With the excitement of BlizzCon right around the corner and World of Warcraft nearing its fifth anniversary, it's hard to remember a time when the Warcraft universe wasn't the center of attention for countless gamers. Actually, countless isn't the right word. According to Blizzard's last announcement in December 2008, the chart-topping MMO is played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. And that number doesn't take into account the PC games, books, comics, board game, pen-and-paper RPG, trading cards, miniatures, action figures and the upcoming movie that all bear the familiar yellow and orange logo of the franchise.

So how did Azeroth get its start and become the stomping grounds of so many avatars? Well, the MMO behemoth actually has its roots set in some very humble beginnings. Blizzard Entertainment was founded in 1991 by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce as Silicon & Synapse. Luckily the name changed, or we'd all be attending or downloading streaming footage from SiliCon this weekend. The trio had just graduated from UCLA and initially focused on making ports before developing such gems as The Lost Vikings and Rock N' Roll Racing. I'm personally hoping we'll hear plans for a Lost Vikings III at BlizzCon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Welcome to Part 2 of "Pwyff's Most Anticipated MMOs and How They Can Succeed!" With BlizzCon and GamesCom coming up very soon, I'm sure all MMO gamers, myself included, will be on pins and needles wondering if Blizzard will release any information about their upcoming MMORPG. Personally speaking, one of the biggest reasons why I believe that the next few years will really change the face of the MMO industry is that Blizzard will finally be entering the ring to defend their title as uncontested champions of MMORPG development. While this is obviously old news, I just find it fascinating that a significant portion of our upcoming mega-hyped MMOs are, for the most part, built on pre-existing IPs. Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2 and Star Trek Online are all tapping in to their millions of fans worldwide, while Blizzard has chosen to compete with just their company image. The only other companies that I can think of that have done this successfully in the past few years have been SOE's Free Realms and NCsoft's Aion. There have been a number of fresh MMORPGs developed but, aside from Free Realms and Aion, I don't believe there have been many games that can boast about having millions of users across the world.

Note that I've bolded "in the past few years," because about 5-10 years ago, the MMO industry was still quite fresh and new IPs were being developed and pushed steadily into the market. If you consider it, Ultima Online, Guild Wars, Asheron's Call, Everquest, Lineage, EVE Online and Dark Age of Camelot (sort of) were all developed based on unique IPs that had little no to pre-existing fan bases. These days, of course, the MMO industry is much more competitive than before and, just like the movie industry, multi-million dollar development companies tend to get a little bit antsy when you're trying to generate a fan base from nothing at all. Either way, let's move forward to look at Part II of my most anticipated MMORPGs for the next few years!

As we've reported, World of Warcraft has certainly had its share of troubles in China since the license for the game changed hands from The9 to NetEase in June. Well, according to incgamers, WoW is still free-to-play in China while the game remains in closed beta pending authorization from the GAPP.

The WoW closed beta event started at the end of July and was supposed to last for one week. Despite the fact that NetEase says internal testing is complete, the wait for authorization has forced the beta test to continue for longer than anticipated. NetEase has already made changes to the game to meet strict standards, such as replacing icons of blood and skeletons with images of boxes and bags.

The official BlizzCon 2009 event schedule has been released, and it shows two days packed with tournaments, gaming, exhibits and panels on Friday and Saturday. There's even a time slot for the costume, song and dance contests, and let's not forget Ozzy will be performing during the closing ceremonies.

If you want to view the entire floor plan of BlizzCon, check out the map after the jump. Members of the ZAM team are currently packing their bags and preparing to cover the event all weekend, so keep an eye on ZAM.com for plenty of BlizzCon news in the next few days.

In late July, a number of World of Warcraft subscribers tried logging into the game, only to discover that their accounts had been suspended. You might remember reading our coverage of the Blizzard "chargeback mess;" a story that circled that blogosphere, mainly as second-page news. Since then, there's been some progress made in untangling the situation—or, at least, a revised statement from Blizzard, finally. The story had the unintentional side-effect of bringing the issue of Blizzard's customer support out of the shadows once again for its semi-annual, public flogging.

The concept of "MMO customer service" is one that's always perplexed me. Obviously, it's something I think about when I encounter my own problems, whether it's an in-game or billing issue. Beyond my personal experience, I've read countless scathing testimonies and damning articles about customer service in the MMO industry, or more appropriately, the lack thereof.

