Normally I wouldn’t want to do a “How’s that working out for you” discussion post for an x.y.z patch, but 3.2.2 came with so many changes that have actively effected the way we play the game, it’s worth checking in and seeing how everyone’s doing. Blizzard described it as minor patch, but along with it came a number of pretty big changes, not the least of which being the re-introduction of Onxyia into the game after having reworked her to be a level 80 raid boss, with loot that looks like the old world gear but wears like some of the finest a raid can pick up.

Changes came down for just about every class, too – hunters got some pretty significant changes, as did druids, death knights, and even mages got some reworking – and while some of the changes are pretty minor, others are significant enough to change the way we play the game.

So! How are you doing with all of the changes in 3.2.2? Mad that the Bestial Wrath change went through? Upset you can only queue for 2 battlegrounds at a time? Pissed that they fixed the Kill Shot bug and now you have to be at range to fire it? Or maybe you’re too busy rolling over Onxyia for loot? How are you liking that? Let us know in the comments!

The beauty of my post, Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched: A Technical Perspective, is that it appeared to come right on the heels of Blizzard completing its datacenter upgrade to add capacity and rid themselves and their players of the dreaded “Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched” error forever.

In a blue post on the official forums, Crygil announces that you all shouldn’t see this error ever again and that the upgrades should all be complete. Seeing is believing of course, but so far so good in my experience, and I haven’t heard people complaining about it recently, which means there must have been an impact. Blizzard’s done good by their customers on this one, especially if the errors really are gone – people have been complaining about this for a good long time, half of them demanding Blizzard keep them updated daily on the status of the changes and requesting way more vision into the back end of World of Warcraft than I think any company gives its users, but we should see that furor die down now that the upgrades are complete – assuming the upgrades have managed to rid us of the error.

Personally, I’m curious if the strategy I laid out in my article turned out to be true, but more importantly, I’m just glad I don’t have to sit outside an instance for a half-hour waiting to get in. What about you? Have you been able to get into all of your instances now that the server upgrades are finished?

I know you love your guild – but how much do you love your guild?

Don’t worry, you can change names to protect the innocent, you can be as vague as you want to be, or you can be as specific if you want to be if you love your guild and all of the people in it. A lot of us absolutely love our guilds and everything about them, and a lot of us absolutely hate our guilds and are only sticking around for one reason or another. What’s your story?

Every guild has issues, there’s no doubt about that, but I think I can attest to the amount of guild drama that any person has to deal with tends to center around why your guild does what it does.

Are you in a hardcore raiding guild? You’re likely to have loot drama, raiding drama, and benchwarmer’s drama – you know the kind, where people have to sit out raids and get upset because someone they think doesn’t deserve the raiding slot gets it over them, or because the shaman got that epic mace instead of the rogue.

Is your guild a casual, friends-only guild? You’ll probably get social drama: “Why did she say that about me?” “So and so doesn’t like me and doesn’t invite me to heroics.”

If you’re prepped and ready for those things, you’ll probably enjoy your guild experience much more than someone who’s in the guild for a different reason. For example, the hardcore raider who joins the social, casual guild, only to gquit a week later because they’re not running heroics every night and raiding three times a week. Or alternatively the socialite who wants to make friends who joins a hardcore raiding guild that treats their gameplay like a job will naturally find themselves wishing they’d never applied after a week or so.

Me? I love my guild – I’m definitely a more casual player, looking to run dungeons and experience content at a leisurely pace – I don’t need to raid three times a week – maybe here and there on the weekends. I’d rather make close friends than have a character decked out in epics, but I don’t think you have to sacrifice one for the other.

So what about you? What’s the secret to finding a great guild, and what’s the secret to staying happy? Have you found the perfect guild, or are you still searching? Shout it out in the comments!

With all the news about Cataclysm leaked, about race/class restrictions being eased or outright lifted, upcoming race/faction changes, and the fact that you can already pay to have your server changed, your character’s gender changes, Cadistra, author/artist of the webcomic WoW, Eh? brought up an excellent question over at Twitter (you can follow her @Cadistra, and I’m @halophoenix!):

Do choices matter anymore?

She’s got a point. The majority of the WoW community is incredibly excited for race and faction changes, and the ability to change them whenever you want (for a price, of course). We can already change servers whenever we land on one we don’t like. We can even change the gender of our characters if we decide that bulky Draenei male is too cumbersome to look at and would much prefer the swaggering tail-butt of a Draenei female, or if your male guild leader gets too much crap for playing a female character. It wasn’t such a big deal then, but she’s got an excellent point: don’t like your character’s appearance? Hit the barber shop and spend a little in-game money to change it. Don’t like your server? Transfer off. Don’t like your faction? Soon you can change it! Don’t like your race/class combo? Soon you’ll be able to make whatever you want!

While I don’t think anyone disputes that World of Warcraft is Blizzard’s game and they can change it as they see fit (and that the players reserve the right to pay for it or not pay for a game they do or do not like), there does seem to be a watering down of the restrictions that Blizzard put in place when the game was new. Now players can create Horde and Alliance characters on the same server even if it’s a PVP server – and players, especially old school ones, are realizing that some of the cherished walls that the game originally put up originally in order to make sure that when you created a character, you were making a commitment to something.

