Only 6 days and counting until The Burning Crusade is unleashed upon the world, and the Dark Portal is finally open. All this week, certain events will be taking place throughout the world. If you venture to the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands, demons are starting to spawn through the Portal. There is a quest to help kill them, and in return you get some gold and a [Tabard of the Protector]. Make sure you get a group first... not because it's hard to kill the demons, but just so you have a better chance of tagging them before anybody else. There will be a lot of people standing around the Portal casting AoE all the time, and they only spawn a few at a time.

Also, one final patch has been released before the Expansion comes out. Here's an blurb from it:

Patch 2.0.3 Wrote:

Several years have passed since the Burning Legion's defeat at the Battle of Mount Hyjal - and the races of Azeroth have continued to rebuild their once shattered kingdoms. With renewed strength, the heros of the Horde and Alliance have begun to explore the broken lands beyond the Dark Portal. What dangers or rewards await mortal champions in Draenor? And what will the Alliance and Horde do when they discover that the demons they thought vanquished have returned to renew their terrible Burning Crusade?

After you install The Burning Crusade, you will have to re-patch 2.0.3, so don't delete the files just yet. The game CDs went into production right before the patch was ready.

Yeah, this is a little old (12/01/2006), but so what.

Drake Wrote:

Since our previous Battle Plan, World of Warcraft has gained a considerable amount of new in-game content, as well as improved and expanded service features – all of which have been focused on enhancing the game experience for our passionate, ever-growing community.

One example of the new content we've added is Naxxramas, a multi-winged 40-player raid dungeon that pits players against the forces of the lick Kel'Thuzad. We've also revamped Light's Hope Chapel to make it a fully functional and exciting quest hub. In addition, many new items have been implemented, including new PvE and PvP armor sets, along with a powerful new Legendary caster item.

In terms of service enhancements, man players have taken advantage of the Paid Character Transfer service, which enables players to move characters between realms. Also, we've decreased battleground queue times by implementing the new cross-realm battleground feature. By allowing players across several realms to play in the same battleground, wait times have significantly improved for most battleground matches.

We've worked hard to deliver these new content and service features while simultaneously developing our first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. In preparation for the expansion, we will be releasing one of our biggest content updates ever for World of Warcraft, called "Before the Storm."


Before the Storm
Already in testing on the public test realms (PTRs), "Before the Storm" will implement a number of significant content updates, including a revamped PvP Honor System, the new Arena System, the new Looking for Group interface, brand-new talents for all classes, and an abundance of other changes and additions. Be sure to check out the PTR patch notes for more information.

The new PvP Honor System will completely replace the current honor and ranking systems. This new Honor System will introduce honor points, a sort of PvP currency, which can be accumulated and spent on rewards. The honor points will be awarded through any PvP combat, similar to the current Honor System, but are not diminished over time. You will be able to participate in PvP at your own pace, accumulate honor points, and spend them on honor rewards whenever you like.

Before the Storm will also introduce a new PvP option: the Arena System. The Arena System will allow for group-based gladiatorial-style combat in which teams compete on a ladder-based ranking system. Teams will consist of two, three, or five players, and will be created similarly to a guild, with each player signing a team charter. As they rise through the ranks, teams will receive arena points, which can be spent on high-end rewards. The Arena System will let players really test their PvP prowess and obtain rewards that will rival some of the best gear coming out of the high-level dungeons.

Speaking of PvP, we're also hard at work on our team-balancing feature for the battlegrounds. This feature won't be ready for this next content patch, but will be added in a patch sometime after the expansion launches. Team balancing will help ensure that the teams facing each other in each of the game's battlegrounds will be as evenly matched as possible.


The Burning Crusade
The content in "Before the Storm" serves as a prelude to The Burning Crusade. We're rapidly approaching the final stages of development on the expansion, thank in large part to the feedback we've received from the thousands of players participating in our ongoing closed-beta test.

We still have much work ahead as we continue focused testing and polishing up until the retail release in January. In the meantime, we are continuing to work on play balance, as well as testing our server load and other important issues. I did want to share details on some of the exciting dungeon related-content coming in The Burning Crusade.


