After today’s maintenance, Horde and Alliance players will find that the updated instances for Operation Gnomeregan and Zalazane’s Fall will be available to enter, so Horde players can head into the Echo Isles to retake the Troll homelands and put an end to Zalazane’s tyranny, and the Gnomes and their allies can muster their forces to retake the Gnomes’ home city of Gnomeregan.

The quests went live on the PTRs a while back, and today’s the day for them to go up on the live realms. Ready?

Over at Wow.com, the news came down that Operation Gnomeregan and Zalazane’s Fall are both live on the PTR.

If you’re interested in seeing what the fate of Gnomeregan is, or if you’re interested in the beginnings of the quest to retake the Echo Isles in the name of the Trolls, you can find out if you copy your character over to the PTRs now.

Doesn’t High Tinker Mekkatorque look badass in that shot? I mean seriously – it’s probably the best image of a gnome looking like he’s serious business I think I’ve ever seen. Seriously, don’t mess with the gnomes.

Remember when Blizzard announced details of Operation: Gnomeregan and the Echo Isles? Yup – looks like we’ll start mobilizing for the operation any week now. The call has gone out at the World of Warcraft Community Site, along with exciting new details about the Operation: Gnomeregan encounter and instance, along with what you can expect when the operation mobilizes. Get ready!

Oh – and head over to download a full-sized high-resolution Operation: Gnomeregan poster – if I were you, I’d download it, run over to Kinkos, get it blown up, and frame that puppy. It’s pretty hot.

Last week, Blizzard announced tons of new information about the upcoming Gnomeregan and Echo Isles instances that we expect to see in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the next major expansion pack to the game. Among them are the fact that the gnomes and the trolls will both have an opportunity in the coming expansion to take their respective homelands back. Nethaera said on the official forums:

High Tinker Mekkatorque, betrayed by Mekgineer Thermaplugg and forced to flee the irradiated city of Gnomeregan with the few of his fellow gnomes who managed to survive, is preparing to reclaim his once glorious city. Meanwhile, in distant Durotar, Vol’jin of the Darkspear trolls is determined to exact revenge upon the witch doctor Zalazane for dividing the Darkspears and seizing the land bestowed to them by Thrall: the Echo Isles. Read more about the ongoing struggles of the gnomes and the trolls… and their plans to seek redemption.

gnomes= http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p9/gnomeregan.xml
trolls= http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p9/echoisles.xml

There are already a number of spoilers floating around out there since a lot of the audio data and text have already started to appear in existing data packs and folks who are familiar with sites that do a lot of data mining may already have seen the content of the events and encounters.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to the opportunity to hand Thermaplugg and Zalazane their marching orders and tell them to get the heck out of your character’s homeland? It’s been said that everything is going to change in Cataclysm, and this certainly looks like the beginning of that.

Thanks to Wow.com for the scoop!

One of these days I’ll get back to posting content and not more video, but I keep seeing awesome video that I think is worth sharing. This one was, as many of them are, a find of the folks at WoW.com, and follows the course of gnomes as they plot to take their rightful place not only in the Alliance, but in all of Azeroth.

Using their superior technology and…fighting…skills…they….. okay I just can’t deal with it anymore. Sure the gnomes are the protagonists here, but as cool as it is, I can’t help but giggle when the gnomes start taking over. In any event, the animation is superb, the music is great, and you really do get a feeling of how epic the whole scenario is. I definitely saw some cues and homages to Battlestar Galactica in here, too. Check out the whole video over at YouTube here if the embedded player doesn’t suit your fancy!