I would argue that there's a third concern: Are the high end guilds stable enough?

Just looking from the outside, you guys seem to have very high churn, and are constantly recruiting. Maybe not the Top 20 guilds, but the layer just under that, the one that's 1-3 deep in Sunwell. And that instability has a large effect on the lower tier guilds, as we're the primary source for your new recruits.

A lower attrition rate, and more stable high end guilds, would be beneficial to the lower tier guilds.

Getting back on track, has anyone else been surprised with the dead stop to information leaks regarding WotLK?

I was under the impression that since it was alpha, patches were quite often. Yet, since that uberleak with the client being downloadable a couple weeks ago(?), new information has been sparse to nonexistant.

I don't know. maybe my google-fu needs work.

As the saying goes, "Leading edge is bleeding edge". Almost all guilds have churn, because you can't stop real life. The only way Blizzard could affect churn due to burnout is to make content that didn't require the high amounts of time and effort that cause the burnout. Unfortunately, that also pretty much means the content is (too) easy, and the people who want content like that would quit. Anyway, this particular topic doesn't belong in a thread about Wrath stuff, so I suggest making a new one to discuss it further.

As far as the gates go, I think it was a little disappointing they removed the original concept of the gates, where everyone on the realm helped open them.

I know a few high end guilds complained about it, but honestly, as one of the majority who isn't in a high end guild, I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't really care who gets world first kills. It in no way affects my play experience.

However, feeling like I could play some part in helping the most progressed guilds on my realm through the sunwell, that was a good thing, and would have made the realm feel a bit more like a community working together than a scattered collection of guilds that WoW to me currently feels like.

Am I alone in wishing that Blizzard would do more things towards making entire realms, rather than guilds, the central community of WoW? It seems to be the market Warhammer is gunning for: the whole idea that all your PvE and PvP actions add up to something tangible in the RvR war.

Well, given that most of the information available in the sandbox has been found, all that's left is to hope people violate the NDA and leak information from the real alpha servers. And while this hasn't happened very much, I have to say that I'm not exactly dying to know what's going on.. it'd just be an issue of "will level 73 blues replace my T5?" and "so what's the venture company doing in Grizzly Hills?" Which I suppose would be interesting and all, but.. meh. I remember that not much was leaked from the NDA-protected TBC servers, except like a screenshot of the Ring of Blood rewards (shard your Ati'eshs at level 65!)

I wouldnt expect Blizz to have lots of patches out all the time. Thats usually not their way. They will have some content out now, not because its everything they have finished, but because they want focused testing, for better or worse.
Then later down the road they add a bunch of new stuff, and let people focus on that. Rather than constantly drowning people in new features, so the stuff that arrived yesterday is forgotten and untested today.

That said, I actually think there has been a few patches out for the alpha, but it was very small version changes (like 8533-->8538 or whatever) , so probably just a few bugfixes.

Blizzard finally got the Alpha forums up today so it is likely we will see a Alpha patch within the next day or so. Not having the forums up yet was probably one of the reasons for waiting since its a bit hard to get good feedback on a new patch to the Alpha without a forum. The Alpha for TBC was patched about every week and I would imagine WotLK will start being like that until the Beta.

Yea 8337 did not add anything new and is basically the same thing as 8334. 8337 seems to just have the new Wrath files while it relies on the files on the Burning Crusade installation for everything else.

Though I don't disagree with you, you also should put yourself in the "hardcore" shoes before you make comments like this. Sure, you might not care about world-firsts and it might not affect your gameplay, but I'm positive it affects the thinking and drive of those top-end players quite a lot. Doesn't their opinion matter just as much as yours since they're paying the exact same fee?

I would love to see more server-wide events. I still have fond memories of the top 5 guilds on our server getting together in Moonglade for the Eranikus event and I think it would be a great thing to include more inter-guild and server wide efforts like that. There's potential for some great stuff in Wrath (the assault on Icecrown seems likely for a major event since its being patched in much like SSO/Sunwell) and I'm sure we'll get something.

