Blizzard Conference Call starting now

[Santrega]

Such a killjoy, Santrega

Nah, i'm afraid they have no room with "this month". They have pinned themselves down to a time period finally...

1 of 18 days will be the launch date... woot!

[KadajSouba]

Blizzard is swimming on money.... literrally.... Lich King is going to get launched at china, the most populated country of the world, Starcraft 2 this year, WoW with still 11+ million users... Diablo 3 coming soon...

Dear Lord. This game better include a bar of gold, or something to justify 7 years of development...

[Caliban113]

Seriously, I think the record amount of users was broken by like, 100 today.

[The_Blade]

I like records, you may always break them.

[Aldrius]

When they said "this month" they meant in blizzard months...

They're not going to miss an announcement saying 'this month'.

That'd be completely ridiculous... and just... weird... I mean honestly in order to miss a month-away deadline something UNBELIEVABLY drastic would have to happen to affect their productivity like crazy.

Honestly. Because. Really. Any deadline at under a month means the product is finished already. They've just decided that B date is when they'll have it ready for release. With all the bells and whistles and things.

[Triceron]

The product has never been in question.

It's Battle.net. It's GLOBAL release. That's what's taking so long for the beta to hit. They have to make sure that thousands upon thousands of players can access and play on Bnet. They haven't really had the numbers they have now since War3, and that was a pre-WoW game.

Bnet 2.0 will have to be able to support players from around the world. It's going to be a 'stress test' just to start things up.

[SinsWage]

So just a curious question, earlier this week we moved to betacon 3 when we recieved favorable but unconfirmed info that beta would start soon, and right now we're at two having the date more or less nailed down. I'm guessing 5 was just the fact that we knew that one day there would be a Beta, and one IS beta. What was the criteria for level four?

/ramble

[Aldrius]

The product has never been in question.

Yes it has. Not recently, but it has in the past.

Anyway, that wasn't what I meant. The distribution of the product is a requirement of it's release. Getting the product ready, in part, entails getting it prepared for distributing it across the globe. Saying the beta is ready THIS MONTH means that it must also be imminently ready for distribution as well. If it wasn't, they wouldn't say it would be ready THIS month.

[Gifted]

To avoid any further confusion, I'll make it concise.

Beta will release this month and be playable. This will be frontpage news in a very small bit, but information released points to the beta emails being sent around 2-3 days before the Start of Starcraft II beta.

[Blazur]

So we know the beta emails will likely be sent up to 2 days prior to the actual start date. Question is...will we discover the new Protoss macro mechanic before the beta starts?