Now, with World of Warcaft up to 11 million subscribers and counting, Blizzard may be reducing the importance of those choices in order to provide flexibility to its player base, which may not understand or care about those commitments or the lore and story around them and are just in a mad rush to play, experience content, and get to the end-game raiding.

What do you think? It’s clear that the choices are being diluted, but do you think they still matter? Why do you think Blizzard is so ready to drop the barriers between races, classes, and factions now, of all times? Shout it out in the commnents!

First MMO Champion said it, then WoW.com said it, and now that it’s been a few days since both sites leaked information that is rumored to be details from the upcoming expansion that’s also rumored to be called World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the dust has settled a bit and revealed a few very important things.

First, let’s take a look at the news that’s caused such an outrage, shall we?

New Races and Class Combinations:
* Goblins
* Worgens
* Human Hunter
* Orc Mage
* Night Elf Mage
* Dwarf Mage
* Blood Elf Warrior
* Dwarf Shaman
* Undead Hunter
* Tauren Paladin
* Tauren Priest
* Gnome Priest
* Troll Druid

Leveling Experience
* Level Cap raised to 85
* Azshara becomes a low level starting zone
* Barrens split up into two separate zones

Azeroth will be entirely revamped.

Flying is allowed in parts of old Azeroth.

Unreleased zones and dungeons, including Hyjal, Gilneas, and Uldum will become part of WoW.

Deathwing and Azshara will be playing a major role in the Cataclysm that will happen.

I’m skeptical, to a very large extent – some of the race/class combinations don’t really make sense, and the lore implications of both Goblins and Worgen and some of the changes to the fundamentals of the game (flying in Azeroth, starting zones changing, etc) are pretty wide ranging and sound like either they must have been in the works for years, or it’d be an awful lot of work for this next expansion.

But unlike a lot of people (and I’ll get to this later) just because I don’t want something to be true doesn’t mean that it might not be – we’ll see. As to the notion of Goblins and Worgen, I hit on that in a previous post, but let’s dive a little deeper, shall we?

So we know that the worgen made their appearance in Azeroth thanks to Velinde Starsong and Arugal, both of whom started summoning worgen into the world for their own reasons. Need a history lesson? Cadistra of WoW, Eh has an excellent primer as this week’s comic.

of worgen…

Velinde prayed to Elune for a weapon to help her clean up Felwood and push back the corruption, and she got that weapon in the form of the Scythe of Elune (which makes an appearance in Northrend as part of a quest chain where you essentially give it back to a group of worgen in Grizzly Hills before you know what they are). She summons more and more worgen into Azeroth and uses them essentially as weapons of war – until she loses control of them and presumably she dies at their hands – that quest chain is woefully unresolved.

Arugal on the other hand was a mage of the Kirin Tor who saw Dalaran overrun by the scourge and, frustrated with the Kirin Tor’s seeming inability to cleanse the scourge from Azeroth started summoning Worgen into the world from Shadowfang Keep to – that’s right – use them as a weapon of war against the scourge. Arugal’s worgen were fairly effective against the scourge, but as if the two events were scripted together, the same thing happened to Arugal that happened to Velinde: the worgen turned on their masters and started killing them outright.

So then, it’s clear that the worgen would have no love for the scourge, but I’m curious how Blizzard will explain their siding with the alliance. It would seem to me they would be a better match for the Horde.

of goblins…

The Goblins are the opposite. They used to be members of the Horde in the Warcraft II and Warcraft III (pre-Frozen Throne) storyline, but left after the Second War in favor of neutrality when they realized it would make them a ton more money to trade with both the Horde and the Alliance. While they may not harbor any specific hate for the Horde, it’s curious why they would break neutrality to join the Horde again, especially considering the fact that they broke with them once. It would almost make more sense for them to join the Alliance, especially in light of the other rumors about the Horde…unless something happens to make them really attractive to the Goblins, or unless Blizzard just wants to make them the equivalent of Horde Gnomes.

The new race/class combos, as some have asserted, may be indicative of the rise of some of the various factions in the game that aren’t directly allied with the capital cities. Dwarven Shamans could be Wildhammer, for example.

In any event, only time will tell whether this is all just rumor and speculation or whether it’ll all come to light. We’ll find out as news filters out of Blizzcon next week!

That being said, I hardly think that sites like MMO Champion and WoW.com would risk their credibility with the fan community by reporting on these without being confident in their sources, and I highly doubt they would post this kind of information just to stir up this kind of trouble.

That brings me to a more nuanced point about journalism, ethics, and anonymous sources, but definitely a digression, so I’ll put it behind the jump below.

(more…)

So we’re two days out from Patch 3.2, and most of the servers are back online for good and aren’t randomly restarting. Blizzard had a bit of emergency maintenance in the US yesterday, and add-on developers are scrambling to make sure their add-ons are updated for the live version of the patch. We’re all still getting used to it, the the bugs list is getting longer, and we’re all geting used to the patch now that it’s live.

