Massively^™

The final segment focuses on World of Warcraft and clocks in at 8 minutes. CM Drysc interviews Jeffrey "Tigole" Kaplan. Kaplan mainly rehashes what the designers are doing with the upcoming Sunwell 2.4 patch. WoW Insider has been covering this ad nauseum, but here's what I gleaned:

• First 3 Sunwell Plateau bosses and their difficulty levels are tuned against Tier 6 players.
  
• No attunement to enter or for the first 3 bosses.
  
• Overall faction for Sunwell Isle is the Shattered Sun Offensive.
• Aldor and Scryer storyline continues as their forces combine to battle against the Burning Legion. NPC changes will be reflected in Shattrath.
  
• Sunwell Plateau loot rewards will be Tier 7; including, armor sets bonuses and class specific loot but no unique sets in terms of looks.
• Kaplan assures that the Tier 7 look will diversify better than the comparisons made with AQ 40 itemization.
• Magister's Terrace 5 man dungeon both heroic and normal modes, and it will have a similar difficulty as Shadow Labyrinth and Shattered Halls.
• Magister's Terrace is a 4 boss dungeon. The first 3 bosses drop one 1 in 15 blues, which are normal level 70 dungeon loot. The last boss will drop 1 in 10 epics on par with lower-end Karazhan epics.
  
• Magister's Terrace itemization is intended to play a deeper relevancy in WoW's itemization today by offering better rewards than older dungeons but not over doing it.
• Possible class balancing depending on the results from the 2.3 patch, but nothing concrete at this time.
• Daily quest allotment will be raised from 10 to 25.

That's a wrap on my show notes. Be sure to check out the official BlizzCast page where you can view the transcript or download the audio. Chris Metzen will be joining the next episode. I'm definitely looking forward to that, and maybe we will get some information on the World of Warcraft movie. Blizzard is also giving away some sweet Logitech 5.1 speaker sets and Starcraft II garb to those who leave feedback about their first show. My thoughts about the production and format are after the break.

Let's face it - if you've played any MMO for any significant amount of time, chances are you've made use of one mod or another during the course of your experience. Whether you picked it up to help you heal your raid, maximize your DPS, or to optimize your crafting efficiency, mods have always fallen into a sort of gray area as far as the terms of service are concerned, and have the subject of heated moral debate amongst players. After all, is it really fair to modify a game in such a way that gives you a decided advantage over the competition? We've always assumed this was the stance taken by most developers -- if it's not part of the game code, it's not sanctioned by the developers. That is, until we caught this bit on the blue tracker last week.

Drysc, a "blue" mod over on the World of Warcraft forums, came out in support of mods -- citing how they help demonstrate features that the player base feels are lacking in the retail code. He said that many of the features that WoW employs today were inspired in whole or in part by fan-created mods. He even punctuated one post on the subject with, "I <3 mods." Now, we know that Blizzard has at least acknowledged the usefulness of mods in the past, but they've taken some more contrary measures, like patching games in such a way as to fundamentally break certain mods. To hear a dev step outside of this tenuous acquiescence and throw full-on support for mods still threw us for a loop.

Blizzard has been recruiting on its website most of this year for team members to work on a "Next-Gen MMO" project, but it has never publicly confirmed that the mysterious title is in development. Some observers have pessimistically suggested that "Next-Gen MMO" is just a hyped-up way of saying "Wrath of the Lich King."

Thankfully, it turns out they were wrong! Official confirmation (of a sort) has come. A Blizzard employee who goes by the forum name of Drysc responded to forum posts speculating about the project. He (or she, maybe -- it's like a female Night Elf Hunter; you can never know) said, "it's an unannounced Next-Gen MMO. And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either."

So Drysc confirmed what most of us already suspected. Hey, better than nothing. So ... is it World of Starcraft? Do we want it to be World of Starcraft? Hmm.