*tap tap tap* This thing on?

In my conference planning days, during the week or so following one of our conferences we would have a big 2-3 hour post-mortem meeting to discuss the good and the bad and make improvements for the next conference. So BlizzCon was weird for me in that while I was there as a first-time attendee, I also couldn’t help but look at it from a planner’s perspective. BlizzCon itself is… well, intense is the only word that even comes close to describing it. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Pros:

First Impressions. Walking into the main floor of the conference center for the first time, with lights and screens everywhere and as the MASSIVENESS of the convention hits you is phenomenal. The showmanship and “fun” factor is off the charts, to the point of being overwhelming if you’re not prepared for it. But that’s a good thing. Also, big kudos to the IT team and whomever set up all the gameplay stations and the systems that run the show. Seriously, that was impressive.

The content. There was so much that it got really difficult to decide what to do at any one time. This is excellent, although they’re reaching critical mass now with all of the e-Sports and they really should consider a third day at this point. I would have loved to have seen a Legion music panel.

Pre-Parties. Not directly Blizzard-related, but the Con Before the Storm pre-party was fantastic. It was laid-back, chill, you could move around and see people, meet up, chat, and so on with no problems. The WowHead party had a completely different feel and felt targeted to a different crowd. Options are good!

Food. Options in and outside of the convention center were excellent, if a little overpriced, but I expected that.

Shopping. The blink shopping worked nicely, although I’m not sure if it really made the shopping lines any shorter on Thursday during ticket pickup, when a lot of people hit up the store. Since this is my first BlizzCon, I don’t have anything to compare it to, but we stood in line for about an hour with blink shopping. If you’ve been to BlizzCon before, what say you? Better? Worse?

Smells – or lack thereof. It really didn’t smell bad that I noticed. For all the talk about “smelly nerds”, I didn’t smell anything offensive. Good job on the deodorant & toothpaste, guys! 😉

Kristian Nairn at the 25th Anniversary Party. Seriously he was fantastic. Would love to see him again!!

Weird Al as the closing performance. HE ABSOLUTELY KILLED IT. The guy knows how to rock and play to the audience. And at the very end, hearing almost all of BlizzCon singing the Star Wars song and Yoda at the end along with him was the most beautiful marriage of three different nerdy fandoms that I’ve ever seen.

Cons:

The StaffPro people. These are contractors hired by either Blizzard or the convention center to help keep things moving, and to be honest, they were terrible and the source of much frustration for attendees. They get their own bullet points:

• The Staff/Media exit from the main stage area to the hallway needs to be marked clearly as such, with a large banner ABOVE the doors. After the Opening ceremony, people were pushing towards those doors because they were open but not marked, and StaffPro people were there turning people away with a rather bad attitude. There may have been banner stands, but if there were, they weren’t visible. People were crammed up against each other in a crowd surge towards those doors so you couldn’t easily flow in the direction the staff were waving you to, tempers flared between the staff and the attendees, and it was a definite safety concern.
• I heard several StaffPro people talking trash about attendees on the show floor. Not appropriate. I get that people have to vent, but they should do so in a staff area.
• StaffPro people were yelling at attendees when they tried to “Enter” through an “Exit” door. Of course they need to do such things for safety reasons, but yelling with a bad attitude is not acceptable.
• For the 2nd floor/staff floor, I would recommend setting up large free standing graphic banners to create a dual hallway area & encourage attendees to keep moving between the 1st & 3rd floors. Again, the interactions with StaffPro people were not positive here because they acted like they were herding cattle instead of hosting an event, and attendees were not allowed to stop on the 2nd floor for any reason.
• I really can’t emphasize enough how frustrating the StaffPro people were – it was so bad that first day that my husband considered not going back the second day. We did go back and we ended up having a great time anyway, but that initial experience was not positive.

Moving between floors. All elevators/escalators should be open immediately following the opening ceremonies. Too many people leaving at once and too many bottlenecks that first day.

