Talk:World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Talk archive before ~ 16 October 2006

Cockatrice
Does anyone have any more information about why the name was changed? Such as the nature of the complaint, maybe. As it is it seems like this might just be a rumour. --Emit 15:00, 4 December 2006 (EST)

I'm pretty sure it was because of the slang name for the cockatrice was causing many complaints. -zarseam

To my knowledge, Blizzard never posted any "reason" for the change. However, try typing "cockatrice" in game with the swear-filter on ;). That's my guess.  Regardless, since the reason for the change is speculative, at best, I think it may be beneficial to just eliminate the "due to complaints" portion and just acknowledge the fact that it was a late-development change by Blizzard. Varonin 12:59, 29 January 2007 (EST)

Rating system and item changes
I have made a section about the new rating system and the item changes in TBC in the item values page (item level), would a link to there on this page be relevant? Or should there even be a new section on the new systems here? Or a new page? Anyone wants to comment on that?

--Kanath 10:56, 16 October 2006 (EDT)


 * There should be a short explanation of it on here, and a link to the article from that. -- Kirkburn  (talk) 12:50, 16 October 2006 (EDT)


 * I made a copy of the blue post explaining the new rating system at Formulas:Combat_Ratings_System. Note that the ratings-to-percent values described are only valid for level 60; at higher levels it will take more rating to get the same percentage chance. --Karrion 22:36, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Levelling to 70
Noobishned, can you provide a reference for your assertion that people that do not purchase the expansion will be able to level past 60? The blue post link you removed directly contradicts it... --Karrion 22:38, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Blue post on this question.

Size of outland
I've done some initial estimates on size. No data mining here, just measuring distance using timing on my epic mount. From the dark portal to the far west tip of zangarmarsh: 7 minutes Using "epic mount minutes" (cf light years) as a unit of distance, I think outland is approximately 50 square epic mount minutes in size. (imagine a square of 7 epic mount minutes by 7 epic mount minutes using the map of outland. Sure there's a couple things that go outside that square, but I think the extra spaces (like between hellfire penninsula and netherstorm) more than make up this distance. (7 minutes is generous) Using the same system (also in the beta for consistency), I traveled from Steemwheedle port to the western edge of sillithus in 9 1/4 minutes. I only counted time spent going east west, all north south time was removed (9 minutes is therefore a minimum, remember I didn't use any of the oceans, or the space between the NW corner of sillithus, and the coast (prolly about 15 epic seconds?)) A square of that is 81 square epic minutes. and comparing that distance on the map with the north south distance is about 3 times the distance, giving us approximately 200-240 square epic minutes. If anyone has any questions about this, please leave me a message at my wp talk page..


 * No, here is the appropriate place to talk about it. 1/5th just makes no sense - that would make outland the size of about 3 azerothian zones, which is impossible! This also ignores the very different shapes of outland and EK/Kalimdor... -- Kirkburn  (talk) 11:01, 1 November 2006 (EST)


 * So, what's your complaint about my research, you dispute the 9 1/4 minutes / 7 minutes sizes of the zones? Or, given that that information is correct, you dispute how I'm estimating the size of the whole continents? Also, saying that it's about the same size as three azerothean zones feels about right to me. Note that the 7 minutes for outland covered just hellfire penninsula and zangarmarsh. Dividing that in half is 3 1/2 minutes. the 9 minutes is traveling through 3 zones (and doesn't include the water...), so each zone is about 3 minutes. so the outland zones are a little wider than the kalimdor zones. But note that both zangarmarsh and hellfire penninsula are a lot smaller North South. Tanaris is huge, probably a fair portion larger than any of the outland zones, Zangarmarsh is probably smaller than Swamp of Sorrows, hellfire, probably a little larger than SoS. Remember that SoS is a small zone, so maybe a little larger than 1/5, but I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit smaller than 1/3, probably closer to 1/4. Mckaysalisbury 15:07, 3 November 2006 (EST)
 * (Oh, and I meant for just a ping on wikipedia. I don't really watch papges on wowpedia. This is the correct place for the discussion.) Mckaysalisbury 15:07, 3 November 2006 (EST)


 * In the faqs about flying mounts being allowed in Azeroth the figure 4 times gets mentioned as the ratio of Azeroth size to Outland size. --Dga 16:18, 3 November 2006 (EST)