Hellfire Citadel
As part of the first encounters in the new Outland portion of the expansion pack, players will get a chance to adventure in Hellfire Citadel. This new four-winged dungeon is strategically placed in the very heart of Hellfire Peninsula, between the Horde and Alliance home bases. Once a Horde stronghold during the First and Second Wars, the bastion of power was thought long abandoned until recently. Now Fel Orcs inhabit the citadel, cultivating and augmenting their dark arts.

The first threw wings are: Ramparts for levels 60-62, Blood Furnace for levels 61-63, and the Shattered Halls for level 70. In the last wing, players will be able to experience a small raid encounter similar to Onyxia, in which they’ll face the Pit Lord Magtheridon (of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne infamy) within his lair.


Heroic Dungeon-Difficulty Feature
Another exciting aspect of the expansion is the new Heroic dungeon-difficulty feature, which will let you experience many of the expansion dungeons in two different modes. One mode will be the normal version, and the second mode, Heroic, will boost the difficulty of the dungeon. The additional risks that players take on at the higher difficulty setting will also come with the opportunity to gain greater rewards.

The challenges that await players inside of a dungeon set to Heroic difficulty will go beyond just increased hit points and attack power for the creatures inside. Enemies will also have extra abilities, making each encounter more tactically challenging. The rewards of course will scale up accordingly with the boost in difficulty. In order to unlock the Heroic level of a dungeon, players will need to be level 70 and achieve other objectives as well. More details on these prerequisites will be revealed at a later date.

While I’m on the topic of dungeons, I wanted to mention here that the Black Temple – the dungeon intended to offer the most challenging encounters in the game – is deep in development and will be opened for public testing after the expansion is released. It’s important to us to spend as much time as possible balancing and polishing the content in this dungeon before releasing it to players; it’s definitely not something we want to rush out the door just for the sake of meeting a deadline. We look forward to sharing more information and offering some glimpses of the Black Temple content in the weeks ahead… and then opening it up to Burning Crusade players on the test realms once they’ve had a chance to level to 70 and gear up in the other dungeons.


Moving Forward
We have many other things in store with The Burning Crusade, such as: new monsters to battle, new lands and dungeons to explore, new quests to undertake, a new profession to learn, and much more. We’ve unveiled a lot of these details over the past few months, but nothing quite compares to the feeling of actually playing through all the new content. We’re looking forward to gathering additional feedback in the final phases of testing, and then sharing the results with you with the release of The Burning Crusade expansion next month.


Shane Dabiri
Lead Producer
World of Warcraft

Finally, after about a month of nothing, I was recently able to update my gear a little bit:
[Enigma Shoulderpads]
[Gem of Nerubis]

On the Burning Crusade frontier, it seems that Blizzard has pushed the release date to January of 2007.

Eyonix Wrote:

IRVINE, Calif -- Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade(tm), the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, will be in January 2007. By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.

"We appreciate the enthusiasm surrounding World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and we're excited about putting the finishing touches on all of the new content," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We feel confident that the extra time spent polishing the game will result in the high-quality experience that our players expect and deserve."

Blizzard began the closed-beta phase of testing on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade earlier this month. The January 2007 release window will allow extra time for current beta testers to participate in the final stages of development and continue providing valuable feedback. Further information on specific worldwide release dates, pricing, and other details will be announced in the near future.

More and more people keep getting hit by keylogging scams, and their accounts are stripped of everything. Here's what Blizzard had to say on the subject:

Eyonix Wrote:

We'd like to make the community aware of a recent account-theft scam that is being circulated through email, game forums, in-game chat, and other mediums. This scam involves fake URLs, or hyperlinks, that once clicked will install harmful "keylogging" software intended to steal your World of Warcraft account name and password. After the creators of these keyloggers steal this information, they log into your account, immediately change your password to lock you out, and then sell all of your items and transfer all of your gold.

The scam comes in many forms, including URLs advertised as links to class guides, gameplay videos, and in many cases user-interface (UI) modifications. As a general rule, be extremely wary of URLs ending in ".jpg.html" and ".scr," as in many cases the harmful software is being hidden at locations that end with these extensions.