The contest host debacle. All I will say about this is that the host wasn’t to my taste, but the bullying from some of our community was uncalled for. Comedy is a funny thing (no pun intended). Obviously if a comedian comes in and tries to make jokes without knowing the audience, he’s going to bomb big-time. But I don’t blame him entirely as I felt that he had not been properly prepped for this job. The contests are about the participants, not the host, but he hadn’t been prepped on how to pronounce names of the characters or the players that participated in the contests. That’s Blizzard’s responsibility to facilitate. My big question is WHY DO WE NEED A COMEDIAN AT ALL for this? I would much rather see a Blizzard staff person or community personality that knows and loves the Blizzard properties host the contests. Or, the pipe dream scenario: ask Chris Metzen if he’ll come back to host the contests. Hey, a girl can dream, right? 😉

Finally:

There really needs to be a “relax & chill” area for attendees that need to get away from the hyped-up crowds for a bit, or for attendees that have physical limitations. The Hearthstone Tavern would have been PERFECT for this. Maybe expand it next year and have signage so that people know its not just for Hearthstone.

I want to talk about this a bit, especially as it relates to BlizzCon first-timers. I’m both claustrophobic and slightly agoraphobic, and anxiety is a very real thing that I struggle with. I don’t think this is all that uncommon among BlizzCon attendees. My husband has back problems and while he isn’t physically handicapped and looks perfectly normal, standing/walking for long periods of time will cause him major issues to the point of being unable to walk at all, and there were very few places to sit and take a load off for a while. There really should be a place in the convention center to relax and cool off away from the huge crowds and the California sun. Somewhere that people can gather and sit and chat and trade pins or play Hearthstone/MtG or whatever without having StaffPro people yelling at them to “keep moving” or feeling like they are at a rave. I really liked the Hearthstone Tavern because of the chill tavern music and the general calmer feeling, it’s just a shame that we didn’t find it until the second day since Hearthstone isn’t high on our priority list.

If you haven’t been to BlizzCon before and you want to go, I most definitely recommend it. It’s an unforgettable experience and despite some bumps in the road, it was still so incredibly worth it in the end. The most important thing is don’t feel like you have to do everything.

• Pick 2-3 things each day you really want to do, and concentrate on those.
• The major panels and e-sports are on the virtual ticket, so try to prioritize things that aren’t on the virtual ticket, like the art & voiceover panels, autograph sessions, etc.
• Build in time for retreating to your hotel for physical/mental rest and getting food.
• Don’t take Twitter or social media too seriously. It’s a great way to connect with other people at BlizzCon, but don’t compare your experience to that of other attendees. It’s so chaotic that it’s going to be unique for everyone, which is not a reflection on you personally.
• Give yourself and your friends a break. If you want to do different things, split up and do them. Give each other that flexibility, no strings attached.
• Bring 2 pairs of really comfy shoes. If you’re cold-natured & want to watch panels or eSports, bring a light jacket.
• And please, if you go to the Hilton bar or the evening parties, keep an eye on your drink and the drinks of your friends. Be safe. Be smart. Take care of each other.

So. The Warcraft movie. I have to be honest here and say that I’ve been waiting for this for YEARS, ever since it was originally announced. We’ve lived through periods of no news, then the excitement that Sam Raimi was interested, the ultimate letdown when that didn’t work out, the excitement then that Duncan Jones was taking over and salivating over every teeny tiny snippet of news or teasers. I watched the gryphon 3D piece on the Legendary app. I was skeptical when I saw the first pieces of footage and elated when I saw the more recent footage with the CGI complete. I’ve seen the walkthroughs of prop sets, watched interviews with the director and cast, and have marveled at how somehow this all came together during a time of personal turmoil for Mr. Jones.

Bottom line, I’m excited for the movie. My friends are excited for the movie. And from what I’ve seen, it has captured the essence of Warcraft and has made real this beautiful and zany world of Azeroth that I’ve loved for 12 years. The initial reviews that we’re seeing from critics however, are not so positive, and while I don’t expect Warcraft to be a Citizen Kane-esque piece of film art, I think the critics are proving that they just don’t get it.

I’m also just going to put this here – the embargo on reviews is officially until May 30, so any professional movie critic releasing their review now is breaking the embargo. Consider that as you consider the source.

Hold on to your butts people. This might be a long one.

