I felt the itch to make a quick update to the blog, because I absolutely love it when employee drinking and cameras combine inside game development studios. During a recent Blizzard Office pub crawl, David Luong (Senior Cinematic Artist) captured candid photos within the studio of people, offices, food, and.. stuff that would be considered internal-only secrets.

While taking a photo of a camera set, he also accidentally captured a high resolution (7360x4912) photo of their in-progress Warlords of Draenor cinematic story board.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ackdoh/11053742104/in/album-72157638070235813/

Going through his history, you'll find other interesting information about life inside the Blizzard offices. For security reasons, many of these pictures (particularly the ones showing ID badges and internal IP addresses) should probably be removed or fixed.

Production Timelines

These storyboards tell you a lot about their work behind the scenes. How long it typically takes to create a cinematic video, how it fits in with other cinematics they have been working on, and it can give you a good idea of when the game will the ready. After all, the game won't be ready until the cinematic is finalized and ready for showing.

Based on the story board, it looks like this is just the beginning of the cinematic, or possible just before the half-way point. Development of the cinematic apparently takes several months, and this doesn't look like it will be completed until around July or August. If that's the case, we're likely looking at a release date of the game sometime in Q4 2014. My bet is November, since releasing games in December has grown unpopular with Blizzard apparently.

Cinematic & Game Prediction

Everyone pretty much knew the game name long before Blizzcon, so the game location set in Draenor was obvious. What we learned from the disappointing in-game trailer (which made it seem like the game was being rushed) and the panels is that Warlords of Draenor. Metzen has promised that this is going to be "THE MOST KICK-ASS EXPANSION SET" ever created however.

It takes place after the Siege of Orgrimmar, where Garrosh is put on trial but then escapes as time travel is somehow used within the game. No one really knows any details of the story from the panels though, other than that it incorporates heroes from the past.

We can see that the cinematic has Mannoroth and blood dripping scenes, so this is definitely the Mannoroth blood ceremony that's taking place on the planet of Draenor. If this is the Mannoroth blood ceremony, then Gul'dan and Grom Hellscream are also present and the cinematic will take place about 35 years in the past. It shows orcs travelling to the ceremony (torches by night), Mannoroth's green blood, and tons of fire, smoke and explosions at some point later. In this cinematic though, that there is an attack sequence during the drinking ceremony which never happened in the original history, so this appears to be about a different version of history taking place. So something goes wrong, Garrosh likely intervenes somehow and changes history, and none of the Orcs will drink the blood - meaning that Grom and all of the other Orc tribes will maintain their brown color in the next expansion pack. It sounds very cool, it's a very well known and historic event. There have been many rumors online about time travel and Garrosh, so I suspect that this is probably the Iron Horde, led by Garrosh, attacking the ceremony to make changes to the future. There's a "glaive blast" sequence which would be Mannoroths weapon and ballista being destroyed, and Grom's Gorehowl will probably make an iconic appearance in the upcoming cinematic.

None of the Raid bosses have been announced yet, but the cinematic definitely provides more insight into what to expect. For example, Gul'Dan and Mannoroth will definitely be bosses, and that means that Archimonde will likely be present as well. Probably as a Raid Final Boss, which makes the most sense. And we can expect several famous historical enemies, like Killrogg Deadeye - my favorite.

I've hunted around, and this is a ton of brand new information that no one is aware of. It'll be fun to watch the fans get really excited about seeing Mannoroth again. I've sent these leaks to PC Gamer and Joystiq, maybe they'll pay attention this time. It's been a while, but I seem to recall a publisher or two that would take all credit for my information and never once mention the source. I sent it to Kotaku too since they love this type of stuff. I know.. ewww gross.. but garbage clickbait websites are the only places that gamers visit these days sadly. Haven't heard anything back yet. And, I'll drop some hints on reddit sometime in the future too.

The Only Other Thing Out of Blizzcon 2013

Last years Blizzcon was cancelled so this was supposed to be the big one: a redemption story to make up for past events.

Unfortunately, the feeling I received from most goers was that Blizzcon was once again a disappointment as they only re-summarized things that we already knew about. The one, and only thing, that attendees were actually excited about were the Updated Character Models. Nothing new was really announced, just a rushed WOW expansion set.

The one thing I absolutely hated about this Blizzcon though was a comment made by J. Allen Brack. A question was asked if there were any plans to create Vanilla WOW (or other expansion) servers.. a question that has been asked many many many times over the past several years. However, his response was just asinine: "No! And, by the way, you don't want to do that either. You think you do but you don't."


