Category: World of Warcraft

The next World of Warcraft expansion: Mists of Pandaria has a release date, September 25, 2012. You can also go ahead and grab yourself a copy on the Battle.net store. The prices are $39 for the standard edition and $59 for the deluxe digital edition. With the Deluxe edition comes with a pet and mount, banner sigil and accent for Diablo® III, and Battle.net® portraits for StarCraft® II.

With the Pandaren expansion you can level your existing character to 90 or start fresh with a new Pandaren Monk. If you’re a full-fledged Panda fan, you can snag up a Collector’s Edition from any number of retail outlets for a whopping $79. With this you’ll get everything from the Deluxe version as well as art book, behind the scenes DVD, soundtrack CD, and mousepad.

Head over to Battle.net and grab your copy.

So WoW is giving a buff to their “Scroll of Resurrection” which has until now offered players a way to bring their friends back into the game. It offered free play time for returning players and that was about it. It’s getting a few new incentives for people to lure their friends back to the crack-like game with a new spectral mount (Gryphon/Wyvern). Players who are on the receiving end and returning back to wow get:

• A single character boosted all the way to level 80.
• A free upgrade to Cataclysm, regardless of the expansions you already own.
• An optional free character move/faction change.
• 7 free days of game time.

Yeah that’s right – you can own the base vanilla game and automatically get Cataclysm and a level 80 as well as a free character move/race change. Sounds like they’re really yearning to have some of their players come back. Offering expansions to these players isn’t really costing them money either – as they probably wouldn’t have paid for the expansions in the first place seeing as they’ve quit the game already.

In order to be eligible, a player must have previously subscribed to World of Warcraft for at least 30 days, and your account must have become inactive on or before March 4th, 2012.

A forum member posed the question: You revamped the whole 1-60 levelling process and made it faster and easier to level and now you’re offering a quick way to skip all of that?? I wish I was given a free 80 for having 6 or 7 level 85’s already but nooooo. Sounds tempting – will you be giving it a shot?

The lost subscriptions are one sign, but the laying off of almost 600 employees is another. Hoot has brought to our attention in the forums that  Business Wire reports Blizzard is laying off approximately 600 employees. The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development – which means about 60 are being laid off from the game development departments.

They do say that it’s not going to affect any of their upcoming releases such as Mists of Pandaria or Diablo III. In addition, Blizzard is still recruiting and looking to hire qualified developers for a number of open positions. Further details are available at http://jobs.blizzard.com. It looks like it was more shrugging off excess overhead that they gained during their WoW growth than a “we’re not making any money so we’re laying off all these people!” Layoffs are always a sign of interior house cleaning though and it does point to the fact that Blizzard probably isn’t making as much money as they were during WoW’s height.