World of Warcraft: Trouble in Azeroth?

Today it happens! When the servers reset, the latest content from Blizzard Entertainment will reshape the world of Azeroth forever. In preparation for the upcoming expansion called the Burning Crusade, Blizzard needs to update all of the existing content package to accept the new. Its existing content has to be made ready for all of the changes and additions to the items sets, quests, character talents, spells, as well as the entire Player vs. Player (PvP) systems. To accomplish this, Blizzard has a patch coming out tomorrow.

The Burning Crusade has been announced for some time but there wasn't a set date for the release. Last month we found out the date would be in January. Moving forward a few weeks, Blizzard released the patch onto its test realms for players to experiment with the new environment as well as act as beta testers. With many bugs and frustrations, it appears that Blizzard has fixed most of the major issues and is set to release the patch to its 7 million subscribers.

While every player has excitement for the new places to fight, play, and explore, one group of hardcore players is wroth with Blizzard. In the world of Azeroth there are three major groups of players. Some subscribers enjoy playing their characters within the confines of the class, sex, and allegiance (Horde or Alliance). These players speak and act in the roles they have chosen. Role Players (RP) enjoy being immersed in the game and will build guilds of like-minded players who take on quests and will even create content on their own.

The other two types make up the majority of the player types. They are classified by who each fight. The first enjoy beating the end game bosses and collecting the gear that goes along with conquering the difficult instances (dungeons). These gamers are called PvE'ers because they battle Player vs. the Environment. At the other end of the spectrum are those who like to kill opposing faction members either in the outside world or special instances called Battlegrounds.

Within this last group of players is a hardcore set of individuals bent on beating competitors on their own servers and more importantly within their own faction. Players strive to become the top player in a 14 step ranking system. On the Horde side this title is High Warlord and on the Alliance it is Grand Marshal. At each rank from 1 through 14 there are items that only these individuals may purchase. This places them in a group of elite combatants that recalculates each week. At each rank there is a level of decay meaning that a player who leaves the PvP grind to rank 14 will de-rank over time. Unlike PvE quests, once players start the push, you cannot get off or you will move backwards.

In the Burning Crusade expansion, players will no longer be held to this do or die system as it will be replaced by a merit system of honour tokens and marks from the different battlegrounds. This should come as a sigh of relief for many players who wanted to get better PvP gear; those who have been in the grind for months have a much different view of the change.