Individually they're paying the same fee. Collectively they're paying maybe 1% of the fee of people like me, if that. Anyway, I find the whole "I pay the same money as you, I deserve X" thing to be rather overdone.

Besides, the rest of my post made it pretty clear that the competition could simply be shifted towards which realm was the world first, rather than just which guild. I think it'd be rather nifty to have everyone involved in pushing for a world first in whatever capacity they are able, hardcore and casual alike. I'm not trying to drive a wedge here, I'm trying to bring people together.

The first leaked build was 8303 which most of what we know comes from. The installer was just the regular PTR one afaik, it copyed vanila and TBC data files to a new place and added WotLK stuff to it.
8303 was patched with a 100mb patch to 8334, IIRC some minor art changes and fixes to spells and talents.

8337 came from a second leaked installer, there doesn't seem to be a patch to upgrade 8334->8337. The installer installs only about 10mb of data, the rest it downloads (via HTTP) in small chunks as needed while playing the game.

From what i have seen (and it's limited, as you can't log in and triger it to actualy download stuff) the content wasn't changed in 8337.

EDIT: Just noticed it now:
8303 and 8334 install as "Wrath of the Lich King Friends and Family Alpha"
8337 is just "Wrath of the Lich King Alpha"

Realm events and achievements are nice and fun, but why piss on the foots of the hardcore raiders? There was a ladder on which realm was the most advanced on the QQ Island and I hope to see more content like that but push it futher.
Nothing to do with raiders but helps out the whole realm and make "realm progression" mean something.

Blizzard tried to do Server events during the AQ gate opening, and in my opinion is "mostly" failed. It did nothing except force top guilds to farm mindlessly (Hello Elite Insects), and the casual populations to farm casually (Hello Reputation Tokens, the vendors for which are -still- available). And in a lot of cases, the fun events (Eranikus, Ringing of the Gong, etc.) didn't include the entire server.

One of the main problems was the simple fact of lag and server stress. Several of the first Servers to open the AQ Gates crashed because hey got overloaded with people that didn't play the server, but wanted to see the gates open.

Also, anyone that didn't play back then didn't get to experience the event. And from what I've seen of Blizzard, they like to include as many people as possible in a lot of "events". This is part of the reason that Holiday events come back each year (on top of the fact that they are part of everyone's real life). They are events that you are guaranteed to experience, as long as you play long enough. Got the game for Christmas, but didn't get to take part in the Holiday Celebration? Just play for a year and you can see it next year! Wearn't playing during the Once-In-A-Lifetime event? Well you don't ever get to experience that now, sorry.


Frequent Server-Wide events would definately be fun, and wouldn't lock anyone out as long as they were frequent enough. And they -can- foster a sense of server community, cooperation between Horde & Alliance, etc; however, they are hard to balance effort vs. reward, as well as taking up design time (which is probably one of the larger reasons we don't see more of them). All in all, I don't expect to see many "unique" server wide events in the future.

I partially agree and partially disagree with this.

I agree that the AQ event was far from perfect, and indeed there is a great concern over server stability, which is why other similer events like the Naxx opening and TBC opening ones were more global and random.

However I dont think that Blizzard care about people missing stuff. In fact they tend to push towards having special "unique" one off things that denote how old people have been ingame for. I personally dont agree with that concept, but meh, its not my game :p.

Things like the PvP titles, the AQ rewards, and in the enxt expansion the bear and TBC titles, are all things recent and old that simply arn't available to everyone, regardless of when they joined.

I myself am rather peeved over the AQ events, I wasn't fortunate enough to be in a top end guild or the "chosen" one to finish the questline when it was meaningful. I actually did finish it when we were 60, and infact I probably went through a lot more hassle, having to rely on friends and motivating people for the "experience" rather than the cause of just opening the gate. I didnt expect anything, and still enjoyed the achievement, however I was a bit miffed why the title was limited to the people that rang the gong only, like the mount wasnt enough of a reward.

