I just watched a video of the big worm bossfight in Stonecore – great, he’s up and down and in and out of the ground but there’s jack all to show a giant big bad worm just burrowed down.

Phasing is great, but it takes players out of the way of world pvp. Teleports are convenient, but …same. Town guards are great, but the re-spawn means that no matter what you do, everything will be the same in an hour.

Meh. If a few more zones were capturable like Tol Barad I’d be happier – kinda hard to make it an even fight, but I think it could be done with restricting number access and also restricting server/faction transfers to only go to the underdog sides of each server.

I was more disappointed when the Shattering patch itself hit. I’d thought that we’d be walking into the immediate aftermath of Deathwing’s appearance — so a Stormwind on fire, panic in the streets, tsunami in Auberdine, etc. Instead we have a new pretty pretty fountain with that statue of Varian, and SW’s mostly rebuilt. I didn’t start really appreciating the politics of the situation until I started levelling a new shammy right after, when I realized that — hey! — there’s a lot more Horde areas than there used to be…and wow, what happened to the Barrens?

I think the game itself is playing just fine right now, but a little more transitional exposition would have been a big help. This could have been done in a few different ways; a “catch up” cinematic would have been an easy fix (“While you were away here’s what’s happened and here’s where it’s at now…”), a more gradual transformation of the world leading up to Caty would have worked instead of the overnight Shattering — say, elemental invasion, then a “immediate post-Deathwing” patch, THEN a “five years have passed” patch. If they really wanted to go long-term, current players 70+ (so folks presumably out in Northrend) could have even gotten “news from home” postcards in their mail, starting right after Caty was announced last year. While it wouldn’t have jibed with what Azeroth looked like at the time, things like the Horde moving in on Ashenvale wouldn’t have been quite so jarring.

If you’re not interested in having a discussion, don’t comment.

I think it’s probably the best way they could have handled it, and it works. And our newer characters get to take part in the world the way it is, and forge ahead with new stories, experiencing what our higher level characters caused to come into life. When my Human Hunter visited Redridge and met watch Captain Parker, Darcy and Libby, she was meeting a family that my level 80 druid helped, in a small way, bring closer together years before. It’s really a nice touch to the game.

My complaint really is simply that I was not prepared, from previous media announcements or discussions, that there was going to be a move forward in time in addition to the cataclysm of Deathwing rising. I tried to remain free of spoilers, and I guess I did that a little too well. I expected all I needed to know about the world within the game, and my place in it, from the game itself, and not from internet website announcements.

It’s not big deal, I knew at the time I wrote the post that we’d all get over it VERY soon indeed, but at the time I did think it was valid to talk about.

Little did I know this old post was going to experience a form of necromancy!

“Not to put a damper on things, but how could Blizzard really make what you’re asking work from a gameplay perspective? Org has burned to the ground, I get to take part! Wait… where’s the bank? Where’s the auctioneers? Where are my trainers?!?

How about leveling in the old world? While some of the current quests could work in a world between the old and the new, there are others that would not fit within that transition. Should Blizzard create new leveling content that will only be available for a couple of months?

I guess it would be nice to have experienced everything. However, it simply is not practical. Blizzard is good, but they’re not miracle workers.”

I am a RPer, and knowing the timeline change – how much of one there’s been, etc – has proven absolutely vital to not having entire plotlines fall apart. A lot of other players have had similar. We can’t let how it feels OOC affect that there has been no real sudden change IC aside from the cataclysmic eruption of Massive Dagron.

There is no years-long timeskip. There has been at least one blue post about this. At most, it’s been a couple of weeks. Deathwing’s clawmarks are still BURNING on Stormwind’s walls. Right before you arrive to Darkshore, it’s wrecked, and you’re out finding survivors of an emergency that literally just happened. Sentinel Hill has had Alliance peasants hammering at the same blocks for six years with no progress – and now we can see what they’ve been doing all that time. It’s not years later.

It feels like it is. But it isn’t.

There is a bit of a disconnect between logging off on Monday in the Old Azeroth and logging in on Tuesday in the new, but as gamers in an MMO, we have to accept those breaks in reality. It’s the same kind of disconnect we have to live with when we tell Mankrik where his wife was. After you leave, he’s still sending people out to find her. It’s the same kind of disconnect pre-Wrath when we log in one day and find a bunch of boats and a huge harbor in Stormwind going to Northrend.

I would have loved to have seen the Shattering happen live, but I understand why it wasn’t. Maybe over the course of the expansion, we’ll get a Caverns of Time instance where we go back and stop the Infinites from stopping it, and thus get to witness it on a smaller scale? That would be much easier to design and implement for groups of five people to do repeatedly than a 20-minute event that happens once for the entire server.

Part of me is happy that major events are in the books rather than reenacted in game. Nothing would ruin the death of Cairne (one of my favorite racial leaders) quicker than watching Garrosh kill him…with Trade shouting Chuck Norris jokes and linking Thunderfury and assholes using things like fireworks and that dancing fire to cause as much distraction as possible.

They could have done massive phasing to move people through the Cataclysm… But the logistical problems there would be a nightmare. They’d have to have designed it to work at all levels, and they would have been lambasted for forcing people to go through a whole lot of content railroad style, with all the problems of phasing where everyone in your Guild is on different phases of different zones.

They could have done incremental static shifts, but that would be a lot of art and a lot of work on content that would be around for weeks at best, and that probably was not deemed to be an acceptable use of resources.

As is they have the not insignificant problem of the timeline of the expansions. Up until now at least you could say that it was chronologically linear going from Vanilla, to BC, to Wrath. But now “Vanilla” is the present, and a new character steps into the “past” when they experience BC and Wrath content.

Now that Arthas is destroyed and the great war is over, here we are, weary soldiers returing to our homes in Azeroth to find that life moved on without us, new fortresses have been built, encroachments on territory have been made, tensions between factions are running high, war between Horde and Alliance is growing ever more likely, Varian Wrynn has turned into such a massive egomaniac that the prick erected a mighty statue in tribute to himself in front of the steps to Stormwind Castle, and, well, we’re finding out what it’s like to have done two tours overseas while life goes on without us.

Right? That’s a pretty powerful, realistic thing to have written into the flow of the game.

Back when I was in the business of being deployed, my life was filled with holes. I would simply drop out of life for several months. Then pop back to pick up loose ends. I was lucky to have a good spouse who could hold together all the normal pieces of modern life that doesn’t understand these things; bills and other finances, kids, etc. But coming home was always a culture shock no matter how many times one did it (the transition from Sandland makes one really appreciate the color green). Its an experience that few walks of life in the civilian world can really comprehend. You’ve captured the essence of it, BBB. And if we stop to think about it… maybe Blizzard has as well.