^.^

Good afternoon, all, and WELCOME to another post on the Deep Space Network blog.

Today, I'm going to dive into some commentary on what has been described as the "crack cocaine"
of online gaming, Blizzard's powerhouse MMORPG, "World of Warcraft".

World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, is now up to patch 2.4.1. There is a rumor that Patch 2.4
(and the family of 2.4.X) will be the last major series of patches before the release of the next
expansion, "The Wrath of the Lich King", which we expect to be out by anywhere from August
of this year to March or so of next year...but it will probably be released closer to the August
date because there's another rumor that Blizzard has already started Alpha testing on the
expansion. A friend of mine who works in the computer field says that an Alpha test means that
Blizzard is shooting more for the 2009 release date, because you first do the Alpha test, work
out the bugs from that, then do the Beta test, work out those bugs, and THEN you are ready
for the release.

In any event, I would recommend listening to The Instance podcast, which can be found at
http://www.myextralife.com/wow/  Some of my info for the above material came from Episode
#101 or #102 of this really cool podcast.

In my own adventures in the world of WoW, I have gotten to Lvl 58 with Ferborg, my troll rogue,
and he has taken the leap, ditched his old-world quests, and will now almost permanently reside
in the Outlands. The problem with this of course is that everything larger than a gnat can pertty
much beat the crap out of him! This is what happens every time a new area opens up for a
character. They go into this NEW place, and look at all the pretty NEW stuff, and check out the
really cool NEW towns and such...that is if they can do all of this in between getting ganked by
all the knotheads on the other side of the faction war, or getting turned into boar food when you
accidently stray a bit too close to one of those things. In the meantime, the FEL REAVER is walking
around like "Hey, I'm the Fel Reaver..." I'm sure I'll love The Outlands once I get a level or so...it's
just getting through that annoying first few quests that will be hard.

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In future posts, I plan on updating you with everything that is going on at Slackerz, our local
game shop. I might even do an interview with the shop owner and run a podcast of it here.

I realize this blog entry is a bit short, but I promise I'll make up for it in the near future.

John B.