Schneiderman spoke this week on how the most recent (but not the largest) wave of 2,000 registered sex offenders being kicked from gaming communities as a result of his office’s initiative called “Operation: Game Over.” Cleverness of the title of the project aside, this situation has offered up some key quotes from the official in his bid to cut out any offenses before they happen.

“The Internet is the crime scene of the 21st century, and we must ensure that online video game platforms do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators. That means doing everything possible to block sex offenders from using gaming systems as a vehicle to prey on underage victims.” – Schneiderman

In New York State the law requires all sex offenders to provide the state with all of their electronic identities. This includes online accounts of all kinds, email addresses, screen names, and basically any other identifying set of numbers and letters a human might have to tie them in to the web. This initiative has this list of contacts run down and used to contact online gaming developers, asking them kindly to purge accounts of the sex offenders. It’s not clear at the moment if this request can be enforced with each developer, but by the sound of it, there’s not been much resistance either way.

“peration: Game Over coincides with recent incidents of sexual predators using voice and text chat functions in online gaming services to lure underage victims across the country. … I applaud the online gaming companies that have purged registered sex offenders from their networks in time for the holiday season. Together, we are making the online community a safer place for the children of New York.” – Scheiderman

The message released today by Schneiderman’s office also included the following tips for parents with kids that play video games:

Attorney General Schneiderman provided the following tips for parents to protect children from sexual predators from online video game networks:

• Choose games appropriate for your child’s age and maturity level;

• Use your game console’s parental controls (control which games can be played, for how long, and whether they can play online;

• Keep computer or game console in a public area of the home; and

• Talk to your kids about how to protect identifying information, and to avoid and report conversations that make them uncomfortable.

Schneiderman’s initiative previously had announcements with different amounts of registered sex offenders kicked from gaming communities, the most recent being an amount of 3,500. Recent targets included Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE community and World of Warcraft. Let us know what you think of this program in comments below!

[via Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman]

With a message that appeared inside the last day, Azeroth appears to be safe once more. As Blizzard puts it, the fix appeared to be simple, but the damage was already done. At the moment it would appear that they’ve got everything under control, but that they’re still hunting for the villains that made the deaths of masses of characters a possibility. Blizzard has sent out word that they’d be glad to hear any information regarding the incident as soon as possible – note it!

“Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit, resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities. This exploit has already been hotfixed, so it should not be repeatable. It’s safe to continue playing and adventuring in major cities and elsewhere in Azeroth.

Video above via BornInCrimson – showing some of the death in Stormwind.

As with any exploit, we are taking this disruptive action very seriously and conducting a thorough investigation. If you have information relating to this incident, please email hacks@blizzard.com. We apologize for the inconvenience some of you experienced as a result of this and appreciate your understanding.” – Nethaera, Blizzard

This situation should remind you of a certain South Park episode in which one single player had enough power to destroy any other character in the game – WoW – to which the boys responded with days and weeks of leveling up, preparing to destroy him. It ended up being that Blizzard had to intervene with a “Sword of a Thousand Truths”, a weapon that only existed in legend – and on a USB stick – with enough power to destroy the one deadly player. As it were here in the “real” world, the hacker(s) still roam free – powerless, but free.

[via Joystiq]

Now that the great fire lord, Ragnaros, has been slain, it’s time for new dungeons and new bosses to take his place. With the introduction of Hour of Twilight, players now have an opportunity to enter four new dungeons – End Time, Well of Eternity, Hour of Twilight, and Dragon Soul. As always, players who wish to enter these dungeons can do so through the use of the Dungeon Finder. The Dungeon Finder will pair you with other players until the group is full for a maximum of five players.

With the defeat of Ragnaros, all of Deathwing’s servants have fallen. It is time for the heroes of Azeroth to stand together to slay the dark dragon. In 4.3 defeating Deathwing has become a great possibility for most players with the implementation of the Looking for Raid finder. It works just like Dungeon Finder in that it searches for other players until the cap of twenty-five players is met. Once the group is full you can enter Dragon Soul for your shot at victory over The Destroyer. For the Horde!

