It is more complicated than it seems. They setup exclusive agreements with press etc to release information and they get lots of free (and favorable press) from whoever they create that agreement with. It is not fun as a fan but that is how the system works.

In this case, there is some cause for annoyance though. The podcast was listed specifically as one of the reasons for such little information release these last few weeks. Then the podcast gets released and there is next to no information contained within. This one had somewhat poor production quality. It seemed more like an afternoons worth of work as opposed to multiple weeks worth. So they likely had some problems behind the scenes or they had to change parts of it because some info became off limits etc.

Very. They could at least have previewed some of the new boss voiceovers or something.

This is utterly pathetic as well. "We realize because this dungeon is coming later in the sort of Burning Crusade cycle it’s very important that the loot be relevant to people who are playing the game now". Level 115 blues and 110 epics are totally irrelevant when everyone can get a set of level 123 epics from honor grinding, or level 146 epics from the arena.
Who is going to run this new dungeon? PvPers won't care, people raiding even something as low as Karazhan won't care, what's the point of it?

I'm going off topic, but I keep seeing people rag on the podcast for not having new information. Honestly I think the fact that there's a podcast at all is a huge improvement in communication. Not everyone scours WoW info aggregation sites for the latest news like many of the readers on this forum do. Give them a bit of a break. Hopefully the podcast becomes more regular than the "state of the game" (or whatever it was called) posts on the forums that we got all of like 2 of in 3 years. Even if it just regurgitates information that was only available as exclusives to magazine X, and then repeated on mmo-champ/wowinsider/etc. it's a step up from the current system of magazine exclusive -> patch note 5 months later (as far as official channels go, that is).

That being said, if they continue the podcast in earnest, they should set aside certain "exclusives" as being for the podcast as if it were another magazine/website/whatever. That would give more people reason to listen to it.

That's silly. Blizzard is the 10-billion pound Godzilla (way above gorilla ) amongst the other MMO developers. If Kaplan even so much breaks wind in a podcast, every site will cover it, no "special agreements" necessary. This isn't some two-bit start up trying to make it big.

Epic level doesn't imply tier 6 gear. Like I said, I was hoping for a trial-run of something resembling 5-man progression. My wish for WotLK is to be able to group in 5-man dungeons and still have a form of progression in the form of difficulty and risk/reward. I was just hoping that Sunwell would offer an option for that. Instead it's going to be a regular dungeon with an epic item and a heroic dungeon with a bunch of epic items. I'm just dissapointed that Blizzard is missing an opportunity to try something new out (5-man progression beyond leveling/capped level/heroics).

I'm thinking more than certain news outlets pay Blizzard some money to get exclusives for their magazine (to drive sales). If they spill these exclusives in a free podcast, then the magazine is annoyed that they payed a bunch of money to blizzard.

I mean, it seems logical right? If you're a gaming magazine and you put out there that your next issue will have screenshots of Sunwell Plateau loot and quest descriptions, you don't think people are going to buy your issue?

People gearing alts, and latecomers who want to gear up for raiding higher level instances, wont have only karazan and badges/heroics (edit, the existing ones of I mean of course). Certainly it is not gaping hole in the game, but kara is a 1 week reset that you can clear in a few hours, and there is only so much you can get from heroics/badges. People do have some catching up to do at this point if they are new or working on a new character, they have addressed leveling recently, now they are doing much the same with level 70 gear progression. Certainly there is pvp as you mentioned, but I for one will not go that route, especially not for an alt even if the gear is better. I play the game to have fun and currently pvp does not cut it. I will be looking at this new gear quite closely.

Yeah, that's par for the course in the gaming industry. Sunwell was planned a while ago and they had info on it at Blizzcon, but they'd already given the exclusive to the September Games for Windows, and simply could not talk about it, even when someone outright asked at a panel, "Hey, any chance we'll see Sunwell as an instance?" Blizzard is obviously tremendously important, but keeping positive ties with the gaming press remains a priority, and I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon.

Anyway, regarding the podcast, as was noted above, I agree that somehow it does seem that 2.4 may be quite a while off. That's troubling. I know this is why Blizzard never gives dates, but how is it possible that in November, Tigole was hoping to get 2.4 on the PTR by Christmas, but now in mid-January they can't even offer the sorts of tidbits and previews that ordinarily have come out 2-3 weeks before every new patch (posts on class forums getting into planned changes, etc.)? It's odd.

The "exclusive agreements" are what gets WoW on the cover of a gaming magazine instead of Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty 4. If they release all of their info in a podcast, then it gets a little sidebar blurb on page 15 that might briefly summarize some of the tidbits. But if Blizzard contacts the publisher and says "We've got a ton of new info about our game and we want to go exclusive with you guys as a cover story" then it works great for both of them. WoW gets a high profile story and the magazine gets to be the only initial source for the info.

I suppose they might simply be delaying it until more than n% of the population have got into BT, and ignoring the people that have already finished. I'm a little confused by the supposed placement of the 5-man dungeon in difficulty terms, but they may well be basing that on the numbers of people still running each of the other normal mode instances. I'm quite ready to believe that there are vast numbers of people that are running the existing 5-man dungeons and heroics, but haven't transitioned to the 10-man game. Presumably the new 5-man is for them, hence pitching the loot and difficulty at the top end of the existing 5-man scale.

Obviously the raiders wont really care about the loot in the 5-mans. That is what the raid zone is for.

The point of it is for the players who have finished the 5-man dungeons out there and want something new. There are a lot of them, even if they don't frequent this site.

Likewise there are other sites like this guy: How Raiding Hurts WoW More Than It Helps | Random Battle who thinks that the 25 man dungeon is completely irrelevant.

