The Sunwell - 12.20.2007

So, a few days ago, a prominent Swedish magazine interviewed Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) with regards to patch 2.4. As ever, the details he provided were sketchy and not nearly enough in quantity, but I suppose we should be glad for any new information Blizzard divulges.

Perhaps the most pertinent piece of information is the fact that Sunwell will incorporate an 'AQ style' opening event as well as a reputation based system in order to gain entry. The 5 man instance apparently will require Honored reputation in order to gain access, whilst Sunwell Plateau, the 25 man instance, will require a certain level of reputation for players to fight the end bosses of the instance.

Leaving the reputation issue aside for a moment and focusing on the opening event - apparently it will be based on daily quests completed by the server population at large. In my opinion this is a fantastic step up from the antiquated AQ opening event, which required large amounts of materials to open the gates - many of which required hours of grinding in low level areas, and some of which were worth rather more on the Auction House than in the hands of your respective faction. Daily quests are a much better incentive for everyone on the server to participate in: they're relatively quick, they give a reputation reward for the player, and (probably most importantly) they give a monetary reward. In this way I think there will be much less toil involved in opening the Sunwell, and it's something that non-raiders have a decent motivation to be a part of.

However, as good as this 'dailies policy' is, is it perhaps unfair for low population servers - who by definition will have less people doing the daily quests and therefore will not get access to the Sunwell for some time after the larger servers? I suppose Blizzard could instigate a system recognizing lower population servers and make the number of dailies required smaller, but this would be a) hard to set up and b) prone to population shifts making it unfair (i.e from free server transfers).

As always, would love to hear opinion's on this matter.

P.S. - If you haven't seen it yet, I strongly suggest watching Tales of the Past III; I'm not particularly interested in machinima, but this movie is fairly exceptional; if you're into Warcraft lore, you'll no doubt love it.

-Joe Zara [Phoee]