"With the majority of World of Warcraft's 11 million players located in
China this is a big business. Recent estimates suggest there are about
500,000 gold farm workers in China."

HALF A MILLION GOLDFARMERS.  Does anyone else find that insane?  11 million subscribers.  That's 4.5% of subscribers are gold farmers.

"Sweden's tax office agrees. In April 2008, it published a clarification
to its tax laws which said that in-game transactions are taxable—in
theory. There is no evidence that such a tax has been levied, but it is
possible."

Great... taxing our games.  Ruin all the fun.  If someone cashes out and earns some sort of income that's different than earning in a virtual world.  I could earn and spend thousands of virtual dollars, should I be taxed on that income?  Anything I buy would that become an asset?  Will I have to inventory my virtual assets in a video game?  Give me a fucking break. Just because the government can't balance their own budget especially during a recession doesn't mean they should be ruining gamers' fun.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7746094.stm

So I loaded warcraft 3 yesterday and this happened.  Sign of the apocalypse?

Blizzard recently announced at BlizzCon 2008 that Starcraft 2 single player would be a trilogy.  This means 3 separate campaigns: one for each race.

Terran - Wings of Liberty

Zerg - Heart of the Swarm

Protoss - Legacy of the Void

What does this mean for us gamers?  Three virtually separate game experiences says Blizzard.  Apparently, the campaigns were each just so massive that they just split them up separately to make them their own to allow us more missions, heroes and action.  Awesome.

New Dota Map released this week.  New heroes Windrunner and Admiral Proudmoore.  A lot of reworkings of the entire map and gameplay.  Some notables:

Map Change - much larger, things have been moved around a lot

New Heroes - With all new heroes, lots of dirty tricks to be found (x marks spot and then tossing them into the air and whacking them with tidehunter)

Recipes/Shops/Shopping - Lots of reworkings here, taverns moved, you can buy without chicken in base and it leaves it on the ground, different items at secondary secret shops.

 Roshan - completely different dynamic to him.  Cant stack Aegis, aegis expires, roshan gets stronger as game goes on, etc.

NEW LOAD SCREEN!

Should be interesting to see how much gets changed over next couple months.  The game seems to atke longer now with the bigger map, but maybe that is the unfamiliarness of it all and it will speed up as people get used to it.

"All political controversy aside, bearing the Olympic torch during its long route
to the Games is an incredible honor, and this year two
professional gamers will take part in the international relay. Through a
sponsorship deal with peripheral manufacturer Razer, XiaoFeng "Sky" Li and Jae
ho "Moon" Jang will both bear the torch as it passes through China en route to
the Beijing National Stadium.

Both Sky and Moon are professional
Warcraft III players, with the former being recognized as the world's
best Human-class player, and the latter as the one of the world's best Night
Elf-class players. Both were chosen by Razer from a group of ten professional
gamers, selected by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games. Congrats go
out to both."

Source: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/18/professional-warcraft-iii-players-to-c...

According to the BBC "The makers of World of Warcraft are locked in a legal battle with a firm that has produced a tool to automate many actions in the virtual world....Blizzard has said the tool infringes copyright because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software."

Related Links

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7314353.stm

http://www.mmoglider.com/

Not quite starcraft related, but I know a lot of us are Blizzard fans. So I saw this and couldn't resist:

Gosu.com is off! We launched publically today with our awesome new layout, thanks to Chris Schultz for the design and Matt Wilson
for the programming. It has been a long time in the works and many
hours spent but we're finally ready to release the new Gosu.com to the
world. While Starcraft 2 is still many months (hopefully not years...)
away we are still excited about it and there are many other great
blizzard games to keep us occupied such as the original Starcraft and
of course Warcraft 3/Frozen Throne. But let's get to the new features!

• New Design!
• Videos - upload videos (100MB cap currently)
• Forums - Two actually, but the main forum has been integrated and improved.
• Groups
  - Make public and private groups for your clan/guild, map team, video
  team, common interest, etc. Each group has its own forum, blog, polls,
  members, and pages.
• Private Messages - Send messages to other users instantly!
• Player Blogs - keep your own blog on Gosu.com.
• Wiki - The unofficial Starcraft 2 Wiki
• Directory - Directory of all SC2 stuff
• Galleries
• Live Chatrooms
• And more!
• PS - $$$ Revenue Sharing $$$ - Update your profile with your google adsense code and make money!

That is it for now, downloads are currently being worked on, replays
and maps will be implemented as Starcraft 2 gets closer to launch and
we have something to put there! If you're interested in becoming part
of the staff here at Gosu.com feel free to contact me.

Known bugs:

-Downloads module

-IE6 layout rendering