The whole reason the game is popular is because it can cater to multiple play styles. If you play solely with raiders and pvp'ers, then yeah, you might miss the whole point of the 5-man. But friends of mine hate PvP and don't raid, and I'm sure they will enjoy the 5-man, as it will give them something new to do, and overall better loot than the other 5-man instances that are out there.

Blizzard needed momentum a while ago. Now they are a freight train. Given nearly 10 million subscribers, a footnote on the last page under the copyright info would sell copies...yet back to what I said earlier, only one person would need to buy it and the rest of the world can find it on the internet.

From a post in early/mid November, they were actually anticipating 2.4 on the PTR at the start of December. Given the massive - and still incomplete - 2.3.2 buglist, though, I certainly expect the somewhat-confirmed 2.3.3 at this point. This would imply that 2.4 is very far off. I am generally not an optimist, but I suppose there is still some small hope that 2.4 is coming soon. The podcast was very obviously recorded over a week ago, possibly before the holidays. There is a chance that more extensive 2.4 information has been delayed to give the inagural podcast more visibility. In that case, Sunwell could be up on the PTR Any Day Now. Not holding my breath, though.

That list that mmo-champion highlighted isn't a list of 2.3.2-specific bugs, and most of them aren't new or even all confirmed as bugs, I don't think. It's just a running compilation of the issues people have reported on the bug forum as potential bugs. Some entries on that list have been on their "Known Issues" lists for months now.

The latest WowJutsu shows that 870 guilds worldwide have killed Illidan. Lets be generous and say 35 people raid regulary in each of those guilds. That's 30k subscribers out of a subset (raiders) of 9 million subscribers that are bored with the raiding game -- and of course some of those guilds just killed Illidan recently so it's not quite that many. My argument is that while it's disappointing from my perspective, in the big picture I don't think it's really a major concern to Blizzard. Since there's been no downtick in subscribers, obviously the casual person is not bored with the game yet either, so they don't feel the pressure to get this out. They can take their time, for whatever reason they have. I will say one thing though -- it better be fairly polished when it comes onto the PTR. A long PTR like the one last summer (2.2? I'm bad with patch numbers) would be a debacle.

This is true, but a fair number of those "Known Issues" were slated to be fixed in or around 2.3. Some of them even earned a place in the patch notes at some point, but still went unfixed on live (examples: Pain Suppression and Blessing of Protection). You would think that they would take another crack at those bugs before releasing another major patch.

Getting KZ epics on a single day timer is what most people have been wanting for many months. Sure none of us care about that but we aren't representable of the average player in WoW. Most people aren't in T5 content, let alone T6 content. And the idea of getting 7 Prince quality epics per week instead of just 2 will be great. Also it will be great for those guilds struggling to gear up in ZA and KZ to switch to 25s.

And PvP gear, regardless of what season, is not ideal for raiding purposes for most specs. It gets the job done and we even brought people in with full S2 gear a few months ago, they just chain potted until they got PvE gear. So yes this is a good thing having more epics available. And I wouldn't doubt there will be more epics on this faction grind we all have to do, give the casuals more free epics. Might even be a necklace or something that gets better as you rep up.

Damn, it really seems like they're missing out on an opportunity to me.

It's a little surprising to me that Blizz doesn't aggressively nurture its online community, instead preferring to go the way of magazines (which are themselves going the way of the dodo). Seems like mmo-champion, worldofraids, even gameriot/ming would all love to have secret exclusives, and their format is much more amenable both to getting the information out in a hurry (because the magazines take a very long time to design, print, and mail), but also to getting instant feedback from various slices of the community that they're trying to cater to.

In some cases obviously that instant feedback would be worse than worthless, but the ability to engage with us at some higher level than the "NETH I FARTED LOLOL" in their own forums has to be worth something.

Gurg/anyone else at EJ, have you thought about the idea of setting up a more long-form news-oriented blog, google-adding it up, applying the prestigious EJ stamp of approval, and asking Kalgan for an interview? Seems like there's value being left on the table and someone needs to pick it up.

I don't think you're grasping the concept.

Sure, hardcore WoW players are going to go wherever they have to to get the latest info on the game. Swedish magazine scans, podcasts, forums, wherever. They are not who Blizzard is concerned with when it comes to promoting their game.

It's the thousands of subscribers to PC Gamer (or whichever magazine) who don't play WoW but see it on the cover of their latest issue that Blizzard is going for. It's the people browsing the magazine aisle at the store who see WoW on the front cover. It's the people who go to their regular gaming news site and suddenly see a huge article on WoW, not the people who check MMO-Champion first thing every morning regardless.

The primary goal of the exclusivity deals is to advertise, not to inform their existing playerbase. If they wanted to inform their existing players, they'd just put a big link on the Launcher.

So back to the usual business model of love for the new signups, no love for the loyal customers? I mean, wow, new players should know what's coming in 2.4 before existing players do? New players won't even know what that new info means! Example: "More dailies in 2.4" translates to "douisdji3782njhd" to a new customer.

An expansion I can understand, but not a patch.

I don't see the point of these podcasts coming out before the real content is released exlusively somewhere. Seems like something they should be doing after the magazine issue has run its course, and *then* they could release what would be new info to anyone not buying or scouring the internet for the page scans.

Again, you are just completely failing to grasp the idea.

Their dedicated, existing players are going to get this information anyways, so why would Blizzard not do it in a way that gives them a large amount of publicity in the mainstream media as well?


Saying that making major announcements about content through mainstream channels instead of smaller channels that cater only to existing players is "showing no love for the loyal customers" is useless and whiny QQ. It's going to be on the front page of MMO-Champion within 30 minutes either way.