I could never be assed to pay to transfer onto another server to ring like a lot of people did, but I always felt that the AQ event would of bbeen a lot better for everyone, if people could restart it by banging the gong again. It wouldnt of taken much to allow anyone to bang the gong upon final completion of the questline, one time only of course, starting off a smaller invasion similer to the main event, that way everyone COULD experience it, and even if they didnt give out further mounts, the title would be a nice reward for those that took the effort to finish the entire line.


Events like the SSO one were actually really nice, it felt good to feel like you were building on the world. More events like that would not be a bad thing imho, however they still suffer from the situation where once its done...you dont see it again outside doing the repeatable identical but newly worded quests.

I would be interested to see situations like the SSO come up again, but have an enemy that "fights back". That is, the players can effect the situation and build on the world, but if they slack off or dont do anything, then the NPCs will gradually "reclaim" the land, relocking the content again. This ofc would have to be carefully tweaked, so that it was feasable to reclaim the lands, maybe tweaking the requirements down the more outdated the content gets, but it would allow everyone to experience the content in the fullest, and would give a lot more special events to go back too if you felt like it, rather than just having old content just being "repeat x instance again".

We do know a bit about the event that Blizzard is planning for the opening of Northrend. Off the top of my head, I can think of:

1. Some researchers were contacted to help out with creating an interesting disease. (Interesting to the researchers, but their requirements sounded like it would have to be interesting for the game as well.) I believe the disease was supposed to arrive before WotLK. Makes sense given the Forsaken lore going on up there.

2. Tuskarr models are in the current game already. I actually have no idea if that means anything.

3. Blizzard does want an event.

4. Money sinks are supposed to appear before the expansion. I don't think anything was said about what those might be.

5. We can suspect that they won't overlap the event with the Fire Festival or the Halloween event. I believe they did test two simultaneous events on the PTR, however. Certainly Darkmoon Faire has overlapped another event before.

I'm sure there's more out there.

There was actually some spell data for a spell called "Scourge Infection", it wasn't particularly interesting from the data I had though, but my data isn't complete. It's tooltip when on someone is simply "Sick." and it has no other noteworthy information. Spell IDs of note are 45771, 46708 (Both of which are Scourge Infection) and 48309 (Which is Cure Infection). They could very well be used for something else entirely though, with the main part of the expansion being Scourge themed and everything.

The original gate idea was stupid. Why should the opening of the gates be dictated by people who will never be limited by one? More directly and importantly, why should high end guilds on servers with larger populations get an advantage over guilds on lower pop servers? That's what it amounted to originally. Look at the Gem Vendor as a good example. Proudmoore had it opened weeks ago while some servers still don't have it now. If the gates were left in their original state it'd be the same thing. It would be EXTREMELY demoralizing to be a guild capable of defeating the content but hamstringed by a low server pop.

Horrible, horrible, horrible idea and I'm glad Blizzard saw this before putting it live.

83 expertise on a set of leg 0.o. Thanks for the link though, was debating whether to gear up my existing alts or just level new ones, this makes the choice for me and some others I am sure.

yeah, 83 expertise is more than slightly stupid. Especially with more than 40 strength on the same piece.

Lvl 71 boots with 41 int (best epic boots in game have around ~30int). This must be indicator that Blizzard is planing to boost Intelect stat on items.

Goes to show that even if level 73 WotLK blue = ilvl 125 epic in stat allocation, you'll probably hold on to your epics simply because the itemization sucks. Of course, I'm mostly making this judgment based on those boots (there's probably T4 loot better than that in terms of caster stats), but yea.

The Tuskarr model was actually removed during the same PTR that accidentally added it.

Blizzard always did say they wanted to return the Scourge invasions that occurred when Naxxramas was released and I would imagine we will be seeing that as the event but maybe just slightly edited.

Note that the level 74 tanking 1H weapon has 97 base dps, and the level 75 DPS 1H weapon has 109 base dps. On the assumption that weapons will not be gaining 12 base DPS per level, I think there's some finagling of the item budget going on. I'm not so up-to-date on melee itemization formulas--does it look like the DPS one dropped unspent points into base damage, or did the tank weapon suck out a few points for stamina, like how caster weapons put it into spell damage?