Pasting here the announce directly from Katricia’s post on the official forums:

You asked for it and the development team has been working hard to get an initial implementation of the Auction House ready for testing!

Please stay tuned for future updates regarding Auction Houses and when they will be implemented in the game .We look forward to hearing your comments once they have been implemented.

Intelligent addiction copied straight from Final Fantasy XI.

It could be interesting because now you can really build some depth into the tradeskills, like the in/famous interdependence.

The players are already noticing problems about one of the features:

BB (or any other non-faction trade houses) will be the best/only place to trade.

And:

Will there be a kissing booth as well?

Suckers.

I love these kinds of news:

In the next patch, and future patches, we are adding more shaders to help improve framerate on cards that support pixel shader model 1.4 and above. Also, we have not yet optimized some of our object rendering and UI rendering. Expect optimizations in these in the near future. Lastly, the client is not a full debug client, but does include a fair bit of debugging code (assertions and the like).

Its also been my experience that ATI cards run WoW better in Direct3D, and NVidia cards run WoW better in OpenGL. There are obviously exceptions to this, but it seems to be the case. Note that some graphical features dont work correctly (or at all) in OpenGL yet, but we will be addressing this in future beta patches.

Finally, I needed a good news to cheer up some. Ogre has announced that with the next push (rumors give it just two weeks away) they’ll open a factional PvP server.

I’m ready to move, that’s what I’m waiting for. Let’s see how much the players hate this damn PvP. I’m ready to bet that the new server will outnumber the standard one. Not just the first few days, but for a long time.

This is my game, despite the many flaws I already foresee and the betrayed potential. A full factional PvP is what I was waiting for from a long time. REAL factional PvP.

In DAoC a full invasion server has never been realized and we just got the Mordred/Andred horrid disaster. When Mythic announced that I was so damn happy, till I discovered that it wasn’t factional, how stupid.

WoW is doing this right but unwillingly. They don’t expect the PvP server to shatter the normal one, but I bet it will happen, despite the lack of specific development. I really hope this will be a strong input for Blizzard, to understand how much potential they have in their hands. They really cannot waste that.

Come on.

Quoting from WorldofWar.net:

We’ve been pressing and probing for nuggets of new info and we found out this morning that Blizzard have now shipped the Beta servers to Vivendi in Paris. So what does this mean? Well we have been told that the European Beta will be rolling out this summer, sometime around August. The European comunity and GM team is also now being assembled which means things are really moving along. Great news indeed for European fans.

First
Second

World of Warcraft has been in development for nearly five years. If the PvP is still a foggy design document it means that it won’t deliver anything worthy.

Or you really think that they are able to wrap a whole game on top of the perfect PvE treadmill in 5-6 months?

It sounds like other betas, with devs promising magic patches to fix all the problems. Just around the corner.

—

That was my idea at the beginning but I’m starting to see that what Blizzard is covering is an empty space. I know the value of the game because I’m in beta. I’m not going to believe anymore that they still have something interesting to deliver aside that.

In more than two months I’ve just seen a single patch that generally added just a bunch of bugs completely new. The next one is planned for the end of May. Nearly three months.

The beta is surely smooth but it’s proceeding slowly like an elephant. Of 60 levels plus hero classes we just have 39. And no PvP at all. That’s less than half the game.

You really believe they will magically add the whole PvP experience, perhaps two days before release?

This interview is quite fun:
http://wowvault.ign.com/?dir=events/e32004&content=interview

To summarize: “We aren’t sure what we want, even less how to deliver it.”

Don’t believe me? Here’s the actual quotes:

We want it to be really cool, so we’re kind of going through and deciding how we want to do it.

How we’re going to accomplish doing that we’re not sure yet.

We kind of want to do something like that. We’re not sure that’s going to work yet. It’s something we’re still working on.

We’re not entirely sure.

We have noticed that running into the opposite faction outside the PvP zones is an issue. It feels funky and broken and we’re looking into it.

What those are in the final shipping product, I’m not sure. We do plan to have PvP servers of some kind.

We actually haven’t finished the design on the heroes yet.

The level of design we have on heroes right now is that we know we want them, but we’re not sure exactly how we’re going to implement them.

We don’t know yet.

It’s not decided yet. I would like to, it would be cool.

we’re kind of trying to balance it

We have a lot of ideas for the end game, and we haven’t announced all of them. Of course there’s going to be PvP. There’s also trade skilling and exploration. What it all is we haven’t decided yet.

We’re going to have rewards. What they will be we haven’t decided yet.

What the exact response will be we’re not sure.

I actually have no clue.

We haven’t reached a final decision on it.

So the chances of new and interesting things happening with cloaks are high. What they are I don’t know.

I don’t know.

And I got bored about as I was halfway through it. Perhaps it’s a joke and I took the bait. Or perhaps we have the first example of sincerity.

A thing to notice is that he’s only a level designer, but it still gives a good idea about how well that part of the game is planned. In particular when I read this announce:

– Inter-realm chatting to be added

It’s obvious that Blizzard’s staff is completely drunk at the E3. They launched a minisite dedicated to it: http://blizzard.com/misc/e3/2004/wow/index.shtml And if you look at the FAQ you’ll notice missplaced answers and double questions.

What’s worth the attention, instead, are the two first section, one with the screenshots and another with the artworks. There’s some new stuff to see there. For example the first screenshot of the troll’s mount (a raptor).

I also gave some importance to one of the answers in the FAQ section:
The game is scheduled for simultaneous release in both the United States and Korea at the end of 2004.

A late October release is more probable now, as written below. And it could slip even further.

In the “money” section of the CNN website has appeared an article with a possible release date of World of Warcraft for November, then December for Korea and January for the Europe.

Is that reliable? It depends, to announce those dates is Phil O’Neil, president of Vivendi, also publisher of Blizzard’s products. If the game is launching for November it means that they still have a lot of time to work on it, that means that the release date is simply a rough guess since nearly everything could change.

It’s interesting the fact that even the publisher is giving out a wide margin. In general the deadlines of publishers are always missed, just think to Half-Life 2, also to be published from Vivendi. But World of Warcraft is a special case, the game is at a good point and a release that distant sounds strange, in particular because the beta is without NDA and will soon turn completely open.

Blizzard is really going to offer and support that for so many months? I’ll quote Anyuzer‘s article:

That said, while it looks like World of Warcraft is going to win this race, there in my opinion is another facet to take into consideration when thinking about World of Warcraft. Assuming that people are looking for a game to play, not a buggy product to beta, this could cause some potential problems. Classically in EverQuest and the subsequent expansions it does not take more than six months for players to burn through all of the content. The only real exception to this that I can remember was Velious, where a few of the major enemies had ‘just’ been beaten by the major guilds before Luclin hit stores. Point is, if World of Warcraft allows this much time for testing, will there be any content for players to actually have fun with by the time the game hits shelves? And will this damage possible player retention?

My personal opinion is that the game will hit the shelves exactly for the end of October, the most “interesting” date to push out a game and maximize the sales, then November for Korea and December for Europe, along with the Christmas.