 * Hrm. Well if we look at Image:Composite Map of Outland.jpg and Image:Official map of outland.jpg, and assume that Hellfire Peninsula is larger than EPl, surely this must show that it's at least more than 1/5. I reverted 1/5 because of the absurdity of the possibility, rather than a get at your methodology. :) Comparing it to an Eastern Kingdoms map it looks more comparable to the size of Lordaeron, so about 1/3-1/4, rather than a fifth. -- [[User:Kirkburn| Kirkburn] (talk) 16:34, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Arena Rating System
This is in case someone out there hates me for removing the sentence, "A person might be calculated to win at 60% but when they actually pwn the other team their chance of winning changes to 100% or a 1." This statement is false.

The probability that we assign to a "chance of winning" does not reflect our ignorance of some deterministic process, but instead expresses the partitioning of an infinity of possible event paths by their outcomes. The universe is by its nature chaotic and this quality is expressed at all levels. Ask your local weatherman. --Bendykst

Article organization
I just scrolled through this a couple times, and it's almost impossible to figure out what's going on here at first glance. I can see the obvious separation of confirmed and debunked rumors, but the article lacks visual direction, and the 3% margin indentation is getting out of hand.

I would like to reorganize the sections so that there are more ==second level== headings to give some clearer delineation of topics, reduce the sheer number of sections to increase readability and reduce the margin problem, and just make the damn thing look sharper. The "debunked" section would stay at the end as a second level heading.

As long as this is a supported change, I'll get to it.

Edit: I've also been getting some errors from MediaWiki about the article being too large (33 KB) for some browsers to edit. As such, I'd also like to summarize sections and then link to a main article for the details. 18:17, 15 November 2006 (EST)


 * IMHO the page should only be about factual information. Rumors/Debunked should be in talk page or some other article. --Gryphon 18:31, 15 November 2006 (EST)


 * I'll second that. Anything to remove content from this page. I can certainly move that section to its own article, if it's even needed, since most of what we know about BC is complete and those rumors will continue to pop up with each expansion until they're realized. 18:32, 15 November 2006 (EST)


 * MediaWiki is being a bit paranoid; most modern browsers support signficantly larger text fields without any sort of difficulty, so the size of the article shouldn't be a factor in revising it. The key issue here is how the content is presented, not how much there is of it. Starlightblunder 12:10, 3 December 2006 (EST)

New article editions for peer review
I have written two proposals for new editions for this article. The current article looks and feels very incoherent. Many sections are in the wrong place, repeat information, and have information tacked on in very unorganized ways.

My versions have a bit more coherence. They are too many edits to describe completely. However, my primary goals were to increase readability and make the organization more intuitive. I removed the Debunked section, made all sections under the Confirmed Information their own headings, integrated sections into areas that were more appropriate for the subject, improved the wording of all sections, removed unnecessary lists, and removed unnecessary self-promotion and speculation. I also removed detailed information and, if a main article didn't exist, created one and added that information to the main article, then linked the article in the appropriate section.

I have two editions:
 * User:Montag/World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade -- Re-organized. Mostly a cut and paste job from the original with the above improvements. All information in the original included in this edition.
 * User:Montag/World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (shorter) -- Removed all but the most important information. Cuts the first edition down by about 20-25%.

I'd like to hear your reactions to these articles, either here or on the talk page of the article itself. I'd prefer you confine your reactions here to keep the discussion coherent.

I highly recommend we adopt one of these editions or some new edition for this article to improve its quality since it is one of the most high traffic articles on the site.


 * I prefer the shorter edition. It captures the essential, leaving it up to the reader which piece of information they wish to explore in more detail. Great work Montag! --Dracomage 15:59, 30 November 2006 (EST)


 * One article that is linked but doesn't exist is Burning Crusade spells. After BC goes live, we'll be getting rid of the BC tags, but for historical reasons I'd love if we had a page or a category for spells first included in BC. At some point I may get around to writing this, too, but if someone else feels the urge, go for it. 17:11, 30 November 2006 (EST)

I'd like some more comments on this before replacing the article. I don't want to replace one of the higher traffic articles on the site without more people in favor of it. 23:32, 2 December 2006 (EST)


 * Since nobody seems to be adamently opposed, I will replace the current article with the shorter version I've worked on. If you think it's too early or too controversial, please revert and we'll continue discussion. 15:29, 3 December 2006 (EST)