[via joystiq]

Blizzard vice president Chris Metzen has described the land of Pandaria, the new China-inspired country that comes in this expansion, as a peaceful place. This peaceful place, he says, is then ruined by the players that come in with the expansion. So basically Blizzard is daring us to be evil, essentially. The announcement of this expansion game at this year’s BlizzCon, taking place this week, and it is said that it will focus on a war between the game’s two factions, blue and red, rather than any sort of new external enemy, he saying thusly:

“Red and blue are about to get it on with a heavy ferocity that has not been seen since the days of Warcraft II” – Metzen

My god! Store your food and stack you paper, war is coming! This announcement also came aside word that World of Warcraft would begin to have an annual subscription plan that would be able to be paid for in monthly installments. For a limited time, they say, anyone who decides they want to sign up will receive a TOTALLY FREE COPY of none other than DIABLO III. Oh my gosh, my goodness, I think I’m going to have a heart attack.

Of course also of note is the fact that neither Diablo III nor the Panda expansion for WoW has been given a release date, so you’ll just have to continue to chill.

[via Wired]

Liu was a former prison guard that was jailed for illegally petitioning the central government about corruption in his hometown. Liu was incarcerated in the Jixi labor camp for three years. Other than killing goblins to make virtual currency to sell for the prison, Liu also says they were forced to carve toothpicks and chopsticks from planks of wood.

Liu told the Guardian, “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labor. There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.” Liu also claims that prisoners that fell behind in their daily gold farming quota were forced to stand with their arms raised while the guards beat them with plastic pipes.

[via Guardian]

Now, this is an awesome tactic. This sort of deal was offered on the original base setup of World of Warcraft and there’s definitely demo versions of basically every Blizzard game out there, including the greatest series of all time Diablo (don’t deny it mang.) This new expansion for WoW isn’t hurting for sales, breaking records by selling 3.3 million copies in 24 hours, but I’m sure a little demonstration action wont hurt to give that another boost.

Check the full trial out over [here] and don’t be shy, tell everyone how you like it (or, if it’s the worst thing since the amount of time you’ve had to wait for Diablo III, say that too.)

[Via Blizzard Entertainment]

Video demos of both projects after the cut

DarwiinRemote allows you to connect your Wiimote to a Mac via Bluetooth, and map the accelerometer input and button-presses to various controls.  In the case of this WoW hack, moving the Wiimote controls the mouse, while the directional pad controls movement. 

As for the balancing robot, that uses a LEGO NXT kit and some custom firmware, built into a two-wheel ‘bot that hooks up to a computer via Bluetooth.  You’ll need some familiarity with using code, but if you’re the sort of person tinkering with NXT then we’d wager that shouldn’t be too great a step for you.

World of Warcraft Wiimote control:

Balancing Robot Wiimote control:

[via Nowhere Else; via Hack a Day]

According to Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard, the company is already thinking about what the next expansions will bring to the World of Warcraft. There’s nothing official yet, as the company is still working hard to ensure Lich King is a success, but Morhaime did make one thing perfectly clear: they will continue to expand the game so long as people want to play it.

He also noted that Blizzard wanted to continue making “regular expansions.” However, it is not clear what “regular” means. While they would like to have yearly expansions, the gap between The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King has almost been two years. They would like to decrease the space between expansions, but they will not do so if content is sacrificed.

So you can set hot keys when playing WoW on a standard keyboard, but it can be difficult to remember what you set the comma to do as opposed to the hyphen. To avoid this confusion, this keyboard has specific keys to make it easier for you. For instance, there are keys for Raiding, PvP, macros and more.

There are also color-coded keys for easy identification. You’re allowed up to 7 keystrokes at once. Yeah. That’s a lot, I know. But for those hardcore Warcrafters, this should be great news. Sounds pretty cool to me. And it’s designed to match up right with your Lich King expansion pack. You can get the keyboard now on Amazon for $69.99.

