The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it.

From Worlds in Motion we've learned that Blizzard has suffered yet another setback in China.

Though it took longer than expected to receive them and FedEx decided it was a wise idea to throw them into the mound of snow next to my well-shoveled porch rather than placing them on the porch or (gasp!) ringing the doorbell so I could accept them myself, my house now has two new guests.

Upper Deck has issued their own news release statement regarding the dropped license of the World of Warcraft: Trading Card Game. The decline in sales and economic downturn has been cited as the cause of their discontinued product.

The topic of player housing continues to crop up as a question on the official forums. Blizzard has stated that guild halls or guild housing will not to be included in the game (at least, not any time soon).

Every so often someone looks back to 40-man raiding: this time it's Zarhym on the official forums, answering a question about raiding's future and their possible return. I have to say that every time someone decides that the 40-man raid game should come back, I cringe a little bit.

One of our readers, Bill, sent us a tip about a WoW account issue on The Consumerist. It seems that the ownership of Anonymous's friend's account is under dispute and Blizzard won't let him use it in the meantime.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Account Security

In the last year, I have noticed that Blizzard has been making more of an effort to reach out to its community. When I say community, I mean the artists, the writers, the singers, bloggers, theorycrafters, and everything in between.