Let’s start with this review from Variety:

Okay, point in case. Warcraft IS A STORY BY NERDS, FOR NERDS. Yes, it cribs from Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and pretty much any other sci-fi/fantasy/geeky franchise. Of course the storyline draws from those influences. It’s a loving tribute to those franchises, a little *wink wink, nudge nudge* to geek and pop culture. The Warcraft franchise actually has developed a deep lore over the years, with tons of different factions and intertwining minor storylines that feed into the main narrative. Between the games, the novels, the comics, and the short stories, it would take an insane number of films to tell the story of Azeroth in its entirety. We’re talking a number similar to Star Wars or the Marvel Universe movies here. This first movie is simply the beginning of the heart of the story and the story told in the very first Warcraft RTS game from 1995. It was a simple story, but it started the entire Warcraft canon.

Now I know that this critic has never played the Warcraft games and isn’t familiar with the franchise. Part of what makes Warcraft unique is its ability to tell serious, dark stories (and they do get VERY dark, if you doubt me, read the novel Illidan by William King) while still retaining an almost tongue-in-cheek silliness. I liken it a bit to Deadpool – he likes to break the 4^th wall on a regular basis and while it gets bloody and violent, it’s also over the top silly. Blizzard doesn’t often blatantly break that 4^th wall, but they do give nods to popular films, viral videos, social media, and even player behavior itself. Even some of the characters within the World of Warcraft are named after popular players and developers. It serves as a way to connect fans into the universe, to give it heart, and insert a bit of levity. My point is that any decent Warcraft movie, in order to be uniquely Warcraft and not a generic piece of fantasy, has to include both the serious and the silly in just the right amount and sometimes at the same time. This isn’t exactly Tolkien, but it’s not exactly Monty Python either.

Moving on to The Wrap, which was a pretty scathing review overall:

Again, this person has never played the games. Warcraft is notorious for having big, visually impactful and unproportional gear and weapons on characters. It’s part of the Warcraft style, a visual orgasm of sorts that makes it easier to track fellow players and enemies during in-game encounters. The colors are bright, vibrant, and sometimes clashy. The materials are slick, shiny, and overly tactile. From a distance you can tell the difference between a staff-wielding cloth-wearing mage and a sword-and-board, plate-wearing warrior, and this is completely intentional. From the clips that I’ve seen, they have tried to keep that aesthetic alive. It was always going to look a bit tacky when making the transition to the big screen – if you want drab and realistic, go see Lord of the Rings (much love to that franchise, by the way). As for the music? From what I’ve heard so far (the Warcraft main theme), the music is exactly what it should be – a fresh take on the game themes, equally tribal and regal with a heavy percussive theme. That’s Warcraft as much as the Imperial March is Star Wars.

This is the thing that I will wait to give my opinion on until after I see the entire movie. I am already impressed with the orcs and the amount of emotion that the actors and the CGI convey. The human acting I am a bit concerned about, to be honest, but I’m withholding judgement until I can see it on the big screen.

And finally, this lovely comment by The Guardian:

Really? REALLY? So you’re telling me that a movie based on a story written in the 1990s is about today’s immigration issues? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize Tupac wrote this screenplay. It reeks of cheap click-bait and making issues where there are none intended. Warcraft’s writers, developers and fanbase are incredibly diverse, spanning all races, nationalities, genders, and ages. This was, quite frankly, insulting.

So, dear movie critics, criticize if you like. The actual viewer feedback from movie-goers in Europe has been overwhelmingly positive. Warcraft fans (and there are millions) are going to love it, that much I’m sure of. I’ll leave you with this little tidbit of a Guardian review of a teeny-tiny little movie from 2001 y’all might know:

Nerdgasm, OUT.

Even though Legion is still 2.5 months away, I’m starting to feel a bit like we’re in a race to the finish of WoD. The availability of character boosting, along with the changes to professions in Legion, has me re-thinking my entire roster of alts, making some last-minute changes, and trying to finish up a few reps and grinds before the Legion pre-patch (which I BET that we’ll see around the first of August, calling it now!).

So, I present to you, my to-do list, sorted by character.

Bhaelie – Paladin:
She’s pretty much done and ready to roll. Her professions are maxed out and I’m not going to bother gearing her more. Right now she’s running old raids for transmog gear and gold.

