The Rainbow Warrior rides to the rescue on his trusty steed ... Sigfried.

Part 11 of the Summer of Warcraft series.

Patch 3.2 for the World of Warcraft dropped today…

No, “dropped” implies speed and suddenness.

After months of teasing, Blizzard finally shut down nearly ALL of its servers today for nearly 12 hours in order to update them all with new content for the Level 80 demigods.

Oh, and they threw all the noobs a bone too – cheap mounts. I was hoping for a bit of new content for the old hell hole original continents, but at least we unworthies will have a few less months to grind up to the fun part of the game, thanks to a 60 percent increase in travel speed that come 10 levels earlier and about 30 gold cheaper. My human priest now has a purdy horsey, and my elf warrior has an effeminate white tiger, which just proves he is secure in his sexuality.

We low-level grinders also benefited from some other, less-publicized improvements to the plain vanilla client, such as the new side-by-side quest log, enemy spell casting meters and bug fixes for Intel graphics chipsets. Speaking of my paltry graphics driver, I have not yet seen a significant hit to my framerate, even though Darnassus was jam packed with newbie riders and high-level bargain hunters this evening. I feared that the explosion of new polygons would melt my laptop, but that hasn’t yet happened.

What remains to be seen is whether the new mounts will bring players back to the old continents. I did see a lot of low-levels on this evening, and they helped me out a lot with quests, but I have this feeling that the renewed interest will be short lived. There’s nothing new for the noobs to do.

During my foray across the WoW media today, looking for 3.2 news, I stumbled upon this excellent article at the Pink Pigtail Inn, which sums up everything that is wrong with Warcraft questing:

There are many factions and elements to Warcraft lore but often these elements feel attenuated to me. … Frequently, questing seems directed to pushing us to the next leveling zone rather than the next plot element. The result is that I level faster but I wind up at the end of the game with a jumbled and fractured picture of the lore.

Oh well, back to collecting Furlbog nipples…