Who Moved My Cheese?

So, how yall doin with the patch 3.1 stuff comin out?

Some people absolutely thrive on getting access to new stuff as soon as humanly possible. There's new armor and weapon art to look at. New dungeon and boss encounters. Changes to talent specs, spells, abilities, stats, whatnot. A tournament world event thing, involving championing the city of your choice. Profession changes. Changes to hunter pets, ammo, quivers. Changes to glyphs glyphs glyphs. Dual Specs.

All sorts of changes.

And if you follow WoW Insider or more than one or two blogs, the hype surrounding each and every change is out of control.

BREAKING NEWS

Really? Breaking???

A large passenger jet recently crashed into a residential neighborhood near where I live, causing a .5 mile fireball, killing everyone on board and injuring/killing people on the ground and destroying houses. Complete tragedy for the family and friends of those involved, heroic effort by fire fighters to limit the extent of the damages to the surrounding area, and caused a big impact on the whole community.

I'm gonna say that that initial news report warranted the label "BREAKING".

Video game patch? Not so much.

But I do understand that many of us take the game seriously, so we'll let it slide.

Anything good in there?

I've mentioned that many of my guildies are hitting the PTR to see Ulduar. Given the hours we raid (max 12 weekly), we don't try to compete for server firsts or anything, but we do like to push ourselves to get the most out of the time we do have. So we'll hopefully see a few encounters on the PTR to help the early days of live server action.

Having never done that before, I'm a little excited to try it out. Sure, like one of the readers here pointed out, that might lead to experiencing doldrums or boredom more quickly after patch 3.1 is released, but I'm willing to give it a whirl.

What about the business opportunity?

We're already seeing posts cropping up about business opportunities. Such and such item is changing, which means so and so material will drop/rise in value so TAKE ACTION NOW!!!!! And the climate will only get more and more urgent as the business folk discover more and more impacts on the economy.

Sure, if you are able to anticipate changes, you can make or save a pretty penny.

Your average player? Probably not that concerned, other than maybe learning about some new daily quests that'll come out to grind out a minimum wage.

The rich will get richer, the folks who only care about having enough dough to enchant and repair won't really give a hoot. I think I count as middle class maybe, somewhere in between the true rich and the i-cant-respec-back-to-my-raid-job-because-i'm-broke ppl, having enough money for frivolity, but earned via gathering and questing rather than buy low/sell high or whatever. I doubt the middle class cares too much about the patches.

The only one I actually care about

This post was actually inspired by one of the dozens and dozens of "3.1 PTR" posts at WoW Insider. This one.

Seems like they might change Fool For Love title to require only 6 out of 8 candies, which means that when I log into the live patch 3.1, I'll instantly be a fool for love, since I've got 7/8 candies at the moment.

And I think that annoys me.

Not game changing in any way shape or form. Nobody's house blew up or any airplanes crashing.

The seasonal event came and went, for better or worse, you either got it or didnt. Sure, I, like many others, felt the seasonal event was soured by the short duration and total dependence on the random number who-haa.

But its over. And it was soured. It gets no less sour by granting me the title after the fact by altering the requirements.

Its like competing in the olympics, not getting gold medal, then 6 months later, video review of the race shows that the gold medal winner stepped his foot out of bounds so he's disqualified and you win gold....6 months later.

Yes, you carry the achievement with you forever, and you hang the gold medal in your trophy room or wear the title around azeroth.

But the moment came and went, and you missed out on it. I highly doubt you'll get a Wheaties box picture 6 months later.

Getting the Lover title months after the event ended will just be stupid and anticlimactic.

I might feel differently if I was trying to get the reward for all the seasonal stuff (special mount, maybe????), but I'm not in the brew of the month club, so that'll be waiting at least until September 2010 I think, and who knows if I'll even be playing WoW at that point?

Who Moved My Cheese?

I seem to always get annoyed by all the hype when big patches first hit the PTR.

This patch is the first big content patch where I'm part of a guild that's cleared everything up to this point and ready to jump in head first, and I think that actually has me even more annoyed by the hype, which seems counter intuitive.

But I suppose that's me....counter-intuitive and fearing of change.

MUST. STOP. READING.

After I finished this post, I read another at WoW Insider, which has now been removed from my feed reader for the next week. No Soup for Insider! One Week!

Luckily, enough regular bloggers write about incoming changes, so I likely won't miss out on any breaking news ;-)


Normal mounts won't dismount when landing in water. Cool.

New aquatic mount added to game. Also cool.

Inferring that this means the next expansion pack will be about some Maelstrom or whatever? Are you $#@#$ing kidding me?


Whether true or not...its just ludicrous!

LK has been out for ~3 months. And they're already leaping to conclusions and making half-assed extrapolations about the next one.

And I though it was only jack@ss bloggers who did shoddy research and then made outrageous incorrect claims.