In fact, there's only one industry that comes to mind when I try to think of something worse: the cell phone market. Does "customer service" even exist in the world of MMOs, or has the concept actually devolved into what we know as "customer support"? These days, I feel a heck of a lot more like a "subscriber" than a "customer" in the eyes of my game publishers. And maybe that's a big part of the problem.

If you're a fan of "The Guild" Web series, you'll be happy to know the entire cast will be at BlizzCon once again to participate in a discussion panel and talk with attendees at their booth. If you've never seen this show about a group of online gamers, head over to the show's Web site to watch every episode from the first two seasons.

Members of the ZAM team will be at BlizzCon next week and we plan on catching up with Felicia Day, the show's creator who has starred in other Internet hits like "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," to see what's in store for "The Guild." Keep an eye out for that and more BlizzCon news on ZAM.com.

Crygil has posted an update on the instance creation issues that have been plaguing many World of Warcraft players. According to the post, "the limit on active instances was originally implemented as an interim solution to ensure that all active instances perform smoothly." This fact has previously been stated by Blizzard, but Crygil goes on to let us know the team has optimized its infrastructure to better handle the instance load on more than 40 percent of North American servers so far.

Performing these upgrades "requires fairly complex coordination with third party affiliates," which is why it will take time to complete this work on all realms. Crygil estimates the optimization efforts should be completed for all servers in the coming weeks. Keep reading below for a list of the servers that have been optimized. Realms on this list should see noticeable improvements as far as instance creation is concerned.

According to sources at MMO-Champion there's a lot of new information about the new suspected expansion "Cataclysm". Some of the rumors include complete revamps of all of Azeroth to allow flying, The Barrens being split down the middle by some major event that also cracks the Greymane Wall. The Goblins have been enslaved by Deathwing and a group of them have splintered off and joined the Horde while the residents of Gilneas transformed by the Worgen curse permantly have joined the Alliance. Theory has it the expansion will be slightly smaller than a traditional expansion and the level cap may only turn out to be level 85 with older dungeons and raids might be brought back to the forefront and redone for level purposes. There's a lot more info located on the MMO-Champion website.

Over the past few years, I've felt that the number of quality MMORPGs entering the market yearly has been dwindling. Perhaps it's the fact that there's a massive behemoth named World of Warcraft that's attracting millions of potential customers who could be playing other MMOs, or maybe everyone has been collaborating, waiting to unleash a torrent of awesome MMORPGs into the market at the same time; hoping to smash into the Blizzard half of the pie and come away with enough crumbs and blueberry filling for everyone. Either way, even if the past few years have seen only a few really successful and innovative titles (EVE Online and Lord of the Rings Online come to mind), I'm sure most of you will understand me when I say, with confidence, that the next few years of MMO development should radically change the face of MMORPGs as we know them.

Don't believe me? During the next few years, and speaking purely about the 'mainstream' MMOs with solid, experienced development teams or extremely popular brands, players will see the release of Aion (NCsoft), Final Fantasy XIV (Square Enix), DC Universe Online (Sony Online Entertainment), Champions Online (Cryptic Studios), Guild Wars 2 (ArenaNet), Marvel Universe (Gargantuan), Star Wars: The Old Republic (BioWare / Mythic) and The Agency (Sony Online Entertainment). Of course, while a majority of you have probably already chosen your 'soon to be favourite' MMORPG of the future, I'm sure you're all very worried that this latest batch of MMOs may not end up delivering the hype and the prestige that some of these companies inspire. In this way, I've decided to compile a list of my most anticipated upcoming MMORPGs that I believe have a strong chance to succeed, and what I believe it will take to turn them into the next big thing.

A post by Nethaera on the official World of Warcraft forums has given us a glimpse into the BlizzCon 2009 goody bag, and it looks like it's going to include a vinyl toy of StarCraft II's Jim Raynor, the leader of Raynor's Raiders. The figure is part of Blizzard's new noobz line of toys and won't be available anywhere else.

Three other n00bz will be on sale at BlizzCon, and you can check them out here. They're the Fury of Ragnaros, Ghoulash and Murloc Madness. According to the site, Blizzard held a contest in April inviting employees to paint blank n00bz, and these three designs were chosen from more than 250 entrees.

If you're going to be at BlizzCon and don't like any of these designs, you can buy a blank n00bz figure and paint it at the convention! If you do design a n00bz, let us know. Maybe members of the ZAM team will take a shot at it while covering the convention.