I wanna go

With the Blizzard World Wide Invitational tickets now going on sale, I'm getting rather whiny. Why might you ask? Well, Paris is one of those cities that I would love nothing more than to live in, and so an excuse to connect my love of French culture with my love of WoW is one I doubt will come again. But it's a chance I will have to pass up. Yes, I still work in the gaming industry (albeit for "The Man," in gaming form) but I simply don't have a valid reason for going. I also don't have the cash.

It's sad because I know the city so well. I spent 6 months there during college, "studying" the language and the culture. If I were still working for WoW Insider, I might be able to justify a trip out to the City of Lights to cover the event, although I anticipate the higher-level bloggers will be sent to stay at a poshe little place on the Rive Gauche. If you do go, make sure you visit Marie Antoinette's fountain at Le Jardin de Louxembourg for me, and eat at least one Nutella and banana crepe purchased from a street vendor in the 6th. You'll thank me later.

If any of you are going to the Invitational and need some dining and not-so-touristy things to see while you're there, lemme know. I bet my favorite fondue place still serves their wine in baby bottles.

Renigging on the Sunwell

It's a very good thing I am no longer working at WoW Insider, because I would most definitely have to answer to Mike Schramm for my complete botching of my guess at the release date of Patch 2.4. It wasn't until this week that Blizzard gave us the trailer for the last content patch coming to WoW before the next expansion. So when I said February or March, I guess I was wrong. There, I admitted it. Happy?

I have to revise my estimate now in face of the fact that the raid instance is not even available for players to test on the PTR. Until guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum get into the instance and provide that all-too-important balancing feedback to the devs, I can't reasonably tell you when I expect the patch to drop. Sad really, because I was on a streak this year, predicting the last 3 patches with a reasonable amount of accuracy. Oh well, we are all human, n'est-ce pas? I honestly think that this is a sign that we will not have that huge gap between patch and expansion that we experienced with TBC, as long as the expansion is released sometime during the early part of next year. I tend to think that the development process is speeding up (relatively of course) over there at Blizzard, and that they have learned that an 8th month gap between patch and expansion means losing beaucoup players, and a certain amount of interest in those players that hang on.

What does this mean for the timing of Patch 2.4? Nothing really, only that the longer it takes to push this up the shorter a time we will have with the new content and the expansion. Is this a good thing? Mebbe not. Perhaps Sunwell Plateau will become another Naxxramas, but I doubt it. I think this content will be meaningful for a while yet, and should take Nihilum at least a month to conquer it. At least we won't have to look at completely restructuring guilds with the coming expansion as we had to do in the past.