This week we dropped by Blizzard's offices to check out the WoW expansion, and while we were there we took a tour of their new HQ. We have two movies showing the office tour as well as a trip around the new Blizzard museum which has all sorts of Diablo goodies on show.

• View the office tour movie
• View the Blizzard museum tour movie

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As part of our continual site revamp we have upgraded the forums which has added a few new bells and whistles with additonal social-networking type features and other tweaks we hope everyone appreciates. If you're a regular forum user (we know some of you have been here for around a decade plus ;), then you'll spot the changes pretty quickly. Enjoy the new features folks.
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Another new interview with Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick has appeared on Portfolio.com where he answers more questions on the Vivendi/Activision merger which was announced last December. Here's a primer...

In 1990, Bobby Kotick bought 25 percent of failing videogame maker Activision for $440,000, with financing from his mentor, casino king Steve Wynn. Since then, the company has been in nonstop-growth mode, through both internal expansion and acquisitions, and late last year, Kotick engineered his biggest deal yet—a nearly $19 billion merger with Vivendi’s game division. The prize for Activision: Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the online game World of Warcraft, which has about 10 million paying subscribers. Vivendi will own a majority stake in the merged company, to be renamed Activision Blizzard, and Kotick will run it.
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The Diablo 3 forums have been a hotbed of action this week and people are now scouring for evidence of the Diablo 3 announcement in this forum thread. You can of course add your own thoughts and evidence in the thread so feel free to do so.

Blizzard keep really tight-lipped about upcoming games so it's been rather fun watching the online investigations by rabid fans. Much of the evidence has been highlighted by Flux in the Diablo 3 wiki page so if you've not yet read that then please do check it out, it's a very interesting read. Blizzard have of course declined to comment on a timescale for a new game announcement but I have a feeling in my bones something is stirring.
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While rumours run rife about a Diablo 3 announcement at this year's WWI, there has been much discussion here on whether Diablo 3 should actually be an MMO like WoW. The recent on-going poll in the Diablo 3 forum suggests that fans would rather it was not an MMO. The monthly fee is what puts people off the idea but this thread by Drixx gives a run-down on why it may be the better option. In my opinion Diablo 3 would make a great MMO but whether there is enough room for both WoW and Diablo is another matter. So what are your thoughts on this? Post your opinions in this Diablo 3 forum thread.
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Welcome everyone to the new look Diabloii.Net. We worked out that it's been about 10 years since the site had a make-over, yes it's been that long! Elly, Flux, Wuushu and myself have been working hard these past few weeks to bring everything up to speed on the site and you'll notice a few changes.

Diabloii.Net has had so much Diablo content over the years that it made sense to finally get all the content you guys are using into a Wiki. This means that the whole Diabloii.net community can now contribute to the site. You don't need to re-register for the Wiki to utilise it, your forum account will work as your login to make things a lot easier. Note we are still adding a few things but feel free to start adding your own entries. The site can also be reached directly via Diablowiki.net.

We have revitalised the gallery providing a place for the community to show off their shots. We are still digging around our old screenshot archive and will get some of those up online as there are some classic screens in there :)

We have also added the news tagging system so logged in members can tag news stories they think are important to highlight them to the rest of the community. Simply go into the new story and click the 'Tag' number and you've tagged it. Note you need to be logged in to do this with your forum account which is used site-wide.

New to the site is the Blog system. This is a place for the Diablo community to post their own blogs which may or may not be about Diablo, it's up to you.

There have been a few forum tweaks which we are still working on and will continue to do so over the coming days.

That's it for now and we hope you like the changes.
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Vivendi and Activision have been given the green light by The European Commission to merge it has been revealed today. Although the deal was announced back in December, the two companies still had to get approval for the merger in the EU and get through all the red-tape.

The merger gives Vivendi a 52 percent stake in a new Activision Blizzard setup which has an annual revenue of $3.8 billion.

The Commission said for "all categories of game software, the combined firm would continue to face several strong, effective competitors, such as Electronic Arts, and the game console manufacturers, such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft".
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