It's fairly well known within the company that he always hated vanilla, but I didn't expect him to make such a public and foolish statement. You can see it for yourself here by skipping to the 30 minute mark or so. He's been against the revival for some time, even working actively against it, but he's completely wrong. If Blizzard were to ever launch Vanilla WoW Servers, it would do incredibly well. I think the number of users returning would completely shock upper management, and their servers may even be unprepared for it. It's sad though when the Production Director for World of Warcraft vehemently demonstrates their lack of game design understanding and why the original game was so addictive.

Tomorrow (04/01), I had something really fun planned from a couple weeks ago that I hinted at to you all. Unfortunately, it appears that the time for fun and games has ended.

On Friday of last week (03/23), I was alerted to a series of significant internet fraud related crimes that were perpetrated in an attempt to shutdown this blog.

Upon learning of the activities, I immediately contacted the appropriate authorities. Based on the evidence provided, the illegal acts were carried out with forethought and willful acts of malice that involved at least one individual. This week, I'm confident I know who the person is and I have been working with various third parties in an ongoing investigation.

Even after requests to cease the activity, the individual (possibly others as evidence points to at least two other persons involved) perpetrated yet another series of criminal attacks this past week. Given the sheer coincidence of the attacks (the dates), the intention of the attacks, and other strange things going on (like odd comments, hoaxes, and users trying to push me or provoke me into doing things), it appears that this has been planned for a very long time and there is some kind of elaborate and more sinister plan still at play that I don't want to be any part of.

This has become a very serious situation, and there have been direct death and threats of violence against myself and my family. Given the obvious mental instability of this aggressor, the crimes committed, and I've been told that they have access to private and confidential information, there are also concerns (as well as hints already) of violence and other plans of future malice.

For now, upkeep and maintenance of the blog will probably suffer as I need to re-prioritize.

I'm not sure when I'll be back due to these threats, but I'll leave the blog as is for now. I won't be checking/approving comments here, unless they are pertinent to the case, so please refrain from speculation.

I will still try to make some updates if I can. But they might just be for really important discoveries. Due to the automated nature of Blogspot and the constant (and variety of) attacks, if for some reason the blog is temporarily or permanently suspended, it will not be due to any legitimate reasons; it will be purely due to outside events.

An interesting read on the "confessions" from a former EA Viral Marketer. I caught this yesterday on Reddit too, and just decided at the last minute to write about it.

This is a known job (mostly outsourced and Work At Home) by many in the gaming industry, but most people don't talk about it. There are a lot of job titles and duties that the industry really doesn't like to discuss. :)

It really doesn't matter if this person is a phony or not as what they say about the job is true. I'd really like someone to come along, though, that can provide real evidence of their job and duties and even provide several real world examples of things they've done.

All Andromeda posted, unfortunately, were public Quarterly Shareholders documents that everyone has access to. And they spent very little talking about their job, and more time attacking the company and it's games. It would have been far more convincing if they had provided real documentation from their job (since there would have been a lot of it, and none of which could have been traced back to them.)

That's why I appreciate some of the recent comments made by Brian Fargo, for example, about the real inner-problems that happen between Developers and Publishers that no one knows about. Now, we finally have a recognizable and trusted name providing proof that what many suspected really does happen.

Andromeda's job is basically conducting creative viral marketing on sites and forums (including /v/), praising their employer, and derailing threads or putting down competitors to deflect and control perception about a game.

You never really know who these people are. They spend years creating online identities, and they have multiple identities on several major and minors forums or blogs. A forum poster on MMO-Champion, for example, might have a dozen identities each with hundreds of posts (or one primary account with thousands and a "good reputation"). They're paid to do this 8+ hours per day, so you can only imagine how much time they spend on sites, forums and blogs building up trust and familiarity over several months or years.

It's a pretty easy job too. And there are different kinds of "marketing" responsibilities.

Some of these professional sockpuppets or shills will primarily engage in praising or controlling the perception of a company or it's game. Others, though, might have the task of attacking competitors, talk trash about their games or generate bad press, try to organize mass "uprisings" against certain companies, constantly attack the reputation of someone who is critical of their employer (any attempt to discredit them, including lies), create bad reviews of competing games (mostly targeting crowds to do it for them), or they engage in unethical practices to deplete the marketing and customer support budgets of competitors.

The key though is manipulating crowd psychology. They want as many people on their side as possible to do the most damage, so they're usually highly social (online) individuals within forums and they use sites like Twitter. They also have multiple accounts, so they're hard to distinguish since each account might have different followers. And, the more followers the better. What's also nice is that they can buy the obedience of many followers by handing out free stuff given to them by their employer. :)

It's really hard to spot these shills though. They engage is casual chatter, talk about their day or their family, movies they watch, etc. And, they're hard to distinguish from simple fanboys. Maybe they even act as fanboys as part of their cover. There probably is a detectable pattern, and a way to find these people, but one would need some real and proven examples of posts from their various identities. I'm sure that some of the more talented viral marketing trolls could probably spot each other though.