Being part of the “press” has a lot of benefits. Being able to attend Blizzcon for free is definitely one of those benefits. While there, not only do you surround yourself with other nerds that share their passion with you. You get to be the first to see really cool stuff and, most importantly, you get to rub elbows with those that create the game many of us consider home.

After attending panel after panel, it was the moments in between that you really saw how much the Blizzard employees believed in their games. If you happened to have caught any of the panels by downloading them through youtube, you only really got half of the information.

The panels in the main exhibit hall were pretty packed, but if you went up to the panels in the smaller room, you were often treated to the big-named employees taking an extra 20-30 minutes after a panel to answer one-on-one questions with the fans. Watching Chris Metzen discuss the possibilities of the Druids using runic magic to assist in shape-shifting into the bear form to hearing the Lead Database Designer marvel at how many copies of WoW sold within the first 48 hours of its original release back in 2004 and how the servers just couldn’t handle the load at the time brought a gleam to their eyes that you just can’t see when you watch the panels.

That gleam became very contagious. After two days of watching the Blizzard employees geek out about WoW I returned home with a renewed hope for World of Warcraft, its progression and ultimately the new expansion I made my trek back to my home state in a state of glee. Hoping to glean some more information before making any news posts I hop on the forums and my house of Blizzjoy came crushing down.

The first page of the general forums was filled with hateful and belligerent posts ranging from basic misconceptions “Why do I have to give up my character to play a Death Knight?!” to the completely misinformed “ZOMG Don’t change all the Paladins into Death Knights, I want to be a Holy Warrior not some necromantic pantywaste!”

My first reaction was to jump on every forum and correct all the false information floating around. I noticed, however, that most of the posts were trolls and were dealt with rather quickly. My attention then turned to the “All of the time you spent playing this game is completely invalidated when the expansion comes out!” posts. These posts actually gave me pause. Did they have a point? Was there a better way develop progression in the game with out making any gear you gain worthless?

The real problem with MMOs is that they are constantly progressive. If the game was released and then the company closed up shop, it wouldn’t last more than a few months if that. So the development company must always be pushing their game further and further, not only in its content, but in its technical capabilities. We’re fortunate enough with WoW that we get our technical and content updates via regular patches as well as the official expansions.

Blizzard seems to use the content patches as methods to advance the current level cap’s progression. Recently they’ve been doing this with content that is more difficult than was previously available. Either via quests that require epic mounts or through instances and raids that are nigh impossible without the gear provided by previously available instances. This allowed a linear progression but also created large gear gaps and discouraged new players as they would need to find a good guild to be able to catch up.

If progression were to continue this way, it would take new players at least a year to catch up on progression, assuming they could find a guild that would run them through the lower raids.

Blizzard remedies this by raising the level cap with its expansions. This allows many to feel like the playing field is being evened out. Many argue that this invalidates the gear that raiders spent all that time to gather. But when you spend the time to think about it, any progression resets your gear set. The real problem for raiders is that those that haven’t spent all that time all of a sudden show up on some kind of even playing field. The truth is, the field never really evens itself out. Upon entering any new content, anyone that raids has a significant advantage over those leveling into the new content. Having one of either, I can tell you that Hellfire Peninsula was much easier with a raiding character than my brand new horde paladin.

So instead of thinking of all the reasons the new expansion and new content is going to suck. Take a second to look at how awesome this game has been to us, remind yourself that the Blizzard team loves this game just as much as we do. Also remind yourself that when you may disagree with their view and approaches, think about them before flaming the boards.

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