157 – The Instance: The Crusade Called, But I Let It Go To Voicemail

It’s Like Christmas In August
Blizzard released version 3.2 of World Of Warcraft this week, a huge patch entitled “Call Of The Crusade”, much to our surprise and with the clear intention of getting it out there early enough before Blizzcon to get the bugs killed in the wild, rather than wait at least three more weeks. This thing is huge!

PvP Servers May Get Ulgier
Blizzard announced this week that they have lifted the restriction on PvP realms that prevents you from creating characters on both factions. Is it a revolution for the PvP realms? It only happened 3 days ago, but we have some ideas.

Hunters Get Some Crazy Statistics
A poster named Friscos brought a very interesting blog to our attention this week, with a thread on our forums entitled “Extremely disappointed in the Hunters of the world!” The blog is called Big Red Rhino. What this guy did was to sort the data on pets that was published by the Armory Data Mining blog a couple of weeks ago. Confused yet? Check it out here.

Town Cryer
John B. writes: Obviously World of Warcraft is a game that’s designed to be played constantly… you do X, get item Y, and then achievement Z, so now you can do raid A because you have items B C and D, etc. There are so many who have the time and devotion to sit in front of the computer day in and day out toiling away at quests and achievements, to get everything to make their characters the best they can be, etc. What about those of us who play on a more casual basis? It’s so tough to keep up with everyone when they play so much more, and have the best gear, and someone like myself can’t do much with them when I do get to play since the stuff I have isn’t sufficient for me to be doing what they’re doing. Case in point, the new instance (Trial of Champions or something). I can BARELY heal the regular, the heroic, forget it, but everyone is Ulduar 25 geared and even they are having trouble.

Did They Seriously Make Second Skin Available For Free?
It certainly looks like it. The acclaimed documentary about MMO players just like you and us has been distributed worldwide for free for you to watch on a website called SnagFilms. In case you’ve missed it so far, Second Skin is an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. It’s free to watch for the next week, SnagFilms is pulling it after August 13. That may not preclude you from being able to watch it on another site like Hulu after that date, but we really want to encourage support of sites like SnagFilms. It’s a brave new world, baby.