Hey North American players, want to PvP with Blizzard’s QA staff? They sure seem to have been doing a lot of these lately. Your next chance is tomorrow, Thursday the 11th, on the PTRs, so get your strategies ready. The details:

Anasterian realm (but players on Broxigar can participate too by queueing for randoms)
3-11-2010, 4:00 PM [...]

The Shadow of Dawn was the entry to Alienware’s Rise to Power from Blackhand Pictures. The story is essentially about a human Alliance member who gets sucked into the Lich King’s web of tyranny, only to eventually be freed by Tirion Fordring at the Battle of Light’s Hope Chapel.
The video is [...]

Zach thinks rogues are dastardly, sneaky and will backstab you at the first opportunity. Take this guide, for example. Rogues just ambushed Zach with a ton of useless information. I mean, they’re just stabby little things, aren’t they?
This final part of our exceptionally long introductory guide — who would’ve thought rogues could be such a [...]

Julie and Fran of the No Prisoners, No Mercy podcast had some special guests on their most recent show, to the delight of the Funcom fans in their audience.
Funcom Community Managers Glen “Famine” Swan and Oliver Kunz visited the podcast to discuss The Secret World as well as Rise of the Godslayer, the upcoming expansion [...]

15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com’s look at World of Warcraft personalities of all shapes and sizes — from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you’d like to hear more about.
The Syndicate first came to our attention a couple of weeks ago, [...]

“I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store on the Citadel.” – English
“Jestem dowódcą Shepard, a to jest mój ulubiony sklep na cytadeli.” – Polish (machine translation)
In a GDC 2010 session entitled “Localizing Large RPGs,” which forms part of an ongoing localization summit, BioWare localization project manager Ryan Warden eloquently explored the revered developer’s [...]

The background downloader has gone active tonight with a 77.5 MB partial file for the Patch 3.3.3 patching process. Don’t expect the patch to go live tomorrow, of course (if nothing else, scheduled maintenance isn’t long enough), but it looks like we may be within a few weeks of some nice new patch goodness, including [...]

It appears mobsters aren’t the only things getting rubbed out in Mafia II, as 2K Games announces it has signed a license agreement with Playboy magazine for the mob saga. The pictorial publication will have over 50 of its “vintage covers and Centerfolds” inside the game when it eventually releases.
The iconic publication first premiered in [...]

Every Monday evening we’ll be putting out a big long list of WoW podcasts that were published the week (and weekend) before. This is the first edition of the list, so we’re probably missing a few — although our Twitter friends were very helpful in making sure we were complete as possible!
If you don’t see [...]

The development team at DiezelPower seems to update their zombie action game Nation Red about as much as Valve updates Team Fortress 2. This week yet another new update was delivered to its players via Steam and as usual it adds quite a bit to the title.
The big new addition in this latest patch is [...]

Eric Ruth, an independent developer who more than proved his prowess with Pixel Force: Left 4 Dead, recently showed off the fruits of his latest labor: A completely renovated, high-definition version of Mega Man 9. Ruth managed to recreate every single character, enemy and background by hand, programmed the game, and used a number of [...]

Next week is the 2010 Game Developers Conference in the fierce city of San Francisco. A lot is expected to be announced and discussed at the show, however there are sure to be a few surprises. Joystiq will have plenty of boots comfortable footwear on the ground covering the show.
Meanwhile, in what boils down to [...]

It’s a highly-anticipated feature, but it’s been causing more than a few headaches for Warhammer Online’s developers. We’re speaking, of course, about the RvR weapons that were one of the large features of patch 1.3.4 and have been proving rather awkward in implementation. The short version is that when prices were lowered in a [...]

Welcome to Betawatch, Massively’s weekly report on the state of MMO betas. In each installment, we’ll report everything from the latest open betas, closed betas and even alphas in one convenient place. Plus, we’ll make sure to include as much info on each game’s current status, including projected release dates (if known) and links to [...]

Fresh off his Olympic gold medal win in snowboarding, Shawn White’s next game project for publisher Ubisoft will be a . . . skateboarding game? Yep, that’s what the game publisher announced this week as the extreme sports star and wearer of a fine hair style will put his name to Shawn White Skateboarding sometime [...]