Gitr Knows WoW

Knock, knock.

What!? I need to have the expansion to enter? Doh! I guess I shall mount up and ride to Best Buy. Too bad they don’t open until 10:00. ARRGGHHH!!! Stupid non-midnight stores!

Short of the Good LORD coming back, this is the day we’ve all been waiting for. I am heading to Best Buy today with my gift card from Christmas to get the coveted Collector’s Edition. I will either go during lunch or maybe even…gasp…wait until after work to pick it up. More likely than not, I’ll go right away and go back to work to listen to the soundtrack and read the book.

If I get on to play tonight, I will consider it amazing, because I predicted in December that this will be the biggest server crash day since the gates opened in 2006. Each realm experienced massive population problems as everyone rushed over to Kalimdor to watch the event.

Also of note, and I missed it, yesterday was the 13th anniversary of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

I just noticed some new plays on celebrity names as I was reading about the new NPCs in Buring Crusade. Here is what I have noticed without any research or digging into possible celeb references:

• Caregiver Ophera Windfury –Oprah Winfrey
• Flightmaster Krill Bitterhue – Phil Donahue
• Gaston – Gaston from Beauty and the Beast
• Lebowski – The Big Lebowski

How many more can you find in the expansion?

It has taken me a while to come up with a noteworthy response to Tobold’s excellent post on How big is Azeroth, but I have finally done it. Actually, it only took me 2 minutes to think it, but much longer to compose it into something deserving of my fine readership’s eyes.

To quote some of Tobold’s experiment:

So what I did was run from the east end of Thousand Needles to the west coast of Feralas, because you can do so in pretty much a straight line. I timed it, and crossing the width of the continent of Kalimdor running took me 18 minutes and 35 seconds. That makes the distance 3.7 miles. That means the continent of Kalimdor is 41 square miles (just over 100 square kilometers) big, and the world of Azeroth pre-Burning Crusade is about 80 square miles or 200 square kilometers.

I have my own answer to my own question about the size of Azeroth: Is Azeroth Big? Now that we know how big it is, does that qualify as big. I can never seem to make anything simple, so I have two answers to this, as I do most things that I can come up with multiple sides.

First is, Azeroth is HUGE! There is no way one person or even guild can dominate the whole virtual world. If there were real world dynamics going on and the Horde and Alliance were actually going at it all the time in a war, the war would go on forever. Neither side could beat the other into submission because it is just too big. A guild could dominate a zone, or a player can dominate a battleground, but just as in real life, someone is always better than you. Eventually someone will get better gear or better tactics or better support personnel and wipe your butt for you.

Second, Azeroth is a tiny little drop in the bucket. Just doing the comparison to the world, Manhattan is not a very big piece of land on the planet, much less compared to Texas. People, such as Loius and Clark and Napoleon have explored far greater areas of the world than Azeroth offers. If exploration is the measure, then Blizzard has fallen far short of Creation itself. Someone can explore every nook and cranny of Azeroth in under 10 days of running around or riding a horse, yet the great explorers have taken much longer for our benefit.

So, which of me is right?

After reading some reviews on Vanguard on various sites and blogs, I have decided that I will be purchasing Vanguard when it comes out at the end of the month. I have pretty weak reasons why, but one of them is that gameplay will be free. Whether that is a sustainable model or not remains to be seen.

I will be far more tempted to get some upgrades to my computer once I start playing it, though, so I am a bit hesitant to get excited about the game, knowing I can’t just go out and spend money like that now. I have responsibilities now. 🙂