Betsie – Priest:
With reports of shadow priests being back to their old selves come Legion, Betsie has gone from a long-time-main-turned-backburner-alt to a possible main or main alt, so I have a little work to do on her. Her gear isn’t the best, but rather than focus on something that will be replaced during the first hour of quests, I’m focusing on professions. She’s an Alchemist, but had zero Archaeology, so I’m grinding that up so that maaaaaybe she can make Vial of the Sands some day. I’m also leving Herbalism at the same time, grabbing whatever herbs I can while surveying sites. After that – the Insane and Netherwing rep grinds! 🙂
– Archaelogy
– Herbalism
– Insane Rep Grind
– Netherwing Rep Grind

Chixlet – Mage:
She’s good to go. Again, not really geared but her main function is bag-making at the moment.

Staesia – Druid:
One-half of my designated farming team, her Herbalism is good but I need to finish her Inscription out. I think she’s at 611/700. Shouldn’t be too bad to finish. I’m not a huge fan of Inscription anyway.
– Inscription

Teaghen – Hunter: 
The other half of the farm team needs to finish leveling her Mining and Skinning. She had Leatherworking, but for a farm alt I’d rather see her have two gathering professions.
– Mining
– Skinning

Qhaelia – Rogue:
She’s a newly boosted character that I boosted explicitly for the purpose of lockboxes for the Insane rep. Her professions are going to be Skinning and Leatherworking, but I’ll only really work on those IF I get time after all the other characters are done.
– Skinning
– Leatherworking

Haijinx – Warlock:
She runs Thunderbrew Distillery, my bank guild, and right now I’m working on leveling Enchanting (for DEing) and Blacksmithing on her.
– Enchanting
– Blacksmithing

These days my main goal in Warcraft is hoarding gold or items that I think will sell for gold in Legion. Here’s the thing: my server, Dalaran, is a fantastic server. I love my guild and the folks on the server and the atmosphere. But as far as the Auction House goes, it’s definitely a buyer’s market. Prices on most things are low low low compared to other servers, which is good and bad. It’s good for new players – up until a few months ago, Dalaran was the biggest New Player server, and it’s still full of a lot of new players and altoholics, and not a very large raiding scene. It’s perfect for my playstyle – usually.

But for those of us that are goblin wannabes, it’s not exactly easy to flip goods on the AH.A few weeks ago, I set aside 5,000 gold, installed TradeSkillMaster, setup some custom groups for transmog and crafting items, and off I went. Bought up all of the transmog that was selling for way less than the TSM prices and still looked cool/unique, plus a good amount of crafting items, and started posting them on the AH. What a flop. 3 weeks later I had sold maybe 5 things, and had made maybe 1000 gold. I ended up either vendoring or disenchanting most of it. So that’s a no-go, at least for right now. Meh.

Another option is farming, which takes more time, but hey, what else am I going to do right now? I ran Firelands trash, Ulduar, and Bastion of Twilight on 25-man heroic just for the drops, and vendored almost all of it. That netted me about 15k gold altogether in a week. Not bad!

Finally there’s crafting. Right now I’m only really doing the Jewelcrafting daily each day on all of my alts, plus creating Hexweave each day for my Tailor. I’m making as many Hexweave Bags as possible at the moment and stowing them all away for the Legion launch. People will be coming back, buying bags for new characters, and the like so I think that market might be pretty decent.

I’m also working on realigning my character/profession matrix for Legion. Professions will no longer be artificially gated like in Legion, so having multiple Tailors, Alchemists, or Jewelcrafters won’t provide a big advantage. Instead I’m leveling Enchanting and Blacksmithing on my bank alt, leveling Leatherworking on a new (boosted) Rogue, and making sure that I have at least two characters covering each gathering profession. This is how I prefer to work anyway, so I really hope that Blizzard decides to cool it with the major profession changes going forward. No need to reinvent the wheel every expansion – just stick with what worked for years.

So far, between garrison missions, JC dailies, farming, and crafting, I’m up to 350k gold as of last night. That’s not a lot compared to most pro goblins, but considering that I’m sinking my teeth back into the game for the first time in years, that’s not half bad.

