Posted on the official World of Warcraft site, Blizzard Entertainment detailed a new change coming to Battle.net, the main hub for Blizzard games. Though it is certainly a big change, it shouldn’t affect players too much. In fact, it should make things a lot easier, consolidating the Blizzard brand into one memorable name.
“Battle.net” is to become known as, simply, “Blizzard”. As are all services related to the platform. Examples of this exist already, in the form of “Blizzard Streaming” and “Blizzard Voice.”
As explained in the official news post, having both the names “Battle.net” and “Blizzard” was causing confusion.
When we created Battle.net, the idea of including a tailored online-gaming service together with your game was more of a novel concept, so we put a lot of focus on explaining what the service was and hot it worked, including giving it a distinct name. Over time, though, we’ve seen that there’s been occasional confusion and inefficiencies related to having two separate identities under which everything falls – Blizzard and Battle.net. Given that built-in multiplayer support is a well-understood concept and more of a normal expectation these days, there isn’t as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology.
So there you have it, one less name to remember! Happy days, right? Or does this actually make it more confusing?
As for actual in-game changes, Blizzard has released update 1.09, which fixes a bunch of bugs. What it doesn’t do, however, is implement a minimap. So those of you requesting a radar will be disappointed.
[Source: WorldofWarcraft.com]
