geekosystem

Diablo III keeps having economy issues on the PC, so of course it's only appropriate to keep chugging along with the console version, right? Right. That's apparently the thinking at Blizzard, as Diablo III is set to release on September 3rd for PS3 and Xbox 360. It's currently unclear when it'll drop on next-gen consoles, but it's not improbable that we'll hear in the coming week.

Blizzard's upcoming MMO project -- known only by its codename 'Titan' -- has been the subject of plenty of speculation and anticipation. Gamers may want to tamp down their anticipation, though, as it looks like we have one more hard fact to go on about the project today, and it's not an encouraging one. According to VentureBeat, Blizzard has scrapped the all-star, 100-person-strong development team that developing the game, reassigning more than 70 staff members to other projects while the remaining staff reboots 'Titan' from scratch.

I'm not going to pretend I know a whole bunch about StarCraft. For whatever reason, it was just one of those franchises I managed to avoid entirely during my formative years. When it came to strategy games, my cup of tea was always Red Alert 2 or one of the Total War installments from Creative Assembly. Also, Age of Empires. That said, Blizzard's latest trailer for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, dubbed "Vengeance," has seriously made me want to start paying attention.

Sure, Blizzard's notorious for running late with products. Okay, maybe Activision is willing to gouge players to the absolute breaking point. Still, there's a reason folks have come back to franchises like Diablo, Warcraft, and StarCraft time and time again. Even if that relationship should sour over time, let it not be said that the people at Blizzard weren't capable of wonders when it came to cinematic sequences. Case in point, the opening cinematic for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm dropped today, and it's just about as beautiful as anyone could hope.

World of Warcraft is a community as much as it is a game, and sometimes that community has been called on to help out the real world. Blizzard, the company behind WoW, has hosted fundraising efforts in the past for charities like St. Jude Children's Hospital, the Make a Wish Foundation, and even the relief effort after the devastating 2011 tsunami in Japan. Their latest call to action for players has broken all of their previous fundraising records. Blizzard announced last week that World of Warcraft players have raised $2.3 million dollars for Hurricane Sandy relief.

In the wake of a series of invasive hacks earlier this year, Battle.Net users are taking their anger and frustration out on Blizzard with a new class action lawsuit. While lawsuits are par for the course when it comes to potentially leaking users' credit card information, it seems that WoW and Diablo III fans are enraged over a different aspect of the scandal. Rather than focusing on the allegedly lackluster security of Battle.Net, users are suing over the fact that Blizzard tried to take advantage of the event by strongly recommending that insecure users buy the Battle.Net authenticator, a little keychain dongle that generates random passwords for players' accounts.

In an Activision earnings call earlier today, Blizzard honcho Mike Morhaime crushed all of our hopes and dreams and noted that the second third of StarCraft II, Heart of the Swarm, will miss 2012 and release sometime in the early part of 2013.

Every so often, a glitch or exploit will be discovered that causes massive amounts of World of Warcraft folks to die. This typically has something to do with incorrectly set flags, or similar circumstances, that then cause a chain reaction as more folks exacerbate the problem. It wasn't that long ago that Death Knights found they could cast their plagues on friendly units and caused a mass extinction of their own. Yesterday, an exploit was used to fly around killing everyone in range, thus nuking entire cities across multiple servers.

A bug in World of Warcraft allowed Death Knight players to cast plagues on friendly characters, triggering untold levels of destruction in Azeroth on Friday night. Players looking to enjoy a regular raiding, looting, questing session of WoW may have been met with a rude awakening when they logged on to find that whole towns of players and NPCs had been turned into piles of bones.

Getting a quick self portrait of your World of Warcraft toon in some newly minted gear. We've all been there, posing for posterity. Through some diligent digital detective work, though, a group of players has uncovered something a touch unseemly -- every WoW screenshot is tagged with a digital screenshot, leaving a record of the player taking the shot, a timestamp indicating when the picture was captured, and information about the realm the player is in at the time, including its IP address -- which could be bad news for players who are running on private servers to escape the monthly subscription fee built into adventuring in Azeroth.

There are some pretty heavy economic sanctions businesses have to deal with under United States law. A number of these have to deal with Iran, because the US isn't what you'd call a fan of their government. However, digital goods and the like have a tendency to be mostly ignored; this isn't because they aren't against the law, per se, but because it's a difficult thing to effectively track and stop. In order to comply with these sanctions, however, it looks like Blizzard has finally blocked access for Iranians to World of Warcraft.

When it comes to Iran and the Internet, we never quite know what to expect, but we can usually assume that it's never anything good regarding digital freedom. A Tehran Blizzard player posted to the forums that Blizzard's online service is now blocked from the Iranian Internet. The user posted a screenshot of the government's message that lists reasons for the block, which includes the "promotion of superstition and mythology."

Some might argue that Blizzard is "panda"-ring to fans with their newest expansion to the popular World of Warcraft franchise, Mists of Pandaria. What's actually hard to disagree with is that the company sure does know how to make a cinematic trailer. Blizzard revealed the official trailer for Mists of Pandaria and, while it might not have the same impact as Cataclysm's, it's a doozy. The lost continent of Pandaria supposedly holds many secrets for both Alliance and Horde factions.

It's time to change your passwords, World of Warcraft fans! The security of Battle.net has been compromised, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime announced earlier this week. The breach has since been found and closed, but not before a  big ol' list of user names, answers to security questions, and data related to Blizzard's special Battle.net Authenticator software was taken from their servers.

Not too long ago, we learned that Bethesda spruced up their offices with a huge statue of Alduin's Wall from Skyrim. Not to be outdone by Bethesda, Blizzard now has a huge statue of Tyrael, embodiment of Justice itself, from Diablo III, guarding their offices from hoards of grindy demons that like to drop various pairs of subpar pants upon death.