Paul poked me to be sure I watched the follow-up to the video I was critical of the other day.

Message recieved, guys! Glad to see it was all in good fun. My original statment of “awesome that you’re admitting when there are problems” and Mark’s subsequent statement about making sure issues are taken care of before tackling the expansion ring very very true to me. Well done!

I’ll add my own “Sorry Colin” - and add one for Paul - if my own reaction was overly knee-jerky.

This past week on the WoW Insider Show, we were thrilled to welcome our friend Michael Zenke of Massively.com — in addition to his experiences in Wrath so far, we talked with him about a few other MMOs WoW players might be interested in this holiday season. Matthew Rossi was also on, and he brought his terrific insight on Warriors, Death Knights, Shamans, and itemization for pretty much all of the classes in the new expansion. And we welcomed back our old friend Turpster to the show — you didn’t think he’d be gone for long, did you?

I’ve actually been 74 for some time … but as I mentioned yesterday, it’s been a bit of a challenge to get in game-and-writing time. I dinged 74 finishing off the content for Borean Tundra proper, which left me just the last few quests on Coldarra/Nexus proper to finish off. I’m now in Dragonblight, and I’ll talk more about my experiences in that (awesome, amazing) zone in a bit.

I want to finish up my ‘Lich King starter zone’ impressions by talking a bit more about the epic feeling Blizzard has instilled in these adventuring areas. It’s actually kind of ludicrous, the sheer number of powerful moments they pack into one area. Even finishing up the kind-of-gimmicky D.E.H.T.A. quest line had some fun times. The last guy I had to kill before Harold Lane was Ned, the Lord of Rhinos. He’s riding a bloody great Kodo, and slaying both of them is required to get the quest completion.

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My personal site (formerly known as Random Dialogue) has been languishing for quite some time, because … well … I have  a hard enough time saying something cogent about the industry my full-time job touches on here. Turning around and writing a thousand word post about my boring ass is really hard to do on top of that.

So, I’ve gone micro-bloggery and re-directed everything over to my Tumblr blog whoisdialogue.com. I’ve had it running for some time so it’s full of a month or two’s worth of twitters and del.icio.us links. Now I’m actually going to use it for blogging / quote posting / picture uploading. I know it’s not super-functional at the moment, but if there’s one RSS feed I’d encourage you to follow, it’d be that one.

WoW Insider is Massively’s big-sister site, all about World of Warcraft. They have a regular podcast, same as we do, and they do live shows on Saturdays via UStream. I’m going to be jumping on with them in about an hour, at noon PT / 2pm CT / 3pm ET. I’m embedding the show below so you can check it out; come join us!

It’s been a long week and a half for me. My wife had surgery on the 26th (day before Thanksgiving, yay!), and it’s been a slow recovery process. We’ve had fits and starts, and a bunch of bumps along the way. Just keeping her happy, me sane, and Massively rolling during a week of seemingly non-stop MMO news and drama was … challenging.

So, my first December 08 post falls on the 6th. So it goes. That said, I want to do a little bit of catching up. Because, like I said, busy week.

• Tabula Rasa’s closure is pretty well BS. Sorry, I know I should be more politik about it, but that’s why this is my personal site and not my responsible-day-job site. I appreciate that they have business needs and all that kinda jazz, but guess what? I’m a player. I don’t have to care about their bottom line. The herculean efforts of the team to put out new patches, introduce new content, and encourage community behaviors at the end of days just proves to me that this is a collection of people which deserves to survive.
• Colin Brennan took them to task opinion-style on Massively for TR’s closure, and we got nothing but hell from it from people on both sides of the fence. I particularly didn’t appreciate this post from Lum; we talked via email and I guess I feel a little better about it. I perpetually live in a state of ‘you can’t please everybody’, but this issue was more like ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
• Good idea: Own up to the fact that one of your core game elements needs some fixing. As I’ve argued here in the past, these games simply cannot be released 100% perfect. If you couch it to the community in the right framework, they’ll be unhappy but understanding. Bad idea: Let your creative director bitch out the guy that made the mistake in front of the entire fucking internet. I’m sorry, I respect Mr. Barnett - as I’ve said here in the past - but come on. I disagree with Lum’s opinion on one point: it was at no point funny. I may not have had any formal management training, but I know one bottom-line concept pretty well already - you don’t make someone into an example. Ever. It’s not funny, it’s not cool, and it inspires people to, um, hate you. Anyone want to take a guess as to how long Colin’s going to stay with Mythic after this?
• In a week with so much bad news, it was great to see Darkfall and Chronicles of Spellborn moving forward after their lengthy development stalls. City of Heroes Issue 13, also? Awesome, completely. They’ve reinstated all the lapsed accounts this weekend if you’re looking for something to do.
• I’ve been struggling with the WoW vs. LotRO issue a lot. My ‘Monday evening’ character has turned into something of a going concern with me. I’m going to talk a lot more about this in the next few days, but … yeah, Turbine has a lot of respect from me.

This week Michael Zenke drops some serious science on Wrath of The Lich King and its place in the MMORPG pantheon. We also go into some depth on a ton more games as the winter deluge finally slows down.