Everyone knows that World of Warcraft is an addicting game. Nobody knows this better than Trevor Miller and his parents, James and Cindy – unfortunately for them, they learned this the hard way.

Seems that Trevor didn’t have money to pay for his account.  This WoW-starved gamer then decided to break into a cars and steal the owners credit cards to pay for the monthly subscription. A local detective from Trevor’s home of Buffalo Grove in Lake County, Illinois caught onto Trevor’s game once he noticed several fraudulent online orders and tracked them back to Trevor’s address.  Yes, this was a bad idea. How bad though, Trevor had no idea.

Authorities got a search warrant for the house and not only did they find the stolen credit cards, but also they cropped up the parent’s marijuana stash they were growing in the house. Busted. To read the source article on the WoW Player that got himself and his parents arrested, click here.

TERA Online recently announced that it will be at Comic-Con 2010 in San Diego this year and is welcoming all its fans to stop by their party.

Join developers En Masse on Thursday, July 22^nd, Comic-Con’s first night, where En Masse will host a party at 923 Bar and Lounge from 7-9 PM (PST).

Why go? Well, surly gamer. “During the event, En Masse will make a special presentation of new, exclusive information about the game. Guests will also have the chance to win TERA prizes and mingle with En Masse Entertainment staff over drinks and appetizers. Video of the event and our presence at our booth in Comic-Con will be produced and made available after the convention ends.”

This is an invite only event, to get on the guest list you must be a TERA Online player. Head over to this official forum thread to sign up for the event. Nobody under 18 can be permitted and the guest list will only cover the first 100 people to sign up – so get moving!

For more information, including directions, head here to view the offical Comic-Con TERA Online post.

The internet can be a cruel place. Nobody knows this better than Josh – the All Points Bulletin Human Avatar. “It’s sort of a mix of excitement and fear,” Josh says.

The votes are in from Stage 2 and Josh is getting the “Cyberpunk” hairdo. This would be a good haircut if Josh lived in a dystopian sci-fi future filled with robots and go-for-broke hackers. Unfortunetly, Josh has to live in our world, as does his hair style.

Josh is still on tap to get a piercing and a tattoo for the APB Human Avatar Project. Stage 3 (piercing) is being voted on now. Head on over to the official website to check out Josh’s transformation or to cast your vote and add your two cents to this wild project.

Playdom, a social gaming developer and aggregate, has been on a spending spree lately with their most recent purchase being San Francisco-based gaming house Metaplace. Metaplace focused on Facebook games, and currently has over 1.2 million monthly active users on their two main products, My Vineyard and Island Life.

Playdom didn’t just acquire a couple of games and their users, however — along with Metaplace they also “bought” Raph Koster, famed MMO developer. Koster was the lead designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, among other titles.

Koster has been a strong proponent of social gaming, arguing on his blog that MMOs and social games are not all that different: “[T]here was a core MMO game that many of the readers of this blog loved that had a farming game where you had to check in every few days to collect your stuff and decide what to try to harvest next. And it wasn’t Farmville. It was Star Wars Galaxies.”

Playdom has not yet released any specifics about their plans for Metaplace and other recent acquisitions. Koster is also vague, but apparently hopeful. His reaction to having a new boss on his blog was simply, “This is going to be a lot of fun. ”

So with all this personal privacy, Real ID madness floating around – its ironic that one person, simply known as Josh, has completely given over not only his identity, but his actual appearance to the hands of game designers and their community.

All Points Bulletin is on the second stage of their Human Avatar program. As quoted on their website, “One person. Three weeks. Total transformation. Inspired by the APB customization engine, we’re taking a real person and over three weeks transforming them into a character to be released out onto the streets of the game. Tattoo, haircut, piercing, clothes, the works. All for real, all decided by you.”

MMOCrunch already feels a little bad for Josh. Stage 2: Haircut is being voted on now – we fear that the bowels of the internet will rise up and either shave Josh’s head, or give him a haircut that will deter anybody from thinking he’s a sane man ever again. As of now the do entitled “Cyberpunk” is in the lead. To say the least, its not really the haircut you want to meet anybodies parents with.

Vote on the transformation yourself by heading over to APBs Official Human Avatar website.

Keep checking back at MMOCrunch as things begin to heat up and Josh begins to represent a virtual thug.

Good news for East Coast gamers: The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) East has been confirmed to be scheduled through 2013. According to The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Reed Exhibitions, an agreement was recently signed that will establish the gaming convention on the East Coast for the next three years.

The first PAX East was held in March of this year, and quickly sold out. Over 60,000 gamers and developers attended the event. PAX is a celebration of gaming of all kinds, including video, card, and tabletop fans.

PAX East will debut in the larger Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in 2011. The original PAX, held in Seattle since 2004, is scheduled to take place over Labor Day weekend later this year.

With the launch of World of Warcraft 3.3.5 patch players were let into the world of Real ID. Real ID offers the ability to put in more personal information that is available to all Battle.net users which includes anyone who plays Blizzard games online. Players can chat across different servers/games, create a friends list, message players and other social networking type add-ons.

Real ID has raised some concerns as of late. Based on the fact that you must input your personal information to use Real-ID, you can’t remain anonymous such on other gaming/social communication tools like Steam’s universal chat. Due to this, people are far more at risk for cyberstalking and other information leaks and scams.

Considering a good portion of Blizzard’s gaming public may be young and influential, the ability to post your personal and private information including email and name can be used as an in for such frauds as identify theft, sexual misappropriations and other terrible actions from the bowels of the internet.