I’m constantly fascinated watching how game development companies market their products. Be it through Kickstarters, word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, or good old-fashioned advertisements, it’s interesting to see what decisions companies make with their marketing. It’s even more interesting when a monster company like Blizzard is trying to market multiple games at once. There was a little bit of kerfuffling yesterday on Twitter because of one little miniscule and inconsequential tweet:

Starting August 30th, kingdoms will burn. #Legion https://t.co/jaDMMmQei4 pic.twitter.com/hDvUbZpxuF

— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) April 18, 2016

Couple of things to discuss here. First, the date itself honestly isn’t that big of a surprise. I was telling a friend yesterday morning that I thought it would be out around August/September, and then a couple of hours later, BOOM! Called it. My theory is that the date is a purely marketing decision and has nothing to do with “when it’s ready”. Marketing teams live and die by their calendars, so I think their thought process went something like this:

Warcraft Movie: June 10. Influx of new/returning players due to hype and any free game/gametime with purchase. Allow a month and a half for those new and returning players to play, level, boost, find guilds, get through WoD content, etc. They are betting on a good spike in subs here.

August 2: Drop the Legion Pre-Patch. Allow four weeks for pre-patch events to build up to a climax. This will grab that movie spike and push it up even more.

August 30: Legion is live! Open the gates and storm the portals! And they’ll get yet ANOTHER spike on top of the movie and pre-patch numbers.

This all opposed to dropping the movie and pre-patch or launch at once… why go for one big spike when you can draw it out and possibly build on your numbers? Blizzard said that they are no longer releasing sub numbers, but make no mistake, they are definitely looking at sub numbers internally and trying to make the most of this event. So while this seems like so far away, and yes it’s a really long time for raiders to spend in Hellfire Citadel, there is a method to the madness.

Secondly, the method in which they released the information: a tweet as opposed to a big announcement as they did for Warlords of Draenor. Again, this has far less to do with the state of Warcraft and more to do with a Marketing Calendar. The thing here is to remember that Blizzard is now managing a portfolio of games and events, as opposed to having 1-2 heavy hitters. Overwatch is launching on May 24 so at this point in the calendar, they want all the major communications and hype to be about Overwatch. Once Overwatch is out, attention will quickly turn to the Warcraft franchise and we’ll all have the summer of Warcraft hype to enjoy. No need to fret, our time is coming very soon.

Garrisons & Mission Tables. Such a polarizing topic among WoW players these days.

WoW developer Watcher posted a long response to some of the concerns about the Mission Table v. 2.0 in Legion.  A few things I want to address here.

But at the same time, there are people who do enjoy the mission minigame, and there are some positive elements, such as a bit of offline progression, and the fun of looking forward to a reward waiting for you when you get home and log in. Not all aspects of the game are intended to appeal to all players – that’s part of the challenge of creating a single game that is played by such a diverse audience with different preferences and playstyles. But while garrison followers and missions were a substantial portion of the content in Warlords, Order Hall missions are probably more like 3% of Legion.

Let’s back up for a moment. Does anybody REALLY enjoy the mission mini-game? I have no doubt that when Blizzard pulls their reports on what players are doing when they log in, they see a whole lot of players running missions, likely on multiple characters every single day. But running missions does not equal enjoyment. Personally, I run missions on 6 characters every single day. It’s NOT fun. It’s NOT enjoyable. It’s NOT something that I think about while I’m at work and it’s definitely not something that I look forward to. I run missions for one reason: gold. It’s similar to running dailies in previous expansions, I’m not doing it because I enjoy the activity, I’m doing it because I want the gold and I feel like I’m missing out on gold if I miss a day.

I understand that there is a fair amount of cynicism, and there are some who are probably reading this right now and thinking that it’s just a bunch of nice-sounding words trying to cover up our sinister plan of mission-table supremacy. But even if we wanted to, we know that we can’t hide anything here. Well before Legion is in anyone’s hands, people will be experiencing the system in its entirety in beta, and we’ll be judged on that basis.

Cynicism is an understatement, and it isn’t undeserved. People have serious mission fatigue right now.

The core of the class Order campaigns is epic quest content that is custom to your class. If you’re a Death Knight, you might be working to raise a new set of Four Horsemen who are powerful enough to stand against the Legion; as a Mage, you may be investigating a plot that threatens to undo Dalaran from within; and so forth. That’s what the Order campaigns are. We start you on these chains during the level-up experience, but they’re intended to be a story that unfolds over time, complementing the game’s level-up and endgame progression.

Could this not be done with traditional quests? I get it, I really do. I love the idea of Order campaigns, class fantasy, and so on. But mission tables are not the right way to do it. The best way I can describe it, with no disrespect intended, is that the playerbase currently has mission table PTSD. The mere sight of a mission table is causing dizziness, nausea, flashbacks, and panic. Maybe the best thing to do would be to cut the losses, move the missions to traditional quest experiences, and just move on.

