The Shrinking Population and the Disappearing Servers

Gazimoff explains how Blizzard is invisibly shrinking the servers and predicts how this will play out in-game as WOW's player base shrinks.  This is a must-read for players interested in the mechanics of networking MMOs.  It starts out with a history of how Blizzard organized their servers (and realms) in 2005 and continues through today with the "random" battleground and dungeon finder systems which allow Blizzard to balance their servers.  This is why you end up in the same dungeon or Battlefield over and over again, by the way.  Blizzard is putting folks where they need them.
http://www.manaobscura.com/2010/07/the-growing-yet-shrinking-world/

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Copyright Solo MMO Player at http://solommo.blogspot.com

More on Planned Battle.net Features

Thanks to the WOWHead blog, I discovered that there is a preview about Battle.net's planned features on Blizzard's Starcraft II site.
http://www.starcraft2.com/features/misc/battlenet.xml

WOW Insider points out the importance of the Real ID part of Battle.net which is the social networking section.  If you are into this, read the article.
http://www.wow.com/2010/02/09/battle-net-preview-real-id/

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Copyright Solo MMO Player at http://solommo.blogspot.com