WoR Maintenance Downtime, Ghostcrawler Chats With Lowered Expectations, Blue Tracker Updates

Maintenance Downtime

We're going to have maintenance downtime today to move World of Raids to the same hosting facility Curse.com uses, which means much better hardware.  While the site is down, you'll see a maintenance splash page with some content I've prepared for the downtime.

During this time RSS feeds and the blue tracker will not be functional, but once the site is back up everything should return to normal.

Ensidia Defeats Hodir Hard Mode

I'm not dedicating an entire news to this because it was accomplished with something that will probably be hotfixed soon (and it isn't a "World First" due to that; Ensidia feels that way too), but it is worth mentioning that Ensidia now only needs to beat Mimiron's Hard Mode for access to Algalon the Observer.  Read this link to understand why Ensidia doesn't feel it's a world first.

Quote from: mek (Source)

So we killed Hodir today on hard-mode. Up until this point and as stated in my blog we considered this boss completely impossible. It's not well tuned like Freya or Mimiron, luck is by far the biggest factor in this encounter and you need it in spades. We bashed about 15 hours into trying to do it when he was first changed to 2 minutes. We tried 8 Mages, we tried mass Death Knights, just about every possible comp you could think of.

Lowered Expectations Chats With Ghostcrawler

Kitts of Lowered Expectations recently had a special visit from Dr. Greg Street, a.k.a. "Ghostcrawler," at a university luncheon, as well as a presentation.  Kitts had a chance to talk WoW and game design with Ghostcrawler, among other things, and shared some details on the Lowered Expectations blog.  Below is a brief summary, but be sure to check out both entries at Lowered Expectations (Entry 1: Today's Luncheon with GC: WoW? | Entry 2: Ghostcrawler and Blizzard).

• Sindragosa will be in patch 3.3 (duh?  Icecrown in 3.3 + cinematic is kind of a giveaway, right?)
• Future expansions will likely come every 18 to 24 months, though he wishes they could release them quicker than that.
• Hero classes probably won't be included in every expansion.  It's also unlikely they'll follow the same model Death Knights did (starting at 55, for example).
• They're giving a hard look at improving classic level-up zones (ala Dustwallow Marsh).  Some examples were the Barrens, Darkshore and Stonetalon Mountains.  Ghostcrawler is particularly unhappy with the Barrens, as it doesn't make sense for it to have a drastic level difference in the north and south.
• Replenishment is a buff crucial to raids.  It's being designed from here out as something raids are expected to have.  Some content may limit its usefulness, like General Vezax, though.
• Arenas shouldn't be looked at as a requirement like they currently are by a majority of the playerbase.  It should be less emphasized compared to PvE content, where most development time is spent.
• Ghostcrawler is the person who came up with most of the fish in Northrend (and maybe some before it, though he only joined the team during Wrath of the Lich King's expansion).  Marine Biology degree for the win?
• He likes to do a lot of testing by actually playing the game.  Yes, you heard it here -- he does indeed play!  That's not to say he doesn't test on GM characters too -- he just prefers it be on his normal play characters when possible.

Blue Tracker Updates

I've made a few more visual updates to the Blue Tracker.  They're fairly subtle, but hopefully they make viewing posts more pleasing and easier overall.  Quick summary-

• Made the post areas a bit less "blocky."
• Posts now have a grey border to allow them to stand out a bit better.
• Spruced up Blizzard poster avatar frames to have a similar feel to the official forums.
• Swapped the "Source" link with an image similar to the official forums.

Please let me know what you think of the new look for the post area of the Blue Tracker in the comments.

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