The AFK Invasion

WoW's Cataclysm launch event is up and running, including a purely cosmetic feat of strength for being present when one of each type of elemental rift is closed.  For the initial phase of the event, the rifts respawn on one-hour timers from the last time they were killed, so it's relatively hard to tell how long you would have to wait for a new one to appear. 

There are three approaches to this challenge:

1. Wait for the next phase of the invasion to start, which will no doubt increase the spawn rate to the point where you can't AVOID completing the feat of strength.
2. Fly around looking for a rift that is open.  Each zone tends to host rifts of a specific element, so you can look up which zones you need and just go roaming.  Northrend is the most crowded, so open rifts are likely to be found and killed before you can reach them.  The old world is the least crowded, but you can't use your flying mounts so it will take longer to search.  Outland theoretically sits in the middle, though I didn't have much luck when I went there.
3. Find a very well known spawn point, such as the gnoll camp outside K3.  Park your character there and alt tab out to work on your blog.  If you're lucky, there'll be dozens of players hanging out in the same place, slaughtering anything that would otherwise pose a threat to your AFK character, and then slaughtering the rift itself in seconds when it finally spawns.

The upside to approach number 3 is that it's an amusing social event, with players from both factions showing off various rare pets and mounts while they wait.  The downside is that the rift will probably die before you get back to take a screenshot.  Oh well, at least my achievement log is updated. 

  The scene while waiting for the rift to spawn, many more players actually showed up before it finally appeared. 

Missing Out On Mabar

Normally, limited time events are just about the top of my priority list, but DDO's Mabar Festival somehow failed to make the cut. 

The Mabar event appears to be as much of a tech demo for instanced public group content as an actual event.  Delara's Graveyard, which is ordinarily a public lobby devoid of anything hostile, is suddenly overrun by the undead.  Non-aggro mobs of approximately your level spawn near you when you enter the zone during the event.  They drop tokens which can be exchanged for loot.  When enough tokens are handed over to the NPC's, players can participate in a public raid encounter for more tokens used to upgrade the loot. 

On paper, it's nice enough, but the execution is a bit rough around the edges.  As a low level player, it's easy to get yourself killed because either you accidentally hit something much tougher than you (low level skeletons and high level mummies don't look all that different in the dark) or because you wandered too close to something that someone else was fighting and got one-shotted by its AOE.  Higher level characters earn "mote" currency more rapidly, and prices are set accordingly.

My guess is that this event is more fun as a max level character in a group.  Given that I had neither, I gave the event a brief try and called it a night.  For unknown reasons - perhaps related to server stability questions, as DDO has not previously had anything that puts this many players in a single combat zone - the event was very short, and ended before I got back to it.  Oh well, maybe next year. 

Parting Wisdom From DDOCast

Jerry Snook, host of DDOcast and a real legend in the DDO community, will be leaving his show after 3.5 years and 191 episodes to go actually work on the DDO community team at Turbine.  He's certainly done enough for the community to earn a slot on the team; the podcast has played a big part in keeping me informed and involved in the game while I work on so many other projects.  Fortunately, the show will go on in the hands of two capable DDOcast regulars, but it won't be quite the same without Jerry. 

As part of his final episode, Jerry took some time to offer up some tips from a podcasting veteran to anyone who is looking to start or improve a podcast.  Though some of the tips are specific to the audio format, I'd actually endorse the discussion (starts at about the two hour mark of the farewell show) for new bloggers as well.  Concepts like establishing a track record, paying attention to the tone and length of your posts, and making sure that your content is easy to find are equally applicable to the written word.  If Turbine is looking to launch an official podcast in the near future, they would be well advised to listen to the new guy. 

Balancing Polish And Ambition In Cataclysm

Chris at Game By Night argues that the state of WoW's Patch 4.0 is so bad that Blizzard has forfeited its claim to superior quality and polish.  Personally, I'm not at all convinced that the bug and balance situation is significantly worse than we've seen in the past - take the time when patch 3.0.8 forced Blizzard to disable Wintergrasp to keep it from killing the servers for just one example. 

(Or the highly unreliable server stability for game's first 3-6 months, when, incidentally, there was no PVP system and extremely limited and buggy raid options.) 

That aside, I'm more interested in addressing the second half of Chris' argument. 

Is the lore revamp all or nothing?
We've known since Cataclysm's announcement that the old world revamp was only slated to cover levels 1-60.  Zones like Azshara and Felwood are much worse off than anything you'll find in Outland because Blizzard had not planned to offer quests all the way to the cap to begin with, and didn't have time to do more than a cursory effort on the upper mid-levels before the game's initial launch.  (After launch, they had level-capped characters to worry about, and could afford only token efforts on the leveling game.) 

The problem is that this revamp is not just updating the local quests to meet modern design standards (e.g. not repeatedly sending players back and forth across multiple zones).  The timeline of the entire world is actually advancing past the fall of the Lich King, which means that these old expansions are literally years in the world's past. 

Blizzard made a comment at Blizzcon that they simply did not have time to redo the first two expansions, and Chris jumps on it, accusing them of not finishing the job of updating the lore so that the game can release in time for the holidays.

More Ambition, Mo' Problems?
WoW is currently two years out from its last expansion and an entire year out from its last significant new content.   The looming expansion has posed a morale problem for many guilds for as much as six months now, and there's a very real argument to be made that even an unfinished expansion would be better than none at the moment.  More importantly, the only reason why it's taking so long is because Cataclysm is actually a very ambitious expansion. 

Wrath of the Lich King launched with about 1,000 new quests.  Cataclysm is launching with a whopping 3,500.  Cataclysm will actually offer more new zones per level than Wrath did (five zones for five levels, versus eight zones for ten levels - I don't count Crystalsong because there are like two quests in the entire "zone") even while gutting and overhauling literally thousands of old world zones and quests (and adding two races, with new zones of their own).  The same type of math works on dungeons - there will be fewer completely new dungeons, butt more total dungeon work as Blizzard revamps a dozen old world leveling dungeons.

It's simply not reasonable to expect Blizzard to take all of that and then also expect them to go through and redo the entire contents of the game's first two expansions.  If the rules had been that Blizzard must revamp the entire game up to the present day lore or not touch any of it, an expansion like Cataclysm simply would not have been possible. 

If "when it's ready" for Cataclysm does indeed end up being a bit less polished than 1.0/2.0/3.0 (again, all of which had their growing pains), that's the cost of having Blizzard actually try something difficult and ambitious instead of churning out another cookie cutter 10-level expansion.  Time will tell, but it looks to me like the results will be well worth the price.