The original launch plan was to make it so everyone had to wait until midnight in their time zone to access the the expanded content, but a change in the plan occurred yesterday. Instead, users were allowed access at 9 p.m. PST to make for a single launch. Of course, some subscribers complained, but there will always be a few discontented individuals.

Apparently, one bug has already been detected that makes it so users on the European servers couldn’t access the Death Knight class, but Blizzard made a temp solution: first create a new character at level one, and then make a Death Knight. A real fix should be rolled out soon.

Now that the latest expansion pack for the game, Wrath of the Lich King, is drawing closer to its release on November 13, many have signed up for the beta phase. In fact, it was this beta testing that pushed the game over the 11 million mark. That’s a lot of people, folks.

This is pretty impressive, especially considering WoW is several years old now. Blizzard keeps breaking records all over the place, so we’ll just have to wait and see how they do with the Lich King expansion.

And while the patch brought new things, like a harbor at Stormwind, new spells and abilities, Barber Shops, plus a lot of class-specific alterations, it also caused a few problems.

In fact, the server was down 24 hours during the patching process, however they came back online and popped back off over and over again. People’s character lists were messed up and there was a serious lag that caused many to take their complaints to General Chat. Things seem to be back to normal now, however, so I guess that means all is well in Azeroth.

[via CrunchGear]

You know what this means? You better have set aside a bunch of time for some serious playing. With two MMO expansions coming in one month, within the same week, no less, many in the land of geekdom will fail to see sunlight.

You can pre-order the expansion titled, Mines of Moria right now. In fact, if you’re a big fan of the game already, you’ll probably want to because a few pre-order goodies are thrown in for free like a cloak, and a token that will net you a prize later on. Interesting!

[via CrunchGear]

If you play WOW then you know there is a TON of running involved in the game. While interesting in thought, there’s no way anyone could actually play the game hooked up to a treadmill for any significant length of time. Avatars in the game also run pretty fast, faster than you’re probably going to be able to on your treadmill.

You can check out some instructions on how to do the treadmill hookup in your own home here. The creators also posted this YouTube video of the process in action:

[via Gizmodo]

Blizzard’s new Achievement system has a great many of us curious as to how it will work and if we’ll see it as either an improvement or just a nuisance. Thus far we know only a few details about the upcoming Achievements and how they will work.

Jeffrey Kaplan decided to give a few more details about the Achievement points.  As always, Blizzard is trying to take the Achievements and improve the way they are done in comparison to existing ones like the Xbox version.  One thing they are doing differently is you will be able to track your progression on a particular Achievement.

On certain ones you’ll actually see a list of completed and uncompleted Achievements.  Which means if you missed something, you know exactly what it was instead of trying to guess and having to start all over again.  Along with that is another new feature one that will track the more quirky things.  Like which bosses have killed your character the most or the most amount of damage ever done.  You can read the full detailed interview here.

[via mtv]

A reader on Kotaku apparently installs PCs for a living and helped install this one in a government office. It is twenty-seven 67” HD monitors. Which means the display is 40ft wide and 15ft high with a desktop resolution of 12600 x 3150.

He claims to have played both Bioshock and WoW on it. Although there is the strong possibility he just posted the login screen up there and never played. Even if he had played on it, being stretched out that badly I would think would give most people a slight headache.

[via kotaku]

The Zhevra mount actually isn’t the only perk you’ll be seeing either. You can actually summon the friends you recruit to you so you can level together. Another nice little bonus is that you and your friends will get triple the experience up until level 60.

Which means not only do you get a cool mount, you can get one of your lower level characters to level up much faster. The experience boost does have a little fine print to it, you can only get that boost in experience if you are both together. Also if one of you is lower level, only the lower level one will get the xp boost. You can read up more on the details here.

[via wowinsider]