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"After the Lead Content Designer of World of Warcraft (WoW), Tigole, deemed a new set of rewards ''welfare'' epics, the WoW player community responded in a multitude of fascinating ways. Using rhetorical analysis, gaming studies literature, and a critical analysis of welfare discourse, four rhetorical strategies can be seen in the discourse produced by the playing community. From directly confronting Tigole's statements to lamenting a loss of avatar capital and analyzing the role the changes have on the multiplayer aspects of the game, the rhetoric of ''welfare'' epics offers unique insights into the importance of balance and scarcity in the normative structures of WoW, how players accept and perpetuate the belief that rewards in online games should be ''earned,'' and how WoW's system of rewards has been fundamentally altered since the game's launch."

"WoW matters because it creates a powerful platform for learning, without a training program in sight. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to business executives as they strive to improve performance more rapidly in their own organizations."

A conversation with Cory Doctorow plunges into the matter at hand so quickly that it's almost impossible not to imagine yourself falling through an internet-era rabbit hole of pop culture and technology. Doctorow is all about synthesizing ideas and spitting them out in as accessible a fashion as possible, and the ground he manages to cover in a single stride can be mind-boggling; he's a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, father, gamer ... A former WoW player and husband of gaming standout Alice Taylor (also previously profiled here in 15 Minutes of Fame), he's widely known as the co-editor of Boing Boing and author of the bestselling young adult novel Little Brother.

"Recently, the guild All Good Things on Kargath lost one of their longtime players. Feelan, one of their guild's holy priests, passed away from cancer in early December -- shortly after he was finally able to meet his online friends. Now the guildmates are wondering what they can do to remember their friend in-game. Kesryth suggests that Blizzard add Feelan's character to one of the floating islands in Nagrand, where he can stand and watch the sunset in his favorite zone."

"Blizzard EVP of product development Frank Pearce has told VG247 that World of Warcraft will return to growth this year, moving beyond the 11.5 million subs it's been stuck at since 2008. Speaking with Adam Hartley in an interview in London yesterday, Pearce told us that the launch of Cataclysm later this year, as well as the release of Wrath of the Lich King in China, will bring increased numbers to the MMO. When asked if it had hit its peak as far as the number of players went, Pearce said: "No, I don't think that at all."

"When interviewing and talking with Production Director J. Allen Brack about the upcoming additions to World of Warcraft there were a lot of ideas that look great for the game. The MMO market is changing and WoW is set to change with it."

B"y the segment's estimate, an astounding half million Chinese now make a living - about $100 a month - from the acquisition and sale of WoW gold to US and EU gamers."

"Executive vice-president of product development Frank Pearce talks WoW 2, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3."

"Interview session with Blizzard's Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, about WoW, Starcraft, Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2."

"For the past 8 months, we have been collecting and analyzing data from WoW. We use "bots" on 5 different servers (covering PvP, PvE and RP realms) and take snapshots of the population every 10 minutes or so (more detail here), capturing data about each present character's level, location, grouped status, and guild affiliation (among other things). So far, we have observed about 150,000 unique characters. While this data is far from perfect (after all, we are only getting what Blizzard is willing to let transpire through their API), it can still yield a surprising amount of insight into the social dimensions of multiplayer games."

"Together with some students from the University of Sheffield, we've done some research into World of Warcraft Gold USA, and what that tells us about the realm-by-realm economies of the European and American servers. What came out of the study was astonishing- and seems to indicate a phenomenal bias on behalf of Blizzard towards their American clients."

"Climbing the scales at Digg this week is a story on How Stuff Works about World of Warcraft. Most intriguing was Section 2 of the article, entitled, "World of Warcraft Players." Here, author Tracy V. Wilson lists a variety of research efforts focused on WoW, currently the most popular MMORPG."

"The patch impressed and excited me in a way I hadn't felt for a long time in Warcraft. For it seemed to mark the culmination of a sometimes hesitant process of refinement which--via 21 major patches, to date--has since the game launched seen it gradually homing in on a particularly potent notion of fun and player involvement. This shift has meant a move away from wasteful complexity, and towards creating as many decisions as possible that players find meaningful. In blunter terms, it's about pulling psychological levers more effectively--and pulling these for more different types of people. … Throughout the game, more is explained, and more is automated: the designers' own thinking is more clearly visible. A virtual world that six years ago felt esoteric, obtuse or just bloody-minded in places (running ten minutes in the form of a ghost in order to locate your corpse comes to mind) has become almost cosy. It no longer wants you walking for miles to locate a tiny object that can't be seen on a map, or slaying a hundred spiders to get one drop of poison. It wants you progressing, interacting, questing: knowing where the next objectives lie, and the ones after that."