This week, we’re giving away a code for a free FigurePrint. Listen to this episode of The Instance to win!

Big News Of The Week

There’s A New Patch In Town, And He Rode In On A Dragon

After years of lurking in her lair, battling brave adventurers who travelled from afar, Onyxia has been reborn — and she’s stronger than ever before. To commemorate the upcoming fifth anniversary of World of Warcraft, the classic Onyxia raid encounter has been updated in the newly released patch 3.2.2.

• Onyxia has been retuned!
• The luckiest adventurers will have a chance to receive the Brood of Onyxia, a very rare 310%-speed mount modeled after the Brood Mother herself.
• Armor Penetration has been nerfed
• There is now a daily battleground quest for everyone all the way down to level 11.
• Leatherworkers can now learn Blessing Of Kings, I mean drums of blessing of kings. Paladin drums or something.
• Check your glyphs! Seven glyphs have been modified.
• You can now only queue for two BGs at a time, and you have to enter the BG faster now.

Don’t Forget The Harvest Festival

It runs until Oct. 3. There’s some cool free foods and drinks just outside the major cities, and a quest for you to go pay your respect to a lost hero of your faction.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

The Saga Of The Crawler Of Ghosts

As we reported on The Instance a few months ago, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street decided to take a more active role as lead designer of World Of Warcraft, and add some community management cred to his job. This past Spring, Ghostcrawler suddenly became a fixture on the official WoW forums, almost daily taking on the posts and opinions of anyone and everyone who chose to go toe-to-toe with him. It was a boon for us – we got much more information about what Blizzard is thinking and doing with WoW than ever before. But as anyone who has ever spent much time in an online forum community knows, you never wrestle with a pig. You just get muddy, and the pig likes it.

Town Cryer

Dan S. writes: About the security tokens – Square Enix with Final Fantasy XI unveiled the security token recently and to get people to purchase it they made it so it granted them an additional bag. Perhaps WoW should implement something like this. Just take that first bag you get and if you link a token to your account, *bing* its a 22 slot bag now. After all what would be a quicker way to get scott to upgrade then to offer him more item slots.

Drop Of The Week

Murky And Lurky Are No Longer Lurking

They have arrived! Fresh from their debut at BlizzCon 2009, the fun and adorable murloc plush dolls, two of the hottest items for sale at the show, are now available to the general public via the Blizzard Online Store. The blue Murky plush doll and the white Lurky plush doll are only $15.00 each in the Blizzard store.

Also, check out the Jinx Brewfest Shirt!

This week, we’re giving away a code for a free FigurePrint. Listen to this episode of The Instance to win!

Additional show content provided by Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.

Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and SquareSpace for sponsoring this episode.

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Big News Of The Week

Blizzard Drops The Curtain In Austin

The famously tight-lipped Blizzard management team morphed into a bunch of chatty Kathys at this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference, which ran from Tuesday through Friday of this past week. In Thursday’s keynote, Bioware’s Allen Vogel introduced a very large crowd to Blizzard Entertainment’s J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce, who proceeded to peel back the layers and tell us more about the inner workings of World Of Warcraft development than ever before.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Well, Maybe Not Then

In a thread on the World Of Warcraft forums this week, a poster named Shadowavatar from Boulderfist repeated what we read from an e-mail on this show two weeks ago:

Blizz needs to include an Authenticator in every single box of the next expansion. Increase the price on the expansion by a 3 dollars and just stick one in every box. Seriously, this will cut down on the hacking and the thousands of calls per week you get for people being idiots about their account information. This should not even have to be sugjested by a subscriber, this should be obvious to EVERYONE working on WoW at Blizzard.”

And he got a response from Blizzard.   Bornakk replied with the following:

While I like the goal, just forcing an authenticator on everybody won’t help them understand it which is what they first need. There are still a lot of people who don’t know what an authenticator is or what it does for them. I’ve seen it several times where a guild gets hacked one at a time and after getting hacked the person gets an authenticator but nobody else does until they are hacked. If you have an authenticator I think letting your friends and fellow players know what it is and what it helps with would be the first big step in security. We hope to have more messaging out on this shortly to go over all of this in more details and then you can just send them a link to go over it all.

Town Cryer

Specialist John M. from FOB Diamondback in Mosul, Iraq writes:

My brother has told me about Northrend and some of its various nuances especially one in particular. Apparently there is a region up there that physically looks one way when you enter and then magically changes when you complete quests and become aligned per a certain faction of sorts. He, as well as myself, were astonished with this. He mentioned that my other brother could stand next to him and not see particular features in the region such as vendors and flight masters etc. Two people with literally the same game looking at two different (worlds). My question is- If I don’t get Cataclysm my world will still be patched and altered right? Or, will they do that magical thing like in Northrend?

