163 – The Instance: I Will Paint My Face With Your Blood

Blizzard Drops The Curtain In Austin
The famously tight-lipped Blizzard management team morphed into a bunch of chatty Kathys at this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference, which ran from Tuesday through Friday of this past week. In Thursday’s keynote, Bioware’s Allen Vogel introduced a very large crowd to Blizzard Entertainment’s J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce, who proceeded to peel back the layers and tell us more about the inner workings of World Of Warcraft development than ever before.

Well, Maybe Not Then
In a thread on the World Of Warcraft forums this week, a poster named Shadowavatar from Boulderfist repeated what we read from an e-mail on this show two weeks ago: Blizz needs to include an Authenticator in every single box of the next expansion. Increase the price on the expansion by a 3 dollars and just stick one in every box. Seriously, this will cut down on the hacking and the thousands of calls per week you get for people being idiots about their account information. This should not even have to be sugjested by a subscriber, this should be obvious to EVERYONE working on WoW at Blizzard.” And he got a response from Blizzard. Bornakk replied with the following: While I like the goal, just forcing an authenticator on everybody won’t help them understand it which is what they first need. There are still a lot of people who don’t know what an authenticator is or what it does for them. I’ve seen it several times where a guild gets hacked one at a time and after getting hacked the person gets an authenticator but nobody else does until they are hacked. If you have an authenticator I think letting your friends and fellow players know what it is and what it helps with would be the first big step in security. We hope to have more messaging out on this shortly to go over all of this in more details and then you can just send them a link to go over it all.

Town Cryer
Specialist John M. from FOB Diamondback in Mosul, Iraq writes: My brother has told me about Northrend and some of its various nuances especially one in particular. Apparently there is a region up there that physically looks one way when you enter and then magically changes when you complete quests and become aligned per a certain faction of sorts. He, as well as myself, were astonished with this. He mentioned that my other brother could stand next to him and not see particular features in the region such as vendors and flight masters etc. Two people with literally the same game looking at two different (worlds). My question is- If I don’t get Cataclysm my world will still be patched and altered right? Or, will they do that magical thing like in Northrend? Nicole Z. from G4 TV writes: I recently came across your site and thought it was a great place for any fan of the game. I wanted to invite you to take a look at the World of Warcraft page on G4tv.com so you could see the depth of content we offer as well. Let me know what you think!

The Abyssal Maw
Azeroth’s native elementals wreaked havoc across the world while they were under the influence of the Old Gods. To keep Azeroth safe from these threats, the titans imprisoned the Old Gods underground and banished the savage elementals to the titan-constructed Elemental Plane, a secure dominion where the elementals could dwell without harming Azeroth. This week, Blizzard posted the 2nd major update to their Cataclysm Expansion mini-site, all about The Abyssal Maw.