In a press release sent out today, Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft has achieved yet another milestone: the massively successful MMO is now played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. WoW’s already impressive numbers have been bolstered by the recent release of its second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King which, by selling more than 2.8 million copies in its first day of release, became the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Wrath sold more than 4 million copies in its first month, breaking yet another record for most monthly PC-game sales. Both of these sales records, ironically enough, were previously held by the first WoW expansion, The Burning Crusade.

A couple of weeks ago, Blizzard unleashed “Echoes of Doom,” its last major content patch for World of Warcraft before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion releases on November 13th. The emphasis here is on “major.” There’s a lot of new stuff in “Echoes” and it’s taken about two weeks to sort through it all, particularly with the unbearable lag that almost always accompanies a new update. I am here, however, to hit some of the high points of the new content for you non-WoWers, you once-WoWers, and maybe some of you soon-to-be WoWers. (Disclaimer: While it’d be great, albeit sad, if I had an uber-70 of every class, this will have to be written from my experience, which is predominantly of the mage and warrior varieties.)

Unfortunately, I’m forced to start with the following: no, you can’t make a Death Knight yet. And no, you can’t get to Northrend yet. Read your patch notes people! Sheesh.

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In case you spent some time this summer under a rock, in some sort of bomb shelter, or frozen in carbonite, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Funcom’s latest MMO, launched last May amidst much hype and fan anticipation. While the game was initially well-received and sold in record numbers for an MMO without “Warcraft” in its name, subscription numbers have since tapered off. These subscriber drops have been attributed to reasons as varied as the extremely high-end computing requirements of the game to lack of promised features. In a recent interview on Gamespot, director Jørgen Tharaldsen discussed the good, the bad, and the refreshingly realistic facets of AoC.

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MMO players are a fickle bunch. Despite all of the success of Blizzard’s multi-million-subscriber juggernaut, the massively multiplayer crowd can almost be defined by a complete inability to be satisfied. Don’t believe me? I invite you to spend a few minutes perusing the WoW forums and try to get through a single page without finding someone complaining about something. Every change that comes down the pipe is met with wildly different responses, ranging from the caps-lock-fueled ravings of players whose class doesn’t “pwn” anymore to people literally worshiping the virtual ground beneath Blizzard’s feet.

Trust me, I know. I’ve been there since the beginning, back when UBRS was end game content and you had to visit each flight point individually to get anywhere.

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