Racial Changes
I've seen a few articles that mention that Racial abilities are going to get reworked for the BC. Does anyone have a run down of this? --BestBrian

Logo and margins
I put the logo back in because I thought it is, after all, the BC logo, and it's certainly the first thing people will recognize about the expansion (when this article is old news). I did, however, keep the NDA out. ~

I also added the margins back in since the old article had it and this also seems to be becoming standard for more well-traveled articles. At some point in the future, we'll finally get the CSS altered and we'll be able to take it out. 01:13, 5 December 2006 (EST)
 * The logo is of dubious value, and package shots definitely do not belong at the top of the page. Think about it - virtually nobody is looking at Burning Crusade to see the new artwork - it's the content they're after, and the header is eating 350 pixels worth of vertical space. If you really want a logo on here, move it to the right, it's secondary to the content you're presenting.
 * It's curious to note that Wikipedia's article on TBC is currently better than ours - it both contains more information, and presents it better. Note the absense of irrelevant visuals - logo is not obstructing content (aligned to the right), packaging shots are under release information (where they should be), the login screen doesn't appear under "New high-level dungeons" (of all things, why this?), and the whole thing looks much less of a linkfarm. In short, the wikipedia article illustrates a better direction to go in - rather than truncating everything to a few sentences to work with peculiar presentation methods, the article should give a good idea of the content introduced and updated by the expansion.
 * As for the divs, well, that's just digging a grave for yourself. It's doesn't do much for legibility, and the formatting pseudostandard is a pain - using margin-left: 3% in global css severely limits the amount of subheader levels you can use. Part of the reason for your revision was that those 3% stacked indefinitely, and you've removed some headers to compensate. However, even in this revision, the Table of Contents appears disconnected because 2-9 are actually subpoints of a missing New Features header - a header that wouldn't be a problem if not for the artificially introduced formatting issues. Starlightblunder 11:33, 5 December 2006 (EST)


 * I agree there are better ways to format the inclusion of the logo, and having it off to the side would probably look fine. I could also see the picture with both boxes in it under Release Information. The login screen is difficult. I'd like to keep it for historical reasons, since the login screen might change again with another expansion, but placement's tough. It used to be under something ridiculous like LFG. I chose to put it under the dungeon section, specifically in the Outland part, because it's a view of the Dark Portal from Outland. However, I disagree that Wikipedia's article is necessarily better than ours by your reasoning. Although it's more comprehensive, it's also based in a wiki that isn't Warcraft-centric and therefore can't draw on other articles like we can. Hence, when I rewrote portions of the article, I made use of links to topic articles instead of repeating details that belong in those articles. ~


 * On margins... I'm not a fan of them, personally. I kept them to adhere to the spirit of the original article. I started a thread on it a while back, but multiple threads on the topic have started and stopped. I'd talk about margins in the Village pump since it's more of a global issue. My original reasoning on the revisions was to remove the "Debunked" and "Confirmed" sections and make an article that would hold up in the future when BC is old news. I don't think it really limits the subheadings you can use, but I did decide on a shallow versus a depth-first approach when organizing the headings, so I have more higher level headings and fewer subheadings. 01:46, 6 December 2006 (EST)

Title
The title "Burning Crusade" was early explained refering the Burning Legion's newest evil conquest.

This makes me confused, since Illidan and his allies are the ones made into the bad guys of Outland, and it's also them we are going to face in the instances. They aren't even in league with Kil'jaeden and the Burning Legion, so I don't get what it has to do with it (I doubt there even are a single Burning Legion raid boss in the expansion). No one knows what Illidan's plans are (if he has one), but I very much doubt he plans to eradicate all life-forms (which is the Burning Legion's goal).