First off: Yes, I am planning on going to BlizzCon! Mr. Moxie and I normally go to the beach or something for vacation (if we take one), but we wanted to do something different this year. We were debating about various locations, but I realized that BlizzCon is something that I’ve always wanted to go to, plus it’s close to Disneyland, AND I’ve never been to the west coast or a game convention. So BlizzCon it is! We don’t have any guildies that are planning on going at the moment, so it’ll just be the two of us. That’s okay in my book – we’ll have freedom to come and go and hit just the sessions that we’re interested in. Still, if you’re reading this and planning on going, let me know! I’d love to meet folks!

On to the main topic… private servers and Nostalrius’ imminent demise. Honestly, I totally understand why people play on private servers. It still breaks my heart when I go to old favorite zones like Darkshore and Ashenvale and they’ve been ripped apart by the Cataclysm updates. They don’t feel the same, and I don’t like the new versions at all, so much so that I no longer level alts through that content. The fact of the matter is that if I want to go back to those places to level alts and experience the nostalgia, I can’t unless I go to a private (vanilla) server. I don’t play on private servers for ethical reasons, but I understand why some people do.

On one hand, I feel that Nostalrius wasn’t competing directly with Blizzard for a couple of reasons. First, the experience on Nostalrius is not offered by Blizzard at this time. Until Blizz opens vanilla servers, there is no real competition. Second, the majority of people that play on Nostalrius are not going to sub to retail just because the private server isn’t available. They aren’t interested in the current version of WoW. Third, Nostalrius wasn’t actually making a profit… people could play for free and could provide optional donations. They were barely making enough to keep the server going.

On the other hand, I used to work in the intellectual property industry. One of the unspoken rules of IP is that if you want to protect your IP, you have to defend it, at least some of the time. If you have registered intellectual property but never actually defend it, it may as well not be yours. Most companies pick and choose their battles. Fan art, homemade crafts, and the like is usually skimmed over, but blatant usage of intellectual property to provide services similar to the owner, or to give the impression that they are the owner or an affiliated company, are typically pursued swiftly and aggressively. From that point of view, I can totally see why Blizzard works to shut down private servers.

In all honesty, the answer is for Blizzard to open a vanilla server. One vanilla server. Set it up with the last update before TBC launched, and then let it ride, no further updates. I think demand would be huge to start with, but over time population would stabilize and it would be a home for a small hardcore vanilla fanbase and a revolving group of tourists that just want to pop in for the occasional nostalgia. It would also be a historical point as well, so that gamers that started in Cataclysm or later can experience the game’s roots. Blizzard has of course said no to this in the past, but to be honest, they’ve said no on a lot of other things before that have since come into fruition. It make take a while, but I would be willing to bet money that this will happen at some point in the future.

Today I’m just going to leave the text of this SUPER-LONG post by Community Manager Lore here. This is what I’ve been soapboxing about lately. This is EXACTLY the kind of communication we’ve needed to see during this expansion: transparent and honest. As they say, bad news doesn’t get better with time, so it would behoove Blizzard to be honest about delays and what is causing them in a timely manner.

Kudos to CM Lore for posting this, even if it was late. This is what we want. Please, please give us more of this as it happens and I think you’ll find that the players will be more receptive and forgiving.

—WARNING: HERE THERE BE PERSONAL OPINION DRAGONS—
I’ll start with this: we’re a software development company. More precisely, we’re a video game developer. Anything and everything can change in the software development world, for reasons that are often impossible to predict ahead of time. As a result, we’re hesitant to 100% commit to anything. We’ve learned that, no matter how confident we are at any given point, there’s always a very real chance that there’s something we haven’t thought of that makes what we want to do impossible.

The whole “weeks, not months” thing makes an easy example. At the time that was said, we firmly believed that it would only take us a few weeks to polish off Tanaan and fix a few areas we knew were likely to have some bugs, and then we’d roll out the flying patch. It’s easy enough, right? We just change a few 0’s to 1’s and it’s all done.

