You’re playing World of Warcraft. You’re out in forest on a quest, killing boars, monkeys, and snake-man hybrids. You collect all the entrails, brains, tears, scales, slime, tusks, pelts, and tails that you need. You return to the client who sent you on this errand. What’s your reward? Up to (and including) Cataclysm, you would have a choice between several rewards. Some only reward gold, while others may offer several rewards. In the case of the latter, you would often have a choice between several different item slots, different armor (or weapon) classes, and a pick between primary stats. A single quest’s reward table looks like this more often than not:

From the quest "Fire Upon the Waters"

If none of those items appeal to you, then you can select whichever one is most visually appealing—assuming the item can be equipped. If you can’t do that, then you can select the item that sells for the most amount of gold. According to a recent Blue post, that is going to change in Mists of Pandaria. You turn in the quest and then you will be awarded gear that is appropriate to your spec. You’ll never get an item that is wasted! Read on to see Ghostcrawler’s statement on the matter, as well as what it means for players.

Last time, I explored the changes from The Burning Crusade’s end-game content to Wrath of the Lich King’s end-game content. It concluded with a discussion of something I like to call the “difficulty threshold.” It just means the point at which content becomes so difficult that the rewards are no longer sufficient motivation to make players overcome the challenges. This time I will be exploring the changes Blizzard implemented to make content that appealed to players’ wide range of difficulty thresholds, and how successful those efforts were.

For a faction that focuses on contract killing and conspiracy, the Dark Brotherhood is the last place one would expect to find quests that really resonate with the player. We’re introduced to characters—clients, targets, and assassins alike—and we can sympathize with them. We can see why most of our clients want their targets dead. We can see that our targets are not simply targets, but are people with their own lives. Our fellow Dark Brothers and Dark Sisters each have their own stories that brought them to Astrid’s Sanctuary. It is perhaps the most well crafted faction in all of Skyrim.

We join the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim by investigating a rumor that Aventus in Windhelm wants someone dead. After killing Grelod in Riften, we’re abducted by Astrid and forced to pay for the stolen contract in blood. From there, we’re as good as in with the Brotherhood, having been given access to the last remaining Sanctuary in all of Tamriel.

The funny thing about killing people is that their relatives tend to want revenge. In Oblivion, Lucien Lachance killed Mathieu Bellamont‘s mother; Bellamont joined the Dark Brotherhood and rose to the rank of Speaker in the Black Hand, which is the Brotherhood’s leadership structure. From there, Bellamont conspired to destroy the Brotherhood by using the player as his instrument. The Black Hand is aware of this betrayal from within, and suspects Lachance to be the mastermind of this treachery; the Black Hand kills Lachance.

Contract killing can be an ugly business.

In Skyrim, we’re going to find out what happens when you kill the wrong person.

On Monday, March 19, 2012, the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) was lifted on a Blizzard press event held the week before. The topic of the press event was the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. As a result of the end of the NDA, the internet was flooded with new information regarding the expansion. Among the topics fans eagerly awaited news for was the issue of character slot limitations. Currently players are limited to 10 characters per server with a cap of 50 characters per account. With the introduction of a new race and a new class, players began seeking an increase in the number of allotted characters per server. Blizzard heard their requests and announced . . . an 11th character slot. Upon reading the news my immediate reaction was “that’s it?”

I have been playing World of Warcraft since July 2008. That means I began playing during The Burning Crusade expansion when patch 2.4.3 came out, the last patch before preparations began for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. While I did manage to hit the level cap of 70 prior to Wrath of the Lich King’s release, I never experienced any of The Burning Crusade’s raid content with the exception of Karazhan. Even then, Karazhan was not “current” content and I was unable to clear the entire thing. I never even did heroic 5-man content. My guild was a close-knit group of friends that mostly did regular (non-heroic) 5-man content.