We see a fair amount of pining for “the way things used to be” in this community — rose-colored hindsight that is, by all accounts, horribly wrong . Maybe you enjoyed the sense of wonder upon going through the game the first time

Patch 3.3.3 Mounts Patch 3.3.3 introduced a couple of new mounts and I think it’s time for a recap! Celestial Steed The Celestial Steed is probably the most impressive mount of his patch, it looks like a mix of Invincible and Algalon. I’m not really sure where this mount will drop for the moment but considering how cool it looks, I wouldn’t expect it to be widely available.

Just the other day we linked to a GameInformer article in which Tom Chilton mentions a new raid coming soon that would take place in the Ruby Sanctum. To make sure there is no confusion around this, Zarhym hit the forums to tell us exactly what this raid will be

Welcome back to The Queue , WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today

There’s an excellent interview with Tom Chilton , the World of Warcraft lead game designer, up on GameInformer. Lots of stuff we’ve heard before, but there are some interesting talking points. For example: They are looking into extending the dungeon finder to 10-man content.

World of Warcraft 5-year Anniversary Interview Archive Below is a list of all the 5-year anniversary interviews I’ve come across over the past month and a half.? I’ve also created a similar thread in the forums and will keep it updated as new interviews are found.? If you know of an interview that isn’t listed, please post a link to it as a reply and I’ll add it. World of Raids: Lead Systems Designer Greg Street and Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton World of Raids: Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton – The Creation of a Raid Dungeon WoW Anniversary Site: Senior Producer Shane Dabiri WoW Anniversary Site: Questions with key Blizzard staff G4 TV: World of Warcraft 5-year Anniversary Retrospective G4 TV: World of Warcraft 5-year Anniversary Blowout Part 2 TankSpot: Production Director J.

Our friends over at WorldofWar.de (who were listening live to the podcast this past weekend) recently got an interview done with Lead Designer Tom Chilton, and you can read it over on their site right now . There’s not a lot of news in there (though Chilton does gush over the Dungeon Finder , just as players have for the past week or so), but aside from the usual player housing deny and the old “we don’t know what the future holds” back and forth, but there is one fun thing he reminds us of in the second half of the interview : Blizzard is adding on to the old Blackwing Lair instance in Cataclysm . It sounds like kind of what they’ve done with VoA: Blackrock Caverns, which we heard about at BlizzCon , will be a new area (supposedly level 85 5-man, though Chilton says “lots of bosses”) inside Blackrock Mountain that’s connected to all of the Black Dragonflight bosses in Blackwing Lair

WorldofWar.de Chats With Kalgan The latest anniversary interview is from WorldofWar.de , an official German fansite, in which they had a chance to talk with Tom “Kalgan” Chilton , currently the Game Director for World of Warcraft. As with the recent Frank Pearce interview , Chilton provides some very interesting information, including the fact that there are no plans for player housing currently, and an “if we could do it all over” scenario related to PvP

The guys over at The Instance podcast got a chance to talk to Blizzard’s Tom Chilton about the recent decision to sell in-game noncombat pets for real money, and the interview is now up in the latest episode on their site. He talks first about the pets’ development, and it sounds like they designed the pets thinking they’d be sold on a real-money store eventually.

We are quickly approaching the fifth anniversary of World of Warcraft ’s release (my calendar has it on the 23rd of November), and G4 has gotten a head start on celebrating — they sent Morgan Webb over to Blizzard headquarters to talk to the team, including Tom Chilton , Alex Afrasiabi , and Jeff Kaplan , about what things have been like in the last five years since WoW ’s launch. There’s nothing super groundbreaking in here, but there is lots of reminiscing about the game’s early thinking — Chilton talks about how dual specs were never even considered as an idea (until they, you know, were) and what things were like in the early post-launch days. Pretty stressful, sounds like.

As you probably noticed if you watched along with us, yesterday’s developer chat (with Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack and Tom Chilton taking questions from Twitter and answering them on the forums) was a little light to say the least.

Gamasutra has a nice interview with someone on Blizzard’s team that we haven’t heard from very much before — Alex “Furor” Afrasiabi is currently a lead world designer for Cataclysm, and while we have definitely seen him at BlizzCon a few times , he hasn’t done as much press as, say, Tom Chilton or J. Allen Brack . But here he is on Gamasutra, talking about what Blizzard is doing to the World of Warcraft in the next expansion.

Blizzard has just released a Q&A on the Crusaders’ Coliseum and the Isle of Conquest. The Q&A is done with Tom Chilton (Game Directory), Scott Mercer (Lead Encounter Designer), and Alex Afrasiabi (Lead World Designer)

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Scrolls of Lore , where they’ve dug up some files that could possibly hint at future playable races for the World of Warcraft . Remember that tidbit about Kalgan saying how Blizzard plans to “pre-seed” future playable races in the game before they actually become available? It’s a different approach from the way they retconned Draenei into game

Jay Harding from ESL TV was able to catch up to Blizzard Lead Designer and the resident PvP guru Tom Chilton at the World of Warcraft Arena Tournament Regional Finals in Cologne, Germany last June and got to squeeze a decent length interview. Because of the focus of the event, Chilton talked a lot about PvP changes, particularly the impact of the upcoming Patch 3.2

Yes, our friend Medros of All Things Azeroth joined us on the podcast last week for an extra long show, and what we can say? There was just tons of things to talk about

We’re doing the podcast at a special time this week, so if you can’t usually tune in to us on Saturdays at 3:30 Eastern, now’s your chance to catch a live show. Tonight at 6pm Eastern, we’ll be live over on the Ustream page, and our special guest will be none other than Medros, of the All Things Azeroth podcast

Zergwatch World of Warcraft could see microtransactions … seriously Destructoid,?Florida As if World of Warcraft wasn’t enough of a cash vacuum, Blizzard Activision has revealed that it’s more then open to the idea of further microtransactions within the world’s premier MMO

Videogamer.com has a nice long interview with World of Warcraft Producer Tom Chilton about everything from patch 3.2 and the Argent Tournament to the future of the game at large. They caught up with him at the Warcraft Regional Finals 2009 tournament in Germany this past week, and in part one, he talks about the upcoming patch and what Blizzard is expecting to get out of it. He says the Isle of Conquest battleground is their most “epic-feeling” instanced PvP setting since Alterac Valley, and that they want it to feel nuts, with players fighting each other via air and land.

Videogamer.com has an interview up with Ryan Barker , the lead designer for seminal MMORPG EverQuest. When asked if he thought WoW would exist without EQ having been around, he replied that he didn’t think so, and that Blizzard designers would likely agree with that statement