Then we started finding a lot more bugs and glitches than we expected. We found tiny pockets of the world that weren’t properly obeying the flight rules, and would drop players to their deaths if you happened to fly through them. We found issues with certain mounts and class abilities that were caused by hotfixes to resolve exploits, which resulted in those mounts and abilities not working. We found situations in which if you fly into your Garrison at juuuuust the right angle, you get disconnected and can’t get back onto your character for a good half hour or so.

Finding those bugs, implementing fixes, testing those fixes, finding more bugs (sometimes caused by those fixes)… it all added up to a lot more work being needed to actually enable flying than we had originally expected. And as a result, what we originally thought would only take a few weeks ended up taking a couple months.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not making excuses here. And I don’t at all blame the players who are frustrated and upset that we didn’t hit the timeline we originally stated. Honestly, we probably should never have said that it would only take a few weeks. That was clearly a mistake, and I apologize for it.

But that should hopefully give you an idea of why — ESPECIALLY given the missteps we’ve made in the recent past — we simply can’t 100% guarantee that nothing will go wrong between now and September 1st. Truth is, we’re more confident in this release date than we usually are this far in advance of a patch. That’s why we felt that we could give a date at all.

There’s just always — ALWAYS — a chance that something can go wrong at the last minute. We could, say, be finishing the fixes for the last couple of dismount bugs on the Saturday before release, and when we compile the final build, all of a sudden activating your flying mount teleports you to the graveyard in Westfall and deletes the contents of your inventory. Is that likely? Not really, no. But it’s possible, so we need to make sure you’re aware that things can change, just in case something like that does happen.

There are alternatives, of course. We could just not give a date until we know for 100% certain, which is our usual strategy. Like I said, we feel a little more confident in this date than usual, so we thought it was okay to share it.

The other option would have been to try to have the patch ready to go by the 1st, but not actually plan to release it until a week or so later. That would let us announce a date we’d be extremely confident in, but we’d essentially be delaying the release of flight even further, and we definitely don’t want to do that. So, we gave a date that we feel pretty good about, with the reminder that we won’t be able to release if something catastrophic happens.

This ended up being a giant wall of text, but I’ll leave it with this: I know it’s super frustrating when it feels like we’re not being as open as we possibly could be. And I know it’s equally frustrating when it seems like we’re completely unwilling to commit to anything concrete. I spent 8 years as a player before I became an employee. I know exactly how it feels.

I just also know that it’s better to not expect much and be pleasantly surprised, than to feel like a promise was broken. At least that’s my opinion.

Regarding the transition from 6.2.1 to 6.2.2: we actually had two potential plans that were dependent on how things fell in terms of development timelines, which is why some of what we’ve said seems contradictory.

The core of it comes from our PTR testing process, and the fact that we are blessed with some extremely savvy fansite operators who are capable of combing through patch data, finding nuggets of information, and drawing educated conclusions based on that information. If we’d put, say, the Illidan-themed Murloc pet into the PTR data before Legion was announced, that would have been a pretty big tip-off. At the same time, we needed to get PTR testing for flight underway as quickly as possible, so that we could make sure we found all those silly obnoxious bugs I mentioned in my earlier post.

So, our strategy was to create two separate versions of the patch. 6.2.1 would have all of the relevant patch features (including flight), and 6.2.2 would have everything in 6.2.1 plus the upcoming stuff that the art team has been working on. In the unlikely event that everything went EXTREMELY smoothly with flight, we’d have the option to go ahead and push out 6.2.1, and 6.2.2 would come separately. If not, we’d just carry on with 6.2.2, which was basically the same patch plus some stuff that other parts of the WoW development team had been working on. As you’re all aware, things did not go extremely smoothly with flight, so the latter option was what ended up happening.

I’ll make a silly analogy. Think of the patch like a bus. This bus is waiting for a high-profile dignitary (flying) to finish up some negotiations, and as soon as she’s done with those, she needs to leave to get to another conference. That bus will not leave without the dignitary, and it will leave immediately once she’s on board.

That said, the bus is also capable of taking on other passengers (who for the sake of the analogy we’ll assume are headed to the same place). The longer the dignitary’s negotiations take, the more opportunity there is for other passengers to hitch a ride. The other passengers, in this case, are things like Mercenary Mode or the new pets and mounts. If the dignitary had finished unexpectedly quickly, there would be another bus coming by later that could take those passengers, but since she hasn’t, the bus company decides to just take one trip instead of two. Make sense?

