BlizzCon 2009: Day Two Recap

With BlizzCon now over, Blizzard’s official website for the event has been updated with three more panel overviews.

Our vision is for the new Battle.net to become the ultimate Blizzard Entertainment social network, in addition to its matchmaking foundation. Simply logging in to Battle.net will make it easy to find and chat with your friends across World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and future Blizzard Entertainment titles, including Diablo III. Keep track of all your buddies in your friends list, view their online status and presence information, voice chat, send out party invites, and broadcast messages to your friends. Detailed character profiles let players keep up to date on friends’ progress and achievements.

On World of Warcraft Dungeons and Raids:

The developers then went on to show us the new World of Warcraft: Cataclysm raid dungeon called The Firelands. This is a 10- and 25-player raid dungeon in the elemental plane of fire, and is an exterior raid zone like Ahn’Qiraj 20 or the Caverns of Time Battle of Mount Hyjal. This plane is the home of our old friend Ragnaros, the Lord of Fire. Here players will be able to fight him again, but this time he will be at his full strength.

On World of Warcraft Rated Battlegrounds:

We plan to include featured weekly Battlegrounds for players to enjoy; coupled with the changes made, this will help keeps the gameplay changing from week to week. The way the new rated Battlegrounds work is pretty straightforward. The more games you win, the higher the rating you acquire; however, we do not plan to punish players for losing. We’re looking at setting a cap of six or more battles per week. We want players to enjoy the ability to acquire rating through Battlegrounds, but it shouldn’t become the main source of rating gains.