Nicole Z. from G4 TV writes:

I recently came across your site and thought it was a great place for any fan of the game. I wanted to invite you to take a look at the World of Warcraft page on G4tv.com so you could see the depth of content we offer as well. Let me know what you think!

Drop Of The Week

The Abyssal Maw

Azeroth’s native elementals wreaked havoc across the world while they were under the influence of the Old Gods. To keep Azeroth safe from these threats, the titans imprisoned the Old Gods underground and banished the savage elementals to the titan-constructed Elemental Plane, a secure dominion where the elementals could dwell without harming Azeroth. This week, Blizzard posted the 2nd major update to their Cataclysm Expansion mini-site, all about The Abyssal Maw.

Additional show content provided by Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.

Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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Big News Of The Week

Faction Changes Abound

It has now been two weeks since the WoW faction change system went online, and this week we’re starting to hear some of the shakeout. The jury is still out on what the faction change service means for WoW, other than the obvious fact that long-lost characters are being brought back into regular play now, but we’ve got quite a bit of observation to run down.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Is There Something Going On With The iPhone Battle.net Authenticator?

We’re not so sure, but we’ve gotten three different reports of players having trouble with their iPhone Authenticators. The culmination of this concern came in the form of a post on The Instance forums, titled “Do NOT update your authenticator app!” by Vexia from Spokane, WA, who said “Blizzard released an update for the authenticator. My friend’s iPhone happily downloaded the update, and now, his serial number of the app doesn’t match the one in his battle.net account. End result – the generated codes don’t match = He can’t get into his account. Apparently, happened to lots of people. He’s having to send a bunch of stuff to Blizz to prove the account is his before they will unlock it… oh, and he has to wait until Monday as well. I’d hold out on hitting that update button on your authenticator app.”

Town Cryer

This episode of The Instance is long on Town Cryer! We responded to more calls and e-mails in this episode than ever before.

We got a great e-mail from Scott K about authenticator security. He wrote:  “Since I had a friend go through this, I’ve learned that to be safe in the event that you lose your authenticator, make sure you make note of the numbers on the back of your authenticator. If you lose it, this will greatly help in having it removed from your account so you can make that next raid. I saved it to a Google Doc.”

Drop Of The Week

Warcraft Legends, Vol. 5

The fifth and final volume of Tokyo Pop’s Warcraft Legends arrived at a comic shop near you this week, with five new chapters, each a different seven-page comic on stories like “First Guardian,” the tale of one of ancient Azeroth’s most powerful secrets, or just in time for Hallow’s Eve: the origin of the Headless Horseman. Tokyo Pop has posted a previewer online for you to have a look at the cover and some of the pages.

Additional show content provided by Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.

Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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Big News Of The Week
Take Faction!

Blizzard went live this week with their faction change service for WoW, allowing players to change their Horde character into an Alliance member, and vice versa. For only $30 US dollars, plus any taxes depending on your location, you can now make your Orc Hunter into a Night Elf or Dwarf Hunter, not that anyone would want to do *that*.

As we previously reported, in the Faction Change service, you are given the ability to choose which race your character becomes, with the absolute restriction that the target race must utilize your class in the first place. This is going to get a lot more complicated down the road, when a bunch of new race/class combinations are added to the game, but for the time being, your Human Paladin can *only* become a Blood Elf. And that’s a nice improvement, anyhow.

Check out the Blizzard FAQ here.

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

Here Is An Excellent Idea

We got an e-mail this week from Heath M., aka Bloomindraal from an unspecified realm. In it, Heath wrote: “So with the latest expansion announcement comes the latest round of hacking scams. People are getting caught out with fake Catacylsm beta testing sites, the lure of free mounts with in-game whispers and much more. If Blizzard truly was against hackers and gold sellers they could put an end to it with one singular act. Ship ALL copies of Catacylsm with an authenticator. All the accounts are going to be converted to Battlenet anyhow.”

Town Cryer

Want a link to that XT-002 song from the last two episodes? Go here.

Drop Of The Week

Echoes Of War To Echo From Your Stereo

The new re-issue of Eminence Symphony Orchestra’s two-disc Echoes of War: The Music of Blizzard Entertainment standard edition has now arrived. The album features 15 unique arrangements, with several pieces from the yet-to-be-released StarCraft II and Diablo III. Ninety minutes of music are featured in all, with bonus tracks arranged by special guests including the critically-acclaimed composer Kow Otani. The new standard edition package, showcasing a redesigned cover art piece, will be available in major retail outlets for $24.98 US. The Legendary Edition is still available online and at retail for $49.98, and comes with a bonus documentary DVD, nine art cards, and a bonus 32-page booklet. You can visit the official Echoes of War website to hear samples and check it out!

Additional show content provided by Darrell the Tipgiver, Steve “Buxley” Pietrowicz and the outstanding Instance Community.

Special thanks to DogHouse Systems, FigurePrints!, TypeFrag and Godaddy for sponsoring this episode.

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