bad follow through.
No, I don’t think the End is Near.
How about you?
From the Washington Post blog:
This afternoon (July 8,) game publisher Activision announced that its shareholders have voted to approve a merger with Vivendi Games.
The proposed merger between the two video game giants was announced in December, but required the blessing of Activision shareholders. The game publisher said that 92 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which is expected to close tomorrow.
One analyst has predicted that the merged company would make $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, enough to make [tag-tec]Activision Blizzard[/tag-tec] the world’s largest game publisher
This could mean interesting things for the World of Warcraft, or maybe that the new company will have the resources to come up with similarly successful games.
But I don’t think I’ll be calling them Activision Blizzard very much…
More on Blizzard Activision:
Source: Activision’s ‘DJ Hero’ Was A Vivendi Game, Now A … – We now know that “DJ Hero†was in development under publisher Vivendi before they merged with Activision to become Activision Blizzard. The now-called “DJ Hero†was one of the few unannounced projects that the new mega-publisher decided …
More layoffs at Blizzard Activision – Vivendi, Blizzard’s owner, officially combined its interactive entertainment business with Activision, a publisher of mostly console games, in July and renamed the group Activision Blizzard. Layoffs have been reported at other locations …
Could Activision Enter The Console War? – Take a look at your game collection, and see how many of your games either have Activision, Blizzard, or Vivendi on them, and then think back to the Atari 2600, and how many quality games over the last 29 years have been released by …
Activision tried to buy Blizzard before merging with Vivendi Games – Merging with Vivendi Games was not Bobby Kotick’s first thought. While talking about the deal today, the Activision (and now Activision Blizzard) CEO admitted that in his first conversations with Vivendi Games CEO Bruce Hack, …
Obviously the World of Warcraft isn’t, and isn’t going to be, free to play, as interesting as that thought might be. But it seems that Bliz actually considered such a model (possibly ad supported,) then dumped it as being non-sustainable.
I happen to agree that a paid model is the way to go if you want to seriously develop a game. Whether of not we agree on the exact direction that Bliz takes with WoW I think we can all agree that they do a lot of support and development work so those few bucks 
that they pull in each month get put to use.
Here’s the clip, from Massively.com:
Blizzard’s own Rob Pardo recently dropped something of a bombshell about World of Warcraft at the Paris GDC event when he revealed in a keynote that the game was originally planned as a free-to-play experience. He also adds that, “We didn’t want to charge a subscription, but as we researched market conditions, we realized that wouldn’t support us.”
Here’s the rest of the article: WoW Originally Planned as Free to Play
Coming Real Soon Now, 2.4.3.
Lots of fixes and a few changes. Mounts will be availabel at level 30, for example.
Patch notes are on WoW Insider
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