For these reasons, it is very important that players take caution when being directed to outside websites and update the security on their computers accordingly. To secure your computer, we suggest adding some Internet security to your system (for example: a firewall and anti-virus scanner). If you are unsure what security measures to take, discuss the issue of system security with your ISP or a trained Network Administrator for the solution that is right for you.

We also strongly recommend that all players use the Blizzard Launcher to start World of Warcraft. In addition to serving as a portal to the game, the Blizzard Launcher provides greater security for our players against harmful software such as the type discussed here. To learn more about this utility, please visit the Blizzard Launcher Page and check out the Blizzard Launcher FAQ.

If you come across a suspicious link or program, please report it here.

For more information on keeping your account secure and what to do if you feel your account has been compromised, please visit the Account Security page.

Some other things you can do to try and avoid being hit with this:

• Use an alternative Internet browser (opposed to IE), such as Firefox or Opera.
• If you have any sort of anti-virus software installed, make sure it is up to date.
• If you're really paranoid, you can disable JavaScript from running in your browser (which is how these keyloggers get installed).

Patch 1.12.1 was released on Tuesday, have a look at what's been done to the game this time.

On the WoW General forums, Eyonix posted a pretty decent Raid Tips Guide. Here's what he had to say:

Eyonix Wrote:

Hey guys, after reviewing feedback on the boards for good raiding tips, we're ready to show off our first iteration of our 'Raid Tips Guide'. We'd like everyone to take a pass at what we've written and provide some more feedback, to ensure that this guide covers as much as possible, is still very user-friendly, and most importantly makes sense and provides valuable information.

On that note, please have a look. ;)

I finally got my damn pearls last night. After calling the raid because of lag issues (most the guilds on the server did the same, actually), I went farming for more pearls. After a long night of nothing, and 4 others helping me clear the beach in Azshara, we gave up. Luckily there were 3 pearls in the AH for pretty cheap, so I just bought 2. Now I can finally use my sword.

This was posted on the WoW site, and it's a pretty good read.

Shane Dabiri, Lead Producer Wrote:

Greetings,

A lot has happened since the last Battleplan: Ahn'Qiraj and the war effort, new dungeon armor sets, paladin and priest talent reviews, weather effects, linked auction houses, and much more. During that time, we've also been diligently working on The Burning Crusade, developing a lot of the content that players are looking forward to, including new zones, quests, monsters, the Alliance race, jewelcrafting, and flying mounts. We'll be revealing more information on upcoming game content at E3, so keep an eye out for all of the media coverage from the show in the weeks ahead. I want to dedicate the rest of this Battleplan to continuing the discussion we've been having with players about the steps were taking to address the service-related issues that those on our most populated realms have been experiencing. This will include an overview of the upgrades we'll be making leading up to the release of the expansion.

Dispersing the Population
The World of Warcraft networking, database, and programming teams have been working just as hard as everyone else to improve and expand our services. Since January 1, 2006, we've opened 22 new realms in North America. We've also offered a number of different realm-transfer options in order to help balance our populations. This in turn has helped improve performance and reduce queues on some of our most heavily populated realms.

We recently brought a new World of Warcraft site online in North America -- the 5th one in this region. This not only allowed us to open new realms -- each site can hold approximately 40 -- it also allowed us to migrate existing realms over to the new, top-of-the-line hardware we used to build the site. As with previous migrations, this relieved pressure on our shared-database backend infrastructure, resulting in noticeable improvements in loot, auction house, mail, and instance lag and general realm stability for the players who we're moved to the new realms as well those who remained at the original site.

Beyond this 5th World of Warcraft site, we are preparing to bring up a 6th site before the end of May, and we have plans to build additional sites in order to handle any increase in population we experience after the release of The Burning Crusade. All of our future sites will be built using the latest hardware and will give us the capacity to support new players and perform additional migrations and character transfers as needed.