One other note: 6.2.1 was briefly labelled as a “Release Candidate” on the PTR prior to the switch to 6.2.2. “Release Candidate” is an internal term we use to basically mean “we think we might have fixed everything.” As it turns out, we hadn’t. In this case, if we hadn’t had the transition to 6.2.2, 6.2.1 would have just stayed as “Release Candidate” until September 1st. But since we had this weird extra “hide your kids” strategy going on with the Legion stuff, the title was switched back as part of the changeover. I completely understand why that looks like “Blizzard delayed the patch to add some pets” to those who aren’t familiar with our internal workings.

Regarding “you should have designed the world with flight from the beginning!” We actually did, we just had to do a lot more development after that, and some of that stuff broke flying in ways we didn’t fully anticipate.

For example, when Warlords released, our servers were unable to handle the massive numbers of players trying to log into the game. Our server technicians pulled some absolutely crazy magic to dramatically increase the number of players who could be on a given server at one time. That solved the load issues, but ended up creating a large number of the dismount/de-instancing issues that players who have been testing flight on the PTR will have noticed.

Another example: a few weeks later, some exploits surfaced that were allowing certain players to fly in clearly unintended ways (such as Druids being able to leave Ashran with the Flight Form book still active). We hotfixed those exploits as they came up, but some of those hotfixes broke flying in Draenor in ways that continued even with flying properly enabled.

Obviously, we knew that both of those things were likely to cause some issues, we just severely underestimated how widespread (and difficult to resolve) those issues would be. And we didn’t want to delay rolling out those fixes, because they had major implications for the live game (especially the server stuff), where no one was supposed to be able to fly at the time anyway.

Given the choice between letting thousands more people actually play the game and potentially breaking something that (at the time) we weren’t sure was even going to matter later, it was an easy decision. But even easy decisions have consequences, and now we’re having to deal with those in 6.2.1/6.2.2.

So, again: if you suspected that the new content would cause problems with flight, then why did you choose to heap MORE features on top of flying in his patch, knowing that would cause delays and thus upset people?
Because we knew it wouldn’t, and it hasn’t. None of the other content in 6.2.1/6.2.2 has delayed flying in any way.

There are multiple teams of people here working on multiple things. The people working on fixing up Draenor for flight are not the same people working on Mercenary Mode, or the class tuning changes, or the pets and mounts, etc.

So yesterday I shared about how I came to play on the Emerald Dream RP-PvP server – but I didn’t go into what exactly I consider RP. Roleplay is one of those things that I love the idea of more than I probably enjoy doing it, to an extent. Sitting in a tavern and listening to characters have a in-character conversation is great, and I love being on a server where that is welcomed and available. But when it comes to participating, I sometimes have a difficult time. That same sitting around and having in-character conversations feels weird because in real life I’m not that social either. It feels like I’m always trying to think of things to say and how to word them so as not to offend and keep things fun and interesting, and that’s more like work than anything else. Why yes, I am an introvert, thank you very much.

This changes somewhat though if we’re doing a roleplay event. We’re going to march through the Eastern Kingdoms on our way to pay tribute to Uther’s Tomb? YES. Going to have a Horde vs. Alliance roleplay event with some PvP action. Oh yeah. Costume contests, beach parties, in-character dungeons and raids. Sign me up! I prefer activities where there is action and the subject of conversation isn’t dependent on me, but on whatever we’re doing at the time.

The other aspect of roleplay that I think you don’t hear a lot about is just old-fashioned game immersion. When I play, I do try to get into the mindset of my character and play as her in my head. That doesn’t mean I yell GLORY TO THE ALLIANCE before every pull or speak in archaic dialect. It’s just when I’m killing those 20 muckgoblins, it’s not me playing a video game killing muckgoblins for 13,000 xp and 2 gold. It’s Teaghan Rose Stoutheart of Thelsamar, Initiate of the Argent Crusade and Harbinger of the Light killing those muckgoblins for GREAT JUSTICE and to collect their livers so that this sweet family can have dinner tonight. And sometimes if somebody is questing in the same area and asks me a question, I’ll answer in a dwarvish accent (which isn’t so far from my normal southern accent) so as not to ruin the immersion for them.

I think there’s room for lots of different types and levels of roleplay as well… more on that tomorrow. 🙂