On January 14th, a couple of articles started popping up on my Yahoo front page about World of Warcraft becoming free to play for Veterans of the game (here's an article on cnet that explains it pretty well). The gist of it was that it was similar to the Starter edition of the game; the one where you can play for free up until a certain level, but you can't join a guild or trade items, stuff like that. The Veteran edition had caps on gold and chatting, but the leveling caps and a few other things weren't clear. Well, Blizzard very quickly cleared that up. On January 16th, this article came out and explained that the Veteran edition is real, except its taking lapsed accounts, and essentially reverting them to Starter editions. The difference is, if the Veteran has a toon in a guild, and is trying to get his below twenty toon into that guild, he can. So it wasn't quite the crisis situation everyone was making it out to be, and it really doesn't change anything gameplay-wise. If you want to come back to WoW, try it out. And if you want to go past level twenty, time to pay up :)
And this is fun for anyone that's been playing WoW for the entire ten years its been out. Blizzard is sending out statues to players that have been subscribed to the game for the full ten years that WoW has been WoW. That means no breaks in your subscriptions at all. Some people that have been playing since the game came out but took a couple of breaks were complaining that they didn't get statues, but that's life. The statue is a reward for supporting World of Warcraft for a whole freaking decade! I am not one of those people, but its still pretty neat. Read about it here.
And in my last bit of WoW news for today, did you guys hear about the player that has one hundred level 100 toons? His name is Watola and that is just crazy! Leveling, even with refer-a-friend (which is what he used to complete this), gets on my nerves after a while. So I can't even imagine trying to do it for that many toons. Here's the link to the article and here is the link to his Battle.net forum post, which is pretty detailed and is a helpful read for anyone trying to level 80 toons and above right now.
In my own personal WoW news....I haven't been doing too much, mostly just garrison stuff on my level 100 Horde mage. It looks like I've missed some quests somewhere, because I don't have the plans for my tailoring building. I've looked in the area that was supposed to have that quest line to obtain the blueprints, and I've completed all the quests. So maybe its a glitch, I'm not sure. And I've noticed that I'm dying a lot while trying to quest, so I'm thinking I missed an area somewhere, and my gear isn't good enough for my toon anymore. I need to jump back on my Alliance toon, to get her to 100, but thats the one I play with my husband, so I'm trying not to get ahead of him.
