April 01, 2005 - Blizzard Entertainment today announced that it has signed a deal with Arena.net where the pvp content of Guild Wars would be incorporated into World of WarCraft, giving the popular massively multiplayer RPG an actual end game. Blizzard President Mike Morhaime said "Without a doubt, World of Warcraft is a huge success on every level. We've sold millions of copies of the game, have over 1.5 million paying subscribers; blowing away the competition in the US and around the world. The only real negative the game suffers from is a lack of any real end game for our level 60 population who craves some solid player vs player combat. This is where Arena.net comes in. Jeff Strain, one of the men who came up with the idea behind Battle.net, now CEO of Arena.net had this to say. "When we left Blizzard, we didn't have any hard feeling towards Mike and the managment in place today. Vivendi was looking to sell the company and we didn't feel very secure. We moved on (hey, even Bill Roper left) and created Guild Wars, a massively multiplayer RPG which is almost the polar opposite of World of WarCraft. We focused on the PvP side of things; what we can offer, will make World of WarCraft by far the coolest MMORPG ever made. What WoW needs is solid PvP and we can provide it now. We are happy to have signed this deal and feel right back at home working with the people we came up with." Guild Wars and WoW are the perfect fit.