account before August 12 (despite Blizzard's website being plagued by massive downtimes), then you're in for more luck! It's just been announced that the opt-in lotteries are now open.

The lottery period starts today, Wednesday, August 20, and will be ending on August 24, 11:59 P.M., PDT. All you have to do is log on to the Blizzard Account Management page any time within the lottery period. By the end of which, 1500 accounts will be picked out from the bunch and be awarded with a chance to get two tickets to the BlizzCon event.

Be advised that simply logging on will already give you a chance to be one of those lucky 1500 winners to be picked out. And since you're already logged on at that time, it might be best to double check your contact information too and update it if necessary.

• Blizzard selling 3,000 additional BlizzCon tickets
• BlizzCon 2008 tickets sold out

Source: wow.qj.net

Blizzard: WoW for PS3, 360 is a 'square peg, round hole thing'
Apparently, some people are still thinking of the viability of having World of Warcraft on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Well, it's one of the most successful MMORPGs of all-time, so maybe porting it over to other platforms is a good thing, for financial reasons (if you're following Square Enix's line of thought).

However, running parallel to Hideo Kojima's statement yesterday (about MGS4 being impossible for the Xbox 360 because the game wasn't designed for the 360 in the first place), J. Allen Brack and Tom Chilton of Blizzard both agree that WoW was always intended to be played on the PC.

In a recent interview with Videogamer, they both reiterated the fact that WoW won't be heading for consoles.

Brack says that WoW was "designed to have a keyboard and a mouse" and that the controls are really - to use Kojima's word from yesterday - optimized for a PC control scheme. Brack continues: "If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it's a very challenging proposition."

Chilton, likewise, explained that it's not a worthwhile endeavor to bring WoW to consoles;

It's really not that we have anything against consoles," Chilton said. "I mean we love console games also. And I'm sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It's just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn't designed with that in mind.

But then… when Videogamer raised the point that Funcom will be bringing their Age of Conan to the Xbox 360 - and that they've got some technology to map the keyboard buttons to a 360 controller - Chilton simply replies that he thinks that WoW wouldn't be "a very good experience playing like that."

While the PS3 has the upcoming Wireless Keypad, and the 360 its Chatpad, they aren't all that big, y'know. As Brack said, it'll be a very challenging experience indeed.

• Blizzard's take on MMOs for consoles; no WoW for consoles
• Kojima: stop asking for an MGS4 Xbox 360 port already
• Square Enix stock shares rise after FF13 Xbox 360 reveal
• Leipzig: new PS3 Wireless Keypad announced
• Xbox 360 Messenger Kit now going for only US 19.99

Source: wow.qj.net