According to Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard, the majority of players who dropped their World of Warcraft accounts for Warhammer Online or Age of Conan have returned to Blizzard’s popular MMO.

It was in a conference call with investors that Morhaime pointed out that despite recent releases by competitors, World of Warcraft continues to grow in numbers.  The game’s upcoming expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, contributed to the return of many players.

“To date, 68 per cent of the players who listed Age of Conan as their reason for cancellation and 46 per cent of the players who listed Warhammer as their reason for cancellation have reactivated their subscriptions to World of Warcraft,” said Morhaime.

Mythic, the company behind Warhammer Online, disagrees.  When Paul Sams, another Blizzard exec made similar comments a few weeks ago, Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs called the assertion naive.

 ”Any comment along the lines of ‘well if they’re in my game they’re not playing in another game,’ flies in the face of all research that’s been done among MMO players,” said Jacobs.  ”The idea that you only play one is really kind of silly.”

In Japan, a 45-year-old woman is facing the possibility of jail time or a hefty fine over the “murder” of her virtual husband.

The couple had been married in the MMO Maple Story, but after the husband virtually divorced her, she logged into his account and deleted his character.

“I was suddenly divorced - without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” she said, according to police officials.  Enraged, she accessed his account using his own username and password and deleted his avatar.

She was arrested for “illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data”, The Guardian reports.

If convicted, she could face a fine of nearly $5000 U.S. or even up to five years of jailtime.

I agree that doing something like this should have a consequence.  Unauthorized access of any electronic account, and deletion of data, is a serious crime.  It does serve as a reminder not to give out your username and password to services like this, though — and to change it if you’ve got a potential security risk.

But at the same time, wow.  Jail time does seem like overkill for something like this.

Blizzard COO Paul Sams has said that his company is starting to see players returning to World of Warcraft (WoW) after briefly leaving to try out Mythic’s MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR).

“We’ve seen a significant number of people, well over half, that cited Warhammer as their reason for leaving - they’ve already returned,” Sams tells GamesIndustry.biz.

Sams went on to point out how difficult it is to launch an MMO, but says that he greatly respects the Warhammer Online team and expects they have the best chance at taking on Warcraft and it’s nearly 11-million subscriber base.

Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs wanted to clarify that WoW’s renewed accounts shouldn’t be taken as a sign that WAR isn’t doing well.

“One thing about MMOs is that people play multiple games,” said Jacobs. “That’s one of the reasons I was very surprised by Paul’s comments. He knows that people may play WoW and they’ll play WAR and maybe even a third game at the same time.”

Jacobs also said that his company has plans to offer WAR updates to compete with Blizzard’s launch of the next WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.  He agrees that his company will be a main contender, saying that it’s “the beginning of a rather lengthy battle with the guys at Blizzard”, and that it’s far too early to make a call on WAR.  “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime had a few words to say about the challenges of launching an MMO video game.

“I think everyone who hasn’t done it will probably underestimate the logistics behind it - we certainly did,” he tells Gamesindustry.biz.  “You focus on the things you are used to but you don’t necessarily realise how difficult it is to scale up quickly and with an MMO you have to factor in providing 24/7 customer service, multiple languages… and that’s not just hiring all those people to do customer service because internally within the organisation you still have to support your employees and that’s a whole lot of management infrastructure that doesn’t exist before the launch.”

He went on to say that the company still plans to release expansions to World of Warcraft annually, but that the development cycle is taking a little longer than a year.  The next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, will be released on November 13.  “I think you guys are going to find with Wrath of the Lich King that it’s going to be worth the wait,” says Morhaime.

The company isn’t rushing to move into the console market, either.  Although they do have plans to approach console gaming, Morhaime insists that their merger with Activision is enabling them to enter that market when they’re ready.  They’re not particularly worried about other MMO games getting there first: “Actually Blizzard has rarely been the first to create a genre, unless you consider Diablo a new genre, nobody said that at the time, they all said it wasn’t new.”

Blizzard is known to be developing another MMO title in addition to its ongoing work on World of Warcraft.  The nature of this title is not yet known, as the company is obviously being very secretive about the project.

Mines of Moria, the first expansion for The Lord of the Rings Online, has been given a release date of November 18.  The expansion will add Volume II to the game’s system of “Books”, taking the storyline to the end of the events in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Here’s a quick summary of the additions in the game:

• Three new regions will be added to the game: Moria, Eregion and Lórien.
• The level cap will be raised to 60.
• Two new classes will be added: Rune-keeper and Warden.
• Six more books (comprising Volume II) will be added to the storyline.
• A new Legendary Items system will allow players to develop custom weapons that get stronger over time.

The expansion pack is available for pre-order from Amazon in the United States and United Kingdom.

Blizzard’s president Mike Morhaime has reportedly told investors about a new project his company is working on.  The title is a new MMO from the famous developers of World of Warcraft.

It’s no surprise, then, that the project is being kept secret.  As investors heard:

“Blizzard has begun staffing on another unannounced massively multiplayer online project but for competitive reasons, we are not able to share any additional information on that project at this time.”

World of Starcraft?  Only time will tell.