Recent changes in my Real Life have forced my Online Life to pretty much be non-existent. A full time job and full time college will do that to you, plus lots of other personal obligations, such as helping my wife study for her classes – which she passed, with flying red, white, and blue colors and became an American Citizen just yesterday – but I do miss being able to pass my days away in Warcraft. Especially now that we have ‘the new shiney’ of patch 2.4.
This patch, which if you play WoW you know about, and have known about since December likely as not, introduced a brand new island full of quest and/or event NPC’s. I only managed to squeak out an hour of playtime in the new lands so far, including the first 5-man dungeon, and was impressed with the flavor. I’m a player who enjoys some story with my mindless questing, and reading over the progression I found it to make a lot of sense. It takes the concepts of the AQ War Effort, mixes them with the sheer brilliance (at least to me) of Daily Quests, and plops them down in the eye-watering land of pink and red that is Sunwell. While I know many of the players in my guild are making plans for the unlocked heroic badge loot, I have a much more simple goal, which probably says more about where I came from than you’d expect, and that is to get that 1000 gold title. Oh, and the illusion orb from MGT. Mmmm, illusion happiness.
The zone unwinds itself as being unlocked, and will be unlocked fairly quickly, unless, and this is a hope, the unlocking works similar to WoW existing reputation system. Some realms are reporting over 85% finished with stage one (of 4 main stages and several sub stages), less than 24 hours after the servers came up. While the quests will not be lost after the phase unlocks, only changed, a major event that ends up lasting only a week seems a bit…dull. Especially when you consider that this zone will be the last major release before the next expansion, which still has no date, nor confirmed beta. I doubt anyone thinks that Blizzard has not started on it, but no beta has yet been announced. I’ve seen sites listing as early as a May 28, 2008 date (EBGames had this up at one point, currently showing 11/03/08), nothing official has come out, besides the statement that this would be the last major patch before WoTLK.
If you haven’t been in the game recently, the 2.4 patch seems to be a good time filler for the multitudes of bored 70’s roaming the game, and will likely keep a lot of us busy for a good while. It is definitely a good pocket filler as far as cash is concerned, and in WoW, gold is worth its weight in repair bills.
I, too, am eyeing that title.
I suspect it was meant to take longer than a week (and may, on some servers), but the excitement of the new has *everyone* doing the new dailies. As opposed to the AQ event, this one’s actually better for the mainstream crowd than for the bleeding edge, and costs them nothing. Go go Blizzard for mobilizing your players.
The resurgence in player motivation has me remembering the good old days of Asheron’s Call the first. Monthly content updates, even if they were relatively minor changes, like one or two new “quests” worth of storyline, gave the explorers reasons to come back again and a again (and in this case, without the risk of running into a lvl 70 mob in a lvl 20 zone and losing all your best gear).
On the European forums, one of the blues has said they expect it to take about a month for the full unlock of the island on most servers.
Saw that quote snagged to our guild’s forums – a month to unlock the badge weapon vendor, aka stage 3. This morning my main play server Garona was 4% of stage 2. I know that we hit 100% of stage one at 11pm last night since I was online and there was people screaming at others to do their dailies and get us done. I fully expect the badge vendor by this weekend, at the latest.
I would expect that after the badge vendor is unlocked that a lot of interest will slow down – the hardcore kids really want that vendor.
Do all four stages of the sunwell have to be unlocked to get into the 25-man raid part of the island or is that already open?
So far I’ve just been enjoying the instant honor calculations and the lighting quick queue times for all the battlegrounds. Seems like a lot of people decided to start doing battlegrounds because of the new blue PvP gear.