Blizzard was smart enough to have some foresight in the matter. Players must first mutually agree to be friends before you can view the others personal info. Further more, Blizzard stresses how to wisely use Real-ID to avoid being scammed. Quoting from their Real-ID FAQ: “The Real ID is a system designed to be used with people you know and trust in real life — friends, co-workers and family.”

That’s all fine, well and good, but its easy to see how people could add people they only know in-game considering those are the people that the system is targeted to connect.

Perhaps most distressing in all this is one little nugget pulled again from the FAQ: “If you are using Real ID, your mutual Real ID friends, as well as their Real ID friends, will be able to see your first and last name (the name registered to the Battle.net account). You will also be able to see the first and last name of your Real ID friends and their Real ID friends.”

What that means is not only do possible scammers get access to your personal information, but your entire network of friends as well. This leads to a massive web of inter-connected players – the perfect playground for scammers.

This kind of lax social networking has become standard of such sites as Facebook and Myspace. However, this is a jump into video games – where, up until now, remaining anonymous as you gun down terrorists or smite wicked trolls was seen as standard and the system worked well. Adding a feature like Real-ID opens up an entire can of worms that this reporter doesn’t think video games completely need to be enjoyed. There are dozens of other networking sites that players can use to connect through. It’s admirable that Blizzard is throwing their own style into the mix – but the idea that it is so easy to misappropriate and have your personal information on the screens of potentially dangerous, or simply, unknown gamers is too big a risk just to help people communicate more effectively in-game.

In addition to this, in order to post on forums, starting with the launch of Cataclysm, players must be logged in through Real-ID. This means that whatever you post will be have your real name as the writer and your personal info a click away. This is another distressing action considering so many forums seem to live on the control to stay unknown.

That being said, the majority of gamers will have no problem with Real-ID and will mainly see it as another neat addition to their favorite games. But for the unfortunate select few that are scammed or otherwise hurt by using Real-ID, the cons far outweigh the minor benefits.

Real ID may be a very cool way to stay in touch with friends and family while playing your favorite Blizzard games. The only problem is that by friending people you are opening yourself up to have your personal information exposed to dozens, if not hundreds of people that you may not have any real connection to. Add in the heavy amount of online theft and general scams out there, and its plain to see why Real ID can be seen as a real problem.

For Blizzard/Battlenet latest announcement on Real ID, click here.

For some levity on the situation, check out Noob Comics take on the fiasco.

Play safe gang.

The folks at Realtime Worlds have finally gone off the deep end as they begin the APB Human Avatar experiment. To promote All Points Bulletin’s character customization system, somewhat amusingly dubbed the “innovative expression suite”, the Human Avatar experiment will see “an average Joe significantly altered in the real world into a San Paro celebrity!” The concept is that a real person, chosen out of two options by community voting, will then have various makeover stages voted on as well, in order to turn out the finished product of an APB character style. Realtime Worlds will then create an in-game character based on this person’s final look.

Despite the fact that this is probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard of a games developer doing, or perhaps because of it, I can definitely see this becoming a popular event. However, I have to wonder if the “average Joe” (side note: the two people available for voting in as the Human Avatar are a dancer and a free runner respectively, not quite average per se) will end up being made to look deliberately insane or ridiculous as a kind of proxy punching bag for a vindictive community. That said, how would that style really differ from the average APB character anyway?

To vote for yourself for which human guinea pig will win the honor of being humiliated on the internet, visit the Human Avatar site.

Pay attention, advertising departments — it turns out that the level of immersion a player experiences in a game can directly affect their in-game buying decisions. First Planet Company (the publishers of the real economy game Planet Calypso, one of the planets in Entropia Universe), Florida State University, and The Stockholm School of Economics teamed up earlier this year to study how immersion can affect buying habits in virtual worlds and the results show that the two are closely linked.

The study was conducted during the recent Miss Calypso beauty pageant in Planet Calypso. It found that the players who felt the most involved in the virtual event were also the most likely to purchase a piece of Calypso clothing, as well as feel increased loyalty to the Calypso brand.

Rob Hooker, a doctoral graduate from the College of Business at Florida State University, oversaw the the study. He said of the results, “… virtual worlds create opportunities for participants to lose track of time in enjoyable brand related activities. Ultimately, this strongly influences the participant’s intention to purchase a product from that brand.”

Planet Calypso bills itself as “the largest real economy MMO in the world”. The in-game economy uses a virtual currency that is kept on par with the US dollar, and players can deposit and withdraw funds as needed.

The important question that springs to my mind from this study is: does this mean we can stop with the completely immersion-breaking “Night Elf Mohawk” WoW ads? Please?

The 2010 Blizzard Global Writing Contest has begun, allowing fans of the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo game series to submit their stories set in those universes for the chance to win a trip to Blizzard Entertainment’s HQ in California. The rules are that the submission must be a short story set in one (or perhaps more – not specified) of the aforementioned worlds, it must be between 2500 and 7500 words, it must be written in English and it must be submitted by August 23, 2010. The grand prize winner will also receive their choice of either a Diablo III “OVERTHROWN” barbarian diorama or a Frostmourne sword.

Blizzard has also announced that Real ID for Battle.net has officially rolled out with World of Warcraft’s 3.3.5 patch. This feature will eventually apply to all Battle.net games, allowing players to give out their Real ID to those other players who they want to be able to see their characters and status in every Battle.net game. Real ID will also allow cross-game chat, for example if one of your Real ID friends is playing Starcraft II while you play World of Warcraft, you will be able to speak to them from within WoW.

For more information on the Writing Contest, visit the Blizzard Entertainment site, and for more information on Real ID, visit the Battle.net site.