Operation:Gnomeregan was a lot of fun but unless I missed something what was the point of showing us how to use the mechanical tank things? I turned up seconds before the battle was about to begin so jumped straight in.
Bit the bullet and paid for epic flying on my warlock, the right decision even if they cut the price in Cataclysm not least because the epic magic carpet is a nicer colour 
My bet is that we get to use them on the second part. Alternatively, they just happened to have a lot of fun building them and thus wanted to use the things even if they ended up falling off the actual story.
You’re lucky - I did the Troll quest on my pally and arrived just seconds after it started. I had to wait for-freakin’-ever to get it done. In fact I ran out of time to do it on my main, so I’ll have to try again tonight or tomorrow if the event is still there.
I was hopeful last night when I got into a VoA25 run and I was the only priest – that never happens. Naturally no priest gear dropped, but I did get the 245 PVP boots so my PvP set is decent, for as little as I use it.
Or my favorite: The questgiver asks you to kill A and B. Then having waded thru killing A, B, C and D, you return to the questgiver who then asks you to go back to the exact same spot and kill C and D. He gives you absolutely no credit for all the C and D mobs you killed while trying to get enough A and B kills.
Hahahaha. And grats on the token!
IIRC, those drop rate changes were made in *all *ubernewb zones, probably around the same time as they made all of the mobs there neutral. I don’t think they started out that way at all, even in the TBC starter zones.
In an MMO like WoW, it’s generally a good idea to assume that if you’re in an empty area, it won’t be empty for long–either a bunch of stuff just got killed and is going to despawn, or a bunch of stuff just just got trained out, and is going to leash back.
Also, it’s probably not 80s doing the training–they’d have to literally ride on top of everything to pick it up like that. Their aggro radius at that level just isn’t big enough. Probably just other people questing at-level in your zone.
What a fucking whiner. If you want to be an officer, talk to the GM and work on demonstrating why you’d make a good one. Passive-aggressive whispers to officers just makes you look like an ass.
Epic flying is soooooo worth it. And I really do doubt they’ll drop the price at all–they need to keep their gold sinks in the game. Since the flying changes that have happened during Wrath (regular flyer available 10 levels earlier, way cheaper, and it goes almost three times as fast as it originally did), I see even less reason for them to knock down the 280% price.
On Korgath, it’s actually become pretty standard to run “VoA 20”–no more than two people from each class who’ll be rolling on gear.
As opposed to my VOA25 run, which had no Priests and had 2 Priest pcs drop:P Another thing I hope gets fixed in Cata.
(Weird, Rik’s post didn’t carry over into the nested quotes, even though all the others did.)
This is true. I level Alliance characters in Azuremyst as a matter of course, and I can tell you some of those quests were not 100% drops. Azure and Blood had their share of infuriatingly slow collection quests just like all the other zones.
weep
Doubtful. They’d have to change the way loot tables are generated. Consider it your enticement to run with well-balanced groups. 
I don’t see random loot going away anytime soon.
Blizzard has tried to mitigate complaints about the frustration of random drops with rep rewards, badge/emblem rewards, and multi-class token drops, but I just don’t see them going any further with it than that.
Make it too easy for people to attain their goals, then they run out of things to do, get bored, and quit. Make it too frustrating, then they no longer care and ragequit. Thus, they have to toe the line between the two – between ease and frustration, where it’s tolerable enough for players to keep grinding away for frustrating drops, but receiving enough reward in the meantime to not ragequit. There ought to be a better system, but nobody’s thought of one yet.
I’d have to look up where I read it (pretty sure it was a Cracked article referencing studies), but randomness increases the chance of addiction, or at the very least holds a player’s interest longer.
Let’s say the quest designer has a quest in which he wants the player to kill about 20 enemies before the quest is finished. He could either make a 100% drop and just require the player to earn 20 quest items, or he could make a 25% drop and just require the player to earn 5 items. The latter is going to keep more people interested in finishing the quest than the former, even if they raeg when they don’t get a drop for a while. I know whenever I see a quest that requires more than 10 kills or quest items, I groan, whereas I’m more willing to do a quest that only needs 5 items but I kill just as many enemies as the other quest.
Personally, when I find a quest that requires X items, but I later find out it has a less than 100% drop rate, I get annoyed–and my frustration is inversely proportionate to the drop rate. I’d *much *rather kill 20 mobs for 20 items at a 100% drop rate than 5 to 5,000,000 mobs to get 5 items at a 25% drop rate.
I think a lot of the motivation studies would do well to examine the differences in motivational requirements that different people have–after all, isn’t this the primary difference between so-called Eastern and Western-style RPGs? Eastern-style tend to have more grinding, which is the slow steady reward (xp per mob stays awesome), where Western-style rely much more heavily on questing and random rewards.
I didn’t even realize that I’m a guild officer until somebody else in the guild congratulated me on the promotion. Didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it, have no clue as to why it was bestowed upon me. I don’t really do anything special with the guild. I show up for raids. If I know where the instance is, I’ll fly down a bit early to help with summons. If one of the lowbies needs to make something dead and I’m not in a dungeon or BG, I’ll go kill it for them. I’ll que with guildies for heroics…but that’s just normal guild stuff in my book. More than a little 
:eek::o on the whole officer thing. Have no idea what my officerness means, but do know I have no intentions of /gkick anybody, don’t deal with guild politics–to the point that I dunno if we even have guild politics. I’m sorta like an un-officer, I guess.
Did my Gnomer and Echo Isles quests yesterday–fun! Except for the part where people didn’t listen to those shouting “don’t go in the tunnel” during the Alliance one and bugged the encounter, forcing us to wait for it to reset and start all over again. Sigh.
I was tickled pink when I noticed the name of the speechwriter Gnome–Toby Ziegear, a nod to what was quite possibly my favorite *West Wing *character.
I did the Echo Isles quest on my second toon yesterday, and again I got there right after the event started, so took forever because I had to wait for the whole event to run twice.
Heh. I got a laugh from the troll drum player - Zild’jian.
I didn’t even see his name–nice!
Apparently there is a minimum level for the final part of Operation Gnomeregan. I did all the preliminaries on my level 15 hunter, but after I turned in the speech, I was not offered the quest to fly up to the final battle 
Where is the Echo Isles event, and what is it about?
Minimum level for the final battle is 75.
The Echo Islands event is to reclaim the Echo Islands from the troll Zaladane, who’s been holding them pretty much forever. You fight alongside Vol’jin (the troll leader), along with the loas he summons and a henceforth hidden group of troll druids led by a female troll whose name I can’t remember. It’s pretty cool. When you’re done, the trolls have their homeland back and don’t have to squat in Orgrimmar anymore.