So, if someone is able, try to explain how all this fit together. And please try to make your sources known.--Odolwa 00:47, 15 December 2006


 * Well, IMO, the races of Azeroth (orcs, humans, night elves, etc.) believed that, with the Battle of Mount Hyjal, the demons of the Burning Legion were defeated once and for all. However, upon visiting Outland, they discover that many demons made their residence there, even them being subjects to Illidan. And those demons are still continuing with their Burning Crusade to wipe out all life. Just look at the Town Hall at the official blizzard' site: "[...] And what will they do when they discover that the demons they thought vanquished have returned to renew their terrible Burning Crusade?"
 * You see, the ones who want to vanquish life in the universe are the demons, not Illidan. Althought Illidan is the proclaimed Lord of Outland, the demons might not obey him; after all, the demons have different objectives than Illidan's. --Gollum 14:22, 20 December 2006 (EST)


 * There are still enough quests in Outland that have the Legion as enemies, though. In fact, the whole point about the war against Illidan is that Outland is the ultimate prize for Alliance, Horde, Legion and Naaru- if the Legion gain Outland, it furthers their Burning Crusade. If the Naaru, Alliance, or Horde fortify it, it is a major blow to the Crusade. --Ragestorm 17:12, 20 December 2006 (EST)


 * Well, the last boss of Burning Crusade is Kil'Jaeden, and we all know that has a lot to do with the Burning Legion. IconSmall_Dwarf_Male.gif K a n a r u   discussion   18:44, 11 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately we were also supposed to access some other portal worlds through various portals set around Outland, however the idea was never completed. Its still unclear if and when they will be. But they were intended to be our assaults on legion homeworlds.Baggins 19:00, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Still, the Legion's level of presense in Outland is a joke and I am very very very dissapointed. --Invin Dranoel 15:29, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

The Paladin In The Cinematic?
Does anyone know who that awesome paladin is in the BUrning CRusade CInematic? He is so cool! Im writing a story about him and if he is not an exhisting character then I hope I can use him. That Draenei Paladin is so awesome!

Sign your posts please. And to answer your question: just like all the other characters in the cinematic, he is just a random person. --Odolwa 19:53, 14 April 2007 (EDT)


 * And I for one am totally rooting for that Orc Warrior. Poor guy! Qii 21:13, 25 February 2008 (UTC

While it is over a year since u said this and u prolly already wrote your fanfic, but it it worth noting that the vindacator in the intro looks slightly like Nobundo in the UN=nbroken picture. But he still is prolly just another schmo like all the other intro movie ppl.--Truckman1 23:26, 31 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Justicar armor and a Hammer of the Naaru seems to the the Vindicator 'uniform'.-- 23:31, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Controversy - Items
I'm surprised there is no mention about the controversy of high quality level 60 items being replaced immediately. This is continuing in WOTLK and still is debated.

Verduria 13:17, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Cause most high quality lv60 items weren't replaced immediately, the high quality stuff might have been replaced well after lv65. 20:52, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Level 57 greens are superior to even level 60 BWL epics. Most people were equipped in this sort of gear when the xpac came out. (Naxxaramas wasn't touched by most players.) Verduria 23:33, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Speaking from a hunter's point of view, I had some Naxx gear, and all hunter gear from BWL, and some from AQ40...sure some things get replaced right off the bat, but I didn't replace my bracers (naxx-ones) till I actually have something drop for me in karazhan. Most of my gear didn't get replaced till half-way through leveling to 70. I even kept a lv60 trinket in use to this day....well...if I still played that character. Of course, that was a major complaint about outlands as a hunter....where's the hunter loot?  02:16, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

It's only a controversy for people who don't understand and/or don't want to accept that is how MMO's are with expansions. Leviathon 04:28, 26 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Whether you personally replaced gear quickly or not, although quite fascinating, isn't what i said or was addressing. I was stating that, opinions aside, this was indeed a hot topic on the forums for some time. There were many posts regarding it and it was probably the single most controversial thing about the expansion. The criticisms already listed on the page are far less poignant than what I suggest be added. Anyone who complained that an expansion that nearly doubled WoW's size and was in development for a year should be free is downright insane. How is that even listed? Most companies give far less for the same prices. Verduria 10:17, 26 February 2008 (UTC)\


 * Well a hot topic on the forums every day is watching everyone whine about their class being weak and the other classes being overpowered :p You can't go by whats talked about on the official forums as mostly everything there is drivel. Quite honestly I don't understand why that criticism part is even on the current page as I have never heard anyone complain about that and it seems to be something that shouldn't of been added. Edit* And apparently that criticism was added by someone who has done nothing but add whines to as many articles as he can and should probably be removed from this page. http://www.wowpedia.org/Special:Contributions/Malduster  Leviathon 16:07, 26 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Agreed Verduria 11:05, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Seconded. The WoW forums truly are a terrifying place at times and I don't think even they complained about this :) Warchiefthrall 23:07, 27 February 2008 (UTC)