Going Retro
The new zones added to the game in The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth's current land mass by 25 percent. To insure that Azeroth continues to feel vibrant and populated, we will be increasing the player caps on all our realms by the same percentage. The new hardware installed on our 5th and 6th sites will be able to handle this increase in concurrency with some adjustments, but the hardware on our mature sites cannot. Therefore, over the next few months we will also be retrofitting our mature sites with the same top-of-the-line hardware deployed at our new sites. Players won't need the expansion to notice the performance boost this new hardware will bring to these sites.

Upcoming Character-Transfer Service
On top of our efforts to evenly disperse our player population through coordinated realm transfers and migrations, we've begun testing our paid character-transfer feature. Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available.

Individual Realm Performance
World of Warcraft currently has 156 realms in North America, and were definitely not happy with the performance that some of these realms have experienced. If any overarching good has come from the extensive troubleshooting we've done for our realms over the past few months, it's that it has enabled us to identify numerous bottlenecks that we've then worked toward eliminating through both software optimizations and upgrades to the realm hardware. We feel it's unacceptable when even one player can't enter the game, gets unexpectedly disconnected at a key moment, or experiences any other interruptions while playing, and we will continue to spend time, money, and manpower to address any such issues that arises.

Weekly Maintenance
To help prevent small-scale issues from becoming large-scale ones, we bring down our realms for scheduled maintenance each week and run diagnostic programs that help us find and fix potential issues. We also run many applications during this maintenance period that allow us to gather, organize, and back up data from the previous week. When performing these maintenance procedures, we occasionally uncover critical game issues that cause the realms to stay down for an extended amount of time. In such cases, we work as quickly as we can to address the issues and bring the realms back online while providing regular updates on our progress. Our ultimate goal is to cut down on the frequency of these maintenance periods.

We also use this period of scheduled downtime to apply patches. After we worked out some shortcomings with our patching process early last year, patch days have been running relatively smoothly. On certain occasions, though, a patch might still cause unforeseen errors, such as was the case with the 10.1 patch a few weeks ago. The mixed experience caused by that patch was completely unacceptable to every one of us. Based on that particular incident, we decided that moving forward, we will be publicly testing small, bug-fix patches on our test realms prior to deploying them to live realms. Recently, we tested patch 10.2 on our test realms, and we were able to catch some potentially serious bugs as a result.

Authentication, WorldofWarcraft.com, and the Forums
The steady increase in players has severely impacted our authentication (login) service and website and forum hardware. The hardware that handles the login requests to both the game and the forums was designed to handle a large number of players, but the recent increase in players has exposed some limitations to our system. As soon as it became clear that we were outgrowing the existing platform, we began designing and testing a more robust and scalable authentication system. We are now in the process of installing the new system, and we expect to go live with it in North America by the end of May. This will help alleviate the issues players have occasionally had when trying to log in to the official forums and our billing system, as well as the login delays that they've experienced during the authenticating, handshaking, or connecting steps.

Our community website and forums are also receiving improvements to their hardware and the applications that run those systems. As part of this process, our web programmers have identified the applications that are causing the website and forums to go down during periods of high traffic, and they are currently working on resolving those issues with a series of code improvements. These improvements, combined with hardware upgrades, will allow our community team to provide more consistent updates during periods of extended downtime. Were also planning on unveiling new forums next month that will allow us to make additional communication improvements.

Moving Forward
Resolving World of Warcrafts current performance issues and upgrading our current hardware in preparation for The Burning Crusade is Blizzard's #1 priority. Were all World of Warcraft players too, and we know how frustrating it is when you experience loot lag, get disconnected fighting a boss, or miss the beginning of your 8:00 PM AQ raid because you can't log in. We've been working around the clock to respond to the issues as they arise, and we will continue to do so for the life of the game. We will also remain focused on taking proactive steps moving toward the release of the expansion so we can avoid similar issues in the future.

Shane Dabiri
Lead Producer
World of Warcraft Development Team

This time, the test realms have been set up with a minor patch. Here's a quote from the WoW main site:

Blizzard Wrote:

We have seen a profound benefit with offering major patches on the PTRs, and although this is a minor patch, we believe the benefits will apply to it as well.

You can see the test realm notes for 1.10.2 here.