149 – The Instance: The Tension Is Mounting



Big News Of The Week

Your Travel Plans Have Been Changed
Blizzard CM Zarhym surprised most of us this week with the unexpected announcement that there sill be big changes to the timing and cost of increasing your movement speed in World Of Warcraft. First, he posted the following: In the next major content patch, we intend to adjust mount requirements to further improve the leveling experience in World of Warcraft. In addition, cast times for summoning all mounts will be reduced to 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds. The following is a breakdown of the upcoming cost and level requirement changes we are making for each riding skill. And followed it with new waypoints for every part of the level progression. It was a lot to take in.

There was immediate uproar, as usual, and complaints everywhere from Blizzardville to the Instance forums that World Of Warcraft would be ruined, never to be playable or good again. Blizzard responded to this within a few hours with the folllowing, The game has gotten quite a bit longer, and allowing players to get from A to B faster only very minimally decreases difficulty; more so, it decreases time spent traveling. We don’t want to discourage players from trying out the game if they have not yet, and we especially don’t want to discourage existing players from trying out new characters because the leveling process from 1-80 seems too daunting after flying around Northrend grabbing purples for a while. Whether you leveled your first character from 1-60 within a month of the game’s release when the leveling curve was less forgiving, and mounts seemed like a distant dream, or you leveled a character from 1-80 in the last month with mounts a little sooner, and experience gains a little accelerated from 1-70, no one’s game play experience and fun — the reason most people would play video games in their spare time in the first place — is at all cheapened. But wait! There’s more! There’s going to be a New Zeppelin between Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar. Finally. And new portals to THE portal are coming. The Dark Portal, that is. They’ll be in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, leading directly to the Stair of Destiny at the Dark Portal. No more need to haul yourself out there at level 58. Just take a portal instead!

Did You Think We Were Done With News This Week?

Amidst all the excitement about mount changes, an announcement by Naethera was largely overlooked by the community: Blizzard has posted a look at the upcoming Sixth instanced battleground in World Of Warcraft, Isle Of Conquest. We’ve got just a couple of thoughts on that.

The Realms Are All A-Twitter
It came to our attention this week that many of the most popular realms in World of Warcraft are Twittering. Twittering their status as up or down, Twittering the approximate size of their population… You can pretty much Google search any realm name on the site twitter.com, and find yours being updated. If you don’t, we’ve noticed new ones coming around regularly. The realm we’re currently playing on, Earthen Ring, is currently UP, with a population of HIGH. John West, the guy who operates that feed, wrote us today, and he said the following I’m already tracking the info for all US and EU realms, but the bots only post on Twitter about the realms that people have requested. A quick message to @jwest23 will get my attention and I’ll get the bots squawking about it ASAP. I’ll be putting up feeds for Argent Dawn US and Sisters of Elune US over the weekend as requested by @LouGagliardi last night.

Those Mountain Dew Battle-Bots
Are coming to a mailbox near you! The much sought-after in-game non-combat pet started arriving in-game this week. If you’ve missed out on Mountain Dew prizes so far, just go here to get started.

Your Brewfest Mount May Be Easier
At least, that’s what we infer from a post Bornakk made on the worldofwarcraft.com forums this week. He didn’t really give us any details, but it is clear that Blizzard wants to do *something* to stave off the yearly boo-hoo-fest that Brewfest has become, with regard to players’ hopes of obtaining the often unique mounts that come with the event.

Town Cryer
Vincent E. writes: Noticed a lot of recount hate in the past few months of shows and I would just like to stand in defense of this mod that many an end game raider would be hopelessly lost without. The way i play my World of Warcraft consists of one rule: If I am not top DPS, there is something wrong, and I need to fix it.

How You Doin?
We saw this posted by Lisa Poisso on WoWInsider this week, and it’s too good to not talk about. It’s a blog for gamers by gamers who care about what shape you’re in as you sit there and play World Of Warcraft and inFamous and Peggle and eat Pringles all day. You know the shape we’re talking about – it’s the shape of a fat butt. Over at ShrinkGeek.com, the geek posters are delivering a daily helping of get yourself fit for the love of all that is holy before you die at the age of 37 in a pile of dirty underwear directly to your RSS feed.