Blizzard and the World of Warcraft dev team have announced a second round of Ask Creative Development. The Creative Development team is charged with maintaining and creating all of the lore behind World of Warcraft both in the game an in the fictional novels based on Azeroth.

The members of our creative development department, headed up by Chris Metzen, are the creators, keepers, and librarians of our game lore and story.

Head over to the Ask CDev forum post to throw your question on the pile.

Please be aware that we'll be using the forum voting system to help decide on which questions to answer. Before asking your own question, look through the thread and add a vote to any others that you like. Feel free to just vote, but if you do have a question, please limit yourself to one per post.

Read more here.

Blizzard has released three custom maps for Starcraft 2. Called Aiur Chef, StarJeweled, and Left 2 Die, the maps are available to players for beta testing. Blizzard acknowledged that the maps are still being developed and that no firm final release date is available. However, devs wanted players to get a first look opportunity to try them out and to provide the team with valuable feedback.

Aiur Chef
Category: Collection/Cooking
Mode: Free For All
Players: Up to 8

Each round of Aiur Chef features a theme ingredient and three succulent recipes that play upon its unique flavor. Before you can master these themed dishes, though, you'll first need to scout across the map and collect a variety of tasty ingredients (including the theme ingredient). Each recipe has its own set of required ingredients, listed in the recipe menu in the upper-left of your screen, which can be picked up off the ground or acquired by killing specific creatures. Don't get too greedy when loading up on ingredients, though -- inventory space is limited, so you'll want to focus on collecting ingredients for one recipe at a time.

Read each map's summary and check out several screens on the Starcraft II blog site.

Gamasutra is reporting that Blizzard Entertainment has issued a statement regarding the World of Starcraft mod being developed by Ryan Winzen. Winzen's mod drew scrutiny from Blizzard and its parent company, Activision, when the modder posted a 'work in progress' video on YouTube. The video was pulled when Blizzard invoked its copyright protection. Since then, Winzen has received a job offer from Riot Games and a lot of attention from the worldwide gaming audience.

"It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor," Blizzard said in a statement. " As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we’ve done with our strategy games in the past."

Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team.

Source:  Gamasutra

It didn't take long for Blizzard to react to Monday's release of a trailer showing what modders were calling "World of Starcraft". The lead modder on the project, Ryan, received a notice from YouTube that his video had been removed due to "copyright complaint(s) regarding material (he) posted". It appears that Blizzard's ultra-agressive stance protecting its copyrighted materials came full bore on this group's project.

This post from the mod team is quoted at Rock Paper Shotgun:

You created a tool that allowed us to do anything with your assets. You encouraged us to use your assets and were eager to see what we might come up with. You had to have seen this coming?

I know it’s hard to trust someone you’ve never met to piggyback on your own legacy. The brilliance of StarCraft combined with the multiplayer focus of World of Warcraft. You might be a little worried about your lore being butchered… or even more-so worried about a guy with no supervision tainting the name of your company with poor product.

Let me assure you that I am in no way shape or form going to deliver anything less than complete perfection. I’ve been following your work since Warcraft. I’ve worked with every editor you’ve put out since I was 13 years old.

If you have a problem with what I am doing… or would like to talk about it. I’m all ears. But please don’t send me some messenger with a cease and desist letter.

Read more here and find all of the relevant links as well.

Since the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion was released just over a month ago, there has been a lot of discussion among players about the difficulty of Heroic dungeons. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has penned a new article discussing why the dev team made the decision to make those dungeons as hard as they are: In short, 'heroic' is supposed to mean something and that players need the challenge.

First, let me state that we do hear you. We understand some of you aren’t having fun and preferred the Lich King paradigm, or at least something closer to the Lich King paradigm. We greatly appreciate the feedback and it always makes us sad when players aren’t having fun. We're not ignoring you. We get it. We may not always agree on every point, but we understand where you’re coming from, and we want to try to help you understand where we're coming from.

The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging, and that is particularly true now while the content is new and characters are still collecting gear. They’re only going to get easier from here on out. We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize. And by extension, we want you to celebrate when you win instead of it being a foregone conclusion.

The balance of the article gives frustrated players a few tips to improve their experiences within the Heroic dungeons.

Read more here.

Blizzard has announced the release of the 1.2.0 patch for Starcraft II. The patch includes some racial balancing, level editor bug fixes, Battle.Net chat channels and more. The patch appears to be heavily focused on the level editor with devs calling the patch fixes "notable".

General

• Battle.net Chat Channels have been added! Players can now join others in both public and private channels.
  • Added in-game chat bar command to whisper to other players. Using the "/w" command will open up a list of available friends, party members, chat channels, and other players within your current game.
  • Added Battle.net option to auto-join previous private channels.
  • Added Battle.net option to prevent chat channel text from appearing in in-game chat display.
• A new Master League has been added! This league now represents the highest tier of players.
• Customizable Hotkey Support has been added.
• Stalemate Detection has been added. This will end the game in a tie for all remaining players if no players have income, production, or destroyed structures for three consecutive minutes. A countdown timer will now appear when the game detects this scenario.
• An Extreme graphics option is now available. Players can now configure screen space ambient occlusion.

Read the full patch notes on the Starcraft II site.

Blizzard has announced that over 4.7 million copies of the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion were sold in the month following its release on December 7, 2010. According to Blizzard's internal sales partnership statistics and its own sales data, this is a record single-month sales record for a PC title.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was simultaneously released in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand on 7th of December , and became available in Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau on 9th of December. With day-one sales topping 3.3 million copies,* World of Warcraft: Cataclysm became the fastest-selling PC game of all time, shattering the previous record, which was held by the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Read more here.

The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory application has been given a free update with support for the Cataclysm expansion. UI improvements have been implemented, Cataclysm items, classes, races, etc. have been added and the app has been reskinned to match the new WoW community site.

The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory App is available from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore. For more information on the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory, visit our Mobile Armory page.

Read more here.

As part of the streamlined World of Warcraft community site, the team has posted a new handy-dandy guide to travel in Azeroth. The guide includes information about mounts available, what levels they can be obtained, flight masters, zeppelin travel and more.

Azeroth is a large world and it's recently become much larger. There are hills to climb, deserts to explore, fjords to ford, and a vast sea separating the continents. And let’s not forget that beyond Azeroth proper there lies a whole other shattered world -- Outland. Traveling has never been more interesting, and for some, confusing. To help you with getting around, we’ve compiled a list of some of the more common ways you can see the world, meet new creatures, and (likely) be killed by them.

Read more here.