Through the Patches

Bowser

Tribe of Judah StarCraft Series Chapter Leader
Beta Phase 2 through Beta Open Phase 7 (four pushes, about 6 months)

This is really just designed to give you a little bit of insight to the game. When it releases you can see how far it has come since the beta first started.

Major Additions

·Auctions
·Hunters
·“Inn-boxes” – mail/postal system
·Raid Groups
·Deeprun Tram
·Talents
·PVP
·Ghosts – ethereal death effects
·Rest State System
·Item Durability
·Maps added to countries

Major Revisions
·Ironforge (redone twice)
·Hunters – new spells added, fixed, or reworked
·Caves – all non-instanced dungeons were re-designed
·Loots – there are now several new looting methods, instead of the initial three
·Tradeskills changed to Professions
·No more Skill Points for Tradeskills
·Guards and PVP and how they act in raid encounters

Locations and Instances
· Un’Goro Crater
· Winterspring
· Moonglade
· Eastern and Western Plaguelands
· Searing Gorge
· Blackrock Spire
· Blackrock Depths
· Stratholme
· Scholomance
· Editing…. (many others)

Transportation
· Mounts
· Boats
· Goblin Zeppelins
· Some new flight paths

Sound
· Environmental Music (each area/country has its own theme)
· Character voice emotes – funny sayings, jokes, hellos, goodbyes, thanks, etc
· NPC Voices – NPC’s now talk when you click on them
· Ambience Music – you hear beating of steel at forges, birds chirping and wolves howling outside, etc
· Town and City Music – each town has its own introduction theme
· Inns – all taverns now have a cool racial music to them (human inns sound different from undead inns, etc)

The Good, the Bad, and the Bobby
· Quest Resets
· Countless server crashes, maintenances, restarts
· Item deletions
· New Items
· Two major changes in code, meaning we had to redownload the entire game over again twice.
· Auctions moved, and moved, and moved again.
· Undead can’t speak no ‘common’ no more
· Every new patch solved five old bugs, and carried two new ones with it
· In June there was very, very little sound in the game.  Kind of boring and monotonous
· Lots of graphics changes.
· For three patches in a row character dances were changed
· Changes in monsters.  Too hard, too easy, and then finally just right.
· Hunters pets would grow up to be HUGE.  The scaling of these pets are now more realistic and in-tune.
· Usually each patch added at least one area.  These countries would be complete with trees, cities, lakes, etc.  Generally the next patch would add content within the previous patch’s areas, such as NPC’s, quests, ambient critters, monsters, etc.  IE: it basically took two patches before an area was fully implemented.
· At first the game was just kinda sorta cool to play, but by the end of testing this had changed to one of the best games I have ever played.  I believe it will be right up there in the ranks of Starcraft, Descent, Doom, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mario Brothers, and the other excellent games that have come to us over the years.
 
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