205 – The Instance: Harry Johnson Meets Peter Lik

We Have A Release Date. You Have A Different One.
Discussion of the release date of the imminent Cataclysm expansion to World Of Warcraft peaked this week as several game vendors, mostly Amazon, decided to start putting exact dates on their offerings – seemingly without any firm input from Blizzard.

Your Raid Lockout Has Been Doing Yoga
Yesterday, Blizzard CM Bashiok dropped a huge wall of text on us regarding changes to how raid lockouts work in the game – changes that are coming in version 4.0.1 to the live game in the next couple of weeks or so. Bashiok started with this: “Almost six months ago we announced that Cataclysm raids were being redesigned to make both raid sizes the same difficulty, drop the same quality of loot, and exist in the same lockout. This evolution in raid philosophy is built on the belief that you should not have to complete the same raiding content twice in a week to maximize your character’s progression. With the release of the 4.0.1 patch, the new Flexible Raid Lock system will debut in Icecrown Citadel and The Ruby Sanctum.”

Rapid Fire Rumors And Scuttlebutt!

 * The Dalaran and Shattrath city portals to other cities are definitely going away in Cataclysm.
 * Blizzard is doing guild wipes in the beta.

Town Cryer
Mike C. writes: I’ve been listening to your guys’ show since about episode 180-something. About half way through episode 204 I wanted to express how it’s the first time I’ve been disappointed by your show. I’d heard you guys mention the show Firefly a few times and it peaked my interest in that show, you guys inspired me to go out and buy the complete series, including Serenity. As of this writing, I’ve watched about half of the episodes of the show, and have yet to watch Serenity. I was greatly disappointed when you dropped a huge spoiler about Serenity on my head without warning. Next time you get me into a great show don’t RUIN it for me… Please?

Get Thee To An Arena-ry!!
And in this case, you don’t have until Cataclsym. You basically have about two weeks. A post on the WoW forums from Zarhym this week: “We are currently planning to end Arena Season 8 as early as October 12. At that point we will go through our normal process to determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards. This process should take approximately one week. It’s very important for players who feel that they may be eligible for the Arena-specific titles and/or the Relentless Gladiator’s Frostwyrm to refrain from transferring their character to another realm until after Arena Season 8 ends.”