Project Lore

I just picked up a new iPhone 3GS, and I must say I am really enjoying it. I've used a few WoW applications on it that aren't very good, but now Blizzard has released their second official application - the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Once you login using your Battle.net credentials, you can access all of the armory in a very slick interface. You can see your gear, achievements, stats, and pretty much anything else that you could see in the full version of the Armory. In fact, it seems a lot faster than the web version of the Armory (even over 3G), and the interface is a lot easier to use. The home screen allows you to choose from your characters or bookmarked characters. You can quickly switch between them with a beautiful "page-flip" animation. Searching allows you to quickly find characters, items, guilds, or arena teams to view. The item view is wonderful and detailed showing where items can be obtained, their full stats and description, as well as disenchanting data. There appear to be notifications with the calendar feature, which could end up being extremely useful. I've been trying to find an easy way to get my armory calendar in Google, and having my iPhone let me know when its time to raid solves the problems entirely. Other features include a leaderboard for achievement points among your characters and bookmarked characters or guild, talent calculators, and armory news directly in the application. This replaces all of the other WoW applications I've been using and it does a much better job. Check it out at the official armory site! What do you think? Will this replace your alt-tabbing to evaluate players in-game, and do you really need the Armory on your phone?

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We saw a glimmer of this when installing Wrath, and its now beginning. Players now have the option to create an overarching Battle.net account and link all of their Blizzard games together. This may become mandatory in the future. After registering, you can "merge" your WoW account and your Battle.net account. Whenever you login to WoW, you then use your Battle.net credentials, namely the email address you used for your Battle.net account and your new password. Login for the non-WoW Blizzard games still uses their existing logon system and they will not (yet?) accept the new Battle.net credentials. You can add StarCraft Anthology, Warcraft III, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Warcraft Battle Chest, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and Diablo II Battle Chest into your Battle.net account by providing the site with your CD key. You can also buy a CD key online from the Blizzard store. You are then able to download the fully patched game to your computer using the standard Blizzard downloader used for all WoW patches and media, and in the future there may be more integrated features to unify the games. Warcraft II Battle.net edition is notably not on the list. In the future, its likely that we will see "account wide achievements" and other such things. Its unclear how or if the older games will play into this, but you can be certain that Starcraft II, Diablo III, and the currently unannounced MMO that Blizzard is working on will use the new Battle.net heavily. Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Diablo II, and Starcraft all shared the same Battle.net servers and game channels could be joined by anyone from any of those games. I'd love to see WoW join in on this, as I still hop on Warcraft III and Starcraft once in a while and would like to chat with players across all of these games. In addition, Blizzard annouced that the highly popular Blizzard authenticator will be available as an application for mobile devices, namely the iPhone and iPod touch. Its a great piece of equipment that improves account security. It is being re-branded as the Battle.net authenticator. The authenticator will work with all Battle.net games. Downloadable software is much easier to keep in stock than hardware, so hopefully this will provide players with a venue to get an authenticator. Price is not yet announced, and it may be free to increase account security. Since mobile devices (especially the iPod) must authenticate over the internet, I don't think its unlikely that an exploit to replicate the authenticator will happen at some point in the future.

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