So what about you? What are you the most excited about? New druid forms (shown above)? Totem bars? The new dungeons and the Call of the Crusade? Let us know in the comments!

Oh, and if you haven’t seen the trailer, check it out here:

A couple of months ago I asked the question “Is there too much to do in World of Warcraft, and one of my good friends, Transrelativity used his WoW.com blog to write an empassioned plea for less stuff to do. Not that Blizzard should actually remove things from the game per se, but that there’s already a wealth of content and a lot of it is coming so fast and hard that we don’t really have the time to absorb and really envelop ourselves in the content we already have.

Transrelativity admits that a great deal of the post is personal opinion and that there are tons of people out there dying for more more more content, more dungeons, more raids, more loot, more everything – but that being said, I have to agree to a certain extent. While I’m equally puzzled as to whether or not Casual-Hardcore is an intrinsic oxymoron, I think it would be much easier to dive in when you really want to and get both hands into the game when you feel like it when you know you have the time to experience the content on your own schedule. If you know that it’ll be gone and replaced by something bigger and better in 2 weeks, you either rush to do it right this second just to have it done (and thus don’t really enjoy it) or you don’t do it at all and wait for whatever that next best thing is and hope it’s more interesting (and thus feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to do).

What do you think? We may be far beyond the point where there’s only enough endgame content that everyone is doing essentially the same thing, but is there so much that players are fractured and it’s difficult to get people together to do anything? Or is Blizzard taking the “something for everyone and every play type” approach and that’s just fine by you?

one of these things is not like the other...

Now that Blizzard has announced that soon you’ll be able to change your faction, a lot of people are thinking about doing it and even more are talking about how it’ll work. Blizzard has all but said that you’ll have to either keep your class so you’ll only be able to change to a race that has that class, but they haven’t said if they’re doing one-to-one changes or any mage can choose an opposing race that supports mages.

Some guilds are talking about switching faction en masse – either to get better racial bonuses (horde to alliance) or to take advantage of high/low pop servers (a horde guild on a low horde pop server switching to a high horde pop server to find more people to recruit, for example), and other people are talking about switching just to get a chance to play with friends who are on the other side.

What about you? What would it take for you to take one of your characters now and change their faction as opposed to just leveling an alt of the opposing faction or rolling a death knight?

Loot rules for guilds vary about as widely as guilds do; more often than not no two systems are truly alike. Even so, most of them can be traced back to some similar system, like the widely used and adopted DKP system. WoW Insider wrote about SWAPS this week, a new system I hadn’t heard about before, but what about your guild? What loot distribution system do you use? How do your raid leaders decide who gets what?

Our guild doesn’t really have a system, and perhaps that’s one of the defining factors of a casual guild – the people who make the runs get to roll on anything they want or need – need if you need it, greed if you want it or no one needs it, and usually our folks are good enough to ask up front “mind if I roll need on that?” and we can scorn them if they shouldn’t or approve if they should. It’s never really backfired on us.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been the occassional “but that’s a bigger upgrade for me than the person who outrolled me” drama, or the ocassional confusion from people who are filling slots on a raid with us. But while that works for us, the biggest raids we’ve ever organized have been 10-mans.

If you’re in a raiding guild, how does your guild handle loot? How do you manage pugs? Do you think the rules would be different for guilds running 10-mans versus 25-man instances? Does your guild’s loot system work for you, date back to the old days of 40-mans, or is it fundamentally broken? Let us know in the comments!

WoW Faction Patches

This week brought some pretty significant changes to World of Warcraft: Blizzard has announced that Alliance players looking to switch to Horde and Horde players looking to join their Alliance friends will be able to soon…for a fee, of course. Currently players can choose to change their character’s gender or race – Blizzard says that soon you’ll be able to go from Horde to Alliance as well.

There are a lot of questions left around this announcement – word came out that it’ll eventually be possible, but it hasn’t been confirmed exactly how the changes will take place, how it will cost, or what will happen to faction-sepcific mounts, reputation, and gear.

Additionally, the biggest debate going around right now is whether race limitations will essentially go away and we’ll see humans walking around Orgrimmar and Blood Elves wandering Darnassus. Over at WoW.com, there’s a whole post about this: it would seem that it’s easiest for Blizzard to allow players to keep their races and their faction specific rewards and simply change their allegiances and rep, but I think it’s far more likely that Blizzard will choose certain races that are the compliment to each other, and players of once race will have to choose the complimentary race. (Draenei to Blood Elf, Human to Orc, Night Elf to Troll, for example) That way, Blizzard will have a direct method to map reputation, titles, achievements, mounts, and items.

At the same time, Blizzard could allow you to choose the race you’d rather play, as long as you can retain your class, and let the rest be damned. They could even just kill all of your old faction rep and force you to rep grind with your new faction. Anything’s possible, and we won’t know until more details emerge. Stay tuned!

What do you think will happen when Blizzard makes faction changes live? How much do you think it will cost? Let us know in the comments.