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On May 15th at 3 A.M. PDT, the heavens will tremble and Diablo 3 will be live. Players will be able to scour Sanctuary for gold and epic loot and trade it on the in-game gold-based auction house immediately, and a week later, the real money auction house will open, where players can trade their items with other players for real world currencies.

The recent announcement of the fee schedule for the “real-money trade” (RMT) auction house had some players astonished at the prices. The fee for the gold-based auction house is 15% of the sale price and while the real-money auction house matches that 15% for “commodities” (e.g., stackable items, gems, materials, dyes, etc.), it charges $1 for equipment and unique items. These fees are charged to the seller and deduced from the money they receive from the sale of the item. Additionally, the real money revenue is credited to a Battle.net account balance; if you want to be paid and withdraw the funds to Paypal, this incurs an additional 15% charge. Once you get the money into Paypal, you can transfer to a bank account for free, or do anything you could normally do with Paypal credit.

If you are at all familiar with Blizzard’s other major auction house system, the WoW gold auction house, you might notice the similarities and differences easily. Here’s a quick rundown of WoW’s auction house fees:

• 5% of the sale price on same faction auction house (99% of the trading), 15% on neutral auction houses
• Players must put down a deposit when selling items. If the item fails to sell, the deposit is not returned. The deposit varies based on the length of the auction and the vendor value of the item.

Activision Blizzard revealed today their first quarter 2012 financial results showing that World of Warcraft lost approximation zero subscribers during the first quarter, maintaining their 10.2 million player-base.

This marks the first time in over a year that WoW has not lost subscribers since the decline began in the fourth quarter of 2010. Since then the game has lost 1.8 million, losing only 100k in the fourth quarter of 2011 and zero last quarter. Giving WoW about 6 months of steady numbers.

One can argue that the Diablo 3 Annual Pass promotion had a major impact on subscription figures this quarter, but even still, it’s pretty impressive.  I’m sure there’s also a few ex-SWTOR players who have been slowly returning as well.

Today, Funcom spilled the beans about The Secret World‘s first beta weekend, revealing what factions and areas will be available to players.

This first beta weekend, titled “Kingsmouth Calling”, will restrict players to the Templar faction, allowing them to explore the small town of Kingsmouth and the city of London, one of the three hub cities in the game.

The beta begins this Friday on May 11th at 9am PDT, and runs until Sunday May 13th to 11:59pm PDT. The non-disclosure agreement has been dropped as of Friday, so players will be able to post information, pics, and videos of their experience over the weekend; which means you can expect us here at Lorehound to have you covered with first impressions galore.

The first stage of grief is denial, which seems to be where EA is headed after it released its financial report yesterday revealing that subscription numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic dropped 23.5% from its peak last quarter.

Active subscribers dropped from 1.7 million to 1.3 million, to which President of EA Labels, Frank Gibeau, responded saying this was due to casual gamers leaving the game.

We brought in a lot of users, and with a brand like Star Wars, it reaches out much past the hardcore MMO fan base into the broader market. And as the service evolves from here, what we’re seeing is that some of the initial casual customers have gone through a billing cycle and decided not to subscribe to the game.

Mr. Gibeau goes on to counter, saying that it’s core is actually growing,

the percentage of paying subscribers from our peak until now has actually gone up, and the folks that we have are as engaged as they were when they first bought the product.

Make no mistake, BioWare intends to grow subscribers.

I don’t believe that Gibeau mentioned to shareholders that EA gave every single player players with a level 50 character a free month of game-time only a few weeks ago. Hmm, I wonder if this 1.3 million number is at all deceptively inflated? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the real number is already under 1 million.

Also mentioned during the conference call was that SWTOR was in EA’s top 10 franchises in terms of profitability, but was less profitable than the following franchises: Medal of Honor, Battlefield, FIFA, Madden, The Sims, and SimCity. However, it did beat Tiger Woods Golf. This places SWTOR somewhere between 7-9 on the list.

EA is doing what all companies do when they have bad news, put on a happy face and try to explain it away, but casual gamers? I won’t consider anyone that uses Xfire to be casual and from their stats, SWTOR is in serious decline.